EU Unveils Tougher Agenda on Climate Change

Continuing to raise the bar on the global response to climate change, the European Union is striving to make itself “the first economy of the low-carbon age.” By creating a plan that would cost each EU citizen 3 Euros a week the EU may well be on the path to lower emissions by 20%. All of this while the United States plans worthless tax cuts, drives bigger cars and treat the Flintstones like a documentary. So much for world leading superpower.

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A Defense of the Humanities

We cannot count on the humanities alone to create better human beings. Stanley Fish is correct on this account in the first two parts of “The Uses of the Humanities” in the New York Times: http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com. We certainly cannot expect the common reader to view the pre-lapsarian Eden and the ensuing downfall of humanity in Milton’s Paradise Lost and find the value of uncritical adherence to authority and the dangers of worldly temptation. Milton’s reader has interpretive power that lies beyond any sort of authorial intention that he may have had as to the moral and spiritual implications of the work. A reader may readily accept the arguments of Milton’s sexy and rational Satan as the true key to worldly wisdom in the text. Readers likewise might cast aside Milton to find moral virtue in The Turner Diaries or discover fascist themes in Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Literature contains a multitude of ideologies and comments extensively on the human condition but is ultimately ambivalent to simple notions of right and wrong. Thus constructing the humanities as a “civilizing,” or “morally enriching” enterprise is fruitless activity.

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EU Caps Airline Emissions by 2012 – US Takes A Small Step With Energy Bill

EU Ministers have passed carbon emissions quotas on the airline industry. The US, true to delusional form, as threatened legal action. This comes on the heels of the US passing an Energy Bill which contains very limited improvements toward reversing climate manipulation.

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