mostly nuggets

blessed britons

In 1982, we filmed a family of Chagos Islanders in exile in Mauritius. Here all 25 of them sleep in shifts in one squalid room with the baby in a cardboard box. [15 years later], we found the same family, living in the same shack, in the same terrible conditions. They still sleep on the floor, the rain still pours in, the toilet is still a hole in the ground. They are still so poor that they often go hungry. What was done to these people is today defined in international law as a crime against humanity.

— John Pilger

Stealing a Nation

mad world

What the FrameWorks Institute found was startling. It found that the more people are bombarded with words or images of devastating, quasi-Biblical effects of global warming, the more likely they are to tune out and switch instead into "adaptationist" mode, focusing on protecting themselves and their families, such as by buying large vehicles to secure their safety.
FrameWorks found that depicting global warming as being about "scary weather" evokes the weather "frame" which sets up a highly pernicious set of reactions, as weather is something we react to and is outside human control... Also, focusing on the long timelines and scale of global warming further encourages people to adapt, encouraging people to think "it won't happen in my lifetime" and "there's nothing an individual can do".

— Simon Retallack

Ankelohe and beyond: communicating climate change

the need to wrongfoot saddam

Submitted by antarchi on June 28, 2007 - 01:57.

[Sir Christopher] Meyer said that in his conversation with Wolfowitz, he had stressed that Britain “backed regime change, but the plan had to be clever and failure was not an option. I then went through the need to wrongfoot Saddam on the inspectors and the UNSCRs [UN Security Council Resolutions]. If all this could be accomplished skillfully, we were fairly confident that a number of countries could come on board.”