Oil extraction thumbs down

This is a good site if you're concerned and want to lend some weight to the Extractive Industries' Report of the World Bank. There's a chance to email the president of the world bank too.

Here's a bit of light relief

Just a set of political cartoons from the USA using flash. Well, I thought they were funny.

If you like to see corporate giants lose...

This site is Greenpeace celebrating their recent victory over Esso with regard to ripping off Esso's logo [well altering it for a campaign]. It's reasonably amusing to see what the Esso case was ...

brown cloud pollution

Just to keep us from getting too elated by the good news; here's a bad news item about atmospheric pollution originating in Asia and circulating in higher atmospheric currents. The knock on effect is drier climate and this combined with water shortages already happening is very worrying for the global security situation.

the future's bright the future's .... windy

This areticle shows a huge growth in wind generated electricity is likely to become part of the UK supply over the next two years. Of course it's still a tiny fraction but the speed of growth is encouraging and with developments in the pipeline in wave generation and the possibility of fairly cheap back-garden wind turbines the possibilities are very encouraging.

We're already paying for global warming

According to Reuters we are already paying for global warming in increased insurance premiums. This combined with the recent anouncement [blogged on this site a week or two back] that the Pentagon is costing the security implications of climate change must surely mean that the USA can't hold out for long -not when defence and financial implications become apparent. Can it?

Paramilitary forgiveness

I note that his own actions were fuelled by anger -at least that is how it reads with regard to the desire to retaliate. There is something of right in this it seems to me: it is not good to simply acquiesce in wrong done as if giving it a blessing; simply forgetting it is not to care, really that a wrong has been done. Anger shows we care about the wrongs done to others, anger is the flip side of love, even.

The interesting thig is that the reaction tends to produce an equal and opposite reaction. Opposite not in the sense of non-violence being meeting violence but of violence pushed in the opposite direction -towards the original perpetrator [or representatives of them or their community]. Perhaps our sense of justice is about wrongs rebounding on the offender and that it would be fitting if *we* did that in the absence of a more automatic nemesis.

Alistair says: "My experience is that people easily turn to violence when their voices aren’t being heard, or when they feel under threat". The wrong of being ignored [accounted nothing] or being [unjustly?] threatened results in feelings that there is a balance to be reweighted or a return to be made.

He writes further; " came to realise that people who use violence – myself included – see things only from one angle only. They don’t see that if you use violence yourself, you encourage revenge and hatred in others. You end up with a never-ending circle of violence. "

The attempt to re-weight the balance or to push back to the perpetrator the wrong thay have done is itself perceived as a wrong and so the cycle kicks off. It is interesting that seeing the wider picture and acknowledging that there may be reason for the other side to have behaved as they did and do can help break the cylce by revealing the cycle to be based on a partial truth. At least that's how I think it goes.

Got to go now; but I think that there's more in this story I want to comment on and engage with. Later -I hope.