All Hallow’s Eve is over for this year and tomorrow, in many countries, is the Day of the Dead or All Souls’ Day. So today might be a good day to focus on what is really alarming: the Climate Zombies that hang around year-round in Washington and Ottawa, and the Corporate Dementors that feed these Zombies with money. Dementors, if you haven’t read your Harry Potter lately, are:
“… among the foulest creatures that walk this earth. They infest the darkest, filthiest places, they glory in decay and despair, they drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them… Get too near a Dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you. If it can, the Dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself…soulless and evil. You will be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life.“
Think I’m exaggerating? Check out these stories:
From the BBC News, regarding an upcoming climate conference to be held at the British Medical Association’s headquarters, where doctors, academics and military experts will gather to discuss climate change:
Officers in the UK military warned that the price of goods such as fuel is likely to rise as conflict provoked by climate change increases.
A statement from the meeting adds that humanitarian disasters will put more and more strain on military resources.
It asks governments to adopt ambitious targets for curbing greenhouse gases. Read the full story Climate Change “Grave Threat” To Security and Health.
Meanwhile, Occupy-related arrests are soaring in the U.S., with often-violent police raids on the public sites in the dark of night. The arrests now number close to 3,000. Here’s a report from the Daily Kos:
A series of evictions of Occupy encampments this weekend has pushed the total number of arrests associated with the movement to nearly 3,000. The evictions occurred in a geographically diverse range of cities around the country…
According to Occupy Arrests, 2,963 protesters associated with the movement have been arrested since Sept. 17. That is an average of 66 per day. Click here to get the details on the police raids.
Apparently governments haven’t realized that the people who are putting their lives on hold to make a statement about corporate greed and the lack of representation of the concerns and needs of the majority aren’t “camping”, and they aren’t going to go away until this injustice is addressed. As the slogan goes, “System change not climate change”.
In a classic example of Corporate Dementors at work, there’s a hearing in a Virginia courtoom this week that could have implications for the privacy rights of scientists at colleges and universities across the country. A special investigation by Facing South has found that this current attack on climate scientists is being orchestrated by an astroturf group well-funded by fossil fuel interests who want to obscure the truth of our warming world and the part their industry is playing in it:
It’s part of a lawsuit brought by the American Tradition Institute, a free-market think tank that wants the public to believe human-caused global warming is a scientific fraud. Filed against the University of Virginia, the suit seeks emails and other documents related to former professor Michael Mann, an award-winning climate scientist who has become a focus of the climate-denial movement because of his research documenting the recent spike in earth’s temperature.
By suing the university, the American Tradition Institute wants to make public Mann’s correspondence in an effort to find out whether he manipulated data to receive government grants, a violation of the state’s Fraud Against Taxpayers Act.
But a Facing South investigation has found that the Colorado-based American Tradition Institute is part of a broader network of groups with close ties to energy interests that have long fought greenhouse gas regulation. Our investigation also finds that ATI has connections with the Koch brothers, Art Pope and other conservative donors seeking to expand their political influence. Read the full story here.
There are defenses against Dementors. According to the Harry Potter Wiki:
Dementors hold no true loyalty, except to whomever can provide them with the most people to feed off. They cannot be destroyed, though their numbers can be limited if the conditions in which they multiply are reduced, implying that they do die off eventually.
The time has come for the 99% to demand change to our system in which corporate greed has multiplied like a cancer and sucked all common sense as well as the commitment to the common good out of our elected representatives. Occupy!!
More links:
A Conspiracy of Transparency Behind Occupy Wall Street
