Coal study names top 20 ‘climate killer’ banks

The NGOs have labelled the banks “climate killers” because their financing efforts have helped to expand coal in the past decade. Many of the banks on the list subscribe to environmental principles, such as cutting their own greenhouse gas emissions and conducting environmental impact assessments on projects they finance.

Read more

Source : The Guardian

Facebook creating a web under class

“We give more power to Big Web companies with every tweet and page we post to their networks while hoping to get a bit of traffic and attention back for ourselves. The open web of free and independent websites has never looked so weak”

Read more

Source : The Guardian

Less Work, More Living by Juliet Schor

“Earn less, spend less, emit and degrade less. That’s the formula. The more time a person has, the better his or her quality of life, and the easier it is to live sustainably.”

Read more

Source :Yes magazine

Quote of the week

“Neo-liberal pro-rich reform in the 1980s. According to World Bank data, the world economy used to grow in per capita terms at over 3 per cent during the 1960s and 70s, while since the 1980s it has been growing at the rate of 1.4 per cent per year”

– Ha-Joon Chang – Faculty of Economics and Politics, University of Cambridge

Spatial Protest in the Era of Fast Capital

“There is nothing to oversee the hyper growth of derivatives or high frequency trading or endless debt games, because there is no global institution that equates with the global markets. It is a clash of the market state and the nation state … The market state is winning, which is probably why we are all on the brink of losing everything.”
Read more 

 

Source : Polis

Space crew returns after ‘Mars’ mission to nowhere

The U.S. Patent and Trademark office issues nearly 160,000 patents a year for everything from nanotechnology to jet-powered surfboards. Yet a mere 1 percent—just 1,600—reach the marketplace, according to the patent office. The dirty little secret about American ingenuity is that we’re terrible at translating original ideas into profit-producing businesses.

Read More

Source : The Guardian

Steve Fuller: it’s time for Humanity 2.0

“it’ll start to be bimodal distribution – some people will live beyond 100 and there’ll be a large number of people who die under the age of 70. And that won’t be because of some government mandate, that will be because people will definitely take advantage of the enhancements on offer, but others won’t have those choices open to them.”

Read article

Source : The guardian

The Architect Has No Clothes

“The phenomenon of “architectural myopia” may also explain the repeated mistakes that architects make in fashioning built environments for others, which turn out to be woefully unsuccessful in what may seem obvious ways to laypeople. Lastly, “architectural myopia” explains the often-disastrous attempts that architects have made to fashion urban schemes for entire neighborhoods and cities.”

Read article

Source : Guernica Magazine

#25 Collected Reading – Protest edition

Quote of the week

“The service of a good citizen is never useless : being heard and seen, he helps by his expression, a nod of his head, a stubborn silence, even his gait. ”
– Seneca


1.Why Establishment Media & the Power Elite Loathe Occupy Wall Street 

“The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

activism,culture,economics,Financial,global

Source :Dissenter.com

2. What’s behind the scorn for the Wall Street protests?

“Some of these critiques are ludicrous.  Does anyone really not know what the basic message is of this protest: that Wall Street is oozing corruption and criminality and its unrestrained political power — in the form of crony capitalism and ownership of political institutions — is destroying financial security for everyone else?”

activism,culture,economics,Financial,global

Source : Salon


3. Unequal Responsibility for Crime

“The case Mokhiber cited is not unique. In 1982 a study of America’s five hundred largest corporations reported that “23 percent of them had been convicted of a major crime or had paid more than $50,000 in penalties for serious misbehavior during the previous decade”

corporations,crime,politics,usa

Source :Truth Out

4. Freedom Riders Documentary PBS

“In 1908, journalist Ray Stannard Baker observed that “no other point of race contact is so much and so bitterly discussed among Negroes as the Jim Crow car.” As bus travel became widespread in the South over the first half of the 20th century, it followed the same pattern”

culture, race, USA, nonviolence

Source : PBS

5. Israelis plan million-strong march as protesters call for social justice

“It is certainly one of the largest street protests we have experienced in Israel,” said Tamar Hermann, of the Israel Democracy Institute. “But what really makes it different is its heterogeneous nature. Normally protest is homogeneous. Diversity is as important as size.”

democracy,israel,policy,politics,protest

Source : The Guardian

Hope you like this collection. Please comment, share and most of all enjoy.

– Kaushik

#18 Collected Reading

Quote of the week

I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining,
but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavor, a better and a
happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it;

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
by Benjamin Franklin


1.Facebook and Twitter fuel iPhone and Blackberry addiction, says Ofcom 

“Of the new generation of smartphone users, 60% of teenagers classed themselves as “highly addicted” to their device, compared to 37% of adults.

Mobile, UK, Culture

Source :The Guardian

2. Israel’s secular middle class strikes back

“Israel’s school system is in the pits with class sizes of about 40; many Israeli women cannot afford going to work because childcare is very expensive; the public transport is that of a third-world country.”

Israel, Policy, Culture, Protest

Source : The Guardian


3. America’s First Great Global Warming Debate

“As a gentleman farmer in Virginia, Jefferson had long been obsessed with the weather; in fact, on July 1, 1776, just as he was finishing his work on the Declaration of Independence, he began keeping a temperature diary. Jefferson would take two readings a day for the next 50 years. He would also crunch the numbers every which way”

Environment, USA, Global, Culture, History

Source :Smithsonian Magazine

4. The Illusion of the Free Internet

“Since life expectancy in Nigeria is less than 50 years it is a fair assumption most people in Ogoniland have lived with chronic oil pollution throughout their lives,” the report says.”

Environment, USA, Global, Culture, History

Source : Slow Media.net

5. Why India Can’t Feed Her People

“As much as 40 per cent of all the fruits, vegetables and food grains grown in India never make it to the market. The country wastes more grain each year than Australia produces, and more fruits and vegetables than the U.K. consumes.”

India, Culture, Food, Policy

Source : The Star

Hope you like this collection. Please comment, share and most of all enjoy.

– Kaushik