'Climate change is real': companies challenge Trump's reversal of policy

In 2015, when Barack Obama signed the nation’s clean power plan, more than 300 companies came out in support, calling the guidelines “critical for moving our country toward a clean energy economy”. Now, as Donald Trump moves to strip those laws away, Mars Inc, Staples and The Gap are just a few of those US corporations who are challenging the new president’s reversal on climate policy.

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“We’re disappointed the administration has decided to roll back climate regulations such as the clean power plan and others,” Edward Hoover, senior manager of Corporate Communications for Mars, told the Guardian. “Corporations can’t do it alone. Governments play a critical role in mitigating the effects of climate change on our economy.”

 

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/29/climate-change-companies-challenge-trump-mars-staples-gap

Israel Approves First New Settlement in Decades

Israel’s government on Thursday approved the establishment of a new settlement in the West Bank for the first time in more than two decades, and also laid the groundwork for further expansion despite a request from President Trump to hold off on settlement activity.

It was not immediately clear whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had received a green light from the White House for Thursday’s announcement. Mr. Trump’s public request to hold off on settlements came during a meeting between the two leaders at the White House last month, after a series of moves by the Israeli leader to approve thousands of new housing units in the occupied West Bank.

In a carefully calibrated statement issued two weeks before the meeting, the White House said, “While we don’t believe the existence of settlements is an impediment to peace, the construction of new settlements or the expansion of existing settlements beyond their current borders may not be helpful in achieving that goal.”

 

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/30/world/middleeast/israeli-settlements-netanyahu.html?_r=0

Trump's policies are not the answer to London terrorism

(CNN)I'm a former British Intelligence officer who combated terrorism for six years. Counter-terrorism is a nasty, complex and often frustrating job. It's not for the faint-hearted. Sometimes terrorists slip through the net, but often they are stopped in their tracks by the use of arrests or absolute force.

 

All of us who've worked on the front lines know that gunning down a terrorist is only one part of the solution. We don't want violence, because the bottom line is that we're fighting violence. We want other solutions.

While the facts about what happened in the terrorist attack in London on Wednesday are still under police investigation, certain details have been officially revealed. Khalid Masood, a British national, drove his car into numerous pedestrians on Westminster Bridge before smashing his vehicle into railings near the Palace of Westminster.

 

The carnage on the bridge resulted in three deaths and severe injuries to others, including a woman who fell into the River Thames. Masood then sprinted to The Houses of Parliament and knifed to death a fourth person, unarmed police constable Keith Palmer. Masood was shot by security forces.

The dreadful nature of the attack was not unprecedented. But what happened after Masood was gunned down was remarkable.

 

After the police and other emergency services raced to the crime scene to help the victims, they also tried to resuscitate Masood. Why? Because paramedics believed the terrorist deserved to live.

 

Ultimately what happened on Wednesday showed how community belief in British values steadfastly pulls people together with remarkable heroism and resolution in times of crises. Members of the public rushed to help injured French children, Britons, Romanians, South Koreans, Greeks, Germans, Polish, Irish, Chinese, Italians and Americans.

 

Tory Foreign Minister Tobias Ellwood tried to resuscitate PC Palmer by giving him mouth to mouth. We Brits are a multicultural bunch and always have been. We're travellers, adventurers and thinkers. We are also fighters.

 

Sometimes we do the right thing overseas. Sometimes in our history we've got it wrong. But one thing we've never got wrong is our embracing of foreign nationals moving to our country and the tourists who visit our shores.

 

(..)

 

Read more.: http://edition.cnn.com/2017/03/26/opinions/donald-trumps-policies-are-not-the-answer-to-terrorism-dunn/index.html

Más allá de la respiración: The Lost Boy

Brahms - Cello Sonata No.1 in E minor, Op. 38

Caravaggio - (Detalle) Judith y Holofernes (1599)

A song

I thought no more was needed
Youth to prolong
Than dumb-bell and foil
To keep the body young.
Oh, who could have foretold
That the heart grows old?

Though I have many words,
What woman’s satisfied,
I am no longer faint
Because at her side?
Oh, who could have foretold
That the heart grows old?

I have not lost desire
But the heart that I had,
I thought ’twould burn my body
Laid on the death-bed.
But who could have foretold
That the heart grows old?

W.B. Yeats
The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)

Vive en el mundo y sigue dichoso tu camino

 Vive en el mundo y sigue dichoso tu camino.
Come si tienes hambre, duerme si tienes sueño.
No reclames la herencia: ya la llevas contigo.
Despojado el espíritu, ¿de qué te sirve el zen?

 

Tran Nhan Tong (1258–1308)

Un Cezanne

Almendros en Provenza es de Paul Cezanne (1900).

Les arbres frissonnent comme des méduses

Les cheveux qui sont l'âge de l'amour
Comme le vin qui coule dans les doigts
Souviens-toi souviens-toi des fleurs de la terre
La honte portait ta tête dans un sac
Mille éboulements marquaient tes pas
Tu es là-haut sur la colline
Où la lune pose ses grandes orgues froides
Les arbres frissonnent comme des méduses
Mais tu ne crois pas à ces cris naturels
Si les montagnes pouvaient toucher à l'air
Et par lui rejondre les saisons
Tu marcherais sur la route du ciel

Georges Schehadé

 Les cheveux qui sont l'âge de l'amour...


Regarde ma douleur beau ciel qui me l'envoies

 Et le soir vient et les lys meurent
Regarde ma douleur beau ciel qui me l'envoies
Une nuit de mélancolie

Enfant souris ô soeur écoute
Pauvres marchez sur la grand'route
O menteuse forêt qui surgis à ma voix
Les flammes qui brûlent les âmes

Sur le boulevard de Grenelle
Les ouvriers et les patrons
Arbres de mai cette dentelle
Ne fais donc pas le fanfaron
Allons plus vite nom de Dieu
Allons plus vite

Tous les poteaux télégraphiques
Viennent là-bas le long du quai
Sur son sein notre République
A mis ce bouquet de muguet
Qui poussait dru le long du quai
Allons plus vite nom de Dieu
Allons plus vite

La bouche en coeur Pauline honteuse
Les ouvriers et les patrons,
Oui-dà oui-dà belle endormeuse
Ton frère
Allons plus vite nom de Dieu
Allons plus vite

 

Guillaume Apollinaire 
Allons plus vite

Una foto de Herb Ritts

Scott Pruitt vs. the Entire Scientific Community

by Mrill Ingram

 

It’s been a bad week for those of us still clinging to an ever-thinning veil of hope regarding the pathology of climate denial. You know, the kind of hope that includes Trump Administration officials suddenly applying their vaunted business acumen to a green economy based on renewable energy. Or maybe even just a few Republicans relocating their faith in the Enlightenment, and crossing party lines to defend the scientific process.

But so far, nothing doing.

 

Scott Pruitt, the Trump team’s head of the Environmental Protection Agency, was asked Thursday morning on CNBC’s news program, Squawk Box, whether he believed that CO2 is the “primary control” on climate. He responded, “No.”

 

“I believe that measuring, with precision, human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do,” Pruitt stated, “and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact. So, no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.”

 

Read more: http://progressive.org/dispatches/scott-pruitt-vs-the-entire-scientific-community/

Que la tierra te sea leve....Go Chuck, go...

Antinoo

Hermoso hasta el dolor: La Modestia de Corradini (1752)

Visto aquí

The Democrat's undemocratic strategy of smearing the green party

Four months since the upset election of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, one of the primary scapegoats of the Democrats for their stunning electoral failure remains the Green Party and its 2016 presidential nominee, Jill Stein. Pointing to final vote tallies in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan that showed Trump’s margin of victory as being below the total vote count for Stein, Democrats have coalesced around the conventional wisdom that Stein voters flipped the election by failing to unite behind the Democratic nominee.

As Matthew Rozsa explains the thinking at Salon, “if the Stein voters in those three states had all supported Clinton instead of Trump, the Republican candidate would have only received 260 electoral votes – 10 shy of the minimum necessary to become president.” So there you have it. Stein spoiled the election. Case closed.

The problem with this analysis is its flawed logic that anyone’s votes actually “belong” to anyone else, and further, it rests on the false assumption that all of Stein’s voters would have naturally voted for Clinton had the Green Party not been competing in the election. The fact is, many of these voters were turned off by Clinton’s hawkishness, perceived ethical lapses and close Wall Street ties, and would have never voted for her regardless of whether there was a third party alternative or not. Some would have stayed home, and others might have actually voted for Trump.

 

Read more:https://essentialopinion.wordpress.com/2017/03/08/the-democrats-undemocratic-strategy-of-smearing-the-green-party/

La vie enclose

Ici, l’Empire au centre du monde. La terre
ouverte au labeur des vivants. Le continent
milieu des Quatre-mers. La vie enclose,
propice au juste, au bonheur, à la conformité.

Où les hommes se lèvent, se courbent, se
saluent à la mesure de leurs rangs. Où les
frères connaissent leurs catégories: et tout
s’ordonne sous l’influx clarificateur du Ciel.

Là, l’Occident miraculeux, plein de
montagnes au-dessus des nuages; avec ses
palais volants, ses temples légers, ses tours
que le vent promène.

Tout est prodige et tout inattendu: le confuss
s’agit: la Reine aux désirs changeants tient
sa cour. Nul être de raison jamais ne s’y aventure.

Son âme, c’est vers Là que, par magie,
Mou-wang l’a projetée en rêve. C’est vers là qu’il veut porter ses pas.

Avant que de quitter l’Empire pour
rejoindre son âme, il en a fixé, d’Ici, le départ.

 

Victor Segalen
Départ

Más allá de la respiración: Matisse

Alexéi von Jawlensky