The John James Newsletter 249

The John James Newsletter 249

22 September 2018

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them more

Oscar Wilde

We need zero emissions cars. China has 1.5 million. We need China to have 100 million. And in California we want at least 5 million electric cars. We can only do that if China requires auto companies to build electric cars

Jerry Brown

A warmer planet cares little for an invasive species called “Homo sapiens” that has colonized its surface and poisoned it

Sonali Kolhatkar

If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention

Ramsay Bolton (Game of Thrones)

How will American democracy survive the twisted goal of one-dollar, one-vote?

Leo Gerard

Is plastic a big problem? Yes, it is. It is almost one ton of plastic waste for every human being living. Imagine were it to magically appear in your living room: one ton for every member of your family

Ugo Bardi

Gold is money. All else is credit

JP Morgan

"WE DEMAND CLIMATE ACTION"

In 2006 we formed the human sign CLEAN ENERGY FOR ETERNITY on Tathra Beach. We are doing another human sign. On 30/9/18 at 11:00am we will be forming WE DEMAND CLIMATE ACTION at Lawrence Park AFL ground in Tathra. The Figmentz will be playing, there will be Japanese drummers, bagpipes, and quite a few surprises. To pull this sign off, we are going to need a lot of people. This will be our biggest, brightest, boldest human sign yet. Come along and help make a difference. - Matthew Nott

Battlefield America: The Ongoing War on the American People

Police tasered a 5-foot-2, 87-year-old woman who was using a kitchen knife to cut dandelions for use in a recipe. Police used force against a deaf 76-year-old woman who was jaywalking. Police first tasered then shot an unarmed man who refused to show his driver’s license after attempting to turn in a stray dog. What Americans have failed to comprehend, living as they do in a TV-induced, drug-like haze of fabricated realities, narcissistic denial, and partisan politics, is that we’ve not only brought the military equipment used in Iraq and Afghanistan home to be used against the American people, but we’ve also brought the very spirit home too. Read

In Ancient Rome, in pre-war Germany, and too often in history, the prelude to dictatorship has been violence. Most often by the uniformed against we ordinary folk. US police today are armed with military equipment, accompanied by SWAT teams, and all sins forgiven by the judiciary even when the evidence is overwhelming. Can you not remember when the presence of a single unarmed man-in-blue was enough to calm the street? We have participated in creating this profound change in attitudes where mutual respect has been replaced by antagonism and hatred. Somewhere individuals have promoted this change, somewhere the choices have been discussed - and initiated. Therefore we should be able to discreate it. Democracy in the US could be extinguished in the blink of an eye, and all our friends locked up in the FEMA camps prepared for you years ago.

What are you doing to stop this??

List of killings by law enforcement officers in the US

Although Congress instructed the Attorney General in 1994 to compile and publish annual statistics on police use of excessive force, this was never carried out, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation does not collect these data either. The annual average number of justifiable homicides alone was previously estimated to be near 400. Updated estimates from the Bureau of Justice released in 2015 estimate the number to be around 930 per year, or 1240 if non-reporting local agencies kill people at the same rate as reporting agencies. Read this

"Normalising" police militarisation, living in denial

The police capacity to organise and distribute state-sponsored violence as well as the ability to shape institutional appearances while doing so, impacts issues of civil rights, domestic order and the quality of political life in a democracy. A growing police state with the rationalisation and normalisation of police militarism can be ill-afforded in an increasingly uncertain future. Read here

We're all someone's daughter

We're all someone's son

How long can we look at each other, down the barrel of a gun?

"Your the voice" Listen here

The War on Terror Has Militarized the Police

Over the past 10 years, law enforcement officials have begun to look and act more and more like soldiers. Police forces throughout the country have purchased military equipment, adopted military training, and sought to inculcate a "soldier's mentality" among their ranks. Here's why we should be alarmed. Read here

Police have killed 646 people so far in 2018

Police killed 1,147 people in 2017. Black people were 25% of those killed despite being only 13% of the population. Read this

Suspending the Constitution: The Government Does Whatever It Wants

The names and faces may change over time (terrorism, the war on drugs, illegal immigration, etc.), but the end result remains the same: our unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the phantom promise of safety and security. In this name the Constitution has been steadily chipped away, and discarded that what we are left with is but a shadow of the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago. Most of the damage has been inflicted upon the Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—which historically served as the bulwark from government abuse—set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches —would understandably sound more like a eulogy to freedoms lost than an affirmation of rights we truly possess. Read more

Generation Being Born Now Is The Last To Be Free

Julian Assange, stranded in the Ecuadorean embassy in London with no outside communication except with his legal team, has a pretty grim outlook on where humanity is going. It will soon be impossible for anyone to avoid being included into global databases collected by governments and state-like entities. This generation being born now is the last free generation. You are born and within a year you are known globally. Your identity in one form or another – coming as a result of your idiotic parents plastering your name and photos all over Facebook or as a result of insurance applications or passport applications – is known to all major world powers. Read more

Sunset for Liberal Democracy

A secretive global legal system gives corporations leverage over the countries where they operate, to intimidate nations into gutting their own laws and to get executives off the hook for crimes they have committed. This 18-month BuzzFeed News investigation, spanning three continents and involving more than 200 interviews and tens of thousands of documents, many of them confidential, has exposed an obscure but immensely consequential feature of international trade treaties, the secret operations of their tribunals, and the ways that business has brought sovereign nations to heel. Read more

The Weaponization of the US Dollar

The Iranian rial: crash. The Turkish lira: crash. The Argentine peso: crash. The Brazilian real: crash. There are multiple, complex, parallel vectors at play in this wilderness of crashing currencies. This is a serious currency crisis affecting key emerging markets. Independent analysts from Russia and Turkey to Brazil and Iran largely agree that the overwhelming factor in the current currency crisis is a reversing of the US Federal Reserve quantitative easing (QE) policy. QE for all practical purposes represented the Fed declaring a currency war against the whole planet – printing US dollars at will on a trillion-dollar scale. That meant mounting US debt was devalued so foreign creditors were paid back with cheaper US dollars. Now, the Fed has dramatically reversed course and is all-out invested in quantitative tightening (QT) that, combined with a global, targeted trade war against major emerging markets, spells out the new normal: the weaponization of the US dollar. It’s no wonder that Russia, China, Turkey, Iran – nearly every major regional player invested in Eurasia integration – is buying gold with the aim of progressively getting out of US dollar hegemony. Read more and one more

The Global Power Elite

The super-rich have similar lifestyles and ideological orientations. They believe capitalism is beneficial for the world and that capital growth will eventually solve inequality and poverty. They recognize that investment opportunities may change from climate ‘modifications’. They are devoid of a legal or moral framework to guide their actions, whether around business, fellow human beings, war or the environment and climate. Read more

Obama’s Imperial Presidency

Obama was among the most militaristic White House occupants in American history. Obama was the only president whose administration was enmeshed in multiple wars from beginning to end. His imperial ventures spanned many countries – Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia along with proxy interventions in Yemen and Pakistan. He ordered nearly 100,000 bombs and missiles delivered, a total greater than that of George W. Bush’s total of 70,000. Iraq alone – where U.S. forces were supposed to have been withdrawn – was recipient of 41,000 bombs and missiles along with untold amounts of smaller ordnance. Meanwhile, throughout his presidency Obama conducted hundreds of drone attacks in the Middle East, more than doubling Bush’s total, run covertly by the CIA and Air Force. Read more

A representative government means nothing when the average citizen has little or no access to their elected officials, while corporate lobbyists enjoy the revolving door

John W. Whitehead

Permanent war is an economic relief valve for surplus capital. War provides investment opportunity and a guaranteed return. War keeps the suffering masses of humanity afraid and compliant. The US spends more on the military than the rest of the world combined.

Peter Phillips

The US trade wars, political sanctions and new tax laws wage a dollar war against political opponents without ever having to declare war. All it took was a series of trade provocations against the huge China economy, political provocations against the Turkish government, new groundless sanctions against Russia, and anyone with dollar loans to higher risk emerging markets. All reflects the beginning of a global dollar shortage.

William Engdahl

In a totalitarian society, ideology is dead. There is no more class hatred. Beating people is just a job, a role to play.

Xu Zhiyong

The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain

Colin Wilson

The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common, they don't alter their views to fit the facts, they try to alter the facts to fit their views

Doctor Who

In 10-15 Years we may hit 2°C due to fracking

2011, a Cornell University research team first made the groundbreaking discovery that leaking methane from the shale gas fracking boom could make burning fracked gas worse for the climate than coal. View more

True cost of Tesla big battery is far better than we thought

The Australian Energy Market Operator has acknowledged the introduction of the Tesla big battery has significantly reduced the cost of power, including by $3.5 million in one five hour period when the battery kept prices low during maintenance, when previously the normal gas generators have been able to game the market to their advantage. AEMO has also praised the battery’s performance in the market, and on its speed, versatility and accuracy in response to major events – most recently in the major outage that cut power in NSW, Victoria, and Tasmania, and caused problems for two generators in Queensland. South Australia emerged unscathed, partly due to the super-fast response of the battery. Read more

Indonesian president signs 3-year freeze on new oil palm licenses

Indonesia has one of the world’s highest deforestation rates, in large part due to uncontrolled expansion by the plantation industry. This has made the country a top greenhouse gas emitter. Corruption in the issuance of licenses for plantations is rife. Mines too; Indonesia is a top coal producer. When the president announced the moratorium on new oil palm licenses two years ago, he also said he would impose a moratorium on new coal mines, but this has yet to be implemented. Read more

Smog: the canary in the mine for Poland's political climate

When worried Poles ominously lament “Winter is coming...”, it is not the arrival of zombies they fear, or even of the cold weather itself. Rather, they reel for some six months of smog caused by the mass burning of coal for domestic heating across the country. Some areas have been measured at times to be more polluted than Beijing and it is estimated that 45,000 people die each year due to the high level of pollution the coal burning causes. Krakow is estimated to have some of the poorest air quality in the world. Read more

This new Antarctic Discovery will affect you massively

Continental trends of grounding lines of glaciers are moving inland. Current peak retreat has been about 25 meters each year, with some over 100 m/y. Most of the world's potential sealevel rise is stored in the icefields of Antarctica. As it is being progressively undermined by the heat being progressively accumulated in the oceans, the pattern of collapse is speeding up each year. Watch more

Why Growth Can’t Be Green

New data proves you can support capitalism or the environment—but it’s hard to do both. There are physical limits to how efficiently we can use resources. Sure, we might be able to produce cars and iPhones and skyscrapers more efficiently, but we can’t produce them out of thin air. We might shift the economy to services such as education and yoga, but even universities and workout studios require material inputs. Once we reach the limits of efficiency, pursuing any degree of economic growth drives resource use back up. Read more

Cartogram of the World Population in 2018

13 countries with more than 100 million are the home of 4.75 billion people, 62% of the world population. China (1.415 billion), India (1.354 billion), United States (327m), Indonesia (267m), Brazil (211m), Pakistan (201m), Nigeria (196m), Bangladesh (166m), Russia (144m), Mexico (131m), Japan (127m), Ethiopia (106m), Philippines (107m), Egypt (100). Six out of 10 live in Asia and Oceania, 36% live in India and China. Worth enlarging

Global Climate Instability? Has ‘the Day After Tomorrow’ Arrived?

The Hurricane season is causing devastation from the Pacific to the Atlantic as seven active storms are currently swirling across the globe – with high chances an eighth powerful storm will soon develop to break an all-time record. And actually there is an additional storm that is also developing in the Pacific which could be the ninth. Overall, there have been 9 named storms in the Atlantic and 15 names storms in the Pacific since the official start of the hurricane season. That is not normal. “In my 35 years forecasting the weather on TV, I have NEVER seen so much activity in the tropics all at the same time.” Read more

Australian teens have complex views on religion and spirituality

Most Gen Z teens have little to do with organised religion in their personal lives, while a significant proportion are interested in different ways of being spiritual. Migration, diversity, secularisation and a burgeoning spiritual marketplace challenge the notion that we are a “Christian” country. More than any other group, teenagers are at the forefront of this remaking of Australian religion. Their daily experience of secondary school and social media sees them bumping into all kinds of difference, so they are forming their own views. Read more

Global Warming and East Coast Hurricanes

Maps below show the temperature anomaly for the past three months and the seasonal mean (Northern Hemisphere Summer). We draw attention to the cool region southeast of Greenland and warmth in the middle of the North Atlantic. Freshwater injection onto the North Atlantic could cause shutdown of the ocean circulation system (AMOC). The cooling southeast of Greenland was due to a slowdown of AMOC, the observed freshening of the North Atlantic surface water, anomalous sea ice export from the Arctic, Greenland melt, and increased precipitation and river runoff. The 21st century slowdown of AMOC is underway. Read more

Are we wasting our time on sustainability?

Given the scale and speed of change needed on sustainability, many and perhaps most of today’s major old companies, simply won’t get there. Not because they couldn’t in theory, but because they won’t in practice. They have some combination of products, assets, culture and values that means transitioning is simply too difficult, too expensive in the short term or just isn’t going to happen in time. Read more

A deliberate campaign to create a 'moral panic' around the issue of antisemitism

This strategy that can be traced back to the horrendous Israeli bombardment of Gaza in the summer of 2014. A UN report estimated that 2,252 Palestinians were killed, around 65% civilians. The death toll included 551 children. There was global public revulsion at Israel's war crimes and empathy with their Palestinian victims. Support rose for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement (BDS) which campaigns 'to end international support for Israel's oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law'. BDS came to be regarded more and more as a 'strategic threat' by Israel, and a campaign was initiated in which Israel and its supporters would be presented as the world's real victims. Antisemitism has been 'weaponised' to attack Corbyn and any prospect of a progressive UK government critical of Israel. Read more

Could restoring forests help ease drought in Australia?

If you've ever walked in a rainforest or even a greenhouse, you'll know that the air inside is heavy with moisture. This phenomenon is caused by trees releasing water vapour through pores in their leaves called stomata. We also know that many big forests, and rainforests in particular, tend to get more rain than surrounding areas — hence the name. An expanding body of evidence supports the idea that forests, in the right conditions, not only make rain locally but also hundreds of kilometres away. In Australia, we've cut down nearly 40 per cent of our forests in the past 200 years, leaving a fragmented landscape in their place. Read more

Lobbying: how big business connects to government

Who are the lobbyists preferred by Apple and KFC? Why do corporate heavyweights like McDonald’s, AMP, LendLease and Amazon engage two lobbyist firms at once? And which firms have their ties to government hidden under Australia’s flawed transparency regime? We’ve added a function below that allows you to explore which company or organisation has hired which client. Use the filters to adjust which group of lobbyists and clients are shown in the dropdown menu, and update the chart by selecting a new firm or client. Read more

China dominates research rising stars

Nine out of the top ten institutions ranked as ‘rising stars’ by Nature Index are in China. One in India is ranked 7, and UCL(Irvine) only eleventh. The list ranks institutions by the increase in their contribution to 82 high-quality journals. Austria, Norway, Brazil, Iran and the Czech Republic have the highest increases. Read more

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