Quote

Peace is not the absence of war; it is a virtue; a state of mind; a disposition for benevolence; confidence; and justice. -Spinoza

Sent from Samsung Mobile

"Nothing bugs Robert Kovacik"

did u see the cockroach?

Grandson of Kim Jong Il talks about school, life outside North Korea

http://m.yahoo.com/w/legobpengine/news/blogs/sideshow/grandson-kim-jong-il-talks-school-life-outside-193355523.html?.b=index&.ts=1350750871&.intl=US&.lang=en

Sent from Samsung Mobile

Who is responsible for disenchantment – the media or politicians?

Has Romney moved to the center on immigration?

http://m.yahoo.com/w/legobpengine/news/blogs/romney-moved-center-immigration-122025670--election.html?.b=index&.ts=1350666454&.intl=US&.lang=en

Sent from Samsung Mobile

Google shares suspended after accidental release of earnings result

Google shares suspended after accidental release of earnings result

http://gu.com/p/3b8by

Sent from Samsung Mobile

Sexism and misogyny: what's the difference? by Naomi Wolf, Julie Bindel, Nina Power, Rahila Gupta, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, Bidisha

An Australian dictionary has changed its definition of misogyny to reflect the fact that it is now used to mean 'entrenched prejudice against women', not just hatred of them. Six feminists tell us what the term means to them

Naomi Wolf: Julia Gillard used the word accurately

I object to more heightened words being appropriated carelessly to make political points: sexism is not in fact misogyny; someone can like women quite a lot in person but be very happy to support systematic discrimination against them (sexism) or to use gender stereotypes against them (sexism). So I am sorry to see the dictionary conflating the terms. Sexism is to misogyny what antisemitism is to Jew-hating. Neither is ever acceptable, but we need precise language to understand and fight injustice effectively.
Having said that, Julia Gillard used "misogyny' perfectly accurately. She said that Tony Abbott described abortion as "the easy way out" and cited his political campaign against Gillard involving posters asking voters to "ditch the witch". The latter, especially, is a time-honoured tradition of true misogyny – stirring up atavistic hatred of the feminine – that goes back to witch-hunts against powerful women in the New World. Her critics, for their part, are asking us to water down our awareness of real woman-hating and accept it as normal in political discourse.
"Misogyny" often surfaces in political struggles over women's role, and you can tell because the control of women becomes personalised, intrusive and often sexualised. Misogyny has the amygdala involved – the part of the brain involved in processing emotional responses – there is contempt and violence in it. A public figure who tolerates the systemic under-prosecuting of rape is guilty of serious and unforgivable sexism; making rape jokes or explaining away the damage of rape in public as Congressman Todd Akin did recently in the US, or legislating, as over a dozen US states are now doing, transvaginal probes that are medically unnecessary, simply to sexually punish women for choosing abortion – well, that is misogyny.

Julie Bindel: Sexists are not always misogynists

When a man claims that women are naturally maternal, or are by default, bad drivers, he is a sexist. If he was to add that women are only good for a fuck and should be confined to servicing men and their children, it is misogyny. Misogynists are always sexist, but sexists are not always misogynists. For example, if a man says of a woman, "Look at the state of that fat, ugly cow, I wouldn't touch her with yours," then he is a misogynist. It would follow that he does not respect women as equals and is therefore also a sexist.

Nina Power: Being misogynist, acting sexist

In a moment of idle curiosity a good few years ago, I wondered whether there was an antonym for misogyny. I presumed it would be something like "philogyny" and it was indeed – "fondness towards women". After the definition, a short note in parenthesis: "usage: rare" (and today, too, the spellchecker has red-underlined the word. Apparently liking women has not become any more popular in the computer age!) What a depressing dictionary note, I thought: we talk about misogyny all the time, and yet the opposite is nowhere to be found.
Misogyny, and philogyny for that matter, seems to imply an essential state of being, perhaps an inability to change an outlook, a claim about what that person is. Sexism, on the other hand, is perhaps more often linked to acts and words – "so this person wrote this tweet that was sexist, but it doesn't mean he hates women", that sort of thing. The interchangeable use of the terms may be in keeping with contemporary usage, but we might want to make a quiet plea to hold open the distinction, if only so the antonym for "hating women" might one day usurp its partner in popularity.

Rahila Gupta: A murky pond in which misogyny flourishes

We all know that sexism is the pond in which misogyny flourishes and because the water is so murky, you sometimes don't even notice how healthily it grows. And because it is growing in water, it sometimes reflects back at you as love instead of hate. To be specific, sexism is when men let you jump the queue and get on a crowded bus first in Delhi (to confuse matters further, that's called chivalry) and then the poor dears, willy nilly, get crushed up against you as their hands "accidentally" cup your breasts in a frenzy of misogyny.

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett: Something darker and angrier

Sexism is to misogyny what Benny Hill is to Rush Limbaugh. While sexism demonstrates a disregard and disrespect for women, I always have associated misogyny with something darker, angrier, and more cynical. Things like Page 3 often betray a failure to move with the times, a certain outdated attitude about women's roles that has the potential to be modernised. But educating someone out of the blinkered hatred of misogyny is a monumental challenge. To think, as the Republicans do, that the male half of society should be able to legislate and control the bodies of the female half, well, that can be nothing but misogyny.

Bidisha: Two sexist remarks and one misogynist one

At a major literary festival, before an event about military fiction, a posh famous English author smirked to me, "What's the difference between a woman and a piece of toast? You can make soldiers from toast." That's sexist.
When boarding a flight from Geneva to London a man followed his wife on to the plane and said at the top of his voice to her, "The plane went down when you got on it," which prompted gasps from everyone around including the cabin staff, while he smirked and the woman looked like she wanted to drop in to a hole in the ground and die. That's sexist.
On a train from York to London a woman was talking on the phone in the quiet carriage. A couple near me got cross. "I'll go and tell her it's the quiet carriage," said the man to us all nearby. "Ooh, don't," muttered the wife. "OK then, I'll go and punch her," he said. That's misogynist.

infographic menarik soal perlengkapan yang dipakai felix

http://www.space.com/17923-supersonic-skydive-space-jump-explained-infographic.html

Waterfall Swing makes waves on the Web

does not make u wet
http://m.yahoo.com/w/legobpengine/news/blogs/sideshow/waterfall-swing-makes-waves-235518437.html?.b=index&.ts=1350289078&.intl=US&.lang=en

Sent from Samsung Mobile

Are black people supporting Obama mainly because he's black?

via AP-Yahoo News

Surviving slavery, segregation and discrimination has forged a special pride in African-Americans. Now some are saying this hard-earned pride has become prejudice in the form of blind loyalty to President Barack Obama.

Are black people supporting Obama mainly because he's black? If race is just one factor in blacks' support of Obama, does that make them racist? Can blacks' support for Obama be compared with white voters who may favor his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, because he's white?

These questions have long animated conservatives who are frustrated by claims that white people who oppose Obama's policies are racist. This week, when a black actress who tweeted an endorsement of Romney was subjected to a stream of abuse from other African-Americans, the politics of racial accusation came full circle once again.

Stacey Dash, who also has Mexican heritage, is best known for the 1995 film "Clueless" and the recent cable-TV drama "Single Ladies." On Twitter, she was called "jigaboo," ''traitor," ''house nigger" and worse after posting, "Vote for Romney. The only choice for your future."

The theme of the insults: A black woman would have to be stupid, subservient or both to choose a white Republican over the first black president.

Russell Simmons, the hip-hop mogul and Obama backer, called Dash's experience "racism." Said Barbara Walters on "The View": "If she were white, this wouldn't have happened."

Twitter users are by no means representative of America, and many black Obama supporters quickly denounced the attacks. But for people like Art Gary, an information technology professional, the reason Dash was attacked is simple: She is a black woman supporting a white candidate over a black one.

"It goes both ways," said Gary, who is white. "There is racial bias amongst whites, and there is racial bias amongst blacks. But as far as the press is concerned, it only goes one way."

Antonio Luckett, a sales representative in Milwaukee who is black, called the attacks on Dash unfair. But when people speak out against a symbol of black progress like Obama, he said, "African-Americans tend to be internally hurt by that."

"We still have a civil rights (era) mentality, but we're not living in a civil rights-based world anymore," he said. "We want to say, 'You're black, you need to stand behind black people.'"

Luckett said one reason he voted for Obama in the 2008 primary against Hillary Clinton was because Obama is black: "Yes, I will admit that."

Is that racism? Not in Luckett's mind. "It's voting for someone who would understand your side of the coin a lot better."

Such logic runs into trouble when applied to a white person voting for Romney because he understands whiteness better. Ron Christie, a black conservative who worked for former President George W. Bush, finds both sides of that coin unacceptable.

"It's not the vision that our leaders in the civil rights movement would have envisioned and be proud of in the era of the first African-American president," Christie said.

Martin Luther King Jr. fought Jim Crow laws, which deprived blacks of political rights after Reconstruction, upheld by Southern Democrats. But black voters switched after Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed through the 1960s civil rights legislation and Republicans successfully pursued the votes of white people who disliked the civil rights agenda.

Since then, Democrats have persistently wooed black voters with programs and platforms that African-Americans favor, and the party has been rewarded every four years.

Clinton got 83 percent of the black vote in 1992 and 84 percent in 1996; the third-party candidate Ross Perot probably sliced away some of Clinton's black support. Al Gore got 90 percent in 2000; John Kerry got 88 percent in 2004. Obama captured 95 percent in 2008, and 2 million more black people voted than in the previous election.

Christie says he, too, shares the sense of pride in Obama smashing what for blacks is the ultimate glass ceiling. He understands that black pride springs from a shared history of being treated as less than human, while the history of pride in whiteness has a racist context.

But he still sees black people voting for Obama out of a "straitjacket solidarity."

Christie sees it in his barbershop, where black men shifted from calling candidate Obama "half-white" and "not one of us" to demanding that Christie stop opposing the first black president.

He sees it in the comments of radio host Tom Joyner, who told his millions of listeners a year ago, "Let's not even deal with facts right now. Let's deal with our blackness and pride — and loyalty. . I'm not afraid or ashamed to say that as black people, we should do it because he's a black man."

The actor Samuel L. Jackson said much the same thing: "I voted for Barack because he was black," he told Ebony magazine. "Cuz that's why other folks vote for other people — because they look like them."

In 2011, as black unemployment continued to rise, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus said that if Clinton was still president, "we probably would be still marching on the White House . (but) nobody wants to do anything that would empower the people who hate the president."

And just last week, the rapper Snoop Dogg posted a list of voting reasons, written by someone else, on a social media account. No. 1 on his pro-Obama list: He's black. Snoop's top reason to not vote for Romney: He's white.

All of this may help explain why Veronica Scott-Miller, a junior at historically black Hampton University, directed the following tweet at Dash: "You get a lil money and you forget that you're black and a woman. Two things Romney hates."

In an interview, Scott-Miller said the GOP fought Obama's effort to provide funding for historically black colleges like hers. She dislikes Romney's opposition to abortion and thinks Republicans have a "negative stigma about us . they make generalizations in their speeches about our race in general, and they make up terms like welfare queens and stuff."

Told that some saw her tweet as racist, she said that's not what she meant. "I was saying that as a black woman, Romney doesn't have that much that would make us want to vote for him," said Scott-Miller, who is black. "Because Barack Obama lives with three black women in his house, he knows about what they need, he knows about the issues we may be facing, he talks to black women on the regular."

Sherrilyn Ifill, a law professor at the University of Maryland, wrote a column last week exploring why so many black voters are rejecting Romney. She said it has less to do with the candidate than with his party's treatment of Obama, such as John Sununu calling the president "lazy" after the debate, a congressman shouting "You lie!" during the State of the Union address, claims that Obama is not a citizen and more.

In an interview, Ifill said that for black voters, such accusations feel like white people are attacking their own dignity. "In essence," she says, "they are closing ranks around Obama."

She noted that women were justifiably moved by Hillary Rodham Clinton's candidacy and Catholics flocked to the polls to elect President John F. Kennedy. Comparing black pride in Obama to white pride in Romney is a "false symmetry" because of the history of black oppression, she says, and she asked for patience from America at large.

"There should not be this resistance to pride over the first black president," Ifill says. "If we get to the fifth one, I'll be with you."

___

Jesse Washington covers race and ethnicity for The Associated Press. He is reachable at http://twitter.com/jessewashington or jwashington(at)ap.org.

"The Dada Engine and Postmodernism Generator"

"The Dada Engine version 1.0 Chaoflux 316 by Andrew C. Bulha" http://dev.null.org/dadaengine/manual-1.0/dada.html#SEC1 The essay you have just seen previously is completely meaningless and was randomly generated by the Postmodernism Generator. To generate another essay, follow this link. If you liked this particular essay and would like to return to it, follow this link for a bookmarkable page. The Postmodernism Generator was written by Andrew C. Bulhak using the Dada Engine, a system for generating random text from recursive grammars, and modified very slightly by Josh Larios (this version, anyway. There are others out there).

"Impostures Intellectuelles" / "Fashionable Nonsense" (by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont)

Thank you Prof Alan, this is a very good article... link :  http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/ "Impostures Intellectuelles" / "Fashionable Nonsense" (by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont) Book first published in French by Éditions Odile Jacob, October 1997. The second French edition -- which is much revised, and includes a new preface responding to our critics -- was published in March 1999 by Livre de Poche (price 50 FF), and can be ordered on-line from amazon.co.fr or FNAC. The English edition was published in the UK in July 1998 by Profile Books under the title Intellectual Impostures; it can be ordered on-line from W.H. Smith or amazon.co.uk. It was published in the US in November 1998 by Picador USA, an imprint of St. Martin's Press, under the title Fashionable Nonsense; it can be ordered on-line from Barnes and Noble or amazon.com. Click here for the preface and first chapter in English. Lecturers who are considering the book for potential student use may obtain an academic inspection copy: please direct your requests here for UK, Europe and the British Commonwealth, and here for US and Canada. Translations into Catalan, Dutch, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Spanish and Turkish have been published. Click here for the preface in Portuguese. Translations into Chinese (PRC), Chinese (Taiwan) and Russian are in the works. I will post more information as it becomes available. For reviews of Impostures Intellectuelles / Fashionable Nonsense, click here. "The Furor over Impostures Intellectuelles" "Les réactions face à la parution d'Impostures Intellectuelles" "Réponse à Vincent Fleury et Yun Sun Limet" Article, by Jean Bricmont and Alan Sokal, published in the Times Literary Supplement (London), 17 October 1997, p. 17 and, in slightly modified form, in Libération (Paris), 18-19 October 1997, p. 5.

Rich Dad, Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki is Bankrupt?

Robert Kiyosaki, author of the bestselling Rich, Dad, Poor Dad series of financial advice books, is offering his fans yet another lesson in how the rich are different than you and me: they file for bankruptcy not because of ill health or unemployment related issues, but instead as a strategic business move. Robert Kiyosaki (Courtesy: Good Morning America)Rich Global LLC, one of the corporate arms Kiyosaki has done business under, filed for bankruptcy protection in August, after it was ordered to pay just under $24 million to the Learning Annex and its chairman Bill Zanker. Kiyosaki was one of the small-time mountebanks who made it to the big-time in the aughts by telling his forever falling behind audience that they could get ahead, they just had not learned how. The shtick behind the Rich Dad books was that Kiyosaki was sharing secret money-making strategies of the wealthy with his wage slave readers. The tips ran the gamut from ridiculous to illegal and downright hurtful and included advocating for insider trading,  arguing for the purchase of multiple real estate properties with little or no money down and telling followers they could purchase stocks on margin via unfunded brokerage accounts. The Learning Annex was one of Kiyosaki's earliest backers, and helped arrange a number of his most prominent speaking gigs in the early aughts. They were not alone. Oprah Winfrey had him on her show, and PBS ran his programming during their fundraising weeks. So how did Kiyosaki, whom the website Celebrity Net Worth estimates is worth a cool $80 million, come to this pass? Well, he didn't come to any pass. He now conducts much of his business not via Rich Global LLC but under the rubrik Rich Dad Co. And it's a corporate bankruptcy, not a personal bankruptcy. When the New York Post, which broke the story, tracked down Mike Sullivan, Rich Dad Co. CEO, he informed them that Kiyosaki would not be putting any of his personal fortune toward the settlement. As for Rich Global, Sullivan claimed it only had a few million in its coffers. Of course, you could argue that Learning Annex CEO Zanker should have known better. No one has ever proven that Rich Dad, the man who supposedly gave Kiyosaki all his advice for wealthy living, ever existed. Nor has anyone ever documented any vast reserves of wealth earned by Kiyosaki prior to the publication of Rich Dad, Poor Dad in 1997.

I am looking for a novel and a movie titled Red Sorghum by Mo Yan... #Nobel2012

Here from wiki: Red Sorghum  pinyin: Hóng Gāoliáng is a 1987 Chinese film about a young woman's life working on a distillery for sorghum liquor. It is based on a novel by Mo Yan. The film marked the directorial debut of internationally acclaimed filmmaker Zhang Yimou, and the acting debut of film star Gong Li. With its lush and lusty portrayal of peasant life, it immediately vaulted Zhang to the forefront of the Fifth Generation directors.

sperma buatan dari sel punca

after reading this, suddenly i remembered Ays Rand novel titled Brave New World
http://m.kompas.com/news/read/2012/10/10/14282737/AS.Segera.Ciptakan.Sperma.Buatan--international

Sent from Samsung Mobile

31 healthiest food

http://healthland.time.com/2012/10/01/guide-the-31-healthiest-foods-of-all-time-with-recipes/#68768-2

Sent from Samsung Mobile

Subic Naval Base will be transformed into a freeport and Tourism Zone

Philippine sees naval port as vital to US

Subic Bay naval base has been transformed into a freeport and tourism zone

• AFP
• Published: 15:13 October 8, 2012
• 

• Image Credit: AP
• US Marines and their Philippine counterparts at the opening ceremony of the joint amphibious landing exercise dubbed Phiblex 2013 aboard the American assault ship Bonhomme Richard docked at Subic Freeport, a former US naval base

Subic Bay: The Philippines said Monday a former US naval base facing the South China Sea could play a key role as a hub for American ships as Washington moves to strengthen its presence in the Asia-Pacific.

Once the US military's largest overseas facility, the former Subic Bay naval base 80km northeast of Manila has been transformed into a freeport and tourism zone since it was shut down in 1992.

But a senior Philippine official pointed out that, with the United States planning to shift the bulk of its fleet to the Pacific by 2020 as it focuses on Asia, it would need natural deep water bays to dock its ships and submarines.

"Based on US official pronouncements, there is a strategic rebalancing (of its forces) and that means more assets, more aircraft in the Western Pacific," said Edilberto Adan, a former general who heads the government's Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) commission.

"There are very few ports that can accommodate naval assets and naval carriers, and one of them is Subic.

"As the US begins to implement (the shift), Subic will play an important role because it is one of the important facilities that can service their presence in the Pacific."

He said Subic could "provide the necessary port calls, port visits and servicing required by US assets, naval or aircraft".

Adan was talking to reporters at Subic Bay aboard the USS Bonhomme Richard, an amphibious Marine Expeditionary Unit assault ship taking part in a 10-day joint exercises with Filipino forces.

Subic, along with the nearby Clark Airbase, were key facilities for the United States, the former colonial ruler of the Philippines, during World War II.

They then provided logistical support during the Vietnam War in the 1970s, and remained of strategic importance during the Cold War.

Clark closed down in 1991 after nearby Mount Pinatubo volcano erupted, covering the base in ash and making it unusable.

Subic, which is in the northern town of Olangapo facing the South China Sea, survived the eruption.

But, amid strong nationalist sentiment and street protests calling for US troops to leave the Philippines, the Senate voted in 1992 to end a lease agreement that allowed the bases to operate.

In November 1992 the last US ship sailed out of Subic.

The Philippines, however, ratified a visiting forces agreement with the US in 1999, allowing the resumption of large-scale training exercises between the allies.

US troops have since been engaged in various exercises with the Philippines annually.

Adan, whose commission oversees the joint exercises with US troops, also said an increased American presence in the Philippines could help protect the surrounding seas.

"Our concern and everyone's concern in the region is freedom of navigation, to ensure that commerce and trade, commercial shipping go unhampered," he said.

"And the Philippines is in a very strategic location in the region, so it is important that (it) plays a role in that regional geographical configuration."

The Philippines has repeatedly expressed concern about a perceived more aggressive Chinese presence in the South China Sea.

China claims virtually all of the South China Sea, even waters close to the coasts of the Philippines and other Asian countries.

Tensions escalated this year after Philippine and Chinese ships were locked in a stand-off at a disputed shoal in the South China Sea.

The Philippines also accused China of using bullying diplomatic tactics to assert its claims, and sought expressions of support from the United States in its dispute.

Under a mutual defence treaty, the United States is bound to come to the defence of the Philippines if it is attacked.

However, Adan made no direct reference to China.

the Earth provides enough to satisfy everyone's need but not everyone's greed (Gandhi)

Is protecting the environment incompatible with social justice? by George Monbiot

Read more : http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2012/feb/13/protecting-environment-social-justice

When Oxfam investigates the question of whether environment conflicts with development, we should take notice

It is the stick with which the greens are beaten daily: if we spend money on protecting the environment, the poor will starve, or freeze to death, or will go without shoes and education. Most of those making this argument do so disingenuously: they support the conservative or libertarian politics that keep the poor in their place and ensure that the 1% harvest the lion's share of the world's resources.

Journalists writing for the corporate press, with views somewhere to the right of Vlad the Impaler and no prior record of concern for the poor, suddenly become their doughty champions when the interests of the proprietorial class are threatened. If tar sands cannot be extracted in Canada, they maintain, subsistence farmers in Africa will starve. If Tesco's profits are threatened, children will die of malaria. When it is done cleverly, promoting the interests of corporations and the ultra-rich under the guise of concern for the poor is an effective public relations strategy.

Even so, it is true that there is sometimes a clash between environmental policies and social justice, especially when the policies have been poorly designed, as I argued on this blog last month.

But while individual policies can be bad for the poor, is the protection of the environment inherently incompatible with social justice? This is the question addressed in a discussion paper published by Oxfam on Monday.

Oxfam, remember, exists to defend the world's poorest people and help them to escape from poverty. Unlike the rightwing bloggers, it is motivated by genuine concern for social justice. So when it investigates the question of whether concern for the environment conflicts with development, we should take notice. Kate Raworth, who wrote the report, has created an essential template for deciding whether economic activity will help or harm humanity and the biosphere.

She points out that in rough terms we already know how to identify the social justice line below which no one should fall, and the destruction line above which human impacts should not rise.

The social justice line is set by the eleven priorities listed by the governments preparing for this year's Rio summit. These are:

• food security

• adequate income

• clean water and good sanitation

• effective healthcare

• access to education

• decent work

• modern energy services

• resilience to shocks

• gender equality

• social equity

• a voice in democratic politics.

The destruction line is set by the nine planetary boundaries identified in Stockholm in 2009 by a group of earth system scientists. They identified the levels beyond which we endanger the earth's living systems of:

• climate change

• biodiversity loss

• nitrogen and phosphate use

• ozone depletion

• ocean acidification

• freshwater use

• changes in land use

• particles in the atmosphere

• chemical pollution.

We are already living above the line on the first three indicators, and close to it on several others.

The space between these two lines is the "safe and just space for humanity to thrive in". So what happens if everyone below the social justice line rises above it? Does that push us irrevocably over the destruction line? The answer, she shows, is no.

For example, providing enough food for the 13% of the world's people who suffer from hunger means raising world supplies by just 1%.

Providing electricity to the 19% of people who currently have none would raise global carbon emissions by just 1%.

Bringing everyone above the global absolute poverty line ($1.25 a day) would need just 0.2% of global income.

In other words, it is not the needs of the poor that threaten the biosphere, but the demands of the rich. Raworth points out that half the world's carbon emissions are produced by just 11% of its people, while, with grim symmetry, 50% of the world's people produce just 11% of its emissions. Animal feed used in the EU alone, which accounts for just 7% of the world's people, uses up 33% of the planet's sustainable nitrogen budget. "Excessive resource use by the world's richest 10% of consumers," she notes, "crowds out much-needed resource use by billions of other people."

The politically easy way to tackle poverty is to try to raise the living standards of the poor while doing nothing to curb the consumption of the rich. This is the strategy almost all governments follow. It is a formula for environmental disaster, which, in turn, spreads poverty and deprivation. As Oxfam's paper says, social justice is impossible without "far greater global equity in the use of natural resources, with the greatest reductions coming from the world's richest consumers".

This is not to suggest that all measures intended to protect the environment are socially just. Raworth identifies the evictions by biofuels companies and plantation firms harvesting carbon credits as examples of the pursuit of supposedly green policies which harm the poor. But before the sneering starts, remember that the fight against both these blights has been led by environmentalists, who recognised their destructive potential long before the libertarians now using them as evidence of the perfidy of the green movement.

But there are far more cases in which poverty has been exacerbated by the lack of environmental policies. The Oxfam paper points out that crossing any of the nine planetary boundaries can "severely undermine human development, first and foremost for women and men living in poverty." Climate change, for example, is already hammering the lives of some of the world's poorest people. You can see the consequences of crossing another planetary boundary in the report just published by the New Economics Foundation, which shows that overfishing has destroyed around 100,000 jobs.

Just as mistaken green policies can damage the poor, mistaken poverty relief policies can damage the environment. For example, where fertiliser subsidies encourage farmers to use more than they need, as they do in China, money supposed to relieve poverty serves only to pollute the water supply. Development which has no regard for whom or what it harms is not development. It is the opposite of progress, damaging the Earth's capacity to support us and the rest of its living systems.

But extreme poverty, just like extreme wealth, can also damage the environment. People without access to clean energy sources, for example, are often forced to use wood for cooking. This shortens their lives as they inhale the smoke, destroys forests and exacerbates global warming by producing black carbon.

With a few exceptions, none of which should be hard to remedy, delivering social justice and protecting the environment are not only compatible: they are each indispensable to the other. Only through social justice, which must include the redistribution of the world's ridiculously concentrated wealth, can the environment and the lives of the world's poorest be defended.

Those who consume far more resources than they require destroy the life chances of those whose survival depends upon consuming more. As Gandhi said, the Earth provides enough to satisfy everyone's need but not everyone's greed.

monbiot.com

A handwritten letter by Albert Einstein in which he calls religion 'childish' is to be sold at auction - with a starting price of £1.85million.