TimesOnline: Blowpipes thwart Borneo’s biofuel kings

TimesOnline:

HUNDREDS of Borneo tribes men armed with blowpipes are blockading roads in protest against companies they accuse of destroying their rainforests to grow oil palms for “green” biofuel, cooking oil, soap and margarine.

The confrontation is taking place in the endangered forests of the Malaysian state of Sarawak, where members of the Penan tribe have existed for centuries as nomadic hunter-gatherers living on fish, wild animals and plants.

“This is a last resort,” said See Chee How, a lawyer fighting land rights cases for indigenous people. “There have been allegations of rape by loggers, the rivers are being polluted and the Penan fear for their food supplies.”

Palm oil provides a third of all cooking oils and is used in household brands such as Palmolive soap and Flora margarine.

Soaring demand for its use in “green” biofuel has pushed up the price by 45% this year, prompting companies to clear more rainforest and plant yet more palms. The latest expansion seems to have set off the blockades.

Timber operations by four companies were halted while police and local politicians attempted to negotiate with the tribesmen late last week.

Lihan Jok, a state assembly member, accused unidentified “outsiders” of fomenting trouble and pledged to have “sincere” and “heart-to-heart” discussions. “I have spoken to the timber companies affected by the blockades. Their managements said they have always treated the Penan well,” he told a local newspaper.

The tribesmen responded by demanding that officials come to see the “dire situation” in their villages. Twelve villages had united to send their men, clad in traditional hats pierced with hornbill feathers and carrying blowpipes, onto the jungle roads to block the timber lorries.

“These logging companies don’t clear the whole forest – they take the valuable trees and wreak a lot of destruction along the way,” said Miriam Ross, a British researcher for Survival International who has lived alongside the Penan.

“When the plantations are established it’s just rows and rows of palm oil, it’s not a forest,” she explained. “There’s not even any space for them, so they [the tribesmen[ can see it is a real threat.”

Stephen Corry, director of Survival, said the Malaysian government must recognise the land rights of local people and stop the companies operating without the tribe’s consent.

The blockades raised the stakes in a conflict that has unfolded for three decades on Borneo, an island treasure house of rare wildlife and plants that is also a rich source of timber and minerals. It pits indigenous tribes, broadly known as Dayaks, against governments and companies seeking to exploit resources.

Sarawak’s state government, which has been ruled by the same grandee, Abdul Taib Mah-mud, for 28 years, has presided over what environmental campaigners say is the systematic destruction of the rainforests.

Taib responds that Sarawak’s plans to double its income by 2020 by building dams and power stations will bring progress and prosperity to all its 2.3m people, about half of whom are Dayaks.

However, threats and violence have beset the Dayak resistance against companies granted licences by Taib’s government to exploit the rainforest. Two years ago the skull of Kelesau Naan, a troublesome village leader, washed up on a muddy riverbank. His disappearance remains unexplained. So does that of Bruno Manser, a Swiss campaigner, who vanished into the rainforest in May 2000.

“I believe the police and the government will have to handle these new protests carefully,” said an activist in Kuching, the capital of Sarawak. “This time they know the world is watching.”

Malaysia’s main opposition party is promising reform if it prevails in Sarawak’s next parliamentary election, due to be held by 2011. Its allegation of “crony capitalism” have focused on Taib, 73, who is finance minister and minister of planning and resources as well as chief minister.

Members of Taib’s famil control or hold shares in several of the companies that have reaped generous rewards from licences, concessions or contracts issued by the state. The Taib family has consistently denied any wrongdoing or conflict of interest.

“The reality is that such projects generate large profits for a small number of people, the elites and the corporations,” said a coalition of Dayak groups.

Pressure from campaigners recently led Unilever, which makes Dove soap and Flora margarine, to commit itself to buy all its palm oil by 2015 from “sustainable” sources. Colgate-Palmolive said it had a similar commitment but sourced only a tiny proportion of its oil from Malaysia.

WP: We Have the Hope. Now Where's the Audacity?

Peter Dreier and Marshall Ganz in the Washington Post:

On Aug. 25 last year, Sen. Edward Kennedy strode onto the stage at the Democratic National Convention in Denver and announced to a roaring crowd of party faithful the beginning of a new generation in American politics.

"I have come here tonight to stand with you, to change America, to restore its future, to rise to our best ideals and to elect Barack Obama president of the United States," he said. Comparing Obama to his slain brother, John F. Kennedy, the senator shouted: "This November, the torch will be passed again to a new generation of Americans. . . . Our country will be committed to his cause. The work begins anew. The hope rises again. And the dream lives on."

Eight months into the Obama administration, as we mourn the senator from Massachusetts, many of us retain the hope, but we are wondering what happened to the audacity that is needed to move the country in a new direction. In recent weeks, many progressives have expressed concern that Obama's bold plan to reform health care may be at risk. A defeat on this key issue could undermine other elements of his agenda. We don't believe that the president has changed his goals, but we wonder whether he underestimated the power necessary to bring about real change.

Throughout the campaign, Obama cautioned that enacting his ambitious plans would take a fight. In a speech in Milwaukee, he said: "I know how hard it will be to bring about change. Exxon Mobil made $11 billion this past quarter. They don't want to give up their profits easily."

He explained what it would take to overcome the power of entrenched interests in order to pass historic legislation. Change comes about, candidate Obama said, by "imagining, and then fighting for, and then working for, what did not seem possible before."

Obama observed: "That is how workers won the right to organize against violence and intimidation. That's how women won the right to vote. That's how young people traveled south to march and to sit in and to be beaten, and some went to jail and some died for freedom's cause."

But in the battle for health-care reform, the president and his allies are ignoring his own warning. The struggle for universal medical insurance -- one that Kennedy began pushing more than 40 years ago, and that looked winnable only a few months ago -- is in trouble.

For months the president insisted that any significant reform of the health-care system include a "public option" -- an expanded version of Medicare that would compete with private insurance companies, pressuring them to reduce costs and providing Americans with greater choice. Republicans have made it clear that they won't support any plan that competes with the insurance industry or challenges its runaway costs and irresponsible practices.

Obama would like, but doesn't need, Republican votes to achieve his goal. But seven conservative Democratic senators -- led by Max Baucus (Mont.) and including Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), Kent Conrad (N.D.), Jeff Bingaman (N.M.), Ben Nelson (Neb.), Mary Landrieu (La.) and Arlen Specter (Pa.) -- oppose the public option as well. So by shilling for the insurance industry, they've made it thus far impossible for Obama to take advantage of the Democrats' majority in the Senate.

In the past few weeks, Obama has hinted that he might settle for reform without a public option, thus assuaging the Baucus caucus and the insurance industry but angering many of his progressive supporters.

At the same time, Obama's readiness to compromise hasn't mollified members of the small but vocal right-wing Republican network who, egged on by the conservative echo chamber, have disrupted town hall meetings across the country, warning of "socialized medicine" and other impending catastrophes. This has made it harder for Obama to argue for his proposals and has hurt his standing in public opinion polls.

If the unholy alliance of insurance industry muscle, conservative Democrats' obfuscation and right-wing mob tactics is able to defeat Obama's health-care proposal, it will write the conservative playbook for blocking other key components of the president's agenda -- including action on climate change, immigration reform and updates to the nation's labor laws.

What went wrong?

The White House and its allies forgot that success requires more than proposing legislation, negotiating with Congress and polite lobbying. It demands movement-building of the kind that propelled Obama's long-shot candidacy to an almost landslide victory. And it must be rooted in the moral energy that can transform people's anger, frustrations and hopes into focused public action, creating a sense of urgency equal to the crises facing the country.

Remember that the Obama campaign inspired an unprecedented grass-roots electoral movement, including experienced activists and political neophytes. It deployed 3,000 organizers to recruit thousands of local volunteer leadership teams (1,100 in Ohio alone). They, in turn, mobilized 1.5 million volunteers and 13.5 million contributors. And throughout the campaign, Obama reminded supporters that the real work of making change would only begin on Election Day.

Once in office, the president moved quickly, announcing one ambitious legislative objective after another. But instead of launching a parallel strategy to mobilize supporters, most progressive organizations and Organizing for America -- the group created to organizeObama's former campaign volunteers -- failed to keep up. The president is not solely responsible for his current predicament; many progressives have not acknowledged their role.

Since January, most advocacy groups committed to Obama's reform objectives (labor unions, community organizations, environmentalists and netroots groups such as MoveOn) have pushed the pause button. Organizing for America, for example, encouraged Obama's supporters to work on local community service projects, such as helping homeless shelters and tutoring children. That's fine, but it's not the way to pass reform legislation.

One Obama campaign volunteer from Delaware County, Pa., put it this way soon after the election: "We're all fired up now, and twiddling our thumbs! . . . Here, ALL the leader volunteers are getting bombarded by calls from volunteers essentially asking 'Nowwhatnowwhatnowwhat?' "

Meanwhile, as the president's agenda emerged, his former campaign volunteers and the advocacy groups turned to politics as usual: the insider tactics of e-mails, phone calls and meetings with members of Congress. Some groups -- hoping to go toe-to-toe with the well-funded business-backed opposition -- launched expensive TV and radio ad campaigns in key states to pressure conservative Democrats. Lobbying and advertising are necessary, but they have never been sufficient to defeat powerful corporate interests.

In short, the administration and its allies followed a strategy that blurred their goals, avoided polarization, confused marketing with movement-building and hoped for bipartisan compromise that was never in the cards. This approach replaced an "outsider" mobilizing strategy that not only got Obama into the White House but has also played a key role in every successful reform movement, including abolition, women's suffrage, workers' rights, civil rights and environmental justice.

Grass-roots mobilization raises the stakes, identifies the obstacles to reform and puts the opposition on the defensive. The right-wing fringe understood this simple organizing lesson and seized the momentum. Its leaders used tactics that energized their base, challenged specific elected officials and told a national story, enacted in locality after locality.

It is time for real reformers to take back the momentum.

In the past two weeks, proponents of Obama's health-care reform finally woke up. They showed up in large numbers at town hall meetings sponsored by elected officials across the nation.

The president himself used his bully pulpit with more resolve, attending public events and addressing conference calls with religious groups, unions and others to urge them to mobilize on behalf of reform.

What's needed now is a campaign to shift the ground beneath Congress. First, it must concentrate on winning support for a specific bill that incorporates the key principles Obama has been advocating: universal insurance coverage, no denial of coverage for preexisting conditions, the public option and controls on exorbitant drug and insurance industry costs. The Limbaugh loyalists know what they are against. But Obama and his allies have to be clear about what they are for.

Challenging the right wing's framing of the issue, Organizing for America and the activist groups need to recruit volunteers to reach out to friends, neighbors and especially the "undecided" public with the same urgency, energy and creativity that they showed in the election.

Second, the campaign must focus attention on the insurance companies that are primarily responsible for the health-care mess. This means organizing public events across the country that can articulate Americans' frustrations with the current health insurance system and polarize public opinion against the insurance companies and their allies.

Americans who are paying the price of our failure to act -- people who lost family members because they were denied coverage for preexisting conditions, people who can't afford health insurance and fear that a medical emergency would wipe them out, families who went bankrupt and lost their homes because of out-of-pocket medical expenses, and businesses that suffer because of the high cost of insurance for employees -- need opportunities to publicly confront those responsible for their plight. It is time to put human faces on the crisis by contrasting their stories with the insurance companies' outrageous profits and top executives' exorbitant salaries and bonuses.

This requires "movement" tactics, from leaflets, vigils and newspaper ads to nonviolent civil disobedience -- such as occupying insurance company offices and picketing the homes of insurance executives -- to focus attention on the companies and individuals who are the major obstacles to reform. As long as the real source of the problem remains faceless (or can hide behind seven conservative Democratic senators), the right remains free to demonize "big government" rather than greedy corporations.

Third, the campaign must educate constituents of the Baucus caucus about their senators' political and financial dependence on the insurance industry and other opponents of reform. They need to ask these conservative Democrats: Which side are you on? If they won't support real reform, they should know that a primary challenge is likely.

This strategy could begin to restore the combination of hope and audacity that drives successful reform movements -- and that put Obama in the White House.

Kennedy understood that reforming health care is a moral obligation, and that the responsibility to heal the sick is at the heart of every faith tradition and is required for a civilized society. He was hoping to live long enough to see it happen. Obama and people of conscience cannot allow that victory -- and that tribute to the late senator -- to slip away.

Daily Throwback: Goodie Mob ft. Outkast "Black Ice"

Goodie Mob feat. Outkast - Black Ice
Uploaded by homhom. - See the latest featured music videos.

Grist: 100 days before Copenhagen, here are 100 things you didn’t know about Copenhagen

From the GristMill:

We hope you already know that the most important climate meeting evah will take place in Copenhagen, Denmark, from Dec. 7 to 18. If all goes according to plan at the gathering—known in wonk-speak as COP15—world leaders will hash out a new global climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

Now, some things you don’t know about Copenhagen and the climate talks:

1. Umbra Fisk will be there!

2. The climate talks could spur a mini-boom in prostitution in the city.

3. MTV is sponsoring climate concerts in the lead-up to Copenhagen.

4. Oct. 24 is an International Day of Climate Action intended to prod leaders to get serious ahead of the Copenhagen talks.

5. 12,000 to 15,000 people are expected to attend the conference, and thousands more journalists, NGO reps, activists, and rabble-rousers will also come to town.

6. The Yes Men have launched a site where people can pledge to engage in civil disobedience the week before the Copenhagen talks to demand serious climate action.

7. Hey, ladies: It’s now legal to go topless at Copenhagen’s public pools.

8. Oxfam has celebrities painting their faces blue for its “Blue in the Face” campaign: demand action on climate change from leaders at Copenhagen until you’re blue in the face!

9. The average December in Copenhagen has 17 days of rain and a temperature of 28 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

10. U.S. President Barack Obama has done some serious thinking about Copenhagen. Grist’s David Roberts explains.

11. Vaunted game theorist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita predicts the climate talks will fail.

12. You can become a fan of COP15 on Facebook.

13. You can follow COP15 on Twitter, or U.N. Climate Talks. Or follow #cop15.

14. You can sign up online to host your own screening of the climate-change documentary The Age of Stupid; the distribution model is intended to get as many people as possible to see the film before Copenhagen.

15. Denmark has a climate minister, Connie Hedegaard.

16. The talks will take place almost exactly 10 years after the WTO protests in Seattle—and some activists say Copenhagen could be the “next Seattle.”

17. International carbon-trading agreements reached at Copenhagen could spur a wave of organized carbon crime.

18. The documentary The Antarctica Challenge: A Global Warning will screen during the conference in Copenhagen.

19. Copenhagen averages one hour of sunlight each day in December.

20. You can buy a “CPHCARD” for easy transportation around Copenhagen and free access to its museums.

21. The current and previous Danish prime ministers are both named Rasmussen (no relation)—and have both been actively pushing for the climate talks to succeed.

22. A site called “Hopenhagen” lets you share your future-y climate-y hopes.

23. No cars are allowed in Christiana, the leafy, free-spirited, communal-living section of Copenhagen founded by hippies in the 1970s. Too bad Christiana’s “Pusher Street” was demolished in 2004—it might have been a temporary haven for stressed-out conference-goers.

24. Greenpeace has predicted what newspapers will report after the climate talks end.

25. Every year on the Little Mermaid‘s birthday on Aug. 23, women and girls of all ages jump into the water surrounding her to celebrate.

26. The conference is taking place in Orestad, an “extension” of downtown Copenhagen that is either an urban-planning coup or an environmental nightmare, depending on your perspective.

27. The conference venue is the Bella Center; other events scheduled there this fall include the Scandinavian Shoe and Bag Fair and a meeting of the International Olympic Committee.

28. The Bella Center is constructing the Bella Hotel, Scandinavia’s largest, which will open in 2010. Talk about bad timing.

29. In lieu of creating waste (and wasting money) by giving gifts to climate conference participants, organizers will put the roughly $700,000 saved toward “climate scholarships” to allow students from around the world to pursue climate-related studies at Danish universities.

30. No bottled water will be provided at the conference—tap water only.

31. At least 65 percent of food at the conference will be organic or fair-trade.

32. No smoking is allowed in Copenhagen’s public buildings or businesses, including restaurants and pubs.

33. Tipping is not expected at Copenhagen restaurants, since waitstaff actually (gasp) make a living wage—but rounding up the bill with a little “drinking money” is appreciated.

34. Conference organizers are encouraging attendees to pursue “a better life as a delegate” by minimizing waste, drinking tap water, using public transportation, and staying in green-certified hotels (good luck getting a room).

35. Nearly 20 percent of electricity in Denmark comes from wind power.

36. Danish companies manufacture almost half of the world’s wind turbines.

37. Denmark is making a huge push into offshore wind power.

38. In 2008, Monocle magazine named Copenhagen the world’s most liveable city.

39. In May, takers of a TripAdvisor survey named Copenhagen Europe’s cleanest city.

40. Copenhagen is the seventh most expensive city in the world.

41. Copenhagen touts itself as the world leader in sales of organic food.

42. By 2015, Copenhagen leaders want all food in the city to be organic.

43. Copenhagen’s tourist website has a section dedicated to “green.”

44. It also has a section dedicated to “kissing places.”

45. A Hindu group has criticized Copenhagen summit planners for neglecting to include world religious leaders.

46. A drug-related gang war has been raging in Copenhagen—and tarnishing its squeaky-clean image.

47. Visitors to Copenhagen should be on the lookout for vicious attack dogs.

48. Actress Connie Nielsen was raised in Copenhagen.

49. Actor Leslie Nielsen was born in Saskatchewan. Just FYI.

50. Lars Ulrich of Metallica lived in Copenhagen.

51. Since 2006, Denmark’s 31 crematoriums have made $15,000 by selling metal that was salvaged from dead bodies to a Dutch recycler.

52. Hans Christian Andersen and Soeren Kirkegaard are buried in Assistens kirkegården, a cemetery that also serves as a public park where people picnic and play.

53. Copenhagen has its own cocktail.

54. You can ice skate for free at Copenhagen’s public outdoor ice rinks.

55. The Black Diamond, the newest addition to Copenhagen’s Royal Library, was built out of granite imported from Zimbabwe, then cut and polished in Italy. So much for minimizing your carbon footprint.

56. The water in Copenhagen Harbor is so clean you can swim in it. Multinational polar-bear dip?

57. Copenhagen has reduced its carbon emissions 25 percent since 1990.

58. The city has a new CityCirkel fleet of electric sightseeing buses.

59. In Copenhagen, even the kids compost, as seen in this video about the city’s transcendent greeness.

60. Copenhagen was founded in the year 1167.

61. Danish officials don’t have a crisis plan to handle a swine-flu outbreak if it crops up during the climate talks.

62. Fortunately, if you get sick while visiting Copenhagen, you are entitled to free medical treatment in hospitals or medical wards (as long as you didn’t visit just to get the medical treatment).

63. There’s a Copenhagen chewing tobacco.

64. And a song about said tobacco.

65. There’s a “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum mechanics.

66. There’s a Copenhagen play (which Daniel Craig starred in during his pre-Bond days).

67. There’s a Copenhagen furniture company.

68. The Carlsberg Brewery is in Copenhagen.

69. Copenhagen’s opposition party has proposed a congestion-pricing scheme.

70. Copenhagen is home to the world’s first walking house, a “solution to beating the floods.”

71. Grocery shopping? You either bring your own bag or buy one at the store. No bag handouts here.

72. Only 3 percent of Copenhagen’s waste goes into landfills.

73. During the last big round of climate talks, Grist’s Sarah Kraybill Burkhalter penned a delightful primer on climate conferences and Kyoto—still useful if you want to get up to speed on those COP and MOP acronyms.

74. Official municipal policy dictates that by 2015, all Copenhagen residents must be less than a 15-minute walk from a park or green space; this has spurred the development of new parks in the city.

75. Copenhagen has three ice hockey teams.

76. Copenhagen is home to the two oldest amusement parks in the world, one of which, Tivoli Gardens, contains the oldest still-operating roller coaster and ferris wheel in the world.

77. Copenhagen has 13 Michelin star restaurants, more than any other city in Scandinavia.

78. The Danish name for Copenhagen is København, which means “Merchants’ Harbor.”

79. “Copenhagenize” is a word (and an environment-related word at that!).

80. Copenhagen aims to be the world’s best city for cyclists.

81. More than 40 percent of Copenhageners bike to work, and the city hopes to get half of commuters onto bikes by 2015.

82. The city has more than 300 kilometers of bike paths.

83. Copenhagen launched a bike-sharing program in 1995, and gave Bill Clinton an honorary bike called “City Bike One” when he visited in 1997.

84. If you rent a bike from the Copenhagen shop Baisikeli, proceeds go toward sending retrofitted bikes to Tanzania, Sierra Leone, and Ghana.

85. Copenhagen-based company YAKKAY makes bicycle helmets that look like hip hats.

86. Teams of kids from all over the world competed in the Children’s Climate Call in Copenhagen in May, building technical solutions to climate change out of Legos.

87. The Lego company, based in Denmark, gets an unimpressive score on the Climate Counts scorecard.

88. It’s illegal to drive without your headlights on in Denmark.

89. The highest point in Denmark is only 564 feet above sea level. Test your Danish language skills by checking the latest sea levels along Denmark’s coast.

90. What’s better than a yoga class for letting go of the tension after all-day climate negotiations or long, cold hours at the protest barricades? Copenhagen has lots of yoga studios.

91. Copenhagen is really close to Sweden. Commuting to Malmö, Sweden, can be quicker than getting to Copenhagen’s outer suburbs. “Naturally, you must seize such a great opportunity to see more of Scandinavia!”

92. Copenhagen’s current time can be found here.

93. Copenhagen’s current weather can be found here. We can’t tell you what it is because we suck at Celsius.

94. The weekend between the two COP weeks will see the traditional and popular NGO party—BYO NGO!

95. Shakespeare’s Hamlet took place in Denmark. Diplomats have adopted the line “I will speak daggers to her, but use none” as an unofficial credo.

96. More Hamlet: “Brevity is the soul of wit.” This will undoubtedly not be heeded by diplomats.

97. “The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” In other words, use art.

98. “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.” Same thing for the effects of climate change.

99. “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.” Let’s hope so.

100. You’re still here? It’s over. Go home. Go.

U-N-I "Land of the Kings"

Underground Up & Comerz: The Half

THE HALF is made up of MC/Producer Dirt Dogg and MC JB, a couple of Madison Wisconsin products who have loved hip hop since they was shittin' their pampers.Dirt Dogg has been producing beats for years and provides tracks for emcees throughout Madison and the midwest. Fans (like me) of Dirt Dogg's beats rave about his clever use of classic samples - along with his sick drum beats and bass chords - creating a one of a kind authentic sound from the street.

Dirt and JB joined forces in early 2009 and are on track to finish the rough draft of their first album shortly (waiting on some studio time for the real ish). Both are emcees who focus on word-play and lyrical storytelling. The Half says that their goal is to get more attention and respect to Midwest from the Hip Hop world. Keep doin' it cha'll.

Check out this hot ish.

On Leadership: Fred Krupp, President of Environmental Defense Fund

Mark's throwback of the week! Blackalicious' "Deception"

Sick.

Jay-Z's trend killing "Off That"

In recent years, Jay-Z has earned a reputation as a “trend-killer,” contributing to the demise of jerseys as a hip-hop fashion statement with a line on What More Can I Say and, more recently, taking aim at Auto-Tune on the controversial D.O.A. On Blueprint 3 track Off That (ft. Drake) Hova tackles a few more trends that have overstayed their welcome—baggy clothes & chains, Timberlands, and big rims notably fall under his crosshairs—over a beat by Timbaland (the thriving producer, not the near-extinct trend), collaborating with Jay for the first time since the rapper’s “retirement.” What’s going to replace these waning fashions? Well, there’s nothing more “in” than a guest appearances from Drake, who provides Hova some moral support on the hook. Expect the typical “why (is) this old man hating?” comments from those wishing to keep such fashions afloat. Among those ready for a change, however, Off That might just reach “anthem” status.

Listen to Jay-Z's Off That:

Raekwon - House of Flying Daggers (feat. Inspectah Deck, GZA, Ghostface Killah & Method Man)

The official music video for Raekwon's latest single from his album "Only Built 4 Cuban Linx II" due in stores Sept. 8th, 2009. The single features Inspectah Deck, GZA, Ghostface Killah and Method Man with and intro from RZA, and was produced by J. Dilla.

The collaboration takes me back, the video is sick, and beats are classic Dilla. This is a badass video.

Africa wants $67 billion a year to fight climate change

Reuters:

DDIS ABABA (Reuters) - African leaders will ask rich nations for $67 billion per year to mitigate the impact of global warming on the world's poorest continent, according to a draft resolution seen by Reuters on Monday.

Ten leaders are holding talks at African Union (AU) headquarters in the Ethiopian capital to try to agree a common stance ahead of a U.N. summit on climate change in Copenhagen in December.

Experts say Africa contributes little to the pollution blamed for warming, but is likely to be hit hardest by the droughts, floods, heatwaves and rising sea levels forecast if climate change is not checked.

The draft resolution, which must still be approved by the 10 leaders, called for rich countries to pay $67 billion annually to counter the impact of global warming in Africa.

It said there had been serious limitations on Africa's ability to negotiate in the past because of a lack of a coherent stance on global warming by African governments.

"The negotiating team need to be backed with the political weight at the highest level in the continent to ensure that the African voice on climate change negotiations is taken with the seriousness it deserves," the document said.

CALLS FOR COMPENSATION

Earlier this year, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi called on rich countries to compensate Africa for warming, arguing that pollution in the northern hemisphere may have caused his country's ruinous famines in the 1980s.

A study commissioned by the Geneva-based Global Humanitarian Forum that was released in May said poor nations bear more than nine-tenths of the human and economic burden of climate change.

The 50 poorest countries, however, contribute less than 1 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions that scientists say are threatening the planet, the report said.

Africa is the region most at risk from warming and is home to 15 of the 20 most vulnerable countries, it said. Other areas also facing the highest level of threat include South Asia and small island developing states.

Developing nations accuse the rich of failing to take the lead in setting deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, and say they are trying to get the poor to shoulder more of the burden of emission curbs without providing aid and technology.

A new climate treaty is due to be agreed in Copenhagen in December. But a senior U.N. official has warned the discussions risk failure if they are accelerated.

Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, said only "selective progress" had been made toward trimming a 200-page draft treaty text in Bonn earlier this month, one of a series of talks meant to end with a U.N. deal in Denmark.

NYtimes: In Brazil, Paying Farmers to Let the Trees Stand

NYtimes:

In Brazil, Paying Farmers to Let the Trees Stand

QUERENCIA, Brazil — José Marcolini, a farmer here, has a permit from the Brazilian government to raze 12,500 acres of rain forest this year to create highly profitable new soy fields.

But he says he is struggling with his conscience. A Brazilian environmental group is offering him a yearly cash payment to leave his forest standing to help combat climate change.

Mr. Marcolini says he cares about the environment. But he also has a family to feed, and he is dubious that the group’s initial offer in the negotiation — $12 per acre, per year — is enough for him to accept.

“For me to resist the pressure, surrounded by soybeans, I’ll have to be paid — a lot,” said Mr. Marcolini, 53, noting that cleared farmland here in the state of Mato Grosso sells for up to $1,300 an acre.

Mato Grosso means thick forests, and the name was once apt. But today, this Brazilian state is a global epicenter of deforestation. Driven by profits derived from fertile soil, the region’s dense forests have been aggressively cleared over the past decade, and Mato Grasso is now Brazil’s leading producer of soy, corn and cattle, exported across the globe by multinational companies.

Deforestation, a critical contributor to climate change, effectively accounts for 20 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions and 70 percent of the emissions in Brazil. Halting new deforestation, experts say, is as powerful a way to combat warming as closing the world’s coal plants.

But until now, there has been no financial reward for keeping forest standing. Which is why a growing number of scientists, politicians and environmentalists argue that cash payments — like that offered to Mr. Marcolini — are the only way to end tropical forest destruction and provide a game-changing strategy in efforts to limit global warming.

Unlike high-tech solutions like capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide or making “green” fuel from algae, preserving a forest yields a strikingly simple environmental payback: a landowner reduces his property’s emissions to zero.

Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change, said that deforestation “absolutely” needed to be addressed by a new international climate agreement being negotiated this year. “But people cut down trees because there is an economic rationale for doing it, and you need to provide them with a financial alternative,” he said.

Both the most recent draft of the agreement and the climate bill passed by the House in late June in the United States include plans for rich countries and companies to pay the poor to preserve their forests.

The payment strategies may include direct payments to landowners to keep forests standing, as well as indirect subsidies, like higher prices for beef and soy that are produced without resorting to clear-cutting. Deforestation creates carbon emissions through fires and machinery that are used to fell trees, and it also destroys the plant life that helps absorb carbon dioxide emissions from cars and factories around the globe.

But getting the cash incentives right is a complex and uncharted business. In much of the developing world, including here, deforestation has been tied to economic progress. Pedro Alves Guimarães, 73, a weathered man sitting at the edge of the region’s River of the Dead, came to Mato Grosso in 1964 in search of free land, pushing into the jungle until he found a site and built a hut as a base for raising cattle. While he regrets the loss of the forest, he has welcomed amenities like the school built a few years ago that his grandchildren attend, or the electricity put in last year that allowed him to buy his first freezer.


Also, environmental groups caution that, designed poorly, programs to pay for forest preservation could merely serve as a cash cow for the very people who are destroying them. For example, one proposed version of the new United Nations plan would allow plantations of trees, like palms grown for palm oil, to count as forest, even though tree plantations do not have nearly the carbon absorption potential of genuine forest and are far less diverse in plant and animal life.

“There is the capacity to get a very perverse outcome,” said Sean Cadman, a spokesman for the Wilderness Society of Australia.

Global as well as local economic forces are driving deforestation — Brazil and Indonesia lead the world in the extent of their rain forests lost each year. The forests are felled to help feed the world’s growing population and meet its growing appetite for meat. Much of Brazil’s soy is bought by American-based companies like Cargill or Archer Daniels Midland and used to feed cows as far away as Europe and China. In Indonesia, rain forests are felled to plant palms for the palm oil, which is a component of biofuels.

Brazil has tried to balance development and conservation.

Last year, with a grant from Norway that could bring the country $1 billion, it created an Amazon Fund to help communities maintain their forest. National laws stipulate that 80 percent of every tract in the upper Amazon — and 50 percent in more developed regions — must remain forested, but it is a vast territory with little law enforcement. Soy exporters officially have a moratorium on using product from newly deforested land.

Here in Mato Grasso, 700 square miles of rain forest was stripped in the last five months of 2007 alone, according to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, which tracks vanishing forests.

“With so much money to be made, there are no laws that will keep forest standing,” John Carter, a rancher who settled here 15 years ago, said as he flew his Cessna over the denuded land one day this summer.

Until very recently, developing the Amazon was the priority, and some settlers feel betrayed by the new stigma surrounding deforestation. Much as in the 19th-century American West, the Brazilian government encouraged settlement through homesteaders’ benefits like cheap land and housing subsidies, many of which still exist today.

“It was revolting and sad when the world said that deforestation was bad — we were told to come here and that we had to tear it down,” said Mato Grosso’s secretary of agriculture, Neldo Egon Weirich, 56, who moved here in 1978 and noted that to be eligible for loans to buy tractors and seed, a farmer had to clear 80 percent of his land.

He is proud to have turned Mato Grosso from a malarial zone into an agricultural powerhouse. “Mato Grosso is under a microscope — we know we have to do something,” Mr. Weirich said. “But we can’t just stop production.”

Even today, settlers around the globe are buying or claiming cheap “useless” forest and transforming it into farmland.

Clearing away the trees is often the best way to declare and ensure ownership. Land that Mr. Carter has intentionally left forested for its environmental benefit has been intermittently overtaken by squatters — a common problem here. In parts of Southeast Asia, early experiments in paying landowners for preserving forest have been hampered because it is often unclear who owns, or controls, property.

There are various ideas about how to rein in deforestation.

Mr. Carter has started a landowners’ environmental group, called Aliança da Terra, whose members agree to have their properties surveyed for good environmental practices and their forests tracked by satellite by scientists at the Amazon Institute for Environmental Research (IPAM), ensuring that they are not cultivating newly cleared land. Mr. Carter is currently negotiating with companies like McDonalds to purchase only from farms that have been certified.

The United Nations program, called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation or REDD, will reward countries that preserve forests with carbon credits that can be sold and turned into cash for forest owners through the global carbon market. The United Nations already gives such credits for cleaning factories and planting trees. Carbon credits are bought by companies or countries that have exceeded their emissions limits, as a way to balance their emissions budget.

Daniel Nepstad, a scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center, has mapped out large areas of the Amazon “pixel by pixel” to determine the land value if it was converted to raise cattle or grow soy, to help determine how much landowners should be paid to conserve forest. Most experts feel that landowners will accept lower prices as they realize the benefits of saving forest, like conserving water and burnishing their image with buyers.

Mr. Weirich, the agriculture secretary, said he was skeptical about that. But he, too, senses that there may for the first time be money in forest preservation and has recently decided to be certified by Aliança da Terra.

“We want to adopt practices that will put us ahead in the market,” he said.

The initial offer Mr. Marcolini has from the environmental group is perhaps not enough to save the forest here. But, he said, if his land was in a more remote part of the Amazon, with less farming potential, “I’d take that offer and run with it.”

NYtimes: A Farm on Every Floor

NYTimes:
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
A Farm on Every Floor

By DICKSON D. DESPOMMIER

IF climate change and population growth progress at their current pace, in roughly 50 years farming as we know it will no longer exist. This means that the majority of people could soon be without enough food or water. But there is a solution that is surprisingly within reach: Move most farming into cities, and grow crops in tall, specially constructed buildings. It’s called vertical farming.

The floods and droughts that have come with climate change are wreaking havoc on traditional farmland. Three recent floods (in 1993, 2007 and 2008) cost the United States billions of dollars in lost crops, with even more devastating losses in topsoil. Changes in rain patterns and temperature could diminish India’s agricultural output by 30 percent by the end of the century.

What’s more, population increases will soon cause our farmers to run out of land. The amount of arable land per person decreased from about an acre in 1970 to roughly half an acre in 2000 and is projected to decline to about a third of an acre by 2050, according to the United Nations. With billions more people on the way, before we know it the traditional soil-based farming model developed over the last 12,000 years will no longer be a sustainable option.

Irrigation now claims some 70 percent of the fresh water that we use. After applying this water to crops, the excess agricultural runoff, contaminated with silt, pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, is unfit for reuse. The developed world must find new agricultural approaches before the world’s hungriest come knocking on its door for a glass of clean water and a plate of disease-free rice and beans.

Imagine a farm right in the middle of a major city. Food production would take advantage of hydroponic and aeroponic technologies. Both methods are soil-free. Hydroponics allows us to grow plants in a water-and-nutrient solution, while aeroponics grows them in a nutrient-laden mist. These methods use far less water than conventional cultivation techniques, in some cases as much as 90 percent less.

Now apply the vertical farm concept to countries that are water-challenged — the Middle East readily comes to mind — and suddenly things look less hopeless. For this reason the world’s very first vertical farm may be established there, although the idea has garnered considerable interest from architects and governments all over the world.

Vertical farms are now feasible, in large part because of a robust global greenhouse initiative that has enjoyed considerable commercial success over the last 10 years. (Disclosure: I’ve started a business to build vertical farms.) There is a rising consumer demand for locally grown vegetables and fruits, as well as intense urban-farming activity in cities throughout the United States. Vertical farms would not only revolutionize and improve urban life but also revitalize land that was damaged by traditional farming. For every indoor acre farmed, some 10 to 20 outdoor acres of farmland could be allowed to return to their original ecological state (mostly hardwood forest). Abandoned farms do this free of charge, with no human help required.

A vertical farm would behave like a functional ecosystem, in which waste was recycled and the water used in hydroponics and aeroponics was recaptured by dehumidification and used over and over again. The technologies needed to create a vertical farm are currently being used in controlled-environment agriculture facilities but have not been integrated into a seamless source of food production in urban high-rise buildings.

Such buildings, by the way, are not the only structures that could house vertical farms. Farms of various dimensions and crop yields could be built into a variety of urban settings — from schools, restaurants and hospitals to the upper floors of apartment complexes. By supplying a continuous quantity of fresh vegetables and fruits to city dwellers, these farms would help combat health problems, like Type II diabetes and obesity, that arise in part from the lack of quality produce in our diet.

The list of benefits is long. Vertical farms would produce crops year-round that contain no agro-chemicals. Fish and poultry could also be raised indoors. The farms would greatly reduce fossil-fuel use and greenhouse-gas emissions, since they would eliminate the need for heavy farm machinery and trucks that deliver food from farm to fork. (Wouldn’t it be great if everything on your plate came from around the corner, rather than from hundreds to thousands of miles away?)

Vertical farming could finally put an end to agricultural runoff, a major source of water pollution. Crops would never again be destroyed by floods or droughts. New employment opportunities for vertical farm managers and workers would abound, and abandoned city properties would become productive once again.

Vertical farms would also make cities more pleasant places to live. The structures themselves would be things of beauty and grace. In order to allow plants to capture passive sunlight, walls and ceilings would be completely transparent. So from a distance, it would look as if there were gardens suspended in space.

City dwellers would also be able to breathe easier — quite literally. Vertical farms would bring a great concentration of plants into cities. These plants would absorb carbon dioxide produced by automobile emissions and give off oxygen in return. So imagine you wanted to build the first vertical farm and put it in New York City. What would it take? We have the technology — now we need money, political will and, of course, proof that this concept can work. That’s why a prototype would be a good place to start. I estimate that constructing a five-story farm, taking up one-eighth of a square city block, would cost $20 million to $30 million. Part of the financing should come from the city government, as a vertical farm would go a long way toward achieving Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s goal of a green New York City by 2030. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer has already expressed interest in having a vertical farm in the city. City officials should be interested. If a farm is located where the public can easily visit it, the iconic building could generate significant tourist dollars, on top of revenue from the sales of its produce.

But most of the financing should come from private sources, including groups controlling venture-capital funds. The real money would flow once entrepreneurs and clean-tech investors realize how much profit there is to be made in urban farming. Imagine a farm in which crop production is not limited by seasons or adverse weather events. Sales could be made in advance because crop-production levels could be guaranteed, thanks to the predictable nature of indoor agriculture. An actual indoor farm developed at Cornell University growing hydroponic lettuce was able to produce as many as 68 heads per square foot per year. At a retail price in New York of up to $2.50 a head for hydroponic lettuce, you can easily do the math and project profitability for other similar crops.

When people ask me why the world still does not have a single vertical farm, I just raise my eyebrows and shrug my shoulders. Perhaps people just need to see proof that farms can grow several stories high. As soon as the first city takes that leap of faith, the world’s first vertical farm could be less than a year away from coming to the aid of a hungry, thirsty world. Not a moment too soon.

Dickson D. Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, is writing a book about vertical farms.

Click on: Deconstructing Illmatic

· by Dan Love (fromdabricks.com)

For more beat-deconstructions visit: Fromdabricks

Shot out to Fromdabricks and Oh Word, great blogs/websites. These guys have unbelievable music knowledge and inspire with their breakdowns and noble outlook on hip-hop. Salut!

~ peace

10.Deep Presents Donnis - Diary of An ATL Brave (Mixtape)

10.Deep Presents: Donnis - Diary of an ATL Brave


DOWNLOAD MIXTAPE HERE

Invincible "The Emperor's Clothes" and commentary on Palestine Israel Conflict

The Palestine Israel conflict is very very complex. Everyone has their own views and opinions, including me, so I won't attempt to argue with you. People's heritage, faith, political opinions, and own experiences shape their views on this issue.

Here is a powerful song and video from Invincible. This was originally recorded as a response to the siege of Gaza. Invincible explains her motivation behind this:

"So I wrote lyrics to K-Salaam and Beatnick’s beat that exposes the similarity between the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the Native American genocide, and the connection between the struggle for justice in Palestine and the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. Since writing the song, I've learned about even more connections–that the Israeli military has trained U.S. police forces such as the Atlanta Police Department and the Border Patrol. By boycotting Israel, we are also boycotting repressive police tactics in our cities and on our borders."

For clarity, I'll mention that Invincible is of Jewish Israeli decent.

I'd also like to mention that I've seen these brutal police tactics when I had an M-16 pointed at me while I was being questioned about my ethnicity while attempting to see the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem with my family when I was maybe 14.

The best word I can describe the security situation Israel has set up for Palestinians is Apartheid.

Lyrics:

Phase 1: Air strikes all day and all night
Phase 2: Rockets hit the Gaza strip with phosphorus
Phase 3: Ground attack how we gonna counteract?

Boycott Divest and Sanction

Israel– you should be ashamed
Kill and maim 1,000's of civilians in our name
Claim you hitting terrorists but children in your aim
Even murder relief workers blood spilling from they brain
While they tried to drive the ambulance, damn they couldn't stand a chance
Even bomb students, hospitals, mosques, Rafah, and Khan Yunis
Shot em in the back like the cops to Oscar Grant…
And in each case the good ol' united states sponsored that
7 million a day that we pay tax and AIPAC's lobbyists is robbin us
Sometimes it feels like they're ain't no stopping this
BUT now nobody can deny it cuz you made it too obvious
Naked truth exposed like the emperor's clothes
The struggles getting hotter and the temperature rose
Since 1948 when you formed the state
Palestinian people still defending their homes
They aint been surrendering, NO

Boycott Divest and Sanction
Cuz they even bombed the United Nations

Look, i'm Israeli, my government's so arrogant
War criminals who call Palestinians terrorists
For resisting extinction and occupation
Comparing this to genocide and reservations of Native Americans
Its a massacre! Kick out they ambassadors!
Divest from their apartheid like South Africa
Boycott em like King to Montgomery buses,
Show them we want peace but only with real justice
They murdering the media and witnesses left
We gonna stop shopping at all the businesses that invest
In building they settlements and gentrifying our corners
Illegal walls over there and the US-Mexico border
Build a worldwide movement til the truth is heard
And supporting the Israelis who refuse to serve
All the C.O.s who AWOL when deployed to Iraqi stations
All the people rallying while the cops are chasing
If we enlisted in the system we got an obligation
We ain't got the patience, time to stop the occupation

Boycott, Divest, and Sanction
Til there's right of return for displaced and reparations

Clean Coal? Dirty Fraud

Daily Throwback: The Roots feat. Common - Act too (Love of my life)

One of my favorite songs.

What?
Hip-Hop y'all, to the top y'all
Hip-Hop check it out
It's like that, and it sounds so nice
Hip-Hop, you the love of my life
We bout to take it to the to the to the
To the to the to the to the
To the to the to the to the
To the to the to the to the check it out
Yo, what? And it sounds so nice
Hip-Hop, you the love of my life
I'm bout to take it to the top, what?
Hip-Hop (hip-hop love)
To the top (to the top) hip-hop, check it out
It's like, word up, and it sounds so nice
Hip-Hop, you the love of my life (of my life)

[Black Thought]
The anticipation arose as time froze
I stared off the stage with my eyes closed and dove
into the deep cosmos
The impact pushed back, the first five rows
But before the raw live shows
I remember I'se a little snot-nosed
Rockin Gazelle, goggles and Izod clothes
Learnin the ropes of ghetto survival
Peepin out the situation I had to slide through
Had to watch my back my front plus my sides too
When it came to gettin mine I ain't tryin, to argue
Sometimes I wouldn'ta made it if it wasn't for you
Hip-Hop, you the love of my life and that's true
When I was handlin the shit I had to do
It was all for you, from the door for you
Speak through you, gettin paper on tour for you
From the start, Thought was down by law for you
Used to hit up every corner store wall for you
We ripped shit, and kept it hardcore for you
I remember late nights, steady rockin the mic
Hip-Hop, you the love of my life

So tell the people like that y'all (that y'all)
And it sounds so nice
Hip-Hop, you the love of my life
We bout to take it to the top..

[Common]
Yo, yo I was speakin, to my guy 'Riq and
How she was desperately seekin to Organize in a Konfusion
Usin, no protection, told H.E.R. on _Resurrection_
Caught in the Hype Williams, and lost H.E.R. direction
Gettin eight/ate in sections where I wouldn't eat H.E.R.
An under the counter love, so _Silent_-ly I _Treat_ H.E.R.
Her Daddy'll beat H.E.R., eyes all Puff-ed
In the mix on tape, niggaz had her in the buff
When we touch, it was more than just a fuck
The Police, in her I found peace (like who?)
Like Malcolm in the East
Seen H.E.R. on the streets of New York, trickin off
Tried to make a hit with H.E.R. but my dick went soft
Movin weight, losin weight, not picky - with who she choose to date
To confuse the hate, with her struggle I relate
Close to thirty, most of the niggaz she know is dirty
Havin more babies than Lauryn, she started showin early
As of late I realized, that this is H.E.R. fate
Or destiny that brings the best of me
It's like God is testin me
In _Retrospect_ I see she brought _Life_ and death to me
Peace to us collectively, live and direct when we perform
It's just coffee shop chicks and white dudes
Over H.E.R. I got into it with that nigga Ice Cube
Now the fight moved to in life, makin the right moves
Besides God and family, you my life's jewel
Like that y'all
Hip-Hop.. [echoes]

[whispered]
Take it to the top, what? Hip-Hop (hip-hip)
To the top, hip-hop (hip-hop) check it out

[Black Thought - louder]
It's like, word up, and it sounds nice
Hip-Hop, you the love of my life, what?
Bout to take you to the to the to the
To the to the to the to the
To the to the to the to the
To the to the to the to the, yo
Fifth Dynamite, and it sounds so nice
Hip-Hop, you the love of my life
I'm bout to take you to the top love
Hip-Hop, word up, to the top (to the top)
Hip-Hop, check it out
It's like that, what? And it sounds alright
Hey, cause you the love of my life
I'm bout to take you to the to the to the
To the to the to the to the
To the to the to the to the
To the to the to the to the, check it out
What? Yeah, and it sounds so nice
Hip-Hop, you the love of my life
Bout to take you to the top love
Hip-Hop (hip-hop) to the top (to the top) hip-hop (hip-hop)
Fifth Dynamite, and it sounds alright
Hey, cause you the love of my life
I'm bout to take you to the to the to the
To the to the to the to the
To the to the to the to the
To the to the to the to the, check it out, yo
Ye-yeh-yo, yo, and it sounds so nice
Hip-Hop, you the love of my life
We bout to take you to the top love, hip-hop (hip-hop)
To the top (to the top) hip-hop (hip-hop)
Check it out, it's like, yeah, and it's sounds alright
Hip-Hop, you the love of my life
We bout, take it to the to the to the

Cyclists Cause Less Than 10% of Bike/Car Accidents

So in the past month, I've gotten in two cycling accidents commuting to and from work. One was clearly my fault (wearing sandals on a bike) and the other I was "doored." If you are unfamiliar with the term "dooring" it's when someone opens up their car door right in front of you and you ride into it. It happened to me two days ago on my way home from work by a cab, and I slammed right into it. I nearly ripped the driver side door off. Definitely caused more damage to the car than myself (bruised and sore shoulder and hand) but it could have been a lot worse.


The moral of the story is that there need to be better cycling laws in all cities. There are regular cycling fatalities around town, including one last year on the corner of Connecticut Ave and 20/N St. There is still a Ghost Bike memorial there. I do a few stupid things when cycling every now and then (sandals), but I'm pretty safe. But at the rate I'm going, something needs to change before my bike gets painted white.

Here are the findings from a study done at the University of Toronto:

Professor Chris Cavacuiti on how to stay safe on the roads

What do drivers and cyclists need to know to share the road safely?

Dr. Chris Cavacuiti of the department of family and community medicine is a staff physician at St. Michael’s Hospital and an experienced cyclist who commutes on his bicycle and races competitively. He was recovering from a serious cycling accident when he began his research on cycling health and safety.

You were recovering from a cycling accident when you began your research—tell us about this.

In 2006 I was hit by a truck while training for an Ironman race. The collision left me with fractured ribs, a broken collarbone, and a shattered shoulder blade. The driver was charged and convicted for making an unsafe turn. As a physician interested in research, I used my recovery time to review the current research on cycling health and safety. I quickly came to realize that there is powerful evidence that with the proper investment in cycling infrastructure, accidents like mine would happen far less often.

Who causes accidents—cyclists or drivers?

While there is a public perception that cyclists are usually the cause of accidents between cars and bikes, an analysis of Toronto police collision reports shows otherwise: The most common type of crash in this study involved a motorist entering an intersection and either failing to stop properly or proceeding before it was safe to do so. The second most common crash type involved a motorist overtaking unsafely. The third involved a motorist opening a door onto an oncoming cyclist. The study concluded that cyclists are the cause of less than 10 per cent of bike-car accidents in this study.

The available evidence suggests that collisions have far more to do with aggressive driving than aggressive cycling.

So what can we do to reduce bike-car accidents?

There is a wide variety of effective strategies that can reduce motorist/cyclist collisions. Many European countries have far lower rates of cycling fatalities than we do in Canada, despite having roads that are narrower and more crowded than ours. They have managed this through a combination of rigorous driver education and training as well as strong law enforcement policies that place the burden of responsibility with driver—not cyclists—when it comes to collisions. The Europeans have also done a far better job investing in cycling infrastructure to keep cyclists safe.

What do you mean by improving cycling infrastructure?

Cycling health and safety isn’t just a matter of saying ‘let’s be safe’ and ‘let’s share the road’—but recognizing that more and better infrastructure investment is essential in keeping cyclists safe. By infrastructure, I mean things like shared or designated roadways and paths, traffic calming measures, increased public education, provision of safe storage facilities and other equipment that makes cycling a safe, convenient travel choice.

Research shows, perhaps not surprisingly, that countries and communities with more investment in cycling infrastructure have higher levels of cycling and lower accident and fatality rates among vulnerable road users—cyclists and pedestrians.

Is this more than a cycling issue?

As a matter of public health, there are many recognized benefits to society as a whole for investment in cycling infrastructure. In fact, the benefits of cycling are estimated to outweigh the risks by as much as 20 to one. Cycling has the potential to be an extremely effective health promotion tool, and it’s unfortunate that it’s not yet part of the public health agenda.

When decisions are made to not to invest in the type of infrastructure that promotes healthy active lifestyles, everyone tends to suffer, especially those with lower socio-economic status, who may not have the extra resources to join a gym, for example, or live where walking or cycling can easily be a part of their daily life.

Those countries that are more committed to active lifestyles via infrastructure tend to have lower rates of childhood obesity. I must add that the studies are not necessarily causal, but there are links.

There is also solid evidence that pollution isn’t just something that makes people cough a little bit. Toronto Public Health estimates some 70,000 days lost from pollution in terms of productivity and functionality with a corresponding dollar value. Pollution also accounts for 200,000 “restricted activity days” per year, including 68,000 asthma days.

What about the bike helmet question?

I wear a helmet while riding. But to be perfectly honest, I wonder how much it actually contributes to my safety. There is a perception that if you’re not wearing a helmet, you’re to blame for your accident—that you don’t take your own personal safety very seriously. The fact is that countries that are the safest in the world for cycling have the lowest rates of helmet use. In the Netherlands, less than one per cent of cyclists wear helmets and cycling is not perceived to be a high-risk activity.

I think the helmet debate takes away from what we could be doing—it’s a distraction with an easy legislative solution. It doesn’t solve the problem of safety while cycling. It might almost be better if wearing a helmet was mandated and then work could move forward with the issues that really matter, like improved infrastructure for safe cycling.

Do you have some tips for new cyclists?

1. Know and follow the rules of the road. Always.
2. Consider taking a course to learn how to share the road as safely as possible with other vehicles. CAN-BIKE courses are offered through the City of Toronto.
3. Find a balance between being a careful rider and being confident enough to claim adequate space on the road within lanes of traffic and around parked cars.
4. Remember that motorists will not necessarily understand what the needs of a cyclist are—so educate yourself. There’s a difference between being assertive and aggressive. Self-preservation should be your primary motivation.
5. If you’re planning to become a regular cycling commuter, there will inevitably be times when you may need to ride in the dark or in the rain, so invest in some lights and some reflective clothing and also buy yourself some good quality rain gear. I ride my bike almost all year round and what I’ve come to realize is that there’s really no such thing as bad weather; there are only bad clothing choices!

The Remix Project Mixtape

The Apple Juice Kid, who produces this tape, just put out another free project for y'all. This time around AJK has put together an experimental live band named The Remix Project to put out this cover album/mixtape. The Remix Project is a North Carolina collective comprised of Apple Juice Kid on the Drums, Matt Brandau on the Bass, Brevan Hampden on Percussion, Mark Wells on Keys, Dana Chell on the Guitar/Samples, and DJ Merlin on the cuts. This project is a live reinterpretation by The Remix Project of classic songs from A Tribe Called Quest, Jay-Z, ODB, Talib Kweli, OutKast, The Foreign Exchange, Scarface, Black Sheep, Digable Planets, Elton John, and many more. Courtesy of OKP & illRoots this project is now available for free download.

Go HERE to download the tape.

Stuff Environmentalists Like

Just found this online. It's in the spirit of Things White People Like. Check it out on the Mother Nature Network:

Choosing one’s friends is a very weighty endeavor that can yield significant benefits. Some people aim to befriend celebrities because of the exclusive par­ties and the possibility of landing on Perez Hilton’s blog. Other people aim for politicians because of the con­nections and first dibs on bumper stickers. Still others aim for musicians because it provides a more legiti­mate excuse to wear tight jeans and not wash your hair. Recently, a new subset of desirable targets has come on the market: environmentalists.

Traditionally, environmentalists have not been in very high demand as friends. This is in part because they have developed a reputation for being long-winded and angry about the state of things, because they want you to replace all of your belongings with green ones, and because until now, they have been largely inaccessible, living in communal farms in Vermont and in the world’s biggest hippie compound — commonly re­ferred to as the Pacific Northwest. They can seem like a very difficult group to infiltrate and eventually exploit.

Do not let this deter you from entering into what can be a financially and emotionally beneficial alliance. Understanding and talking about the things that environmentalists care about most will be your golden ticket to free lightbulbs, handmade soap and many other perks. In the coming week's I'll be providing a step-by-step guide to befriending environmentalists.

Step One: Bringing numerous talking points to dinner
If an environmentalist invites you over for dinner, do not assume that your host’s primary purpose is to serve you a meal. The goal is education.

You cannot assume your host is vegan or vegetarian either. Doing so could lead to a number of social faux pas that are on par with or worse than calling her a Republican. While many environmentalists are vegan or vegetarian, others can talk for hours about how it is possible to eat meat and still be green. Their requirement of course is that the animal is raised on a small farm and allowed to run around and eat grass. If you are hoping to impress a host in the latter camp, tell a story about how you are raising a few chickens in your backyard. For extra points, use the following terms: free-range, factory farm and antibiotics.

If conversation starts to lull, it’s always a good idea to bring up a paradox that engages the entire table. The most pressing question of our generation is: local or organic? This subject is sure to create a lively distraction while you grab whatever delicious food remains, leaving only the tempeh and brown rice for the other guests.

Once the meal is over, it’s always good manners to insist on doing the dishes. But do not worry about actually having to do them. Simply walk into the kitchen, put the dishes in the sink, turn on the hot water, return to the host, and say, “I’m just waiting for the water to heat up.” They will bolt into the kitchen and shut off the faucet to prevent wasting both water and energy. Feign ignorance. They will finish the job and try to offset the awkwardness of the situation by giving you the leftover local, organic peach cobbler to take home. Environmentalists like to offset things.

Step Two: Brainwashing children
Since the human population is most responsible for the destruction of the planet, you might be wondering if it is appropriate to suggest that an environmentalist commit suicide as a gift to the earth. The answer is no, mostly because environmentalists have so much work to do before they die and are eventually composted.

But while they are on earth, one of the environmentalists’ top priorities is to raise a child in the most eco-friendly fashion possible. This process begins with natural childbirth and quickly moves to a restricted diet entirely free of processed sugar, bleached flour and all other food items typically enjoyed by children. The ultimate plan is to force kids to acquire a taste for organic broccoli, whole grains and tofu before their young minds can yearn for a Happy Meal.
This is important to know in the event that you are asked to supervise an environmentalist’s child. More than likely there will be a list — a very long list — of things the child cannot do, so it is essential to do everything in your power to avoid getting involved. If for some reason you do get stuck babysitting, you should feed the child Snickers bars and soda. This is also an excellent strategy for quickly exiting a friendship with any environmentalist who can no longer benefit you in any way.

Step Three: Being depressed by statistics
The best way to ensure that you always have something to say around your new friends is to make sure you are getting information from sources they trust. To determine if a news source is acceptable, simply look to see if it is sold at the checkout stand at Whole Foods. If this is the case, study the content for conversation points. Before you know it, you will be conversing fluently about tidal power, offshore drilling and gas taxes.

Although television is broadly recognized as unacceptable, documentaries are seen as an important source of statistics and anecdotes. It is essential that you understand how important it is to be able to recite statistics on demand: percentage of Arctic ice melted, average global temperature, days of drought, number of species endangered, and acres of rainforest destroyed hourly. Fortunately, these numbers change every day, so do not be concerned with accuracy.

Step Four: Knowing which ingredients in your shampoo will kill you
The first thing you will notice about environmentalists is the smell. As it stands, they come in three flavors: lavender, patchouli and natural. This is due to the fact that environmentalists do not use deodorant because it contains aluminum and a number of chemicals that concern them greatly. Instead, environmentalists prefer the scents of nature. The most committed allow their own bodies to dictate their smell identity. More often than not this will lead you to believe that the person you are talking to is an organic onion or garlic farmer. Fortunately, there are no environmentalists who consider it an insult to be mistaken for an organic farmer.

As for the rest of their grooming regimen, a look into the shower stall of an environmentalist will reveal several bottles of natural shampoos that didn’t work but can’t be thrown away, and of course, handmade soap. Once you have confirmed that your new friend has an oddly shaped bar of soap, you should ask them if they make their own. If the answer is yes, you have discovered what you will be receiving for your birthday! If the answer is no, then you know exactly what to get them for nondenominational holidays.

Step Five: Never throwing stuff away
Environmentalists are passionate about bicycling, public transportation, and walking — none of which ever add up to a free ride to the airport. One of the few types of automobiles accepted by environmentalists is a Volvo or Mercedes converted to run on vegetable oil. These are considered valid options because they run on the waste of nonenvironmentalists and they reuse older cars. Environmentalists will go to great lengths to reuse things, even things they didn’t like the first time around.

While this emphasis on reuse will ultimately benefit the earth, you should not overlook the many ways in which it can benefit you! When you are in the home of an environmentalist and see something you covet, start dropping hints. Keep saying, “I suppose I’ll pick one up — I just hate to buy new and use all those resources.” If this does not work, you probably aren’t dealing with a real environmentalist.
Please note: This tactic will not work if the object in question is a Prius. Procuring an environmentalist’s Prius is an advanced procedure that is too complicated and delicate to divulge on these pages.

I will continue to post more of these if they are published, but I may also write a few of my own.

Jamie Foxx - Digital Girl (Remix) (feat. Drake, The-Dream & Kanye West)

The official music video for Jamie Foxx's remix to his single "Digital Girl" featuring Drake, The-Dream and Kanye West, from the album "Intuition" in stores now!
Shouts to MrWP

Directed by Hype Williams.

Jay-Z - Run This Town (feat. Rihanna & Kanye West)

New HOVA! The official music video for Jay-Z's lead single off his upcoming album "The Blueprint³", due in stores September 11th 2009. The single features Rihanna and Kanye West, who also produced the song alongside No I.D..

Video is interesting, but i'm hoping for more out of the album. Maybe Mr. Carter is easing us in.

Republicans, religion and triumph of unreason...

Johann Hari: Republicans, religion and the triumph of unreason

How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality?

Wednesday, 19 August 2009

Sarah Palin really has claimed ? with a straight face ? that Barack Obama wants to kill her baby

Something strange has happened in America in the nine months since Barack Obama was elected. It has best been summarised by the comedian Bill Maher: "The Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved to a mental hospital."

The election of Obama – a black man with an anti-conservative message – as a successor to George W. Bush has scrambled the core American right's view of their country. In their gut, they saw the US as a white-skinned, right-wing nation forever shaped like Sarah Palin.

When this image was repudiated by a majority of Americans in a massive landslide, it simply didn't compute. How could this have happened? How could the cry of "Drill, baby, drill" have been beaten by a supposedly big government black guy? So a streak that has always been there in the American right's world-view – to deny reality, and argue against a demonic phantasm of their own creation – has swollen. Now it is all they can see.

Since Obama's rise, the US right has been skipping frantically from one fantasy to another, like a person in the throes of a mental breakdown. It started when they claimed he was a secret Muslim, and – at the same time – that he was a member of a black nationalist church that hated white people. Then, once these arguments were rejected and Obama won, they began to argue that he was born in Kenya and secretly smuggled into the United States as a baby, and the Hawaiian authorities conspired to fake his US birth certificate. So he is ineligible to rule and the office of President should pass to... the Republican runner-up, John McCain.

These aren't fringe phenomena: a Research 200 poll found that a majority of Republicans and Southerners say Obama wasn't born in the US, or aren't sure. A steady steam of Republican congressmen have been jabbering that Obama has "questions to answer". No amount of hard evidence – here's his birth certificate, here's a picture of his mother heavily pregnant in Hawaii, here's the announcement of his birth in the local Hawaiian paper – can pierce this conviction.

This trend has reached its apotheosis this summer with the Republican Party now claiming en masse that Obama wants to set up "death panels" to euthanise the old and disabled. Yes: Sarah Palin really has claimed – with a straight face – that Barack Obama wants to kill her baby.

You have to admire the audacity of the right. Here's what's actually happening. The US is the only major industrialised country that does not provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead, they are required to provide for themselves – and 50 million people can't afford the insurance. As a result, 18,000 US citizens die every year needlessly, because they can't access the care they require. That's equivalent to six 9/11s, every year, year on year. Yet the Republicans have accused the Democrats who are trying to stop all this death by extending healthcare of being "killers" – and they have successfully managed to put them on the defensive.

The Republicans want to defend the existing system, not least because they are given massive sums of money by the private medical firms who benefit from the deadly status quo. But they can't do so honestly: some 70 per cent of Americans say it is "immoral" to retain a medical system that doesn't cover all citizens. So they have to invent lies to make any life-saving extension of healthcare sound depraved.

A few months ago, a recent board member for several private health corporations called Betsy McCaughey reportedly noticed a clause in the proposed healthcare legislation that would pay for old people to see a doctor and write a living will. They could stipulate when (if at all) they would like care to be withdrawn. It's totally voluntary. Many people want it: I know I wouldn't want to be kept alive for a few extra months if I was only going to be in agony and unable to speak. But McCaughey started the rumour that this was a form of euthanasia, where old people would be forced to agree to death. This was then stretched to include the disabled, like Palin's youngest child, who she claimed would have to "justify" his existence. It was flatly untrue – but the right had their talking-point, Palin declared the non-existent proposals "downright evil", and they were off.

It's been amazingly successful. Now, every conversation about healthcare has to begin with a Democrat explaining at great length that, no, they are not in favour of killing the elderly – while Republicans get away with defending a status quo that kills 18,000 people a year. The hypocrisy was startling: when Sarah Palin was Governor of Alaska, she encouraged citizens there to take out living wills. Almost all the Republicans leading the charge against "death panels" have voted for living wills in the past. But the lie has done its work: a confetti of distractions has been thrown up, and support is leaking away from the plan that would save lives.

These increasingly frenzied claims have become so detached from reality that they often seem like black comedy. The right-wing magazine US Investors' Daily claimed that if Stephen Hawking had been British, he would have been allowed to die at birth by its "socialist" healthcare system. Hawking responded with a polite cough that he is British, and "I wouldn't be here without the NHS".

This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy world isn't new; it's only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, the US right simply claimed they had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence for man-made global warming became unanswerable, they claimed – as one Republican congressman put it – that it was "the greatest hoax in human history", and that all the world's climatologists were "liars". The American media then presents itself as an umpire between "the rival sides", as if they both had evidence behind them.

It's a shame, because there are some areas in which a conservative philosophy – reminding us of the limits of grand human schemes, and advising caution – could be a useful corrective. But that's not what these so-called "conservatives" are providing: instead, they are pumping up a hysterical fantasy that serves as a thin skin covering some raw economic interests and base prejudices.

For many of the people at the top of the party, this is merely cynical manipulation. One of Bush's former advisers, David Kuo, has said the President and Karl Rove would mock evangelicals as "nuts" as soon as they left the Oval Office. But the ordinary Republican base believe this stuff. They are being tricked into opposing their own interests through false fears and invented demons. Last week, one of the Republicans sent to disrupt a healthcare town hall started a fight and was injured – and then complained he had no health insurance. I didn't laugh; I wanted to weep.

How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality? It begins, I suspect, with religion. They are taught from a young age that it is good to have "faith" – which is, by definition, a belief without any evidence to back it up. You don't have "faith" that Australia exists, or that fire burns: you have evidence. You only need "faith" to believe the untrue or unprovable. Indeed, they are taught that faith is the highest aspiration and most noble cause. Is it any surprise this then percolates into their political views? Faith-based thinking spreads and contaminates the rational.

Up to now, Obama has not responded well to this onslaught of unreason. He has had a two-pronged strategy: conciliate the elite economic interests, and joke about the fanatical fringe they are stirring up. He has (shamefully) assured the pharmaceutical companies that an expanded healthcare system will not use the power of government as a purchaser to bargain down drug prices, while wryly saying in public that he "doesn't want to kill Grandma". Rather than challenging these hard interests and bizarre fantasies aggressively, he has tried to flatter and soothe them.

This kind of mania can't be co-opted: it can only be overruled. Sometimes in politics you will have enemies, and they must be democratically defeated. The political system cannot be gummed up by a need to reach out to the maddest people or the greediest constituencies. There is no way to expand healthcare without angering Big Pharma and the Republicaloons. So be it. As Arianna Huffington put it, "It is as though, at the height of the civil rights movement, you thought you had to bring together Martin Luther King and George Wallace and make them agree. It's not how change happens."

However strange it seems, the Republican Party really is spinning off into a bizarre cult who believe Barack Obama is a baby-killer plotting to build death panels for the grannies of America. Their new slogan could be – shrill, baby, shrill.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

More from Johann Hari