_Kurt Vonnegut
address at Ohio State University
(should be this, 01 MAR 2006)
Quoted in Kurt Vonnegut's "Stardust Memory"
by Harvey Wasserman
Published on Sunday, March 5, 2006 by the Columbus Free Press (Ohio)
Ice-T: "What happens is that eventually ... small crimes aren't going to sustain the lifestyle you live. When you're young you sell a little weed here and there, you try to get some rims. Okay, now you move up to Benzes and Ferraris. You can't sell joints, you gotta sell pounds. The more the crime escalates the more violence escalates. ...
Sometimes you learn from your mistakes, sometimes through the mistakes of others.
I felt like I was running down this road, this hustling road, where I thought it was going to be roses and money and all that good [stuff] at the end. I got to the end of the road and I seen there's a cliff, and over the edge of the cliff fires are burning.
Now I'm running back up, yelling at people not to go down that road."
"This is an edited extract from Crime, by Alix Lambert ..."
'Thank God hip-hop came along'
"Music turned Tracy Marrow into rap star Ice-T and saved him from a life of gangs and robbery.
Here, together with author and film-maker Nelson George,
he reflects on the forces that can conspire to make crime attractive, inevitable even"
Guardian / guardian.co.uk, 17 MAY 2008
"In fact, the main value gap today is not between Europeans, Americans, Asians, and Africans, but between all of us and the values of the ruling economic fundamentalism -- which even in democratic countries is presented as sacrosanct and without alternative.Our problem today is not a 'values vacuum' but that widely-agreed human values are not acted on. Indeed, they have often been rendered invisible by the refusal of commerce and finance to accept that they should be restricted by the values of the societies in which they operate."
"A New Human Story", by Jakob Von Uexkull,
The Ecologist, May 2001
Quoted at Save the Earth : Get informed
"Bright green environmentalism aims to provide prosperity in an ecologically sustainable way through the use of new technologies and improved design."
"The Hungarian Marxist writer Georg Lukacs once said that the essence of opportunism is always to begin with ‘parts and not the whole, symptoms and not the thing itself’.
This is an apt description of the current outbreak of mourning over the Yangtze river dolphin. It overlooks ‘the thing itself’ that caused the dolphin to die off: China’s transformation of the Yangtze into a source of nourishment, livelihood and wealth for millions upon millions of human beings. What the Chinese have done to the Yangtze in recent decades could be described as a mini-industrial revolution. Over the past 200 years, and the past 50 years in particular, the Yangtze has become one of China’s main lifelines: its waters support and enable vast amounts of agricultural work, which keep millions of people in employment and produce millions of tonnes of food; the river also allows the transportation of goods -- food, medicine, bicycles, computers, furniture -- through nine of China’s provinces, which cover 695,000 square miles of land.
The Chinese have harvested the river to make mind-boggling amounts of rice. And as one writer on the world’s rivers points out, rice remains ‘the world’s single most important food crop and a primary food for more than a third of the world’s population’ (6). China accounts for 35 per cent of the world’s rice production. A large proportion of this Chinese rice is cultivated around the Yangtze: each year, the river deposits more than 170 million cubic metres of silt, which makes up the fertile plains of the Jiangsu province, and the Chinese use these plains to make ‘abundant harvests’ of rice (7). Millions are employed in China’s rice production industry, and their harvest feeds millions more Chinese as well as millions of people across the Third World. Remember that soppy Band Aid song ‘Feed the world’? Well, China’s harvesting of the natural properties of the Yangtze (or what some refer to as its poisoning of the Yangtze) is helping to do precisely that.
The river enables modern industry, too. Tonnes of fish are pulled from the Yangtze every day and transported to Shanghai and other cities across China. Most strikingly, 20,000 labourers are currently working on finishing the Three Gorges Dam. ... It will create a five-trillion gallon reservoir which will be 400 miles long and hundreds of feet deep. It will further stabilise the river, allowing freighters weighing up to 10,000 tonnes to navigate their way into the heart of China. The dam’s turbines will generate the same amount of electricity as 18 nuclear power plants, and will supply around a ninth of China’s electricity. Put another way, they will meet the electricity needs of 150 million people. Modern China harvests the Yaghtze for fish, rice production and energy.
Of course, vast amounts of waste and sewage are created as a result of all this activity on the Yangtze, and they have given rise to pollution and caused hardship for certain animals." (Of course. "Hardships" such as going extinct, for example. Or surviving in an environment of sewage. We might respectfully request that writer O'Neill be subjected to the latter [though not the former] for a few years, and then re-examine his feelings on environmentalism vs development.)
"Q. What's the difference between the Democratic and Republican parties?- A page on this site on / "Republicrats" /
A. Not enough.
"How is it that domestic politics in this country is at once so rancid and so banal, so embittered and yet so uninspiring? Why should it be that two parties with few if any essential differences are ready to speak of each other as if a cultural or even a civil war were only a few speeches away? Obviously, much of this fatuous rhetoric arises from the need to disagree more and more about less and less, to maintain the mills of fundraising in a churning condition, and to keep the dwindling groups of genuine loyalists and activists in a state of excited pseudo-commitment. (I think that Neil Postman's analysis in Amusing Ourselves to Death : Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business is also quite apposite here.) But much of the dankness and dinginess is owed to the influence exerted by professional political operators, those who have a careerist interest in "the process" as it is -— which is to say partisan in theory and bipartisan in practice. ...
The self-satirizing summa of all this is the bizarre (sic) marriage of Mary Matalin and James Carville, who actually contrived to run opposing presidential campaigns in 1992 while still, at the end of the day, proving that the two parties were essentially in bed together."
"Tomihiro Taniguchi, vice chairman of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said the challenges of cutting carbon emissions should be viewed as an opportunity to develop new technologies and make a profit in the process.
'There is still...a wrong perception or wrong conviction that the environmental issues including climate change can be a minus, or harmful to economic development or the recovery.
But the main message is that this is not necessarily the case. We can have a lot of net benefit, no regret options. That message is very difficult to convey.' "
"... Green Party candidates nationwide are calling for a “Green New Deal” to end the legal doctrine of corporate personhood, which grants corporations constitutional rights that had previously been reserved for people.Links are mine - ed.
In addition, in August the U.S. Green Party endorsed 'stripping [corporations] of artificial "personhood" and constitutional protections,' along with 'revoking the charters of corporations that routinely violate safety, health, environmental protection or other laws.'
In contrast, neither the Democratic nor the Republican parties support ending corporate personhood, or revoking the corporate charters of lawless corporations. ...
These are the ten planks of the Green New Deal:Cut military spending at least 70%
Create millions of green union jobs through massive public investment in renewable energy, mass transit and conservation
Set ambitious, science-based greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, and enact a revenue-neutral carbon tax to meet them
Establish single-payer "Medicare for all" health care
Provide tuition-free public higher education
Change trade agreements to improve labor, environmental, consumer, health and safety standards
End counterproductive prohibition policies and legalize marijuana
Enact tough limits on credit interest and lending rates, progressive tax reform and strict financial regulation
Amend the U.S. Constitution to abolish corporate personhood
Pass sweeping electoral, campaign finance and anti-corruption reforms"
On genetic engineering in agriculture -- a subject I admittedly know little about. Has the potential for great benefits and extraordinary harm. For the present, it seems to me that for the release of genespliced organisms into the environment (e.g. agricultural applications),the risks generally edge out the potential gains.
from Billionaires for Bush (or Gore)
- A page on this site on / "Republicrats" /
"Capitalism is an economic system where the means of production are for the most part privately owned and controlled; socialism is an economic system where the means of production are for the most part publicly owned and controlled. Most Green Party programs do not advocate either system. Greens in the US characterize their economic orientation in a phrase: community-based economics."
-- sounds to me like this should be indistinguishable from, or at least very similar to, syndicalism
"For the Greens, it is common-sense that the Left in the U.S. ought to have a political party as it does in other Western democracies. The right has two parties, both committed to serving the consensus of the U.S. business leadership. One is socially moderate, the other socially conservative. The corporate parties are ruled by what are commonly called 'special interests', -- those bodies who benefit economically from prevailing policy. The fact that neither party thought twice about allowing the likes of Anheuser-Busch to underwrite the 2000 Presidential debates underscores their total acquiescence to their own corporate sponsorship.Links and bold are mine -- ed.
... there is good reason that Gore and Bush excluded Nader. Not only would Nader have wiped the floor with them on the issues, he would have spoken plainly to the American public about the policy matters that we care about, the issues that the two party 'duopoly' ignores."
"... perhaps as I sit here typing these words, fully convinced that everyone must feel at least a degree of the meaningless and alienation -- of the anomie -- that I feel and project upon the world around me, you are thinking just how grand life is and what a wonderful world we all live in: To each his own. I would argue, however, as William Monroe does in Power to Hurt: The Virtues of Alienation, that this is unnatural:Links are mine -- ed.
'This suspicion, and often renunciation, of the twentieth-century world -- with its exploitation, war, mechanization, conspicuous consumption, and pervasive mendacity -- has been compelling. What man or woman of sensitivity and conscience would not be against such a world and opposed to the cultural forms and genres that support and take sustenance, however indirect, from that world?' (68-69)."
"In the past three or so weeks, I’ve read no less than eight “pieces” referencing white people and their inalienable right to, basically, eat garbage.
No. I’m serious. That’s the “food culture war.” 'You may not like what I eat, but I’ll defend to my death my right to eat it.'
The right to eat complete and total garbage processed food is even painted as patriotic – the “right of the ‘real American’” ...
A lonnnnng time ago, I read a comment on Racialicious that fits into what I’m saying here, and it needs to be highlighted. Again.It reminds me of the “bike to work” movement. That is also portrayed as white, but in my city more than half of the people on bike are not white. I was once talking to a white activist who was photographing “bike commuters” and had only pictures of white people with the occasional “black professional” I asked her why she didn’t photograph the delivery people, construction workers etc. … ie. the black and Hispanic and Asian people… and she mumbled something about trying to “improve the image of biking” then admitted that she didn’t really see them as part of the “green movement” since they “probably have no choice” ...We can’t accept that there are places where people aren’t afforded that choice and move from there because we’re too busy having to contend with this element of white populism that rejoices in not knowing things. We spend far too much time dealing with people who refuse to go beyond their front yard – or their citiy’s “downtown,” even though it is clear that food deserts often are not that far away from the average person – to understand the plight of others, simply because it is not their plight. We spend too much time with people who very well may, in one form or another, subconsciously suppress “food availability” as a Black issue…. and we all know that that’s a step toward populist acceptance of the idea that “labeling something a Black issue means that white America doesn’t have to address it.” Y’know, because us Blacks aren’t “real Americans.”
So, in the same way when people in a poor neighborhood grow food in their yards … it’s just being poor– but when white people do it they are saving the earth or something. ... (Reply to this article)
Again, the rejoicing in not knowing things.
"In a silent revolution of sorts, Indian women across the country, especially in rural and semi-urban areas, have a single condition before they agree to a match -- the groom must have a toilet in his home.Article goes on to say that worldwide an estimated 1.1 billion people don't have toilets.
The "No Toilet, No Bride" campaign, initiated by the government, is co-opting young women to bring in much-needed social change. Across the country, more people have access to mobile phones than to toilets. ...
Bindeshwar Pathak, who in 1970 founded the Sulabh Sanitation Movement, which aims to provide affordable toilets, says ... 'the country has made a huge jump and that should be acknowledged. From 20% in 2001, 57% of the population have toilets today -- and it's a huge achievement.' ...
A recent World Bank study puts the cost to India of not having adequate sanitation facilities at nearly $54bn annually. The study says premature deaths, treatment for the sick, and loss of productivity and revenue from tourism were the main factors behind the significant economic loss."
"Green Party candidates and leaders have called the sustained assault on the U.S. Constitution over the past decade one of the missing issues of the 2004 election year. 'The Constitution -- not the flag or the Pledge of Allegiance -- is the glue that holds our nation together', said Marakay Rogers, Green candidate for Attorney General of Pennsylvania. 'Democrats and Republicans alike tell us that anticonstitutional measures like the USA Patriot Act are necessary for security and for law and order. But these measures promote the transformation of the U.S. into something that more and more resembles a police state, an authoritarian regime, an empire. ...Links are mine -- ed.
'The rights, protections, and laws enshrined in the Constitution are now in danger of erosion to the point where it may become an irrelevant historical artifact', said David Cobb, Green candidate for President of the United States. 'Greens are committed to upholding and defending the Constitution, and amending it legally where it falls short'. "
"In 1900, there were only a few thousand cars in the world. Today there are over 500 million. From a few thousand barrels of oil per day in 1900, we have increased our appetite for oil to 72 million barrels per day in 1997. Human population has increased exponentially, from 350 million at the turn of the last millennium, to 1.6 billion at the turn of the 20th century, to almost 6 billion today. And just about every single one of them wants a car.Links are mine -- ed.
If the world follows the Western model of one car for every two people, we will have 5 billion cars by the mid-21st century, boosting our fuel consumption to one trillion barrels per year. Ironically one trillion barrels is the current estimate of the total amount of oil remaining to be extracted from the Earth. No one really expects oil to be around by 2050. 80% of the oil produced today comes from fields discovered before 1973, and the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment estimates that all known oil reserves will dry up by 2037."
"(Western) People like to talk about how different indigenous peoples are than us as westerners, but people are often really much the same at the end of the day. What do they want? They want a good life. They want a decent life for their kids. They want clean air and water. And if you tell them OK you can have more money in your pocket but all this other stuff is going to disappear -- potable water, your medicine, your food, your sacred sites -- it becomes a pretty obvious choice."
"I know you will agree that as a country we are obscenely wasting billions of dollars every week in Afghanistan, and the Obama administration is hard-pressed to explain why.
A few weeks ago, journalist Chris Hellman, writing for Tomdispatch, calculated that the real annual military budget is $1.2 trillion -- an astounding number. This is an amount that would solve virtually every fiscal problem we have -- state budget shortfalls, health care, education, environmental protection and retirement for many, if we ever found the will to emphasize human priorities, instead of making war and dominating the globe.
We at AlterNet think this is the highest priority work we can do, and of course it affects all other issues and challenges.
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"It is always very common in all modern wars to find, for instance, that tasks will be achieved or attempted using inappropriate tools in order to justify those tools' existence. ...As Bob Wilson famously said:
We are told in official announcements that some 112 Tomahawk cruise missiles were used in the initial strike at the weekend, launched from US and British warships and submarines off the Libyan coast. We are also told that "a number" of Storm Shadow shorter-ranged cruise missiles were launched from Tornado bombers. The Tornadoes had flown 3,000 miles from Kent Norfolk to do so, requiring the aid of repeated air-to-air refuelling assistance both on the way out and on the way back.
We can be pretty sure what the unspecified number of Storm Shadows was, as the Tornado can carry only one Storm Shadow into combat and we are told that a total of four Tornadoes have been assigned to Operation ELLAMY, the British contribution to the Libyan fighting. ...
Later in the weekend the Tornadoes launched another massive longhaul mission from the UK but this was aborted due to the presence of civilians in the target area – although there is some suggestion that a Storm Shadow may have been fired anyway. More Tomahawks were also launched from naval units off the coast.
Following the weekend cruise missile barrage of 112 to say 200+ Tomahawks (and three or four Storm Shadows) we were told [2] that 'the Libyan air force no longer exists ... we can operate in Libyan airspace with impunity'. ...
It has been widely noted in the press that Tomahawk missiles are expensive: the most recent batch purchased by the UK cost about £1m each, though the Americans (buying in bulk) get the earlier models for around £300k. The Tomahawk is very cheap compared to the Storm Shadow, however, which has cost [3] the UK approximately £2m a pop – despite being short-ranged and thus needing a Tornado to carry it much of the way. ...
So armoured [ground] forces are useless either way: if you have air superiority you plainly don't need them, and if the skies are hostile they will be destroyed. Armour and most types of artillery are also extremely expensive, require enormous logistic support and take ages to get to the battlefield. They account for the majority of our army's budget and personnel, in fact, one way and another – perhaps a clue as to why the generals cling to them so vigorously. ...
Most shamefully of all, the Coalition has slashed [8] – and may now cancel altogether [9] – an order for vital Chinook helicopters that would let our troops fight safely and effectively in Afghanistan (or anywhere else). ...
This is an aside – not really relevant to Libya, not yet anyway – but it's important, so forgive the digression. The helicopter issue really is critical. Just for example, British troops in Helmand last month mounted an airmobile operation into Taliban-controlled territory in which some 300 troops needed to be delivered in one lift. ...
On an earlier operation in 2009 no helicopters could be obtained (perhaps nobody cared to beg the Americans for some). The colonel in charge on that occasion wrote [10]:'I have tried to avoid griping about helicopters – we all know we don't have enough.The colonel was subsequently killed by an IED explosion during an unnecessary road movement. ...
We cannot not move people, so this month we have conducted a great deal of administrative movement by road. This increases the IED [Improvised Explosive Device, ie roadside bomb] threat and our exposure to it.'
Hopefully this illustrates the awful, deadly, embarrassing lack of helicopters our forces suffer from, and the terrible betrayal of Coalition ministers' plans to prevent this being partially sorted out. As for the RAF air marshals who have advised those ministers to cut the new helicopter order in order to keep Tornadoes and Storm Shadows, it's impossible to imagine how they get to sleep at night. No condemnation is too strong for them.
Quite apart from Service parochialism and empire preservation, another and even more powerful factor has been at work. All through the Review the malign influence of the greedy, inefficient British arms industry has been paramount.
After all, the RAF wouldn't at all mind having F-18s instead of Tornados or F-35s instead of Eurofighters, but BAE Systems would lose huge, lucrative maintenance and upgrade contracts if that happened. BAE would lose yet more if the army's tanks and artillery were cut. The crappy £2m Storm Shadow is partly British made, the far superior £1m-and-falling Tomahawk is not. The ripoff megabillion air-to-air refuelling deal is run by a consortium of influential British defence contractors. So the list goes on."
"The World Bank has warned that rising food prices, driven partly by rising fuel costs, are pushing millions of people into extreme poverty.
World food prices are 36% above levels of a year ago, driven by problems in the Middle East and North Africa, and remain volatile, the bank said.
That has pushed 44 million people into poverty since last June.
A further 10% rise would push 10m more below the extreme poverty line of $1.25 (76p) a day, the bank said.
And it warned that a 30% cost hike in the price of staples could lead to 34 million more poor.
The World Bank estimates there are about 1.2 billion people living on less than $1.25 a day. ...
The bank suggests a number of measures to help alleviate the impact of high food prices on the poor.
They include encouraging food-producing countries to ease export controls, and to divert production away from biofuels production when food prices exceed certain limits..
Other recommendations include targeting social assistance and nutritional programmes to the poorest, better weather forecasting, more investments in agriculture, the adoption of new technologies - such as rice fortification to make it more nutritious, and efforts to address climate change.
It also said financial measures were needed to prevent poor countries being subject to food price volatility."
"For almost as long as I can remember, the experts have been saying that the US, with 5% of the world's population, consumes a third or more of the Earth's resources. That is no longer true.Links are mine -- ed.
China has now overtaken America as the world's leading resource consumer. Among the basic commodities -- grain and meat in the food sector, oil and coal in the energy sector, and steel in the industrial sector -- China now consumes more of each of these than the US except for oil. It consumes nearly twice as much meat -- 67m tonnes compared with 39m tonnes in the US; and more than twice as much steel -- 258m tonnes to 104m. ...
The western economic model -- the fossil fuel-based, car-centred, throwaway economy -- is not going to work for China. If it does not work for China, it will not work for India, which by 2031 is projected to have a population even larger than China's. Nor will it work for the 3 billion other people in developing countries who are also dreaming the "American dream".
In an increasingly integrated global economy, where all countries are competing for the same oil, grain and iron ore, the existing economic model will no longer work for industrial countries either. ...
Business as usual -- Plan A -- cannot take us where we want to go. It is time for Plan B, time to build a new economy."
"Investing $1.3 trillion (£800bn) each year in green sectors would deliver long-term stability in the global economy, a UN report has suggested. ...
UNEP defined a "green economy" as one that resulted in 'improved human well-being and social equity, while significantly reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities'."
"... short-term and local self-interest must yield to a long-term, global consciousness -- a tall order. Increased efficiency and alternative fuels might for a time fill the gap left by petroleum’s decline. But we have yet to devise an alternative as versatile as petroleum that can fill its huge role -- especially in the face of relentlessly growing demand for energy. And whatever we do to support population growth will only make overshoot worse in the end.Links are mine -- ed.
In addition to unique abilities, we have a serious shortcoming. We are unwilling, perhaps unable, to see ourselves as subject to the same constraints as Earth’s other inhabitants. But in our dependence on the environment for food and water, we most certainly are subject to those constraints. Without a solution, we will die ....
Given Earth’s limits, there already are too many of us for the long run. But the day of reckoning is many years away (months at least!), and it is notoriously difficult for political leaders to seek moderate sacrifice today to prevent terrible sacrifice tomorrow when there is too little general recognition of the trouble ahead."
"The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, released on 30 October, has been praised by many economists, who say it sets a new benchmark for quality and thoroughness. But its dramatic conclusions, including the claim that tackling climate change would cost 20 times less than doing nothing, were immediately attacked by right-wing commentators and other economists."
This is of course the libretto of the song Turn Back, O Man
from the 1971 stage production / 1973 film Godspell.
I was quite surprised to learn that this was originally written in 1916.
"Clifford Bax, an English hymnodist, wrote this in 1916,
at the request of his friend, Gustav Holst.
This was during The Great War, of course –
'the war to end all wars'."