Karl Lagerfeld and the House of Chanel.
The Optimum Population Trust glosses over the fact that the world is going through demographic transition: population growth rates are slowing down almost everywhere and the number of people is likely, according to a paper in Nature, to peak this century probably at around 10 billion. Most of the growth will take place among those who consume almost nothing. But no one anticipates a consumption transition. People breed less as they become richer, but they don't consume less; they consume more. As the habits of the super-rich show, there are no limits to human extravagance. Consumption can be expected to rise with economic growth until the biosphere hits the buffers. Anyone who understands this and still considers that population, not consumption, is the big issue is, in Lovelock's words, "hiding from the truth". It is the worst kind of paternalism, blaming the poor for the excesses of the rich. So where are the movements protesting about the stinking rich destroying our living systems? Where is the direct action against superyachts and private jets? Where's Class War when you need it? It's time we had the guts to name the problem. It's not sex; it's money. It's not the poor; it's the rich.
My country is a profligate producer and distributor of weapons to the world. How very horrible. How very horrible. This is a market of unimaginable gruesome murder and brutalising and smashing into smithereens everything decent in its path. All the lives, the villages, the farms, the cities, the generations of history obliterated and the humanity betrayed on a scale we have failed to understand.
The industry mostly macerates the innocent bodies of women and children living in areas with rich natural resources required by the industrial/pharmaceutical/banking mafiosi to grease the slippery slope of their descent into the hell they are making of our world. The American/British/Israeli Way of War is cutting swathes of devastation through significent areas of human habitation on this planet, weapons turning families into black and bloody heaps in the rubble of their homes.
But the USA produces more weapons than all the other major powers combined.
Science and engineering have given us powers that were traditionally reserved for gods: raising the dead, creating new life forms, and destroying the world. In contrast to our awesome physical power, humanity's social progress is at best in the adolescent phase. This chasm between our technological powers on the one hand and our social development on the other has created a recipe for disaster that demands urgent attention if the human race is to survive. Humanity is like a 16-year-old with a new driver's license who somehow got his hands on a 500 hp Ferrari. He will either mature rapidly or kill himself.
MI5 Whistleblower Speaks Out: The Inner Workings of the Secret State.
http://911blogger.com/node/20356
Annie Machon, Cambridge University Classics graduate, has worked in the areas of counter-subversion and international terrorism within M15. After becoming aware of gross mismanagement and state-sponsored murder, Machon resigned and blew the whistle. Machon stands with experts in many fields who believe that there are serious problems with the official narrative of 9/11 that need to be investigated.
"The second largest export from Iraq is scrap metal,"Prince Hassan says, "Our children are dying as we speak; from eating out of cooking pots that are uranium depleted; from climbing on climbing frames that are uranium depleted. You can say you need to take the necessary steps, but tell that to the sticky-fingered." And the sticky fingered have deemed it "economically sensible" for a university to invest in the arms trade. Last year the guardian reported arms maker BAE System delivered sharply higher profits helped, by what it called, the "high tempo of British and American military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan." "We have a great business plan for the next five years", the chief executive said. That is, assuming people carry on wanting to kill each other.
Teenage girls will have seen Ziff in glossy magazines and wished they could look like her, but Ziff is filmed leafing through the same images in her local newsagent and saying how dreadful she thinks she looks. It seems the industry which makes the rest of us feel insecure and imperfect leaves its own stars feeling the same way. Louise France, The Observer, Sunday 7th June 2009.