Hi. Here are some pertinent notices and two sentient articles. Ed
Senator Boxer is taking calls and looking for numbers to support her stand for democracy today against the certification of the (fraudulent) electors. Call (or fax): Washington, D.C. (202) 224-3553 San Francisco, CA (415) 403-0100 fax (415) 956-6701 Los Angeles, CA (213) 894-5000 fax (213) 894-5012 San Diego, CA (619) 239-3884 fax (619) 239-5719 Now would be good.... Mark Hull-Richter, U.S. Citizen & Patriot U.S.A. - From democracy to kakistocracy in one fell coup. http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0416-01.htm http://verifiedvoting.org http://blackboxvoting.org === Re: Shirley Chisholm's Legacy Greetings Moderator and Happy New Year! In case you were not aware, there is a film documentary on Ms. Chisholm that primarily focuses on the 1972 presidential candidacy titled "Chisholm '72: Unbought and Unbossed, which was directed by Shola Lynch. This documentary will premiere on PBS this February 7 at 10:00 p.m. as part of the P.O.V. series. Persons could find out more at: http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2005/chisholm/ for local ================== Here is a small victory for the good guys. I've had an ongoing email conversation with Staples saying that although I've been a more than good customer, I was going to boycott them because they advertised on Sinclair (the right-wing broadcasting network). (I had no idea where I was going to get my notebooks, ink cartridges and stuff.) But it worked! They've withdrawn their advertising. From: Staples.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 10:57 AM To: Subject: Staples Advertising Inquiry Cheryl, we appreciate your inquiry concerning this issue. As a result of Staples ongoing review of its advertising media activity, Staples will no longer be airing advertising on any Sinclair stations news programs as of Jan 10, 2005. Thank you for your patience concerning this matter. Bree, Customer Service Representative e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] phone : 1-800-3STAPLE (1-800-378-2753) fax : 1-800-333-3199 online: http://www.staples.com/help/default.asp?zone=contact *** Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit sent by Simon McGunness The Guardian - Jan 4, 2005 The victims of the tsunami pay the price of war on Iraq US and British aid is dwarfed by the billions both spend on slaughter by George Monbiot There has never been a moment like it on British television. The Vicar of Dibley, one of our gentler sitcoms, was bouncing along with its usual bonhomie on New Year's Day when it suddenly hit us with a scene from another world. Two young African children were sobbing and trying to comfort each other after their mother had died of Aids. How on earth, I wondered, would the show make us laugh after that? It made no attempt to do so. One by one the characters, famous for their parochial boorishness, stood in front of the camera wearing the white armbands which signalled their support for the Make Poverty History campaign. You would have to have been hewn from stone not to cry. The timing was perfect. In my local Oxfam shop last week, people were queueing to the door to pledge money for the tsunami fund. A pub on the other side of town raised £1,000 on Saturday night. In the pot on the counter of the local newsagent's there must be nearly £100. The woman who runs the bakery told me about the homeless man she had seen, who emptied his pockets in the bank, saying "I just want to do my bit", while the whole queue tried not to cry. Over the past few months, reviewing the complete lack of public interest in what is happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the failure, in the west, to mobilise effective protests against the continuing atrocities in Iraq, I had begun to wonder whether we had lost our ability to stand in other people's shoes. I have now stopped wondering. The response to the tsunami shows that, however we might seek to suppress it, we cannot destroy our capacity for empathy. But one obvious question recurs. Why must the relief of suffering, in this unprecedentedly prosperous world, rely on the whims of citizens and the appeals of pop stars and comedians? Why, when extreme poverty could be made history with a minor redeployment of public finances, must the poor world still wait for homeless people in the rich world to empty their pockets? The obvious answer is that governments have other priorities. And the one that leaps to mind is war. If the money they have promised to the victims of the tsunami still falls far short of the amounts required, it is partly because the contingency fund upon which they draw in times of crisis has been spent on blowing people to bits in Iraq. The US government has so far pledged $350m to the victims of the tsunami, and the UK government £50m ($96m). The US has spent $148 billion on the Iraq war and the UK £6bn ($11.5bn). The war has been running for 656 days. This means that the money pledged for the tsunami disaster by the United States is the equivalent of one and a half day's spending in Iraq. The money the UK has given equates to five & a half days of our involvement in the war. It looks still worse when you compare the cost of the war to the total foreign aid budget. The UK has spent almost twice as much on creating suffering in Iraq as it spends annually on relieving it elsewhere. The United States gives just over $16bn in foreign aid: less than one ninth of the money it has burnt so far in Iraq. The figures for war and aid are worth comparing because, when all the other excuses for the invasion of Iraq were stripped away, both governments explained that it was being waged for the good of the Iraqis. Let us, for a moment, take this claim at face value. Let us suppose that the invasion and occupation of Iraq had nothing to do with power, domestic politics or oil, but were, in fact, components of a monumental aid programme. And let us, with reckless generosity, assume that more people in Iraq have gained as a result of this aid programme than lost. To justify the war, even under these wildly unsafe assumptions, George Bush and Tony Blair would have to show that the money they spent was a cost-efficient means of relieving human suffering. As it was sufficient to have made a measurable improvement in the lives of all the 2.8 billion people living in absolute poverty, and as there are only 25 million people in Iraq, this is simply not possible. Even if you ignore every other issue - such as the trifling matter of mass killing - the opportunity costs of the Iraq war categorise it as a humanitarian disaster. Indeed, such calculations suggest that, on cost grounds alone, a humanitarian war is a contradiction in terms. But our leaders appear to have lost the ability to distinguish between helping people and killing them. The tone of Blair's New Year message was almost identical to that of his tear-jerking insistence that we understand the Iraqi people must be bombed for their own good. The US marines who have now been dispatched to Sri Lanka to help the rescue operation were, just a few weeks ago, murdering the civilians (for this, remember, is an illegal war), smashing the homes and evicting the entire population of the Iraqi city of Falluja. Even within the official aid budgets the two aims are confused: $8.9bn of the aid money the US spends is used for military assistance, anti-drugs operations, counter-terrorism and the Iraq relief and reconstruction fund (otherwise known as the Halliburton benevolent trust). For Bush and Blair, the tsunami relief operation and the Iraq war are both episodes in the same narrative of salvation. The civilised world rides out to rescue foreigners from their darkness. While they spend the money we gave them to relieve suffering on slaughtering the poor, the world must rely for disaster relief on the homeless man emptying his pockets. If our leaders were as generous in helping people as they are in killing them, no one would ever go hungry. http://www.monbiot.com (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005 *** UPI via Washington Times - Jan 3, 2005 http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20041231-043147-5101r.htm Climate: The debate is changing By Dan Whipple UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL Boulder, CO, Jan. 3 (UPI) -- The global warming debate will shift in the United States in 2005 because evidence that the phenomenon is real has reached a crescendo. The catalyst for the shift is not some esoteric discovery by an atmospheric scientist, but a fairly simple paper by a history professor, Naomi Oreskes of the University of California, San Diego. Oreskes has found there is a "scientific consensus" on global warming -- that is, it is real and it is being caused by humans. Oreskes' paper's strength is its simplicity. It is something everyone can understand, without knowing the chemistry of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. She looked at nearly 1,000 technical papers in the peer-reviewed scientific literature and could not find a single one that disagreed with "the basic consensus statement, that CO2 is increasing, that it is changing the chemistry of the atmosphere, and it's having discernible effects," she told UPI's Climate. Further, she added, these CO2 increases are the result of human activity. There has been an avalanche of evidence indicating the effects of warming are being felt more and more on the planet. In only the last six months: -The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment found winter temperatures in the Arctic have increased by 4 degrees to 7 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees to 4 degrees Celsius) in the past 50 years and should go up about twice that much more in the next hundred; -Arctic summer sea ice will decline by 50 percent by the end of the 21st century, the ACIA found, with some models predicting complete disappearance of summer sea ice; -Coastal native villages in the Arctic are eroding, requiring relocating their inhabitants further inland; -Climate change is affecting the migration patterns, habitat preferences and ecology of hundreds of animal species in the United States, according a report by the Pew Foundation; -Floating ice shelves in Antarctica, stable for the past 13,000 years, have collapsed; -Glaciers around the world are melting at rates unprecedented for thousands of years; -Glaciers in Antarctica -- previously thought to be relatively immune from warming trends -- are thinning and speeding up dramatically. "We're beginning to push past the normal range of climate variability of the Holocene (post-Ice-Age period)," said Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the Snow and Ice Data Center in Denver. "We're seeing the first few steps, the first few responses of a globally warming world. People will point back to these first few years of the 21st century and say that this is when we saw it in the polar regions." The polar changes could mean a dramatic increase in sea-level rise, he said, well beyond current projections. "I don't want to mince words," Scambos told Climate. "It looks to me like we are headed toward a more rapid sea-level rise than projected by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report." In 2001, the panel had predicted a range of 4 inches to 30 inches (11 centimeters to 77 centimeters) in sea-level rise between the years 1990 and 2100. Each piece has its critics, of course, but taken as a whole, across many disciplines, the mounting evidence presents a strong case global warming is real and it already is causing tangible effects that are at least potentially serious. Whether the effects are serious and damaging enough to warrant potentially expensive actions -- such as attempting to curtail CO2 emissions -- should now become the focus of the debate in the United States and elsewhere. Because the Oreskes paper is easy to understand, and because she did not find even a single paper dissenting from the consensus position, there has a flurry of Internet commentary downplaying the meaning of this consensus. Roger Pielke Jr., of the University of Colorado's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, wrote in "Prometheus: The Science Policy Weblog," that "I am amazed by the recent attention being paid to the issue of a scientific consensus on climate change. Naomi Oreskes wrote an article a few weeks back in (the journal) Science, claiming that a literature review shows that a central statement of consensus reported in the IPCC is indeed a consensus. Since that article was published, debate and discussion has taken place on, among other things, whether it is in fact a unanimous perspective rather than the overwhelming view of most scientists." Roy Spencer, of the University of Alabama-Huntsville, argued on the Web site TechCentral Station that Oreskes' definition of what issue on which everyone apparently agreed was so weak it was nearly meaningless. "Let's be honest about what that consensus refers to," Spencer wrote, "that 'humans influence the climate.' Not that 'global warming is a serious threat to mankind.'" Interpretations aside, the studies included in the Oreskes paper also show the costs and benefits of climate change are not distributed evenly. The climate will change differently for different regions. Some studies indicate the United States, for instance, may come out a net winner from a warmer climate. On the other hand, the burden is expected to fall heavily on poor and developing countries. What else is new? Even if humanity strides through the changes unbowed, other residents of Planet Earth might not fare so well -- polar bears dependent on vanishing Arctic sea ice, for example, or pikas at alpine altitudes with a lifestyle evolved to survive in near-permanent snow cover. Hard-headed and pragmatic policymakers usually give short shrift to policy recommendation that cannot be measured in dollars, but these softer issues of human responsibility to the rest of creation have been an important driver of many environmental polices over the past 35 years. Global warming quickly may become another one of these arenas. [Climate is a weekly series examining the science behind and potential impact of global climate change, by Dan Whipple, who covers environmental issues for UPI Science News.] To subscribe: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr ==================================================== NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ==================================================== ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> DonorsChoose. A simple way to provide underprivileged children resources often lacking in public schools. 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