The United States comes from a long tradition of cultural values that are based on the idea of separation from nature. Nature is evil, something to overcome, to be controlled. So we have separated ourselves from it. Our history of conquering nature brought us to a point now, in America, where we mercilessly and without forethought, engage in willful mass murder of domesticated animals within our borders of control; not for the survival of our people, but for the sustainment of economic powers.

What about cage-free chickens? What about Kobe beef? And other animal products labeled similarly? Lies. They are are simply lies built up through marketing rhetoric to trick the American people into thinking they are purchasing a more humane product. Cage-free chicken means that the giant death house where the chickens are kept in the dark from birth to death, wing to wing, on top of each other, are exposed to sunlight once a day, by opening the barn doors. Kobe beef? Don’t those cows get massages and beer? Well, there is no such thing as Kobe beef in America. Kobe beef comes from a very specific stock of cows in Japan. Everything marked in America as Kobe beef is simply a marketing ploy. Tricks like these and countless others attempt to pacify us in light of the atrocities committed by America every second of every day.

To the Plains Indians, buffalo were the givers of life, food, clothing, shelter, and spiritual understanding. The animal was their brother and a necessary kill so that many could live. The fallen animal was ...

If we were hoping for peace in our time, 2012 did not deliver it. Conflict grew ever bloodier in Syria, continued to grind on in Afghanistan, and flared up periodically in West, Central, and East Africa. There were multiple episodes of ethnic, sectarian, and politically motivated violence in Myanmar (Burma), South Asia, and around the Middle East. Tensions between China and its neighbors have escalated in the South China Sea, and between China and Japan in the East China Sea. Concerns about North Korea’s and Iran’s nuclear programs remain unresolved.

And yet, many feared eruptions within and between states did not occur. Strong international pressure helped to contain the Second Gaza War quickly. A long-sought peace agreement was secured for the southern Philippine island of Mindanao. Major strides were taken toward sustainable peace and reconciliation in Myanmar. There was no major new genocidal catastrophe. And, despite the United Nations Security Council’s paralysis over Syria, UN General Assembly member states made clear their continuing overwhelming acceptance of the responsibility to protect those at risk of mass-atrocity crimes.

The bigger story has been concealed, as ever, by the media’s daily ...

Polls show that many members of the public believe that scientists substantially disagree about human-caused global warming. The gold standard of science is the peer-reviewed literature. If there is disagreement among scientists, based not on opinion but on hard evidence, it will be found in the peer-reviewed literature.

I searched the Web of Science for peer-reviewed scientific articles published between 1 January 1991 and 9 November 2012 that have the keyword phrases "global warming" or "global climate change." The search produced 13,950 articles. See methodology.

I read whatever combination of titles, abstracts, and entire articles was necessary to identify articles that "reject" human-caused global warming. To be classified as rejecting, an article had to clearly and explicitly state that the theory of global warming is false or, as happened in a few cases, that some other process better explains the observed warming. Articles that merely claimed to have found some discrepancy, some minor flaw, some reason for doubt, I did not classify as rejecting global warming. Articles about methods, paleoclimatology, mitigation, adaptation, and effects at least implicitly accept human-caused global warming and were usually obvious from the title alone. John Cook and Dana Nuccitelli also reviewed and assigned some of these articles; John provided invaluable technical expertise.

This work follows that of Oreskes (Science, 2005) who searched for articles published between 1993 and 2003 with the keyword phrase “global climate change.” She found 928, read the abstracts of each and classified them. ...

So the bidding has begun.

According to the Wall Street Journal (which got the information from GOP leaders), the President’s opening bid to Republicans is:

— $1.6 trillion in additional tax revenues over the next decade, from limiting tax deductions on the wealthy and raising tax rates on incomes over $250,000 (although those rates don’t have to rise as high as the top marginal rates under Bill Clinton)

— $50 billion in added economic stimulus next year

— A one-year postponement of pending spending cuts in defense and domestic programs

— $400 billion in savings over the decade from Medicare and other entitlement programs  (the same number contained in the President’s 2013 budget proposal, submitted before the election).

— Authority to raise the debt limit without congressional approval.

The $50 billion in added stimulus is welcome. We need more spending in the short term in order to keep the recovery going, particularly in light of economic contractions in Europe and Japan, and slowdowns in China and India.

But by signaling its willingness not to raise top rates as high as they were under Clinton and to cut some $400 billion from projected increases in Medicare and other entitlement spending, the White House has ceded important ground.

Republicans obviously want much, much more.

The administration has taken a “step backward, moving away from consensus and significantly closer to the cliff, delaying again the real, balanced solution that this crisis requires,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) in a written statement. “No substantive progress has been made” added House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio).

No ...

Calls are mounting for the world’s big fishing powers to stop subsidizing international fleets that use destructive methods like bottom trawling in foreign coastal waters, drastically reducing the catch of local artisanal fishers who use nets and fishing lines.

Such subsidies total 27 billion dollars a year, with nearly two-thirds coming from China, Taiwan and Korea along with Europe, Japan and the United States, according to a University of British Columbia study.

Most go to building the ever-more-efficient ships that are required to catch ever-dwindling populations of fish around the world, with yet more subsidies going to offset their growing consumption of fuel as they venture ever farther and deeper to fill their holds.

The result, says Dr. Rashid Sumaila, lead author of the UBC study, is that taxpayers are funding the depletion of the world’s fish populations and the impoverishment of coastal communities abroad.

“A lot of the fish eaten in Europe, the United States and Japan comes from other countries, mostly poor ones,” because the developed countries long ago overexploited their own waters, he told IPS in a telephone interview.

“The more their fleets fish out an area, the harder it gets to keep fishing there and the more they ask for subsidies,” he added. “It’s crazy.”

A senior United Nations official agrees, charging last week that developed countries, which eat three times as much fish per capita as poor ones, are are depleting the oceans and depriving coastal fishermen in developing countries of their livelihood and coastal populations of food.

“Without rapid action” to stop destructive practices, “fisheries will no longer be able to play a critical role in securing the right to food of millions,” the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to ...

Investors wasted no time running from what had been a nice little three-month rally in coal stocks ahead of the 2012 presidential election. [Market Watch]

US President Barack Obama has hinted he will make another push to fight climate change after cruising to a new term, but his room for maneuver will be limited even with a new focus after megastorm Sandy. [AFP]

Barack Obama’s invocation of “the destructive power of a warming planet” in his victory speech has stoked ...

Six children were attacked in Afghanistan and Pakistan this past week. Three of them, teenaged girls on a school bus in Peshawar, in the tribal region of western Pakistan, were shot and gravely wounded by two Taliban gunmen who were after Malala Yousufzai, a 14-year-old girl who has been bravely demanding the right of girls to an education. After taking a bullet to the head, and facing further death threats, she has been moved to a specialty hospital in Britain. Her two wounded classmates are being treated in Pakistan.

The other three children were not so lucky. They were killed Sunday in an aerial attack by a US aircraft in the the Nawa district of Helmand Province in Afghanistan, not so far from Pakistan. The attack, described by the military as a “precision strike,” was reportedly aimed at several Taliban fighters who were allegedly planting an IED in the road, but the strike also killed three children, Borjan, 12; Sardar Wali, 10; and Khan Bibi, 8, all from one family, who were right nearby collecting dung for fuel.

Initially, as is its standard MO, the US denied that any children had been killed and insisted that the aircraft had targeted three “Taliban” fighters, and had successfully killed them. Only later, as evidence grew indesputable that the three children had also been killed, the US switched to its standard fallback position for atrocities in the Afghanistan War and its other wars: it announced that it was “investigating” the incident and said that it ...

Saoirse and Ula have a favorite story they are forever asking me to retell. It is about my first encounter with bullies in my kindergarten year. It goes like this: At the end of each day, my older brother and his best friend would pick me up from my classroom, and together we’d walk to our babysitter’s house in town. And each day, the moment we were off school property, a group of three bullies waited for us. They made threats, and we just kept walking. But the afternoon eventually came when fighting ensued. Each of the two older boys took on my brother and his friend. They instructed the youngest to “get the girl.”

I stared at him coming at me. Then I dropped my backpack off my shoulder. It held a metal lunch pail. I kept the strap in my hand. As soon as he was close enough, I closed my eyes and swung in a circle, clobbering the first thing that came into contact with the lunch pail and bag, which was the boy’s head. Golly, did he let out a wail. The cry was loud enough to break up the other two fights, and the three bullies went home to tell on me. No trouble ever came of the incident, and we were able to walk safely to the babysitter’s house after that.

The story is one of my most vivid childhood memories, as it was the end of my fear of bullies. Oh, how innocent it all was back then.

Flash forward to my early twenties, when I was working as a high school English teacher in Japan, with 600 students. As an adult, I never saw the bullying. But one of my students wound up committing suicide over it. Naturally, by the time I had children of my own, the idea of childhood bullying struck me as horrific. And while bully avoidance wasn’t the reason I chose to homeschool my kids, I was perfectly happy to sidestep that part of Saoirse and Ula’s growing pains.

It turns out I didn’t sidestep it as much as I thought.

Saoirse was ...

Years before F-22 pilots began getting dizzy in the cockpit -- before one struggled to breathe in advance of a fatal crash, before two more went on television to say they refused to fly it -- a small circle of U.S. Air Force experts knew something was wrong with the costly stealth fighter jet.

Coughing among pilots and fears of contaminants in their breathing apparatus led the experts to suspect flaws in the oxygen-supply system of the F-22 Raptor, especially in extreme high-altitude conditions. They formed a working group a decade ago to deal with the problem, creating a unique brain trust.

Internal documents and emails obtained by The Associated Press show they proposed a range of solutions by 2005, including adjustments to the flow of oxygen into pilot's masks. But that key recommendation was rejected by military officials who expressed reluctance to add costs to a program already well over budget.

"This initiative has not been funded," read the minutes of their final meeting in 2007.

Minutes of the working group's meetings, PowerPoint presentations and emails among its members reveal a missed opportunity for the Air Force to improve pilot safety in the 187-plane F-22 fleet before a series of high-profile problems damaged the image of the aircraft and led to a series of groundings. Its production was halted last spring and the aircraft has never been used in combat.

The Air Force says the F-22 is safe to fly — a dozen of the jets began a six-month deployment to Japan in July — but flight restrictions remain in place, preventing its use in high-altitude situations where pilots' breathing is under the most stress.

The working group urged various repairs that the Air Force has only recently embraced. One, a backup ...

In many of history’s most successful economic reforms, clever countries have learned from the policy successes of others, adapting them to local conditions. In the long history of economic development, eighteenth-century Britain learned from Holland; early nineteenth-century Prussia learned from Britain and France; mid-nineteenth-century Meiji Japan learned from Germany; post-World War II Europe learned from the United States; and Deng Xiaoping’s China learned from Japan.

Through a process of institutional borrowing and creative adaptation, successful economic institutions and cutting-edge technologies spread around the world, and thereby boost global growth. Today, too, there are some great opportunities for this kind of “policy arbitrage,” if more countries would only take the time to learn from other countries’ successes.

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For example, while many countries are facing a jobs crisis, one part of the capitalist world is doing just fine: northern Europe, including Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia. Germany’s unemployment rate this past summer was around 5.5%, and its youth unemployment rate was around 8% – remarkably low compared with many other high-income economies.

How do northern Europeans do it? All of them use active labor market policies, including flex time, school-to-work apprenticeships (especially Germany), and extensive job training and ...

Can Romney possibly recover? A survey conducted between Sept. 12 and Sept. 16 by the Pew Research Center — before the “47 percent victim” video came to light – showed Obama ahead of Romney 51% to 43% among likely voters.

That’s the biggest margin in the September survey prior to a presidential election since Bill Clinton led Bob Dole, 50% to 38% in 1996.

And, remember, this recent poll was done before America watched Romney belittle almost half the nation.

For the last several days I’ve been deluged with calls from my inside-the-beltway friends telling me “Romney’s dead.”

Hold it. Rumors of Romney’s demise are premature for at least four reasons:

1.  Between now and Election Day come two jobs reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics – October 5 and November 2. If they’re as bad as the last report, showing only 96,000 jobs added in August (125,000 are needed just to keep up with population growth) and the lowest percentage of employed adults since 1981, Romney’s claim the economy is off track becomes more credible, and Obama’s that it’s on the mend harder to defend.

With gas prices rising, corporate profits shrinking, most of Europe in recession, Japan still a basket case, and the Chinese economy slowing, the upcoming job reports are unlikely to be stellar.

2. Also between now and Election Day are three presidential debates, starting October 3. It’s commonly thought Obama will win them handily but that expectation may be very wrong – and could work against him. Yes, Romney is an automaton — but when ...

Japan’s massive government debt conceals massive benefits for the Japanese people, with lessons for the U.S. debt “crisis.”

In an April 2012 article in Forbes titled “If Japan Is Broke, How Is It Bailing Out Europe?”, Eamonn Fingleton pointed out the Japanese government was by far the largest single non-eurozone contributor to the latest Euro rescue effort.  This, he said, is “the same government that has been going round pretending to be bankrupt (or at least offering no serious rebuttal when benighted American and British commentators portray Japanese public finances as a trainwreck).”  Noting that it was also Japan that rescued the IMF system virtually single-handedly at the height of the global panic in 2009, Fingleton asked:

How can a nation whose government is supposedly the most overborrowed in the advanced world afford such generosity? . . .

The betting is that Japan’s true public finances are far stronger than the Western press has been led to believe. What is undeniable is that the Japanese Ministry of Finance is one of the most opaque in the world . . . .

Fingleton acknowledged that the Japanese government’s liabilities are large, but said we also need to look at the asset side of the balance sheet:

[T]he Tokyo Finance Ministry is increasingly borrowing from the Japanese public not to finance out-of-control government spending at home but rather abroad. Besides stepping up to the plate to keep the IMF in business, Tokyo has long been the lender of last resort to both the U.S. and British governments. Meanwhile it borrows 10-year money at an interest rate of just 1.0 percent, the second lowest rate of any borrower in ...

I've seen a lot of sick stuff in my career, but this was sick on a new level.

Here was the handwritten log kept by a senior engineer at the nuclear power plant:

Wiesel was very upset. He seemed very nervous. Very agitated. . . . In fact, the plant was riddled with problems that, no way on earth, could stand an earth- quake. The team of engineers sent in to inspect found that most of these components could "completely and utterly fail" during an earthquake.

"Utterly fail during an earthquake." And here in Japan was the quake and here is the utter failure.

The warning was in what the investigations team called The Notebook, which I'm not supposed to have.  Good thing I've kept a copy anyway, because the file cabinets went down with my office building ....

WORLD TRADE CENTER TOWER 1, FIFTY-SECOND FLOOR
NEW YORK, 1986

Two senior nuclear plant engineers were spilling out their souls and files on our huge conference table, blowing away my government investigations team with the inside stuff about the construction of the Shoreham, New York, power station.

The meeting was secret. Very secret. Their courage could destroy their careers: No engineering firm wants to hire a snitch, even one who has saved thousands of lives. They could lose their jobs; they could lose everything. They did. That’s what happens. Have a nice day.

On March 12 this year, as I watched Fukushima melt, I knew:  the "SQ" had been faked.  Anderson Cooper said it would all be OK.  He'd flown to Japan, to suck up the radiation and official company bullshit.  The horror show was not the fault of Tokyo Electric, he said, because the plant was built to withstand only an 8.0 earthquake on the Richter scale, and this was 9.0.  Anderson must have ...

For years, climate scientists have been warning the world that the heavy use of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) threatens the world with human-induced climate change. The rising atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, a byproduct of burning fossil fuels, would warm the planet and change rainfall and storm patterns and raise sea levels. Now those changes are hitting in every direction, even as powerful corporate lobbies and media propagandists like Rupert Murdoch try to deny the truth.

In recent weeks, the United States has entered its worst drought in modern times. The Midwest and the Plains states, the country’s breadbasket, are baking under a massive heat wave, with more than half of the country under a drought emergency and little relief in sight.

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Halfway around the world, Beijing has been hit by the worst rains on record, with floods killing many people. Japan is similarly facing record-breaking torrential rains. Two of Africa's impoverished drylands – the Horn of Africa in the East and the Sahel in the West – have experienced devastating droughts and famines in the past two years: the rains never came, causing ...

Major banks and the financial global elite are now confirmed to have as much as $32 trillion in hidden assets stashed away in offshore accounts that are subject to little or no taxation. As a result, around $280 billion is estimated to be lost in tax revenues. In other words, the multi-trillion dollar banks and elite families are avoiding any taxation while forcing United States citizens to foot the bill. Amazingly, the $32 trillion stashed away represents the overall GDP of the United States and Japan combined.

In order to reach the monetary figure, which many are calling quite conservative, economist James Henry commissioned was by the Tax Justice Network — a group that seeks to bring tax evasion to light. Even the Tax Justice Network was quite shocked by the outcome, with spokesperson John Christensen saying he was ultimately startled by the “scale” of the numbers. What’s more concerning than the numbers, however, is the entities behind them. The report revealed that major banks such as Bank of America and Citigroup were among the many major corporations and banking organizations to hide their assets in offshore tax havens.

Bank of America, HSBC, Global Elite Families Among Listed

In an interview with the news organization Al Jazeera, Christensen explains just how deep the report goes:

“We’re talking about very big, well-known brands – HSBC, Citigroup, Bank of America, UBS, Credit Suisse – some of the world’s biggest banks are involved…and they do it knowing fully well that their clients, more often than not, are evading and avoiding taxes.”

To find the incriminating information, Henry (the economist working ...

Anti-nuclear protesters camping at what they describe as “the gates of hell” — that is, on the edge of BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam uranium mine in the desert of South Australia — decided to play a game of cricket on Tuesday, July 17, in order to publicize their message: Uranium isn’t Australian.

“It’s just not cricket,” they chanted, “and that’s why we picket.”

Police, however, wanted to play rugby. After a scrum, the cops confiscated the ball but failed to clear demonstrators from the road leading to the mine’s entrance. Then came the tear gas. Next, the mounted police.

The activists, who were gathered in the Outback to shut down what is slated to be the world’s largest open-pit uranium mine, should have known better than to tempt BHP’s army. Earlier that day, six protesters had been dragged away by officers of the law for serving porridge at the mine’s gate. After the cricketers were cleared from the road, three female activists attempting to relieve themselves in the bush were carted away by two policemen.

There’s no room for nature’s business in the uranium business. That’s why BHP is digging into the belly of Kalta, the sleeping lizard who, according to aboriginal legend, lives under the rocks at Olympic Dam. BHP is sucking yellow uranium poison out ...

The global economy is experiencing a major growth challenge. Many advanced countries are attempting to revive sustainable growth in the face of a decelerating global economy. But the challenges across countries are not the same. In particular, the tradable and non-tradable parts of a range of economies differ in important ways.

In the non-tradable sector (60-70% of the economy in advanced countries), the main growth inhibitors are weak demand, as in the United States following the financial crisis, and structural and competitive impediments to productivity, as in Japan. In the tradable sector, growth depends on a country’s productivity relative to incomes and competitiveness. At the global level, there can also be a shortage of aggregate demand on the tradable side.

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The Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow has shown that growth comes from three sources: the working population, capital investment, and technological progress. A growing young population helps to maintain fiscal balance and ensure intergenerational equity, but it does not by itself increase incomes. On the other hand, economic growth below the sum of growth in the working population and the labor-saving part of technological change fuels unemployment.

Developing countries, once they enter rapid-growth mode, generate growth from capital deepening via investment, in a sense making up for past underinvestment. And it is possible for advanced countries to fall behind by under-investing, particularly in the public sector, relying instead on less ...

Disarmament activists and former U.S. ambassadors are urging Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to increase U.S. aid to Laos to clear millions of tonnes of unexploded ordinance (UXO) left by U.S. bombers on its territory during the Indochina War during her brief visit to the country Wednesday.

The visit, scheduled to last only a few hours on a hectic eight-nation tour by Clinton designed in part to underline the Barack Obama administration’s “pivot” from the Middle East to Asia, will nonetheless be historic. No sitting U.S. secretary of state has visited Laos since 1955.

Sources here said Clinton is considering a 100-million-dollar aid commitment to support bomb-clearing efforts over a 10-year period. Such a commitment would more than double the nearly 47 million dollars Washington has provided in UXO assistance since 1997 when it first began funding UXO programmes in Laos.

“While Secretary Clinton’s visit celebrates a promising future for U.S.-Lao relations,” said Amb. Douglas Hartwick, who served as Washington’s envoy in Vientiane from 2001 to 2004, “I hope she also affirms to the Lao people America’s steadfast commitment to help Laos and the international community to resolve this legacy once and ...

A Japanese parliamentary inquiry has concluded last year’s nuclear meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was "a profoundly man-made disaster — that could and should have been foreseen and prevented." We speak to former nuclear industry executive Arnie Gundersen about the report and what it means for U.S. nuclear facilities, in particular the 23 with a similar design to the Fukushima plant. "There’s actually some curious information on Fukushima Unit 1. That was the first one to fail," Gundersen says. "That was built by an American company, General Electric, and an American architect/engineer. So it’s hard for the Japanese to blame themselves, when this was an all-American design. ... I am concerned that the industry, the nuclear industry in the United States, will say it’s a Japanese problem. And it’s not."

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