Thomas Paine's version of "you didn't build that":
"Separate an individual from society,and give him an island or a continent to possess,and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end,in all cases,that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore,of personal property,beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice,of gratitude,and of civilization,a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came"
Submitted by Leah
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Nearly all of these are English-edition daily newspapers. These sites have interesting editorials and essays, and many have links to other good news sources. We try to limit this list to those sites which are regularly updated, reliable, with a high percentage of “up” time.
Fears of decline … a remain demonstrator outside the Houses of Parliament, London. Photograph: Xinhua / Barcroft Images
Earlier this decade we all watched as France entered one of its terminal historical crises. Now it is Britain that has lost definition – or should that be England, or the United Kingdom? No longer can a national intellectual such as George Orwell set down a few thoughts about our aversion to conscription and fascism and our liking for a drink, as he did in 1941 in The Lion and the Unicorn, and we will all nod because we recognise ourselves. What united the inhabitants of Grenfell Tower with the billionaires of Kensington Palace Gardens and the parishioners shuffling into the church of St Mary Abbots every Sunday, other than their residency of the same London borough?
John Major’s “long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs” were greeted with sniggers when the Tory prime minister brought them up in a speech in 1993 (he also mentioned Orwell). Nowadays we measure ourselves against flattering abstractions – liberty, enterprise, tolerance – but these are universal values and may be found more abundantly elsewhere. Only as individuals, or as groups holding little flags of race, gender or sexuality, can we put who we are into words.
Now we have Brexit to contend with and the pessimists think it will break us. Break what, exactly? Ask the historians, for the job of history is to explain our kinship with others and the structures that keep us civil. Here are two very different books to help us through our predicament of botched renewal and recrimination.
The Rise and Fall is a fierce and dazzling account of 20th-century Britain from a historian of science and industry
David Edgerton’s TheRise and Fall of the British Nation is for the most part a fierce and dazzling account of 20th-century Britain from the perspective of a historian of science and industry. As befits an opponent of “declinism”, a syndrome that exaggerates Britain’s fall from grace before proposing implausible “solutions”, Egerton spends the best part of 500 pages arguing that things haven’t been all that bad. Then suddenly, like a cyclist defeated by the final, brutal ascent, he collapses in a heap of cynicism and despair.
Edgerton’s modern Britain didn’t emerge from the empire (itself a pretext for protectionism through imperial preference) but from free trade. In the Edwardian era almost anything could be imported into Britain duty free. The “full English” was made up of Danish bacon, Dutch eggs and bread from Argentinian wheat. Cotton came from the US, iron ore and timber from the continent. “Buy British”, the mantra of more recent years, when domestic agriculture and manufacturing huddled behind tariffs, would have been meaningless.
Beginning in the 1930s, accelerating after the second world war, this changed. From the introduction of national service to protection for car-makers and the rhetoric of nationalism employed by the Attlee government, Britain became more like the nation states of continental Europe. Here, then, is the “rise” of the “nation” – set to a jingoistic score. “We now have the moral leadership of the world … and we shall have people coming here as to a modern Mecca, learning from us in the 20th century as they learned from us in the 17th.” The patriot who uttered these words was Nye Bevan, who was well to the left of Attlee and set up the National Health Service.
Nye Bevan … he was the chief architect of the NHS, which become the undisputed symbol of postwar Britain. Photograph: PA/EMPICS Sports Photo Agency
Causing more national angst than any other institution, the NHS is the undisputed symbol of postwar Britain. Edgerton is disrespectful of the myths. Both major parties exaggerated the resources that went into its establishment in 1948, he finds – the Conservatives alleging waste, Labour boasting of social justice. In fact the cold war and Britain’s obsession with punching “above its weight” meant that it was defence spending, not welfare, that consumed 10% of GDP in the early 1950s – including Attlee’s short second ministry, when Bevan resigned as minister of labour in disgust at the introduction of charges for false teeth and spectacles to pay for arms. In the 1970s Britain’s “warfare state” was better financed than either education or health.
The reader is introduced to declinism as decolonisation proceeds and the nation searches for its USP. Orwell has plausible paternity but Edgerton rounds on CP Snow, who in 1959 famously alleged an elite bias against science and expertise. Nonsense, Edgerton retorts, and he reels off the names of boffins with influence over policy, but the truth is that a lot of costly technical projects failed. Britain’s “independent” nuclear deterrent was abjectly reliant on American technology. Not a single foreign airline bought Concorde. Much postwar mass housing was so shoddy it had to be pulled down.
On the wider question of national failure Edgerton argues that Britain’s pre-eminence in the world was inevitably brief; “the others” were always going to make up the difference. Even then we didn’t just curl up. Our war effort was much more efficient than the prevailing image of Colonel Blimps would have us believe (the subject of Edgerton’s earlier book, Britain’s War Machine). As late as 1950, Britain retained one quarter of the world market in manufactures; between 1950 and 1984 there were just two years without a British Nobel prize. But through the 70s the achievements get fewer and less substantial.
Edgerton’s penultimate chapter, A Nation Lost, is about Thatcher’s Britain. She inherited, “uniquely in British history”, a nation self-sufficient in food and – thanks to North Sea oil – about to become a net energy exporter. She left behind a net importer of manufactures whose assets had been flogged, a riven people increasingly captive to European federalism – anything but the socially conservative Britain with a strong manufacturing base in private hands that she seems to have wanted. Thatcher planted the “bullshit Britain” that was harvested by Blair, a polity simultaneously capable of and vulnerable to centrifugal separatisms even as it encourages “fantasies of transformative revival and distinctiveness”.
Julie Bishop and Malcolm Turnbull at the Liberal party council in Sydney. Bishop has ruled out moving Australia’s Israel embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Photograph: Joel Carrett/AAP
Australia will not be following Donald Trump’s lead and moving its embassy to Jerusalem, Julie Bishop has said, despite strong support from the party’s base.
The Liberal party’s youth arm had called on the government to relocate its embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel’s legislative capital, and to suspend all aid to Palestine “until it terminates its ‘Martyr’s fund”.
The motion, which is non-binding, was carried in a vote 43 to 31, but the foreign minister said there was no chance the government would adopt it as policy. There are 110 council delegates who have voting rights at the national council.
“While I understand the sentiment behind this resolution, the Australian government will not be moving our embassy to Jerusalem,” Bishop said.
“Jerusalem is a final status issue and we have maintained that position for decades and we are doing all we can do to ensure that any support we give to the Palestinian Authority is only used for purposes that we determine.”
Bishop said she had recently written to her Palestinian counterpart to ensure Australian aid, about $43m in the next financial year, was being spent on health, education and governance.
“Our funding to the Palestinian Authority is subject to a memorandum of understanding, defining precisely how it is used and subject to very close audit to ensure that no funds are diverted to the so-called Martyr’s fund,” she said.
But Australia did side with the United States to vote against a UN human rights council motion for an independent investigation into last month’s “March of Return” protest deaths.
In explaining why Australia was the only other nation, other than America, to vote against sending in investigators, Australian officials said they were concerned the investigation “was not independent or impartial.
President Trump defended his praise of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and claimed credit for solving the nuclear threat. In a wide-ranging press appearance, Mr. Trump also said he would not sign a moderate immigration bill and claimed the IG report “exonorated” him. Democratic strategist Lynda Tran, Republican strategist Leslie Sanchez and CBSN political contributor Caitlin Huey-Burns joined CBSN with analysis.
The McGlynn: Obviously he hasn’t “solved” anything. He has gotten almost as far as Presidents have done several times before, and he has done it by giving legitimacy and praise to one of the most brutal dictators in modern history.
Russia inquiry: how Trump’s inner circle could bring him down – video explainer
Donald Trump has falsely claimed a report issued on Thursday by a Department of Justice watchdog “totally exonerates” him of allegations of collusion with Russia or obstruction of justice.
The president also claimed to have the support of “the real FBI. Not the scum on top.”
Trump was responding to the inspector general’s review of the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state – not alleged coordination between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
Nonetheless he attempted to conflate the two, telling reporters at the White House: “I think the report yesterday, maybe more importantly than anything, it totally exonerates me. There was no collusion, there was no obstruction, and if you read the report you’ll see that.”
Trump added: “What you’ll really see is you’ll see bias against me and millions and tens of millions of my followers that is really a disgrace and yet, if you look at the FBI, and you went in and polled the FBI, the real FBI, those guys love me and I love them.”
The investigation of Russian election interference and links between Trump aides and Moscow by special counsel Robert Mueller has, Trump claimed, been “totally discredited”.
The DoJ inspector general’s report found no evidence that the former FBI director James Comey was motivated by political bias and did not fault his decision that Clinton should not face prosecution. It did conclude that he was “insubordinate” in failing to follow protocol and that he himself used a personal email account to conduct official business.
FBI agents were also criticised for making politically charged remarks in text messages. Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who were having an affair at the time, showed a “willingness to take official action to impact” Trump’s election chances, the report said.
Trump rejected the inspector general’s conclusion that there was no political bias in the FBI’s actions. “The end result was wrong,” he said. “There was total bias. That was the most biased set of circumstances I’ve ever seen in my life. Comey was the ringleader of this whole, you know, den of thieves. It was a den of thieves.”
Asked if Comey should be jailed, the president said: “What [Comey] did was criminal. What he did was a terrible thing to the people. What he did was so bad in terms of our constitution, in terms of the wellbeing of our country. What he did was horrible. Should he be locked up? Let somebody make the determination.”
Trump held the impromptu question-and-answer session after appearing on Fox & Friends, the reverently pro-Trump morning show which conducted its broadcast from the North Lawn of the White House.
In a basic and blatant mischaracterisation of the report, Trump said it had shown the FBI was biased against him “at the top level” and was “plotting against my election”. He added: “I’m actually proud because I beat the Clinton dynasty, I beat the Bush dynasty. Now, I guess, hopefully I’m in the process of beating very dishonest intelligence.”
Discussing his supporters, Trump told Fox: “I have the real FBI. Not the scum on top, not Comey and that group of people.” He then repeated a threat to “get involved” with the Department of Justice, a possible move which, though never defined, has prompted alarm among constitutional experts.
Trucks and machinery along routes within the Suncore tar sands site near to Fort McMurray in Northern Alberta. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian
Tar sands are the dirtiest fossil fuels. These are low-quality heavy tar-like oils that are mined from sand or rock. Much of the mining occurs in Alberta Canada, but it is also mined elsewhere, in lesser quantities.
Tar sands are the worst. Not only are they really hard to get out of the ground, requiring enormous amounts of energy; not only are they difficult to transport and to refine; not only are they more polluting than regular oils; they even have a by-product called “petcoke” that’s used in power plants, but is dirtier than regular coal.
This stuff is worse than regular oil, worse than coal, worse than anything. Anyone who is serious about climate change cannot agree to mine and burn tar sands. To maintain climate change below critical thresholds, tar sands need to be left in the ground.
This fact is what motivated me to testify to the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission last November, to inform my state’s ruling commission about the impact of tar sands on the climate. Canadian energy company Enbridge has petitioned to put a pipeline through my state to carry this dirty tar to refining sites on the coast.
The proposed pipeline is called “Line 3.” The pipeline would carry approximately 760,000 barrels per day – the new pipeline would make it easier and cheaper for the oil companies to transport tar sands and consequently, would boost their bottom line. We already move over two million barrels per day through Minnesota in Enbridge pipelines. This new pipeline would encourage them to extract and sell more tar sands.
So, how much pollution would this pipeline carry? 170bn kilograms of carbon dioxide each year. The emissions are equal to approximately 50 coal power plants. These are huge numbers, but more importantly, approval of pipelines like this make it more likely that all of the tar sands in Alberta will be extracted. If that happens, global temperatures will increase by approximately 0.65°F (0.36°C). An astonishing number – approximately three decades worth of global warming.
If you care about climate change, then it is not logically possible to approve any pipeline or other infrastructure that may further worsen our climate. We are already screwing up the climate enough as it is.
The decision-making body in my state has heard climate arguments before. In fact, in 2016, the same body ruled against the coal giant Peabody. That ruling decided that fossil fuel companies low-balled the social cost of carbon. Back then, Peabody brought in a group of climate contrarians to argue their nonsense. My colleagues and I were able to convince the Commission that the facts were clear – we are causing climate change, and our decisions today can make tomorrow’s climate worse. This ruling was used when evaluating the social cost of carbon pollution for a new Line 3 pipeline. A judge found that emissions from this project would impose $287bn in social costs over 30 years……………I would hate to be a fossil fuel lawyer, or executive, or lawmaker who fights for climate destruction today and has to justify his actions to his kids tomorrow. History will be a very harsh judge to them; but of course it will be too late for the rest of us.
I’ve said this before and I will say it again, if we cannot say no to tar sands, what can we say no to?
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