Tag Archives: julia

Julia Holter’s Hypnotic Chamber Pop

by HeribertoKomine Posted on September 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Julia Holter
Have You in My Wilderness
Domino

Soothing and gently unsettling at once, Julia Holter’s beguiling fourth album could be the elusive music you hear in an intense but puzzling dream. The Los Angeles native’s graceful chamber pop is distinguished by an appealing lightness of touch, both in the string-centric arrangements and her placid vocals, with occasional detours into Nico-like gravity. While artfully crafted lyrics abound, they never diminish the primal power of the hypnotic melodies, tending more to delicate allusion—note the recurring aquatic imagery—than literal insistence, aside from the anguished query “What did I do to make you feel so bad?” Offering different subtle pleasures with each hearing, Have You in My Wilderness promises to have a long shelf life.

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Julia Holter’s Hypnotic Chamber Pop

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Thomas Friedman: The world is hot

by AugustTCKaxuwc Posted on August 19, 2015

Thomas Friedman: The world is hot

By on 19 Aug 2015commentsShare

In his New York Times column on Wednesday, Thomas Friedman began with a bet:

Here’s my bet about the future of Sunni, Shiite, Arab, Turkish, Kurdish and Israeli relations: If they don’t end their long-running conflicts, Mother Nature is going to destroy them all long before they destroy one another.

We may not know the stakes, but it is a provocative wager nonetheless. I like to imagine Friedman, steeped in cigar smoke, sitting around a poker table with Netanyahu, Erdoğan, half a dozen sheikhs, and Julia Roberts. Julia is there because when I hear “Mother Nature,” I cannot but hear her intone, “I have been here for eons”:

This is Julia at her fiercest. But I digress. Friedman was writing on the relationships between climate and state fragility in the Middle East. It is a story of extreme drought, the politicization of air-conditioning, and revolutionary sparks. He concludes with a call for cooperation:

All the people in this region are playing with fire. While they’re fighting over who is caliph, who is the rightful heir to the Prophet Muhammad from the seventh century — Sunnis or Shiites — and to whom God really gave the holy land, Mother Nature is not sitting idle. She doesn’t do politics — only physics, biology and chemistry. And if they add up the wrong way, she will take them all down.

The only “ism” that will save them is not Shiism or Islamism but “environmentalism” — understanding that there is no Shiite air or Sunni water, there is just “the commons,” their shared ecosystems, and unless they cooperate to manage and preserve them (and we all address climate change), vast eco-devastation awaits them all.

In a move that should shock few, Friedman glosses over some salient points here. Climate change and political fragility are intersectional, but they don’t have the same solutions. You can’t convert from Shiism to environmentalism. (They’re also not mutually exclusive.) Moreover, it’s the Islamic State that’s bulldozing the Middle East, not “all the people in this region.” Preaching the promise of “shared ecosystems” in a world of Daesh is naive. The lack of distinction here also ignores the fact that most people in the Middle East are just trying to live their lives, not actively fighting over who is caliph.

Luckily, on the climate front, the world recently came one step closer to the cooperation hinted at in Friedman’s throwaway parenthetical: “and we all address climate change.” On Tuesday, a group of leading academics released the first Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change, a call to the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims and Muslim countries to “increase their efforts and adopt the pro-active approach needed to halt and hopefully eventually reverse the damage being wrought” on the environment.

The declaration calls for an “equitable and binding” climate agreement in Paris this December, financial support for developing countries, preferably a 1.5 C target, and commitment to a zero-emissions strategy as soon as feasibly possible. And while it’s safe to say that the declaration was not signed by members of ISIS, this type of call for cooperation — from within the Muslim community — is already fostering the kind of environmental dialogue that Friedman asserts is absent.

The body of research linking climate and conflict is formidable and growing — as Friedman is well aware — and the triggers and threat multipliers that tie together drought, rising temperatures, and political unrest are very real. Something as abstract as climate change is made more tangible when viewed through the lens of political conflict, but that lens doesn’t get you any closer to solutions. And it certainly doesn’t get you any closer to pacifying the political and religious woes of the Middle East.

Friedman is right about Mother Nature, though: She is not sitting idle. As Julia Roberts once said, “I have fed species greater than you, and I have starved species greater than you.”

Source:
The World’s Hot Spot

, The New York Times.

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Oceans 15


This chef built her reputation on seafood. How’s she feeling about the ocean now?Seattle chef Renee Erickson weighs in on the world’s changing waters, and how they might change her menu.


How do you study an underwater volcano? Build an underwater laboratoryJohn Delaney is taking the internet underwater, and bringing the deep ocean to the public.


How much plastic is in our oceans? Ask the woman trying to clean it upCarolynn Box, environmental program director of 5 Gyres, talks about what it’s like to sail across the ocean, pulling up plastic in the middle of nowhere.


How catching big waves helped turn this pro surfer into a conservationistRamon Navarro first came to the sea with his fisherman rather, found his own place on it as a surfer, and now fights to protect the coastline he loves.


What seafood is OK to eat, anyway? Ask an expertWhen it comes to sustainable seafood, you could say director of Seafood Watch Jennifer Dianto Kemmerly is the ultimate arbiter of taste.

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Thomas Friedman: The world is hot

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Will dumping Australia’s climate-savvy prime minister help the climate?

by h0rt67bx11 Posted on June 28, 2013

Will dumping Australia’s climate-savvy prime minister help the climate?

By John Upton

Alpha

Kevin Rudd is Australia’s new prime minister, again. Now he has to defend that job from an opposition leader who once called climate science “crap.”

In terms of climate policy, Australians face a choice between fairly good and downright evil in an upcoming federal election.

The face of evil belongs to climate skeptic Tony Abbott, leader of the opposition Liberal Party (which, in topsy-turvy Down Under fashion, is in fact conservative).

And the face of relative good is … in some disarray at the moment. Power brokers in the Labor Party, which narrowly holds power in the country, this week stripped the prime ministership away from Julia Gillard and handed it back to former leader Kevin Rudd. They believe this move will help them win the election, which is tentatively scheduled for September.

The stakes are high. Australia is among the world’s worst per-person contributors to climate change. The country is a huge producer of coal, exporting a lot and consuming a good bit itself. And it’s been suffering heavily from climate change in recent years, enduring epic heat, drought, wildfires, and floods.

But lately, the country been trying to mend its ways, and setting a global example in doing so. Over the last six years, under first Rudd and then Gillard, the Labor Party has introduced policies and taxes designed to battle and adapt to climate change. Reports are confirming that the new taxes and policies are doing what they were intended to do: curb power plant carbon emissions and accelerate investment in renewable energy.

But Labor’s been flailing in the polls and weighed down by infighting. Rudd had been agitating for the top job for months, destabilizing the party. Now, after he was sworn in as prime minister on Thursday, Labor’s members of parliament are vying against each other for positions in his new cabinet, instead of focusing on their reelection campaigns.

The conservatives have not hidden their glee at the pre-election upheaval within the governing party:

Labor’s move was a desperate one, and it might very well backfire. But many in Australia just couldn’t see Gillard leading her party to another victory.

As a stubborn champion of new taxes on the powerful fossil fuel and mineral sectors, and as a tough-as-steel woman leading a country still plagued by machismo and misogyny (and as an unmarried atheist without any kids, to boot), Australia’s first female prime minister was the target of ruthless and incessant attacks on her character and leadership. She had sandwiches thrown at her by men making the statement that a woman’s place is in the kitchen. Political rallies supported by Abbott were held to “ditch the witch.” Guests at a political fundraiser were served “Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail,” described on the menu as “Small Breasts, Huge Thighs & A Big Red Box.”

Now, with Rudd back in Kirribilli House, pundits are busily analyzing how the new prime minister’s climate policies might differ from the old one’s. He might change rules on how the prices for carbon emissions are set, for example.

Rudd, a nerdy policy wonk, once described climate change as the “great moral, environmental and economic challenge of our age.” He led the party during most of the first of its two consecutive terms in power, introducing climate-friendly policies before he was replaced by Gillard amid similar turmoil prior to the last election.

Gillard, though, had the courage to introduce climate taxes that had made Rudd hesitate (some would say wisely, politically speaking).

But while there are differences between the two leaders in their approach to climate and energy issues, they won’t matter if Labor loses the election. This week’s savage bloodletting was all about trying to avoid that outcome.

David Jackmanson

Tony Abbott, opposition leader and climate denier.

Abbott, for his part, once described the science behind climate change as “crap.” He has since recanted, but, as we explained in April, he has nonetheless pledged to eliminate the new carbon and mining taxes, dismantle a federal department of climate science advisers, and take other steps that would see the country retreat to its unbridled climate-changing ways of decades past.

Rudd now has until August or September to steady the Labor Party and navigate it to political victory (or thereabouts — as prime minister, he has the power to set the election date, which can be no later than Nov. 30). That won’t be easy amidst a political maelstrom of his own creating. But if his party can rediscover some unity, it won’t be impossible.

If Rudd does win, he’ll have a moral obligation to mull the environmental consequences of Australia’s substantial coal exports. But, then, that’s a world-warming beast that no leading Australian politician has shown any willingness to wrangle.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Will dumping Australia’s climate-savvy prime minister help the climate?

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