2013

Happy Birthday Bertolt Brecht – 115 years since February 10, 1898

Even though the German playwright, poet, director and theoretician of the stage was persecuted by the Nazi’s, and then forced to leave his exile home in the US when he was accused of being a communist, he did become a major influence on visual and performance artists such as Jean Luc Godard, Robert Wilson, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Augusto Boal, Pina Bausch, Dario Fo and many others.
His most famous plays, the Threepenny Opera and the Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny were just two of over sixty plays. During the war years, Brecht became a prominent writer of the “Literature in Exile”. He expressed his opposition to the National Socialist and Fascist movements in his most often performed plays: [ . . . ]

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A Quarter Century of Unheeded Warnings: Stephen Schneider Tribute (TWO of TWO)

Schneider gave the opening address at the “Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change” conference at the Hadley Centre in England on February 1, 2005. At the request of the British government 200 scientists convened to counter the refusal of the US administration to acknowledge the urgency of the problems related to climate change.
Data on the accelerated melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and the possible collapse of the Gulf Stream that brings warm waters from the tropic across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe caused the greatest concern – but were not covered in the commercial US media.

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A Quarter Century of Unheeded Warnings: Stephen Schneider Tribute (ONE of TWO)

When the Stanford Professor Stephen Schneider died on a return flight from a climate conference in Sweden in 2010 the world lost one the great and courageous climate scientists. He and Prof. James Hansen risked their careers by researching and publishing on climate change since the 1980s and the world would be a very different place today had their warnings been heeded instead of denied and disparaged.
This conversation was recorded in March 2001 in the garden of Schneider’s home near the Stanford Campus. He had just returned from his work with the IPCC. Thousands of scientists are making contributions that are reviewed by the IPCC and then must be approved line by line by all 120 plus member nations. [ . . . ]

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)

Global Warming – A Quarter Century of Unheeded Warnings

Remembrance of the late Dr. Stephen Schneider
Topics: CO2 now 20% higher than in last half million years; rate of CO2 increase higher than in geologic time; extreme weather; solutions: carbon pricing and equity.
In TUC radio’s last program you heard Hansen’s acceptance speech. This – by extension is my credit to Schneider whose name on the press coverage of the award came up only as a quote: “a Stanford professor who died”. Nothing about his very unique and holistic view based on his expertise in biology and atmospheric science, his ability to describe how climate and life evolved together – and how that process is falling apart as humans are disturbing the earth. And nothing about his work with the Intergovernmental [ . . . ]

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)