Today is the International Day for Biological Diversity, a day to consider our relationship to the natural world and this year the theme is ‘Our solutions are in nature’. The slogan emphasizes how dependent we are on healthy ecosystems for our own health and welfare. This has probably been particularly relevant this year given our […]

International Day for Biological Diversity — Caravan Correspondent

International Day for Biological Diversity

11h ago

Today is the International Day for Biological Diversity, a day to consider our relationship to the natural world and this year the theme is ‘Our solutions are in nature’. The slogan emphasizes how dependent we are on healthy ecosystems for our own health and welfare.

This has probably been particularly relevant this year here in Australia given our isolation from others, closure of business and leisure opportunities and the complete upheaval of plans we may have had for this year.

While we have had to distance ourselves from other human contact, one sanity saver has been the opportunity to get outdoors and into nature to feel some sort of normality by visiting beaches, forests, parks and rivers. I think it has given us all a sense of just how important these natural places are to our mental health for starters, and how lucky we are in Australia to have these places.

Biological diversity refers to plants, animals and microorganisms, found in nature and the different ecosystems they live in such as lakes, forest and deserts. There are a lot of reasons to be in harmony with nature and stop biodiversity loss especially when you consider that historically our medicines started in the form of herbal concoctions.

To this day many herbal remedies are still used, but science has also been responsible for the advance of medicines where active ingredients from natural sources have been made into mainstream medication, for instance aspirin is derived from willow tree bark. It stands to reason then that if we lose habitats and species, perhaps without even knowing they exist or what potential they have, we could be harming future sources of medicine too.

The indigenous people of Australia have had a respectful relationship with nature for thousands of years, relying on the natural environment to provide food, medicine and materials for their everyday living. They were aware that their actions would have a direct impact on their ability to sustain themselves and that was where habitat burning at certain times of the year and only targeting certain species for hunting were imperative for sustainable living.

Continue reading “International Day for Biological Diversity .. Australia, 22 May”

Welcome to the American Dream, run by a lunatic challenged by a geriatric. Home sweet home of the Capitalist Paradise. So Proud to be destroying the Planet. Now with the Covid massacre nearing 100,000 we are to be forced back to work or starve to death. But rejoicing together that we can once more put a Man in Space…

Back to work, or else: Trump administration tells states to pull unemployment benefits – People’s World– People’s World

WASHINGTON—GOP President Donald Trump’s Labor Secretary, Eugene Scalia, and his #2 who runs the agency that oversees jobless benefits want employers to report—and states to bar benefits from—workers who fear returning to their old jobs because their employers won’t protect them against the coronavirus.

President Donald Trump and Tony Stallings, vice president of integrated supply chain at Honeywell International Inc., right, interrogate a worker about his job during a tour of a Honeywell plant that manufactures personal protective equipment, May 5, 2020, in Phoenix, as Honeywell CEO Darius Adamczyk and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows watch. | Evan Vucci / AP

The memo, from John Pallasch, a GOP operative, an advocate for so-called charter schools and a former top Kentucky Employment Department official under right-wing GOP Gov. Matt Bevin, makes clear the intention is to deny jobless benefits to those jobless workers.

see also.. 19 May ..Strikes erupt as US essential workers demand protection amid pandemic.. Working conditions, low pay and lack of safety protections have triggered protests across various industries

“States must work to maintain program integrity by ensuring claimants”—workers—“are not continuing to claim benefits when they have been offered suitable work,” he declared. In other words, if you’re offered your old job, regardless of conditions, you must take it.

Continue reading “Back to work, or else we cut benefits and you starve, says US Govt as deaths multiply”

Apart from seafood, the market’s offerings included live wild animals, such as foxes, crocodiles, wolf puppies, giant salamanders, snakes, rats, peacocks, porcupines, koalas and game meats, a previous report revealed.

Wuhan BANS eating wild animals: Five-year rule brought in after global coronavirus pandemic was linked to city’s wet markets

• New rules forbid the consumption of wildlife, including those bred by farms
• Experts believe the coronavirus outbreak was caused by the practice in China
• The virus likely jumped to humans from animals sold at a wet market in Wuhan 
• The law also bans people from producing, processing and trading wild animals 
• Beijing in February issued a temporary ban on the trading and eating of wildlife
• Here’s how to help people impacted by Covid-19

By Billie Thomson For Mailonline shared with thanks

The Chinese city of Wuhan has banned the eating of wild animals, a practice believed to have caused the coronavirus pandemic.

The new policy went into effect on May 13 and will stay in place for five years, according to a notice released by the Wuhan government today.

Experts in China said in January that the virus had likely jumped onto humans from wild animals sold as food at a wet market in the city of 11million.+14

The government of China’s Wuhan city has banned the eating of wild animal species, including those bred and raised by people, for five years. The file photo taken on January 17 shows the Huanan Seafood Whole Market, which is believed to be the origin of the coronavirus outbreak+14

The law forbids the consumption of all wild animals on land as well as endangered and protected wild aquatic species. In the file photo taken on January 5, 2004, workers collect civets in Xinyuan wildlife market to prevent a possible spread of SARS in Guangzhou

Continue reading “China: Wuhan BANS eating wild animals for 5 years”

What will happen when Covid finally dies down and the Mega Depression winds up? Can ‘Dog Eat Dog’ Capitalism be replaced with a humane and simpler system and avoid Climate and Environment meltdown?

Early signs say NO WAY. Governments are happy to just print money.. but prefer to use it to prop up obsolete money spinners like aviation and petroleum.. We are angry and suffering but governments have used Lockdowns to practice total police and military control. First attempts at solidarity to stop wars were sabotaged by the US Bully State. The unions are weaker than ever and people more divided… Will we be branded as traitors for defying nationalist goals to restore neoliberalism on ‘The Long Road Back’..?’

What we need is a massive movement to spring up, horizontally organized without Parties and Conmen. Enough is enough, we have all the resources to create a new and sustainable world. Now it’s time to cancel the debts, scrap the weapons and THROW OUT THE 1%.

The Race to Replace a Dying Neoliberalism

CounterPunch.org Walden Bello Web site view

The morning will come
When the world is mine. Tomorrow belongs to me!

From Cabaret

In response to the cataclysm occasioned by the coronavirus, three lines of thinking are emerging.

One is that the emergency necessitates extraordinary measures, but the basic structure of production and consumption is sound, and the problem lies only in determining the moment when things can return to “normal.”

One might say that this is the dominant opinion among political and business elites. Representative of this outlook is the infamous Goldman Sachs-sponsored teleconference involving scores of stock market players in mid-March of this year, which concluded that “there is no systemic risk. No one is even talking about that. Governments are intervening in the markets to stabilize them, and the private banking sector is well capitalized. It feels more like 9/11 than it does 2008.”

A second line of thinking is that we are now in the “new normal,” and while the global economic system is not significantly out of kilter, important changes must be made to some of its elements, such as redesigning the workplace to accommodate the need for social distancing, strengthening public health systems (something even Boris Johnson now advocates after Britain’s National Health System saved his life), and even moving towards a “universal basic income.”

A third response is that the pandemic provides an opportunity for transforming a system that is ridden with deep economic and political inequalities and is profoundly destabilizing ecologically. One must not simply talk about accommodating a “new normal” or expanding social safety nets, but of decisively moving toward a qualitatively new economic system.

Continue reading “The Race to Replace Dying Neoliberalism.. Another World is Possible”

The culling of the herd – is this what is happening in Brazil, UK and USA?

Pro-Trump Media’s New Chorus On Coronavirus: Let People Die After first downplaying the coronavirus crisis, right-wing media briefly began to take it seriously. But now that President Donald Trump has vowed to defy health officials and reopen businesses, his favorite pundits have settled on a new message: Let people die.

Where did an investment fund economist get this knowledge and authority in order to reach that kind of conclusion? In other words: what is the disease that has been driving and legitimizing these people to mobilize for the reopening of Brazil’s economy while death rates only increase? Who produced this? Where did it come from? How does it reproduce? The answer is: we are dealing with 21st century Nazism with “natural selection” varnish. Systematic extermination as an ideology.

Act 1

“Following our numbers a little, I would say that Brazil is doing well”, says Guilherme Benchimol, economist at XP Investimentos, “the peak of the disease has passed when we analyze the middle class, the upper class”. The declaration day was May 5 – we had 7,321 deaths officially registered in the country.

Continue reading “Capitalists say ‘Let Them Die’ .. Covid Culling of the herd?”