It is sad, but true. The Gulag horrors are being expanded in Russia. Innocent civilians from Ukraine are suffering there. Out of our sight, out of reach from their suffering families. Pain radiates out from their locations and maybe you and I, if we care enough, will speak of them and condemn their captors and regime which perpetuates this psychopathic environment.
July 13, 2023, headline:
Thousands of Ukraine civilians are being held in Russian prisons. Russia plans to build many more.
Journalists, and the Ukrainian government, have been telling us that for the past four years of Russian aggression against Ukraine, thousands of Ukrainians have been swept up during the war and driven to be tortured and incarcerated in old and new Gulag style prisons.
Under Russian law these people have no status.
Under international law, civilians must never be imprisoned during war.
A Russian government document obtained by The Associated Press dating to January outlined plans to create 25 new prison colonies and six other detention centers in occupied Ukraine by 2026.
Watching this unfold, some have ideas to emulate this concept. Prisons are supposed to be for persons tried and convicted by a respected and fair justice system.
Harsh solutions are also emerging against innocent migrants.
From hotels to ‘detention centres’ for migrants who have sought refuge away from their homeland to another country where they wanted to be safe and earn a living. Now we hear of migrants hubs to ‘process asylum claims’ – but it seems like a dumping ground to deport them away from safety.
The Gulag mentality has seeped into the minds of more governments and their populations as human rights are dismissed and persecution of innocents is becoming more acceptable.
This savagery has shown itself throughout history, as mental instability permeates societies not strong enough to protect the innocent.
Now is the time for us to show strength and to ensure this wrong direction is averted and we progress and evolve as human beings are capable of doing.
Don’t follow false gods.
Pope Leo XIV has already made some clear observations:
Energy Plug wants to enter into a long-term partnership with the Malahat First Nation. Plans are to build a 100,000-square-foot battery assembly and research facility at the nation’s Malahat Business Park, a 52-acre industrial park in Mill Bay, roughly 40 killometres north of Victoria and fronting the Trans-Canada Highway.
The Malahat First Nation were offered to hold 51 percent of Energy Plug’s planned enterprise
Canada’s first Indigenous-led gigafactory could take shape on Vancouver Island
Apartnership between a Vancouver Island First Nation and a Vancouver company focused on lithium battery assembly is touting itself as Canada’s first Indigenous-led gigafactory.
A gigafactory is a large-scale manufacturing facility where electric batteries are produced and/or assembled on a grand scale.
“We were looking for a long-term partnership with an understanding of our vision of renewable technology,” says Broderick Gunning, CEO and president of Energy Plug, whose business is assembling lithium iron phosphate battery packs for residential and commercial storage uses.
Energy Plug wants to enter into a long-term partnership with the Malahat First Nation. Plans are to build a 100,000-square-foot battery assembly and research facility at the nation’s Malahat Business Park, a 52-acre industrial park in Mill Bay, roughly 40 killometres north of Victoria and fronting the Trans-Canada Highway.
The Malahat First Nation, with 51 per cent ownership, would be responsible for building the facility, while Energy Plug would provide leadership, sales, partnerships and finance creation of the internal systems, which include offices, engineering, robotics, research and development.
The Malahat First Nation’s director of economic development notes negotiations haven’t concluded for the project. COURTESY BRODERICK GUNNING, CEO OF ENERGY PLUG — The proposed 100,000-square-foot battery assembly facility to be built at the Malahat Nation’s Business Park.
“We’re focused on land, utilities and a long-term partnership,” says Tristan Gale, who started work with the nation as a fisheries biologist almost eight years ago…..
“The Malahat checked all the boxes,” he says.
Those boxes include sitting at tidewater, access to electricity and being located in a free trade zone, a location where goods can be shipped, handled, manufactured, reconfigured and re-exported without involvement of customs agencies.
Gale points out with 11 kilometres of waterfront, the Malahat First Nation is in charge of one of the few deep-sea ports on the West Coast that isn’t booked up.
As well, the Malahat First Nation is a Land Code Nation, which means the nation is in control of zoning, permitting and taxation on its lands.
Also driving the project is that locally the Malahat Nation, amongst others, will eventually exceed the amount of electricity available. By having a majority stake in the battery facility, the nation will be able to both build and use the battery storage systems, Gale says.
And after more than 25 years of negotiations, the Malahat Nation is close to finalizing the transfer to it of an estimated 3,000 acres of land, which will add to its energy needs. Having the electricity for both new lands and industry, and for existing band members, roughly 370 today, is important for future development, Gale says.
Once built, the factory will also be used for research on lithium, nickel, manganese, cobalt, sodium-ion and solid state batteries.
Then we see Vancouver based Lithium Americas is to mine lithium in a beauty spot in Nevada:
Lithium Americas Provides a Thacker Pass Construction Plan Update
03/14/2024
(All amounts in US$ unless otherwise indicated)
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 14, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Lithium Americas Corp. (TSX: LAC) (NYSE: LAC) (“Lithium Americas” or the “Company”) provides a construction plan update for its Thacker Pass lithium project located in Humboldt County, Nevada (“Thacker Pass” or the “Project”).
It is on the land of indigenous local tribes. For 5 years this land has been the scene of protests to the mine, who ask :
“One, we wanted to stop the mine, but two, we wanted to force a bigger conversation about whether this transition to so-called green energy was actually green and whether we can really save the natural world by destroying more of the natural world, which is what it will take to manufacture things like electric cars and electric car batteries. But my involvement in this campaign is very much based in my love for the natural world and my recognition that everyone’s wellbeing is tied up in the wellbeing of the natural world. And this new wave of extraction for so-called green energy is just going to be another wave of destruction.”
For more details of the protests, and of legal action being taken against them, see:
General Motors are major investors in the project, which was encouraged by the Biden administration.
GM, LAC sign $625-million agreement in push to secure lithium supply in the West
The Vancouver, Canada-based Lithium Americas (LAC) entered into a new $625-million investment agreement with the US automaker General Motors (GM) for establishing a joint venture to fund, develop, construct and operate LAC’s Thacker Pass lithium mine, the company announced on Wednesday October 16
In October 2024, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Loan Programs Office (LPO) announced a $2.26 billion loan to Lithium Americas Corp’s subsidiary, Lithium Nevada Corp. (including $1.97 billion of principal and $289.7 million of capitalized interest), to help finance the construction of facilities for manufacturing lithium carbonate at Thacker Pass in Humboldt County, Nevada. The project is located next to a mine site that contains the largest confirmed lithium resource in North America. Once fully operational, the facility is expected to produce approximately 40,000 tonnes per year of battery-grade lithium carbonate for use in lithium-ion batteries.
In a profoundly moving and meticulously crafted address, Palestinian author and human rights activist Susan Abulhawa captivated the Oxford Union during a debate Nov. 28, 2024, on the motion: “This House Believes Israel Is an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide.” The motion passed with overwhelming support, 278 votes to 59, but it was Abulhawa’s speech that resonated deeply, leaving the audience in stunned silence.
I will not take questions until I’m finished speaking; so please refrain from interrupting me.
Addressing the challenge of what to do about the indigenous inhabitants of the land, Chaim Weizman, a Russian Jew, said to the World Zionist Congress in 1921 that Palestinians were akin to “the rocks of Judea, obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path.”
David Gruen, a Polish Jew, who changed his name to David Ben Gurion to sound relevant to the region, said. “We must expel Arabs and take their places.”
There are thousands of such conversations among the early zionists who plotted and implemented the violent colonization of Palestine and the annihilation of her native people.
But they were only partially successful, murdering or ethnically cleansing 80% of Palestinians, which meant that 20% of us remained, an enduring obstacle to their colonial fantasies, which became the subject of their obsessions in the decades that followed, especially after conquering what remained of Palestine in 1967.
Zionists lamented our presence and they debated publicly in all circles—political, academic, social, cultural circles—regarding what do with us; what to do about the Palestinian birthrate, about our babies, which they dub a demographic threat.
Benny Morris, who was originally meant to be here, once expressed regret that Ben Gurion “did not finish the job” of getting rid of us all, which would have obviated what they refer to as the “Arab problem.”Benjamin Netanyahu, a Polish Jew whose real name is Benjamin Mileikowsky, once bemoaned a missed opportunity during the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising to expel large swaths of the Palestinian population “while world attention was focused on China.”
Some of their articulated solutions to the nuisance of our existence include a “break their bones” policy in the ’80s and ’90s, ordered by Yitzhak Rubitzov, Ukrainian Jew who changed his name to Yitzhak Rabin (for the same reasons).
That horrific policy that crippled generations of Palestinians did not succeed in making us leave. And frustrated by Palestinian resilience, a new discourse arose, especially after a massive natural gas field was discovered off the coast of Northern Gaza worth trillions of dollars.
This new discourse is echoed in the words of Colonel Efraim Eitan, who said in 2004, “We have to kill them all.”
Aaron Sofer, an Israeli so-called intellectual and political advisor, insisted in 2018 that “we have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”
When I was in Gaza, I saw a little boy no more than 9 years whose hands and part of his face had been blown off from a booby trapped can of food that soldiers had left behind for Gaza’s starving children. I later learned that they had also left poisoned food for people in Shujaiyya, and in the 1980s and ’90s, Israeli soldiers had left booby trapped toys in southern Lebanon that exploded when excited children picked them up.
The harm they do is diabolical, and yet, they expect you to believe they are the victims. Invoking Europe’s holocaust and screaming antisemitism, they expect you to suspend fundamental human reason to believe that the daily sniping of children with so called “kill shots” and the bombing of entire neighborhoods that bury families alive and wipe out whole bloodlines is self-defense.
They want you to believe that a man who had not eaten a thing in over 72 hours, who kept fighting even when all he had was one functioning arm, that this man was motivated by some innate savagery and irrational hatred or jealousy of Jews, rather than the indomitable yearning to see his people free in their own homeland.
It’s clear to me that we’re not here to debate whether Israel is an apartheid or genocidal state. This debate is ultimately about the worth of Palestinian lives; about the worth of our schools, research centers, books, art, and dreams; about the worth of the homes we worked all our lives to build and which contain the memories of generations; about the worth of our humanity and our agency; the worth of bodies and ambitions.
Because if the roles were reversed—if Palestinians had spent the last eight decade stealing Jewish homes, expelling, oppressing, imprisoning, poisoning, torturing, raping and killing them;
IF
Palestinians had killed an estimated 300,000 Jews in one year, targeted their journalists, their thinkers, their healthcare workers, their athletes, their artists, bombed every Israeli hospital, university, library, museum, cultural center, synagogue, and simultaneously set up an observation platform where people came watch their slaughter as if a tourist attraction
IF
Palestinians had corralled them by the hundreds of thousands into flimsy tents, bombed them in so called safe zones, burned them alive, cut off their food, water, and medicine;
IF
Palestinians made Jewish children wander barefoot with empty pots; made them gather the flesh of their parents into plastic bags; made them bury their siblings, cousins and friends; made them sneak out from their tents in the middle of the night to sleep on their parents’ graves; made them pray for death just to join their families and not be alone in this terrible world anymore, and terrorized them so utterly that their children lose their hair, lose their memory, lose their minds, and made those as young as 4 and 5 year old were die of heart attacks;
IF
we mercilessly forced their NICU babies to die, alone in hospital beds, crying until they could cry no more, died and decomposed in the same spot;
IF
Palestinians used wheat flour aid trucks to lure starving jews, then opened fire on them when they gathered to collect a day’s bread; if Palestinians finally allowed a food delivery into a shelter with hungry Jews, then set fire to the entire shelter and aid truck before anyone could taste the food;
IF
a Palestinian sniper bragged about blowing out 42 Jewish kneecaps in one day as one Israeli soldier did in 2019; if a Palestinian admitted to CNN that he ran over hundreds of Jews with his tank, their squished flesh lingering in the tank treads;
IF
Palestinians were systematically raping Jewish doctors, patients, and other captives with hot metal rods, jagged and electrified sticks, and fire extinguishers, sometimes raping to death, as happened with Dr Adnan alBursh and others;
IF
Jewish women were forced to give birth in filth, get C-sections or leg amputations without anesthesia; if we destroyed their children then decorated our tanks with their toys; if we killed or displaced their women then posed with their lingerie…
IF
the world were watching the livestreamed systematic annihilation of Jews in real time, there would be no debating whether that constituted terrorism or genocide.
And yet two Palestinians—myself and Mohammad el-Kurd— showed up here to do just that, enduring the indignity of debating those who think our only life choices should be to leave our homeland, submit to their supremacy, or die politely and quietly.
But you would be wrong to think that I came to convince you of anything. The house resolution, though well-meaning and appreciated, is of little consequence in the midst of this holocaust of our time.
I came in the spirit of Malcolm X and Jimmy Baldwin, both of whom stood here and in Cambridge before I was born, facing finely dressed well-spoken monsters who harbored the same supremacist ideologies as Zionism—these notions of entitlement and privilege, of being divinely favored, blessed, or chosen.
I’m here for the sake of history. To speak to generations not yet born and for the chronicles of this extraordinary time where the carpet bombing of defenseless indigenous societies is legitimized.
I’m here for my grandmothers, both of whom died as penniless refugees while foreign Jews lived in their stolen homes.
And I also came to speak directly to zionists here and everywhere.
We let you into our homes when your own countries tried to murder you and everyone else turned you away. We fed and clothed you, gave you shelter, and we shared the bounty of our land with you, and when the time was ripe, you kicked us out of our own homes and homeland, then you killed and robbed and burned and looted our lives.
You carved out our hearts because it is clear you do not know how to live in the world without dominating others.
You have crossed all lines and nurtured the most vile of human impulses, but the world is finally glimpsing the terror we have endured at your hands for so long, and they are seeing the reality of who you are, who you’ve always been. They watch in utter astonishment the sadism, the glee, the joy, and pleasure with which you conduct, watch, and cheer the daily details of breaking our bodies, our minds, our future, our past.
But no matter what happens from here, no matter what fairy tales you tell yourself and tell the world, you will never truly belong to that land. You will never understand the sacredness of the olive trees, which you’ve been cutting down and burning for decades just to spite us and to break our hearts a little more. No one native to that land would dare do such a thing to the olives. No one who belongs to that region would ever bomb or destroy such ancient heritage as Baalbak or Bittir, or destroy ancient cemeteries as you destroy ours, like the Anglican cemetery in Jerusalem or the resting place of ancient Muslim scholars and warriors in Maamanillah. Those who come from that land do not desecrate the dead; that’s why my family for centuries were the caretakers of the Jewish cemetery in the Mount of Olives, as labors of faith and care for what we know is part of our ancestry and story.
Your ancestors will always be buried in your actual homelands of Poland, Ukraine, and elsewhere around the world from whence you came. The myths and folklore of the land will always be alien to you.
You will never be literate in the sartorial language of the robes we wear, that sprang from the land through our foremothers over centuries—every motif, design, and pattern speaking to the secrets of local lore, flora, birds, rivers, and wildlife.
What your real estate agents call in their high-priced listings “old Arab home” will always hold in their stones the stories and memories of our ancestors who built them. The ancient photos and paintings of the land will never contain you.
You will never know how it feels to be loved and supported by those who have nothing to gain from you, and in fact, everything to lose. You will never know the feeling of masses all over the world pouring into the streets and stadiums to chant and sing for your freedom; and it is not because you are Jewish, as you try to make the world believe, but because you are depraved violent colonizers who think your Jewishness entitles you to the home my grandfather and his brothers built with their own hands on lands that had been in our family for centuries. It is because Zionism is a blight onto Judaism and indeed onto humanity.
You can change your names to sound more relevant to the region and you can pretend falafel and hummus and zaatar are your ancient cuisines, but in the recesses of your being, you will always feel the sting of this epic forgery and theft, that’s why even the drawings of our children hung on walls at the UN or in a hospital ward send your leaders and lawyers into hysteric meltdowns.
You will not erase us, no matter how many of us you kill and kill and kill, all day every day. We are not the rocks Chaim Weizmann thought you could clear from the land.
We are its very soil. We are her rivers and her trees and her stories, because all of that was nurtured by our bodies and our lives over millennia of continuous, uninterrupted habitation of that patch of earth between the Jordan and Mediterranean waters, from our Canaanite, our Hebrew, our Philistine, and our Phoenician ancestors, to every conqueror or pilgrim who came and went, who married or raped, loved, enslaved, converted between religions, settled or prayed in our land, leaving pieces of themselves in our bodies and our heritage. The fabled, tumultuous stories of that land are quite literally in our DNA. You cannot kill or propagandize that away, no matter what death technology you use or what Hollywood and corporate media arsenals you deploy.
Someday, your impunity and arrogance will end. Palestine will be free; she will be restored to her multi-religious, multi-ethnic pluralistic glory; we will restore and expand the trains that run from Cairo to Gaza to Jerusalem, Haifa, Tripoli, Beirut, Damascus, Amman, Kuwait, Sanaa, and so on; we will put an end to the zionist American war machine of domination, expansion, extraction, pollution, and looting.
..and you will either leave, or you will finally learn to live with others as equals.
Susan Abulhawa Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian writer and human rights activist and animal rights advocate. She is the author of several books.
Also see recent interview on BBC between Philippe Lazzarin and Jeremy Bowen:
Israel denying food to Gaza is ‘weapon of war’, UN Palestinian refugee agency head tells BBC –
On May 14th, 2025, the following action was noted by Robert Reich on Substach:
Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, was arrested and charged with “crowding and obstructing” while protesting against the Gaza blockade during a hearing of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
Video footage (above) shows him being hauled out of the committee room, handcuffed and escorted away.
As he’s being removed, a woman asks him why he’s being arrested. He replies: “Congress kills poor kids in Gaza by buying bombs and pays for it by kicking kids off Medicaid in the U.S.,” adding, “Congress and the senators need to ease the siege, they need to let food into Gaza. They need to let food to starving kids.”
Gaza is now in the 11th week of a total blockade by Israel that prevents essential items including food, fuel, and medicine from reaching the area’s 2.3 million Palestinians. Many are surviving on limited supplies of canned peas or dried beans.
A report this week from food security experts warns that Gaza is at “critical risk of famine.”
2024 Ireland, Spain and Norway have announced they will officially recognise Palestine as an independent state.
In 1992 Venezuela was the richest country in the Western Hemisphere., due to its massive oil reserves, drilled by American oil companies.
Below, an extract from the BBC obituary of Chavez, 5 March 2013
Father’ Fidel
Cuba says Hugo Chavez was like a “true son” to Fidel Castro
With his fiery revolutionary rhetoric, Mr Chavez was in many ways the ideological heir of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, taking on the mantle of left-wing opposition to US influence in Latin America.
The veteran Cuban revolutionary, 28 years his senior, became a close ally and mentor – perhaps even a father figure.
Cheap oil from Venezuela rescued Cuba’s struggling socialist economy.
In return, Cuba sent thousands of health workers to Venezuela to support President Chavez’s social project for the poor.
Havana also sent security advisers and intelligence agents as maintaining the Venezuelan alliance became critical to the survival of the Cuban revolution.
Whether the cheap Venezuelan oil continues to flow now Mr Chavez has died will be a vital consideration for Cuba, as well as for other poor Caribbean nations that benefitted from his generosity.
Mr Chavez also helped set up new regional bodies to provide an alternative structure to the Organisation of American States, which excluded Cuba and – in his view – was dominated by Washington.
The Union of South American Nations (Unasur), the Boliviarian Alliance for the Americas (Alba) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac) were all founded as part of the drive for regional integration.
A year before Chavez died, Bernie Sanders was reputed to say “Venezuelans are living the American Dream better than Americans.”
Yet 5 years earlier, Chavez had ordered American oil companies out of his country. He will have known that would trigger anger in America.
Looking back to the Chavez rule:
July 2001, Chavez wins elections
The government of former paratrooper Hugo Chávez Frías, comfortably endorsed by 59 percent of the vote in general elections held on July 30, failed to mount an effective response to Venezuela’s deep-seated human rights problems, in particular the ingrained abusiveness of its police forces and appalling prison conditions. The government introduced ambitious plans for prison reform, but attention to overcrowding in Venezuela’s prisons did not result in a significant decline in inmate violence. Police killings of criminal suspects increased from 1999, and some measures authorities proposed to combat violent crime raised serious human rights concerns.
Introduced in December 1999, the constitution included forty-two articles protecting human rights, including some of the most advanced in the hemisphere. However, it also greatly expanded the power of the presidency and enhances the political role of the armed forces.
Prison conditions were a problem when Chavez came to power and maybe new, more human rights oriented prisons should have been built early on. The laws which placed people in such incarceration probably should have been investigated, and an understanding of brutality and degradation affecting human behaviour detrimentally maybe should have been addressed.
All countries, including the UK, who do not address inapproprate prison conditions for inmates will be aware of the psychological damage done to all who have to live there, including prison guards.
After 12 years since Chavez died of cancer, another cancer has grown in the prisons of Aragua state of Venezuela. The gang culture of now transnational Tren de Aragua.
Tren de Aragua, Venezuela’s most powerful and far-reaching criminal organization. The organization emerged in the early 2010s as a prison gang in the Tocorón penitentiary in the Venezuelan state of Aragua but grew into a transnational organization with operations across South America. Its expansion followed the routes of Venezuelan migration, allowing the group to establish criminal cells in countries such as Colombia, Peru, and Chile. From within Tocorón, the gang maintained control over these external cells and profited from a wide range of illicit activities. In September 2023 the Venezuelan police and military raided the Tocorón prison to reassert state control, but the organization’s leadership escaped, and its transnational operations remain active. In response to growing concern about Tren de Aragua’s activities in the United States, the U.S Treasury Department officially designated the group a transnational criminal organization in July 2024. The U.S State Department also offered $12 million in reward money for information leading to the arrests of three of its senior leaders.
History
Tren de Aragua originated in the early 2010s inside Tocorón prison, located in Venezuela’s Aragua state. The organization’s name, which roughly translates to “the Aragua train” is thought to come from a labor union connected to an unfinished railway project in the region. Its rise was closely tied to Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, known as “Niño Guerrero,” a Tocorón inmate who became the gang’s leader. Under his control, the organization consolidated power inside the prison and began expanding its influence outward. Tocorón functioned not only as a prison but also as Tren de Aragua’s base of operations. Venezuelan authorities, following a broader pattern of prison self-governance, allowed inmates known as pranes, or criminal leaders, to effectively run the facility. With access to illicit revenue, the gang transformed Tocorón, adding amenities such as a swimming pool, zoo, nightclub, and restaurants—symbols of the criminal organization’s dominance within the prison system.
After establishing control of Tocorón prison, Tren de Aragua began expanding its influence beyond the prison walls. Its first area of control was nearby neighborhoods, where it enforced social order and reportedly received government support through one of the organization’s charitable fronts known as “Fundación Somos El Barrio JK.” Other gangs in Aragua and nearby states began entering into nonaggression agreements with Tren de Aragua. The organization gradually extended its reach to other parts of Venezuela through alliances with smaller gangs. About 2018 Tren de Aragua expanded and began operating across the Venezuela and Colombia border, particularly between the Venezuelan state of Táchira and Colombia’s Norte de Santander department. There, it competed with Colombian criminal groups such as the National Liberation Army and the Gaitanistas for control of border areas used for smuggling drugs, contraband, and migrants. Between 2018 and 2023 the group developed a transnational criminal network, establishing itself in Colombia, Peru, and Chile, with additional reports of activity in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Brazil. As its presence grew, it moved into local criminal economies, often using targeted violence to displace rival criminal groups. Its activities abroad include extortion, migrant smuggling, kidnapping, retail and small-scale international drug trafficking, human trafficking, loan sharking, and robbery. These cells often specialize in different activities depending on the local conditions.
Tattoos of Tren de Aragua gangs are highly elaborate
CECOT El Salvador
CECOT was built after President Bukele declared “war” on the gangs that had terrorised El Salvador for decades and led to its reputation as the murder capital of the world. In slickly choreographed promotional videos prisoners scuttle into CECOT, shackled and bent over between two rows of guards. Prison administrators have promoted the high-security prison as “key to winning the war against the gangs”.
Sprawled over 23 hectares, CECOT consists of eight concrete buildings, each containing 32 cells. Each cell, designed to hold more than 100 inmates each, has 80 four-storey metal bunks without bedding and two toilets and sinks with no privacy. Mesh ceilings allow guards to patrol the cells from above.
According to ananalysisby The Financial Times using satellite imagery, if the prison were to reach its 40,000 person capacity, detainees would have just 0.6 square metres of cell space each. That’s less space than the one hen per square metre rule Australian poultry farmers must adhere to for “free range” accreditation.
In March 2022, President Bukele used his government forces to crackdown on El Salvadors gangs, mainly the MS-13 and 18th Street.
El Salvador’s parliament has approved a state of emergency after the Central American country recorded dozens of gang-related murders in a single day.
Police said there had been 62 murders on Saturday, making it the most violent 24-hour period since the end of the civil war in 1992.
New laws restrict the right to gather, allow arrests without a warrant and the monitoring of communications.
Last year, the gang-plagued nation recorded 1,140 murders – a 30-year low.
However, that still equates to 18 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. In November, another spate of violence led to more than 40 people being killed within three days.
Hours before MPs voted on the new powers, which will remain in place for 30 days, police said four leaders of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang had been arrested over the spate of killings…..
The Trump administration is focusing on Venezuelan immigrants, looking to deport members of Tren de Arugua.
A USA TODAY investigation found the group is still small in the U.S. − with activities far less pervasive than established transnational criminal groups, such as MS-13.
As the above shows, El Salvador is home to MS-13. Seems strange it is TDA and not MS-13 being pursued by ICE, thus rounding up Venezuelan immigrants rather than Salvadorians?
Our country has been invaded and fought over since the Romans, like lands across the world, there have been many peoples who were conquered, made to live under some ruling empire.
All empires ended. But the world has seen its last empire. The Great British Empire. Since that ended, all land has been fought over as resources become depleted and climate change pushes people away from inhospitable land.
Monarchs of history have interbred, attempting to create allies and access to each other’s resources. That time is over too.
Since 1917, before the end of World War 1, the British monarchs were declared to belong to the anglicised name of the House of Windsor, by King George V.
The House of Windsor
On 17 July 1917, at a meeting of the Privy Council, King George V declared that ‘all descendants in the male line of Queen Victoria, who are subjects of these realms, other than female descendants who marry or who have married, shall bear the name of Windsor’. It remains the family name today.
In 1901, the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha succeeded the House of Hanover with the accession of King Edward VII, son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.
In 1917 the name change came about due to anti-German sentiment in the United Kingdom during WW1. These feelings reached a peak in March 1917 when the Gotha GIV, a heavy aircraft capable of crossing the English Channel, began bombing London and it became a household name.
Add to that the abdication of King George’s first cousin, Tsar Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, which raised the spectre of the eventual abolition of all monarchies in Europe. The King changed the family name plus all German titles and house names were anglicized. The name had a long association with monarchy in Britain, through the town of Windsor and Windsor Castle.
There have been four British monarchs of the House of Windsor: King George V, King Edward VIII, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II.
The German and Russian family blood links were consigned to the past, but they could not remove the ancestral line written in their genetics.
The name Saxe-Coburg-Gotha came into the British Royal Family in 1840 with the marriage of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert, son of Ernst, Duke of Saxe-Coburg & Gotha. Queen Victoria herself was the last monarch of the House of Hanover.
The House of Hanover ruled Britain for nearly 200 years, and this dynasty oversaw the modernisation of Britain. Despite their not insignificant place in British history, the monarchs of the House of Hanover are often glossed over. But the six Hanoverian monarchs were some of Britain’s most colourful characters – their reigns were filled with scandal, intrigue, jealousy, happy marriages and terrible familial relationships.
They lost America but oversaw the rise of the British Empire to span nearly 25% of the world’s population and surface area. The Britain Victoria left in 1901 was dramatically different to the one the German-born George I arrived in in 1714.
The House of Hanover ushered in two famous periods in English history: the Georgian era and the Victorian era, which is where we get our Georgian and Victorian architecture from………
Founded by George, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, the House of Hanover originated in Germany in 1635 as a cadet branch of the House of Welf. Their rise to power in Great Britain and Ireland would come through descendants of this house 79 years later in 1714 under the Act of Settlement 1701, through their cousins Queen Anne, King William III and Queen Mary II. Through the Act of Settlement 1701 and the death of Queen Anne without an heir, they were placed next in line to the throne. Between 1714 and 1901 The Hanoverians gave us six monarchs.
Queen Victoria was the last monarch of the House of Hanover.
Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (Francis Albert Augustus Charles Emmanuel) was born on 26 August 1819, just three months after Victoria. Albert’s father and Victoria’s mother were brother and sister (as shown in the tree above), meaning Victoria and Albert were cousins. They married in February 1840.
In those days it was common to marry a cousin, though now it is known the offspring may have genetic problems.
Victoria and Albert had nine children, with their second child Edward becoming King on his mother’s death:
Victoria, Princess Royal
Edward VII of the United Kingdom
Princess Alice
Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha
Princess Helena
Princess Louise
Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn
Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany
Princess Beatrice
Victoria died on 22 January 1901, outliving her beloved husband Prince Albert by forty years, and becoming the country’s longest reigning monarch. During her lifetime the nation saw the Industrial Revolution and British Empire developed dramatically; the Victorian era is a significant chapter in Britain’s history.
Victoria’s eldest son Edward married Princess Alexandra of Denmark in 1863, and they went on to have six children, including George, their second eldest son, who became King in 1910 when Edward passed away. The eldest son Albert died before his father.
The Russian Romanov Tsar family were related to King George V.
Windsor-Romanov relations.
In 1917, the British king George V (1865-1936) decided to break relations with his two cousins, German Emperor Wilhelm II (1859-1941) and Russian Emperor Nicholas II (1868-1918). After Nicholas II, George V’s first cousin, was overthrown from the Russian throne during the Revolution of 1917, the British Government offered Nicholas II and his family political asylum – but George V opposed this decision, seeing the Romanovs’ presence in his country inappropriate.
King George V
After Nicholas and his family were killed by the Bolsheviks, George V wrote in his diary: “It was a foul murder. I was devoted to Nicky, who was the kindest of men and thorough gentleman: loved his country and people.”
However, only two years later, a British battleship was sent to Crimea to rescue the 72-year-old Maria Feodorovna (1847-1928), Nicholas II’s mother and, at the same time, George V’s aunt.
This classic book is a ‘must read’ by any British person or anyone fascinated by the emergence of the ‘class system’ in this country.
Penguin have managed to keep this book available as a hardback,but also as an eBook. I was so pleased to add it to my eBook library so I can carry it around with me now. Thank you Penguin.
I also have this as an ebook:
The Vory also looks back in history, to Moscow in the 19th century, and there are similarities to the London slum dwelling filth in areas where poverty sprang out of thousands leaving rural areas, arriving at the capital to seek opportunity. There was wealth in London and Moscow, but in the hands of the few.
Early 19th century Moscow:
During the early 19th-century, Russia developed trading relationships with other European countries but much of this trade was focused on grain exports. Much of the export revenue that flowed into the empire lined the pockets of aristocrats and wealthy landowners; it was not used as capital to build an industrial and manufacturing economy
London in the 19th century was a city of superlatives. At the height of its imperial power, the British capital was the largest, richest, and most technologically advanced metropolis in the world. Yet it was also a city of stark contrasts – a glittering hub of wealth and culture that rested on a foundation of poverty, squalor, and social dysfunction. This was the London that contemporaries dubbed “the Monster City” – a seething cauldron of humanity that inspired both awe and apprehension.
Mark Galeotti describes the historical conditions of a location, not far from the Kremlin, during the 1820s:
Not twenty minutes’ walk from the Kremlin was the Khitrovka, perhaps the most notorious slum in all Russia. Levelled during the 1812 Moscow fire, the land was bought by Major General Nikolai Khitrovo in 1823 with plans to build a market there. He died before his designs could be enacted, though, and by the 1860s, following the emancipation of the serfs, the area had become a spontaneous labour exchange. It was a magnet for newly arrived hopefuls and dispossessed peasants, at once desperate for a place to seek work and prey for urban predators of every kind. Dosshouses and cheap taverns lined a maze of small, dark courtyards and alleyways, teeming with the unemployed, unwashed and usually drunk or drugged. It was perennially cloaked in a heavy and evil-smelling fog from the stagnant river Yauza and the cheap tobacco and open cooking pots of its denizens as they cooked the unsavoury mix of salvaged and spoiled food known as ‘dog’s delight’. The common saying that ‘once you’ve eaten Khitrovka soup, you’ll never leave’ was as much a statement about the mortality rates as about the miserable chances for social elevation.1 This was a living hell, a slum in which up to 10,000 men, women and children were crammed into lean-tos, shacks, tenements and four disease-ridden trushchoby: the Yaroshenko (originally Stepanov), Bunin, Kulakov (originally Romeiko) and Rumyantsev houses. In these dosshouses, they bunked down on double- and triple-decked wooden sleeping platforms, above infamous drinking dens including those tellingly known as Siberia, Katorga (‘Penal Servitude’) and Peresylny (‘Transit’).2 The last was a particular haunt for beggars, Siberia for pickpockets and their fences, and Katorga for thieves and escaped convicts, who could find anonymity and employment in the Khitrovka.
And in London, the infamous taverns, as here painted by William Hogarth:
Wm Hogarth ‘The Tavern Scene’
Alcohol was the chosen liquid as water was unsafe, therefore people soon lost their inhibitions! The novels of Charles Dickens reflected the struggles and immorality of the class divisions.
The price of this explosive growth and domination of world trade was untold squalor and filth. In his excellent biography, Dickens, Peter Ackroyd notes that “If a late twentieth-century person were suddenly to find himself in a tavern or house of the period, he would be literally sick – sick with the smells, sick with the food, sick with the atmosphere around him” (Ackroyd, 1990, p. 687).
Imagine yourself in the London of the early 19th century. The homes of the upper and middle class exist in close proximity to areas of unbelievable poverty and filth. Rich and poor alike are thrown together in the crowded city streets. Street sweepers attempt to keep the streets clean of manure, the result of thousands of horse-drawn vehicles. The city’s thousands of chimney pots are belching coal smoke, resulting in soot which seems to settle everywhere. In many parts of the city raw sewage flows in gutters that empty into the Thames. Street vendors hawking their wares add to the cacophony of street noises. Pick-pockets, prostitutes, drunks, beggars, and vagabonds of every description add to the colorful multitude.
In Moscow, as in London, divisions of class grew during industrialization:
Mechanization and industrialization emerged during the 19th century, leading to the growth of factories and the rise of a working class. Industrial workers, including factory laborers, miners, and railroad workers, earned wages for their manual labor. The development of industries, particularly in areas such as textiles, iron, and coal, offered new employment opportunities for the Russian population.
Hot, dirty work ensured cheap alcohol for the labourer. In Moscow it was Vodka, in London it was ales.
In May 1859, the vodka protests in Russia turned violent. There were attacks on taverns in town after town in Pensa province, mainly during local markets. The movement spread West to neighbouring Tamhov province and then East to the Volga provinces of Samara, Saratov, Simbirsk, Orenburg, and Kazan as well as to Vyatka in the Urals, and Voronezh province to the South. Meanwhile, riots broke out further to the West in Moscow province. After July, the protests began to subside, although there were minor outbreaks even into the first months of 1860. In contrast to the boycotts, which were mainly a rural phenomenon, most of the riots seem to have taken place in towns or large villages, and mainly on market days when large crowds were present. Amongst those arrested for ‘inciting’ the riots were landlords, priests, towndwellers, and several ex-soldiers or soldiers on leave, though it seems that state peasants probably played the major role. The riots reflected the same working class hostility to tax farms as the boycotts.
Wherever there was excess of alcohol, there was violence. But always there was a richness , diversity, warmth and love amidst the seething humanity who dreamed of a better life than the one they had found themselves in.
I’m reproducing The Conversation newsletter which was emailed to me. It is a response to Tony Blair’s recent advice to not phase out fossil fuels with the Net Zero objective:
Rapidly phasing out fossil fuels and limiting energy consumption to tackle climate change is “a strategy doomed to fail” according to former UK prime minister Tony Blair.
In the foreword of a new report, Blair urges governments to rethink their approach to reaching net zero emissions.
Instead of policies that are seen by people as involving “financial sacrifices”, he says world leaders should deploy carbon capture and storage, including technological and nature-based approaches, to meet the rising demand for fossil fuels.
But speak to many academic experts on climate change and they will tell a very different story: that there is no strategy for addressing climate change that does not involve ending, or at least massively reducing, fossil fuel combustion.
You’re reading the Imagine newsletter – a weekly synthesis of academic insight on solutions to climate change, brought to you by The Conversation. I’m Jack Marley, energy and environment editor. This week, we respond to Tony Blair’s net zero claims.
A fossil fuel phase-out is ‘essential’
“There is a wealth of scientific evidence demonstrating that a fossil fuel phase-out will be essential for reining in the greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change,” says Steve Pye, an associate professor of energy at UCL.
“I know because I have published some of it.”
Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, agrees.
“Rapidly reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, and not issuing new licenses to extract oil and gas, is the most effective way of minimising future climate-related disruptions,” he says.
“The sooner those with the power to shape our future recognise this, the better.”
Fossil fuels are responsible for 90% of the carbon dioxide heating the climate. The amount burned annually is still rising, and so is the rate at which the world is getting hotter. Scientists now fear we are approaching irreversible tipping points in the climate system, hence their support for an urgent replacement of fossil fuels with renewable energy.
Blair is confident that an emergency response on this scale can be avoided by absorbing CO₂ immediately after burning fossil fuels, from the smokestacks where the greenhouse gas is concentrated.
Not all of the emissions responsible for climate change would be prevented. UCL earth system scientist Mark Maslin says that natural gas, which would linger as an energy source thanks to carbon capture, still leaks from pipelines and storage vessels upstream of power plants.
Commercial applications of the technology also have a poor track record. Just two large-scale coal-fired power plants are operating with CCS worldwide – one in the US and one in Canada.
“Both have experienced consistent underperformance, recurring technical issues and ballooning costs,” Maslin says.
Blair might baulk at what he perceives to be the expense of ditching fossil fuels. But economic modelling led by Oxford University’s Andrea Bacilieri suggests his concern is misplaced. A rapid phase-out of fossil fuels could save US$30 trillion (US$1 trillion a year) by 2050 she concludes, compared with allowing power plants and factories to keep burning them with CCS.
Developing CCS will be necessary to help manage an orderly transition from fossil fuels according to Myles Allen, a professor of geosystem science at Oxford University. But it is not a substitute for undergoing that transition, he says.
“Above all, we need to make sure the availability of CCS does not encourage yet more CO₂ production.”
Keeping the public on board
Is Blair right to fret about a public backlash to lower energy use? Academics suggest multiple reasons to think otherwise if the alternative is prolonging the use of fossil fuels.
Replacing a gas boiler with a heat pump that runs on electricity, for example, can lower a household’s energy consumption without a deliberate effort. That’s because renewable appliances convert power to heat more efficiently (how much depends on how well insulated the home is).
In fact, it’s dependence on fossil fuel that is preventing many households from making this switch. The high wholesale price of gas determines the cost of electricity for UK consumers.
“Crucially, the public wants and needs the government to show clear and consistent leadership on climate change,” they say.
Meanwhile, what can corrode public acceptance of sacrifices is the high-consuming behaviour of a minority (think pop stars in rockets, as Westlake recently argued). And, arguably, the statements of powerful people like Blair.
New research even suggests the politics that Blair and many others like him favour might also play a role here. Felix Schulz (Lund University) and Christian Bretter (The University of Queensland) are social scientists who study how ideology affects personal views on climate policy.
They identified respondents in six countries (the UK, US, Germany, Brazil, South Africa and China) who shared Blair’s neoliberal worldview, which the pair define as a belief that individuals are primarily responsible for their own fortune, and need to take care of themselves – as well as an abiding faith in the free market.
“We observed a strong link between a neoliberal worldview and lack of support for the climate policies in our study,” they say.
Schulz and Bretter urge us to consider not only how well-informed a commentator is on climate change – but how their ideology ultimately shapes their understanding of the problem and its solutions as well.
– Jack Marley, Environment commissioning editor
Was this email forwarded to you? Join the 45,000 people who get one email every week about the most important issue of our time. Subscribe to Imagine.
Sent every Friday, Climate Weekly is an essential resource for anyone working on environmental or climate issues. For 15 years, Climate Home News has helped inform and inspire by covering the latest news, analysis and commentary on the international politics of the climate crisis. With reporters on three continents, their award-winning coverage helps you make sense of the world.
More than a century of research shows that burning fossil fuels warms the climate – that’s exactly why granting new North Sea oil and gas licenses is a bad idea.
Many of you here today have likely felt the chilling effect of the policies and the rhetoric coming from Washington, D.C. and what the effect has been on businesses and investors and far beyond.
The Dow Jones, of course, today fell another thousand points and since Donald Trump’s inauguration it’s gone down six thousand points. But while the most visible impacts of what the new administration is doing may be in the market for stocks and bonds, that’s not the only thing that he has caused to crash.
The trust market has crashed.
The market for democracy has taken a major hit.
Hope is being arbitraged in the growing market for fear.
Truth has been devalued and confidence in U.S. leadership around the world has plummeted.
We are facing a national emergency for our democracy and a global emergency for our climate system.
We have to deal with the democracy crisis in order to solve the climate crisis.
The scale and scope of the ongoing attacks on liberty are literally unprecedented. With that in mind, I want to note before I use what is not a precedent, I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich to any other movement. It was uniquely evil, full stop. I get it.
But there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil, and here is one that I regard as essential.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, a small group of philosophers who had escaped Hitler’s murderous regime returned to Germany and performed a kind of moral autopsy on the Third Reich. The most famous of the so-called Frankfurt School of Philosophers was a man named Jurgen Habermas – best known, I would say. But it was Habermas’ mentor, Theodor Adorno, who wrote that the first step of that nation’s descent into Hell was, and I quote, “the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power.” He described how the Nazis, and I quote again, “attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.”
The Trump administration is insisting on trying to create their own preferred version of reality. They say Ukraine attacked Russia instead of the other way around, and expect us to believe it! At home, they attack heroes who have defended our nation in war and against cyberattacks as traitors.
They say the climate crisis is a “hoax” invented by the Chinese to destroy American manufacturing.
They say coal is clean.
They say wind turbines cause cancer.
They say sea level rise just creates more beachfront property.
Their allies in the oligarchic backlash to climate action argue that those who want to stop using the sky as an open sewer, for God’s sake, need to be more “realistic” and acquiesce to the huge increases in the burning of more and more fossil fuels (which is what they’re pushing), even though that is the principal cause of the climate crisis.
You may not be surprised to learn that this propagandistic notion of “climate realism” is one that the fossil fuel industry has peddled for years.
The CEO of the largest oil company in the world, Saudi Aramco has said “We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas.”
His colleague, Exxon CEO Darren Woods, has claimed that “the world needs to get real. … The problem is not oil and gas. It’s emissions.”
The American Petroleum Institute says that we need “a more realistic energy approach” – one that, you guessed it, includes buying and burning even more oil and gas.
So, allow me to put this question to all of you: What exactly is it that they want us to be realistic about?
Their twisted version of “realism” is colliding with the reality that humanity is now confronting.
The accumulated global warming pollution (because these molecules linger there on average about 100 years and it builds up over time), it’s trapping as much extra heat now every single day as would be released by the explosion of 750,000 first generation atomic bombs blowing up on the Earth every single day!
Is it realistic to let that continue?
Is it realistic to think that if we opt out of taking action to reduce greenhouse gas pollution, we’ll be able to just wish it away and continue with business as usual? Well, Mother Nature makes a pretty good case against that argument. Every night on the TV news is like a nature walk through the Book of Revelation.
Is it realistic, for example, to continue stoking the risk of wildfire in California, after what has already happened to so many communities in Northern California? And just look at the devastation caused by the Los Angeles wildfires in January.
Is it realistic to tell homeowners around the world that the global housing market is expected to suffer a $25 trillion loss in the next 25 years? Fifteen percent of all the residential housing stock in the world if we do not change what we’re doing? Is that realistic in their view?
Is it realistic to continue quietly accepting 8.7 million deaths every single year from breathing in the particulate co-pollution that also comes from the burning of fossil fuels? That is the number of people who are already being killed. According to health experts, it is, and I quote, “the leading contributor to the global disease burden.” When you’re burning coal, oil and gas, it puts the heat trapping pollution up there and it puts the particulate and PM 2.5 pollution into the lungs of people downwind from where the facilities are burning the fossil fuels.
Is it realistic, in their view, for governments to manage 1 billion climate migrants crossing international borders in the balance of this century? That’s how many the Lancet Commission estimates will be crossing borders in the decades to come, if we continue driving temperatures and humidity higher and making the physiologically unlivable regions of the world vastly larger by continuing to put 175 million tons of man-made heat-trapping pollution into that thin shell of the troposphere surrounding the planet. You know what that blue line looks like, that thin blue shell is blue because that’s where the oxygen is. And it’s so thin, if you could drive a car straight up in the air at highway speeds, you’d get to the top of that blue line in five to seven minutes.
That’s what we’re using as an open sewer. Is that realistic? I don’t think it is.
We’ve already seen, by the way, how populist authoritarian leaders have used migrants as scapegoats and have fanned the fires of xenophobia to fuel their own rise to power. And power-seeking is what this is all about. Our Constitution, written by our founders, is intended to protect us against a threat identical to Donald Trump: someone who seeks power at all costs to get more power. Imagine what the demagogues would do as we continued toward a billion migrants crossing international borders. We could face a grave threat to our capacity for self-governance.
Is it “realistic” to continue inflicting the financial toll that the climate crisis is taking on the global economy? According to Deloitte, climate inaction will cost the economy $178 trillion over the next half century. And is it realistic to miss out on the economic opportunity that we could seize by going toward net-zero? Over that same period, climate action would increase the size of the global economy by $43 trillion.
A question with particular relevance in nearby Silicon Valley: is it realistic for the semiconductor industry to experience losses of up to 35% of annual revenues due to supply chain disruptions caused by the stronger and more severe cyclonic storms and supercell storms?
Is it realistic to continue with a system of financing that leaves the entire continent of Africa completely out? Right now, the entire continent of Africa, fastest-growing population in the world, has fewer solar panels installed than the single state of Florida in the United States of America. That’s a disgrace to the makeup of our financial system. But Africa has three times as many oil and gas pipelines under construction and preparing for construction to begin than all of North America. It is ridiculous to allow this system to continue as it is. How is that realistic? Or fair? Or just?
Is it realistic for us, all of us here, to consign our children and grandchildren to what scientists warn us would be Hell on Earth in order to conserve the profits of the fossil fuel industry? The predictions of the scientists 50 years ago have turned out to be spot on correct. Their predictions just a few decades ago have turned out to be exactly right. Should not that cause us to listen more carefully to what they’re warning us will happen if we do not sharply and quickly reduce the emissions from burning fossil fuels?
Is that unrealistic to listen to a proven source of advice?
This newfound so-called climate realism is nothing more than climate denial in disguise. It is an attempt to pretend there is no problem and to ignore the reality that is right in front of our faces.
What’s never present in any of this so-called “realism” is any credible challenge whatsoever to the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. They never address that. They just wish it away and say, “Oh it’s unrealistic to actually do anything about it.”
I wish we could wish it away, but we cannot.
The hard reality is that the fossil fuel industry has grown desperate for more capital. They’re seeing their two largest markets wither away: electricity generation, number one and transportation, number two. They’ve been losing their share of investment in the energy market to renewables and so they’re panicked.
That explains why they are so aggressively using their captive policymakers to block meaningful solutions. Of course, as you know, they’re way better at capturing politicians than they are at capturing emissions. They’ve grown very skillful at that.
They are the wealthiest and most powerful industry lobby in the history of the world. They make the East India Company look like a popcorn vendor. They are the effective global hegemon.
They have used their war chests and their legacy network of political and economic power to block any reductions of fossil fuel burning emissions – whether at the international conferences that we call the COPs, the Conference of Parties in the UN process, or at the global negotiations for a plastic treaty. They blocked anything there, too.
Why? They’re losing the first market of electricity generation because 93% of all the new electricity generation installed worldwide last year was solar and wind. They’re losing that market steadily. EVs are rising dramatically. They say they’ve slowed down. Well, we just got the new figures – an 18% increase year-on-year here in the United States. In many countries much faster than that.
And so, their third market – they’re telling Wall Street that they’re going to make up all of the expected lost revenue in their first two markets by tripling the production of plastics over the next 35 years.
Well, we might have a word to say about that. Is that realistic? Because we’ve already found – the scientists say – that some seabirds are manifesting symptoms like Alzheimer’s disease from the plastic particles in their brains and they found that it crosses the blood-brain barrier in humans, and the size of the amount has doubled just in the last decade.
Do we really want to continue that?
It’s crazy, but they are blocking action at both of these international forums and they’re blocking action in the deliberations of nation-states, even in states and provinces, and even at the local level. Anywhere in the world where there is an effort to pass legislation or regulations that reduces the burning of fossil fuels, they are there with their money, with their lobbyists, with their captive politicians, blocking it as best they can.
And the solution is what you’re doing here at Climate Week here in San Francisco. We have got to rise up and change this situation.
That’s also why they are ballyhooing ridiculously expensive and hilariously impractical technologies like building giant mechanical vacuuming machines to suck it back out of the atmosphere after they put it up there. Could that someday be a realistic part of the solution? Perhaps, perhaps. But not now! Not even close.
They use it as a bright, shiny object to distract attention and say, ‘see this, see this, this could be so miraculous, we don’t have to stop burning fossil fuels at all! We can actually continue to increase the burning of fossil fuels because look at this bright, shiny object. We’ve got this vacuuming machine.’
Well, CO2 is 0.035% of the molecules in the air. You’re gonna use an energy-intensive, ridiculous, expensive process to filter through the other 99.965% of the molecules? It’s absolutely preposterous.
In reality, the Sustainability Revolution is powering more and more of our global economy. It has the scale and impact of the Industrial Revolution and is moving at the pace of the Digital Revolution.
By the way, in Texas, which used to have a free market for energy, over 90% of all their new electricity generation last year was solar and wind. And, you know, they’ve got captured politicians there. They’re pushing legislation in Texas to legally require any developers of solar and wind to spend time and money developing more oil and gas before they’re given permission to develop renewables.
That’s not realism, that’s pathetic.
That is a sign of desperation.
They don’t trust the free market. They’re just relying more and more on the politicians who will jump when they tell them jump and ask how high when they tell them to jump again.
So, around the world, the market is transforming. Since the Paris Agreement, the cost of solar has dropped 76%. The cost of wind is down 66%. Utility-scale batteries are down 87%.
In 2004, when Generation was founded, it took a full year for the world to install one gigawatt of solar power. Now it takes one day to install one gigawatt of solar power.
And it’s not just renewables. We’re seeing the Sustainability Revolution rapidly take hold across the rest of the global economy from transportation, to regenerative agriculture, to circular manufacturing, and so much more.
So, as we gather here to kick off Climate Week and as we gather on the eve of Earth Day, we have to treat this moment as a call to action.
So, I’m here not only to respond to the invitation for which I’m grateful…. I’m here to recruit you.
Many of you are already working on this, but those of you who are not, I’m here to recruit you. We need you. This is the time and this is a break glass moment. This is an all hands on deck moment.
Now is the time to look at every aspect of your businesses, your investments, and your civic engagement to determine whether or not you can contribute even more to solving the climate crisis.
It’s easy to adopt our own versions of climate realism to say that the challenge is too great. Some people worry about that. To say that our individual role is too small to have an impact. Some use that as an excuse: that if the government won’t act, what can any of us do about it?
Well, just as the climate crisis does not recognize borders between countries, it does not either recognize delineations between the duty of government and businesses and all significant participants in the global economy.
Climate change is already impacting your life and work and will more so through disrupted supply chains, increased liability, changes in consumer demand, and more.
This is a moment when we all have to mobilize to defend our country. And remember the antidote to climate despair is climate action. It was in this city in the 1960s that Joan Baez first said that the antidote to despair is action. And we need to remember that now.
And during a time of when people were tempted to despair in the struggle for civil rights in this country, Martin Luther King said something about overcoming the forces that try to discourage you and halt progress. He said this: “If you can’t fly, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl. But by all means, keep moving.”
And that’s where we are.
Every one of the morally based movements in the past had periods when advocates felt despair. But when the central choice was revealed as a choice between right and wrong, then the outcome at a very deep level became foreordained.
Because of the way Pope Francis reminded us we have been created as God’s children.
We love our families.
We are devoted to our communities.
We have to protect our future.
And if you doubt for one moment ever that we as human beings have the capacity to muster sufficient political will to solve this crisis, just remember that political will is itself a renewable resource.
Since the US is now running a tarrif trade war, mostly targeting China, it has been said that Xi told his people “eat bitterness” and that was interpreted as “absorb the pain”. It is well known, throughout the 5000 year history of China, its people have known great suffering. It is a large land mass, like Russia, and Russians too have known great suffering.
Since Russia is a huge country and Britain is a small one, I have chosen to read this book to educate myself about Stalin’s brutal treatment of these children:
Cathy Frierson was introduced to survivors through NGOs The Return and civil rights group Memorial. Since then:
Russian court orders oldest civil rights group Memorial to shut
Published 28 December 2021 (BBC report)
Here is the introduction:
This book introduces ten people who were survivors of childhood trauma during the Soviet era and who were still living in Russia in 2005–2007. The Soviet government created their suffering when it orphaned them in the 1930s and 1940s by arresting one or both of their parents, whom the state then imprisoned, exiled, or executed. The children subsequently endured social, political, and economic stigmas as offspring of “enemies of the people” or “traitors to the motherland.” These categories excluded them for life from many opportunities their peers enjoyed as unstigmatized Soviet citizens. When World War II began in Poland in 1939, the horrors on the Eastern Front of Soviet-occupied territory made these fatherless, and sometimes motherless, children more vulnerable than others to hunger, exposure, violence, homelessness, and death. And yet they survived. They agreed to share their stories with me, believing that in doing so they would make an important contribution to the history of the Soviet Union, Soviet terror, and the Soviet network of penal institutions known as the Gulag. Unwittingly, they were also offering lessons in survival…..
…….I define the Gulag broadly here to include the entire network of detention facilities; transit prisons; long-term prisons; execution chambers and fields; forced labor camps; and “special settlements” run out of the Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), renamed the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) in 1946 and the Committee of State Security (KGB) in 1954. The Gulag also includes the network of NKVD institutions for children: so-called child receiver-distributors, orphanages, and labor colonies. The youngest Soviet citizens who entered this vast network thereby became “children of the Gulag.”
Around 10 million of these children were orphaned when their parents were taken from them. From babies to age 16.
The author located people from 5 different cities:
Survivors in this volume lived in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Staritsa, Vologda, and Kotlas. Their parents ranged from peasants to leaders of the Bolshevik Party, from manual workers to intellectuals………
………..The very fact that they lived to tell the tale may encourage them to look for factors that contributed to their resilience and survival. This cohort of Soviet citizens was also the age group most thoroughly indoctrinated in mandatory gratitude to the Communist Party, the Soviet state, and Joseph Stalin. They had to read and repeat the expression “Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for my happy childhood!” much as an American child has to repeat the Pledge of Allegiance.26 Classroom in Stalingrad, early 1940s (Private collection of Irina Dubrovina) Expressing gratitude was a well-practiced skill; these survivors transferred the object of their gratitude from the Party and Stalin to those who saved them from the Stalinist system. We might also explain these survivors’ positive memories as a product of this group’s peculiar perspective as a tiny minority of child victims of Soviet political repression who survived well into old age and recognized fully their exceptional good fortune in having done so.
When a nation creates laws which point the finger at children, even babies, there is something seriously sick with that nation’s lawmakers:
The Soviet state’s laws and regulations prescribed the punitive actions to be taken against individual men and their wives, children, and other relatives when they were deemed dangerous to the system. It was thus perfectly legal for state agents to target children as young as twelve months for separation from their families to be raised by the Soviet state, and to place teenagers in labor colonies for “correctional labor.”
And as we wonder about those thousands of Ukrainian children (730,000 by February 2024), kidnapped and being Russified in some place in Russia, let us hope they remember their roots and will return to Ukraine one day, in the not too distant future.
Meanwhile, whilst I am familiar with the stories told by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, I am not familiar with these stories of trauma suffered during the 1930s -1940s in Stalin’s Russia.
Yesterday, whilst Pope Francis lay in state and his mourners continued their grieving, the media showed clips of his past expressions of love of humanity. This man, who promoted that we each care for one another, died on Easter Monday, April 21st 2025, the next morning after meeting his last visitor at the Vatican on Easter Sunday, (J.D. Vance, US Vice President).
On April 23rd we also shared the sorrow Days of Remembrance for Victims of the Holocaust, whilst the suffering remaining populations in Gaza are herded by Israelis into smaller parcels of land, with no food, water, shelter being supplied. It is said Gaza was a topic raised by Pope Francis as he spoke to the Vice President.
The lack of love and the overflowing of love, that we can both protect and destroy one another is perhaps best expressed by the Taoist ancient wisdom of ‘Yin-Yang’.
The symbol summed up by an AI trawl:
The yin yang symbol, also known as the taijitu, represents the duality of opposing forces in the universe, illustrating how they are interconnected and interdependent. It consists of a circle divided into black (yin) and white (yang) halves, each containing a dot of the opposite color, symbolizing that each force contains the essence of the other.
Those opposing forces may explain why we humans can feel so full of love but can also be cruel beyond belief with no ounce of compassion for those we have ‘othered’. Perhaps life is in balance though some of us perceive that we humans are polarised into extreme beliefs which may accelerate our destruction.
We can read of past cruelty or see it daily, expressed verbally and physically. Is this the intensity of life forces at play, where we are so caught up it can feel like a maelstrom?
The Ying-Yang suggests there is an equal amount of positive and negative energy, but the forces work in harmony. If this wisdom is valid, then perhaps the more recent wisdom of Desiderata also holds true:
Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass.
Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.
Max Ehrmann was born in Terre Haute, Indiana on September 16, 1872 to German immigrant parents. In 1894 he graduated from DePauw University in Greencastle. Later Ehrmann studied law and philosophy at Harvard University. He returned to Terre Haute where he practiced law. When he began writing, he devoted every day to his work. Ehrmann wrote many poems, but his most famous poems are “Desiderata” (1927) and “A Prayer (1906)”.
He studied at Harvard and looks to have lived a fulfilling life. But he died in 1942 knowing WW2 was well underway, and he was of German descent.
There is a negative cloud over Harvard now, since 31st March of this year:
borderslynn 
You must be logged in to post a comment.