Hawken says men should stand back and let women run the show
Touring Australia to promote his project and book Drawdown, Paul Hawken told audiences in Brisbane on Thursday and Byron Bay on Friday that overwhelmingly, women are the solution to climate change.
Hawken edited the 100 solutions presented in the book. Each solution selected for publication was modelled by the team of scientists that form the organisation Drawdown. Two of the top ten solutions specifically deal with the role of women. Solution #6 is the education of girls and solution #7 is family planning. Hawken described these solutions as pathways to the same outcome, which is empowerment of women, leading to a reduction in population growth which is one of two major factors driving environmental damage. Per capita consumption multiplied by the world population is the sum of total resource consumption on the planet. As well as impacting population levels, the empowerment of women leads directly to preferential investment in less aggressive and wasteful approaches to production and commerce, Hawken said.
A separate solution is to supporting women running small scale farms. That has a significant effect on the production of carbon. “Women running small farms produce more food than corporate agriculture,” Hawken told enthusiastic audiences, “that means that we do not have to accept the lie that we need big agriculture to feed the billions of people living in mega cities.”
He challenged the notion that corporate agriculture is feeding society. “Think about what they produce,” he said, “Corn, soy, sugar, highly refined grains and foodstuffs that cause obesity, diabetes, heart attacks. They are not feeding society, they are funding big pharma.”
He also pointed out that the military is one of the biggest contributors to environmental and societal harm, destroying landscapes, agriculture and societies on an enormous scale. He said that while he suspects world peace is probably the number one solution to reducing climate chaos, it has been left out of the book because there is no data available to model the impact of reversing it.
While the tour is largely complete, there are plenty of opportunities online to see Hawkens expounding the value of the book.
The Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull will today decree a Royal Commission into Sexual Staff Relations known as the Royal Commission into Bonks, i.e. #bonkcommission.
He will say, “Far from being tawdry or salacious, the investigation will provide clear guidelines as the what is and is not appropriate in navigating the complex world of human relations in the intense workplace environment that is Australian Parliament House.”
The announcement follows yesterday’s revision to the Code of Ministerial Conduct trending online as #bonkban.
The Prime Minister will also say. “The Commission will find it desirable to set up a Register of Staff Relations.”
Those failing to accurately use the Register will be deemed to have committed a #bonkommission.
The PM says there will be zero tolerance for #bonkemissions in his APH
He will also announce a new APH (Australian Parliament House) clean furniture policy. Breaches of this policy will be known as #bonkemissions.
International media and parliamentary supervisors watch developments in Australia with interest. Some commenttators consider the Australian PM an endangered species known as The Woolly Malcolm.
The Age special investigation by Royce Millar, Ben Schneiders and Chris Vedelago into Catholic Inc has unleashed a storm of controversy about the stinginess of the Church in response to child sex abuse victims. It is a valuable piece of research that justifiably triggers strong emotions in the largely irreligious Australian population.
The image of a vastly wealthy institution lying about its wealth in court to protect itself from the compensation claims of innocent victims of rape perpetrated by its officials is inflammatory in the extreme. It is, however, a distraction from the fundamental distortions of moral principle that typify the status of the church in our society.
The list is long:
There is the hypocrisy of the church deliberately lying.
There is the hypocrisy of the church worshipping money.
Then there is the complex and fraught issue of the tax free status of religion.
Then there is the blatant placing of the church above the law by its most senior officers in public, without any shame, regret or attempt at explanation.
On top of that there is the complicity of the state which pays the church billions of dollars to provide welfare services even though it has been extensively proven that the church committed institutional and systemic abuse and exploitation of the weak and vulnerable in those very welfare services.
While nearly all of these are mentioned in the Age special report, they are simply referred to as part of building the general case that the church gets special privileges that it may not deserve. This article argues that each of these items deserves focused consideration.
The lies
Millar, Schneiders and Velago extensively document the nature of the lies and the methods used to fabricate them. The church deliberately misled the courts and parliaments or refused to provide the information necessary to determine its wealth. There is no point in carrying out this subterfuge unless it is to protect that wealth. The act of lying about that wealth implicitly proves that the church is acting to protect and nurture that wealth from the interests of the state in which it operates.
The worship
Timothy writes of the duty of servants and masters to behave themselves in the interests of a stable society. He lectures servants on hating good masters and masters on coveting wealth.
Timothy 6:7 For we brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out.
Timothy 6:10. For the love of money is the root of all evil: which, while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
Much of the basis of the 400 year old protestant revolution was based on the sin of the church in being too focused on wealth. This is not a new problem but it needs to be restated a thousand times.
The tax
The relationship between church and state is long and complex.
Traditionally the priest caste and the warrior caste performed different roles in society and often came to loggerheads. Jared Diamond in Collapse presents the demise of Easter Island, as just such a tussle. The failure of crops due to overpopulation was blamed on the weakness of the priest caste and so the warrior caste rose to prominence and directed the energy of the people into building its famous stone monuments.
Tom Holland in Rubicon and The Shadow of the Sword describes Rome as perfecting the use of religion as a cheaper tool for subduing populations than force. To have people willingly submit to the state as a divine protector is a handy form of social management.
He extends the notion in Millenium, describing the pact between a struggling church and a rampant force of land dwelling vikings (the northmen, norsemen, Normans) who used the recently discovered stirrup to mount armed raids on a defenceless public and rape and pillage medieval Europe into a blackened mess. By redirecting their energy into the Crusades and promising them wealth on Earth and everlasting accolades in heaven a string of actors from the Abbot of Cluny to Charlemagne founded Christian Europe on a very clear alliance between Church and State.
The separation of Church and State is a concept born in the Enlightenment in an attempt to relegate the Church to a less central position of power. The fact that the Church developed, refined and continues to use every weapon in its arsenal to resist that relegation should hardly surprise us.
We cannot and must not dismiss the notion of taxing the church as impossible or unreasonable not can we underestimate the power and fury with which the church will resist any such attempts.
This is not a simple decision that will be made by a mail order plebiscite, this is a tooth and claw battle that has fuelled many civil wars in the past and is likely to do so in the future.
The current level of debate on this topic is a long way from taking this dangerous, historical dimension into account. /religious-tax-exemption-protects-the-state/
The law
Given the history just outlined, the church naturally assumes a special relationship with the law. Kings ruled by the Grace of God at the whim of the pope. The protestant refusal to pay taxes to the church and await a papal blessing on the choice of spouse is still viewed within the church as a particular characteristic of a certain period of history rather than as the rightful relationship between church and state.
Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s reserves plenty of room for interpretation about exactly where that line lies.
What is interesting in the alt-right context of 2018 is to compare this with the hysteria around the nature of Sharia law as it is practiced in countries like Saudi Arabia. The alt right feed and fuel the fear that our unholy military alliance with such evil bastards might allow their creepy zealotry to infest and overwhelm our precious democracy. In truth, the enemy is within. It is our own existing religious institutions, especially the Catholic Church, who put themselves above the law and would “prefer to go to jail that inform the police of the [criminal] activities of a priest.” Yes, our democracy is fragile, but it is not immigration that threatens it, it is corruption in the upper echelons of society.
Welfare
And so to the unholiest alliance of all.
In the name of economic rationalism, modern neoliberal governments attempt to outsource welfare and willingly hand over billions to the churches who are well organised, have the real estate, the workers and the financial framework to deal with those members of society who are not productive participants in the money generating machine.
The fact that the churches all have a notion of the deserving poor, make moral judgements about who should and should not receive that welfare and are more concerned with building and protecting their institutions than in servicing their clients means nothing to the bureaucrats. It is simply handy to get those inconvenient numbers off the books and get on with the business of running “the economy”.
More relevantly, these institutions have been proven to be organised crime syndicates systematically nurturing and protecting rapists and paedophiles. Worse, they blatantly deny any responsibility for compensating the victims or preventing future re-occurences of this criminal behaviour.
Despite this, our governments assume that we will continue to accept the churches as the relevant institutions to teach our children, protect our orphans, feed and clothe the poor and homeless and find work for the damaged and under employed.
At the same time, hardworking secular organisations are branded as advocates and lobbyists and punished for their activism by having their funding removed.
That specific argument is presented in detail in an earlier editions of the Cross. /criminal-gangs/
and so …
It is critical that we act. The heat generated by this worthy investigation into the unholy wealth of this criminal organisation can and should be harnessed to call for fundamental change. We must be ready to back the secular organisations that offer alternatives to church welfare and we must stand up to our pious and self serving politicians that will pay lip service to the cause but fundamentally protect their backsides from the heat of a furious dragon protecting its gold.
Above all we must be prepared to face the truth. The church is not a protector of our morals or a force for good. It is a dark and secretive institution designed to prey on the billions of its members to accumulate vast wealth and wield vast power. We must be prepared to fight it no matter how hard that is.
The Iranian owned Sanchi on fire with 1 million barrels of jet fuel on board
The oil from sunken tanker Sanchi is heading for Korean and Japanese fisheries according to the British National Oceanography Centre.
The tanker sank two weeks after crashing with a cargo ship in the East China Sea on January 6th. Registered in Panama and owned by Iranian interests the Sanchi was carrying 136,000 tonnes (960,000 barrels) of ultra-light crude as well as its own heavy diesel fuel. 30 Iranians and 2 Pakistanis on board the ship died in the accident. The ship burned for a week before it sank. This is almost as large as the Exxon Valdez and the largest oil spill since the BP Deppwater Horizon disaster in the gulf of Mexico.
The plume of oil from the sunken Sanchi spreads around the Korean and Japanese coast
The ultra light crude is difficult to clean up as it is highly flammable. Also known as condensate, it is used to create fuel for jet and rocket engines. At the time of the disaster it was hoped it would evaporate, or mix with the sea water and dissipate.
While the greatest danger to the Japanese and Korean shoreline remains the heavy diesel fuel from the ship, the impact of the highly toxic condensate under the water is yet to be determine. The British oceanographers are concerned about the impact on the coral reefs and fisheries in the area which are important food sources for both the Korean and Japanese people.
US politiicans have been paid $100million to deny climate science.
The figures are in.
38 climate denying senators have received three quarters of a million dollars each from fossil fuel interests with the price of a member of Congress denying the science being about one third that.
In total fossil, fuel interests have directly spent over 97 million dollars paying the currently sitting US Senators and Representatives to represent their interests. deny the climate science and question the role of fossil fuels in generating climate chaos. Fossil fuel companies also donate to senators and representatives promoting evidence based policies at one quarter the rate. On average a senator who supports science has received $180,000 dollars in donations from fossil fuel companies compared to the $732,000 received, on average, by the 38 deniers.
Like Australia, the US stands in stark contrast to European nations where climate chaos is an accepted fact and industry and government are working together to redue emissions and amerloriate the inevitable affects of the future chaos and underlying warming already built into the system.
Climate chaos is affecting ordinary people directly and through economic drain
In 2017 alone, sixteen $1 billion-plus weather- and climate-related events killed some 362 people in the US and cost the national economy $306 billion. This is a record for natual disasters and appears to be the shape of things to come. This represents 1.6% of the total US economy at a time when the economy is finely balanced between growth and recession.
The vast bulk of this damage was caused by hurricanes, with Hurricane Harvey alone costing the nation $125 billion. By comparison, wildfires only cost $18billion dollars.
2005 was previously the most expensive year with Hurricanes Katrina, Wilma and Rita racking up a total of $215 billion.
