Death, famine, drought: cost of 3C global rise in temperature

We need to take this in both to understand how urgent things are and also to realise that we are not talking about more of the same only a bit warmer. Some people seem to think that it'd be nice to have a warmer climate. Unfortunately, the collateral effects are rather serious as this article helps us to understand. What we should also realise is that even a smaller effect will have some of these consequences and that the results politically over the next 50 years is that we should be preparing for population movements, disruptions of food supplies, tensions over basic resources like water, as Christians the question is do we prepare to be part of the solution to a threatened new dark ages and the potential 'mongol/hun/vandal invasions' or are we going to hide our heads in the increasingly warm sand?

I can't help wondering, either, whether the kind of legislation that western Anglo-saxon governments seem to be keen on passing -ostensibly to fight terrorism- is actually being framed more with handling the kinds of difficulties that are just beginning to be noticed and which will surely grow. I can't believe that there are not government think-tanks testing out these scenarios and thinking about what would be needed to meet them. Clearly, they think that more repression is our only hope; can we not develop other models which rely on Christian principles other than Augustinian/Constantinian?

To our bretheren who believe that this is all about the signs of the end I say: the church has loads of t-shirts for this already and we're still waiting. We all wish that this may not happen, but such wishes may not be fulfilled even if we persuade ourselves as Christians have done in former ages that they are right and think we have interpreted scripture rightly. And if you are wrong, you will have contributed to darkening the ages that follow ours; the verdict of history on you would not honour our Lord. In any case, if, when He comes, Jesus expects us to be doing what we are called to do and if His coming is to surprise us all [and this is the unambiguous message of the gospels on the matter], then what should you/we be doing but acting in the light of what we know and working for the common good and to lay foundations for the spread of the gospel? All of these considerations point to acting to help damp down climate change.
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Death, famine, drought: cost of 3C global rise in temperature

Filed in: global_warming, environment, science, climate_change, effects, politics

Britain's drift to "Fabio-Fascism"

One of the commentators on this article shows that what we are facing now has a long history and that we are back on a disturbing trend interupted by WW2 and the cold war:

In the 1930s E.M. Forster wrote: “We are menaced by something much more insidious [than Fascism or Communism] – by what I might call ‘Fabio-Fascism’, by the dictator-spirit working quietly away behind the facade of constitutional forms….Fabio-Fascism is what I am afraid of, for it is the traditional method by which liberty has been attacked in England”. While the Blair brigade is bossy but probably basically benign, the same may not be true of its successor governments in twenty, or even ten, years’ time. As Forster said, “As soon as people have power they go crooked and sometimes dotty as well, because the possession of power lifts them into a region where normal honesty never pays.”

It's that last line with its twist on Lord Acton's dictum ["All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely"]that is truly worrying.
It's worth reading also John Pilger's New Statesman article on the topic. If you have the stomach for it; I'm feeling slightly queasy about it all.

Like the constitution-hijacking bill now reaching its final stages, and the criminalising of peaceful protest, ID cards are designed to control the lives of ordinary citizens (as well as enrich the new Labour-favoured companies that will build the computer systems). A small, determined and profoundly undemocratic group is killing freedom in Britain, just as it has killed literally in Iraq. That is the news. "The kaleidoscope has been shaken," said Blair at the 2001 Labour party conference. "The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder this world around us."

Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | Blair's inner circle and its ferocious grab for power
Filed in: UK, government, reform, liberties

Nuclear power is not energy solution, say MPs

The findings of the parliamentary environmental audit committee raise concerns over the risk of terrorist attacks, but also focus on the full costs of nuclear generation, such as the disposal of waste and decommissioning. Its report on nuclear power, renewables and climate change questions whether new plants would cut carbon emissions as dramatically as promised and suggests they could crowd out other energy sources such as windpower

Let's hope this report carries enough weight and support to kill nuclear power in the UK.
Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | Nuclear power is not energy solution, say MPs:
Filed in: energy, UK, policy, government, nuclear, renewables

This is how it ends ... not with a bang,

... but with a whimper. The Blair administration, elected as much because of disenchantment with a Tory government that had clearly begun to rule for the sake of the gravy train, has fallen prey to the same temptations of power and wealth.

Number 10's 'citations' explaining the case for putting Sir David Garrard and Barry Townsley in the House of Lords 'prominently' featured their role in helping these inner city schools. Downing Street sources said the Prime Minister wanted their political support in the Lords for the controversial policy.

One has to wonder whether the rather tyranically-potentiated legislation that they are attempting to put on the books is actually a means to try to keep the gravy train on the rails for them.
The Observer | Politics | No 10 admits link between school donors and peerages:

This is how it ends ... not with a bang,

... but with a whimper. The Blair administration, elected as much because of disenchantment with a Tory government that had clearly begun to rule for the sake of the gravy train, has fallen prey to the same temptations of power and wealth.

Number 10's 'citations' explaining the case for putting Sir David Garrard and Barry Townsley in the House of Lords 'prominently' featured their role in helping these inner city schools. Downing Street sources said the Prime Minister wanted their political support in the Lords for the controversial policy.

One has to wonder whether the rather tyranically-potentiated legislation that they are attempting to put on the books is actually a means to try to keep the gravy train on the rails for them.
The Observer | Politics | No 10 admits link between school donors and peerages:

Secularity and fundamentalism

When I first read the following, I thought it was saying something else.

Fundamentalism's strength as an opponent is the certainty of its convictions.
The defenders of the secular state, believers and non-believers, can only hope to disarm it by finding a language that allows for doubt without compromising its own familiar principles - its faith in a rationally ordered society, a respect for science, for evidence-based knowledge, for non-religious education, and tolerance of religion supported by laws protecting individual rights.

I thought that what was recommended was that a language that allowed for identification of important faith-issues which also left room for people to honour them without necessarily interpreting them illiberally. I guess that's actually been going on for ages. In fact. But it does rumind us that we need to maintain wide roads between fundamentalisms and their 'host' faith-community so that on reflection people can move across to less aggressive and closed expressions of faith without feeling that it is some kind of second conversion but rather it has positive continuities with what has gone before in their lives. This is a really hard thing to do, and it requires that we can see and honour the goods of a fundamentalist position while critiquing it with, as far as possible, the resources of its own positions. It also requires a positive regard [which we might call respect, even love] and an unwavering commitment to the welfare of those who are involved in fundamentalism. The 'demonising' of opponents is to fall prey to the same dynamics as we are seeking to break others out from.

So the 'doubt' is presumably about how the principles of respect, equality, and freedom are to be exercised. I think that this amounts to preferring 'soft' secularism over 'hard'. This is the effect, I think, of "a secular society is not one with no religion, but one where all are free". I have come across versions of secularism where a hard attitude prevails; that is where, in effect religion is not really recognised or allowed in the public realm. 'Soft' secularism recognises that 'public space actors' bring with them, among other things, a religious or philosophical identity and makes room for it without allowing it to be unfairly imposed on others. It's messier and means constant negotiation and the risk of misunderstanding, but that's better than building a permanent resentment among those for whom religious concerns are precisely the issue in public life.
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Fight the good fight:
Filed in: religion, fundamentalism, secularity, society

A point of fact?

An interesting article on the rise of fundamentalism. But I was puzzled by this bit implicating Christian fundamentalism in terrorist activity.

Christian fundamentalism brought violence to the United States almost a decade before 9/11. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber who killed 168 people in 1995, was acting in revenge for the federal authorities' attack on the Waco Branch Davidian sect two years earlier.

I'm not saying that Christian fundamentalisms don't have ideologies that justify violence. Some of them do. It's that I thought McVeigh's issue was political: he hated the way that federal government in the USA was conspiring to surpress liberties and the Waco episode seemed to be the epitome and final straw for him. I wasn't aware he was a fundy ...
Anyone got any further info on this?
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Fight the good fight:Filed in: fundamentalism, religion, culture, global