Mois : juillet 2007

Linked with AntiWar.com, with JPRI The Japan Policy Research Institute; with about Chalmers Johnson’s “Nemesis »-book, with Iraqi Wars – (or how to end it?), and with his presentation of February 19, 2006.

Chalmers Ashby Johnson is an author and professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego. He is also president and co-founder of the Japan Policy Research Institute, an organization promoting public education about Japan and Asia. He has written numerous books including, most recently, three examinations of the consequences of American Empire. (full text).

Read: Empire v. Democracy, Why Nemesis Is at Our Door, February 1, 2007.

He says: ”In early 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, I was putting the finishing touches on my portrait [The Sorrows of Empire] of the global reach of American military bases. In it, I suggested the sorrows already invading our lives, which were likely to be our fate for years to come: perpetual war, a collapse of constitutional government, endemic official lying and disinformation, and finally bankruptcy. At book’s end, I advocated reforms intended to head off these outcomes but warned that ‘failing such a reform, Nemesis, the goddess of retribution and vengeance, the punisher of pride and hubris, waits impatiently for her meeting with us » … (full text).

Read: Cold Warrior in a Strange Land, March 22, 2006.

Chalmers Johnson – USA

He works for the Japan Policy Research Institute JPRI.

Read: Republic or empire: A National Intelligence Estimate on the United States, January 2007.

Listen to his longer interview on AntiWarRadio (February 5, 2007).

See his blog: The American Empire Project.

He says also: « By the end of the first century BC, Rome had seemingly, again, « inadvertently » acquired an empire that surrounded the entire Mediterranean Sea. They then discovered that the inescapable accompaniment, the Siamese twin of imperialism, is militarism. You start needing standing armies. You start having armies that are demobilized, of men who have done nothing but spend all their lives in the military. It’s expensive to pay them. You have to now provide them, in the Roman Empire, with farms or things of this sort. They become irritated with the state. And then along comes the military populist, the figure who says, « I understand your problems. I represent your interests against the Roman Senate. » And, certainly, Julius Caesar is the model for this. « The only requirement is that I become life dictator for this » — Napoleon Bonaparte, Juan Peron, this type of figure.

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Linked with Earth Policy Institute, with Plan B 2.0, and with Search for an Eco-Economy.

Lester Russell Brown (born 1934) is an environmental analyst who has written several books on global environmental issues. He is the founder of the Worldwatch Institute and founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute which is a nonprofit research organization in Washington, D.C. Though he has written over twenty books, he is best known for Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble. With books in more than forty languages, he is one of the world’s most widely published authors …  » (full text).

Read: ENVIRONMENT: Replanting the Planet, Analysis by Lester R. Brown, July 10, 2007.

Listen to his speech on poptech.com, (no time indication).

He says: ”Our global civilization today is on an economic path that is environmentally unsustainable, a path that is leading us toward economic decline and eventual collapse ».

Lester Brown – USA

Read: Bill Boyne: Corn that fuels cars can’t fill stomachs, June 29, 2007.

Listen to his videos on google (with hereafter a short selection):

• Lester R. Brown, 52 min, 03-May-2006;
• Authors@Google – Lester Brown, 55 min, 01-May-2007;
• SC AgSummit, Lester Brown, 1 hr 7 min, October 26, 2006;
• Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble, 1 hr 7 min, 18-Apr-2007 (around 22 – 26 min.: cars run by corn fuel rise the prize for people’s corn).

He says also answering the question, ‘Can the Earth support three billion more people?’: « The question is, if we look at it just in food terms, at what level of living? If we’re talking about living at food-consumption levels today of, say, the average person in India, then the current world harvest can support 10 billion people. But if we’re talking about the U.S. level of consumption, then we’re talking about a world that will support two and a half billion people.

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Linked with Mexicans in America, and with Keynote Address by RICHARD RODRIGUEZ …

Richard Rodriguez (born 31 July 1944) is a Mexican-American writer who became famous for his 1981 book, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (ISBN 0-553-27293-4), a narrative about his development as a literate, American student. (full text).

He says: ”Bilingual-education advocates say it’s important to teach a child in his or her family’s language. I say you can’t use family language in the classroom — the very nature of the classroom requires that you use language publicly. When the Irish nun said to me, « Speak your name loud and clear so that all the boys and girls can hear you, » she was asking me to use language publicly, with strangers. That’s the appropriate instruction for a teacher to give. If she were to say to me, « We are going to speak now in Spanish, just like you do at home. You can whisper anything you want to me, and I am going to call you by a nickname, just like your mother does, » that would be inappropriate. Intimacy is not what classrooms are about ». (full text).

The Browning of America is a phrase coined by Rodriguez to describe an increase in the mixing of cultural, racial, and ethnic identities in the United States during the late 20th and early 21st century. (full text).

Richard Rodriguez – USA

Richard Rodriguez is a contributing editor at New America Media in San Francisco. He writes regularly for several newspapers and magazines, both in the United States and in England. He has also written an autobiographical trilogy on class, ethnicity and race: « Hunger of Memory » (1982) « Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father, » (1992) and « Brown: The Last Discovery of America » (2002). He is currently working on a book concerned with the ecology of the desert and monotheism. (full text).

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Linked with Past Global Changes.

Thomas Stocker is Professor of Climate and Environmental Physics at the University of Bern and head of the Division of Climate and Environmental Physics of the Physics Institute since 1993. He developed the first climate models of intermediate complexity, and he investigates the role of the carbon cycle in the climate system, in particular, the impact of abrupt climate changes on the biogeochemical cycles. He is the coordinator of the chapter « Global Climate Projection » in the forthcoming Fourth Assessment Report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC. (full text).

He says: (Question: Where did the carbon dioxide come from?) « This is one of the grand unsolved puzzles in climate research, about 50% of the 80-ppm glacial-to-interglacial increase can be explained by a change in the solubility of carbon dioxide. Warmer ocean water carries less carbon dioxide than colder water. However, there are complicated biochemical processes in the ocean, such as pH, the depth of the dissolution level for calcium carbonate, and the net primary productivity of the marine carbon cycle that are also playing a role ». (full text).

Thomas Stocker – Switzerland

He works for the laboratory for Climate and Environmental Physics, Univ. Berne (Switzerland).

Research Interests are: Dynamics of the Climate System, Climate Modelling, Past and Future Climate Change, Abrupt Climate Change, Ice Core Analysis, Isotopes in the Environment, Radiocarbon. (full text and his homepage).

Stocker’s guest lecture was entitled: ‘The latest results from EPICA (the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica): Greenhouse Gases and the Bipolar Seesaw’. Thomas Stocker is a Professor at the University of Bern where he is leader of the Climate and Environmental Physics group. He was in Bergen as part of a three-day workshop involving participants in the project entitled, ‘Patterns of Climate Variability in the North Atlantic (PACLIVA)’. (full text).

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Linked with APWLD Women’s Alliance for Peace and Democracy, Sri Lanka, and with The International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism IMADR.

She is a founding member of APWLD Women’s Alliance for Peace and Democracy, Sri Lanka. (full text, scroll down).

An attorney-at-law and women’s rights activist. She is President of the International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism (IMADR) and the Women’s Forum for Peace in Sri Lanka. Nimalka is a founding member of ARENA and was a member of the ARENA Executive Board 1994 – 1997. (full text).

And she is a member of the Democratic People’s Movement in Sri Lanka which is a coalition of people’s movements, NGOs and trade unions initiating action and dialogue for alternative development paradigms. (full text).

Nimalka Fernando – Sri Lanka

She says: « The issue here is that the sense of insecurity that majority Sinhalese feel is that most of the LTTE training camps were in India. This is not my position but this is a feeling that Sinhala extremists sometimes propagated.

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