Critique of Resonance Project

SUBHEAD: This is the usual guano that you get from cranks and charlatans and the out and out con merchants.

[ID Editor note: As most techno-optimist efforts turn out -  they are "too good to be true". This project has had some detractors going back a few years. I'm still looking to find new and clear scientific opinions on the Nassim Haramein's work, but right now it looks as real as desktop cold-fusion did in 1989]

By VDewan on 1 February 2010 for Sceptic's Guide to the Universe -
(http://sguforums.com/index.php?topic=11897.0)


Image above: Nassim Haramein works his cosmological magic on Waimea Canyon, on Kauai, hawaii. This is a still from the Resonance Project Foundation video From (http://youtu.be/bn35qoCjLYA).

I found a physics website that basically does rip this guy (Nassim Haramein and the Resonance Project) to shreds.  Here's what I emailed my friend about it a few weeks ago:

I've plucked out some key quotes.  However, they go into much more detail about the math and the general concepts. [IB Editor's note: www.sciencefile.org is no longer linking to these quotes.]

This is just utter, utter garbage, produced by someone that doesn't understand the basics of the relevant physics, who is too dumb to realize the profundity of their own misunderstanding -- or someone who is just plain lazy, and thinks that pretty pictures, wishful thinking, and misunderstood poor analogies is some sort of alternative to doing the hard physics and the hard maths. 

(http://www.sciencefile.org/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1251881447/20)

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Bottom line: what testable predictions does this 'fractal model' of black holes make, which could demonstrate it to be a better theory than the standard Einsteinian one?
(http://www.sciencefile.org/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1251881447/40)

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Responding to the above: Except we have the even-bottomer line -- does the model as stated make sense, before we worry about what predictions it makes!

(http://www.sciencefile.org/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1251881447/40)

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Regarding Haramein's claims about angular momentum and spin: As for spin, we have no reason to believe that angular momentum was ever not conserved, so the net angular momentum of the universe will be exactly the same now as it ever was, big bang or not. The spins of individual elements are of no cosmic importance. All friction or collision does, is to redistribute angular momentum between interacting bodies without altering the total.

More about Spin: Why spin? Well, in maths terms, because the Poincare group describes basic symmetries of physics (translations and rotations plus boosts). Given that, any particle theory we write down will be written down in terms of objects that correspond to representations of this group -- hence they will be objects with definite spin. You don't need anything to start them spinning, spin matters because direction DOESN'T.

Same goes for conservation of energy, conservation of linear momentum, conservation of angular momentum -- rather than being weird things that might not have been true, there are instead a result  of the fundamental symmetries of physics within a spacetime.

And those symmetries are kind of the obvious things -- that physics doesn't depend on where or when you are, or which direction you are pointing. Start from those extremely simple statements, and the conservation laws and significance of spin for particles all follows.

And anyone who knows anything about the standard model (either cosmology, or the standard model of particle physics), knows those very basic facts as to why something like angular momentum/spin matters. And trying to witter on about it as if it is some great mystery is just the purest twaddle, born of almost total ignorance.

[Further, regarding Haramein's theory]: This is the usual guano that you get from cranks and charlatans (and the straight forward out and out con merchants!).

No point in worrying about the basics? Anyone with half a brain cell can see that to improve something, you have to understand what current theory is in detail, and why it does not work. Trying to improve upon it without understanding it is just folly. Sounds more like religion, frankly.

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Regarding four papers posted on The Renonance Project website:
[IB Editor's note: www.resonanceproject.org site no longer exists. It is now (http://resonance.is/)]

http://www.theresonanceproject.org/pdf/torque_paper.pdf

http://www.theresonanceproject.org/pdf/quaternions_spinors_twistors_paper.pdf

http://www.theresonanceproject.org/pdf/scalinglaw_paper.pdf

http://www.theresonanceproject.org/pdf/plasma_paper.pdf

I have looked at this website and some of the articles for general public on there -- and they're crap. Not just  bad, but wrong.

Further regarding the papers:

I started with the first one, and found it appallingly badly written.

Ditto the others. And a notable lack of proper peer-reviewed papers -- seems Raushcer has been more occupied producing papers with Targ claiming to explain ESP: "Although we do not presently understand the detailed mechanisms underlying psychical abilities, thousands of experiments have been carried out successfully in dozens of laboratories around the world establishing the existence of some form of ESP."  Which suggests to me that her scientific credibility is not that high, if she can happily make such a claim.

Scaling law -- same numerology as in Schwarzschild proton paper. In fact, very little content, a lot recycled, and very little actually explained.

Why not? Because they don't need to! Rope in a few long in the tooth physicists, produce some papers with sexy sounding titles that your followers can neither understand nor want to, and then you just tell them what it all means:

"This view allows us to recognize that we are embedded in a fractal feedback dynamic that intrinsically connects all things via the medium of a vacuum structure of infinite potential. This research has far reaching implications in a variety of fields including theoretical and applied physics, cosmology, quantum mechanics, biology, chemistry, sociology, psychology, archaeology, anthropology, etc."

See? You add the word fractal and you gain a whole new load of potential devotees! They don't understand any of the supposed physics, but who cares as long as they keep singing your praises and keep buying your DVDs.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Quantum Gravity & Holographic Mass 5/21/13
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Wrong Mountain and Ahupuaa

SUBHEAD: More meetings on Kahili Horizontal Directional-Drilled Well & Energy Project.

By Hope Kallai on 20 May 2013 In Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2013/05/wrong-mountain-and-ahupuaa.html)


Image above: Kahili Mountain Park. From (http://www.kahilipark.org/).

Oops! We really didn't mean Waialeale!

Really?

We meant Kahili Mountain"

So says the Kauai Department of Water.

Technical errors made the head of the department, David Craddick, leave the meeting before anybody realized that they were talking about the wrong mountain, the wrong ahupua`a, with the wrong potential impacts.

The Department of Water has scheduled another round of meetings to better explain this proposed project.  It is unclear whether the past meetings with misinformation provided by Kauai DOW should count as part of public testimony and comments.

However, according to the Department of Water website the EIS Preparation Notice comment period is closed but we still would welcome and appreciate all suggestions and comments.

Nobody wants high water pump costs.  Nobody wants to drink poisoned water. We should take a hard look at how we use our water and why it is toxic.  Drilling deeper to escape the poisons makes no sense if you continue to poison the water source.

This proposal will impact everybody on this island, now and in the future.  Your involvement is important.

Kauai DOW Press Release

By Joy Buccat, DOW Public Relations Specialist on 15 May 2013 -

The Department of Water (DOW) announced that it will hold public informational meetings around the island to discuss the Kahili Horizontal Directional-Drilled (HDD) Well & Energy Savings Project.

Interested community members that would like to learn more about the proposed project, that seeks to reduce power costs by not requiring electricity for the production and distribution of potable water, are welcome. Anyone with other water related concerns are also encouraged to attend a meeting in their community.

The meetings will be held as follows:

WHEN & WHERE:
Tuesday, May 28th, Hanalei Elementary School Cafeteria, 6:00-8:00 p.m.

Wednesday, May 29th, Lihue Neighborhood Center, 6:00-8:00 p.m.

Thursday, May 30th, Koloa Neighborhood Center, 6:00-8:00 p.m.

Friday, May 31th, Kilauea Neighborhood Center, 5:00-7:00 p.m.

Wednesday, June 5th, Kapaa Neighborhood Center, 6:30-8:30 p.m.

Additional meetings in the Kekaha, Hanapēpē and Kalāheo areas will be announced as soon as the details have been finalized.

CONTACT:
Joy Buccat, public relations specialist
Phone: 245-5461    Fax: 246-8628
Email: jbuccat@kauaiwater.org


The electricity used by DOW for pumping and overall water treatment amounts to roughly $2.5 million annually in the Lihue-Kapaa system.

According to DOW’s Manager and Chief Engineer David Craddick, “a high-level well would not only eliminate the need for pumping, and therefore reduce our energy costs, but would also provide water that will not require the extensive treatment we now pay for.”

Both of these costs are predicted to rise significantly in the future. “The DOW believes this project reflects our mission to provide safe, affordable, and sufficient drinking water to our customers.”

If a higher-level source of clean water could be tapped, DOW may be able to close existing vertical wells and surface water treatment facilities that require expensive electrical power for pumping.

• Auxiliary aids and services at DOW meetings are available upon request. A request for reasonable accommodations should be made no later than five working days prior to the needed accommodations. Please call the department at 245-5408 for assistance.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: No to Horizontal Drilling 4/11/13


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Quantim Gravity & Holographic Mass

SUBHEAD: A groundbreaking paper from Kauai sheds light on the theory of gravity with the potential to impact global issues.

By Susan Kornacki on 7 May 2013 for the Resonance Project Foundation -
(http://resonance.is/explore/quantum-gravity-and-the-holographic-mass-trailer-and-press-release/)


Image above: Promotional photo of Nassim Haramein. From Resonance website.

[IB Editor's note: For an example of peer review history see (http://www.sciencedomain.org/review-history.php?iid=224&id=4&aid=1298) for a critique see (http://sguforums.com/index.php?topic=11897.0)]

A groundbreaking paper published last week sheds new light on the theory of gravity and the potential to significantly impact global issues facing the human race, including alternative energy sources.

Nassim Haramein, Director of Research at the Hawaii Institute for Unified Physics (HIUP), has authored a paper titled “Quantum Gravity and the Holographic Mass,” which has been validated and published in the peer review journal, Physical Review and Research International. This paper discusses Haramein’s “Connected Universe” theory, which offers a new and alternative understanding of gravity through basic algebraic and geometric equations.

Haramein’s work indicates everything in the universe is connected, from the largest to the smallest scale, through a unified understanding of gravity. He demonstrates that it is the space that defines matter and not matter that defines space.

“Remember that matter is made up of 99.9 percent space,” Haramein said. “Quantum field theory states that the structure of spacetime itself, at the extremely small level, vibrates with tremendous intensity. If we were to extract even a small percentage of all the energy held within the vibrations present in the space inside your little finger, it would represent enough energy to supply the world’s needs for hundreds of years. This new discovery has the potential to open up access and harness that energy like never before, which would revolutionize life as we know it today.”

At the basis of Haramein’s research is a bold prediction about the charge radius of the proton, which was recently verified by experiment. Less than a month after Haramein sent his paper to the Library of Congress, the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland released a new measurement for the size of the proton, confirming Haramein’s prediction.

“Protons are the primary building blocks of our universe – they are at the center of every atom and therefore are everywhere and in everything,” said Chris Almida, Executive Director of the Resonance Project Foundation, parent organization of HIUP. “It is critical that we accurately understand proton structure if we are to even begin to understand the ‘connected universe.’ Nassim's prediction was confirmed and is exactly right (within the margin of error of the experiment), whereas the Standard Model theory is off by a significant amount.” Almida continued, “If Nassim’s theory is correct, insight into solving some of mankind’s most prevalent problems could be within our grasp.”

Haramein’s approach could potentially unlock new discoveries in the areas of energy, transportation and even space travel.

A twenty minute documentary from filmmaker, Malcom Carter, illustrates these new ideas in a compelling fashion. View the trailer at Resonance.is. More information, visual media and a layman's paper will be released through The Resonance Project Foundation’s website, Resonance.is and HIUP, the official site of the Hawaii Institute of Unified Physics.

For a Science Press Release, visit the Hawaii Institute of Unified Physics website.

The Resonance Project Foundation is a 501c3 non-profit organization chartered to conduct research and education in the field of unified physics. The Foundation’s initiatives include The Hawaii Institute for Unified Physics (HIUP), a growing scientific research community working to advance the principles on the forefront of the unified field theory. For more information, visit Resonance.is.

Media Contact:
Susan Kornacki
Email: media@hiup.org
Voice: (408) 676-9969

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Critique of Resonance Project 5/22/13
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Centralization and Sociopathology

SUBHEAD: Concentrated power and wealth are intrinsically sociopathological by their very nature.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 20 May 2013 for Of Two Minds -
(http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/centralization-and-sociopathology.html)


Image above: The charm of the 1980's style sociopath. From (http://pandodaily.com/2013/03/21/the-allure-of-sociopaths/).

I have long spoken of the dangers inherent to centralization of power and the extreme concentrations of wealth centralization inevitably creates.

• The Master Narrative Nobody Dares Admit: Centralization Has Failed (June 21, 2012)
• The Solution to Concentrated Power: Decentralize, Diffuse and Devolve Power (June 22, 2012)
• To Fix Healthcare, Let 100 Solutions Bloom (February 26, 2013)

Longtime contributor C.D. recently highlighted another danger of centralization:sociopaths/psychopaths excel in organizations that centralize power, and their ability to flatter, browbeat and manipulate others greases their climb to the top.

In effect, centralization is tailor-made for sociopaths gaining power. Sociopaths seek power over others, and centralization gives them the perfect avenue to control over millions or even entire nations.

Even worse (from the view of non-sociopaths), their perverse abilities are tailor-made for excelling in office and national politics via ruthless elimination of rivals and enemies and grandiose appeals to national greatness, ideological purity, etc.

As C.D. points out, the ultimate protection against sociopathology is to minimize the power held in any one agency, organization or institution:

After you watch these films on psychopaths, I think you'll have an even greater understanding of why your premise of centralization is a key problem of our society.

Defense Against the Psychopath (video, 37 minutes; the many photos of political, religious and secular leaders will likely offend many/most; if you look past these outrages, there is useful information here)

The Sociopath Next Door (video (only audio), 37 minutes)

The first film points out that psychopaths generally thrive in the corporate/government top-down organization (I have seen it happen in my agency, unfortunately) and that when they come to power, their values (or lack thereof) tend to pervade the organization to varying degrees. In some cases, they end up creating secondary psychopaths which is kind of like a spiritual/moral disease that infects people.  

If we are to believe the premise in the film that there are always psychopaths among us in small numbers, it follows then that we must limit the power of any one institution, whether it's private or public, so that the damage created by psychopaths is limited.  

It is very difficult for many people to fathom that there are people in our society that are that evil, for lack of a better term, and it is even harder for many people in society to accept that people in the higher strata of our society can exhibit these dangerous traits. 

The same goes for criminal behavior. From my studies, it's pretty clear that criminality is fairly constant throughout the different levels of our society and yet, it is the lower classes that are subjected to more scrutiny by law enforcement. 

The disparity between blue collar and white collar crime is pretty evident when one looks at arrests and sentencing. The total lack of effective enforcement against politically connected banks over the last few years is astounding to me and it sets a dangerous precedent. Corruption and psychopathy go hand in hand.  

A less dark reason for avoiding over centralization is that we have to be aware of normal human fallibility. Nobody possesses enough information, experience, ability, lack of bias, etc. to always make the right decisions.

As C.D. observes, once sociopaths rule an organization or nation, they create a zombie army of secondary sociopaths beneath them as those who resist are undermined, banished, fired or exterminated. If there is any lesson to be drawn from Iraq, it is how a single sociopath can completely undermine and destroy civil society by empowering secondary sociopaths and eliminating or marginalizing anyone who dares to cling to their humanity, conscience and independence.

"Going along to get along" breeds passive acceptance of sociopathology as "the new normal" and mimicry of the values and techniques of sociopathology as the ambitious and fearful (i.e. almost everyone) scramble to emulate the "successful" leadership.

Organizations can be perverted into institutionalizing sociopathology via sociopathological goals and rules of conduct. Make the metric of success in war a body count of dead "enemy combatants" and you'll soon have dead civilians stacked like cordwood as proof of every units' outstanding success.

Make lowering unemployment the acme of policy success and soon every agency will be gaming and manipulating data to reach that metric of success. Make higher grades the metric of academic success and soon every kid is getting a gold star and an A or B.

Centralization has another dark side: those ensconced in highly concentrated centers of power (for example, The White House) are in another world, and they find it increasingly easy to become isolated from the larger context and to slip into reliance on sycophants, toadies (i.e. budding secondary sociopaths) and "experts" (i.e. apparatchiks and factotums) who are equally influenced by the intense "high" of concentrated power/wealth.

Increasingly out of touch with those outside the circle of power, those within the circle slide into a belief in the superiority of their knowledge, skills and awareness--the very definition of sociopathology.

Even worse (if that is possible), the incestuous nature of the tight circle of power breeds a uniformity of opinion and ideology that creates a feedback loop that marginalizes dissenters and those with open minds. Dissenters are soon dismissed--"not a team player"-- or trotted out for PR purposes, i.e. as evidence the administration maintains ties to the outside world.

Those few dissenters who resist the siren song of power soon face a choice: either quietly quit "to pursue other opportunities" (the easy way out) or quit in a blast of public refutation of the administration's policies.

Public dissenters are quickly crucified by those in power, and knowing this fate awaits any dissenter places a powerful disincentive on "going public" about the sociopathology of the inner circle of power.

On rare occasions, an insider has the courage and talent to secure documentation that details the sociopathology of a policy, agency or administration (for example, Daniel Ellsberg and The Pentagon Papers).

Nothing infuriates a sociopath or a sociopathological organization more than the exposure of their sociopathology, and so those in power will stop at nothing to silence, discredit, criminalize or eliminate the heroic whistleblower.

In these ways, centralized power is itself is a sociopathologizing force. We cannot understand the present devolution of our civil society, economy and ethics unless we understand that concentrated power and wealth are intrinsically sociopathological by their very nature.

The solution: a culture of decentralization, transparency and open competition, what I call the DATA model (Decentralized, Adaptive, Transparent and Accountable) in my book Why Things Are Falling Apart and What We Can Do About It.

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State Department promotes GMOs

SUBHEAD: US taxpayers are footing the bill for State Department heavy promotion of GMO crops overseas.

By Carey Gillam om 14 May 2013 for Huffington Post -
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/14/monsanto-gmo-crops-taxpayers-overseas_n_3272136.html)


Image above: State Department Secretary Hillary Clinton in profile. From (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2012/12/17/rush-limbaughs-obsession-with-hillary-clinton/).

Monsanto interests mentioned in US State Department overseas cables.

U.S. taxpayers are footing the bill for overseas lobbying that promotes controversial biotech crops developed by Monsanto Corporation and other seed makers, a report issued on Tuesday said.

A review of 926 diplomatic cables of correspondence to and from the U.S. State Department and embassies in more than 100 countries found that State Department officials actively promoted the commercialization of specific biotech seeds, according to the report issued by Food & Water Watch, a nonprofit consumer protection group.

The officials tried to quash public criticism of particular companies and facilitated negotiations between foreign governments and seed companies such as Monsanto over issues like patents and intellectual property, the report said.

The cables show U.S. diplomats supporting Monsanto, the world's largest seed company, in foreign countries even after it paid $1.5 million in fines after being charged with bribing an Indonesian official and violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in 2005.

One 2009 cable shows the embassy in Spain seeking "high-level U.S. government intervention" at the "urgent request" of Monsanto to combat biotech crop opponents there, according to the Food & Water Watch report.

The report covered cables from 2005-2009 that were released by Wikileaks in 2010 as part of a much larger release by Wikileaks of a range of diplomatic cables it obtained.

Monsanto spokesman Tom Helscher said Monsanto believes it is critical to maintain an open dialogue with government authorities and trade groups in other countries.

"We remain committed to sharing information so that individuals can better understand our business and our commitments to support farmers throughout the world as they work to meet the agriculture demands of our world's growing population," he said.

State Department officials had no immediate comment when contacted about the report.

Food & Water Watch said the cables it examined provide a detailed account of how far the State Department goes to support and promote the interests of the agricultural biotech industry, which has had a hard time gaining acceptance in many foreign markets.

"It really goes beyond promoting the U.S.'s biotech industry and agriculture," said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch. "It really gets down to twisting the arms of countries and working to undermine local democratic movements that may be opposed to biotech crops, and pressuring foreign governments to also reduce the oversight of biotech crops."

But U.S. officials, Monsanto and many other companies and industry experts routinely say that biotech crops are needed around the world to increase global food production as population expands. They maintain that the crops are safe and make farming easier and more environmentally sustainable.

The cables show that State Department officials directed embassies to "troubleshoot problematic legislation" that might hinder biotech crop development and to "encourage the development and commercialization of ag-biotech products".

The State Department also produced pamphlets in Slovenia promoting biotech crops, sent pro-biotech DVDs to high schools in Hong Kong and helped bring foreign officials and media from 17 countries to the United States to promote biotech agriculture, Food & Water Watch said.

Genetically altered crops are widely used in the United States. Crops spliced with DNA from other species are designed to resist pests and tolerate chemical applications, and since their introduction in the mid 1990s have come to dominate millions of acres of U.S. farmland.

The biotech crops are controversial with some groups and in many countries because some studies have shown harmful health impacts for humans and animals, and the crops have been associated with some environmental problems.

They also generally are more expensive than conventional crops, and the biotech seed developers patent the high-tech seeds so farmers using them have to buy new seed every season, a factor that makes them unappealing in some developing nations.

Many countries ban planting of biotech crops or have strict labeling requirements.

"It's appalling that the State Department is complicit in supporting their (the biotech seed industry's) goals despite public and government opposition in several countries," said Ronnie Cummins, executive director of nonprofit organization Organic Consumers Association.

"American taxpayer's money should not be spent advancing the goals of a few giant biotech companies."

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Consumers - Please don't!

SUBHEAD: Dear American Consumers: Please don’t start eating healthfully. sincerely, the Food Industry.

By Patrick Mustain on 19 May 2013 for Scientific American -
(http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/05/19/dear-american-consumers-please-dont-start-eating-healthfully-sincerely-the-food-industry/)


Image above: Looks like home, but this is a supermarket snack aisle in South Korea. From (http://iconicseoul.blogspot.com/2012/07/scary.html).

A disturbing trend has come to our attention. You, the people, are thinking more about health, and you’re starting to do something about it. This cannot continue.

Sure, there’s always been talk of health in America. We often encourage it. The thing is, we only want you to think about and talk about health in a certain way—equating health with how you look, instead of outcomes like quality of life and reduced disease risk. Your superficial understanding of health has a great influence over your purchasing decisions, and we’re ready for it, whether you choose to go low-calorie, low-fat, gluten-free or inevitably give up and accept the fact that you can’t resist our Little Debbie snacks, potato chips and ice cream novelties.

Whatever the current health trend, we respond by developing and marketing new products. We can also show you how great some of our current products are and always have been. For example, when things were not looking so good for fat, our friends at Welch’s were able to point out that their chewy fruit snacks were a fat free option. Low fat! Healthy! Then the tide turned against carbohydrates. Our friends in meat and dairy were happy to show that their steaks, meats and cheeses were low-carb choices. Low carbs! Healthy!

But we’re getting uneasy.

In 2009, Congress commissioned the Inter-agency Working Group (IWG) to develop standards for advertising foods to children. The IWG included the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Congress identified these organizations as having “expertise and experience in child nutrition, child health, psychology, education, marketing and other fields relevant to food and beverage marketing and child nutrition standards.”

We were dismayed when the IWG released its report in 2011. The guidelines said that foods advertised to children must provide “a meaningful contribution to a healthful diet.” For example, any food marketed to children must “contain at least 50% by weight one or more of the following: fruit; vegetable; whole grain; fat-free or low-fat milk or yogurt; fish; extra lean meat or poultry; eggs; nuts and seeds; or beans.”

This report was potentially devastating. These organizations, experts in nutrition, were officially outlining what constituted “a meaningful contribution to a healthful diet.” Thankfully, we have a ton of money and were able to use it to get the IWG to withdraw the guidelines.

In a public comment posted on the FTC website, our friends at General Mills pointed out that under the IWG guidelines, the most commonly consumed foods in the US would be considered unhealthy. Specifically, according to General Mills, “of the 100 most commonly consumed foods and beverages in America, 88 would fail the IWG’s proposed standards.” So you see? If you people start eating the way the nutrition experts at the CDC and USDA recommend that you eat, that would delegitimize almost 90 percent of the products we produce! Do you realize how much money that would cost us?

According to the General Mills letter, if everyone in the US started eating healthfully, it would cost us $503 billion per year! That might affect our ability to pay CEOs like General Mills’ Ken Powell annual compensations of more than $12 million.

But revamping the food environment will also cost you money. The General Mills letter stated “a shift by the average American to the IWG diet would conservatively increase the individual’s annual food spending by $1,632.” Sure, we’ve heard talk about costs to the individual that arise from being obese. One 2010 paper from the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services estimated that the annual costs to an individual for being obese can be upwards of $8,000. We like to think of this as a small price to pay for consumer freedom.

Of course, we don’t necessarily want you to be unhealthy. It’s just that it’s so much more profitable to provide foods that happen to be unhealthy. We’ve been able to industrialize the food system so that we can produce massive amounts of the cheapest ingredients available, in the cheapest, most efficient way possible.

On top of that, we understand human biology. Humans evolved in situations in which food was scarce. This led to an evolutionary adaptation that causes you to crave salty, sugary and fatty foods. Consuming foods with these characteristics actually lights up the same pleasure centers in the brain as cocaine. Who wouldn’t play upon that biological craving to increase profits? If one company didn’t, their competitors would, so we all kind of have to do it.

We are also able to provide you with perceived value. Because it doesn’t cost us that much more to make a soda, say, 42 ounces instead of 22, we can almost double the size of a beverage and only charge you 20 percent more. How could you resist a deal like that? You can’t. Trust us, we know.

So you see, dear consumer, everything is fine. We’ve got a good thing going here. There’s no need for you to start worrying about the industrial food system. If you do start thinking about your weight, check out our line of Healthy Choice frozen meals. If that doesn’t work, our friends over in the pharmaceutical industry, the health and fitness industry and the healthcare industry will be happy to help you to continue to fulfill your role as an American Consumer.

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High Plains Go Dry

SUBHEAD: “I’ve raised 294 bushels of corn per acre there before, with water and the Lord’s help.” Now, he said, “it’s over.”

By Michael Wines on 19 May 2013 for the New York Times -
(http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/us/high-plains-aquifer-dwindles-hurting-farmers.html)


Image above: Ashley Yost's grandfather struck an artery of water so prodigious that he could pump 1,600 gallons  to the surface every minute. That's over now. From original article.

Forty-nine years ago, Ashley Yost’s grandfather sank a well deep into a half-mile square of rich Kansas farmland. He struck an artery of water so prodigious that he could pump 1,600 gallons to the surface every minute.

Last year, Mr. Yost was coaxing just 300 gallons from the earth, and pumping up sand in order to do it. By harvest time, the grit had robbed him of $20,000 worth of pumps and any hope of returning to the bumper harvests of years past.

“That’s prime land,” he said not long ago, gesturing from his pickup at the stubby remains of last year’s crop. “I’ve raised 294 bushels of corn an acre there before, with water and the Lord’s help.” Now, he said, “it’s over.”

The land, known as Section 35, sits atop the High Plains Aquifer, a waterlogged jumble of sand, clay and gravel that begins beneath Wyoming and South Dakota and stretches clear to the Texas Panhandle. The aquifer’s northern reaches still hold enough water in many places to last hundreds of years. But as one heads south, it is increasingly tapped out, drained by ever more intensive farming and, lately, by drought.

Vast stretches of Texas and Kansas farmland lying over the High Plains Aquifer no longer support irrigation.

Vast stretches of Texas farmland lying over the aquifer no longer support irrigation. In west-central Kansas, up to a fifth of the irrigated farmland along a 100-mile swath of the aquifer has already gone dry. In many other places, there no longer is enough water to supply farmers’ peak needs during Kansas’ scorching summers.

And when the groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the aquifer would require hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains.

This is in many ways a slow-motion crisis — decades in the making, imminent for some, years or decades away for others, hitting one farm but leaving an adjacent one untouched. But across the rolling plains and tarmac-flat farmland near the Kansas-Colorado border, the effects of depletion are evident everywhere. Highway bridges span arid stream beds. Most of the creeks and rivers that once veined the land have dried up as 60 years of pumping have pulled groundwater levels down by scores and even hundreds of feet.

On some farms, big center-pivot irrigators — the spindly rigs that create the emerald circles of cropland familiar to anyone flying over the region — now are watering only a half-circle. On others, they sit idle altogether.

Two years of extreme drought, during which farmers relied almost completely on groundwater, have brought the seriousness of the problem home. In 2011 and 2012, the Kansas Geological Survey reports, the average water level in the state’s portion of the aquifer dropped 4.25 feet — nearly a third of the total decline since 1996.

And that is merely the average. “I know my staff went out and re-measured a couple of wells because they couldn’t believe it,” said Lane Letourneau, a manager at the State Agriculture Department’s water resources division. “There was a 30-foot decline.”

Kansas agriculture will survive the slow draining of the aquifer — even now, less than a fifth of the state’s farmland is irrigated in any given year — but the economic impact nevertheless will be outsized. In the last federal agriculture census of Kansas, in 2007, an average acre of irrigated land produced nearly twice as many bushels of corn, two-thirds more soybeans and three-fifths more wheat than did dry land.

Farmers will take a hit as well. Raising crops without irrigation is far cheaper, but yields are far lower. Drought is a constant threat: the last two dry-land harvests were all but wiped out by poor rains.

In the end, most farmers will adapt to farming without water, said Bill Golden, an agriculture economist at Kansas State University. “The revenue losses are there,” he said. “But they’re not as tremendously significant as one might think.”

Some already are. A few miles west of Mr. Yost’s farm, Nathan Kells cut back on irrigation when his wells began faltering in the last decade, and shifted his focus to raising dairy heifers — 9,000 on that farm, and thousands more elsewhere. At about 12 gallons a day for a single cow, Mr. Kells can sustain his herd with less water than it takes to grow a single circle of corn.

“The water’s going to flow to where it’s most valuable, whether it be industry or cities or feed yards,” he said. “We said, ‘What’s the higher use of the water?’ and decided that it was the heifer operation.”

The problem, others say, is that when irrigation ends, so do the jobs and added income that sustain rural communities.

“Looking at areas of Texas where the groundwater has really dropped, those towns are just a shell of what they once were,” said Jim Butler, a hydrogeologist and senior scientist at the Kansas Geological Survey.

The villain in this story is in fact the farmers’ savior: the center-pivot irrigator, a quarter- or half-mile of pipe that traces a watery circle around a point in the middle of a field. The center pivots helped start a revolution that raised farming from hardscrabble work to a profitable business.

Since the pivots’ debut some six decades ago, the amount of irrigated cropland in Kansas has grown to nearly three million acres, from a mere 250,000 in 1950. But the pivot irrigators’ thirst for water — hundreds and sometimes thousands of gallons a minute — has sent much of the aquifer on a relentless decline. And while the big pivots have become much more efficient, a University of California study earlier this year concluded that Kansas farmers were using some of their water savings to expand irrigation or grow thirstier crops, not to reduce consumption.

A shift to growing corn, a much thirstier crop than most, has only worsened matters. Driven by demand, speculation and a government mandate to produce biofuels, the price of corn has tripled since 2002, and Kansas farmers have responded by increasing the acreage of irrigated cornfields by nearly a fifth.

At an average 14 inches per acre in a growing season, a corn crop soaks up groundwater like a sponge — in 2010, the State Agriculture Department said, enough to fill a space a mile square and nearly 2,100 feet high.

Sorghum, or milo, gets by on a third less water, Kansas State University researchers say — and it, too, is in demand by biofuel makers. As Kansas’ wells peter out, more farmers are switching to growing milo on dry land or with a comparative sprinkle of irrigation water.

But as long as there is enough water, most farmers will favor corn. “The issue that often drives this is economics,” said David W. Hyndman, who heads Michigan State University’s geological sciences department. “And as long as you’ve got corn that’s $7, then a lot of choices get made on that.”

Of the 800 acres that Ashley Yost farmed last year in Haskell County, about 70 percent was planted in corn, including roughly 125 acres in Section 35. Haskell County’s feedlots — the county is home to 415,000 head of cattle — and ethanol plants in nearby Liberal and Garden City have driven up the price of corn handsomely, he said.

But this year he will grow milo in that section, and hope that by ratcheting down the speed of his pump, he will draw less sand, even if that means less water, too. The economics of irrigation, he said, almost dictate it.

“You’ve got $20,000 of underground pipe,” he said. “You’ve got a $10,000 gas line. You’ve got a $10,000 irrigation motor. You’ve got an $89,000 pivot. And you’re going to let it sit there and rot?

“If you can pump 150 gallons, that’s 150 gallons Mother Nature is not giving us. And if you can keep a milo crop alive, you’re going to do it.”

Mr. Yost’s neighbors have met the prospect of dwindling water in starkly different ways. A brother is farming on pivot half-circles. A brother-in-law moved most of his operations to Iowa. Another farmer is suing his neighbors, accusing them of poaching water from his slice of the aquifer.

A fourth grows corn with an underground irrigation system that does not match the yields of water-wasting center-pivot rigs, but is far thriftier in terms of water use and operating costs.

For his part, Mr. Yost continues to pump. But he also allowed that the day may come when sustaining what is left of the aquifer is preferable to pumping as much as possible.

Sitting in his Ford pickup next to Section 35, he unfolded a sheet of white paper that tracked the decline of his grandfather’s well: from 1,600 gallons a minute in 1964, to 1,200 in 1975, to 750 in 1976.

When the well slumped to 500 gallons in 1991, the Yosts capped it and drilled another nearby. Its output sank, too, from 1,352 gallons to 300 today.

This year, Mr. Yost spent more than $15,000 to drill four test wells in Section 35. The best of them produced 195 gallons a minute — a warning, he said, that looking further for an isolated pocket of water would be costly and probably futile.

“We’re on the last kick,” he said. “The bulk water is gone.”
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The Case for Hope

SUBHEAD: Of course there is no way forward now. You walk the path into being, you make the way, and if you do it well, others can follow the route.

By Rebecca Solnit on 19 May 2013 for Tom Dispatch  -
(http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175701/tomgram%3A_rebecca_solnit%2C_what_comes_after_hope)


Image above: Trekking through Malaysia in March 2012. From (http://samandkaty.wordpress.com/2012/03/15/food-glorious-food/).

Ten years ago, my part of the world was full of valiant opposition to the new wars being launched far away and at home -- and of despair. And like despairing people everywhere, whether in a personal depression or a political tailspin, these activists believed the future would look more or less like the present. If there was nothing else they were confident about, at least they were confident about that. Ten years ago, as a contrarian and a person who prefers not to see others suffer, I tried to undermine despair with the case for hope.

A decade later, the present is still contaminated by the crimes of that era, but so much has changed. Not necessarily for the better -- a decade ago, most spoke of climate change as a distant problem, and then it caught up with us in 10,000 ways. But not entirely for the worse either -- the vigorous climate movement we needed arose in that decade and is growing now. If there is one thing we can draw from where we are now and where we were then, it’s that the unimaginable is ordinary, and the way forward is almost never a straight path you can glance down, but a labyrinth of surprises, gifts, and afflictions you prepare for by accepting your blind spots as well as your intuitions.

The despairing of May 2003 were convinced of one true thing, that we had not stopped the invasion of Iraq, but they extrapolated from that a series of false assumptions about our failures and our powerlessness across time and space. They assumed -- like the neoconservatives themselves -- that those neocons would be atop the world for a long time to come. Instead, the neocon and neoliberal ideologies have been widely reviled and renounced around the world; the Republicans’ demographic hemorrhage has weakened them in this country; the failures of their wars are evident to everyone; and though they still grasp fearsome power, everything has indeed changed. Everything changes: there lies most of our hope and some of our fear.

I’ve seen extraordinary change in my lifetime, some of it in the last decade. I was born in a country that had been galvanized and unsettled by the civil rights movement, but still lacked a meaningful environmental movement, women’s movement, or queer rights movement (beyond a couple of small organizations founded in California in the 1950s).

Half a century ago, to be gay or lesbian was to live in hiding or be treated as mentally ill or criminal. That 12 states and several countries would legalize same-sex marriage was beyond imaginable then. It wasn’t even on the table in 2003. San Francisco’s spring run of same-sex weddings in 2004 flung open the doors through which so many have passed since.

If you take the long view, you’ll see how startlingly, how unexpectedly but regularly things change. Not by magic, but by the incremental effect of countless acts of courage, love, and commitment, the small drops that wear away stones and carve new landscapes, and sometimes by torrents of popular will that change the world suddenly. To say that is not to say that it will all come out fine in the end regardless. I’m just telling you that everything is in motion, and sometimes we are ourselves that movement.

Unstoppabilities
Hope and history are sisters: one looks forward and one looks back, and they make the world spacious enough to move through freely. Obliviousness to the past and to the mutability of all things imprisons you in a shrunken present. Hopelessness often comes out of that amnesia, out of forgetting that everything is in motion, everything changes. We have a great deal of history of defeat, suffering, cruelty, and loss, and everyone should know it. But that’s not all we have.

There’s the people’s history, the counterhistory that you didn’t necessarily get in school and don’t usually get on the news: the history of the battles we’ve won, of the rights we’ve gained, of the differences between then and now that those who live in forgetfulness lack. This is often the history of how individuals came together to produce that behemoth civil society, which stands astride nations and topples regimes -- and mostly does it without weapons or armies. It’s a history that undermines most of what you’ve been told about authority and violence and your own powerlessness.

Civil society is our power, our joy, and our possibility, and it has written a lot of the history in the last few years, as well as the last half century. If you doubt our power, see how it terrifies those at the top, and remember that they fight it best by convincing us it doesn’t exist. It does exist, though, like lava beneath the earth, and when it erupts, the surface of the earth is remade.

Things change. And people sometimes have the power to make that happen, if and when they come together and act (and occasionally act alone, as did writers Rachel Carson and Harriet Beecher Stowe -- or Mohammed Bouazizi, the young man whose suicide triggered the Arab Spring).

If you fix your eye on where we started out, you’ll see that we’ve come a long way by those means. If you look forward, you’ll see that we have a long way to go -- and that sometimes we go backward when we forget that we fought for the eight-hour workday or workplace safety or women’s rights or voting rights or affordable education, forget that we won them, that they’re precious, and that we can lose them again. There’s much to be proud of, there’s much to mourn, there’s much yet to do, and the job of doing it is ours, a heavy gift to carry. And it’s made to be carried, by people who are unstoppable, who are movements, who are change itself.

Too Soon to Tell
Ten years ago I began writing about hope and speaking about it. My online essay “Acts of Hope,” posted on May 19, 2003, was my first encounter with Tomdispatch.com, which would change my work and my life. It gave me room for another kind of voice and another kind of writing. It showed me how the Internet could give wings to words. What I wrote then and subsequently for the site spread around the world in remarkable ways, putting me in touch with people and movements, and deeper into conversations about the possible and the impossible (and into a cherished friendship with the site’s founder and editor, Tom Engelhardt).

For a few years, I spoke about hope around this country and in Europe. I repeatedly ran into comfortably situated people who were hostile to the idea of hope: they thought that hope somehow betrayed the desperate and downtrodden, as if the desperate wanted the solidarity of misery from the privileged, rather than action. Hopelessness for people in extreme situations means resignation to one’s own deprivation or destruction. Hope can be a survival strategy. For comfortably situated people, hopelessness means cynicism and letting oneself off the hook. If everything is doomed, then nothing is required (and vice versa).

Despair is often premature: it’s a form of impatience as well as certainty. My favorite comment about political change comes from Zhou En-Lai, the premier of the People’s Republic of China under Chairman Mao. Asked in the early 1970s about his opinion of the French Revolution, he reportedly answered, “Too soon to tell.”

Some say that he was talking about the revolutions of 1968, not 1789, but even then it provides a generous and expansive perspective. To hold onto uncertainty and possibility and a sense that even four years later, no less nearly two centuries after the fact, the verdict still isn’t in is more than most people I know are prepared to offer. A lot of them will hardly give an event a month to complete its effects, and many movements and endeavors are ruled failures well before they’re over.

Not long ago, I ran into a guy who’d been involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, that great upwelling in southern Manhattan in the fall of 2011 that catalyzed a global conversation and a series of actions and occupations nationwide and globally. He offered a tailspin of a description of how Occupy was over and had failed.

But I wonder: How could he possibly know? It really is too soon to tell. First of all, maybe the kid who will lead the movement that will save the world was catalyzed by what she lived through or stumbled upon in Occupy Fresno or Occupy Memphis, and we won’t reap what she sows until 2023 or 2043. Maybe the seeds of something more were sown, as they were in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring of 1968 and Charter 77, for the great and unforeseen harvest that was the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the nonviolent overthrow of the Soviet totalitarian state in that country.

Second, Occupy began to say what needed to be said about greed and capitalism, exposing a brutality that had long been hushed up, revealing both the victims of debt and the rigged economy that created it. This country changed because those things were said out loud. I can’t say exactly how, but I know it mattered. So much that matters is immeasurable, unquantifiable, and beyond price. Laws around banking, foreclosure, and student loans are changing -- not enough, not everywhere, but some people will benefit, and they matter. Occupy didn’t cause those changes directly, but it did much to make the voice of the people audible and the sheer wrongness of our debt system visible -- and gave momentum to the ongoing endeavors to overturn Citizens United and abolish corporate personhood.

Third, I only know a little of what the thousands of local gatherings and networks we mean by “Occupy” are now doing, but I know that Occupy Sandy is still doing vital work in the destruction zone of that hurricane and was about the best grassroots disaster relief endeavor this nation has ever seen. I know that Strike Debt, a direct offshoot of Occupy Wall Street, has relieved millions of dollars in medical debt, not with the sense that we can fix all debt this way, but that we can demonstrate the malleability, the artifice, and the immorality of the student, medical, and housing debt that is destroying so many lives.

I know that the Occupy Homes foreclosure defenders have been doing amazing things, often one home at a time, from Atlanta to Minneapolis. (Last Friday, Occupy Our Homes organized a “showdown at the Department of Justice” in Washington, D.C.; that Saturday, Strike Debt Bay Area held their second Debtors' Assembly: undead from coast to coast.)

Fourth, I know people personally whose lives were changed, and who are doing work they never imagined they would be involved in, and I’m friends with remarkable people who, but for Occupy, I would not know existed. People connected across class, racial, and cultural lines in the flowering of that movement. Like Freedom Summer, whose consequences were to be felt so far beyond Mississippi in 1964, this will have reach beyond the moment in which I write and you read.

Finally, there was great joy at the time , the joy of liberation and of solidarity, and joy is worth something in itself. In a sense, it’s worth everything, even if it’s always fleeting, though not always as scarce as we imagine.

Climates of Hope and Fear
I had lunch with Middle East and nonviolence scholar Stephen Zunes the other day and asked him what he would say about the Arab Spring now. He had, he told me, been in Egypt several months ago watching television with an activist. Formerly, the news was always about what the leaders did, decided, ordained, inflicted.

But the news they were watching was surprisingly focused on civil society, on what ordinary people initiated or resisted, on how they responded, what they thought. He spoke of how so many in the Middle East had lost their fatalism and sense of powerlessness and awoken to their own collective power.

This civil society remains awake in Egypt and the other countries. What will it achieve? Maybe it’s too soon to tell. Syria is a turbulent version of hell now, but it could be leaving the dynasty of the Assads in the past; its future remains to be written. Perhaps its people will indeed write the next chapter in its story, and not only with explosives.

You can tell the arc of the past few years as, first, the Arab Spring, then extraordinary civil society actions in Chile, Quebec, Spain, and elsewhere, followed by Occupy. But don't stop there.

After Occupy came Idle No More, the Canada-based explosion of indigenous power and resistance (to a Canadian government that has gone over to the far right and to environmental destruction on a grand scale). It was founded by four women in November of 2012 and it’s spread across North America, sparking new environmental actions and new coalitions around environmental and climate issues, with flash-mob-style powwows in shopping malls and other places, with a thousand-mile walk (and snowshoe) by seven Cree youth this winter. (There were 400 people with them by the time they arrived at Canada’s Parliament in Ottawa.)

Idle No More activists have vowed to block the construction of any pipeline that tries to transport the particularly dirty crude oil from the Alberta tar sands, whether it heads north, east, or west from northern Alberta. Each of those directions takes it over native land. This is part of the reason why tar sands supporters are pushing so hard to build the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Thankfully, the push back is also strong. Our fate may depend on it. As climate scientist James Hansen wrote a year ago, “Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas, and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now.”

The news just came in that we reached 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, the highest level in more than five million years. This is terrible news on a scale that eclipses everything else, because it encompasses everything else. We are wrecking our world, for everyone for all time, or at least the next several thousand years. But “we” is a tricky word here. Some of the people I most love and admire are doing extraordinary things to save the world, for you, for us, for generations unborn, for species yet to be named, for the oceans and sub-Saharan Africans and Arctic dwellers and everyone in-between, for the whole unbearably beautiful symphony of life on Earth that is imperiled.

Part of what sustains me in the face of this potential cataclysm is remembering that, in 2003, there hardly was a climate movement. It was small, polite, mostly believed the troubles were decades away, and was populated with people who thought that lifestyle changes could save the planet -- rather than that you have to get out there and fight the power. And they were the good ones. Too many of us didn’t think about it at all.

Only a few years later, things have changed. There’s a vibrant climate movement in North America. If you haven’t quite taken that in, it might be because it’s working on so many disparate fronts that are often treated separately: mountaintop coal removal, coal-fired power plants (closing 145 existing ones to date and preventing more than 150 planned ones from opening), fracking, oil exploration in the Arctic, the Tar Sands pipeline, and 350.org’s juggernaut of a campus campaign to promote disinvestment from oil, gas, and coal companies. Only started in November 2012, there are already divestment movements underway on more than 380 college and university campuses, and now cities are getting on board. It has significant victories; it will have more.

Some countries -- notably Germany, with Denmark not far behind -- have done remarkable things when it comes to promoting non-fossil-fuel renewable energy. Copenhagen, for example, in the cold gray north, is on track to become a carbon-neutral city by 2025 (and in the meantime reduced its carbon emissions 25% between 2005 and 2011). The United States has a host of promising smaller projects. To offer just two examples, Los Angeles has committed to being coal-free by 2025, while San Francisco will offer its citizens electricity from 100% renewable and carbon-neutral sources and its supervisors just voted to divest the city’s fossil-fuel stocks.

There are so many pieces of the potential solution to this puzzle, and some of them are for you to put together. Whether they will multiply or ever add up to enough we don’t yet know. We need more: more people, more transformations, more ways to conquer and dismantle the oil companies, more of a vision of what is at stake, more of the great force that is civil society. Will we get it? I don’t know. Neither do you. Anything could happen.

But here’s what I’m saying: you should wake up amazed every day of your life, because if I had told you in 1988 that, within three years, the Soviet satellite states would liberate themselves nonviolently and the Soviet Union would cease to exist, you would have thought I was crazy. If I had told you in 1990 that South America was on its way to liberating itself and becoming a continent of progressive and democratic experiments, you would have considered me delusional.

If, in November 2010, I had told you that, within months, the autocrat Hosni Mubarak, who had dominated Egypt since 1981, would be overthrown by 18 days of popular uprisings, or that the dictators of Tunisia and Libya would be ousted, all in the same year, you would have institutionalized me. If I told you on September 16, 2011, that a bunch of kids sitting in a park in lower Manhattan would rock the country, you’d say I was beyond delusional. You would have, if you believed as the despairing do, that the future is invariably going to look like the present, only more so. It won’t.

I still value hope, but I see it as only part of what’s required, a starting point. Think of it as the match but not the tinder or the blaze. To matter, to change the world, you also need devotion and will and you need to act. Hope is only where it begins, though I’ve also seen people toil on without regard to hope, to what they believe is possible. They live on principle and they gamble, and sometimes they even win, or sometimes the goal they were aiming for is reached long after their deaths. Still, it’s action that gets you there. When what was once hoped for is realized, it falls into the background, becomes the new normal; and we hope for or carp about something else.

The future is bigger than our imaginations. It’s unimaginable, and then it comes anyway. To meet it we need to keep going, to walk past what we can imagine. We need to be unstoppable. And here’s what it takes: you don’t stop walking to congratulate yourself; you don’t stop walking to wallow in despair; you don’t stop because your own life got too comfortable or too rough; you don’t stop because you won; you don’t stop because you lost. There’s more to win, more to lose, others who need you.

You don’t stop walking because there is no way forward. Of course there is no way. You walk the path into being, you make the way, and if you do it well, others can follow the route. You look backward to grasp the long history you’re moving forward from, the paths others have made, the road you came in on. You look forward to possibility. That’s what we mean by hope, and you look past it into the impossible and that doesn’t stop you either. But mostly you just walk, right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot. That’s what makes you unstoppable.

• Rebecca Solnit’s first essay for Tomdispatch.com turned into the book Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, since translated into eight languages. Portions of this essay began life as the keynote speech at the National Lawyers' Guild gala in honor of attorney and human rights activist Walter Riley, whose own life is a beautiful example of unstoppability. Solnit’s latest book, The Faraway Nearby, will be published in June. 

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Resisting Near-Term-Extinction

SUBHEAD: Prattling about how resistance is futile and the need to passively accept NTE is exactly what the mass media up to.

By Jeffrey Strahl on 16 May 213 for Nature Bats Last -
(http://guymcpherson.com/2013/05/resistance-is-the-only-ethical-response-to-near-term-extinction/)


Image above: Violent protests in Madrid and growing talk of secession in Catalonia are piling pressure on Spain.
From (http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2012/09/27/eurozone-crisis-spain-inching-closer-to-a-meltdown/).

I begin with a short biography to give readers some understanding of why I see things the way I do. I grew up in New York, where I received a degree in mechanical engineering from the City University of New York. I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in early 1970 to take a job, and I still live there, with most of my time spent living in Berkeley. I was a very conservative and conformist person when I started working for Bechtel, the giant multinational construction firm, assigned to the division designing and supervising the construction of nuclear power plants. It took me just a few months to be totally disgusted by both the nature of corporate culture and nuclear power.

Simultaneously I faced a close call regarding induction into the armed forces, which were still engaged in Vietnam. These experiences, plus my increased engagement with the counterculture still prevalent in Berkeley led to a rapid personal transformation, and to my being laid off from my job as a recession deepened and Bechtel supervisors grew disenchanted with an employee whose looks and views changed right before their eyes.

I subsequently applied to law school at Berkeley and was admitted, with the notion of using my technical background and legal education to pursue environmental law. At the time I started school in autumn of 1972, I also started going to Grateful Dead shows, further exploring the alternative route, and in addition came upon anarchist politics.

By the middle of my second year, I came to realize that the environmental crisis which had been manifesting itself even to the mainstream for several years could not be dealt with by new laws and regulations, or new shopping habits, but required the elimination of capitalism. I also had become conscious of the still-continuing pacification program directed at the 1960s insurgency, be it by COINTELPRO and direct police repression, or by media efforts to convince the public that “the ’60s are over” and that conformity and a “New Age” of self-indulgence were now what’s in.

I dropped out of law school, but kept the job I had began on campus to support myself, tutoring students in math and statistics. I ended up sticking with that job for almost 37 years (until my retirement in 2009), becoming for all practical purposes the instructor for many students in the second-year calculus classes that form the mathematical foundation for engineering and physical sciences. In the meantime, my politics developed further, incorporating Marx’s analysis of capital, the surrealist/situationist analysis of modern mass culture, a critique of the mechanistic materialist paradigm that has dominated science for centuries, a critique informed by process philosophy (see here and here), and other ideas that have come up.

The world today faces three deadly crises. They can be analyzed separately but are interconnected and feed back and forth in major ways. I won’t go into too much detail, as a lot more can be found in the readings I will reference.

The first is the global economic crisis. I’m tackling it first because it has manifested itself the longest. It has little to do with greedy banksters and speculators, inadequate regulations and corrupt regulators, monopolies, or the restricted ability of “the masses” to consume. It is a crisis rooted in the very structure of global capitalism. It first appeared in a global form on the world stage in the early 1910s, and led to WWI. That war did not provide a long respite, and so the crisis reappeared globally by 1930, leading to WWII.

The massive destruction of much of the industrial world’s fixed capital in that war, and the need to reconstruct all that, formed the foundation of what appeared to be a postwar boom, aided by a reconfiguration of the world economy under US domination and with coordinating institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, massive expansion of debt, unprecedented consumerism, vast military spending via the creation of the military-industrial complex, and the increased incorporation of the non-industrial world into the global empire, often facilitated by military force.

But by 1970, the fundamental crisis had begun to reemerge. It has been staved off by even more massive exponential debt expansion, by globalization which has facilitated the driving of wages and working conditions downward all over the world, and by hi-tech innovations. However, all these countermeasures have by now turned into factors which exacerbate the crisis. The collapse of 2007-8 has not been overcome. In fact, signs of worsening arise daily, such as indications Europe is entering a new Great Depression.

There is no reason whatsoever why the crisis now will not lead to another global war, and already we see the emergence of currency/trade wars, just as occurred before each of the Twentieth Century’s two global conflicts.

We even see renewed discussions of “winnable” nuclear wars. For more extensive readings, I recommend this series of articles, all by Jack Straw: “The American Left Doesn’t Get Capitalism,”
“Michael Hudson and Webster Tarpley Disseminate Disinformation,”
and “Occupy Should Target and Destroy the Ruling Money Fetish.”

I also recommend a very fundamental analysis of capitalism, Sander’s “A Crisis of Value.”

One short note: readers should not confuse Marx’s analysis of capitalism with the state capitalist monstrosities of the former USSR and allied states, with state ownership of capitalist enterprises, or even with workers’ ownership of such enterprises. His analysis isn’t another school of “economics,” like the Austrian or Keynesian schools. Nor is it based upon competition and other conditions specific to Nineteenth Century industrial capitalism. It uses a single global capital as its starting point. Hopefully the suggested readings will do away with such confusion.

The Ecological Crisis needs little introduction to readers of Nature Bats Last. While climate collapse is the most obvious facet, there are others, such as the destruction of habitats and ensuing, accelerating collapses of ecosystems and species extinctions, the acidification of the oceans, and the spreading of chemical poisons and pollutants of all sorts, including GMOs and nano-materials. I would like to refer readers to a couple of older articles, “The Sick Planet” by Guy Debord from 1970, and “In the Wake of the Exxon Valdez: World Capitalism and Global Ecocide” by Will Guest from 1989. These articles demonstrate how the problem has been festering and worsening while some people warned us.

Last, but far from least, the world faces an increasing shortage of resources which are vital for both human survival and, even more, the very functioning of the global advanced industrial system, in particular the energy supplied by fossil fuels. Peak Oil comes to mind readily, but we also face Peak Soil, Peak Water, and many other vital peaks. Regardless of industry/media propaganda, the shale shell games will make little if any difference.

We have just started seeing the effects of what will be growing shortages. Readers who are still not sure should read sites such as Resilience and Culture Change. I recommend a couple of articles on the inability of “renewables” to power a growth-requiring capitalist global economy (or for that matter any system requiring the maintenance of modern industry), “Searching for a Miracle” by Richard Heinberg, and Ted Trainer’s “Can the World Run on Renewables, Nuclear Energy and Geo-Sequestration? The Negative Case,” which has a link to his full paper. Short pieces on this topic can be found at The Energy Skeptic site.

These three crises feed back and forth. Global warming increases pressures upon dwindling clean water sources, and requires more expenses on the part of states which are already facing severe budget constraints. The economic crisis makes investment in renewables increasingly problematic. Peak Oil means the costs of producing oil are such that gas prices have to climb to where they start choking off other spending. And so on. In addition, there are sub-crises being spun by the major ones which take on lives of their own, such as the accelerating disintegration of the fiber which holds society together due to the near-universal use of cell phones and other wireless devices, which drive people into self-absorption bubbles, detached from the physical reality around them.

Clearly, there is no way out which preserves capitalism. Indeed, there is no way to preserve industrial society and the population levels it has enabled, levels which are far beyond the capacity of the planet to support. We would not be in this situation were it not for the emergence of and global conquest by capitalism and its growth imperative, but more needs to be shed than just the capitalist mode of production.

Near-term extinction appears to be almost inevitable. To me, the main question right now is whether the extinction will come first from a new global war, or from runaway climate destabilization. The US government is consciously preparing for the future by reinforcing its military/police state apparatus. Part of these preparations have included the execution of false-flag terrorist attacks. This is the only way to understand 9/11 in context. See here and here.



Image above: Slaughtered elephants - wildlife rangers fight to save them from poaching extinction. From (http://www.islandbreath.org/2013Year/05/130519extinction.jpg). 

Yet this conclusion does not mean that people should stop resisting the pressures to conform and to go along with futile steps intended to maintain what is totally unmaintainable, and increasingly so even in the short term.

There are those who offer “New Age” psycho-babble to the effect that resistance is futile and that we should focus on ourselves and on coming to terms with death and go gently into the good night. In my book however, a failure to resist amounts to complicity with the accelerating destruction. It is as much an aspect of counterinsurgency as are the various repression efforts of the control apparatus. This is true even if the odds of failure are just about certain, indeed even more so.

When you see a rape and do nothing, you are guilty too. When you see genocide and do nothing, because you claim you feel powerless, you are a participant. This is what global society determined regarding how Germans behaved during WWII. A few brave ones, e.g., the White Rose Society, resisted the Nazi regime, odds be damned. The others turned their heads and pretended to not know. People within the concentration camps also counseled that “resistance is futile.” Most of those who listened to them died sooner than they otherwise would have.

It would not occur to a mouse in the mouth of a cat to stop resisting. There is after all a thing called the survival instinct. Just as they have to be taught to be killing soldiers in an organized armed force, a behavior which is far more akin to sheep being herded than to an animal fighting for its food or survival. People have to be taught to not resist. Resistance is what living things and living systems do in the face of attempts to do them in.

Our resistance is not just about us as individuals, or even us as a species, but us as members of the global ecosystem, an entity which like the Tao is everything and nothing, a sum of its parts which is more than a sum. We owe it to all the other members to do what we can on behalf of the whole. See Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid and Lynn Margulis’s The Symbiotic Planet for useful antidotes to the mainstream’s junk notions that the dominant motif of life is selfish competition.

Some folks counsel for us to give in, to reject making a stand, and to counter “bad vibes” with “joy.” Such notions given the present situation show to me people who are in a privileged position in global society, coasting on top of terrain anchored upon slave mines in Africa and South America, sweatshops in Bangladesh and China (and even in North America) as well as on massive ecocide. People in those situations do not engage in discussions whether resistance is appropriate. They have to resist just to survive day to day.

Please spare us talk of how “we are all equally at fault,” “it’s just human nature,” and “we need to all come together and recognize our common humanity,” or false hopes that the ruling elites will somehow do the right thing.

There is no one “we.” There is the vast majority of ordinary humans on one hand, and a tiny segment of ruling elites who are psychopaths and sociopaths, determined to keep their system going and their social power intact no matter what, who have made and continue to make the essential decisions which have led to the current situation of near-term extinction. The current holocaust, currently in its early stages, will affect all of humanity and the bulk of the ecosystem, putting the Nazi version to shame. Passivity is complicity. Silence is consent.

Prattling about how resistance is futile and how we’re better to retreat into passive contemplation and getting those around us to passively accept it all is exactly what the mass media do day in and day out. Let’s not pretend that it’s anything but another form of pacification.

Our predicament is like that of someone who is tied up in a boat which is rapidly approaching a large waterfall. If this person could get untied and jump off, they are highly likely to be swept up by the current and go over anyway.

But how many people would simply not even try? I intend to go on with my resistance, be it in public acts of defiance, conveying information through writing and talking, or helping out with my neighborhood collective native plant garden, pacification efforts be damned.

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See Harvest of Empire

SUBHEAD: Free showing of documentary film "Harvest of Empire" at Kapaa Library on 5/24/13, 6pm.

By Michael Goodwin on 18 May 2013 in Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2013/05/see-harvet-of-empire.html)


Image above: From (http://menudoreport.com/TMR-Latinopoliticalave41413.html).

WHAT:
Free showing of documentary film "Harvest of Empire" exclusive to Kaua`i. Not available at Amazon or Netflix.

WHEN:   
Friday, May 24th, at 6:00pm

WHERE:
Kapa`a Library,
Kuhio Highway
  
Adapted from the book by Democracy Now co-host Juan Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire chronicles the long history of US military and economic intervention in Latin America, and the resulting unprecedented wave of migration that transformed America's cultural and economic landscape.

From the late 19th century wars for territorial expansion that gave the US control of Puerto Rico, Cuba and most of Mexico (and Hawai`i) to the covert operations that imposed oppressive military regimes in Honduras, Ecuador, El Salvador and Guatemala, Harvest of Empire unveils a moving human story that is largely unknown in today's America.

Opening the event: Latin Music performed by Peruvian-born now Kaua`i resident Danitza Galvan, with John Dumas and Blu Dux.


Video above: Official trailer for "Harvest of Empire". From (http://harvestofempiremovie.com/).



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Worldwide March Against Monsanto

SOURCE: Michael & Patti (wisevalentine@gmail.com)
SUBHEAD: Kauai will be part of the Worldwide March Against Monsanto on Saturday, May 25, 2013!

By Patti Valentine on 16 May 2013 in Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2013/05/worldwide-march-against-monsanto.html)


Image above: Monsanto controlling Obama illustration on Facebook. From (https://www.facebook.com/MarchAgainstMonstanto).

The Worldwide March Against Monsanto Saturday, May 25, 2013

Kauai will be part of the WORLDWIDE March Against Monsanto happening Saturday, May 25, 2013!

We rally to protect our food supply, support lo cal farmers, be aware of the harmful effects of gmo foods, promote organic solutions, and expose the cronyism between big business and the government.

Join GMO Free Kauai for sign-making from 9:30-10:30am in the Dance Studio at Children of the Land Polynesian Center in Safeway & Long’s shopping center in Kapaa.

Sign waving will follow on Kuhio Highway in front of the shopping center from 10:30am-2pm.


WHAT:
 The Worldwide March Against Monsanto on Kauai

WHERE:
Dance Studio at Children of the Land Polynesian Center
Kauai Village Shopping Center
Next to Papaya's Natural Foods in Safeway & Long’s shopping center.
4-831 Kuhio Hwy #332, Kapaa

WHEN:
 Saturday, May 25th, 2013
No-GMO sign-making 9:30-10:30am
Sign waving on Kuhio Highway 10:30am-2pm

This is text from Maui March against GMOs at 11am at War Memorial Stadium in Wailuku. Maui, Hawaii on 25 May, 2013:

WHY MARCH WITH US?

GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISMS. OR GMO'S ARE PLANTS OR ANNALS CREATED THROUGH THE GENE SPLICING TE04NIQUES OF TECHNOLOGY (ALSO CALLED GENETIC ENGINEERNG, OR GE) THIS EXPERIMENTAL TECHNOLOGY MERGES DNA FROM DIFFERENT SPECIES CREATING UNSTABLE COMBINATION$ OF PLANT ANIMAL BACTERIAL AND VIRAL GENES THAT CANNOT OCCUR IN NATURE OR IN TRADITIONAL CROSSBREEDING (HTTP://NONGMOPROJECT.ORG)

70 % OF THI PROCESSED FOODS SOLD IN GROCERY STORES CONTAIN GMOS WHICH ARE MADE AND MODIFIED BY THE WO"S LARGEST "ROUND UP" PESTICIDE MANUFACTURER: MONSANTO.

LAB RATS THAT INGESTED THIS GMO CORN DEVELOP HORRIFYING TUMOURS AND WIDE SPREAD ORGAN DAMAGE & PREMATURE DEATH THE SANE CORN 6 IN NMORGANIC BREAKFAST CEREAL, T02TILLA CHIPS ETC.

MORE THAN 60 COUNTRIES HAVE RESTRICTIONS OR BANS ON THE

PRODUCTION AND SALES OF GMO'S (CANADA AND USA ARE NOT PART OF

THESE COUNTRIES) WHILE MONSAN70 WILL TELL YOU THIS IS SAFE 70 EAT,

EXPERIMENTS DONE ON ANNALS IN LABORATORIES WILL SHOW OTHERWISE

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

AVOID GMO'S AND VOTE WITH YOUR DOLLARS TO AVOID PROCESSED FOODS AND EAT ORGANIC! BUY LOCALLY GROWN FOOD OR BETTER YET GROW YOUR OWN EDUCATE YOURSELF, YOU OR YOUR CHILDREN ARE NOT SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS


MARCH AGAINST MONSANTO

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