Last Straw

Sharp decline in public’s belief in cli­mate threat, Brit­ish poll reveals:

The pro­por­tion of adults who believe cli­mate change is “def­in­itely” a real­ity dropped by 30% over the last year, from 44% to 31%, in the latest sur­vey by Ipsos Mori.

What I don’t under­stand is that we’ve been here so often before. Why do people listen to the pro­pa­ganda of oil com­pan­ies and the like over sci­entific evid­ence? How many times do you have to have the wool pulled over your eyes by pro­pa­gand­ists deny­ing that smoking causes can­cer, deny­ing that CFCs lead to ozone deple­tion, deny­ing that cer­tain pol­lut­ants cause acid rain or deny­ing that cli­mate change is man­made (or, ori­gin­ally, that it even existed)?

This is a great time to be born, a great time to be alive. This gen­er­a­tion gets to com­pletely change the world we live in. We have a chance here to reima­gine every single thing we do. But, no, per­haps we’d rather go down with the ship and listen to rich old men try­ing to squeeze every last dol­lar, euro and yen from their invest­ments in out­dated industries.

Back in 2003 and 2004 over 70% of American’s polled were telling poll­sters not only that they believed Sad­dam Hus­sein had WMDs but that he was per­son­ally involved in the attack on the World Trade Centre.

Now they’re at it again, with over 70% telling poll­sters that they think Iran has nuc­lear weapons.

Should this coun­try really be allowed to deal in inter­na­tional politics?

How to defend the Enlight­en­ment:

On the pub­lic­a­tion of his new book In Defence of the Enlight­en­ment, Tzvetan Todorov tells Brit­ish philo­sopher AC Grayling why the Enlight­en­ment must be sep­ar­ated from sci­ent­ism and cul­tural chauvinism.

Nich­olas D. Kris­toff, writ­ing for the New York Times:

Research­ers have found, for example, that some humans are par­tic­u­larly alert to threats, par­tic­u­larly primed to feel vul­ner­able and per­ceive danger. Those people are more likely to be conservatives.

Free­dom of speech is on the offensive.

What an idea, a new busi­ness model for Ice­land:

On Tues­day, the Icelandic par­lia­ment is expec­ted to intro­duce a meas­ure aimed at mak­ing the coun­try an inter­na­tional cen­ter for invest­ig­at­ive journ­al­ism pub­lish­ing, by passing the strongest com­bin­a­tion of source pro­tec­tion, free­dom of speech, and libel-tourism pre­ven­tion laws in the world.

Sup­port­ers of the pro­posal say the move would make Ice­land an “off­shore pub­lish­ing cen­ter” for free speech, ana­log­ous to the off­shore fin­an­cial havens that allow cor­por­a­tions to hide cap­ital from author­it­ies. Could global news organ­iz­a­tions with a home office in Reyk­javík soon be as com­mon as Delaware cor­por­a­tions or Cay­man Islands assets?

“This is a legis­lat­ive pack­age to cre­ate a haven for free­dom of expres­sion,” Icelandic mem­ber of par­lia­ment Birgitta Jóns­dót­tir con­firmed to me, say­ing that a pro­posal for com­pre­hens­ive media law reform will be filed in par­lia­ment on Tues­day, and that whistle-blowing spe­cial­ists Wikileaks has been involved in draft­ing it.

Pro­fessor Colin Blakemore assesses the intriguing implic­a­tions of advances in neur­os­cience that have made it pos­sible to com­mu­nic­ate with those in a veget­at­ive state:

Astro­nomy, from Coper­ni­cus on, has trans­formed our view of the place of the earth in the heav­ens. Dar­win changed forever our view of the status of human­ity. Neur­os­cience is likely to chal­lenge our very under­stand­ing of what it is to be a person.

There’s a cam­paign under way in the U.S. to “restore the First Amend­ment to its ori­ginal pur­pose: to pro­tect people, not cor­por­a­tions.” They need to hurry. The U.S. has long taken the road to corpor­a­to­cracy. The longer this goes on the less likely they’ll ever be able to turn back.

Press TV:

Iraq’s Min­istry for Human Rights will file a law­suit against Bri­tain and the US over their use of depleted uranium bombs in Iraq, an Iraqi min­is­ter says.

Accord­ing to Iraqi experts, the U.S. and Bri­tain, being the lov­ers of free­dom and demo­cracy that they are:

… bombed the coun­try with nearly 2,000 tons of depleted uranium bombs dur­ing the early years of the Iraq war. Atomic radi­ation has increased the num­ber of babies born with defects in the south­ern provinces of Iraq.

Finally. Let’s hope this guy is good.

Richard Wilkin­son and Kate Pick­ett writ­ing for The Guard­ian:

The evid­ence shows that almost all the prob­lems that occur most often in the poorest neigh­bour­hoods — includ­ing those that make us a broken soci­ety — are sys­tem­at­ic­ally more com­mon in more unequal soci­et­ies. Rates are not just a little higher, but between two and eight times higher. Wider income gaps make soci­et­ies socially dys­func­tional across the board.

Last Octo­ber Cameron roun­ded on Labour, say­ing: “Who made inequal­ity greater? No, not the wicked Tor­ies. You, Labour. You’re the ones that did this to our soci­ety. So don’t you dare lec­ture us about poverty. You have failed and it falls to us, the mod­ern Con­ser­vat­ive party, to fight for the poorest who you have let down.”

But the truth is that we are suf­fer­ing the impact of the massive increases in income inequal­ity under Thatcher, which Blair and Brown have since failed to reverse. In the 1980s the gulf between the top and bot­tom 20% widened by a full 60% — much the most dra­matic widen­ing of income dif­fer­ences on record.