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Democrats Clock All-Nighter With Climate Talk
Source: NBC Los Angeles
Democratic senators clocked an all-nighter, working in shifts into Tuesday morning to warn of the devastation from climate change and the danger of inaction.
Addressing a nearly empty chamber and visitor gallery, more than two dozen speakers agreed with each other about the need to act on climate change. Naysayers — Republicans — largely stayed away, arguing hours earlier that regulation would cost Americans jobs in a sluggish economy.
The talk-a-thon ended at 8:55 a.m., almost 15 hours since it began. It was the 35th all-night session since 1915, according to the Senate.
Florida Sen. Bill Nelson, who flew aboard the space shuttle Columbia in 1986, said when he looked out at the rim of the earth, "you could see what sustains all of life, the atmosphere. I became more than an environmentalist. I saw in its entirety how fragile this ecosystem is."
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Read more: http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/national-international/Democrats-Clock-All-Nighter-With-Climate-Talk--249439971.html
22 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
Spaceship Earth is a world view term usually expressing concern over the use of limited resources available on Earth and encouraging everyone on it to act as a harmonious crew working toward the greater good.
In 1965 Adlai Stevenson made a famous speech to the UN in which he said:
We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave—to the ancient enemies of man—half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.[2]
The following year, Spaceship Earth became the title of a book by a friend of Stevenson's, the internationally influential economist Barbara Ward.
Also in 1966 Kenneth E. Boulding used the phrase in the title of an essay, The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth.[3] Boulding described the past open economy of apparently illimitable resources, which he said he was tempted to call the "cowboy economy", and continued: "The closed economy of the future might similarly be called the 'spaceman' economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system". (David Korten would take up the "cowboys in a spaceship" theme in his 1995 book When Corporations Rule the World.)
The phrase was also popularized by Buckminster Fuller, who published a book in 1968 under the title of Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.[4] This quotation, referring to fossil fuels, reflects his approach:
"...we can make all of humanity successful through science's world-engulfing industrial evolution provided that we are not so foolish as to continue to exhaust in a split second of astronomical history the orderly energy savings of billions of years' energy conservation aboard our Spaceship Earth. These energy savings have been put into our Spaceship's life-regeneration-guaranteeing bank account for use only in self-starter functions."
United Nations Secretary-General U Thant spoke of Spaceship Earth on Earth Day March 21, 1971 at the ceremony of the ringing of the Japanese Peace Bell:
"May there only be peaceful and cheerful Earth Days to come for our beautiful Spaceship Earth as it continues to spin and circle in frigid space with its warm and fragile cargo of animate life."[5]
This is a conflict with the GOP and Libertarian ideology; the theology of the End Timers and the heirarchy of the plutocrats and aristocrats, roughly described here:
Spaceship Earth:
The earliest known use is a passage in Henry George's best known work, Progress and Poverty[1] (1879). From book IV, chapter 2:
It is a well-provisioned ship, this on which we sail through space. If the bread and beef above decks seem to grow scarce, we but open a hatch and there is a new supply, of which before we never dreamed.
And very great command over the services of others comes to those who as the hatches are opened are permitted to say, "This is mine!"
One person is quoted at the Wikipedia page who doesn't agree - there is some truth to what he says, but it doesn't negate the concept, IMO. It rather gives urgency to our need to value the productive capacities for life on this small planet even more, in the harsh and unforgiving 'vacuum' of space beyond our atmosphere:
David Deutsch has pointed out that the picture of Earth as a friendly "spaceship" habitat is difficult to defend even in metaphorical sense. The Earth environment is harsh and survival is constant struggle for life, including whole species extinction. Humans wouldn't be able to live in most of the areas where they are living now without knowledge necessary to build life-support systems such as houses, heating, water supply etc.[6]
One could easily say that this is no Garden of Eden, kept going by supernatural means, but that does not mean that the means of life are so random that they cannot be nurtured.
Not particularly caring about his opinion, as what he stated is a bald fact to even the most uneducated person on the planet. To give up on working to save life, which he may not have meant to say there, is foolishness.
It is almost on par with the nihilist Rapture theology, which rather than a call to living one's life extremely well according to God's Will to pass a test, has effectively discarded the value of life on this planet. If you are going to removed from destruction, you don't care about other people or life on this planet. Because you are superior to your God, and won't suffer the fate of the Earth.
We also have the CTers, who claim to be revealing ancient esoteric knowledge, that shows there is going to be a fascist world government. And that Democrats, liberals and progessives are the tools of evil persons, some satanic and possibly from off world, or of a special bloodline, who have always ruled the world and will continue to do so, if the 'sheeple' don't all 'wake up' and leave the system of government and society to join their cults of guns, biologically defined roles, fundamentalist christianity and the like.
If we do not become more brutal than their fantasies of the rulers, ready to kill liberals, Democrats, socialists, gays, uppity women and minorities, or whoever is on their list.
They are really working for the ones who would bring a world society based on corporatism, using fossil fuels, destroying the carrying capacity of the planet for the wealth of the Koches and their spiritual kin, and bringing the exact tyranny that they fear.
So much of climate change denialism and anti-science rhetoric is based on a fear of a one world government based on the creation of castes of people, just as their nightmare says. They are against this and say that nationalism and their kind of patriotism is all that will save us, which leads us right back to the quote above:
And very great command over the services of others comes to those who as the hatches are opened are permitted to say, "This is mine!"
It is the creed of Randians, Supermen, Nazi master race proponents, and the like. It would be amusing if they were not so dangerous.
I'll stop here. Not interested in editing but adding the link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceship_Earth
Thanks for posting this. Hope to see videos and or transcripts of the all-nighter later.
