APATHY FOR THE DEVIL

I posted the following message on several progressive boards, among which "Being Michael Moore" (see the "Mikecrocosm" section) :

Nov 2nd is the anniversary of Bush's re-election. Massive nationwide protests are being organized for the anniversary date! People everywhere will walk out of school, they will take off work, they will come to the downtowns and town squares and set out from there, going through the streets and calling on many more to JOIN US. They will repudiate this criminal regime, making a powerful statement: "NO! THIS REGIME DOES NOT REPRESENT US! AND WE WILL DRIVE IT OUT!". Silence and paralysis are NOT acceptable. That which you will not resist and mobilize to stop, you will learn — or be forced — to accept. There is no escaping it: the whole disastrous course of this Bush regime must be STOPPED. And we must take the responsibility to do it. I encourage you to join or stage your own protest on Nov 2nd. Anything and everything will make a difference!! Let us stand together as a nation and say we want Bush out of office for good!!!

This is no joke and could definitely be huge. Endorsers like the Progressive Democrats, Cindy Sheehan, Anti-Flag and Howard Zinn.

Get informed :

http://worldcantwait.org/

Find out about events in your area :

http://mobilize11-2.blogspot.com/

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And typically, I got this reply from aptly named fallenphoenix in "Being Michael Moore" :

Do you really, really believe this is going to change things? Stand up and say your piece if it's going to make you feel better, but don't delude yourself as to its potency. Our country made (what is in my estimation at least) a huge mistake when we reelected Shrub (hell, it was a mistake the first time). But mistake or not, he's in there. And until our democratic representatives in the House and Senate grow some backbone and consistently start calling Bush on his BS, all the protests and walkouts in the world won't do a lick of good. Truthfully, all such actions accomplish is to hurt small business. A giant like WalMart won't even flinch if they lose 5 cashiers for a day--they've probably got a dozen more in reserve. But Mom & Pop are going to have serious problems on their hands if 2 of their people decide they need to take the day off for a political rally that's not going to accomplish a thing.


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I replied, and let it be my creed on the crucial slacking problem :

I really, really believe that some Black woman needed to open her mouth and utter a few words roughly meaning NO before the Civil Rights could get started. I really, really believe that those who walked on the moon first had to put one of their feet ahead of the other on their way to the rocket.

I really, really believe that our democratic representatives in the House and Senate WON’T grow some backbone and consistently start calling Bush on his BS, that even Barbara Boxer wouldn’t and maybe couldn’t have spoken out against the fraud without Michael Moore’s and the people’s pressure, and that a giant like WalMart IS FLINCHING RIGHT NOW because of the loss of its image due to the people’s pressure.

I really, really believe that defeatist bull from the people who can’t conceive multitasking and believe in fantasy land hierarchies instead of plain democracy is what allows our democratic representatives in the House and Senate not to grow some backbone and consistently start calling Bush on his BS.

I really, really believe that bullshit like “Stand up and say your piece if it's going to make you feel better” is REPUBLICAN TALK and that I’ve seen it expressed in a much talented way by the Reps themselves, like, typically : Nothing you will do there will drive out anything nor will it break any silence or paralysis. The press is full of NON- silence. The only way to drive out anyone is through impeachment and I hope we all agree that that is in no way an possibility and no rally will change that. GW will be in office 3 more years, end of story.

I really, really believe that when your representatives are complacent, when the media are dead, when all the decision-making bodies and services are Bush’s and when all legal actions are dead-ends, the solution lies in THE STREET.

I really, really believe that despising protests is despising the protestors, and that despising the protestors means despising people like Cindy Sheehan, Howard Zinn, MLK, Gandhi AND MICHAEL MOORE who endangered his life and was nearly jailed just to open his fucking mouth in order to reach slackers like you.

I really, really believe that DESPISING PROTESTS IS DEFINITELY NOT BEING MICHAEL MOORE AND THAT BEING MICHAEL MOORE CONSISTS IN BELIEVING WHAT YOU BELIEVE IN, REFUSING TO LEAVE YOUR FIRST AMENDMENT TO THE DOGS AND FUCKING DOING SOMETHING.

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The link to THE WORLD CAN'T WAIT is in the MIKEROCOSM section.

JOIN US.

OR DO YOUR OWN THING.

OR DIE.

MIKEROCOSM

At last I figured out where the "Links" section was hiding in the controls and it magically appeared ! Moment of triumph. Hey kust, I hope you're satisfied - I sweat it out because you asked. :-)

This area will probably grow, maybe unreasonably even with all those vital Michael Moore links the world can't do without. But for starters, I'll keep it basic and sober. Mike is awareness and Mike is the people, so I'll begin with a sub-section devoted to local, personal and responsible politics and another for involved, artistic and great people whose sole flaw is to be unknown.

- THE UNOFFICIAL MICHAEL MOORE FORUMS is my own special place for local, personal and responsible hero worship and for diversely involved, artistic and great people (it's a forum). As I'm one of the Mods, I'll welcome you with arms open wide if you're pro-Moore. kusturica will if you're just yet another Moore bashing blockhead.

- NEWS FROM DAVISON, MICHIGAN is just what it says it is, the world as seen from Mike's birthplace, Davison, and by someone who's not particularly ashamed of him ;). Blogger Kevin McKague never runs out of interesting or colorful stuff, ranging from a poem made of Bushisms to questions like : "When does speech cross the line from constitutionally protected expression to criminal behavior?".

- BEING MICHAEL MOORE boasts the most beautifully ambitious name a site can have, and chief Admin robotboy_77 has no intention of pricing it cheaply. "This is a 'Left-Wing' community (in shorthand - it's for people with progressive values), and it's a community for people who like Michael Moore's work. If you don't fall into one of those categories, please remove yourself. Or sooner or later we're going to do it for you", he warns. Strangely, I never had the slightest problem with that guy...

- FAHRENHEIT 911 (AND A HALF) has been taking the country's pulse as revolving around the Moore revolution since the early days of the F9/11 phenomenon, and according to a refreshingly decidedly left-wing perspective. Although the articles are never published in full (which is a crying shame), this blog can be regarded as the F9/11 library. Now that's some compliment...

- kusturica was taken is where my friend kusturica strolls by when he feels poetic, or moody, or playful, or simply unanswerable. It's always surprising and full of curios, but the greatest attraction remains the author, whose understanding of things and people never fails to leave me abashed : deep in his heart, there's a house that can hold just about all of you. Meet him if you deserve it.

- INCENDIARY ADVICE, full of elegance, sincerity and passion, is where Anne, natural born queen and Pyrogirl extraordinaire, gives (all too rarely) her sharp and profound commentary of the current events. She's knowledgeable, thoughtful, lucid and honest, and her heart of gold shows through everything she writes. Hannah Arendt used to wonder how one could possibly "think the event". That's because Anne wasn't born yet.

- RASP MOVIE DATABASE may well be what you need if you think like me that IMDb sucks. Not only a great site for movie lovers, but it has details on music and... French comedians too ! rasp himself is some kind of a monk/missionary who teaches whatever he can, puts his duty before his pleasure and tirelessly keeps coming out with the same old important things, dealing with anti-French idiocy and rarely getting angry without blaming despicable behavior. Meet him even if you don't deserve it.

GLOBAL WARMING 101

I recently had the opportunity to write about the basics of global warming, so I thought that I might as well share what I came up with. Global warming causes a lot of misconceptions and much confusion in many minds. So here's my claim to clarity.

Global warming is real, confirmed as caused by human activity and irreversible by the international scientific community, and universally denied by the politicians and the corporations who get rich off it and the international public opinion who’s unable to take responsibility for such a crime.

What remains in debate (or should, at least) is the extent of the impact (for the scientists) and how we all move on from here (for us, the people).

Environmentalists are not nutty. They will find that civil disobedience is made necessary because of the collusion between the powers that be and the corporations which causes most of legal actions and suing to fail. Most of them are cultured, informed and moderate people who (naively ?) believe that people do nothing because they don’t know what’s going on, and devote a lot of energy to popularization and explanations. However, the media are not interested in cultured, informed and moderate people, they are interested in sensationalism and extremists. The “nuts” are those who, like Greenpeace, understand that and, like Mike, agree to play the media’s game.

Same goes for best selling fiction books about burning topics. Publishers are not interested in cultured, informed and moderate characters who believe that people do nothing because they don’t know what’s going on, they are interested in sensationalism and extremists. So they ask their writers to be hard on the documentation so that they’re credible, but soft on the problematics so as the readers feel disturbed but only pleasantly, that is, not enough to refuse to buy the book or drop it and march in the streets. I have selected a link to a scrutiny of Crichton’s novel "State of Fear" (which I haven't read yet) by a panel of global warming specialists (below).

I voted for Nader in 2000, silently commended his candidacy in 2004, always thought that Mike’s next should be about global warming and still feel that a third party must emerge in order to pull these issues to the forefront where they belong. But Mike chose another strategy and he knows better, so I followed him. Besides, he will surely deal with global warming when he discusses the handling of Katrina in F9/11 1/2. There’s no escaping this issue and he knows it. But he also probably knows that there’s not a chance in the world he can use it as his main soap box and win.

His chapter entitled "Nice Planet, nobody home" in Stupid White Men is not specifically about global warming, more like an introduction to America’s specific environmental neurosis. He first states his refusal of the basic American environmental PC kit and goes on to explain why by investigating, beyond the righteous and useless recycling, about the car culture he knows well and, still beyond, about the consumption based culture and its consequences (air conditioning on ozone, poisoned food) and the effects of the deregulation policies. In Dude, there’s also a delicious little sci-fi parable entitled “Oil’s well that ends well” that focuses specifically on the madness of an all oil-based civilization. He imagines that he meets his great-granddaughter, Anne Coulter Moore, and that she asks him questions like : “When you were young, were people really so stupid to think that there was enough oil to last forever ? Or did they just not care about us ?”

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Now here are a few links that should allow you to form your own opinion on the topic :

General - Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis

http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/

from

http://www.ipcc.ch/

"The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been established by WMO and UNEP to assess scientific, technical and socio- economic information relevant for the understanding of climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation. "


The Consensus : on which points ? and which validity ?

“The skeptic attitude to consensus usually starts with "there is no consensus". That's wrong, and they usually retreat from it to "but consensus science is meaningless", and/or "consensus has nothing to do with science". The latter is largely true but irrelevant. The existence of the consensus doesn't do a lot to determine what science is done; it doesn't prevent contrary lines being explored. But the consensus view does come into the tricky interface between science and policy, and science and the media. “

The main points that most would agree on as "the consensus" are:

”1. The earth is getting warmer (0.6 +/- 0.2 oC in the past century; 0.1 0.17 oC/decade over the last 30 years (see update)) [ch 2]
2. People are causing this [ch 12] (see update)
3. If GHG emissions continue, the warming will continue and indeed accelerate [ch 9]
4. (This will be a problem and we ought to do something about it) “

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=86


Certainties and uncertainties

“We find model versions as realistic as other state-of-the-art climate models but with climate sensitivities ranging from less than 2K to more than 11 K. Models with such extreme sensitivities are critical for the study of the full range of possible responses of the climate system to rising greenhouse gas levels, and for assessing the risks associated with specific targets for stabilizing these levels.”

http://www.climateprediction.net/sc...rst_results.pdf


How much does Katrina relate to global warming ?

According to two studies (Emanuel Kerry’s of the MIT and Peter Webster’s of the Georgia Institute of Technology), the number of hurricanes hasn’t changed, but their force and intensity have increased. Webster’s article is now available online due to the seriousness of what happened in New Orleans :

Changes in Tropical Cyclone Number, Duration, and Intensity in a Warming Environment –

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/conte...l/309/5742/1844


Michael Crichton : the truth and the dictates of best-selling :

According to the scientists who scrutinized his novel, “The issues Crichton raises are familiar to those of us in the field, and come up often in discussions. Some are real and well appreciated while some are red herrings and are used to confuse rather than enlighten.”

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=74



Hope it’s been useful.