Mainstream journalism for sale

SUBHEAD: The Atlantic and Economist are selling editorial interviews to lobbyists at DNC and RNC.

By April M. Short on 2 July 2016 for Alternet.org -
(http://www.alternet.org/media/big-political-news-outlets-are-selling-interviews-and-editorial-coverage-lobbyists-dnc-and-rnc)


Image above: Clinton and cover story from The National Enquirer. From (http://www.nationalenquirer.com/politics/hillary-clinton-scandals-secrets-affairs-bill-coverup/).

In case you still had faith in the political media machine's integrity, several big outlets have cleared that misconception right up for you. They’ve decided to offer news interviews up for sale at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

This means these outlets not even trying to hide their sleaze anymore. As Lee Fang wrote in a July 1 article for The Intercept, which broke the story:

“For high-rolling special interests looking to make an impression at the presidential conventions next month, one option is to pay a lot of money to a media outlet. Lobbyists for the oil industry, for instance, are picking up the tab for leading Beltway publications to host energy policy discussions at the convention, including The Atlantic and Politico.

And for the right price, some political media outlets are even offering special interviews with editorial staffers and promotional coverage at the convention.”

The Hill newspaper, for example, is sponsoring events at both party conventions and is promising its sponsors who pay $200,000 convention interviews with The Hill editorial staffers for “up to three named executives or organization representatives of your choice,” according to a brochure obtained by The Intercept.

“These interviews are pieces of earned media and will be hosted on a dedicated page on thehill.com and promoted across The Hill’s digital and social media channels,” the brochure promises.

The Hill ignored The Intercept’s inquiries, Fang wrote.

Fang's article mentionsThe Economist and its subsidiary CQ Roll Callas having similar deals on the table.

Even for big media, this is a slimy new low. These once-journalistic news organizations are undeniably morphing into paid advertising and PR for the 1-percenter corporations and billionaires who control the political lobby.

People who care even a little bit about the importance of journalistic integrity, or the checks and balances of the press—which are a necessary piece of any healthy democracy—should immediately boycott any news organization willing to stoop this low. This kind of behavior erases the already-too-fuzzy line between the news media and the moneyed class's greedy interests.

Maybe you aren’t shocked by this new low because this is simply a blatant version of what you already knew has been going on behind the scenes for years—but still. That they are so brazen about it is terrifying.

What does it say about the state of the press when these well-known, long-time trusted publications are straight-up going, "Hey, rich people: ever wanted to buy off a journalist? Now's your chance!"

It's upsetting on a whole new level.

You can read the full Intercept article here.

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Pope on a roll

SUBHEAD: Pope Francis slams GMOs and pesticides for destroying the Earth’s ‘complex web of ecosystems’.

By Lori Ann Burd on 26 June 2015 for EcoWatch -
(http://ecowatch.com/2015/06/26/pope-francis-pesticides-gmos/)


Image above: Pope Francis at Castel Gandolfo is a 135-acre retreat fifteen miles outside of Rome.There the Pope has directed it to be a sustainable farm that delivers a cornucopia of milk, yogurt, veggies, meat, cheese, honey, olive oil, and more to the Vatican every day. From (http://www.nationofchange.org/2015/02/07/old-mcpontiff-farm/).

Pope Francis’s encyclical didn’t just cover climate change, he also denounced pesticides and genetically engineered (GE) crops, declaring “the spread of these crops destroys the complex web of ecosystems, decreases diversity in production and affects the present and the future of regional economies.”

Biotech companies claim their products are key to solving hunger, but the Pope knows this isn’t true. No commercial GE crops are engineered for increased yield. Five of every six acres of GE crops are engineered for herbicide-tolerance, i.e. to survive being drenched with what would normally be a toxic dose of herbicide, usually Round-up, or glyphosate.

The Pope’s message couldn’t come at a better time. Pesticide use is at an all-time high. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says glyphosate use on corn and soy increased from 10 million pounds in 1996, the year Roundup Ready crops were introduced, to 204 million in 2013. The U.S. Geological Survey routinely finds glyphosate in our water. The Word Health Organization just declared glyphosate a probable carcinogen.

The Pope observed that pesticide use “creates a vicious circle in which the intervention of the human being to solve a problem often worsens the situation further.” He said, “many birds and insects die out as a result of toxic pesticides created by technology … [and this] actually causes the Earth we live in to become less rich and beautiful, more and more limited and gray …”

Pesticides have already made our Earth less rich and more gray by nearly wiping out monarch butterflies, which have declined by 90 percent, largely because increased glyphosate use has wiped out the monarch’s sole host plant, milkweed. Pesticides are a leading cause of our current pollinator collapse. With one-third of the bites we eat requiring bee-pollination, many world leaders, including President Obama, are waking up to the need for action.


Like Pope Francis, I believe protecting the Earth is our moral imperative. With this encyclical, the Pope reminds us that our fates are intertwined with all species, and calls us to action.

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Pope brings sanity to GMO debate
SOURCE: Katherine Muzik PHD (kmuzik@gmail.com)
SUBHEAD: “A technology severed from ethics will not easily be able to limit its own power.”

By Jill Richardson on 24 June 2015 for Alternet -
(http://www.alternet.org/food/pope-francis-roll-brings-sanity-gmo-debate)


Does genetically engineering crops — creating seeds with the DNA of other species inserted in them, like a tomato with DNA that includes genes from a fish — violate religious principles?

People with a vested interest have tried for years to speak on the Vatican’s behalf on this question. Now, Pope Francis has weighed in.

Using plain and forceful language, the Catholic leader has made it clear that he’s against this kind of agricultural tinkering. In speaking out on what he sees as a question tied to the sanctity of life in his new environmental encyclical, he’s also defied U.S. foreign policy.

The State Department dispatched its diplomats to lobby Pope Benedict, Francis’s predecessor, on genetic engineering just months after he took office. Diplomats cast embracing the technology as a “moral imperative,” WikiLeaks revealed when it published State Department cables.

A year later, the diplomats reported that the Vatican was “cautiously optimistic” about the newfangled foods. Yet in 2010, the Vatican clarified that it hadn’t come out in favor of genetic engineering.

Not surprisingly, the Vatican’s concern all along — whether defined by Pope Benedict or Pope Francis — has been how the technology will impact the poor, as well as all of God’s Creation. Pope Francis takes a balanced and reasonable approach to the issue.

“It is difficult to make a general judgment about genetic modification (GM), whether vegetable or animal, medical or agricultural, since these vary greatly among themselves and call for specific considerations,” he writes. “The risks involved are not always due to the techniques used, but rather to their improper or excessive application.”

Instead of delivering a verdict on the science, Francis probes the social issues related to genetically engineered crops that the U.S. government and biotech companies like Monsanto and DuPont often try to sweep under the rug.

He observes that “in many places, following the introduction of these crops, productive land is concentrated in the hands of a few owners,” while others lose their farmland. That means “the most vulnerable…become temporary laborers, and many rural workers end up moving to poverty-stricken urban areas.”

Meanwhile, the pope writes: “The expansion of these crops has the effect of destroying the complex network of ecosystems, diminishing the diversity of production, and affecting regional economies, now and in the future.”

In other words, even if a technology is safe, that doesn’t make it fair. Nor does its purported safety suffice in terms of deciding whether it benefits humanity as a whole.

To address this, Pope Francis calls for “a broad, responsible scientific and social debate…one capable of considering all the available information and of calling things by their name.”

However, he adds that such a conversation may be difficult to achieve, as information is sometimes withheld due to political, economic, or ideological interests.

He’s right.

Although he doesn’t mention the United States by name, our rules governing genetically engineered crops were written to stymie such a conversation. Biotech giants like Monsanto lobbied for — and received — favorable regulations that didn’t require new legislation, so Congress and the American people couldn’t weigh in.

And that’s to say nothing of the socio-economic impacts of the crops that Pope Francis writes about.
However, when an international group of scientists did gather to discuss the matter, they concluded that mutant crops aren’t needed to feed the world.

Genetically engineered crops inherently raise serious questions that humanity can’t just leave to scientists. As Pope Francis concludes, “A technology severed from ethics will not easily be able to limit its own power.”

• Jill Richardson is a member of the Organic Consumers Association policy advisory board. She is the author of "Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It."

See also:
Ea O KA Aina: Pope considers GMOs 8/14/14
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Grand Jury Runaround

SUBHEAD: Flame before spark. Michael Brown in Ferguson Was the spark — Eric Garner in New York is the fire.

By John McWhorter on 3 December 2014 for Time Magazine  -
(http://time.com/3617369/eric-garner-grand-jury-protests/)


Image above: Eric Garner being choked to death by Ofiicer Pantaleo while three other policeman struggle to hold him down. Garner repeated "I can't breath!" several times before losing consciousness. His offense selling loose cigarettes on the sidewalk.  From (http://time.com/3617369/eric-garner-grand-jury-protests/).

Here’s a look at the future, and probably not that far into it. People will learn two things:

1. That an officer was not indicted for murdering Eric Garner—black, 43, and detained simply for selling single cigarettes—despite the fact that the killing was recorded from start to finish for all of America to see. 
    
2. That an officer was not indicted for killing Michael Brown after Brown had stolen from a store, refused the officer’s request to step aside and perhaps tried to grab his gun, with the officer shooting when Brown repeatedly lunged toward him for some reason, with none of this recorded and the details murkily varying from one witness to the next. 

Perfectly sensible people will be wondering why so many people in late 2014 thought of the Ferguson case, in particular, as the civil rights case of the 21st century. Yes, Brown should not have died—I have heartily agreed, repeatedly. But people in the future will see the current focus on Ferguson as evidence of people losing sight of the fact that activism is supposed to be about results.

Are we trying to create a humanity devoid of any racist bias, or are we trying to stop cops from shooting black men? The two aren’t the same. A world without racism would be a world without dirt. A world where episodes like what has happened just this year to Garner, Brown, John Crawford, Akai Gurley, and Tamir Rice is much more plausible. We need special prosecutors, body cameras, and, if you ask me, an end to the war on drugs.

As such, we must be pragmatic. I know the people protesting Michael Brown’s death nationwide are sincere. But it’s easy to forget that in cases like this, sincerity is supposed to be forward-focused. It’s all too human for people to end up mistaking the heightened emotions, the threats, the media attention, the catharsis, as progress itself. But drama alone burns fast and bright. Think about how Trayvon is already—admit it—seeming more like history than the present.

Are we really committed to this thing lasting past the winter?

If so, then we have to ask ourselves—is Michael Brown more important somehow because he was killed with a gun? Is Garner somehow less worthy of iconic, implacable protest because he was older than Brown, less “glamorous” than a teenager? Is it, in other words, that Brown is more dramatic?

Because there are other kinds of drama, if we must. For example, Officer Daniel Pantaleo’s statement about Garner is outright tragedy—so disgustingly detached coming from someone’s murderer that it constitutes drama in itself.

“It is never my intention to harm anyone,” Pantaleo says—as if we were thinking now of “harm,” a formal term you can use to refer to a dent in your car. “I feel very bad about the death of Mr. Garner”—my God, “very bad” sounds like he broke someone’s window with a baseball, and “the death of Mr. Garner” sounds like something he watched on TV rather than did with his bare hands. “Accept my personal condolences” says this man twice brought up on misconduct charges before, as if it were his aunt by marriage who passed away after a brief illness.

This, to me, is an articulate testament to how some whites can be unable to see black people as human—and, especially if cops, be more likely to kill them. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a precious teaching moment. Pantaleo’s statement is, in its way, as useful as Reverend King’s Letter From a Birmingham Jail as a look into a human mind.

>Yet one hears that however iffy the Ferguson details are, we should just go with it because it has struck a chord. That our message to America is to be “Even when my son steals from a store, refuses a cop’s order and tries to take his gun, he shouldn’t get shot.”

And he shouldn’t, but wow, what a delicate and hopelessly controversial point that is in such a key moment as this. It’s a tricky, subtle assertion, which has not struck a chord with the disinterested middle because the facts are too murky. We want to make history, not just headlines.

How about this, as a story we can tell the next generation without taking a deep breath and thinking about how to paper over the holes?

Ferguson was the spark, but Garner was “it.”

Here is where I am quite sure Reverend King and Bayard Rustin would be planning not just statements and gestures, but boycotts. The recording of Garner’s death has the clear, potent and inarguable authority of the Birmingham newsreels. We must use that. Yes, use—we are trying to create change, not just perform.

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No Reckless Endangerment?
SUBHEAD: Grand Jury in Eric Garner case wasn't asked to consider 'Reckless Endangerment' charge.

By Andres Jauregui on 5 December 2014 for Huffington Post  -
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/05/eric-garner-reckless-endangerment_n_6275698.html)

The Staten Island District Attorney did not ask the Eric Garner grand jury to consider reckless endangerment charges against NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo, NBC New York reports.

An unnamed source familiar with the case told the station that District Attorney Daniel Donovan only asked jurors to consider charges of manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide as they heard evidence.

Under New York law, reckless endangerment entails conduct that causes a substantial risk of serious physical injury or death to another person. Garner, a 43-year-old asthmatic, died after Pantaleo put him in a chokehold in July.

The jury determined that there was no probable cause to indict Pantaleo in Garner's death Wednesday, a decision that has been met with criticism from people across the political spectrum and sparked nationwide protests.

Although grand jury proceedings are typically sealed by law, Donovan petitioned a judge to release limited information about them, according to ABC New York. None of the evidence presented was included in the release, only the following:

• Jurors sat for nine weeks
• Testimony was heard from 50 witnesses
• Those witnesses included 22 civilians and 28 cops, EMTs or doctors
• There were 60 exhibits, including videos, records and photos
• The grand jury was instructed in law regarding physical use of force

The D.A.'s office issued a statement Thursday that said he was "constrained by New York law to reveal nothing further regarding these proceedings."

In New York, indictment by grand jury requires at least 12 jurors to agree that there is sufficient evidence and reasonable cause to believe a crime was committed. The D.A.'s role is to present evidence and instruct the jury in the principles of relevant law.

Legal experts told SILive.com that Pantaleo's testimony was likely a huge factor in the decision not to indict. The 29-year-old officer, who has received resounding support from the NYPD union, testified before the jury for two hours before Thanksgiving, his lawyers said.

At least one expert who talked to the site was unconvinced by the ruling.

"I'm disappointed in the result. I believe the officer's actions were not necessary to effectuate the arrest of Eric Garner," Mark J. Fonte, a criminal defense lawyer and former prosecutor, said. "It seems to me there was a better way to handle the situation with Eric Garner. No person should lose their life for selling loose cigarettes."

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Witnessing a Police Killing
SUBHEAD: David Corn told a grand jury he saw a cop shoot and kill an unarmed man. It didn't indict.

By David Corn on 4 December 2014 for Mother Jones  -
(http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/12/grand-jury-witness-police-killing-indictment-david-corn)


Image above: Painting of man on cover of 1971 Jethro Tull studio album LP record "Agualung".   From (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqualung_%28Jethro_Tull_album%29).

Many years ago, during the 1980s, I witnessed a killing: a New York City cop shooting an unarmed homeless man near the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was later called as a grand jury witness in the case. The grand jury did not indict the officer.

It was a summer evening. I was heading to play softball in Central Park. At the corner of Fifth Avenue and 79th Street, I got off my bicycle to walk toward the Great Lawn. The west side of Fifth was crowded with New Yorkers enjoying the beautiful night. People were streaming in and out of the park. Sidewalk vendors were doing brisk business. The vibe was good.

And in the midst of the hubbub, I spotted a fellow wearing dirty and tattered clothing. His hair was filthy, his face worn. It was hard to determine his age. He reminded me of Aqualung. (See this Jethro Tull album cover.)

He was carrying a large and heavy rock with both of his hands, pushing his way through the throng, and muttering unintelligible words. I wondered, what's his story? But I didn't give it much more thought.

Most of the people on the corner were not paying attention to him. Those in his direct path, as he lumbered north, did quickly step out of his way. But no one seemed much alarmed by the guy. In New York City, unfortunately, you often saw broken people—and shrugged them off as just another crazy.

I was about to head down the footpath toward the baseball fields, when I saw a commotion to my right. Several police officers—four or so, I recall—were approaching the man with the rock. And their guns were drawn. As they neared the fellow, he dropped the rock, he then began to run in the same direction he had been walking.

The cops were not grouped together; they were spread out—in a circle that was drawing tighter. The man, displaying a fair degree of agility, leaped into the street and tried to cut between two of the officers to get away.

Shots were fired. Two or three. Maybe four. And he went down.

The cops surrounded the man. He didn't move. This was no longer a person. This was a body.
I moved closer to the scene. Passersby had stopped to watch. It was still difficult to assess his age. His clothes were a grimy gray. I saw his dirty hands. Both were empty.

Soon police cars and an ambulance arrived. The paramedics did not move fast. They covered the body with a sheet. Several police officers were standing around a female officer. She was in anguish. They were consoling her. It was obvious: She had fired the shots that killed the man.

Her race? She was white. His skin color? I thought it was dark, but it was tough to tell if it was dirt or pigment.

Cops were buzzing about the scene. Flashing lights illuminated this ritzy stretch of Fifth Avenue. On-lookers gawked. And I noticed something that struck me as odd: The police officers were not talking to any of the witnesses. They were talking to each other and the paramedics. I approached one cop and said that I had seen it all. He wasn't impressed and looked at me as if to say, "So what?" I had thought the police would want to round up eyewitnesses to the shooting.

"Shouldn't I talk to someone?" I asked this officer. He nodded his head toward another policeman. I went up to that cop. "Excuse me, officer," I began. "I saw what happened." Again, I received a look of disinterest. "Shouldn't I...." He cut me off: "Talk to him." He was looking at another officer who was barking instructions to other cops.

I tried once more. I approached this officer who seemed to be in charge. "Officer, I saw...." He shut me up with a wave of his hand, signaling I should wait. And wait I did, as he directed other cops to do this or do that. The paramedics were preparing to cart off the body. After a few minutes, I went up to this officer again and told him I had witnessed the whole episode.

"Okay," he said.

He said nothing else. He didn't ask me for my name. He didn't ask if I would provide a statement. I was surprised by his lack of interest.

"Shouldn't I tell someone what I saw," I said.

"If you want to," he said, not in an encouraging tone.

"Okay, who do I talk to?" I ask.

"If you want to make a statement," he said, as if I was inconveniencing him and the entire police force, "you can go down to the station and do it there." Now I got it: He didn't want my statement, even though he had no idea what I would say. He was not interested in taking my name and contact information. It was my job apparently to make it to the police station on my own, and the station was a mile or so south.

This ticked me off. He was essentially trying to shoo me away. As the paramedics were loading the body on to the ambulance and as the cop who had shot the man was surrounded by her colleagues, I got on my bike and started to ride down Fifth.

At the station, I approached the front desk and told the officer staffing it that I had witnessed the shooting and had been told to come to the station to provide a statement. This fellow looked surprised to see me. He asked me to wait on a bench.

I waited. Five minutes, fifteen minutes. I went back to the desk. Yes, yes, I was told, someone will be with you shortly. Another five minutes, another fifteen minutes. Obviously, no one would have minded if I gave up and left.

Sitting next to me in this waiting area was a woman—middle-aged and white (if that matters)—who was also a witness. We probably weren't supposed to compare our accounts, but we did. (No one had told us not to.) She mentioned that she thought she had seen the victim holding something in his hand, perhaps a knife, when he started to run.

Her vantage point had not been as good as mine, and I told her that I had seen the man drop the big rock and immediately begin to run. There had been no time for him to pull out a knife. Moreover, I had been in a position to see his hands—before and after he was killed—and I saw no knife. We looked at each other and didn't know what else to say.

Finally, a detective—I think he was a detective, he didn't say—came over and gave me a form on a clipboard and asked me to write a statement of what I had seen. I did. I stuck to the facts: nutty-looking homeless man carrying a small boulder, approached by cops, drops rock and runs, cops get closer, he darts between two of the officers, cop fires on him.

It was clear to me that the officer did not have to shoot the man. He was not threatening the officers. He was trying to run from them. But I didn't write down this conclusion. I presented the facts; I believed their implication were undeniable.

When I finished, I handed my statement to one of the officers. I was told, "You'll be contacted, if that's necessary." None of my interactions with the police led me to believe that a thorough investigation was in the works.

As I left the station, I saw the female officer who had fired the fatal shots. She was with several colleagues. She was upset and appeared to be crying. The other cops were being supportive. I couldn't help but feel sorry for her. My interpretation was that she had screwed up; she had overreacted or panicked and fired her shots too soon. My hunch was that she knew that.

The next day—this was long before the internet era—I checked the newspapers and saw no stories on the shooting. Some time later—I think it was a couple of months—I received a call. A grand jury was examining the shooting, and my presence was requested.

I went to the courthouse at the appointed hour and waited to be called into the grand jury room. My time in the drab conference room with the grand jury was brief. The jury was, as they say, a diverse group. But most of the jurors looked bored. A few seemed drowsy.

The prosecutor asked me to identify myself and certify I had filed the statement. He asked me to describe where I had been and whether I had seen the full episode. But he never asked me to provide a complete account. The key portion of the interview went something like this:

Prosecutor: You saw him start to run?

Me: I did.

Prosecutor: Did you see anything in his hand?

Me: No.

Prosecutor: Did you see him holding a knife?

Me: No. But I....

Prosecutor: Thank you.

I had wanted to say that I had seen him drop the heavy rock and bolt and that it was unlikely he had been able to grab and brandish a knife while sprinting. And I thought the grand jurors should know that he had not charged at any of the officers; he had been trying to dash through an opening between two of the cops in order to flee. And if they were interested in my opinion regarding the necessity of firing on him, I would have shared that, too.

But the prosecutor cut me off. He didn't ask about about any of this. And not one of the jurors asked a question or said anything.

I left the room discouraged. This was not a search for the truth. It appeared to be a process designed to confirm an account that would protect the officer who had killed the man. The prosecutor was in command and establishing a narrative. (A knife!) The jurors appeared to be only scenery. (Insert your own ham sandwich reference here.)

Long before the present debate spurred by the non-indictments in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, it seemed clear to me that the system contained a natural bias in favor of police officers. That certainly makes sense. Police officers have damn tough and dangerous jobs, and they are going to look out for their comrades-in-blue who slip up.

And prosecutors work closely with cops to rack up convictions, and they don't want to alienate their law enforcement partners. No one in that grand jury room was there to serve the interests of the dead guy.
On the way out of the courthouse, I realized I did not know the name of the victim.

I subsequently called a reporter who worked on the metro desk of the New York Times to tell him about my experience, hoping the paper would dig into the case. But I never saw a Times story on it. (At the time, I was working for a magazine that covered arms-control issues and in no position to write about the event. And back then, there was no equivalent to tweeting, blogging, or Facebooking.)

Several weeks, or a month or two, after my grand jury appearance, I called the person who had contacted me about testifying. Whatever happened? I asked. Oh, the man said, the case is over. I took that to mean the officer was not charged. Before I hung up, another question occurred to me.

I don't know why I thought about this, but I asked, "Whatever happened to the body of the man who was shot?" He was never identified and buried somewhere, he replied. And I wondered, never identified? How hard did they try?


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TGI as apologists' highway

SUBHEAD: TGI is heavily influenced by the corporations, organizations and individuals doing Kauai the most harm.

By Juan Wilson on 2 February 2014 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2014/02/tgi-as-apologists-highway.html)


Image above: Typical fluff. Front page TGI photo by Dennis Fujimoto on 2/2/14.  Halea Bactad and Jessica Kaleiohi, react to the ice water during the polar plunge Saturday at Kapaa Beach Park. From (http://thegardenisland.com/news/local/plunging-for-a-good-cause/article_0e0ca90e-8bd6-11e3-86bf-001a4bcf887a.html).

This Sunday the only newspaper on Kauai, the Garden Island News has an unusually heavy number of of neer-do-wells and P.R. flaks pimping for organizations that are under pressure from island residents.

Number 1:
Front page banner headline
Atrazine Hazard Use Down

THE GIST: Don't worry. Even though Syngenta manufactures Atrazine and uses it and many more restricted use pesticides in GMO plant experiments near Kauai neighborhoods you don't have to be concerned because that's just a bad memory fading in the rear view mirror. You should trust our government's regulating efforts and the corporations providing the few jobs left on Kauai.

Atrazine Hazard Use Down Report shines light on statewide use of chemical herbicide By Chis D'Angelo on 2 February 2014 for TGI  (http://thegardenisland.com/news/local/atrazine-hazard-use-down/article_44c742c0-8bd5-11e3-b454-001a4bcf887a.html) Over the last seven decades, the use of atrazine in Hawaii has declined significantly, from about 400,000 pounds in 1964 to 77,403 pounds in 2012, according to a recent study by the state Department of Health. And much of that drop is the result of the state’s dying sugar industry. For anyone concerned about atrazine and its potential health and environmental impacts, DOH supervisor Fenix Grange said the report should be “extraordinarily comforting.” “The hazard is going down, not going up,” she said. “But to be sure, we’re going out and collecting samples.” The legislative report — as well as the DOH’s current sampling effort — is the fruit of House Concurrent Resolution 129. Adopted in April, it called for the DOH to head up a task force to address the potential data gaps on air, surface water and near-shore effects of the chemical herbicide. “Last spring they asked for an atrazine study, because atrazine was kind of the flavor of the month,” said Grange, who prepared the report along with DOH toxicologist Barbara Brooks. The report, completed in November and recently posted online, found that the sugar industry “was and is the largest user of atrazine in Hawaii.” “The drop in atrazine usage over time reflects the decline of sugarcane cultivation, cancellation of some uses and more restrictive label application rates,” according to the report. HCR 129 states “it is in the best interest of the state to be at the forefront of a monitoring and regulatory effort to protect Hawaii residents from the potential adverse effects of chronic atrazine exposure.” Grange said the 63-page report is the first of its kind, a compilation of historical atrazine use data throughout the state. Manufactured by Syngenta, Atrazine is a pre- or post-emergence herbicide used for weed control. Registered in the U.S. since 1958, it is one of the most widely used herbicides, with 76.5 million pounds of the active ingredient used domestically each year... Click here for more.

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Number 2:
Front page above the fold story
Mayor - Attacks are politically motivated

THE GIST: It must be getting hotter in Mayor Bernard P. Carvalho's inner sanctum to have  a heavy hitting Honolulu attorney respond to recent actions by Kauai residents to have the mayor step down for inappropriate use of a county credit card for personal gain and refusal to testify and so violating Hawaii Statute 78-9. See GasGate article here.

Mayor - Attacks are politically motivated Carvalho’s attorney responds to public criticism By Darin Moriki on 2 February 2014 for TGI  (http://thegardenisland.com/news/local/mayor-attacks-are-politically-motivated/article_b63ef294-8bd6-11e3-9289-001a4bcf887a.html) Kauai Mayor Bernard Carvalho Jr. is dismissing claims that he violated state law during a county audit investigation that began four years ago. The two-term mayor issued a statement on Saturday through his Honolulu-based attorney in response to public claims that he had violated the law. The allegations, released in emails to county officials, state lawmakers and several media outlets over the past two weeks, called on Carvalho to step down because he did not cooperate with a criminal investigation stemming from an audit of county fuel charges. “This is old news and curiously comes at a time when the mayor is ramping up a re-election campaign,” Carvalho’s personal attorney Eric Seitz said in the statement. “These allegations are without merit and an examination of the facts will show the mayor has done nothing wrong.” The audit, published by County Auditor Ernesto “Ernie” Pasion in April 2012, implied that Carvalho and other county employees illegally used county fuel for personal use. A subsequent review of the allegations by the attorney general’s office found no basis for further criminal investigation. Because Carvalho invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and refused to answer questions during the investigation, several residents, including Glenn Mickens, Ken Taylor, Michael Sheehan, and Sheehan’s attorney Richard E. Wilson, said state laws specifically call for Carvalho to vacate office. “Your tenure as mayor has ended,” Wilson wrote in a Jan. 30 letter addressed to Carvalho. Click here for more.

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Number 3:
Editorial Page Guest Commentary
KIUC top goal remains reducing bills

THE GIST: It's funny that if that is the goal of KIUC for the last decade in that we still have the most expensive electricity in the country. Maybe it's partially because of the over generous perks to the KIUC executive elite. Maybe it's because its the board's refusal to face a future of less consumption and centralization of electrical power generation. Maybe it's because KIUC is not really a cooperative at all, but just another corporation bleeding its customers.

KIUC top goal remains reducing bills By KIUC Chair Allan Smith on 2 February 2014 in TGI Now that the special election on meter fees is concluded, I want to thank the 43 percent of our members who took the time to learn about the issue and to vote. We're especially grateful to the 74 percent who voted "yes" and supported the decision of their elected board. I want to make some observations about our member-owned cooperative, about our obligations as directors and about the realities of running a public utility. As an elected director, I have the fiduciary duty to represent the interests of all members of KIUC. This includes our industrial and commercial members who represent 60 percent of our revenue as well as our 25,000 residential customers. As a lifelong resident of Kauai, I take my responsibilities seriously, especially when considering how the actions I take today will affect future generations. Over the course of this election, I've heard some people talk about "making the cooperative act like a cooperative." The way they would accomplish this is to increase the influence of a tiny minority of the members and put operational decisions of the utility up for a popular vote. Cooperative and democratic principles are not based on the tyranny of the minority, but rather on representing the views of the majority. As for running the utility, I'm confident that the great majority would prefer to leave that to the professional staff and elected board. As chairman of KIUC's board, I only am one vote of nine. Every action we take must receive the support of a majority of the directors. This is how a cooperative works. This is how democracy works. We must be able to compromise, we *must accept that we do not always get our way and, win or lose, we must move on to address the next issue. Once the board makes a decision, we have the fiduciary duty to advocate for that decision and explain to members why they should support it. Yet this is seen by some as violating the principles of the cooperative. To me, it would not only break our commitments as directors but would go against common sense to remain silent on a challenge to one of our decisions. In the event of future petitions, we will continue to educate our members on why the decision was made and what's at stake for the cooperative. We will ask for their vote to support the elected directors' decisions. I am increasingly concerned by the process that allows 250 people to sign a petition - less than 1 percent of our membership - to challenge actions taken by the board. Particularly when a repeat petition challenger told The Garden Island that he "was more excited about the high voter turnout than disappointed about the results ... that's good for democracy ... I'm glad that we had the conversation." It was not a conversation, it was a confrontation,  one that cost the membership well over $100,000 in direct expenses and staff time. While the petitioners may look upon this as some sort of academic exercise, a challenge to a board action is a very serious matter. We do not take it lightly. And now, for the second time in three years, nearly three-quarters of the members who voted in a petition election defeated a challenge of a board action. While the petitioner believes the high turnout was "good for democracy," he shouldn't tryto spin the outcome as a win. I took it as a sign that many of our members are fed up. This was a direct rebuke from the vast majority of members who are tired of seeing their cooperative's time and resources diverted from the No. I goal in our strategic plan: cutting their electric bill. Now we have another vote coming up. The ballots will be arriving soon for the 2014 board of directors election. I hope our members will remain engaged and will vote after studying the backgrounds and positions of the 11 candidates. As directors, our job is to make choices. Some choices are more popular than others. But we make these choices in a thoughtful, responsible manner and in the best interests of our members and Kauai. IB note: This article was not online at time of this publication.

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CONCLUSION
My take on these three TGI articles is an increasing distrust of having no paper of record actually published on Kauai. The news (and the lawyering) is coming from Oahu and beyond. This stuff is a lot of mushy mealy public relations sprinkled with sugar (or more likely HFCS).

I praise the individual letters to the editor and the efforts of some of our on islands reporters, but TGI is heavily influenced by the corporations, organizations and individuals doing Kauai the most harm.

The real issues are related to Conservation, Decentralization and Rehumanization. See more Ea O Ka Aina: A Bargain with the Archdruid.
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The God with Three Heads

SUBHEAD: To make sense of the future closing in on us, it’s going to be necessary to drop our idea of progress.

By John Michael Greer on 24 April 2013 for the Archdruid Report -
(http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-god-with-three-heads.html)


Image above: Statue in Bangkok, Thailand, of Erawan, the three headed elephant deity. From (http://www.flickr.com/photos/mjaaustria/2880112724/lightbox/).

It's been said that a man’s religion is the thing he can’t bear to have questioned. If there’s any truth in that old saying, the idea that faith in progress is a religion has a great deal going for it. Over the seven years this blog has been appearing, I’ve discussed any number of controversial issues and made plenty of proposals that contradict the conventional wisdom of our times; none of them has fielded me as many spluttering denunciations as the suggestion that belief in progress is the most important civil religion of the modern industrial world.

A commenter on one of the many other sites where my posts appear thus started off his critique of last week’s post with a shout of “Why bear with this?” Since I doubt anybody’s holding a gun to his head and making him read The Archdruid Report, he’ll have to answer his question himself. Still, his furious outburst is a useful reminder of one of the distinctive features of the belief systems we’re discussing; however subtle and closely reasoned their intellectual sides happen to be, they reach right down into the deepest places of the human heart, and draw on powerful and unreasoning passions.

Civil religions and theist religions alike have motivated believers to die for their faith and to kill for it, to make tremendous sacrifices and commit appalling crimes. Not many human motivations can equal religion as a driving force, and I don’t know of any that reliably surpass it. When people push past the limits of ordinary humanity in any direction, good or evil, if it’s not a matter of the love or hate of one human being for another, odds are that what drives them onward is either a theist faith or a civil one.

This is among the core reasons why I’ve launched into an exploration of the religious dimensions of peak oil, and why I’ve begun that with a study of the most distinctive feature of the religious landscape of our time: the way that belief in the invincibility and beneficence of progress has come to serve an essentially religious role in the modern world, permeating the collective conversations of our time. It’s also a core reason why that exploration will continue over the weeks to come, because there’s much more that needs saying about the contemporary faith in progress, the historical mythology that underlies it, and the distortions it imposes on nearly all of our society’s assumptions about the future.

It’s important, to begin with, to pay attention to the ambiguities wrapped up in the modern conception of progress. When people think or talk about progress, by that name or any of its common euphemisms, there are at least three different things they can mean by it.

All three share the common presupposition that history has an inherent tendency to move in a particular direction, that movement in that direction is a good thing, and that human beings can and should contribute to that forward movement toward the good; it’s the dimension of human life in which the movement is believed to be taking place that marks the distinction between these different meanings of progress.

The first version of progress is moral progress: it centers on the claim that history’s inherent tendency is toward increasingly ethical human relationships and social forms. These days, especially on the leftward end of society, this version of progress is usually framed in political terms, but its moral thrust is impossible to miss, as its proponents inevitably frame their arguments in terms of moral absolutes, virtues and vices.

At its best, the ethical stance of the contemporary mainstream Left in America and Europe is one of the few really original moral philosophies to develop in modern times, with a distinctive focus on the virtues of equality, social justice, and kindness, all understood and pursued primarily on a collective rather than an individual level; at its worst—like all philosophies, it has its less impressive side—it becomes a self-righteous cant, by turns saccharine and shrill, in the service of the craving for unearned power that’s the besetting sin of all modern moralists.

You can see the faith in moral progress in action any time people insist that some proposed social change is an advance, a move forward, away from the ignorance and injustice of the benighted past. Even when this sort of talk is cheap manipulative rhetoric, as of course it so often is, it’s the faith in moral progress that gives the manipulation power and allows it to work.

Think about the implications of “forward” and “backward” as applied to social changes, and you can begin to see how deeply the mythology of progress pervades contemporary thought: only if history has a natural direction of flow does it make any kind of sense to refer to one set of social policies as “progressive” and another as “backward,” say, or to describe the culture or laws of one of the flyover states despised by the coastal literati as “stuck in the 1950s.” It’s the faith that history moves in the direction set out by a specific definition of moral progress that gives these very common metaphors their meaning.

That’s only one of the three things that faith in progress can choose as its focus, though. The second is scientific and technical progress, which centers on the claim that history’s inherent tendency is toward increasingly complete human knowledge and domination of the cosmos. In theory, it might be possible to conceive of scientific progress without a corresponding increase in technical power, or vice versa; in practice, at least in the minds of those who interpret progress along these lines, the two are rarely separated.

As Francis Bacon argued in the first gray dawn of the scientific revolution, the value of knowledge concerning nature is the power that results from that knowledge; investment in the production of scientific knowledge is almost universally justified by talking about what the resulting knowledge will let humanity do to the world.

To see the core features of a religion in starkest terms, it’s often useful to look at its most extreme forms, and the faith in scientific and technical progress is no exception.

The example I have in mind here is the Singularitarian movement. Singularitarian prophet Ray Kurzweil has set the date as 2045 when the unstoppable onward march of progress, bootstrapped by the creation of artificial intelligences far more powerful than any human mind, will accelerate to infinity.

All the dreams of science fiction, from starflight through immortality to virtual sex with Marilyn Monroe, will become realities, and humanity will achieve something like godhood—unless the hyperintelligent computers decide to exterminate us all instead, that is.

There are plenty of things worth discussing about the Singularitarian religion, but the one that’s relevant to the present theme is the wild misunderstanding it imposes on the nature of scientific knowledge. A large portion of the discoveries of science, including many of its greatest achievements, can be summed up neatly by the words “you can’t do that.”

If an all-wise supercomputer could be created at all—and it’s far from certain that one could be—it’s entirely possible that it would sort through the sum total of human science and technology and say to us, “For beings of such modest mental capacities, you’ve done a good job of figuring out what can be done with the resources available to you.

Here are some technical tricks you haven’t worked out yet, but starflight, immortality, sex with this Marilyn Monroe person? Sorry, those aren’t possible; you’ll have to go on living without them.” What’s more, it’s entirely possible that it would be right.

Even outside the Singularitarian faith, though, you can count on either blank incomprehension or furious disagreement if you suggest that there might be things that scientific and technological progress can’t achieve. Those of my readers who have been in the peak oil scene for any length of time will have learned that the most common dismissal they’ll get, when they try to suggest to the rest of the world that betting the future on infinite resource extraction from a finite planet is not a bright idea, is some variation on;

 “Oh, I’m sure they’ll come up with something.”

The “they” in this overfamiliar sentence are of course scientists and engineers; the mere fact that “they” have been trying to come up with something in this particular case for well over a century, and success is still nowhere in sight, does nothing to dent the really rather touching faith that today’s popular culture places in their powers.

Scientific and technical progress, then, plays a massive role in the modern mythology of progress. It's equalled if not exceeded by the third kind of progress, economic progress, which centers on the claim that history’s inherent tendency is to ever greater levels of economic abundance, however that abundance may happen to be distributed.

The belief that ongoing exponential economic growth is normal and beneficent, and that anything else is abnormal and destructive, is perhaps the most widely accepted form of the mythology of progress in contemporary life, not least because most people like to imagine that they themselves will benefit from it.

Open the business section of any newspaper, turn the pages of any economics textbook, scan the minutes of any meeting of any business corporation in contemporary America or most of the modern world, and you’ll get to see a faith in economic progress as absolute and unthinking as any medieval peasant’s trust in the wonderworking bones of the local saint. In the mythic world portrayed by the prophets and visionaries of that faith, economic growth is always good, and comes as a reward to those who obey the commandments of the economists.

The fact—and of course it is a fact—that obeying the commandments of the economists has by and large brought more disaster than prosperity to the industrial world’s economies for decades somehow rarely enters into these reverential thoughts.

In recent years, to be sure, faith in economic progress—that is, growth—has come under fire from two sides.

On the one hand, there’s the small but gradually expanding body of ecologists, economists, and other scholars who point out the absurdity of perpetual economic expansion on a finite planet, and document some of the ways that an obsession with growth for its own sake produces a bumper crop of problems.

On the other, there’s the less coherent but far more widespread sense that economic progress doesn’t seem to be happening the way it’s supposed to, that standards of living for most people are declining rather than improving, and that economic policies that have been sold to the public as ways to fix a troubled economy are having exactly the opposite effect. Even so, most of the critiques coming out of this latter awareness, and no small number of those belonging to the former class, assume that growth is normal, and fixate on how that supposedly normal state got derailed.

Moral progress, scientific and technological progress, and economic progress: those are the three forms that progress takes in the minds of those who put their faith in it: if you will, the three heads of the deity of the Church of Progress. It’s crucial to keep in mind, though, that these three visions of progress often intertwine in complex ways in the minds of believers.

To many mainstream American liberals in the late 20th century, for example, the limitless progress of science and technology would guarantee equally limitless economic growth, which would make it possible to abolish poverty, provide equal opportunity for all, and fulfill the hopes of moral progress without requiring any of those who already had access to privilege and economic abundance to give up any of these things.

So complete a fusion of the three modes of progress was once standard. Read any of the vast supply of self-congratulatory literature on progress churned out by popular presses in 19th century Britain or America, for example, and you can count on finding all three twisted tightly round one another, with the supposed moral superiority of Anglo-Saxon civilization serving as the linchpin of arguments that claimed to explain the limitless progress of technology and also to justify the extremely uneven distribution of the benefits of economic growth.

The 20th century’s ghastly history made such moral claims a good deal harder to make with a straight face, and so versions of the faith in progress popular in recent decades often avoid the moral dimension and focus on the other two forms of progress.

Far more often than not these days, as a result, the mainstream American version of faith in progress fixates purely on the supposedly unstoppable feedback loop between scientific and technological progress, on the one hand, and economic growth on the other, while moral progress has been consigned to bit parts here and there.

It’s mostly on the left that faith in moral progress retains its former place in the blend—one of the many ways in which the leftward end of the American political landscape is significantly more conservative, in the strict sense of the word, than those who call themselves conservative these days.

And even there, it’s increasingly a fading hope, popular among the older generation of activists and among those who have moved toward the fringes of society and mix their faith in progress with a good solid helping of its erstwhle antireligion, the faith in apocalypse: it’s from this unstable mix that we get claims that the morally better world will arrive once evil, and most of the planet’s population, are blown to smithereens.

It’s by way of this latter process, I think, that faith in moral progress tends to pop up in the literature of peak oil, and even more often in conversations in the peak oil scene. I’ve long since lost track of the number of times that someone has suggested to me that if industrial civilization continues down the well-worn track of overshoot and decline, the silver lining to that very dark cloud is that the rigors of the decline will force all of us, or at least the survivors, to become better people—“better” being defined variously as more ecologically sensitive, more compassionate, or what have you, depending on the personal preferences of the speaker.

Now of course when civilizations overshoot their resource base and start skidding down the arc of decline toward history’s compost bin, a sudden turn toward moral virtue of any kind is not a common event. The collapse of social order, the rise of barbarian warbands, and a good many of the other concomitants of decline and fall tend to push things hard in the other direction.

Still, the importance of faith in progress in the collective imagination of our time is such that some way has to be found to make the future look better than the present. If a future of technological advancement and economic growth is no longer an option, then the hope for moral betterment becomes the last frail reed to which believers in progress cling with all their might.

To many of my readers, this may seem like a good idea; many others may consider it inevitable. I’m far from convinced that it’s either one. For more than thirty years now, the conviction that progress will somehow bail the industrial world out from the consequences of its own bad decisions has been the single largest obstacle in the way of preventing more of those same bad decisions from being made.

How many times have we all heard that economic growth was going to take care of resource depletion and environmental degradation, or that scientific and technical advances were going to take care of them, or that a great moral awakening—call it the rise of planetary consciousness, or any of the other popular buzzwords, if you wish—was going to take care of them. As it turned out, of course, none of those things took care of them at all, and since so many people placed their faith on one or the other kind of progress, nothing else took care of them, either.

Nor, for that matter, is faith in progress hardwired into the human psyche. It’s a specific belief system with distinct and well-documented historical roots in the Western world, and most other people in most other places and times have had beliefs about the future that contradicted it in every particular.

There have been many cultures in which history was held to have an inherent tendency to move from better to worse, from a Golden Age in the past to an age of darkness and horror somewhere in the future, and individual and collective hope focused on the possibility of holding onto the beneficent legacies of the past as long as possible in the teeth of decline. Nor are these the only options; there have, for example, been many cultures that saw time as a circle, and many more for whom time had no direction at all.

It’s quite common for people raised in a given culture to see its view of things as normal and natural, and to scratch their heads in bewilderment when they find that people in other places and times saw things in very different ways. Modern industrial civilization, for all its self-described sophistication, is no more exempt from this custom than any other human society.

To make sense of the future closing in on us, it’s going to be necessary to get past that easy but misleading habit of thought, to recognize that the contemporary faith in progress is a culturally specific product that emerged in a highly unusual and self-terminating set of historical circumstances, and to realize that while it was highly adaptive in those circumstances, it’s become lethally maladaptive now.

To understand these things, in turn, it’s going to be necessary to dig down to the foundations of modern industrial culture, and grapple with one of the core cognitive frameworks our society—like every other—uses to make sense of the inkblot patterns of the cosmos. For want of a better label, we’ll call this framework the shape of time. We’ll talk about that next week.

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Fukushima denial & extinction ethics

SUBHEAD: For about seventy years, we’ve been building and operating reactors with design lives of maybe 40 years.  

By Mary Poppins on 14 May 2012 for Nature Bats Last - 
  (http://guymcpherson.com/2012/05/fukushima-denial-and-the-ethics-of-extinction/)

 
Image above:Wreckage of Fukushima Daichi Plant #3 containment building on 11/12/2011. From (http://boingboing.net/2011/11/12/inside-fukushima-first-photos.html).
 
The problem first became apparent in 1985. I was sitting on a porch in the mountains in Arizona reading a Scientific American article by one of the early researchers investigating the unlikely possibility that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere might be a problem. Over the previous months there had been a number of similar pieces on things like the ozone layer and the decline in fisheries. Then a ‘eureka!’ (actually, a ‘holy shit’) moment. Clearly there was going to be serious trouble in maybe 20-30 years unless something changed. I tried hard and for a long time to help that change happen, because it sure didn’t look good, even back then.

Skip forward to now. The window of time during which our species could have changed course and averted this has slammed shut. The forces we blindly set in motion are far beyond our ability to control, despite the geoengineering fantasies of the technologists. Ever see The Sorcerers Apprentice?

There are several irreversible processes under way that would each, alone, be sufficient to kill off if not everything at least the upper part of the food chain, which now consists mostly of humans..Two of them are the release of the methane now beginning to boil out of the Arctic ocean and permafrost and ocean acidification.

These are disasters from which the living planet will not recover for perhaps millions of years, and the composition of the recovered biosphere will include few currently extant species. Cockroaches look good to go, primates not so much. But life has made it through these sorts of things before, these great extinctions, and probably would yet again recover and flourish although we will not be around to see it. The third problem is different, new to the world.

We have created astoundingly toxic substances which have not been present on the surface of this planet in billions of years; some have never been here before. All are made in nuclear reactors — they do not occur in nature. The particulars of this problem are well documented and need not be repeated here, except to note that earth’s living beings do not have eons of genetic adaptation to constant high radiation levels. All other problems allow some optimism about the long term prospect for recovery after the human rampage is over. This threat is different in kind from other environmental problems because radioactivity directly disrupts or destroys the ability of genes to accurately replicate. This is not repairable. We menace everything, not just ourselves.

For about seventy years, we’ve been building and operating reactors with design lives of maybe 40 years. There are roughly 450 operating civilian reactors, and a guesstimated 500+ military, research, and other reactors, all of which continue to produce radioisotopes with half-lives ranging from seconds to millions of years in containments designed as temporary until the waste problem is solved. Unfortunately, no solution has been found, and when the containments begin to fail significantly, all the garbage sitting in them will disperse into the environment. There is no other choice- remove this crap from the biosphere, or eat, breathe, and wear it, wash with it, walk on it and drink it when the containment fails.

We’re there. (See http://fukushimaresponse.com)

You’re now looking down the barrel of the gun that is the likeliest of all to kill you, me and everyone we know. It’s not vague any longer. This is the specific problem that will end civilization and ruin the biosphere, with a specific mechanism of action and a very short time frame. Unless, of course, something can be done to secure those SFPs and reactors until a currently unknown technology can be invented capable of removing the spent fuel to another place before the earthquakes and entropy make the effort moot. Is it even possible?

Denial
Maybe, but we’re unlikely to ever find out. The first step in solving or mitigating a problem is to acknowledge it, all of it, and humans don’t if they can possibly avoid it.

When I was in my twenties and reading a lot of history, there were a couple of years where I got fascinated by the Holocaust, how that could have been, what people thought they were doing. One aspect in particular struck me; it was in a book whose title is long forgotten, about the response of the Jewish community in Germany to the rise of the Nazis. In a nutshell, denial.

Nobody in the Jewish community, especially the well-off, wanted to believe that the words they were hearing from the Nazis as they rose were serious. Respectable authorities, rabbinical celebrities reassured everyone that Hitler was just posturing, nothing would come of it. As the vise grew tighter, the denial grew more fervent. Those few who defied the consensus and insisted on the reality of the danger were admonished, ridiculed, and finally shunned, in the old-fashioned sense — nobody would have anything to do with them. Reality was just too damn uncomfortable, so they chose to die rather than face it. This is not uncommon; in fact, it is pretty normal behavior. People would often rather die than give up comfortable lives.

That is what we’re doing. For a minimum twenty years it has been clear to anyone who actually look that industrial civilization is a suicide machine based on a false premise; that the Earth offers both endless resources and a bottomless pit for waste. Wrong on both counts, obviously- but admitting that is to acknowledge the destruction we create merely by living in this briefly possible fashion, this remarkably comfortable suicidal fashion.

So you and me, naturally above average in awareness, intelligence, spiritual development, so hip and edgy that we read Nature Bats Last, been worried about this stuff for years, tsk tsk — we gonna give it all up and live on what can be had from the interaction of air, soil, sunlight, water and intelligence?

Do you sometimes drive for pleasure, say, out to eat and a movie? Been known to blast out a few Btu to get the hot tub ready? Get on an airplane? Buy convenient plastic items (gotta have music) that will still be leaking toxins in a millennia or two?

Me, too.

And there’s your answer: No.

Proposed solutions to any of this mess which require humans to behave better than we do are worthless, just another form of denial. Please consider the environment in which the creatures whose descendants we are, evolved. To be successful in evolutionary terms means only one thing, breeding.

The champion breeders (sorry, I can’t resist: did you know one sixth of the human population carries genes from the most successful breeder of all, Genghis Kahn?) in our line of descent were those who were best at acquiring food, water, shelter, and a mate- short term challenges. The critters who were best at short term challenges did well; there were no bonus points awarded for worrying about the ozone layer. As a result, we are hard wired for short term motivation, and long term problems are mostly invisible to our emotional perceptions (and it’s the emotional process that dictates our actions despite these fond illusions of intellectual rigor). We’re going to behave the way we’re wired to behave, with some rare exceptions. The wiring isn’t going to change quickly.

An aside, scientists are wired on the same plane as the rest of us. They are just as addicted to denial and comfort as anyone else, and as unwilling to look at harsh reality. I had a mentor in radiation monitoring for a while, a retired physicist with a background in that area. He was great as long as we were talking about equipment and procedures, but I made the mistake of telling him about Fukushima, and he declared himself too depressed to continue and cut off contact.

Another interesting thing this situation has turned up is the apparent inverse relationship between social rank and ability to grasp the consequences of the situation. Wealthy and powerful people rarely seem to understand that not all problems can be handled with spin, force or money. People who deal with physical reality for a living take a look at this information and quite often get it immediately.

So denial it is and will be, until the situation gets so immediately, undeniably awful that denial will no longer work, at which point everybody starts demanding immediate action; that usually occurs long after there is any effective response possible. We’re most likely there now — the time available to reinforce SFP 4 is melting away as the next earthquake approaches.

Plus there’s another problem that may make doing anything impossible. Tepco is almost out of workers. The experienced workers at all levels have far overstepped the radiation dosages which bar them from further work and must leave. There is no one to replace them, and it is getting extremely difficult to find anyone willing to go out there for any amount of money, as the ambient radiation hits higher and higher levels and continues to rise. Reactors 2 and 3 cannot even be approached anymore, and there appears to be an ongoing release of yellow, radioactive steam cracks in the ground. It seems likely that the plant will be abandoned soon, not by policy, but because anyone going there will die.

What to do?

In all likelihood, Fukushima is going to blow and the chain of dominos will fall; if some miracle occurs this time it won’t matter for long, because all commercial reactors are being run by for-profit companies under a de facto policy of “run to failure” — that’s how you maximize profits. And then there are those other lethal problems if we get past this one.

Why do anything?

The ethics of extinction
My ethics are personal and therefore subjective, as I think is ultimately true for everyone. So since I’m going to talk about ethics, I need to tell you a little about mine to keep things up front. My effort in life is to grow in kindness and integrity, which to me look like necessary components of each other. I don’t have a religion or gurus, but let me tell you about a story in the Los Angeles Times some years ago, when the newspaper were doing a series on the poorest of the poor.

The story was about a couple living in a hut with their child in a barren wasteland in Africa. Poor doesn’t begin to convey their situation. None of them had shoes or more than a rag or two. Every day the man went scrounging in this desolate, empty place for some way to get enough calories for another day of life. Because repeated failure would doom them all, he always had to eat first even when if child went hungry. The woman made her efforts closer to home. One day a near miracle occurred; out scavenging, she found five potatoes, which could be traded for nearly a week’s worth of millet, a huge windfall.

Walking home, she encountered a mother with a baby who hadn’t eaten in two days and whose milk had failed, who asked her for help. She thought about it for a moment, and then she gave the mother three of the five potatoes.

I think that this woman is a very advanced soul, and if I can make some progress towards her ethics then this life will have been a success.

To my subjective perception, service is the expression of kindness, and it seems incumbent upon me to try and do whatever I can to make things better for the beings around me.

So here are some personal, subjective reasons to keep trying, even in the face of human extinction:

We have just seen a sudden mass movement intentionally triggered by a small group — Occupy Wall Street — significantly change the political debate in this country overnight. It may be possible to do something similar regarding Fukushima. It won’t solve the problem, but it could be part, even an important part, of a larger effort which mitigates things a bit.

That’s about as much hope as the visible landscape will bear. It isn’t much, and granted, the likeliest outcome by far is the worst one.

If there was nothing at stake except our sorry selves, then maybe sinking back into the familiar numbness of inertia would be defensible. But that isn’t the case. There are uncountable numbers of living beings, some of them human and very small, who will suffer and die horribly and slowly when Fukushima blows. Almost all of them are innocent, and powerless to prevent this.

You and I are neither powerless nor innocent. We didn’t stop gobbling the world even when we knew that others will be paying for our little party with their futures, including our own children. We have failed as guardians of their future.

Our unbridled selfishness has ruined the ever-changing web of living interaction known as the biosphere. This has been called biocide, and if the worst happens with the worlds radioactive waste, that may become literally true. Our debt is very large indeed, and it is owed to our own victims. It is just possible that an enormous effort may help somewhat.

What kind of person am I if I will not try?

Many of us have treasured deep connections to certain places (the deserts and mountains of Arizona, in my case) and done our best to keep them alive and vibrant, to leave hawk and juniper, and ponderosa, elk and wolf room to thrive, to push back against the death culture with every tool available. We failed, and for those who know what is now gone the loss is hard to bear.

Consider love of life as a reason to keep working, love for what was and the astounding grace of having known the beauty and intelligence of a flourishing living ecosystem before the chance was gone, and love manifested as a willingness to make it possible again. I will keep trying in gratitude, and in hope that possibly the recovery can be expedited in some small way by something I do.

That’s reason enough.

Who will you chose to be now, in this painful, nightmare time? This is an existential crisis in the most literal sense. The future existence of our species, and likely everything above the cockroach level is seriously in question, and our individual lives and the lives of our children are immediately at risk from Fukushima. One quake, one lengthy glitch in the water flow to any spent fuel pool, and immense suffering ensues instantly.

The situation may still seem abstract and unreal on an emotional level because humans cannot perceive radiation directly, and usually only personal perception of danger registers. But this will change over time as the cover-up cracks, or immediately if a pool burns. At some point the denial will break, followed by much disorder as people try to make themselves and their loved ones safe when it is impossible to be safe.

In disasters people can both show great kindness and commit terrible crimes, but mostly there is fear and running, hiding and shocking, paralyzing confusion. Responding to this situation requires courage, not least the courage to look directly at the horror we are facing and still not be broken, to refuse to stay safely passive as our species kills itself and everything else.

I think that for myself, integrity requires I keep trying until I no longer have the ability.

I adore little kids. A yard full of happy pre-schoolers is about as much fun as I know how to have. I am reading about what is happening to kids in Japan, and it breaks my heart and make me very sad and very angry- children dying of cardiac arrest in fifth grade, children forced to consume huge amounts of radiation to protect the reputation of Fukushima produce, refusal to test children for internal radiation. It goes on and on it is sickening and horrifying and as a human being I will not stand idly by while this happens there and spreads around the world, regardless of any other reason to try.

Fuck the murderous corporate scumbags doing this. I will fight them to my last breath. It is too late for Japan, but it may not be so everywhere. WE MUST NOT PASSIVELY LET THEM POISON MORE CHILDREN. And to those displaying a sophisticated, cynical superiority such that even this doesn’t signify a moral imperative to act: consider living with yourself when they start dying here. Is this who you chose to be? Is this really who you chose to see in the mirror every morning?

How much cowardice is currently showing?

Because this is really what it comes down to, isn’t it- taking full responsibility for who we are and what we do, and making and living that hard decision to always do the right thing. I am a fighter by nature and by path, and for me this is the essence of life for an honorable warrior. It’s only secondarily about fighting, although defending those who need it is certainly a necessity. The true essence is always doing the right thing regardless of personal consequences. Fear, and overcoming it, is just part of the work. There are many depending on us to do this, for they cannot help themselves and without our help they will die in great misery. For your sake as well as theirs, I hope you will undertake to become courageous and help them.

So there it is, one person’s reasons for trying regardless of whether or not it makes any difference, of whether or not the universe offers meaning beyond that which we construct, whether or not anyone else does anything. I will never stop trying to make things better, so long as I am able to choose. And sometimes there is a success.

It is enough.

SOMETHING, HOWEVER SMALL AND IMPERFECT, IS BETTER THAN NOTHING
But the form of the effort may change. No matter what we do, it may not be possible to avert biocide and our own extinction.

Then what?

There is a Zen monastery near Fukushima, currently a place of immense suffering. The citizens there have effectively been condemned to death by their government because admitting the truth and evacuating them would cause an intolerable loss of face. They are watching their children sicken and die, while the medical profession refuses to test for radiation and diagnoses the problems as “flu” and “stress” and “hysteria.” The area will not be habitable again for thousands of years; it is truly a lost cause helping them.

One of the insane things that is happening there is a truly bizarre and useless effort to decontaminate areas by digging up contaminated soil. The citizens have been told this will work and of course it doesn’t, but they are conditioned to believe what authority tells them and to obey. So this process generated many tons of highly contaminated soil in plastic bags, with no place to put it, and there were many anxious homeowners thinking that if only they could put this stuff someplace, their children would be helped. Where to put it?

The Abbott of the temple opened the gates and invited anyone who needed a place to dump, to bring the bags to the temple.

That is what to do: just give kindness. It’s the only thing you can always offer.

That’s enough words for now. There are a few of us involved in a project to get the word out, and there are plans to set up radiation monitoring networks and a non-government controlled radiation measurement lab so people can see what their kids are eating, and more. If someone is interested in that, or if you’ve got a better idea contact me, or maybe we can have a discussion in the comments? I’ve never done this before and I don’t know how it works.

I hope someone finds this essay useful.

Kindness to all beings, as best I am capable of doing it. And best wishes to you.
 
• Mary Poppins, a long-time environmental activist who can be reached via at info@fukushimaresponse.com.

Former Vegan becomes Butcher

SUBHEAD: By killing the animal himself, he says, strengthens his bond to that animal, as well as the food it provides.  

By Kristoror Husted on 21 January 2012 for NPR - (http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/01/21/145521431/how-one-former-vegan-learned-to-embrace-butchering)

 
Image above: Andrew Plotsky, former vegan, assists dying pig he will soon butcher. From original article.

The farm-to-table philosophy has been mostly about knowing where food was grown. For meat, that meant knowing if your chickens were caged and if your beef was grass fed. But with the revival of the butcher shop, some young people are undertaking the largely lost art of butchering as a stronger way to connect with their food.

For 24-year-old Andrew Plotsky of Washington, D.C., that meant leaving his job as a barista in a snobby coffee shop to learn the process of raising an animal, slaughtering it and butchering it for a meal.

"I had a romantic idea of the way I thought animals should and could be processed," he tells The Salt. He says he was attracted to the small scale tradition of a whole community having its hands involved in the raising of animals for food. "I wanted to be a part of that process," he says. "Somehow, that manifested in pig slaughter." Long gone is the idea that only chefs care about the provenance of the meat they cook.

Now, the notion of knowing a piece of meat's history seems to be trickling into the mainstream. Who raised it? Who killed it? How did it die? Who butchered it?

It was questions like these that led Plotsky across the country. The former vegan went to Vashon Island, Wa=shington, to learn the butcher trade from Brandon and Lauren Sheard. His goal was to document the process for about a week and half.

He ended up staying for two years. "I had been preparing myself intellectually for years," he says. "The immediacy of taking life was difficult at first. It's still something I'm figuring out how to rationalize." Pigs are first shot with a rifle to stun them. Then their throats are cut to let them bleed out.

"The moment of silence before the shot is taken was difficult," Plotsky says. "It came out of fear that the pig would suffer." By killing the animal himself, Plotsky says he strengthens his bond to that animal, as well as the food it provides, the ground it lived on, and the family and friends he shares the meal with. Though killing the animal weighs heavy on Plotsky's heart, carving the precise cuts from the pig weighs heavy because of its physical size. He has to wrestle the carcass and take awkward positions to make sure he gets exact cuts. "There's a steep learning curve," he says.

As a pork butcher, Plotsky typically uses a bone saw, a cleaver, a boning knife and another sharp knife to "break down" a pig. Each side of the pig will get cut into quarters: the shoulder, the leg, the loin and the belly. Using geographical markers, such as the sternum and vertebrae, butchers locate exactly where to slice first. For the leg quarter, it's one vertebra up from the curve near the bottom of the spine.

Two years later, the butcher and filmmaker is still working at the farm and documenting the process with the Sheards for others to see. He says he finds the work enriching because he's present for the whole process — something he hopes more consumers can connect with through his agrarian videos. It seems to be working, too.

"I see the 'hipification' of butchery in urban areas like Brooklyn and San Francisco," he says. "It's a good thing." His favorite cut of a pig? The trotter, or the foot. "If you have a trotter on a plate, you should feel blessed and not say 'Ew,'" he says. "They're kind of everything a chicken wing dreams of being."


On The Anatomy Of Thrift: Side Butchery from farmrun on Vimeo.
Video above: Andrew Plotsky's film on pork butchery. Caution some images may be too graphic for some viewers. From original article (http://vimeo.com/32367993).
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The Penn State Conflagration

SUBHEAD: The intersection of America's fake warrior culture of football with the nation's fake morals is instructive. By James Kunstler on 14 November 2011 for Kunstler.com - (http://kunstler.com/blog/2011/11/-the-penn-state.html) Image above: Manufactured phoney football patriotism. From (http://evilforalltime.blogspot.com/2011/09/after-fog-manufactured-patriotism-911.html). The Penn State football sex scandal, and the depraved response of the university community at all levels, tells whatever you need to know about the spiritual condition of this floundering, rudderless, republic and its ignoble culture.

For nine years, head coach Joe Paterno covered up a grad student's report of having witnessed former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky anally raping a ten-year-old boy in the athletic department's shower room. The grad student, Mike McQueary, didn't bother to call the police. He was later hired as Paterno's defensive coordinator. Two other Penn State administrators were informed about the rape and let the incident slide, after which Sandusky went on to a lively career in serial child homosexual rape. For many years after the witnessed incident, he was permitted regular access to Penn State's gyms, fields, and locker rooms, while cherry-picking victims from his own foundation, Second Mile, for needy children.

The intersection of America's fake warrior culture of football with the nation's fake moral and ethical culture is instructive. It has many levels, like a convoluted freeway intersection of on-ramps, off-ramps, and merge-ramps.

First is the pretense that college football is a character-building endeavor. Rather it's an odious money-grubbing racket that chews up and spits out quasi-professional players who, with rare exceptions, only pretend to be students. It corrupts everyone connected with it. College football is little more than a giant conduit for vacuuming money out of alumni, hawking brand merchandise, and generating TV revenues. At Penn State, the racket sucked in about $70 million a year net profit. All over America, the old land-grant diploma mills pay their coaches million-dollar salaries, while academic adjunct professors can't even get health insurance. At SUNY-Albany, the flagship campus of New York's system, they got rid of the department of foreign languages, but the football team plays on. Meanwhile ordinary students rack up tens of thousands of dollars in unpayable college debt via a related racket in which free-flowing government-backed Sallie Mae loan money prompts colleges to boost tuition rates way beyond inflation rates.

Then there is the merge-ramp between religion and football. Was I the only person revolted by video of the phony "prayer" session held in the Penn State stadium just before Saturday's "big game" with the University of Nebraska? Players from both teams led by Jesus-shouting cheerleaders affected to "pray" for Jerry Sandusky's rape victims, an exercise that was joined and legitimized by the crowd with all the passion of a Nuremberg rally. When that easy little ritual was out of the way they could settle back and enjoy the game's ersatz heroics with a clear conscience, and the tailgate barbeques that followed. A genuine sense of collective shame would have produced a different course of events - for instance cancelling the game, maybe the rest of the season, or perhaps even the entire football program in plain recognition of how foul and corrupt it is. That decision would have been up to the university's board of directors and tells you all you need to know about corporate leadership in America today.

Perhaps even more disgusting than the pre-game prayer show was the rash of demonstrations the night the story broke. These weren't about shame and repentance, just violent displays of sanctimonious "moral" support for an entire system in disgrace. Do you suppose these people could not have endured a night or two of uncomfortable silent reflection. And why didn't the new president, or any other campus executive, make a pubic statement that all the prideful carrying-on was indecent? I wonder how many of the same students will be ground down to dust by the weight of their unpayable college loans.

Equally disgusting was the cable news media's wall-to-wall coverage of the Penn State story, as if there weren't other important events going on in the world - for instance the resignation of two European prime ministers due to a political crisis that could sink the global economic system. CNN turned the Penn State story into an instant reality-TV show, with play-by-play action and spin-o-rama scenario-flogging aimed mainly, it seemed, at how Coach Joe Paterno might manage to wiggle out of culpability in the civil lawsuits that are sure to dog him now until the end of his days.

What the public doesn't know is how soon the sun will be setting on these giant universities in their entirety - football, classrooms, alumni golden circles, and all - as we enter the age of intense energy and capital scarcities. Remember: institutions, just like living organisms, often reach their greatest scale just before they go extinct. Resource constraints would be enough to get the job done, but it's interesting to see how our programming failures and internal moral contradictions have reached the last limits of flamboyant grotesquerie in the same exact moment.

This is a nation with psychological boundary problems in every realm - the family, the school, the government, the corporation, the diocese, the police station, you name it. Meanwhile the so-called fine arts branch of our culture valorizes "transgressive" behavior - as if there were any behavioral boundaries left to cross. Maybe Jerry Sandusky should be sentenced to a one-man show at the Whitney Museum. Then just wait a week or so: we'll get Jeffrey Dahmer, the Musical on Broadway.

Every new day that dawns lately gives further proof that we are a wicked people who deserve to be punished.

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