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Started by aa1234779, August 20, 2017, 07:35 AM

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scarface

Tonight, I'm going to talk about climate change with an interesting article.

The Paris agreement set a goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. Climate Action Tracker measures countries’ progress toward meeting this goal and the latest report finds that just two countries, The Gambia and Morocco, currently have policies that meet the 1.5-degree target.

Wind turbines along the Morocco coast, near the town of Tarfaya.


Scientific evidence shows that a 2-degree warmer world will be far more disastrous for civilization than a world that warms by 1.5 degrees or less.
Climate Action Tracker’s Yvonne Deng notes that the group’s ratings take into account the unique situations of each country.

“When you look at the overall emission reductions that we need to see globally, it doesn't mean that every country has to reduce their emissions,” she explains. “Countries that are still developing need to be allowed to increase their emissions from current levels. Countries that have already developed really need to look at decreasing emissions.”

When it comes to global emission reductions across different counties, wealthy countries simply need to do more than their poorer counterparts.
There are various approaches to figuring out how to share global emission reductions across different countries, Deng says. One approach looks at per capita emissions and tries to calculate reductions between now and some future date; another approach factors in what some countries have already emitted to further their own development; a third approach says that wealthy countries simply need to do more than their poorer counterparts.

Climate Action Tracker looks at “the whole range of possible emission levels per country, in any of these approaches,” Deng says, “and then determines what we call the ‘fair share range’ of emission reductions â€" and that informs our rating scale.”
In addition to rating each of the countries’ commitments under Paris, Climate Action Tracker also uses what they call their CAT Thermometer, a tool that measures global temperature rise under various scenarios. For example, they’ve calculated that if countries do what they've committed to doing under the Paris agreements, the world will see a rise of about 3 degrees Celsius by the end of this century.
“The good news,” Deng says, “is that we have almost all the technologies available that we need for this. … [T]he challenge really is in getting them out there and getting them scaled up. So, this is a political problem. It's a question of willingness to do it. It's not a question of figuring out how to do it technically; that would be even scarier. But we know how to do it.”

Most countries have not yet met their commitments under the Paris climate agreements, and Climate Action Tracker rates a small group of countries as “critically insufficient or highly insufficient.” These include Russia, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the US.
Deng notes that in the US, state and local level governments are working to find ways to reduce emissions, but at the federal level, under the Trump administration, there is not only a lack of action but a reversal of direction.

Morrocco’s former environment minister, Hakima El Haite, finds this inexplicable.
“I’ll be very frank,” El Haite says. “When you see America withdraw from the Paris agreement, I'm not only disappointed, I'm feeling that politicians are not taking their responsibilities seriously. The United States was a leading country during the negotiation, and now, as President Trump decided to withdraw from the Paris agreement, they are still blocking the negotiation. This is not right.”
Morocco has been on a path to a low-carbon economy for decades, El Haite points out. She says her country has understood since 1964 that climate change is a problem they need to address. What’s more, she points out, the whole of Africa accounts for only four percent of global carbon emissions.
“The ones who are impacting the world are the fuel producers and industrial developers,” she says.
“Those countries should lead the negotiations. I’m thinking about the United States, Russia, China, Europe, et cetera. So, I'm really feeling disappointed â€" as a Moroccan, as an African, as a citizen of the world â€" and feeling that those who are blocking the negotiation now are not taking responsibility. Many millions and millions of people will die because of this decision.”

scarface

#141
Here are a few interesting articles.

In Pakistan:
By building a wire fence at the Afghan border, Islamabad, suspected by the international community of nurturing the Taliban, is trying to prove that it wants to keep them away.
https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2019/01/04/au-pakistan-la-cloture-du-double-jeu_5405172_3210.html

The yellow jackets.
"The yellow vests" want to escape the feeling of dispossession.
For researchers Ivan Bruneau and Julian Mischi, the social protest movement reflects the malaise of the populations established in the rural communes that are lacking everything, including the political organizations that are absent from these areas.
https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2019/01/03/les-gilets-jaunes-veulent-rompre-avec-le-sentiment-de-depossession_5404581_3232.html

Climate 2019. Democracy under pressure from the environment
To comply with the Paris agreement, governments must put in place radical and unpopular measures. Or accept to suffer the effects of global warming which, moreover, bring the least democratic political movements to power.
https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2019/01/03/la-democratie-a-l-epreuve-de-l-environnement_5404750_3232.html


I assume that if some users like shadow.97 or Maher are currently so busy, maybe it's because they have decided to become some..yellow jackets.

scarface

Maybe some of you have seen the video with a former champion French boxer, caught on camera punching riot police as Yellow Vest activists clash with officers, on Saturday 5 December.
As riot police struggled to prevent yellow vest protesters from crossing the Leopold-Sédar-Senghor bridge several protesters can be seen forcing officers back.
He was identified as Christophe Dettinger, 36. On Sunday, he was on the run after investigating sources in Paris confirmed he was the boxer who won France's Light Heavyweight title in October 2007.
video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWPY37xJNhA

scarface

On Saturday morning, a powerful explosion destroyed a bakery in central Paris on Saturday morning, injuring at least 12 people and blowing out dozens of nearby windows after a suspected gas leak. We don't know if it was an attack or an accident yet.

According to reports, at least five people were critically injured in the explosion, which smashed windows in surrounding buildings and damaged a number of parked cars.

A fire broke out after the blast at around 9am, which occurred at a bakery (boulangerie) on Rue de Trévise in the busy 9th arrondissement of the city. 
Around 200 firefighters were mobilised to battle the fire and rescue residents in neighbouring buildings, Interior Minister Christophe Castaner told reporters at the scene.


scarface

Today, some interesting new hit the headlines, and I finally decided to translate an article about Israel.


On Friday, hundreds of rioters demonstrated in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Haifa in Israel. The users of the forum like Maher or aa1234779 must be thinking: “It must be very important. Maybe they are protesting for actions against climate change. Or they are demanding the liberation of Palestine”

Actually, hundreds of Christians demonstrated in front of the Haifa Museum of Contemporary Art Friday to protest against a work of art titled Mc Jesus depicting a crucified Ronald McDonald's.
Apparently, the son of God has become the son of the junk food God:



The demonstrators tried to force the doors of the establishment to take down the work of art. Incidents broke out with the police who were stoned. Three members of the police were wounded in the head. The night before, an incendiary device had been launched against the museum.

MC Jesus represents Ronald, McDonald's yellow and red clown, nailed to a thick wooden cross. The Finnish artist Jani Leinonen created the work as part of an exhibition called Sacred Goods whose theme is, as the name suggests, the sacralization of consumer goods. Jani Leinonen, 41, specializes in misappropriating brand images and strategies. He was sentenced in 2012 for stealing a plastic pillar from a McDonald's restaurant that he later destroyed. Two of his installations were exhibited in August 2015 at Dismaland, an ephemeral and artistic attraction park designed by the street artist Banksy in Great Britain.

Warning signs in the museum
On Thursday, the Minister of Culture Miri Regev wrote to the Director General of Haifa Museums, asking for the withdrawal of the work. In her letter, she indicates that she received "many complaints" for "serious insult to the feelings of the Christian community". "The contempt of sacred symbols for religions is illegitimate and can not be displayed in a cultural institution backed by public funds," she wrote.

The museum management refuses to do anything. However, she decided to place warning signs at the entrance of the exhibition to indicate that the work could be perceived as offensive. According to the Haifa Museum, the debate on art should not sink into violence. As for Mc Jesus, it is part of an exhibition on consumerism that "refers to the cynical use of religious symbols by multinationals".


scarface

#145
Today, I’m going to hold an exceptional conference about the latest book of Houellebecq, titled Serotonine and released in January 2019.  I guess that some of you like shadow.97 or humbert heard of it, even though I doubt you can buy this book in an American library or in a Saudi grocery store, since the English translation won’t be published until September.


Provocative French author Michel Houellebecq gives voice to the simmering anger behind the rural “yellow vest” revolt in his eagerly awaited, prophetic new novel.
I remind you that Houellebecq, as a a fierce eurosceptic, became a pin-up of the far right after his last book, Submission, which envisioned a France subject to sharia law after electing a Muslim president in 2022.

The deeply depressed hero of his latest book Serotonin is an agricultural engineer who returns to his roots in a provincial France devastated by globalisation and European agricultural policies.
The protagonist of serotonin, Florent-Claude Labrouste works for the Ministry of Agriculture and lives in the Totem tower in Paris accompanied by his partner, the young Yuzu.

The totem tower in Paris


He is not a happy man: Labrouste, a narrator in the first person, admits in the second paragraph of the novel that the "most painful moment of the day" is to "wake up": he hates knowing that he continues to exist. He also hates the woman with whom he lives. He regrets the absence of sexual relations with her, and uses it to disdain the work he does on the house of Japanese culture ("it would be enough to organize one or two exhibitions on the manga, one or two festivals on the new Japanese porn trends") and he says that one afternoon, spying on his email, he discovered a video in which the girl is" at the center of a gang bang classic account: some men waited their turn quickly, using a condom for vaginal and anal penetrations; Nobody called anything. "
Labrouste's misogyny, however, ends up in the background, because the contempt is greater than the feeling of the character. serotonin it is a novel about a man who makes a last attempt to straighten out his decline. Initially, Yuzu is about to kill, but ends up deciding to leave him and, installed in a hotel, Labrouste visits a psychologist to receive antidepressants. The effects of the tablets used to increase serotonin, the Captorix, are "nausea, the disappearance of libido, impotence". "Was he able to be happy in solitude?" I thought not, "says Florent-Claude. Was he capable of being happy in general? It's the kind of questions, I think, it's better to avoid planning. "Speaking of the ability to feel good and at peace with himself, the protagonist of serotonin Invite readers to immerse themselves in their depressive minds.

Finally, Labrouste decides to “disappear” and returns to Normandy, where he once worked promoting Camembert and other regional cheeses. There, he stumbles across the distress of local farmers, among them an old college contemporary, Aymeric. The novel’s central, and fatal, drama takes place on a junction of the A13 motorway, where French riot police confront a blockade of armed farmers and blazing agricultural vehicles, all filmed by a 24-hour news channel. The parallel with the gilets jaunes is inexact, not least because Mr Houellebecq’s modest group of rural protesters are farmers, not employees, and their grievance is with the European Union’s policy on milk quotas, not Mr Macron. The sense of provincial neglect, disarray and violence nonetheless feels eerily familiar, as does the uneasy reaction of politicians who agree on the need “to understand the distress and the anger”.

Although there are touching moments, the women who pass through Labrouste’s life, like those who feature in Mr Houellebecq’s previous work, are bleakly two-dimensional, more often than not there to serve the narrator’s (dwindling) sexual needs. One is described as “pre-feminist”. That said, the novelist’s wit, and skill at shifting from the banal quotidian to the existential, are intact. Labrouste detests Paris, “a city infested with eco-responsible bourgeois”, but ends up there in a hotel room consoled by day-time television and hummus. His life’s possessions are the files on his Macbook: “my past weighed 1,100 grammes”. Overhyped he may be, but Houellebecq has once again managed to put his finger on modern French (and Western) society’s wounds, and it hurts.

scarface

Tonight, I'm going to talk about Syria.

The Syrian Civil War has gone through several phases over the course of seven years and it now appears to be entering another one. Government forces have regained control over much of Syria with Russian air support and Iranian ground forces. Only Idlib and the territories east of the Euphrates river remain out of the hands of President Assad’s regime. With the U.S. planning an imminent withdrawal from Syria, things could soon shift again.

If the US has soldiers in Syria, it's mainly because the region has oil. The United States is not intervening to liberate Palestine. It's not intervening in the African dictatorships like Mozambique or Eritrea either. Maybe Trump will announce an intervention in Mozambique very soon, to overthrow Mugabe, but it's highly unlikely.

In the meantime, the Islamic State is still waging Jihad against the Americans.
Yesterday, Four Americans were killed in an explosion while conducting a routine patrol in northern Syria, according to the Pentagon. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility, indicating that it was "brother Abu Yasin al-Chami" who conducted the attack.
Two U.S. service members, one civilian employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency and one contractor working as an interpreter died in the attack in Manbij. Three service members were injured.


The explosion damaged a restaurant in Manbij, Syria, on Wednesday, as shown in a screen grab from the Kurdish Hawar News agency.

A local news site reported that a huge explosion erupted in the city center near a girls' school and a restaurant. The site reported that both civilians and troops were killed and wounded. Local groups say at least 16 people were killed in total.

The town of Manbij, located close to the Turkish border in northern Syria, was retaken from ISIS in 2016. U.S. troops have been working in the city with the local military council, as well as patrolling outside the city with Turkish troops, NPR's Tom Bowman reports.
"It's a vibrant, bustling city," says Bowman, who visited in early 2018. "[It] has a huge market selling all sorts of goods and produce."

humbert

Quote from: scarface on January 17, 2019, 01:31 AM
If the US has soldiers in Syria, it's mainly because the region has oil. The United States is not intervening to liberate Palestine. It's not intervening in the African dictatorships like Mozambique or Eritrea either.

MAINLY?? How about ONLY? Oil also is the reason the US and others rushed to the defense of Kuwait in 1991, and yet a few years later the world stood idly by and watched nearly 800,000 people massacred in Rwanda. No oil, only innocent "niggers" who, in their view, probably aren't even human.

scarface

Here is a little article about climate change.

Thousands gathered on Sunday to denounce political inaction on battling climate change. The protests didn't take place in the US among supporters of Trump. Im not speaking of bird brains. Im not talking about Saudi protesters either. The morality police would have cracked down on them immediately. Once again the protests are happening in France. More here: https://www.france24.com/en/20190127-france-climate-change-paris-environment-protest

scarface

#149
Tonight, I'm going to hold another conference about climate change, inspired from an article published in Le monde.

In the Bible, God sent 10 plagues on Egypt. But today's humanity has suffered the wrath of climate change in at least 467 different ways. Above all, these punishments will intensify, since in 2100, half of the population could be threatened by three to six climatic catastrophes (droughts, heat waves, floods...) of maximum intensity simultaneously if the gas emissions greenhouse gases are not drastically reduced.



These are the two conclusions of a groundbreaking, original and very disturbing study published in Nature Climate Change on 19 November 2018 which addresses for the first time the cumulative risks brought about by climate change.

To estimate the danger to the population, the authors - about twenty international researchers, mainly from the University of Hawaii - began by studying the past by compiling data, close to 3,300 scientific studies published since 1980 relating to to climate change, due to human action or natural climate variability - knowing that greenhouse gas emissions are already responsible for increasing the temperature of the planet by nearly a degree.
The greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change are already responsible for increasing the temperature of the planet.



In dry areas, this can lead to drought or even devastating fires. In wetter areas, rains and floods are on the rise as super storms form over warmer oceans.
So far, scientists have focused on these disasters primarily by type. But the study published in the journal Nature Climate Change warns against the possibility, or even the probability that they are cascading.

Last year Florida suffered a severe drought, record temperatures, a hundred fires and Hurricane Michael.
"Focusing on risk can hide the impacts of other hazards, leading to an incomplete assessment of the consequences of climate change on humanity," said lead author Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii.
The likelihood of this simultaneity depends on geography and efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
If, as foreseen by the Paris agreement on the climate of 2015, the world manages to limit its warming at the worst to + 2 ° C compared to the pre-industrial era, New York will probably undergo a unique climatic hazard each year at the end of the century.
But if C02 emissions continue at the current rate, the mega-city could be up to four at the same time, just like Mexico.
Even under optimistic scenarios, "cumulative and increasing exposure to a multitude of climatic hazards will hit rich and poor countries in the same way," says the study.

"If we take into account only the most direct effects of climate change, heat waves or storms for example, inevitably, we will be caught short by more important threats that, by combining, can have a wider effect on society" commented another author, Jonathan Patz, from the University of Wisconsin.