L. MICHAEL HAGER, - Truthout
Stephan: The pious posturing we do concerning human rights abuses in other countries is understood by much of the rest of the world for what it is -- high level hypocrisy. We have fallen a long way from being the shining city on a hill and, it is a fall engineered by both liberal and conservative politicians. Neither party has clean hands in this.
Last week, the UN Human Rights Committee issued a draft evaluation of US performance in upholding the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. While some progress was acknowledged, serious lapses – including NSA spying and failures of accountability – were detailed.
When America calls others to account for human rights offenses, it must be ready to acknowledge and correct its own lapses.
Last week, a bipartisan group of 52 members of Congress urged President Obama to address human rights concerns in his meeting with Saudi King Abdullah. During the same week, the UN Human Rights Committee assessed US compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) – and found the US wanting in many respects.
The ICCPR defines fundamental civil and political rights, including the rights to life, due process, fair trial and privacy. It also enshrines various freedoms, including the freedom from torture, and provides for equal protection. Adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1966, the ICCPR came into force in March 1976. The US became a state member in 1992.
Chaired by Sir Nigel Rodley, a British law professor, the Human Rights Committee of 18 independent human rights experts monitors the ICCPR. The […]
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Stephan: Here is an aspect of climate change that has received very little attention. The more we understand about what is coming, the worse the story gets.
Forget changing rain patterns – warmer temperatures alone could bring drought to a third of Earth’s land area by the end of the century. That’s the gist of a new study from Columbia University’s Earth Observatory: Hotter temperatures will mean more evaporation, drying out the soil and posing a significant risk to global agriculture and food security.
Climate Central has the details:
Climate models using the so-called business-as-usual greenhouse gas emissions scenario, which assumes no effort to curb emissions, found that increased evaporation ‘not only intensifies drying in areas where precipitation is already reduced, it also drives areas into drought that would otherwise experience little drying or even wetting from precipitation trends alone,” the authors wrote. That would potentially push up to 30 percent of Earth’s land area into drought, compared to the 12 percent precipitation trends alone would affect.
…The U.S. Central Plains and southeast China showed signs of that long-term drying trend in the models, and these are ‘two regions where if you just naively assume that it’s just precipitation that matters,” that drought signal might not show up, [study author Ben] Cook said. Even if rain is falling, increased evaporation can mean […]
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DEIRDRE HUGHES, - Yahoo Finance
Stephan: A reader, with a PhD sent me this, saying he felt it to be true in his own case and suspected it would be true of many other SR readers.
The share of Americans who consider themselves middle class is now the minority. According to a Pew Research Center survey, just 44% of Americans believe they are part of the middle class. That is the lowest level ever, down from 54% as recently as 2008. 40% identified themselves as lower-middle class or lower class in the January survey, compared to 25% in 2008.
According to the definition offered up by the White House’s ‘Middle Class Task Force”, the middle class in America is a thing of the past. How can that be? It is precisely because there is no empirical definition of what the middle class is or even a middle income range that defines the class. The fundamental principal that defines the American middle class is aspiration. The task force determined that: ‘middle class families are defined more by their aspirations than their income.”
Based on that definition, the middle class is eroding simply because aspiration is eroding – and quickly. According to a Washington Post/Miller Center poll, just 39% of Americans believe their children will have a better standard of living than they do. A similar poll conducted by Gallup found the share of Americans who believe today’s youth will […]
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Thursday, April 3rd, 2014
ANN SOLOMAN and CAROL THORBES, - Simon Fraser University (Canada)
Stephan: Here is the latest on the rise of Willful Ignorance, and the decline of knowledge in both the United States and Canada.
Natural history provides essential knowledge for human wellbeing, yet its research, use and instruction in academia, government agencies and non-government organizations is declining drastically.
Simon Fraser University ecologist Anne Salomon is among 17 authors of a new paper that claims this decline in the developed world could seriously undermine the world’s progress in research, conservation and management.
The paper, Natural History’s Place in Science and Society, evaluates the state of natural history research and use today. The journal BioScience has just published the paper online.
Natural history is the study of the fundamental nature of organisms, and how and where they live and interact with their environment.
According to the study, natural history collections have stopped expanding. The number of active collections of preserved plant specimens has dropped since 1990 in Europe and North America.
The authors say 75 per cent of emerging infectious human diseases, including avian influenza, Lyme disease, cholera and rabies, are linked to other animals at some point in their life cycle. Control strategies rely on knowledge of the hosts’ natural history.
The authors note there are all kinds of examples throughout history of how the world could have avoided natural resource-based calamities, had it paid attention to natural history’s […]
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Thursday, April 3rd, 2014
Senator Bernie Sanders, - Truthdig
Stephan: Senator Bernie Sanders is one of the few people in Congress really dedicated to making the world a better place. Here is his excellent assessment of what is happening to democracy.
In his 1943 painting ‘Freedom of Speech,” Norman Rockwell illustrated American democracy in action by depicting a man speaking up at a town meeting. A framed poster of Rockwell’s painting hangs proudly on a wall in my Senate office in Burlington, Vt.
Since 1990, when I was first elected to Congress, I have held hundreds of town meetings in almost every community in Vermont. Just this past Sunday I held a town meeting in Middlebury, Vt., with a video connection to meetings in three other towns. At these town meetings I listen to what my constituents have to say, answer questions and give a rundown of what I’m working on and what’s going on in Washington.
This process-an elected official meeting with ordinary citizens-is called ‘democracy.”
Ironically, at the same time as I was holding town meetings in Vermont, a handful of prospective 2016 Republican presidential candidates (Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Chris Christie and Scott Walker) trekked to Las Vegas to audition for the support of Sheldon Adelson, the multibillionaire casino tycoon who spent at least $93 million underwriting conservative candidates in the last election cycle. Those candidates were in Las Vegas for the sole purpose of attempting to win hundreds of millions […]
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