Leakage at Fukushima an emergency

SOURCE: Brad Parsons (mauibrad@hotmail.com)
SUBHEAD: Tepco Press Conference - The situation at Fukushima is bleak — “This discharge is beyond our control” 

By Kim Hyunbin on 6 August 2013 for Arirang News -
(http://www.arirang.co.kr/News/News_View.asp?nseq=149925)


Image above: The reactor building of Unit 3 is seen at the Fukushima six months after disaster. From (http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/energy/stories/japan-to-shape-post-fukushima-energy-options-by-spring).

Japan's tsunami-crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant is facing yet another emergency as highly radioactive groundwater appears to have risen above an underground barrier meant to contain it.

The head of the country's Nuclear Regulatory Authority task force Shinji Kinjo told Reuters on Monday that the leak was an emergency, but he was worried the plant's operator, TEPCO, had no sense of how to deal with it.

He went on to say the highly radioactive groundwater is likely seeping into the sea.
In a recent news conference, TEPCO General manager Masayuki Ono said the situation was bleak.

"We understand that this discharge is beyond our control and we do not think the current situation is good."

To prevent further leaks, plant workers are injecting chemicals to create an underground barrier to block groundwater from leaking out to the ocean.

But experts say the barrier may not be enough as it needs certain conditions to solidify.
A retired nuclear engineer who worked on several TEPCO nuclear plants says the company is out of its depth.

"The situation is already beyond what TEPCO can handle. They are doing everything they can but there are no perfect solutions."

Some Japanese media outlets have predicted the contaminated water could breach the ground surface in the matter of just a few weeks.

Just last week, TEPCO estimated a cumulative 20 to 40 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium may have leaked into the sea since the nuclear disaster some two-and-a-half years ago.

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Two Rods Removed from Reactor Four

By Yuri Kagigama on 18 July 2013 for Komo News - 
(http://www.komonews.com/news/national/2-fuel-rods-removed-from-wrecked-Fukushima-nuclear-plant-162868926.html)


Image above: Reactor Unit Four with dangerous spent fuel pool in weakened.

A giant crane removed two rods packed with nuclear fuel from the Fukushima nuclear plant on Wednesday, the beginning of a delicate and long process to reduce the risk of more radiation escaping from the disaster-struck plant.

All of the 1,535 rods in a spent-fuel pool next to reactor No. 4 at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant in northeastern Japan must eventually be moved to safer storage - an effort expected to take until the end of next year, according to the government.

The building containing the pool and reactor was destroyed by an explosion following the failure of cooling systems after a massive earthquake and tsunami in March 2011. The cores of three reactors melted.

Fears run deep about the large amounts of radioactive material stored in the pool, which unlike fuel in the cores of the reactors is not protected by thick containment vessels. The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., intends to remove all the rods to eliminate the risk of the pool spewing radiation.

Separately, a reactor at the Ohi nuclear plant in central Japan went online Wednesday, the second to restart after the disasters. Another Ohi reactor was restarted earlier this month.

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets Monday demanding an end to nuclear power, outraged by the restarts. It was the biggest rally since the Fukushima crisis began.

Also Wednesday, the government ordered two utilities, Kansai Electric Power Co., which operates Ohi, and Hokuriki Electric Power Co. to restudy earthquake faults that lie beneath their nuclear plants.

Japanese TV reports showed cranes removing the 4-meter (13-foot) rods. TEPCO declined comment, citing the need for secrecy in handling nuclear material.

About 150,000 people fled their homes after last year's nuclear disaster, the worst since Chernobyl. A 20-kilometer (12-mile) zone around the plant remains a no-go area.

According to a worst-case scenario prepared by the government, a loss of coolant in the spent-fuel pool at reactor No. 4 could have caused a massive release of radiation and forced millions of people to flee.

A year and a half after the disaster, the pool's cooling system has been fixed and reinforcements have been built to prop it up. But TEPCO recently said the wall of the building is bulging, although the pool has not tilted.

Hiroshi Tasaka, a nuclear engineer and professor at Tama University who served as adviser to the prime minister after the disaster, said the spent-fuel pool poses a danger because the building is not sufficiently secure to stop radiation escaping in the case of a strong aftershock.

The two rods removed Wednesday are among 204 that have not been used to generate power and are not as prone to releasing radiation as the 1,331 spent-fuel rods also sitting in the pool.

Tasaka said the government target of removing all the rods by the end of next year may prove too optimistic because of many unknowns, the need to develop new technology and the risk of aftershocks.

"If we are asked whether things are completely safe, we cannot say that," he said. "If there is another major earthquake, we don't know what may happen, although we hope for the best."

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The paper of elitist record

SUBHEAD: New York Times is guilty of 'Aiding the Enemy' with its biased reporting on whistleblowers.

By Mickey Z. on 2 August 2013 for World News Trust -
(http://worldnewstrust.com/new-york-times-guilty-of-aiding-the-enemy-mickey-z)


Image above: Photo of Free Bradley manning demonstration by Mickey Z. From original article.

“There is an odor to any press headquarters that is unmistakable: the unavoidable smell of flesh burning quietly and slowly in the service of a machine.”

- Norman Mailer

If you’ve ever wondered why someone like Bradley Manning gets far less media coverage than, say, a “royal” birth or a mayoral candidate’s penis, well… you can always count on the “newspaper of record” to reveal the method behind the madness.

A July 30, 2013 New York Times article by John M. Broder and Ginger Thompson was deftly entitled, “Loner Sought a Refuge, and Ended Up in War.” The stage was set in a single word -- the first word, in fact -- as we all know what America thinks about “loners.” Those are the ones who turn out to like Oswald or Dahmer or Klebold and Harris.

Any lingering hope for a nuanced discussion on privacy or war crimes was dashed by the opening paragraph:

Feeling outcast and alone in Iraq, Bradley Manning, then a 22-year-old Army private, turned to the Internet for solace in early 2010, wanting to share with the world what he saw as the unconscionable horrors of war, an act that resulted in what military prosecutors called one of the greatest betrayals in the nation’s history.

Not only a loner but an “outcast,” Manning merely exposed “what he saw as the unconscionable horrors of war.” Well played by the Times as loyal readers -- long conditioned by daily propaganda -- are given the comfortable choice of accepting that some weirdo geek with a grudge against god’s country misinterpreted U.S. military behavior. For good measure, Broder and Thompson only tell us how military prosecutors perceive his actions.

For the handful of mainstream folks who might actually continue reading the article beyond this point, the Times offers passing mention of Manning being “confined to a tiny cell 23 hours a day at the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia,” before quickly returning to their more familiar role of stenographer to power.

Those same military prosecutors, we’re told,

“accused Private Manning of being a self-promoting ‘anarchist’ who was nothing like the tortured man of principle portrayed by his lawyers, supporters around the world celebrated him as a martyr for free speech.”

Let’s stop for a second to note that the NY Times not only dragged out the all-purpose smear of “anarchist” but has yet to find it “fit to print” to include any details of the specific “unconscionable horrors of war” Manning exposed. This omission allows Broder and Thompson to claim his supporters are solely focusing on the issue of “free speech.” 

As for the Times’ mocking phrase “tortured man of principle,” it wouldn’t take the reporters (sic) much effort to find Manning’s own thoughts and words on the topic. But, of course, the article’s authors don’t want to complicate matters with such context. Instead, they educate their readers with news that the “heated language on both sides” tends to “overshadow the human story at the center of the case.”

With all due respect to both Manning’s courage and the criminal treatment he’s endured, the story at “the center of the case” is not his personality, upbringing, or political leanings. The story cleverly but predictably obscured by the Times is all about the Home of the Brave™ sanctioning war crimes as policy and throwing the full weight of its legal (sic) might at anyone crazy enough to expose such global criminality.

As Amnesty International recently concluded: “It's hard not to draw the conclusion that Manning's trial was about sending a message: the U.S. government will come after you, no holds barred, if you're thinking of revealing evidence of its unlawful behavior.”

Rather than discuss any of that, of course, journalists (sic) Broder and Thompson treat us to details like Manning being “the child of a severed home” and “a teenager bullied for his conflicted sexuality” who “never fit in.” Even in the Army, he was a “misfit” and just in case you’re not sure why, the Times gleefully clarifies: “In early 2010, he covertly downloaded gun-camera videos, battle logs and tens of thousands of State Department cables onto flash drives while lip-syncing the words to Lady Gaga songs.”

Who ya gonna trust, big strong white men with lots of stripes on their uniforms or a Gaga-loving misfit outcast?

The slander and innuendo goes on -- and on -- but it isn’t until paragraph 12 (when maybe 90 percent of readers have already moved on?) that Broder and Thompson deign to mention Manning as: 

“disturbed by footage shot by an Apache helicopter of an attack on a street in Baghdad in July 2007 that killed two Reuters journalists and several other men.”

Before any of you get the bright idea to ponder a U.S. military helicopter given the name “Apache” or to question our (sic) heroic (sic) men and women in uniform, Broder and Thompson lay it out simply but firmly: 

“While larger questions about government secrecy and the role of the news media in the Internet age swirl around the case, the roots of Private Manning’s behavior may spring as much from his troubled youth as from his political views.”

The remainder of the article provides tidbits about Manning playing video games, being teased by classmates and rejected by his father, living in his car for a while, and 

“his geeky fascination with computers, his liberal political opinions and his sexual orientation.”

To fully illustrate the sheer weirdness of this America-hating gay anarchist loner, Broder and Thompson make sure they tell us that Private Manning wore a dog tag that said “Humanist” and kept a toy fairy wand on his desk.

Which brings me back to the title of this article…

The U.S. government charged Bradley Manning with aiding the enemy but, let’s state the obvious: the enemy is the U.S. government… and the multi-national corporations that fund it. The crime isn’t whistle-blowing, the crime is relentless, lawless global war in pursuit and protection of profit. The New York Times and all corporate media outlets, therefore, should be charged with aiding the enemy.

It is the role, the mission, of the corporate-run media to aid the enemy.

Whether you label them liberal or conservative, most major media outlets are large corporations owned by or aligned with even larger corporations, and they share a common strategy: selling a product (an affluent audience) to a given market (advertisers).

Therefore, we shouldn’t find it too shocking that the image of the world being presented by a corporate-owned press very much reflects the biased interests of the elite players involved in this sordid little love triangle.

If you created a blueprint for an apparatus that utterly erased critical thought, you could make none more efficient than the American corporate media -- and please don't fall into the trap of only demonizing Fox News.

A major component of the free press illusion is the notion that some media outlets are more liberal while others are more right-wing -- belief in this myth further limits the already limited parameters of accepted debate.

Reality Check: The media are as liberal or conservative as the corporations that own them.

So, of course the mainstream media distorts and/or ignores the Manning story. That's their job and it's a waste of our time and energy to expect otherwise. The major media corporations been given the keys to the public (sic) airwaves and we don't yet have the means to change that. We do, however, have the means to circumvent this model.

Tracy Chapman once promised that revolution “sounds like a whisper.” Well, we may not be able to yell louder than the professional propagandists of the corporate media but we damn sure can whisper more effectively.
The media can't be "fixed" any more than all the other dying institutions (banking, health care, education, etc.) can be. So, I say: Let the corporate press rot while we utilize our resources and ingenuity to create an entirely new model.

If we build it, they will join us…

It will require both outrage and outreach for us to outlive the corporate pirates (and the politicians they fund) who have hijacked our future. To help make this happen, we need more of the 99% to get aware and active. Thus, we must keep whispering the truth and continue working to model new alternatives.

Let’s not allow Bradley Manning’s efforts and sacrifice to be in vain!

#shifthappens

Video above: From(http://youtu.be/5rXPrfnU3G0).


• Mickey Z. is the author of 11 books, most recently the novel Darker Shade of Green. Until the laws are changed or the power runs out, he can be found on an obscure website called Facebook. Anyone wishing to support his activist efforts can do so by making a donation here. 

On Kauai we are all victims…

SUBHEAD: Many of the 600 GMO company workers passionately testified for their jobs at the hearing the other day.

By Fred Dente on 3 August 2013 in Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2013/08/on-kauai-we-are-all-victims.html)


Image above: Audience for public hearing on Bill 2491 on 31 July 2013 at the Kauai Veteran's Center. Photo by Juan Wilson.


I’m for Bill #2491 to be passed unanimously, with amendments for strict enforcement of it’s provisions. This commentary will serve as my public testimony.

I’m a U.S. Veteran for Peace and, for over 30 years, I grew organic Italian garlic in Washington State. One thing I have been doing for years here on Kauai is to boycott Kauai Coffee. Those big red tanks along the highway aren’t filled with lemonade for their workers. Eliminate the poison, and I’d be happy to buy locally. 

I attended the 7/31/13 hearing for several hours in the evening. Many thanks to KKCR community radio for pre-empting regular programming to broadcast almost all of the 12 hour hearing live. I was able to hear much of the testimony in my car as I was doing the day’s business.

Thanks to the Kauai County Council, the Veterans Center and the Police Deptartment for a most amazing day and night of peaceful testimony. Although representative democracy is practically dead on national and state levels, it still works sometimes locally. Because of Gary Hooser’s vision and leadership, with support from Tim Bynum, thousands of citizens have become active on this vital issue. We must have this kind of participation if we are to have a sustainable future here on Kauai. The option is to continue to allow ourselves to be overrun with cancer poisons, military madness and the gridlock of more out of control “development” and tourism nightmares.

 The front page of TGI on 8/1/13, the day after the marathon public testimony, is one of the best I’ve seen since I started reading this paper in 1978. With an obvious headline  reference to America’s Civil War times, and the great photo of the Rivera Brothers shaking hands, this front page is a classic illustration of the division and the passion of the two sides of this issue. A good sign for Kauai is that journalism is improving, thanks in large part to citizen journalists, bloggers, community radio activists and whistleblowers. Without a strong and independent, non-biased fourth estate, it’s back into the stone age for all of us.

Four of the big six mega-billion dollar chemical companies, who have been masquerading as seed farmers on Kauai for many years, are a huge part of the post WWII military/industrial complex. They have helped to create a toxic soup on Planet Earth, and they are partly responsible for untold worldwide death, destruction and disease. They must be stopped from their diabolical control of all of us, especially here on Kauai where we have allowed this once pristine paradise to become the laboratory for their horrors, and for us to become their guinea pigs and lab rats and collateral damage in their bottom lines.

Kauai’s toxic legacy began many years ago, even before the testing of Agent Orange (AO) in the early 60’s. Thanks to the UH and the U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Service, AO was tested and sprayed here in high concentrations, and many millions of lives and countless square miles of the earth have since been decimated, including hundreds of thousands of U.S. military personnel, and their Families. After the “successful” testing, Monsanto and Dow and others raked in their billions supplying AO to our military for their genocidal purposes.      

A few years ago, I was doing research interviews for a PBS documentary about the effects of AO on Kauai workers and people living in the area of the testing. I’ve personally spoken to many who worked in the fields, and several innocent citizens who were sprayed by airplanes that blanketed the area with 2-4D and the other killer components of Agent Orange. Many cancers resulted rapidly, and the lives of humans and animals were horribly changed forever, including excruciating deaths. There have been an untold number of cancer-related deaths and diseases among the collateral damage of the chemical death merchants, here on Kauai. The filmmakers couldn’t continue the project because no one was willing to come forward, for fear of public embarrassment, and because of the threats of government intimidation and punishment.      

Many of the 600 chemical company workers passionately testified for their jobs at the hearing the other day. They are neighbors and Family members and Friends and fellow citizens. How many are brainwashed by corporate plantation speak, and the threat of losing their jobs? Knowingly, unknowingly, or in denial, they are the primary victims of the poisoning of our island.

Just like the Kauai workers who handled and mixed and sprayed the Agent Orange all over the Wailua Homesteads, who accepted the jobs, bought the lies of the Army, the UH, the Hawaii Deptartment of Agriculture and the government regulators who are in bed with the manufacturers and the military.

Although the people of Hawai`i recently forced them to stop GMO taro experiments, the mad scientists at the University of Hawaii (UH) are experimenting with new ways to play God with our food, and all the rest of our environment. According to Ching Yuan Hu, associate dean of research at the UH Manoa's College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources, the university is engineering seeds for disease-resistant bananas, a new variety of papaya, and Spanish lime, and who knows what else?

We must pass Bill #2491, as a great start to ridding Kauai and the rest of Hawaii and the planet of these chemical death monsters. Kauai, as much as ANY place on earth,  owns this legacy of weapons of mass destruction. God/Goddess gave us all we need to live a clean healthy life without the corporate poisons and their profiteering.

Council members, please make this a unanimous vote. Take a precautionary principled stand to protect our precious health and well being. We can be world leaders if we want to be. And, we will take care of the 600 workers and their Families because we love them, as we love our own Family.

It’s so simple to use the Golden Rule and common sense. That’s what we elected you to do. Be strong and bold in your leadership, and truly represent the health of the People and the Aina.

.

Renegade Gardener

SUBHEAD: Ron Finley plots world domination through guerilla gardening home-grown veggies in South Central L.A.

By katrina Rabeler on 30 July 2013 Yes! Magazine -
(http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/gardening-is-gangsta-an-interview-with-urban-gardener-ron-finley)


Image above: Ron Finley giving TED Talk. From original article.

Ron Finley grew up in South Central Los Angeles, a "food desert" where nutritious eats are chronically unavailable. But when the fashion designer, personal trainer, poster collector, and father got tired of driving 45 minutes to buy an organic tomato, he decided to grow his own. Since then, he's started a gardening revolution in his inner city neighborhood, professing that "gardening is gangsta" and that an easy way to promote human rights at home is to "go plant some shit."

The fame of this "renegade gardener" took off after his February TED talk (the video has over a million views and can be viewed at the end of this article). The New York Times called him "an Appleseed with an attitude."

Because of all the hype, I definitely wasn’t expecting to see Finley saunter onto the stage of Seattle’s Queen Anne United Methodist Church wearing a pair of cargo shorts with saggy pockets, a pair of Vibram FiveFingers shoes—the ones that have little spaces for each of your toes—and a brown T-shirt that read "Get Dirty." As the pastor introduced him, Finley stretched his arms, broke out his camera, and took a couple of pictures of the audience. He wandered over to check out a picture on the wall and jumped around like a little kid—perhaps a little kid with ADHD.

Finley’s take on gardening is similarly active. In the fall of 2010, he planted a "demonstration garden" on the strip of land between the curb and the sidewalk—also known as a "curb strip"—in front of his house in South Central Los Angeles, a neighborhood where he has lived all his life. He says he was tired of living in the "food prison"—where the lack of access to healthy foods was causing diabetes, obesity, and other health problems.

"If you look at the statistics, the drive throughs literally are killing more people than the drive-bys," Finley says. 

Finley’s garden is a public explosion of color and smells. "I wanted people to get their senses blasted," he says. He didn’t just plant food, but also jasmine, lavender, and sunflowers that grew to ten feet tall. And it got the neighborhood’s attention. People would creep past his yard in their cars, rubbernecking. One day a kid strolled down the street wearing his headphones and then stopped dead in his tracks when he saw the sunflowers.

"Yo, is that real?" Finley remembers him saying. A few days later, the kid was in the dirt helping out.

Finley encouraged people to take what they needed from the garden. He shared tomatoes, peppers, melons, eggplant, pumpkins, and more with anyone who passed by his home, often people with few financial resources and little access to vegetables.

In May of 2011, however, Finley received a citation from the city, which considered his plants "obstructions." They asked him to pay $400 for a permit or remove the garden. After getting 500 signatures on a petition posted on change.org and gaining the confidence of a city councilman, Finley received a permit for free and eventually provoked the city to relax its laws on curb strip usage.

Since then, Finley has created the organization LA Green Grounds, which plants vegetable gardens in South Central yards free of charge and has installed public gardens in curb strips, homeless shelters, abandoned lots, and traffic medians. The all-volunteer organization has installed over 30 gardens. Finley gets people in the soil and hooks them on fresh homegrown vegetables and a do-it-yourself attitude.

"People have been away from the dirt for so long," Finley says. "Once you get them in it, they’re gone." His admittedly simple idea is catching on in South Central. As for changing eating habits, Finley believes that gardening makes it happen. "Kids that grow kale eat kale," he says. "Kids that grow tomatoes eat tomatoes."

His next plan is to bring shipping containers to the abandoned lots in South Central and turn them into cafes. The cafes will be attached to the gardens and serve as community hubs and places to teach cooking lessons.

Though the city has become a little more lax in its laws, this renegade gardener still considers gardening to be dangerous, revolutionary work. Monsanto, GMOs, chemicals whose names you can’t pronounce, Cheetos, "Big Ag," seed patents—these are the villains Finley says we are up against. They’re "feeding the medical industrial complex" and killing us slowly by giving us diseases like diabetes and cancer, while fostering unnecessary relationships of dependence.

"Growing your own food is like printing your own money," Finley says, adding that this is something the food companies don’t want us to realize.

Finley does not identify as an environmentalist. "People ask me 'how did you get into the green initiative?'" he says. "I didn’t. I got into the life, the people, the health initiative."

---

Because of his renegade status, I thought Finley was going to have a "too cool for school" attitude, but he treated his audience like they were the most awesome people around. He admits he doesn’t have all the answers—he says he is simply preaching and practicing the gardening gospel that came to him.

After his Seattle talk, Finley conversed with his fans for two hours, greeting each of us with a giant bear hug. Then I asked him some questions.

Katrina Rabeler:
Why is gardening "gangsta"?

Ron Finley:
Gardening is gangsta because it empowers, it changes, it uplifts, it creates life, it creates community, it builds. And to me, that's gangsta. Breaking down and polluting and trashing and negativity—to me, that's not gangsta. That's why I say we've got to flip the script on what gangsta is.

Rabeler:
How do you make something that kid’s grandmothers probably do seem cool?

Finley:
Because it is. To me, the grannies are gangsta. [Chef and school lunch reformer] Alice Waters is one of the ultimate gangstas to me. Anytime you have that kind of effect and you're changing people like that and you're getting recognized and you're literally changing lives and creating life, that's gangsta.

Rabeler:
You’re also a fashion designer. How does that skill translate into gardening?

Finley:
The garden is just another canvas. I don't put in gardens the way people usually put them in—in rows. Nothing is straight in nature. So when I plant, I want it to be a palette like a tapestry. Color pops. I want people to see different heights, different colors, stuff that supposedly doesn't go together. Especially if it's on the street, I want people to take notice of it.

Even when I give instructions to people, there're like, "Well, where should this go?" And I'm like, "I don't know. Where should it go?" And then people release. It's just like when you take a paintbrush to a canvas. There's no system. You just start.

Rabeler:
You talked a lot about kids in your talk. Are you reaching out to families too?

Finley:
Totally. When we put in gardens we usually do it for families. Because I want everyone affected by it. You can't do the one without doing the other. You can't change a child whose parents are not into gardening. The kid brings this home and the parent is going to go "We don't do dirt. Get that out of here. You can't bring that in the house. That's nature. Nature doesn't belong in the house."

So that's when I talk about the cultural shift. We have to get the mammas and the papas and the children to realize that there’s a change. Because if you're growing but your parents don’t get it, they’re going to say, "We don't do that! We're not slaves." And that's the mentality of a lot of people: that we don't do it—we don't do that anymore. It's below them. "We eat at McDonalds. We don't grow our own food."

Rabeler:
What do you say to those parents who, when their kids come home excited about gardening, they say, "We’re above that?"

Finley:
You try to get them in the dirt. You try to get them in the soil. You try to get them to taste the food and to see the difference and to change their wicked ways. We have to change culture. And that's big and it's hard and it's long. Because you've got this stuff that's ingrained in people. And they've become their environment. They've become the music. They've become the street. They've become the concrete. That's their DNA now. So that's the biggest shift that we have to do. We have to break this culture. And it takes years to do that. It takes years.

Rabeler:
Your collection of film posters is in the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles. It’s titled Travels Through Blackness: The Ron Finley Collection of International Movie Posters, 1920s to 1970s. Is gardening also a medium by which you can "travel through blackness?"

Finley:
Totally. Because a lot of the stuff we, Africans, brought here. Watermelon is from Africa. We brought rice over here. Everybody thinks it's an Asian thing. Africans brought a ton of the agriculture over here. And that's why slave owners used them for agriculture. They brought it. The women would store seeds in their skirts and they brought all kinds of stuff here.


Rabeler:
You mentioned in your talk that there can be a competitive attitude to gardening. What does it take for us to go from that attitude to a collaborative one?

Finley: 
  It's not far at all. And that's what it should be and that's what you should be encouraging. If I put a garden in your place, you have to help on the next garden. It's a pay it forward kind of thing. That's what it's all about. If we all do that, everybody's going to have a garden. If we all pitch in. It's almost like a barn-raising with the Quakers. Now everybody's got a barn. Because everybody pitched in.

Rabeler:
What's your biggest wish for your project?

Finley: 
  World domination. That we have healthy, sustainable food sources all over the world. That people understand that you can do this yourself. There are entities that don't care about our health. They don't care about us. They've shown that millions and millions of times. So we have to do it. It's the only way it's going to happen.
I want to see people empowering themselves with sustainable food, sustainable lives, and being able to live free—where they don't have to be supported or expect somebody else to support them. I want to see empowerment and people who know that they have it and know that they can change their life—know that they can change their manufactured reality and design their own life the way they want it to be. And that's what gardens represent to me.


Video above: TED talk "A guerilla gardener in South Central LA" by Ron Finley. From (http://youtu.be/EzZzZ_qpZ4w)


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Retiring the American Empire

SOURCE:Jonathan Jay (jjkauai@gmail.com)
SUBHEAD: The U.S. isn't a typical empire. Perhaps it can distinguish itself in this one category - Legacy.

By John Feffer on 3 August 2013 for Press TV -
(http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/08/02/316825/retiring-the-american-empire/)


Image above: The Statue of Liberty up to her nostrils in global warming. From original article.

As people near retirement age, they enter the twilight years. Sometimes, they rebel against retirement. They want to keep working. They’re not interested in shuffling out of their office never to return. And if they’re in fact the owner of the workplace, conflicts often ensue. Those who have power rarely want to give up that power.

The United States is relatively young as a country. It is even younger as the so-called “leader of the free world.” But for at least three decades, reports have circulated that the American empire has entered its twilight years, perhaps even its dotage.

The U.S. government itself cautioned us to scale back our expectations in the late 1970s when President Jimmy Carter called on Americans to cut back on consumerism and adjust to an age of diminishing expectations. Then, after the Reagan rebound, we were warned by Yale professor Paul Kennedy of imperial overstretch in the late 1980s. The Clinton years saved us from bankruptcy and the George W. Bush administration again reasserted American power in the world.

But now, the United States has again sunk into economic malaise and the wars of the last decade have left the country badly bruised. Historian Alfred McCoy believes the U.S. empire won’t make it until 2025. Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung pulls the horizon a little closer to 2025. It’s also possible that the empire already ended and somebody forgot to make the announcement. In 2011, Standard and Poor’s removed the United States from its list of risk-free borrowers, putting us below Canada and Australia. That could very well have been the death knell.

Predicting the end of American empire is complicated by the fact that the United States is not a traditional empire. It does not try to maintain territorial control over distant lands (though many residents of Hawai’i and Guam might disagree). It doesn’t practice a straightforward policy of pillaging overseas possessions for their material wealth. It practices a form of consensual give-and-take with its allies in Europe and Asia.

But the American Goliath does straddle the globe militarily, with hundreds and hundreds of military bases and Special Forces operating in 71 countries. The United States remains number one in the dubious categories of overall military spending and overall military exports.

Economically, the United States attempts to use the size of its economy to negotiate favorable deals with smaller countries (think: NAFTA) and often defines its national security priorities by their proximity to valuable natural resources (think: oil). It wields disproportionate influence in international economic organizations like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

Culturally, Hollywood and the music industry and the television studios all set the standard for cool around the world. English is the world language, and the dollar (for now) is the world currency.

This is, in other words, an empire of consent. Other governments ask for our military bases (though often over the objections of their citizens). Other governments want to trade with the United States. No one makes people watch Avatar or Titanic, the top-grossing movies worldwide. No one forces consumers at gunpoint to eat at McDonald’s or drink Coca-Cola. It’s true that Washington does what it can to tilt the playing field - through export subsidies, diplomatic arm-twisting, and the occasional show of force. And it can be a very lonely world for those countries, like North Korea, that consistently defy the United States. But this still remains a much more complex set of relationships than Pax Romana or Pax Britannica.

However one defines U.S. power, though, a fundamental shift is clearly taking place in the world. China is slated to surpass the United States as the world’s largest economy as early as 2016. According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, many people already believe that China has done so. Indeed, if measured by purchasing power, China nosed past the United States a couple years ago.

It’s not just China. The other celebrated members of the BRICS - Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa - are more quietly building up their economic and geopolitical power. Then there’s MIST - Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, and Turkey - another group of rising powers. The proliferation of other groupings - the Next 11, CIVETS - all testifies to the transformation of world power.

Meanwhile, the United States is behaving like a country desperately trying to maintain its edge. It has proclaimed a “Pacific pivot” even though it doesn’t have the resources to execute any significant shift from the Middle East to Asia. It has attempted to maintain unsustainable levels of military spending at a time of serious budget constraints. It has tried to maintain a surveillance state in the face of considerable challenges from both individuals and organizations. Detroit has gone bankrupt; bridges have collapsed in Washington state and Arizona; thousands in New York and New Jersey are still homeless after last year’s Hurricane Sandy; gun violence annually claims tens of thousands of lives.

And on the issues where the world truly needs leadership - global warming, global poverty, global militarism - the United States is either out to lunch or very much part of the problem.

An aging chief executive who resists calls for retirement will often whip out his trump card: après moi, le deluge! In other words, if the top person goes, whatever their vices might be, the organization will collapse because no one else can provide effective leadership.

The United States frequently resorts to this kind of argument. In Asia, for instance, the U.S. military bills itself as the only force that prevents China, Japan, the two Koreas, and the various claimants to the South China Sea islands from tearing out each other’s throats. Afghanistan, we are told, will fall to the Taliban without U.S. assistance. U.S. drone warfare, worldwide surveillance, and “overseas contingency operations,” according to Washington, are the only things between al-Qaeda and global domination.

Whether the U.S. military and U.S. corporations are a force for stability or instability is a question I’ll leave to future debate. But to extend the retirement metaphor, responsible executives prepare for their own eventual - and inevitable - retirement by preparing others to fill the shoes. Empires, of course, never do this. They simply collapse and thereby cause tremendous chaos.

But the United States is not a typical empire. Perhaps it can distinguish itself in this one additional category: legacy.

Imagine if the United States helped to refashion current institutions like the United Nations and the World Bank to reflect the current geopolitical balance of power instead of the realities of the immediate post-World War II era. Imagine if the United States helped to create a new global mechanism devoted to penalizing countries for high rates of military spending and rewarding them for increasing their budgets to address poverty and climate change.

Imagine if the United States sat down with China to talk about how the two leading world economies can work together on global problems rather than at cross-purposes.

If the United States were to change its global behavior, it might discover that the calls for early retirement fade. Then, as a more cooperative international player, America could truly enjoy its imperial twilight in the sure knowledge that the deluge is not imminent.


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Manning and WikiLeaks not deadly

SUBHEAD: Bradley Manning sentencing testimony indicates WikiLeaks not responsible for any deaths.

By Matt Sledge on 3 August 2013 for Huffington Post -
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/03/bradley-manning-sentence_n_3696501.html)


Image above: Supporters of Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, Wikileaks and ex-NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden gather with banners and flags outside the Ecuadorean embassy where Julian Assange is scheduled to make a balcony speech. From (http://www.demotix.com/news/2188354/julian-assange-supports-whistleblower-ed-snowden-speech-transcript#media-2188384).

 For three years Bradley Manning and Julian Assange were accused of murder. Members of Congress and the administration said their WikiLeaks document dump endangered U.S. interests -- and lives.

"Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family," Adm. Mike Mullen, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in July 2010.

Before a press corps hollowed out to a skeleton crew after Manning's verdict, that insinuation is falling apart. Top government officials testifying in open court for Manning's sentencing in recent days have cited no credible evidence his leaks led directly to any deaths. They have instead spoken to diplomatic sources placed at risk and strayed foreign relations. In the words of one official, some allies got "chesty."

The State Department's current, official take on the cables' release may come Monday, as Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy testifies in court for a full day on damage caused by the cables. Or Kennedy may once again be forced into closed session to talk about any specifics in yet another example of the secrecy that has shrouded the trial, even in its sentencing phase.

During the first phase of the trial, the judge overseeing Manning's case prevented the defendant from presenting any evidence against claims that his releases caused any harm. So those revelations, endlessly fought over in the press since WikiLeaks' releases, have all taken place during the sentencing phase of Manning's court martial. They may shave years off his maximum 132.5-year punishment.

For Assange supporters, meanwhile, the trial testimony comes as long-awaited vindication for the much-vilified WikiLeaks founder.

"I did not expect anyone was killed otherwise I am sure it would have come out already. What we saw early on regarding Manning, Julian Assange and Wikileaks were efforts to poison the atmosphere against them by claiming they had blood on their hands," said Michael Ratner, Assange's U.S. lawyer. "Our government lies."

The disclosures have come out as glimpses of sunlight in the secrecy shadowing the trial. Though Manning's leaks are freely available online, the government still treats most of them as classified.

It's an absurd situation that has led to Manning's prosecutors referring to clearly legitimate State Department cables as "purported" State Department cables. Perhaps more consequentially, it means a significant portion of the testimony about the harm caused by the cables' release is taking place in closed, classified session.

Nevertheless, the most explosive claim about Manning's leaks -- that battlefield reports from Iraq and Afghanistan got U.S. sources killed -- seems to have been settled. The prosecution's first witness was Brig. Gen. Robert Carr, who led the Department of Defense's review of the WikiLeaks releases.

Carr's order to lead the Information Review Task Force came straight from then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Carr and a team of 300 worked for over a year.

"We had to understand this data ... give them some reassurance that they didn't have to sit on the top in the middle of a hill in Afghanistan and go through 77,000 documents to find their vulnerabilities," Carr said. "That was our job."

Not a single death could be linked to names in the WikiLeaks files, Carr testified.

After more than a year of searching, the task force found a single instance where the Taliban claimed to have killed an Afghan source because of WikiLeaks. But then they discovered the cables did not actually contain the source's name.

"The name was not there," Carr said.

The Taliban's claim was so dodgy that the judge overseeing the case, Col. Denise Lind, said she would disregard it.

But Carr did state that, "There are some people out there that quit talking to us as a result of their releases." He also provocatively suggested that the release of Guantanamo detainee assessment briefs in April 2011 slowed down transfers from the prison to foreign countries.

"There might have been a delta between what the foreign government was saying and what they had told their people," said Carr, "and that could, in fact, cause conflict between two nations and stop our efforts to move forward on the Guantanamo."

Two lawyers who represent clients at Guantanamo, however, reject Carr's claims out of hand. They note that the assessment briefs' release came right in the middle of the longest period without a transfer in the history of the prison.

"I would think it would be difficult for this administration to claim with a straight face that they were making any efforts to close the prison in 2011 or '12," said Shane Kadidal, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights. "It's faintly ludicrous to blame their failures on WikiLeaks."

Clive Stafford Smith, director of the UK legal charity Reprieve, said, "It is idiotic."

Carr was followed on the witness stand Wednesday by John Kirchhofer, who as deputy director of the Defense Department's WikiLeaks task force was responsible for its day-to-day operations.

Kirchhofer singled out one episode in open court: a briefing he gave to NATO allies in Belgium the week the Iraq War Logs were released in October 2010.

There were some "pretty aggressive people getting chesty," Kirchhofer said. "In a closed forum I can tell you what countries if that matters."

More tangibly, Michael Kozak, who led the State Department's WikiLeaks Persons at Risk working group, testified about the efforts the department had to take to protect U.S. sources named in the diplomatic cables. If the group thought someone might be in danger of "violence or incarceration or something similarly grave," he said, it sprung into action -- notifying them that their name was in the cables, and asking if they needed American assistance.

The most important type of assistance offered, Kozak said, was a ticket out of harm's way or help with immigration status in a new country. Kozak spoke bluntly. But he was not asked, nor did he offer, any testimony about sources who were named in the cables and later killed.

Kozak said the greatest damage of the leaks, from his perspective, was their "chilling effect" on human rights activists no longer willing to talk to the U.S.

When Kozak was asked how many people the working group had identified as being in danger, he was quickly cut off by a defense objection. He added that he would rather provide an answer in closed, classified session -- which the court then entered.

The exchange was one more example of how the court's strict adherence to government secrecy has obscured the presentation of evidence of actual harm caused by the leaks. But Steve Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said closing court may sometimes be necessary.

"It’s possible that publicly highlighting a specific incident of damage -- perhaps some kind of diplomatic dispute arising from the cables -- would reopen the dispute and aggravate it further," Aftergood said.

"But if something like that is true, it would be true only with regard to specific incidents," he added. "It should still be possible for the prosecution to publicly characterize the damage it says was done, and to describe the nature and the magnitude of the harm."

Outside of the courtroom, there are clues about damage from the cables' release.

P.J. Crowley, the former State Department spokesman who helped respond to the WikiLeaks dump that became known as "Cablegate," told HuffPost before the trial started that fears the disclosures would throw sand in the gears of U.S. diplomacy had not been realized. This was in part, Crowley said, because of extensive outreach and mitigation efforts of the sort Kozak described in court Friday.

But on the individual level, Crowley said, "The reality is that people have been put in danger -- people have been incarcerated. There are people who have been cited in these cables who have been killed."

"Now, I'm very cautious," he added. "Was somebody killed because they were listed in a WikiLeaks cable? I can't say that."

If the sentencing testimony from State Undersecretary Kennedy remains hidden Monday in a secure courtroom at Fort Meade, the closest we may come to the facts is an anonymous congressional aide's January 2011 analysis to Reuters. The aide's summation of internal government reviews of the WikiLeaks releases at both the State and Defense departments came just months after Kennedy first briefed Congress on harm from WikiLeaks.

It's an appraisal that has been widely known for years, yet it has not stopped critics from repeating the charge that Assange and Manning have blood on their hands.

As the anonymous aide related to Reuters in 2011: "We were told (the impact of WikiLeaks revelations) was embarrassing but not damaging."

On the Far Side of Progress

SUBHEAD: The consequences of a collective loss of faith in  progress will spill over into nearly every dimension of life.

By John Michael Greer on 31 July 2013 for the Archdruid Report -
(http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/07/on-far-side-of-progress.html)


Image above: Note bird in sky can fly. A Soviet built TU-144 Super-Sonic-Transport (SST) aircraft abandoned in Kazan and covered in snow. It had a tilting cockpit enclosure that allowed the crew to see the ground on takeoff and landing. Only 16 were ever built from 1968 to 1984. They were in service less than 20 years. The only other SST to enter service was the French Concorde and it last flew ten years ago. From (http://www.tu144sst.com/history/taking_care77107.html).

The pointless debates over evolution discussed in last week’s Archdruid Report post have any number of equivalents all through contemporary industrial culture. Pick a topic, any topic, and it’s a pretty safe bet that the collective imagination defines it these days as an irreconcilable divide between two and only two points of view, one of which is portrayed as realistic, reasonable, progressive, and triumphant, while the other is portrayed as sentimental, nostalgic, inaccurate, and certain to lose—that is to say, as a microcosm of the mythology of progress.

According to that mythology, after all, every step of the heroic onward march of progress came about because some bold intellectual visionary or other, laboring against the fierce opposition of a majority of thinkers bound by emotional ties to outworn dogmas, learned to see the world clearly for the first time, and in the process deprived humanity of some sentimental claim to a special status in the universe. That’s the way you’ll find the emergence of the theory of evolution described in textbooks and popular nonfiction to this day.

Darwin’s got plenty of company, too: all the major figures of the history of science from Copernicus through Albert Einstein get the same treatment in popular culture. It’s a remarkably pervasive bit of narrative, which makes it all the more remarkable that, as far as history goes, it’s essentially a work of fiction.

I’d encourage those of my readers who doubt that last point to read Stephen Jay Gould’s fascinating book Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle. Gould’s subject is the transformation in geology that took place in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when theories of geological change that centered on Noah’s flood gave way to the uniformitarian approach that’s dominated geology ever since.

Pick up a popular book on the history of earth sciences, and you’ll get the narrative I’ve just outlined: the role of nostalgic defender of an outworn dogma is assigned to religious thinkers such as Thomas Burnet, while that of heroic pioneer of reason and truth is conferred on geologists such as James Hutton.

What Gould demonstrates in precise and brutal detail is that the narrative can be imposed on the facts only by sacrificing any claim to intellectual honesty. It’s simply not true, for example, that Burnet dismissed the evidence of geology when it contradicted his Christian beliefs, or that Hutton reached his famous uniformitarian conclusions in a sudden flash of insight while studying actual rock strata—two claims that have been endlessly repeated in textbooks and popular literature.

More broadly, the entire popular history of uniformitarian geology amounts to a “self-serving mythology”—those are Gould’s words, not mine—that’s flatly contradicted by every bit of the historical evidence.

Another example? Consider the claim, endlessly regurgitated in textbooks and popular literature about the history of astronomy, that the geocentric theory—the medieval view of things that put the Earth at the center of the solar system—assigned humanity a privileged place in the cosmos. I don’t think I’ve ever read a popular work on the subject that didn’t include that factoid. It seems plausible enough, too, unless you happen to know the first thing about medieval cosmological thought.

The book to read here is The Discarded Image by C.S. Lewis—yes, that C.S. Lewis; the author of the Narnia books was also one of the most brilliant medievalists of his day, and the author of magisterial books on medieval and Renaissance thought.

What Lewis shows, with a wealth of examples from the relevant literature, is that nobody in the Middle Ages thought of the Earth’s position as any mark of privilege, or for that matter as centrally placed in the universe. To the medieval mind, the Earth was one notch above the rock bottom of the cosmos, a kind of grubby suburban slum built on the refuse dump outside the walls of the City of Heaven.

Everything that mattered went on above the sphere of the Moon; everything that really mattered went on out beyond the sphere of the fixed stars, where God and the angels dwelt.

The one scrap of pride left to fallen humanity was that, even though it was left to grub for a living on the dungheap of the cosmos, it hadn’t quite dropped all the way to the very bottom. The very bottom was Hell, with Satan trapped at its very center; the Earth was a shell of solid matter that surrounded Hell, the same way that the sphere of the Moon surrounded that of Earth, the sphere of Mercury that of the Moon, and so on outwards to Heaven.

Physically speaking, in other words, the medieval cosmos was diabolocentric, not geocentric—again, the Earth was merely one of the nested spheres between the center and the circumference of the cosmos—and the physical cosmos itself was simply an inverted reflection of the spiritual cosmos, which had God at the center, Satan pinned immovably against the outermost walls of being, and the Earth not quite as far as you could get from Heaven.

Thus the Copernican revolution didn’t deprive anybody of a sense of humanity’s special place in the cosmos; quite the contrary, eminent thinkers at the time wondered if it wasn’t arrogant to suggest that humanity might be privileged enough to dwell in what, in the language of the older cosmology, was the fourth sphere up from the bottom!

It takes only a little leafing through medieval writings to learn that, but the fiction that the medieval cosmos assigned humanity a special place until Copernicus cast him out of it remains glued in place in the conventional wisdom of our time. When the facts don’t correspond to the mythology of progress, in other words, too bad for the facts.

Other examples could be multiplied endlessly, starting with the wholly fictitious flat-earth beliefs that modern writers insist on attributing to the people who doubted Columbus, but these will do for the moment, not least because one of the authors I’ve cited was one of the 20th century’s most thoughtful evolutionary biologists and the other was one of the 20th century’s most thoughtful Christians.

The point I want to make is that the conventional modern view of the history of human thought is a fiction, a morality play that has nothing to do with the facts of the past and everything to do with justifying the distribution of influence, wealth, and intellectual authority in today’s industrial world.

That’s relevant here because the divide sketched out at the beginning of this essay—the supposedly irreconcilable struggles between a way of knowing the world that’s realistic, progressive and true, and a received wisdom that’s sentimental, nostalgic, and false—is modeled on the narrative we’ve just been examining, and has no more to do with the facts on the ground than the narrative does.

The great difference between the two is that neither medieval cosmographers nor late 18th century geologists had the least notion that they were supposed to act out a morality play for the benefit of viewers in the early 21st century. Here in the early 21st century, by contrast, a culture that’s made the morality play in question the center of its collective identity for more than three hundred years is very good at encouraging people to act out their assigned roles in the play, even when doing so flies in the face of their own interests.

Christian churches gain nothing, as I pointed out in last week’s post, by accepting the loser’s role in the ongoing squabble over evolution, and the huge amounts of time, effort, and money that have gone into the creationist crusade could have been applied to something relevant to to the historic creeds and commitments of the Christian religion, rather than serving to advance the agenda of their enemies. That this never seems to occur to them is a measure of the power of the myth.

Those of my readers who have an emotional investment in the environmental movement might not want to get too smug about the creationists, mind you, because their own movement has been drawn into filling exactly the same role, with equally disastrous consequences. It’s not just that the media consistently likes to portray environmentalism as a sentimental, nostalgic movement with its eyes fixed on an idealized prehuman or pretechnological past, though of course that’s true.

A great many of the public spokespersons for environmental causes also speak in the same terms, either raging against the implacable advance of progress or pleading for one or another compromise in which a few scraps are tossed nature’s way as the engines of progress go rumbling on.

According to the myth of progress, those are the sort of speeches that are assigned to the people on history’s losing side, and environmentalists in recent decades have done a really impressive job of conforming to the requirements of their assigned role. When was the last time, for example, that you heard an environmentalist offer a vision of the future that wasn’t either business as usual with a coat of green spraypaint, a return to an earlier and allegedly greener time, or utter catastrophe?

As recently as the 1970s, it was quite common for people in the green end of things to propose enticing visions of a creative, sustainable, radically different future in harmony with nature, but that habit got lost in the next decade, about the time the big environmental lobbies sold out to corporate America.

Now of course once a movement redefines its mission as begging for scraps from the tables of the wealthy and influential, as mainstream environmentalism has done, it’s not going to do it any good to dream big dreams. Still, there’s a deeper pattern at work here.

The myth of progress assigns the job of coming up with bold new visions of the future to the winning side—which means in practice the side that wins the political struggle to get its agenda defined as the next step of progress—and assigns to the losing side instead the job of idealizing the past and warning about the dreadful catastrophes that are sure to happen unless the winners relent in their onward march.

Raise people to believe implicitly in a social narrative, and far more often than not they’ll fill their assigned roles in that narrative, even at great cost to themselves, since the alternative is a shattering revaluation of all values in which the unthinking certainties that frame most human thought have to be dragged up to the surface and judged on their own potentially dubious merits.

Such a revaluation, though, is going to happen anyway in the not too distant future, because the onward march of progress is failing to live up to the prophecies that have been made in its name. As noted in an earlier post in this sequence, civil religions are vulnerable to sudden collapse because their kingdom is wholly of this world; believers in a theist religion can console themselves in the face of continual failure with the belief that their sufferings will be amply repaid in heaven, but the secular worldview common to civil religions slams the door in the face of that hope.

The civil religion of Communism thus imploded when it became impossible for people on either side of the Iron Curtain to ignore the gap between prophecy and reality, and I’ve argued in an earlier series of posts that there’s good reason to think that the civil religion of Americanism may go the same way in the decades ahead of us. The civil religion of progress, though, is at least as vulnerable to that species of sudden collapse.

So far, the suggestion that progress might be over for good is something you’ll encounter mostly in edgy humor magazines and the writings of intellectual heretics far enough out on the cultural fringes to be invisible to the arbiters of fashion; so far, “they’ll think of something” remains the soothing mantra du jour of the true believers in the great god Progress.

Nonetheless, history points up the reliability with which one era’s unquestioned truths become the next era’s embarrassing memories. To return to a point raised earlier in this sequence, the concept of progress has no content of its own, and so it’s been possible so far for believers in progress to pretend to ignore all the things in American life that are blatantly retrogressing, and to keep scrabbling around for something, anything, that will still prop up the myth.

In today’s America, living standards for most people have been falling for decades, along with literacy rates and most measures of public health; the nation’s infrastructure has been ravaged by decades of malign neglect, its schools are by most measures the worst in the industrial world, and even the most basic public services are being cut to Third World standards or below; the lunar landers scattered across the face of the Moon stare back blindly at a nation that no longer has a manned space program at all and, despite fitful outbursts of rhetoric from politicians and the idle rich, almost certainly will never have one again. None of that matters—yet.

Another of the lessons repeatedly taught by history, though, is that sooner or later these things will matter. Sooner or later, some combination of events will push cognitive dissonance to the breaking point, and the civil religion of progress will collapse under the burden of its own failed prophecies. That’s almost unthinkable for most people in the industrial world these days, but it’s crucial to recognize that the mere fact that something is unthinkable is no guarantee that it won’t happen.

Thus it’s important for those of us who want to be prepared for the future to try to think about the unthinkable—to come to terms with the possibility that the future will see a widespread rejection of the myth of progress and everything connected to it. That wasn’t a likely option in an age when economic expansion and rapid technological development were everyday facts of life, but we no longer live in such an age, and the fading memories of the last decades when those things happened will not retain their power indefinitely.

Imagine a future America where the available resources don’t even suffice to maintain existing technological systems, only the elderly remember sustained economic growth, and the new technological devices that still come onto the market now and then are restricted to the very few who are wealthy enough to afford them.

At what point along that curve do the promises of progress become so self-evidently absurd that the power of the civil religion of progress to shape thought and motivate behavior breaks down completely?

It’s ironic but entirely true that actual technological progress could continue, at least for a time, after the civil religion of progress is busy pushing up metaphorical daisies in the cemetery of dead faiths. What gives the religion of progress its power over so many minds and hearts is not progress itself, but the extraordinary burden of values and meanings that progress is expected to carry in our society. It’s not the mere fact that new technologies show up in the stores every so often that matters, but the way that this grubby commercial process serves to bolster a collective sense of entitlement and a galaxy of wild utopian dreams about the human future.

If the sense of entitlement gives way to a sense of failure or, worse, of betrayal, and the dreamers wake up and recognize that the dreams were never anything more than pipe dreams in the first place, the backlash could be one for the record books.

One way or another, the flow of new products will eventually sputter to a halt, though at least some of today’s technologies will stay in use for as long as they can be kept functioning in the harsh conditions of an age of resource scarcity and ecological payback.

A surprisingly broad range of technologies can be built and maintained by people who have little or no grasp of the underlying science, and thus it has happened more than once—as with the Roman aqueducts that brought water to medieval cities—that a relatively advanced technology can be kept running for centuries by people who have no clue how it was built.

Over the short and middle term, in a world after progress, we can probably expect many current technologies to remain in place for a while, though it’s an open question how many people in America and elsewhere will still be able to afford to use them for how much longer.

Ultimately, that last factor may be the Achilles’ heel of most modern technologies. In the not too distant future, any number of projects that might be possible in some abstract sense will never happen, because all the energy, raw materials, labor, and money that are still available are already committed twice over to absolute necessities, and nothing can be spared for anything else.

In any age of resource scarcity and economic contraction, that’s a fairly common phenomenon, and it’s no compliment to contemporary thinking about the future that so many of the grand plans being circulated in the sustainability scene ignore the economics of contraction so completely.

Still, that’s a theme for a different post. The point I want to raise here has to do with the consequences of a collective loss of faith in the civil religion of progress—consequences that aren’t limited to the realm of technology, but spill over into economics, politics, and nearly every other dimension of contemporary life.

The stereotyped debates introduced at the beginning of this post and discussed in more detail toward the middle will be abandoned, and their content will have to be reframed in completely different terms, once the myth of progress, which provides them with their basic script, loses its hold on the collective imagination.

The historical fictions also discussed earlier will be up for the same treatment. It’s hard to think of any aspect of modern thought that hasn’t been permeated by the myth of progress, and when that myth shatters and has to be replaced by other narratives, an extraordinary range of today’s unquestioned certainties will be up for grabs.

That has implications I plan on exploring in a number of future posts. Some of the most crucial of those implications, though, bear directly on one of the core institutions of contemporary industrial culture, an institution that has derived much of its self-image and a galaxy of benefits from the historical fictions and stereotyped debates discussed earlier in this post. Next week, therefore, we’ll talk about what science might look like in a world on the far side of progress.

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Security Strategy at Bill 2491 Hearing

SUBHEAD: Pure speculation on the strategy behind the change in venue for hearing on Bill 2491.

By Juan Wilson on 1 August 2013 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2013/08/security-strategy-at-bill-2491-hearing.html)


Image above: Several uniformed and plainclothes Kauai police officers control the entrance to the Kauai Veteran's Center. The man at right wore a bulletproof vest, carried a gun under his shirt and seemed to be in charge. All officers were armed. At least one had a taser. Those who were to testify stood with backs to wall at left and waited to be called. At the moment of this photo Nani Rogers (white hair at lower right corner) who is Hawaiian and 74 years old, was requesting a seat inside. It took five officers to deny her entry. Photo by Juan Wilson.

I would characterize the shift in venue for this event from the Kauai Community College auditorium to the Kauai Veterans Center as a strategic move to increase the impact of the corporate efforts to display public rejection of the bill and for the police to have intimidating control over this public meeting. It was like no other public meeting I have seen on Kauai.

The Shuttle Trip
I arrived about an hour before the hearing at the Kauai Veterans Center. No parking was available at the KVC or out in front on Kapule Highway. The assigned parking for the hearing was at Vidinha Stadium a few hundred yards away.

More than a 200 hundred private cars were parked at Vidinha Stadium already. As I began walking to the distant KVC with my briefcase I was hailed by two women at a folding table with walkie-talkies. They invited me to take the air-conditioned shuttle bus.

A Kauai bus was loading and I got on. It was a circuitous route around on Kaana Road to get around grassy playing fields. There were two large orange plastic obstacles (like Jersey barriers) the shuttle had to weave through before we passed between the Police Headquarters and the Court/Jail facility beyond. A check-point in 2008 Baghdad came to mind.

The place was certainly living up to its Tropo-Fascist architectural styling. The shuttle turned onto the Kapule Highway. Many demonstrators were dressed in identical blue tee shirts that read on the front "Proud To Be..."  and on the back "...supporting Kauai Ag". They held signs against the bill and encouraged people to honk their horns. Only a few red shirted supporters of the bill were out on the highway. The shuttle ran us down the line to the front of the Veterans Center. The trip was eight-tenths of a mile long.

The Line-Up
When I arrived at the KVC, there was already no seating available inside. Hundreds of people milled about out, about equally between red and blue t-shirts. The red tee-shirts read on the front "Pass the Bill" and on the back "Kauai Has The Right To Know".


Image above: Two men in blue preparing to testify against bill 2491. Behind a pregnant women in red top supporting the bill next to a man with a black t-shirt from Ohana Kauai. I was told Ohana Kauai provided the red "Pass the Bill" red shirts that many wore.

A large number of red shirts were in the shade of a large tent (approximately 40'x80') that had been set up on a lawn behind the KVC parking lot. The tent has some refreshments and a remote TV monitoring the sounds and sights within the KVC.

In the parking lot about an even number of blue and red shirted people mixed. Of course not everybody wore a team t-shirt. About a third of those milling in the parking lot, including myself, wore their regular clothes. My personal take is that wearing the colors militarizes and ultimately alienates the factions on different side of such issues, much like the blue and red of the Crips and Bloods street gangs. I was wearing a black floral aloha shirt and might pass as neutral.

The Sergeant of Arms of the County Council came out of the single entrance that was guarded by Kauai Police with a clipboard. He read names of those who had not gotten to testify at the June 26th meeting on the issue, but who had signed up. I had come to read my wife's testimony as she had to work that day and was suffering from a sharp sinus headache.


Image above: Panoramic view of those lined up yo testify on the Bill 2491 standing against the outside north wall of the KVC. Note Kauai jail in center. Photo by Juan Wilson.
About fifty to a hundred names were read off and people began to line up against the building in the order they would testify. There was no place to sit or get water. The majority of those who were to testify were wearing red or were others I knew who were not wearing red but supported the bill.


Image above: The wait to testify went on for over an hour before things began moving.  Photo by Juan Wilson.

I also saw people I knew who had signed up to testify but were intimidated by the whole situation and didn't line up.

There were rumors from several people that many of the blue shirted were GMO employees that were flown in from Molokai and Oahu. That might explain another reason for the venue change. The KVC is across the street from the Lihue Airport.

Occasionally the KCV parking lot was filled with the sounds of jet engines. There were helicopters hovering overhead and on one occasion three Air Force fighter jets passed over the KVC.

Inside the KVC
 

Image above: Panoramic view inside the KVC those who were to testify lined up against the wall (on left and right) with a sea of blue shirts center. Click to enlarge. Photo by Juan Wilson.
After about an hour those who waited to testify were lead a few at a time into the KVC to stand in another line before getting to the mike. The first impression I had was how many blue shirts were inside. Hundreds. They must have been seated much earlier in the day to have filled the hall so early.

The few who were testifying as hold overs from the last meeting had to leave the hearing as soon as they had spoken, so I only heard a dozen or so testimonies. Most were for the bill.

The testimony I heard fell into two lists of interest.

Those favoring the bill were focused on health, the environment of the island and food security. They invoked the aina and keiki (land and children). More than half of those who I heard testify were women - two of whom were pregnant.

Those opposing the bill focused on job security, the safety of the technology and hope it can feed a compromised world. They invoked money and corporate promises.

One blue shirt who appeared to be a field worker testified before I did. He finished emotionally by stating that his son had diabetes and that if was not for advanced bio-technology of GMO modified bacteria to create insulin, his son would be dead today.


Image above: Blake Drolson, a founding member of GMO Free Kauai, speaks to the County Council. Photo by Juan Wilson.

After I read my wife's written testimony to the council committee, I left the hall and wandered over to the GMO Free Kauai tent. See yellow path on aerial image below. I spent some time there talking to friends and listening to testimony on the TV monitor. There was shade, seats, coconut water and children playing.

Back to the Parking Lot
A while later I thought I'd walk back to my car at Vidinha Stadium. It was straight behind the KVC and south across a soccer field. I headed over that way. I came across five Kauai County uniformed police officers standing in a cluster at the back of the KVC. They told me there was no entry there and that I would have to walk back north to the parking lot of the Court/Jail and go around on Kaana Road.

I went around to Kaana Road past the barriers and found an opening in the fence that bordered the soccer fields. I began to cross one of the fields. I found several rows of vehicles parked there. Many were white unmarked large passenger vans. Only a few women in blue shirts were among the vehicles. I guessed they were the GMO company's shuttles.

On the opposite side of the field I could see a gate to the parking lot. There were four men standing there wearing blue shirts. As I got nearer I noticed some orange plastic fencing tied over the opening of the fence leading to the parking lot. As I approached the fence and reached for a section of the plastic screening the opening one of the guys and blue reached out and released a corner of the plastic fence to provide me access through. I passed.

As I headed to the parking lot the man called out "What's in your briefcase?" I turned and said, "My lunch, a camera, some pens and papers." He asked, 'What did you think of what went on inside today?"

I told him about the man in blue who testified about his son with diabetes. I told him my first thought was that high consumption of GMO high-fructose-corn-syrup in sodas and many refined packaged foods might be playing a role in childhood obesity and the epidemic of diabetes here in Hawaii.

He told me he had five kids and lived in Kekaha and that they were all healthy. I mentioned that if he was a meat eater - whether it be chicken, beef or pork - that which he ate was fed on GMO corn, with additives of antibiotics, bone meal and god knew what else.

As I walked away he said "I eat plenty pork that was fed GMO corn."


Image above: GoogleEarth image of the KVC site with Vidinha Stadium at right and Police Headquarters and the Court/Jail facility at right. Note the red path is the shuttle trip to the KVC and the yellow path is my walk back to the car. The large blue rectangle is where white unmarked vans and other vehicles were parked. Only those in blue shirts were in the area. The small blue rectangle on the right is where five uniformed police stood that directed me away from the blue parking area and around the long way to the parking lot. The small blue rectangle on the left is where the only opening to the field's south side was "guarded" by four men in blue shirts who had some orange plastic fencing blocking the opening. Click to enlarge.

At the End of the Day
As I implied at the beginning, I think this change of venue from KCC to KVC was carefully orchestrated. The whole event felt like going through a TSA security check. The proximity and security of the Police/Court/Jail facility made sure of that.

I'm sure that the overwhelming crowd at the hearing on the 26th set this up. There was just so much disorderly goings on with people just showing up. The results were more  "security and control". It wasn't so much a public meeting as a heavily policed episode of the TV reality show Survivor.

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Reports on Hearing for Bill 2491

SUBHEAD: The Environmental Services Committee/Public Safety Committee of the County Council hearing on Pesticide/GMO Regulations.

By Staff on 1 August 2013 for NBC KITV News -
(http://www.nbcnews.com/id/52638388/#.UfqXulOihwl)


Image above: Parking lot of the Kauai Veterans Center where those for and against the Bill 2491 could listen to a PA system with the sounds of the hearing inside Note GMO Free Kauai tent in right background. Photo by Juan Wilson.


Battle lines were drawn on Kauai Wednesday as a bill that seeks to reel in the GMO industry went to public hearing before the County Council.

Kauai County public information assistant Sarah Blane said the crowd inside and outside of the Kauai Veterans Center was estimated at 2,000 people, which would represent nearly 3 percent of the island's population.

"We're just thrilled with the turnout here today, and we look forward to a positive discussion (and) a great path forward," said Scott McFarland, state vice president for the Hawaii Farm Bureau Federation, a trade group that supports genetically modified crops.

Those in support of the GMO industry wore light-blue T-shirts, while those who opposed wore red. It was almost a carnival-type atmosphere at the public hearing with both sides positioning themselves along Kapule Highway, while trying to get drivers to honk their horns.

The controversial bill is being sponsored by councilmen Gary Hooser and Tim Bynum. It would force GMO corporations on Kauai to make public the application of restricted or experimental pesticides, if use exceeds five pounds or 15 gallons within a year. All GMO fields or storage facilities would be identified by geographic location and tax map key. The bill would also establish buffer zones of 500 feet near schools, hospitals, homes, public roadways as well as streams and shorelines.

In addition, open air testing of experimental pesticides would also be banned, as well as the cultivation of experimental GMOs outside of a laboratory or contained greenhouse. The bill also calls for an environmental impact statement that would lead to a permitting system and a temporary moratorium on any new GMO production or experimentation.

"We're here to hear from both sides of the community, from all sides," Hooser told KITV4. "At the end of the day when this process is done a couple weeks from now, I'm hopeful that we'll have a bill, a new ordinance that satisfies both sides.

However, those who work within the GMO industry say all of the restrictions imposed by Bill 2491 could drive away jobs, or perhaps even corporations. Pioneer, Syngenta, Monsanto, DOW and BASF all have a presence on the Garden Isle.

"It's been great to see the community turn out and really bring forward to the council a message about the importance of jobs in our community, (and) the importance of good, sustainable agriculture," said McFarland.

The bill faces another vote in Hooser's Economic Development and Intergovernmental Relations Committee before it can be forwarded to the full council for a final approval. Since Hooser and Bynum sponsored the bill, the measure needs just two more votes for passage on the seven-member council.

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GMO Issue Heats Up

By Leo Azambuja on 1 August 2013 for the Garden Island -
(http://thegardenisland.com/news/local/gmo-issue-heats-up/article_255cf608-fa73-11e2-8139-0019bb2963f4.html)


Image above: Brothers Benji Rivera, in the red ‘Pass the Bill’ shirt, and Kamaaina Rivera, in the blue ‘We Are Kauai Ag’ shirt, greet each other in front of KVC. From original article. Photo by Dennis Fujimoto.

More than 1,000 people came to Kauai Veterans Center Wednesday to attend a public hearing on a proposal that has put Kauai on the spotlight across the state and has sharply divided island residents.

Bill 2491, introduced by Kauai County Councilman Gary Hooser, would demand disclosure of pesticide use and the presence of genetically modified organisms, and would set up pesticide-free buffer zones for large agricultural operations.

Just down the road from Lihue Airport, it looked more like a soccer match laced with everlasting rivalry was going on rather than the council hearing public testimony from both sides of the issue.

On the grassy area fronting KVC, a lively crowd sporting either blue or red shirts waved signs and cheered to passing motorists, who in turn would blast their horns. On the parking lot, hundreds mingled, with their sides easily identified by the color of their shirt — blue for GMO and against the bill; red for anti-GMO and for the bill.

Inside KVC, emotions were also high, and Hooser had to constantly remind the public to not cheer, applaud or boo public speakers.

But the issue was much more serious and complex than winning a championship. It was about voicing concerns on a proposal that some say could either destabilize the economy on Kauai’s Westside or contribute to an already high incidence of cancer, respiratory and neurological diseases in that corner of the island.

Peter Wiederoder, site manager for Dow Agrosciences, said his company wouldn’t be farming on Kauai if the bill passes without any type of modification.

“Basically it means there is a large portion of our farms we cannot use any type of pesticides, not just restricted, but also general use,” he said. “If we can’t use any pesticides, we would not be able get yields that we would need in our farm production. Basically our companies would take that production to a different island.”

Dow has about 40 employees, and contracts another 80 to 120 people, according to Wiederoder.

Altogether, the GMO companies on Kauai — Dow, Pioneer, Syngenta and BASF — employ about 600 people. Kauai Coffee, another large agribusiness that buys a large amount of restricted use pesticides, would also be affected by the bill.

To Hollan Hamid, owner of Caffe Coco restaurant, the issue at stake is safety.

“I live about 700 feet from GMO fields in Poipu,” she said. “I have three kids, the tradewinds blow through the fields to my house and I want to make sure that I’m protected.”

Hamid said she tries to not use any GMO products in her restaurant’s menu. She added Caffe Coco uses local organic produce and locally caught fish.

Melissa Atkins, wearing a blue shirt, said her husband refuses to buy organic. In fact, she said, he thinks organic foods are a scam, and a lot of food scares have been connected to organic foods.

Atkins’ husband holds a master’s degree in agronomy and currently works for Syngenta as a field operations manager.

She said there is lot of misinformation and scare tactics regarding GMOs, but there has been many studies pointing to the their safety.

Atkins was holding her 3-month-old daughter, waiting to get inside KVC. Her husband, she said, works in the GMO fields, close to pesticides being sprayed, and is a healthy man.

“I even had a kid with him,” she said, laughing. Actually, Atkins and her husband have three children — their two young boys weren’t at the hearing. She said her daughter, their only child born on Kauai, is the healthiest of their kids.

Lori Hilles said if the GMO companies are forced out of Kauai, it would devastate the economy. The GMO companies employ about 600 people. If they lose their jobs, their families would be affected, causing a direct effect on about 2,000, and a ripple effect on all Westside businesses.

Hilles said she has been around GMOs almost her whole life and can attest for their safety.

Since she was 7 years old in Washington state, her father worked for a GMO company, and he still does. Hilles’ husband is a biologist who works as field operations manager for Pioneer. Together, they have two healthy children, a 5-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy who were at the hearing.

She said they are supportive of what the GMO companies are doing, solving issues to feed the world and creating plants that are resistant to pesticides.

“I totally believe they are safe, there has been 20 years of scientific research done,” Hilles said.

To Kalaheo resident Pat Gegen, sporting a red shirt, the bill would not drive GMO companies off the island.

“I’m not out to shut anybody down,” he said.

What he wanted is the information that is not available, the disclosure on pesticide use — and he had a reason for that.

Gegen said his wife is a nurse on Kauai’s Westside, and she has attended many patients with all kinds of symptons, but there isn’t enough information to understand their conditions. Additionally, the number of cases of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a rare cancer, is “definitely high” on the Westside, and one of the causes is pesticide use, he said.

As far as arguing that GMO regulations are restricted to state and federal agencies, Gegen said the tobacco industry is regulated by those agencies, but counties also have their laws regulating smoking. And regarding permitting, the county has a strict set of building permits to ensure safety, and should be no different with GMO crops.

“The permitting process is to make sure the procedures that are going on are safe,” he said.

Inside KVC, the blue shirts dominated by about two-to-one the crowd of more than 550 people. Outside the building, the red shirts had majority, with roughly two-to-one over the blues.

There were rumors that GMO companies paid hundreds of workers from off-island to fly in and attend the meeting, but Wiederoder said it wasn’t true, at least for Dow. He also said the company offered their employees to take the day off, and didn’t require them to attend the meeting. But many came in support.

“They’re obviously concerned, they’re actually fired up, you can tell by them being here,” Wiederoder said of the GMO employees.

Koloa resident and musician Kepa Kruse said the sad thing is that local residents have been divided by a third party coming from off-island. Inside KVC, he said, both sides of the issue were demonizing each other. Most of the people were wearing red or blue shirts, when they should be trying to find solutions together.

“They should all be wearing purple,” he said. After all, their goals were pretty similar.

“Both sides are fighting for the same thing, their families,” he said. “One side is fighting to feed their families; the other side is fighting to feed their families good food.”

If the Westside lands were used for solar farms, it would create more than 1,000 jobs and reduce the price of electricity on Kauai, which is the highest in the nation, he said.

“There has to be a unification of people for this to work,” Kruse said. “Otherwise, one side is going to lose.”

Kauai sustained itself for more than 1,000 years without outside contact, and without pesticides.

“It’s been proven already, so we can try to do it again,” Kruse said.

At the end of the day, the state government took a chunk of money from Kauai residents. There was a row of cars parked on the grass on the other side of Kapule Highway, across from KVC.

“They all got tickets,” a police officer said.

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