There is no meaningful response to climate change without massive social change. A cap on this and a quota on the other won’t do it. Tinker at the edges as we may, we cannot sustain earth’s life-support systems within the present economic system.

Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and bigger production in a finite planet. And yet this ideological model remains the central organising principle of our lives, and as long as it continues to be so it will automatically undo (with its invisible hand) every single green initiative anybody cares to come up with.
guardian.co.uk

Tornadoes early Thursday tore through New Orleans neighborhoods that were hit hard by Hurricane Katrina just five months earlier, collapsing at least one previously damaged house and battering the airport, authorities said.

Roofs were ripped off and utility poles came down, but no serious injuries were reported.

“Don’t ever ask the question, `What else could happen?'” said Marcia Paul Leone, a mortgage banker who was surveying the new damage to her Katrina-flooded home.

She would go no farther than the front porch of her house Thursday morning. Windows were blown out, and the building appeared to be leaning.

“I’ve been in the mortgage business for 20 years. I know when something’s unsafe,” she said.

Electricity was knocked out at Louis Armstrong International Airport, grounding passenger flights and leaving travelers to wait in a dimly lit terminal powered by generators. The storm also ripped off part of a concourse roof, slammed one jetway into another, and flipped motorized runway luggage carts.
breitbart.com

Nearly 2,000 people in the Seychelles have been infected with an incurable mosquito-borne disease that has spread to three Indian Ocean islands prompting health alerts, officials said.

Jules Gedeon, the Seychelles director for community health, said the number of people diagnosed with “chikungunya” was steadily rising since it was first reported in November and nearly 1,000 cases had been reported in January alone

….”Chikungunya” is Swahili for “that which bends up” and refers to the stooped posture of those afflicted by the crippling and extremely painful disease for which there is no known vaccine or cure.

It is characterized by high fever and severe rashes, and while non-fatal in itself and most people eventually recover, it can provide opportunities for other diseases to set in.

Health officials in the Seychelles attributed the recent sharp rise in cases of chikungunya to heavy rains that have been pounding the island since December.
breitbart.com

…We a family
the Outsiders will always be
remember who we are
we’re making history
no one understands how we stay together
I tell them we’re brothers
and life isn’t the same without each other.
— Rap lyrics by Outsider Mark Cevallos

They called themselves the “Outsiders”: a bunch of spiky-haired, barely teenage boys from Van Nuys whose families came from Mexico and other parts of Latin America.

Eleven of them entered Birmingham High as freshmen in the fall of 2001.

There was Isaac, a tough guy the girls adored; David, a gifted student and a baseball player; and Polo Morales, a fatherless boy who loved football. There were others: An eloquent rapper, a fearless skateboarder, a rock ‘n’ roll drummer. The boys break-danced together and spent hours writing lyrics to rock and rap songs.

Navigating the streets of their neighborhood, they had learned never to walk alone.

Belonging to a group meant they didn’t have to. The Outsiders were not a gang. Gangs killed people. They simply watched one another’s backs. If one needed a dollar, another spotted him. If one got punched, another punched back.

As students, none was exceptional. Half of the boys had earned too few credits to participate in graduation from junior high, but the Los Angeles Unified School District’s social promotion policy allowed them to move on to high school anyway.

They expected to graduate together.

By late spring of 2005, only four of the 11 were left.
latimes.com

WASHINGTON – National Intelligence Director John Negroponte said Thursday that the al-Qaida terror network remains the “top concern” of the U.S. intelligence community, followed closely by the nuclear activities of Iran and North Korea.

Negroponte told the Senate Intelligence Committee in a relatively rare public session that Iran probably does not yet have nuclear weapons, nor the fissile material needed for producing them.

“Nevertheless, the danger that it will acquire a nuclear weapon and the ability to integrate it with the ballistic missiles Iran already possesses is a reason for immediate concern,” he said.
msnbc.msn.com

Negroponte should be on top of everybody’s list. His appearance right at this moment is ominous.

I was so concerned about this issue that I wrote a book, “Why They Hate Us So Much: 100 Facts About 9/11, Islam, and the Middle East- You Don’t Know But Should.”

I am a Desert Storm/Desert Shield veteran. During the war I went into Iraq with the XVIII Airborne Corps. Before the war I taught my unit Arabic numerals, basic Arabic, and basic Arabic history. What was most disturbing and at the same time interesting to me was the complete and total lack of knowledge “intelligent” Americans had about Islam and the Middle East. In the almost 15 years since the war- I must say it has gotten worse not better. How is that? How can we be dumber about the region with all of the channels we have in America and the thousands upon thousands of hours that have been dedicated to the Middle East due to the second Iraqi War, the Palestine/Israeli conflict, and 9/11? How can the country ! with the largest college and university system on Earth be that ignorant of a people and place that will absolutely determine both our future as a country and how we live as a people for the rest of the 21st Century?
kavkazcenter.com

More than 20,000 paramilitaries have now laid down their arms in Colombia following the latest disarmament drive under the peace process, officials say.
Over 2,500 fighters of the Central Bolivar Bloc surrendered their weapons at a ceremony in the town of Santa Rosa, north of Bogota.

The government believes this faction controlled a coca production area.

Under the peace process, those who have committed crimes and agree to disarm face reduced prison terms.

Most of the rank-and-file paramilitaries are expected to be pardoned and can be eligible for job-training programmes and a monthly government stipend for two years.
bbc.co.uk

Can we discern the hand of Chavez and Castro here? Will Uribe now reject Plan Colombia and throw the North Americans out?

…The debate on the politicisation of the Forum will continue through the Karachi meet this March and on into Nairobi next year. “It is the peoples and social movements, not the leaders, who must mobilise and exert pressure on the governments, because without mobilisation, nothing can be achieved,” said Belgian activist Eric Toussaint, president of the Brussels-based Committee for Cancellation of the Third World Debt.

For her part, Francisca Rodríguez of the National Association of Rural and Indigenous Women of Chile, maintained that “the Forum needs to re-examine itself and take a leap forward, because we are refusing to consider political approaches, and that is counterproductive.”

“If we don’t take this step forward, we will forever be nothing more than social tourists,” she stressed.
commondreams.org

DAVOS, Switzerland – The Swiss Alpine ski resort of Davos has never suffered a disaster like Hurricane Katrina, which left 1,326 people dead and 6,644 missing after passing through the southeastern U.S. city of New Orleans last August.

In fact, the cultural, social and climatic differences between the cities are so vast that they seem to share almost nothing in common, except perhaps for the fact that both attract large numbers of tourists.

But according to New Orleans community activist Jay Arena, there is another common link that the two cities share: the power exerted by politically conservative, economically neoliberal power elites.

Davos is the host city for the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) gathering of the world’s political, economic and business elites, described by Arena as “a group of unelected, unresponsive, unaccountable capitalist elites meeting in private” to chart out the future of the entire planet.

This process is strikingly similar to the Bring New Orleans Back Commission established by Mayor Ray Nagin to oversee post-hurricane reconstruction efforts, Arena told IPS.

Many have criticised the mayor’s commission as being highly stacked with business leaders and real estate developers. As a result, Arena noted, people like real estate mogul Joseph Canizaro, “one of the biggest contributors to the (George W.) Bush administration,” will now have the power to make plans that will affect “the lives of tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people in New Orleans.”

“And at the same time, they try to co-opt some community organisations and labour unions to legitimise their criminal enterprise,” he added.
commondreams.org

More than half of Africa is now in need of urgent food assistance.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is warning that 27 sub-Saharan countries now need help.

But what appear as isolated disasters brought about by drought or conflict in countries like Somalia, Malawi, Niger, Kenya and Zimbabwe are – in reality – systemic problems.

It is African agriculture itself that is in crisis, and according to the International Food Policy Research Institute, this has left 200 million people malnourished.

It is particularly striking that the FAO highlights political problems such as civil strife, refugee movements and returnees in 15 of the 27 countries it declares in need of urgent assistance. By comparison drought is only cited in 12 out of 27 countries.

The implication is clear – Africa’s years of wars, coups and civil strife are responsible for more hunger than the natural problems that befall it.
bbc.co.uk

I find it ‘particularly striking’ that in this whole raft of articles by the BBC that no mention is made of IMF/World Bank ‘development goals’ that mandate cash-cropping that exhaust the land and make it impossible for Africa to feed itself.

By all means, blame Africa’s situation on the ineptitude of Africa without a mention of continuing Western pillage.

Can aid do more harm than good?
What is to be done?

Mr Easterly and others are not arguing that the solution to perverse incentives lies in withholding emergency aid.

They contend that it could be made to work better in a number of ways, including:

-Providing compensation to local farmers
-Making sure aid stops when things improve
-Giving hungry families cash rather than food
-But the most effective move would be to focus less on emergencies and more on chronic problems. Mr Easterly says this could be done cheaply in the Sahel.

Improving access to clean water and distributing re-hydration tablets, for instance, would help eradicate diarrhoea, which drains nutrients away and makes children particularly vulnerable.

Tony Vaux, for his part, calls on the media to present a balanced picture of the situation of the ground, and not see their role as promoting the NGOs public appeals.

But he does not hold out much hope.

“When I first joined Oxfam in 1972 there was a famine in the Sahel, exactly like the famine today,” he recalls.

Three decades and umpteen appeals later the same emergencies keep recurring, he says ruefully.
The NGOs bread and butter depends on the existence of hunger forever. In Dickens’ Bleak House there is a woman who is busily wringing her hands and gathering up aid for the Poor Black People of Africa while her unkempt children are tumbling into the fireplace of her filthy house.