Transhumanist Theorist Calls the AI-Unenhanced ‘Useless People’

And the curtains have already been parted a hundred years ago, and these human stains, now or then, are no different than all the other racists:

“It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”1 This statement was made by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. while presenting the court’s majority opinion on the sterilization of a seventeen-year old girl in 1927.

Francis Galton, an English statistician, demographer and ethnologist (and cousin of Charles Darwin), coined the term “eugenics” in 1883.

Galton defined eugenics as “the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally.” Galton claimed that health and disease, as well as social and intellectual characteristics, were based upon heredity and the concept of race.

During the 1870s and 1880s, discussions of “human improvement” and the ideology of scientific racism became increasingly common. So-called experts determined individuals and groups of people to be either superior or inferior. They believed biological and behavioral characteristics were fixed and unchangeable, and placed individuals, populations and nations inside of that hierarchy.

And that first woman (sic) running for USA president shows her maternal colors:

Another notable early advocate for eugenics was Victoria Woodhull, a famous American suffragist who was the first woman to run for President in 1872. She travelled across the U.S. giving speeches about establishing a “perfected humanity” and echoed her principles in her publication Stirpiculture; or, The Scientific Propagation of the Human Race.

She stated

“we see people cursed to-day with hereditary diseases, hereditary brutish passions, and with hereditary criminal instincts. What can we expect from the man born with alcoholized brain cells but a drunkard?”

The combination of encouraging individuals considered “superior” in intelligence, physical traits and characteristics to breed freely and discouraging “inferior” groups to breed prompted many to seek practical measures, which was a significant factor in the birth of the eugenics movement.

Now now, the AI crew, the transhumanists, these Zuckerbergs, ALtmans, and thousands of others in the billionaire and millionaire class loking for their own fucking DFountain of Youth through herbs, supplements, blood transfusions, sperm from virgin boys, growth hormones, DNA hacking, and everything else, you name it, even the Epstein rape sessions, they are the enemy, the sophisticated and sexy Hitlers of our time.

That’s one way to talk about other human beings. Uh? You and I never get into the private chambers of their hell, the Davos flights, the Gates and Company Late Night McDonald’s confabs, all those World Economic Forum private orgies, all the Mengele Factories of bioweapon labs, racial recognition soups of diseases and depopulation formulas. But here, another chosen writer, Weil, for the New Yorker, putting on her pink 20 ounce boxing gloves when interviewing another chosen one.

As writer Elizabeth Weil notes in a new profile of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in New York Magazine, the powerful AI executive has a disconcerting penchant for using the term “median human” a phrase that seemingly equates to a robotic tech bro version of “Average Joe.”

Altman’s hope is that artificial general intelligence (AGI) will have roughly the same intelligence as a “median human that you could hire as a co-worker.”

It’s a disconcerting assertion, considering that it really sounds like Altman is looking to replace the work of normal people with a not-yet-realized AGI. (Weil)

Bullshit. This guy is Mengele with coding, and virtual-augmented-mixed-reality AI under his smeared fingertips.

Altman or, Hitler? California Dreaming, man.

Transhumanism, boiled down to its bones, is pure eugenics. It calls itself “H+,” for more or better than human. Which, of course, is what eugenics is all about.

Alarmingly, transhumanist values are being embraced at the highest strata of society, including in Big Tech, in universities, and among the Davos crowd of globalist would-be technocrats. That being so, it is worth listening in to what they are saying under the theory that forewarned is forearmed.

One state in particular caught the attention of the Eugenics Record Office: California, which was upheld as a model state for its accomplishments in this field. California was the second state to introduce eugenic laws in 1909, the first state being Indiana in 1907, where laws were passed to legalize the sterilization of the “feeble-minded.” The compulsory sterilization law allowed state officials to enforce sterilization on those they deemed unfit to propagate, such as prisoners with criminal convictions, mentally ill patients in state psychiatric hospitals, and individuals who they deemed generally unfit to breed. Under this law, forced castration was made legal. In 1913 and 1917, the law was amended twice to direct the focus towards the sterilization of patients in insane asylums rather than forced castration of prisoners. By 1951, the law was changed to limit the allowance of forced sterilization, but the eugenics movement had already earned a bad reputation primarily due to the unveiling of the horrific acts of genocide by the Nazis in World War II.

In 1922, Margaret Sanger published The Pivot of Civilization, amongst her other books such as What Every Mother Should Know, Woman and the New Race, and My Fight for Birth Control, in which she discussed her views on marriage and family, motherhood, feminism and the benefits of birth control. In The Pivot of Civilization, Sanger described birth control as “really the greatest and most truly eugenic method, and its adoption as part of the program of Eugenics would immediately give a concrete and realistic power to that science. As a matter of fact, Birth Control has been accepted by the clearest thinking and far seeing of the Eugenicists themselves as the most constructive and necessary of the means to racial health.” It is evident that Sanger worked tirelessly to persuade eugenicists to embrace birth control as a vital tool for the eugenics.

The term eugenics is basically a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population, historically by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior and promoting those judged to be superior. But the Germans did not invent eugenics. In fact they were inspired by the founder of the taxpayer funded Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger. The truth behind the genesis of that organization and its founder are much darker than most Americans realize. Hosted by Colin D. Heaton. Forgotten History is a 10th Legion Pictures Production.

And what is AI, then, as in replacing humans, boys, dads, girls, mothers, men and women with artificial thinkers and planners and worker? Techno eugenics?

It is hard to miss the warnings. In the race to make computers more intelligent than us, humanity will summon a demon, bring forth the end of days, and code itself into oblivion. Instead of silicon assistants we’ll build silicon assassins.

The doomsday story of an evil AI has been told a thousand times. But our fate at the hand of clever cloggs robots may in fact be worse – to summon a class of eternally useless human beings.

At least that is the future predicted by Yuval Noah Harari, a lecturer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, whose new book says more of us will be pushed out of employment by intelligent robots and on to the economic scrap heap.

Monster, in the photo:

K-Y Jelly, man, just more useless reporting:

Machines could take 50% of our jobs in the next 30 years, according to scientists. While we can’t predict the future, we can imagine a world without work – one where those who own the tech get rich from it and everyone else ekes out a living, propped up by an increasingly fragile state. Meet Alice, holder of the last recognisable job on Earth, trying to make sense of her role in an automated world.

The last job on Earth: imagining a fully automated world – video

Israeli philosophy professor Yuval Harari is one of the movement’s chief proselytizers. He believes that AI/human hybrids are inevitably going to take over — and that those of us who refuse to join our minds with these computer programs will come to be considered a “useless class,” or even, “useless people.” From the Miami Standard story:

Harari went on to say that humanity is in the midst of a “second industrial revolution” centered around artificial intelligence. “But the product this time will not be textiles, or machines, or vehicles, or even weapons, the product this time will be humans themselves,” Harari asserted. “We are basically learning to produce bodies and minds. Bodies and minds are going to be I think the two main products of the next wave of all these changes.”

The “useless people” referenced by the WEF advisor would be those who refuse to be injected with artificial intelligence capabilities in the coming decades. Describing humans as “hackable animals”, Harari believes that “the masses” would “not stand much of a chance” against these changes even if they were to organize.

Ah, the old “resistance is futile” gambit.

What will happen to “useless people?”

“The problem is more boredom, what to do with them and how will they find some sense of meaning in life when they are basically meaningless, worthless,” Harari continued. “My best guess at present is a combination of drugs and computer games.”

Caesar would approve.

A world without “work.” Well, farming, housing, transportation, culture, education, mutual aid, fishing, restorative conservation, human touch, fun, love, all the stuff to get billions through the quickening of a world without ice, a world with 100,000 toxins mixing and matching and detroying mammal life, and other forms, we need nothing from these Mengeles. We need people in the field, on the streets, tending to health, welfare and human and animal needs.

One day phones will become devices integrated into our skin, rather than the black rectangular slabs we’ve become accustomed to, according to the inventor of the cell phone.

“The next generation will have the phone embedded under the skin of their ears,” Marty Cooper, who’s credited with inventing the first phone in 1973, told CNBC in an interview at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday.

Such devices won’t need to be charged, as “your body is the perfect charger,” Cooper said. “When you eat food, your body creates energy, right?”

Elon Musk’s Neuralink wants people to control computers with their minds. How close are they?

Lest We Forget: Eradicating the ‘Useless Eaters’ in the Third Reich. The Nazis murdered at least 240,000 disabled people, according to the Government of Germany, who in 2005 issued an apology to their relatives. How did doctors, nurses and others trained to save lives end up planning and killing thousands of disabled Germans? Drawing on the development of a false science called ‘Eugenics’ developed in the UK and America, Hitler and the National Socialists instituted measures for compulsory sterilisation of men and women suffering from hereditary diseases in July 1933 soon after coming to power. In ancient Greece, which was made up of city states they relied on warriors to maintain their power and empire. Physical or mental impairment was viewed as an unacceptable weakness. Aristotle and Plato taught that disabled babies should be killed. This was the start of eugenics.

Mr. Kissinger is heard telling Nixon in 1973 that helping Soviet Jews emigrate and thus escape oppression by a totalitarian regime — a huge issue at the time — was “not an objective of American foreign policy.”

“And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union,” he added, “it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

Or,

And so, these eugenics freaks are hitting 100 — mutlimillionares, or billionaires:

“Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.”

— Henry Kissinger

He who controls the mental health, controls the useless breathers, eaters, breeders, sleepers, workers, learners, defecators, dreamers, walkers, talkers, doers and relaxers.

Between 2014 and 2020, the UN published three reports on mental health, prepared by the special rapporteur on the right to health (Dainius Puras). These called for a radical change in the practice and organization of mental health care across the world. The UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights declared the work “groundbreaking”:

In 2017, the Special Rapporteur issued a ground-breaking report addressing the “global burden of obstacles” in mental health settings and in the field of psychiatry. The obstacles are: 1. the dominance of the biomedical paradigm; 2. power asymmetries which impact all levels of the decision-making in mental health policies and services, and 3. the biased use of evidence in mental health. (UN OHCHR) [Global Psychiatry’s Attempt to Excommunicate the Former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health]

These Altmans and Musks and Mengeles, they want all this nonsense to stop, this human empowerment nonsense, because it cuts into the billions in profits for the elite:

Thousands of Kaiser Permanente workers across the United States began a strike against contract negotiations that strikers say are not being done “in good faith” and fail to adequately address the “unsafe staffing levels” within the major medical organization.

The contracts for several thousand Kaiser Permanente workers expired Sunday evening, including contracts for about 400 pharmacists and optometrists out of Virginia and Washington, D.C., kicking off the nationwide strike of Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers and technicians, according to a written statement from The Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions.

The bulk of the striking workers are located on the West Coast, where nearly 75,000 nurses, certified nursing assistants, a variety of health care technicians, and a multitude of other positions started a three-day strike in in California, Oregon and Washington, according to the coalition. They say it’s the “largest healthcare worker strike in U.S. history.”

Ahh, the racism we see with ZioAzovLensky and his cadre. Russophobia is racism, and look who’s playing = EU, UK, Canada, USA, Israel, NZ, Australia. Hmm.

As the eugenics movement prospered in the early twentieth century, its racial ideology developed through arguments supported by Social Darwinism. Concepts such as Nativism and Nordicism were introduced by racial theorist William Z. Ripley who proposed the hierarchization of the different races in his book, The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study. Such a hierarchy was eventually developed by Madison Grant, a prominent zoologist and eugenicist, and fleshed out into the theory of a master race – the Nordics, in his infamous book, The Passing of the Great Race. The notion of a master race was eagerly embraced by Nazi Germany, which named it Aryanism. The Galton Society of America advocated fiercely for the notion of Nordicism; applicants were required to prove their Anglo-Saxon ancestry in order to be accepted into the organization. Many eugenicists campaigned against miscegenation, the mixing of races, in order to prevent the degeneration of the superior race (white and Anglo-Saxon), and were largely responsible for laws such as Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which prohibited interracial marriage and introduced strict regulations for how an individual was to be racially classified. The notion of racial traits and heredity being interconnected can be traced back to the late nineteenth century.

In an open letter published in the 1893 Virginia Medical Monthly, Hunter Holmes McGuire, President of the American Medical Association, asked for “some scientific explanation of the sexual perversion in the negro of the present day.” In response, Frank Lydston, a Chicago physician, stated that “African-American men rape white women because of hereditary influences descending from the uncivilized ancestors of our negroes.” He continued to suggest that “surgical castration would prevent the criminal from perpetuating his crime.”39 This proposition was eventually executed in the form of sterilization laws beginning in 1907 in the state of Indiana, followed by California in 1909.

Link.

Funny Funny:

And where are the robust pushbacks here? Where are those who say enough is enough? Who says anyone can jump on the moon or fill the fucking sky with satellites?

They all need machetes, man — 500,000 satellites? Who gives them the right? Then, the limp-wristed “scientist” is concerned? No ire, no fuck them and the horse they rode into town on ire?

On some nights, one of the brightest objects in the sky is neither a planet nor a star. It is a telecommunications satellite called BlueWalker 3, which at times outshines 99% of the stars visible from a dark location on Earth, according to observations reported today in Nature¹.

BlueWalker 3 is the most brilliant recent addition to a sky that is already swarming with satellites. The spaceflight company SpaceX alone has launched more than 5,000 satellites into orbit, and companies around the globe have collectively proposed launching more than half a million satellites in the coming years — a scenario that astronomers fear could hamper scientific observations of the Universe.

The study “shows us that there are no boundaries to satellite brightness”, says Patrick Seitzer, an emeritus astronomer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who was not involved in the study.

“I’m concerned that we’re going to see a very large number of large satellites launched in the next decade, and it will change the appearance of the night sky forever.”

… what is your story, uh, and will you tell it, and, who do you want to read it, uh, and can you see we need more stories from us, we the people, the regular goddamned people?

I am teaching or facilitating a memoir writing class for the local community college and it’s part of community education.

The Art of Literary Portrait Making 

Come parachute into a memoir-writing class and explore how those hard knocks and amazing trials and tribulations can be lifted into literary art. “On the coast,” says the instructor, Paul Haeder,  “I have found dozens of people whose stories count for more than notches on their belts. They have lived, seen, analyzed, suffered and prevailed, and many have had pretty engaging lives. That’s the foundation to starting a memoir.” In this course, students will share and critique, and the instructor will guide participants, whether they want to write an essay or tackle a book-length project. 

INSTRUCTOR: PAUL HAEDER 
EIGHT SESSIONS | FRIDAYS, OCT. 6- DEC. 1 
2-3:30PM  |  $75  |  WALDPORT, Room 113 

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It’s a deal, man, $75 a head for my own passion, my energy, my entertaining self, resources, feedback, all of that wizardry of being a teacher. I have eight students, two of whom are out of the city/state attempting to hook into it via Zoom.

What is that memoir? What prompts people to want to write? To devulge personal passages in life, so called significant emotional events, putting it all into a package — a short essay, a long-form piece, a novella-length auto-fiction or memoir, or that big one, the book length and chapter heavy book of one’s life, now.

Or, what is shaping life as we are still alive in this class.

Or, what series of significant events have affected change? Perspective? Some sense of a passage or rite of passages?

It will be a hoot, man, working with local people. Always is, always will be.

This one goes here and there, all over the place, but Viet is a good writer, great one:

A conversation between Professor Adriane Lentz-Smith and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer and The Committed Viet Thanh Nguyen on “Struggle, Trauma, Memory, and the Power of the Fictions We Weave.”

Here, from his new memoir, the end of a piece her wrote for The New Yorker =

A Departure from Reality

My mother will not count as one of war’s casualties. But what do you call someone who loses her country, her parents, her peace of mind, because of war? By Viet Thanh Nguyen/ September 9, 2023

Má’s eyes do not open. She gives no sign of hearing.
Her breathing finally stops. It is midnight.
Her journey on this earth, complete.

My mother is mine and my
mother is also Other to me.

My brother makes a phone call. In an hour,
a courteous stranger who might be Filipino arrives
with a gurney, fills out a form, takes away my mother,
leaves the empty hospital bed in the family room,
and drives my mother into the night.

I remember Má loved me.

Everything else

I can forget. ♦

What we get in any class is facing pain, when it comes to writing poetry, fiction and memoir. Writers are not there for hope, all the time or some of the time. I remember a publisher telling my agent that my book — story collection — was amazingly written, but, “man, the stuff in here is dark . . . too dark maybe for mainstream fiction.”

Dark!@#$%

When Dionne Warwick won her first Grammy in 1968 for the song “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” no one could have predicted that the fall of Saigon seven years later would trigger a massive influx of Vietnamese refugees. Among them was a hardworking couple, soaked in Catholicism, who opened one of San Jose’s first Vietnamese grocery stores in a decrepit downtown while raising two sons.

One of those sons was Viet Thanh Nguyen, who left the city after high school, became radicalized at Berkeley, found solace in critical theory, and eventually won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Sympathizer. Nguyen’s collection of short fiction, The Refugees, features a story called “War Years,” based on experiences growing up in his parents’ store, at Fifth and Santa Clara Streets.

In the early 2000s, the city of San Jose purchased the grocery’s building by force—the Nguyens sued to get a fair price—and the parcel became an unused parking lot until a 28-story residential skyscraper was built there, with a shiny new city hall directly across the street.

Nguyen’s new book, A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial, deftly processes the psychological scars left by this history. The opening chapter is called “Do You Know the Way to San José?”

This man, a displaced person, Nguyen, has come a long way baby!

It is what for many refugees see as a great accomplishment coming to America, that one, the one that invaded their country, the killing fields of Vietnam:

The decision to make a television adaptation of his 2016 Pulitzer-winning novel “The Sympathizer” was a double joy for Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen.

“It’s a thrill for any writer to have their book adapted to the screen, and in my case, a particular thrill because I’m very excited to be working with Park Chan-wook, whose work I’ve greatly admired even before I wrote the novel,” Nguyen said in an interview with The Korea Herald in June.

Powered with Park’s direction and a star-studded cast that includes Robert Downey Jr. and Sandra Oh, the series is scheduled for release next year via Warner Bros. Discovery’s global streaming platform HBO.

Familiar with many of the renowned South Korean director’s works, the writer recalled being struck by not only how visually powerful, but also politically powerful Park’s 2003 classic “Oldboy” was. The film explored some of the themes that Nguyen was also concerned with — violence, memory and revenge.

The fictional stories, well, for Nguyen he has partly inserted into the stories, in terms of humor and sensibility.

HBO! A win!

[Photo: From left: Actor Sandra Oh, head writer Don McKellar, interpreter Jaehuen Chung, director Park Chan-wook, producer Niv Fichman and writer Viet Thanh Nguyen in March 2020. (Courtesy of Viet Thanh Nguyen)]

Now, Nguyen is more than the sum total of filmmaking glee, that so called film industry, a la HBO, Hollywood, but this is now again part of his story, memoir. Nguyen is away of the realities of us, the regular people, not the “beautiful” people. He’s not Cormac McCarthy, obviously.

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In addition to being split between two countries, Nguyen is a professor of English, American studies and ethnicity and comparative literature at the University of Southern California by day, and a writer by night.

“I became a professor … because my parents wanted a ‘real’ job, a day job, but writing has always been my fantasy.”

Nguyen finds that the two roles complement and influence each other; his academic background allows him to tackle historical and political issues in his novels while he deals with weighty issues with an entertaining approach. (source)

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And here in a nutshell is an example of memoir. Mine. A slice of time. With a huge historical backstory, front story, a never-ending story. Part of a single point in time when I went to Vietnam not to fight an illegal war, but to immerse myself into biodiversity studies, but so so much more, and so it’s only a few thousand words that put who I am (one part of me) into perspective!

War and Peace In Vietnam

By Paul K. Haeder

Flying into Vietnam 10 years ago brought back the phone call my family received that my father had been shot by the Viet Cong. That was 1969, and I was a 13-year-old fighting schoolmates because I didn’t support the war in Indochina.

Even before the cold announcement that my father had been severely wounded carrying cryptographic equipment in a Huey, I knew the United States was wrong to be in Vietnam. Something about the mythology of war, invisible dominoes, never repeating history.

Now, flying over the mossy forest, a patchwork of clouds, and the glimmer from hundreds of flooded fields and winding rivers, I felt like I was about to drop into a dream.

The stiff green uniforms and yellow star on red background of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam suited the hard-faced immigration soldiers at Hanoi’s airport. There was panic in the air from mostly Vietnamese workers and businessmen deplaning from Moscow. Our group was scatterbrained from the long flights from London to Moscow to Pakistan to Hanoi. We were researchers being treated like tourists, our gear dragged by young blokes looking for hotel commissions.

Most of the Vietnamese on the streets hustling us for cyclo rides (three-wheeled pedaled push carts) and hawking imitation Swiss army knives, Rolex watches, Zippo lighters and U.S. dog tags were young men. This was a testament to one of the world’s highest population growth rates (2.5 percent) and to burgeoning under- and unemployment rates (40 and 20 percent).

As soon as we boarded the bus, cutting through rice paddies tended by women in conical hats, surrounded by teary-eyed water buffaloes and frenetic ducks, I knew I was in another world.

It felt like Vietnam instantly. I could almost taste the explosives in the air.

Scientific expeditions into Third World locales evolve into a weird mix of wanting to be open to a culture and attacking it with these disassociations. With Vietnam, there was emotional baggage and the statistics of war:

– 2 million civilians killed in the north, 2 million in the south;
– 1.1 million military casualties; 600,000 wounded;
– 58,183 Americans (eight of them women) killed;
– 3,869 fixed-wing aircraft and 4,857 helicopters lost;
– 15 million tons of ammunition expended;
– 2,000 Americans and 300,000 Vietnamese missing in action.

So many millions of acres of rain forest and mangroves were destroyed. More than 6 million lives were lost from 1954 to 1975. America introduced the concept of “ecocide” — warfare on the ecology — that still affects each new generation with carcinogenic and mutagenic dioxin from herbicides in human breast milk.

But I hadn’t come to Vietnam to unload a war catharsis.

“The war against America has little relevance in the minds of the people today, as opposed to how people in the U.S. feel about it,” Gene Reddic, a copy editor in Hanoi with the Vietnam Investment Review, told me.

“They don’t live it everyday … the Vietnam war does not conjure up B-52’s bombing Hanoi, and they don’t see Americans as evil people,” he added.

I felt alone for much of the time I worked in Vietnam, and not only because I was the only American in a group of 23 British, Canadian and Vietnamese scientists.

It wasn’t separation from familiar surroundings that stirred the feeling, or the fact that we were bivouacking for three months in primary rain forest — a cloud island, really, and hundreds of miles from Hanoi, just a few clicks from Laos. The raw primal rain forest we had come to study as a part of an international biodiversity project wouldn’t account for the strange separateness I would be feeling. My isolation came from being an American in a sea of Vietnamese — more than 83 million of them in an S-shaped country the size of Italy but with a per capita annual income of just $270.

It has one of the world’s highest population densities for any agricultural country. And then there is the “onslaught.” The 1986 economic reform program, known as Doi Moi, or “open door,” has brought an incredible Westernization — not only of Hanoi’s storefronts, but in the mindset of the people who find themselves actually desiring Western capitalism.

There is almost a lust for the new life, with disregard for tradition, spirituality and the environment.

I felt like an intruder — big, burly, full of extra calories, my dollars gold. I was an American returning with my father’s ghost haunting me.

Many of us have the “secondary Vietnam aftershock”: episodes with friends who had been to Vietnam now self-medicating with drugs, booze, violence. I have taught Vietnam draftees at community colleges — students with faraway gazes who couldn’t cope with festering emotions. All the land mines at home.

“I have buddies who did the tunnel-rat thing, the deep jungle sapping,” said Brian O’Connor, a 42-year-old Ohioan who was swapping stories at the Apocalypse Now bar in Hanoi. “But you have to remember, most of the servicemen were not in combat zones. I had two tours, and I fell in love with Saigon — no bullets. Just the occasional knifing or bottle bomb.”

Almost 3.2 million Americans, including more than 7,000 service women, served in Vietnam during America’s one and a half decades here. Around 80 percent were rear echelon or support; less than 20 percent ever saw combat.

“It’s still something talked about in our schools in Germany,” said Petra Buchbinder, a 24-year-old German traveler and backpacker who has been working as an English teacher in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and Hanoi. “Almost nothing about Hitler and the Third Reich, but much on the fire bombing and My Lai massacre. When I see Americans over here, I wonder if that one or this one fought here … and what they must have seen, or what dark horrors they carry with them.”

Buchbinder said after 18 months living in Saigon and Hanoi, she’s developed a “sixth sense” about foreigners. “I am 90 percent correct when I try to guess if he is American, if he has seen combat here.” It’s the look in their eyes, she insisted.

I had to press hard to get older folk — 40 or older — to talk about the war. In Hanoi, Hue and Vinh, people didn’t want to broach topics of combat duty or flights from carpet-bombing.

However, south of the Ben Hai River, the zone area along the 17th parallel that demarcated the war (DMZ), many spoke of killing Viet Cong. Others lamented how they had lost and been shuttled to reeducation camps set up by the communists after “the victory.”

Quang Tri, Cam Lo, Rockpile, Lang Vay and Hamburger Hill are just a few of the places these South Vietnamese fought at, places that saw bloody battles and ended up on television in America’s living rooms.

They had done hard labor in camps, and now they’re working the streets for big tourists to pay 50 cents for long rides on their cyclos. Others are street sweepers or sledging boulders.

I saw older women working on road gangs, hauling boulders and hot tar and baskets of sand. “The pro-Americans, the elite, or sympathizers were stripped of jobs, impoverished, received no education,” Reddic said. “Those that held land were basically evicted and singled out for reeducation.”

Because the north didn’t suffer as much from the Americans, compared to the south, a lot of tension exists between the north and south.

“The north fears the south breaking away. The south was more enterprising,” Reddic said. Of course, during the war, the U.S. government pumped in billions that built up infrastructure and provided capital for private and public works projects.

The war with America may have pitted the south against the north, but Vietnam has been at war with invaders for more than a thousand years. “The Vietnamese have a history of always protecting themselves, always throwing out the big guy. Like China, Japan, the U.S.,” said Tim Carr, a New York journalist who worked in Hanoi for two years.

An owner of three cafes — including the Memory Cafe, a hot spot for expatriates and foreign travelers looking for rental bicycles, motorcycles and tours around Hanoi — 37-year-old Tam Hang recalls B-52 bombing raids against Hanoi in the early part of 1970 and then three years later.

“I saw my aunt and uncle and friends laid out on the street when we were finally let out of the bomb shelter at school. There were thousands lined up and covered with sheets during just one attack. I still remember the sound of the bombs. I don’t forget the war, the smell of rotting flesh, but I am not against Americans,” Tam said.

Vietnam wants Americans back. This is true of the north, which saw some physical damage from American warplanes, as well as the south, which received the bulk of 13 million tons of bombs and tons of napalm and white phosphorus, as well as most of the 20 million gallons of Agent Orange sprayed on millions of acres of forest, cropland and mangroves.

When I was singled out of our group as an American, dozens of people, young and old, anywhere — in Hanoi’s old quarter at cobra and dog meat stalls, or at Buddha pagodas along the banks of the jade-tinged Perfume river in Hue, or in Con Cuong, an outback town full of loggers — would seek me out for handshakes and embraces.

They bowed and shoved to get a closer look. They measured my wrists and ankles. They stroked blond forearms hairs, bowed as if I held some prominence, and always laughed.

The younger ones wanted to know how much money I made; how much my diver’s wristwatch cost; why I was in Vietnam; what kind of car I owned. Others, older with war-weary eyes, tried in broken English or French to tell me their exploits. They secreted envelopes addressed to relatives living in the States and stuffed them into my pockets.

[Link]

North Vietnam was victorious in the 15-year war with America, although “Uncle” Ho Chi Minh wasn’t alive to witness it.

Victory shows in crumbling buildings and ox-carts towing dung and human waste (night earth) for subsistence farms, and smoky Russian buses ferrying dozens of passengers crammed among blocks of tea leaves and live pigs and duck along Vietnam’s potholed roads built by the French and the United States.

Those first two weeks in and around Hanoi, we prepared to make the plunge into a bio-dome where rare Asiatic elephants, Javan rhinoceroses and a newly discovered species, a bovine called the pseudoryx, roam.

It was here where I was rushed with images of a rural country permanently sunk by “victory.” A country now overhauling itself daily, overloading itself with Japanese electronics and American clothing trends.

I was taken aside by expatriates who told me about yet-unexplored Buddhist temples. Surfers right out of the “summer of love” traced my maps showing me where the best waves where hitting China Beach. Vietnamese businessmen bought me syrupy, sweet coffee, pitching ventures for exporting jade or importing computers. Scientists making $50 a month asked me to send them Western books on entomology and taxonomy.

So many changes are taking place in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City weekly. The streets are a riot of bicycles, motorcycles and trucks. And time is running out to preserve the environment and study the few pockets of relatively untouched territory left.

And yet the concept of “biodiversity” is foreign, treated like a guided missile from the West. Even the word “conservation” barely made it into Vietnam’s lexicon a few years ago.

“You’d be in the same position if you exchanged shoes with us,” said Cao Vang Sung, deputy director of zoology and ecology for Vietnam’s Institute of Ecology and Biological Resources. “People need to cut wood for food and medicine. Biodiversity from your Western point of view forgets to look at the overall effects of a country’s living standard.”

I kept asking myself what I was doing here trying to collect data on this country’s mammals, plants, insects, ethnic minorities. It’s so poor, so backward, so unreceptive to outside help, so paranoid about foreigners.

A poet friend from Cleveland who had been a Vietnam vet put it best: “We spent so much time and money and lives to topple that country, and now Americans are going back 25 years later to help restore a country it helped destroy. It’s crazy, weird.” Schizophrenic.

“All these wars have put the Vietnamese into a short-term mentality … turning everything into a commodity — trees, animals, women and children,” says Reddic with a sigh.

—++ end of article ++—

Collection of short fiction relives memories of Vietnam and its American war

where do we draw the line — sanctions, economies of scale, banking high jinx, non-profit industrial complex, just being an American is, well, terror befalling the world!

Timothy: For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.

Lack of money is the root of all evil. – George Bernard Shaw

I was hit with an email from an acquaintence who sent me a Daniel Schmachtenberger interview held last month in Sweden on the metacrisis and plycrisis. See my last post = What is an Economy For? People? Planet? Profits? The Machine? Endless (sic) Valuation (sic) Until All Gaskets Burst?

I’m on the same sheet, more or less, with Daniel for the larger issues. Yep, I was an eco-warrior, whale protector, ended up fighting developers in Arizona, and then, I stayed hard with that around scuba diving and Sea of Cortez, and the systems there collapsing quickly — tourism, big appetite for shrimp, fins from sharks, and so much more in the sea which Cousteau called the aquarium of the world.

I also got into learning about Chile, had a friend’s husband who was a refugee from Chiles under Pinochet, and then, I was invovled in the underground railroad and liberation theology and folks from Salvador and Guatemala coming into Tucson, sometime smuggled by amazing workers, to seek asylum from death squads.

I was also a journalist, worked in the trenches with cops and city councils, and then moved into a larger context working with migrant students in El Paso, teaching college as an underpaid adjunct, got nto organizing, writing novels, doing book reviews, freelancing.

I ended up in Mexico and Central America, and again, seeing what the environment is, how we are not connected to it holistically, and alas, I ended up doing more around border rights, fighting against militarization of the border, fighting for the rights of undocumented humans.

It gets complicated because I was putting my toes and feet up to my hips into many deep pools, i.e. arenas and kicking down silos. Poetry, literature, magazine writing, teaching writing, fighting against Reagan and his Contras, against Bush and those invasions and illegal terrorist campaigns, and then his son’s bullshit, and then the Billy Boy’s illegal warring, and then on and on.

I got wonky after one graduate degree, ended up in Vietnam working on a biodiversity project run by Brits in Hanoi and along Laos, and alas, got mired in that aspect of my father’s war, our war, the beginning of the great slide into American ecocide, viralcide and set down terrorism by-for-with-because of the CIA, NSA, DoD, DARPA, and all the other alphabet soup agencies and then the Fortune 10,000 corporations stiched together as the Military EVERYTHING Complex.

I got into sustainability, studied in Vancouver, BC, did the three e’s == environment, economy, equity. I got into cool building designs, worked around sustainable agriculture, and of course, I learned about the UN, Limits to Growth, the Tragedy of the Commons, the lies of Malthus and Ehrlich, and moved into Ismael and Daniel Quinn, and again, stayed true to literature, both literary/poetry and environmental.

I’m concerned in that one interview from Sweden in the blog post I listed yesterday, Daniel mentioned how that most people are good, that most Germans did not like or want what the genocide of Hitler and Nazis brought to humankind.

I digress and disagree, not because I am trying to rant against Daniel, but I am concerned that he believes that people in Germany, post World War, or, now, that you can’t find a Nazi under the skin.

It gets to what is evil and wrong and misanthropic. Germans, like Americans, like others, while pumped up with fake history, no history, propaganda, spin, PR, all of that, tied to say Ukraine and Russia, those people, far and wide (not just the powerful ones, the ones at the so-called top), support war against Russia. Support bombing the Nordstream. Are for more tanks to Ukraine, more money to Ukraine, more shells to Ukraine. Britain, France, USA, Canada, Germany, well, you have people there — yes, the common people are all stoked up with hate and such, sure — who do not advocate for diplomacy, for actual history of what the fuck is going on in Ukraine.

Where Zelensky is shooting for more weapons, no-fly zone, cluster bombs, F-16’s, and nuclear war heads.

In any part of this chain of hate, from small family gathering yammering about the evil Russia, to the Poison Ivy League non-diplomats, to the politicians, all of the CEOs of offensive weapons cartels, the media, so many more, THEY ARE FOR MORE DEAD UKRAINIANS and Russians.

Is that evil, a sort of ignorance that produces an evil outcome, and what is pure evil versus other stages or spectrums of evil?

This is not difficult to understand: In a nutshell, Ritter covers the history of Ukraine, Nazi’s, genocidal Bandera fasdcists, and the work of the OSS/CIA/OUN in murdering people in Ukraine, both Russian and Ukrainians. He touches on the evil of Americans.

0:00 – Intro

1:55 – Welcome Scott Ritter

2:15 – Why the War Didn’t Start in 2022

3:25 – US Ambassador Warns of Russian War

4:12 – How the Conflict Began in 1942

7:26 – If Putin Withdraws Will This Conflict End?

9:00 – Putin’s Controversial Speech

13:55 – The Minsk Accords

15:00 – Did Russia Try to End the War?

18:10 – Why Russia Invaded Ukraine

21:05 – Why a Neutral Ukraine is Key to Peace

24:46 – Will there be a DMZ in Ukraine?

29:40 – Is America’s Investment in Ukraine a Good Thing?

31:50 – Is America Only Spending 5% of Military Budget?

35:05 – Is America Ukraine’s Friend?

38:02 – When will the Ukraine War End?

40:32 – Problems with Ukrainian Refugees

A video Pompeo pushes, from some evil group, GOP for Ukraine.

Evil, man = The ‘wicked trinity’ of late capitalism: Governing in an era of stagnation, surplus humanity, and environmental breakdown.

“For years, Mark Zuckerberg decreed that Holocaust denial would be allowed on the virtual version of the public square. And then from one day to the next, he reversed this call. Why should a young gazillionaire be deciding on what kind of opinions are acceptable in public? In order to shuck his responsibilities, Zuck has said that Facebook shouldn’t be in the business of arbitrating truth. And in a sense, we agree with him here: Facebook needs to be in the public domain.

In other words, we need to nationalize the social media companies, and put them under the control of not only their workers, but the entire working population.

Will this stop “polarization” and “radicalization”? Well, the organic crisis that is engulfing bourgeois society is not some “technical” issue that can be solved by altering a few lines of code. Yes, social media companies are doubtlessly accelerating the spread of morbid symptoms of capitalism’s decline. But the crisis is ultimately a result of the ruling class’s inability to address the most urgent problems facing humanity. This is why they escape to ever-more-distant fantasies — as far as Mars! — as the planet burns and their “democracy” becomes increasingly clownish.

The demand to nationalize Facebook and the rest of Big Tech is not just a reform program. Rather, it is a step toward putting all of society’s wealth under the control of working people. This would not only give humanity control over the means of production — it would, as a pleasant side effect, also remove the social basis for the terrible ideas that spread across social media.” (source)

Is the entire project of the Conquest evil, from Bishops and Generals all the way down to sailors and monks?

This is evil writ large = In 1493, Christopher Columbus wrote a letter that would change the landscape of the modern world. “I sailed to the Indies with the fleet that the illustrious King and Queen, our sovereigns, gave me, where I discovered a great many islands, inhabited by numberless people,” he wrote after his return to Europe to royal treasurer Luis de Santángel. “Of all, I have taken possession for their Highnesses.”

The events relayed in the letter were “the first report of a voyage that really did change the world”, says Columbus biographer Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto.

European colonization of Americas killed so many it cooled Earth’s climate/Research finds killing of native people indirectly contributed to a colder period by causing deaths of around 56 million by 1600. Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492

Evil, these hucksters, these people who pray on the almighty dollar or British pound = Now a rare 1493 Latin translation of this letter, printed on an early printing press to swiftly convey news of Columbus’s “discoveries” to elite Europeans, is expected to fetch up to £1.2m ($1.5m) at a Christie’s auction this month.

+—+

How much evil is behind privatized, for profit, predatory, designed to kill medicine? A contract for workers, and those in charge of stalling it, they of course are evil on that “spectrum.”

A contract for 75,000 Kaiser Permanente workers expired. Historic US health care strike could start Wednesday

“Healthcare workers want to be in facilities with the patients they care about,” said Renee Saldana of Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW).

SEIU-UHW is the largest union in the coalition, representing 58,000 Kaiser Permanente workers. “Given the urgency of this staffing crisis, frontline healthcare workers are ready to sit down with Kaiser executives whenever they are ready to bargain in good faith over lasting solutions so patients can be safe and get the care they deserve.”

+—+

How much evil is here, and how many thousands will be participants in nuclear power plants for AI?

Training large language models is an incredibly power-intensive process that has an immense carbon footprint. Keeping data centers running requires a ludicrous amount of electricity that could generate substantial amounts of greenhouse emissions — depending, of course, on the energy’s source.

Now, The Verge reports, Microsoft is betting so big on AI that its pushing forward with a plan to power them using nuclear reactors. Yes, you read that right; a recent job listing suggests the company is planning to grow its energy infrastructure with the use of small modular reactors (SMR.)[source]

ChatGPT’s immense popularity and power make it eye-wateringly expensive to maintain, The Information reports, with OpenAI paying up to $700,000 a day to keep its beefy infrastructure running, based on figures from the research firm SemiAnalysis.

“Most of this cost is based around the expensive servers they require,” Dylan Patel, chief analyst at the firm, told the publication.

+—+

Of course, Zuckerberg and his ilk and his Eichmann’s are evil = Meta recently threatened to fire employees who did not obey to its strict return-to-office mandate. But CEO Mark Zuckerberg is still enthusiastic about the potential of remote work—just not with the technology commonly used today. 

+—+

Then think of evil on a cultural or nationwide level. Imagine, the money, time, research wasted, energy wasted, pollution expended and created by war, by GPT Chat, by economics, and, here, then, attempt to get your head around this, and how evil are you and I when we do not stand up and stop this terrorism against ourselves, our people?

Hurricanes, heat and humidity have always been looming threats on the Gulf Coast. But as drought grows in the Central US and sea level rises, residents in southern Louisiana are finding a formerly unusual emergency is becoming more frequent: saltwater is infecting drinking water city by city up the Mississippi River.

Ocean water has already polluted the drinking water for thousands of residents in Plaquemines Parish. The Army Corps of Engineers predicts it will contaminate the water systems that serve tens of thousands more residents, including those in New Orleans, in the coming weeks.

When will saltwater arrive in New Orleans? Here’s what to know

Extreme drought and sea level rise are colliding in Louisiana, and John Callahan, a climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s center for operational oceanographic products and services, said it will only become a bigger problem in a future made hotter and drier by planet-warming pollution.

+—+

Again, Evil! Back to millions of people working this scam, under the thumb of oligarchs, but again, complicite.

Canadian Oligarchy: How the Super-Rich Rule “Socialized” Healthcare

+—+

The past century, dubbed the ‘Age of Genocide saw more than 60 million people murdered to meet the needs of the state. One unassailable fact behind this litany of human conflict and suffering is that political, social, or religious groups wanting to commit mass murder are never hindered by a lack of willing executioners. How is it that ordinary people like you and me, commit such extraordinary evil?

So, if I go to Israel, and scratch a Zionist or just scratch a plain old Jew (they are all Zionists there, though), will I find a fascist? Racist? Anti-human? Anti-Palestinian? Will I find people — a lot of them — who will tell me Arabs and Palestinians are nothing more than animals?

+—+

Techno-fascist EVIL. By the millions of individuals. This huge issue of blockchain, social impact, all those controlled social dashboards, here, Alison McDowell:

These are the two main ideas I wanted to convey. I’m not saying they are right, but only that it’s worth looking at them hypothetically as thought experiments to see how they hold up in the context of cybernetic impact finance, bio-digital convergence, radiation hormesis, and collective consciousness management.

Thought experiment one:

Consider the internet (and soon extended reality) as a portal into the equivalent of Battle School in Ender’s Game where cooperative infinite games are substituted for finite competitive games. Nested brackets of teams engage in problem solving under conditions of real time sensing, programmed stress, and dynamic constraints. Gameplay is situated in live action role play to tap into the collective subconscious. Picture participants compensated with UBI or crypto play to earn micropayments for their in-game contributions tracked on blockchain mindfile ledgers. The interspecies / inter-intelligence communication medium in this problem-solving space could be Web3 tokens with embedded, nested narratives (think Chinese characters ala Leibniz’s aspirations for the Characteristic Universalis or sigils). Perhaps aspects of the digital stories would be unlocked and presented via holograms (think Princess Leia’s distress message for Obi Wan Kenobi). Exchange of tokens through the ritual game play of votes, trades, media engagement, and biometric and cognitive data could result in computational solutions grounded in real truths of human emotion, culture, and soulful imagination. Could Web3 tokens be a long-sought computational language bringing together the social and physical sciences?

Thought experiment two:

Could this collective cooperative “Battle School” problem space be a digital petri dish for a mass anthropological experiment where ubiquitous sensing charts lived behaviors on planet Earth in order to develop a new interspecies language? Perhaps there is something beyond this dimension, time scale, or sensing framework that really wants to communicate with life here, but it hasn’t yet found the key. What if Fourth Industrial Revolution mass surveillance, natural language processing, the shift to platform life, digital therapeutics, and human weather forecasting are being used to build mental models for linguistic analysis? As we perform our humanity in alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, is there a biofilm colony keeping track and working to devleop a computational system of sociology that can bridge across our mental models of the cosmos? If so, I wonder to what end? If Barbara Dewey is correct about mind creating matter from the endosphere, installing a coordinating infrastructure (decentralized ledgers and tokens) for mass mind coordination could be leveraged to manifest unimagined realities. I don’t think we are prepared for what the chaos magician posse has in store for us with their foxy Ethereum Consensys program.

+—+

I’ll leave it here, but I challenge people like Daniel to understand how deeply epigenetic and deeply embedded evil is. Hitler and stormtroopers, or men who rape and men who abuse their wives and spouses? The numbers are HUGE for DV and rape and sexual assault, and that is evil, no, beating a child or a spouse, phsyically and mentally?

Female genital mutilation, honor killings, acid attacks? Men who rape children and “father” children? Is that evil, on a scale of what evil a Soros does? That is the question. Billionaires are sociopaths, so, is that enough for an evil definition? But then, PayDay loans, and then just scale that up and across all sectors and we shall see there are literally millions in this country who are evil, think and speak and believe and act upon evil. Snake oil and a sucker born every minute is grandma’s retirement stolen right from under her. Is boasting an epipen up to $600 or $1000 a dose evil?

Oh, so many parsings of what evil is:

Nietzsche’s skeptical attack on the concept of evil has encouraged philosophers to ignore the nature and moral significance of evil and instead focus on the motives people might have for using the term ‘evil’ (Card 2002, 28; Cole 2019, 178).

In the Atrocity Paradigm, Claudia Card defends the concept of evil from Nietzsche’s skeptical attack (Card 2002, 27–49). Card rejects Nietzsche’s view that ascriptions of evil merely demonize enemies and indicate a negative life-denying perspective. Instead, she argues that judgments of evil often indicate a healthy recognition that one has been treated unjustly. Eve Garrard and David McNaughton go even further in their rejection of Nietzsche’s form of evil-skepticism, arguing that it is morally objectionable to question ascriptions of evil by victims of atrocious crimes (Garrard and McNaughton 2012, 11–14).

Card also argues that we have just as much reason to question the motives of people who believe we should abandon the concept of evil as we do to question the motives of people who use the concept. She suggests that people who want to abandon the concept of evil may be overwhelmed by the task of understanding and preventing evil and would rather focus on the less daunting task of questioning the motives of people who use the term (Card 2002, 29).

Kant makes several other controversial claims about the nature of evil in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. One of these claims is that there is a radical evil in human nature. By this he means that all human beings have a propensity to subordinate the moral law to self-interest and that this propensity is radical, or rooted, in human nature in the sense that it is inextirpable. Kant also believes that we are imputable for this propensity to evil (Kant 1793, Bk I). Richard Bernstein argues that Kant cannot coherently hold both of these theses since we could not be responsible for a propensity that is in us originally and that we cannot be rid of (Bernstein 2002, 11–35). Notwithstanding this important criticism, several philosophers have argued that Kant’s thoughts on radical evil offer important insights into the nature of evil. For example, Paul Formosa argues that Kant’s reflections on radical evil draw our attention to the fact that even the best of us can revert to evil, and thus, that we must be constantly vigilant against the radical evil of our natures (Formosa 2007. See also, Bernstein 2002 and Goldberg 2017).

According to Card, marriage and motherhood are evil institutions because it is reasonably foreseeable that their normal, or correct, operation will lead to intolerable harm in the form of domestic abuse without justification or excuse (Card 2002, 139–165). For instance, Card argues that the normal, or correct, operation of marriage leads to spousal abuse “because it provides incentives for partners to stay in broken relationships, places obstacles in the way of escaping from broken relationships, gives perpetrators of abuse virtually unlimited rights of access to their victims, and makes some forms of abuse difficult or impossible to detect or prove” (Calder 2009, 28). Card argues that there is no moral justification for the intolerable harm that results from the institution of marriage since nothing prevents us from abolishing marriage in favour of other less dangerous institutions.

The Concept of Evil

The concept of engaging in trades or bargains with demonic figures has been a common motif in folklore around the world for centuries, but this particular iteration—the Faustian bargain—derives its name from the Germanic folk legend of Doctor Faust. These legends spring from a real historical figure, a sixteenth-century itinerant alchemist and astrologer named Johann Faust, whose larger-than-life reputation led to rumors that he had sold his soul to the devil in exchange for great knowledge and magical abilities. The legend of Doctor Faust has been directly adapted into works of literature many times.

7 Techniques Of The Faustian Story

tap dancing into not just a painted-in corner . . . AI and synthetic biology is the paradigm shift….Economics played today puts a dollar on every blink, yawn, step, defecation, urination, swallow..

“Economists study and analyze poverty in their nice offices, have all the statistics, make all the models, and are convinced that they know everything that you can know about poverty. But they don’t understand poverty.”
— Manfred Max-Neef

They just will not stop. They will not step back and say, “This is just not a technology, science, service or system that actually helps the planet, people, our purpose on earth to mutually support the poor, weak, helpless, infirm, old, young, disabled, and damaged and injured.

Now, my greenie friends have pushed for genuine economic growth, right livelihood award, an Earth Charter, but they have pushed the lockdowns, attacked those of us who have not gotten mRNA shit, and they wear the dirty Nazified Blue and Yellow of UkroNaziLandia.

The Reuters/Ipsos survey, conducted over two days (June 2023), found 65 percent of respondents want the U.S. to continue arming Ukraine, compared to 48 percent who said the same thing back in May, indicating a sharp rise in support. The survey also found 67 percent and 73 percent of Americans would support a presidential candidate who wants to continue supporting Ukraine with weapons and equipment and one who backs the NATO alliance respectively.

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This woman-girl is a monster: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met Thursday with Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg and prominent European figures who are forming a working group to address ecological damage from the 16-month-old Russian invasion.

Oh, the climate warriors, the Climate Billionaire, John Kerry, itching for more Ukrainian and Russian and environmental killing!

Language and thought and rhetoric and common sense and thinking and diplomacy have all gone moldy, toxic, dirty poisonous, empty, and contradictory.

2019:

So, here we are, Jacobin: EVERYONE? DON’T like PUTIN? Fuck.

“Everyone I know is united in condemning this war, and none of us like Putin,” Branko Marcetic, a staff writer at the Marxist journal Jacobin, told Yahoo News. But, he said, that doesn’t mean the U.S. should arm Ukraine.

“The idea of sending weapons to Ukraine — I think there’s a defensible argument for it,” Marcetic said. “The problem is, there was a similarly defensible argument for arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s when they were fighting a Soviet invasion.”

This is why the world is upside down, and lies dominate the killing fields of washing away history.

[Photo: Above: members of the African People’s Socialist Party on the stage of an event held by Caleb Maupin’s Center for Political Innovation]

All the socialist parties around the world that are intensely involved in the fight against U.S. hegemony have come to back Russia, and their support has gotten more solid as time has gone on. The leaders of the DPRK, the PRC, socialist-led Nicaragia, and as of this year Cuba have felt compelled to make statements affirming their alignment with Russia in the conflict. Within the Global South movements that aren’t influenced by Washington’s soft power network, support for Russia is seen as the default stance; from an American perspective, it may feel incredible that the participants in the recent anti-colonial revolutions of Africa’s Sehal region have been flying Russian flags. But on their side within the system of global exploitation and imperialist violence, it’s simply logical to align oneself with NATO’s biggest sources of opposition.

Whatever “leftist” or “Marxist” forces throughout the Global South that disavow Russia (or oppose Russian partners like China) are ones which are based within petty-bourgeois radicalism; that seek to replicate the opportunistic model of the left within the exploiting countries, where unserious “socialist” groups can find support from a niche of students, intelligentsia members, and now social media circles. It’s these places that are often associated with purity-fetishizing, dogmatic currents of leftism, like Trotskyism and Maoism. And with the trend towards military leaders taking power so they can defy the liberal global order, such academic projects for normalizing American-style leftism across the Global South are failing.

In the exploiting countries, though, the unserious elements that lead socialists towards the anti-Russian stance continue to dominate. Which has created a conflict between them, and the minority of socialists in America and Europe who share the Global South’s predominant view of the new cold war.

But, back to reality — the economy is for WAR, for the killing fields, for economic war, for cultural war, and the dominating masters of psychopathy. And we have Thunberg and Kerry, all those Davos freaks, WEF, the carbon credits continuing criminal enterprise.

What is that economy for then, when put into the green bucket? PROFIT and profits and subjugating people, putting the global south in a Faustian Bargain, and then forcing poor countries to stay poor, desolate, polluted, backward, sick, ailing, injured, cancerous.

This is the Boris Johnson, who actually with USA stopped Ukraine and Russia from reaching a cease fire, end of the special military operation. Is he the new Hitler?

Certainly the little Goliath, err, David Winston Zelensky Churchill will get one of those little Hitler awards, along with millions of his conspirators.

A hell of a history:

Pravda reported that “Johnson brought two simple messages to Kyiv”:

“The first is that Putin is a war criminal; he should be pressured, not negotiated with. And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not. We can sign [an agreement] with you [Ukraine], but not with him. Anyway, he will screw everyone over,” is how one of Zelenskyy’s close associates summed up the essence of Johnson’s visit…

Johnson’s position was that the collective West, which back in February had suggested Zelenskyy should surrender and flee, now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined.

Moreover, there is a chance to “press” him. And the West wants to use it.

In public remarks during his trip, Johnson vowed that the U.K.–in line with the U.S., Germany, and other western powers–would continue ramping up its “military and economic support and convening a global alliance to bring this tragedy to an end, and ensure Ukraine survives and thrives as a free and sovereign nation.”

“I made clear today that the United Kingdom stands unwaveringly with them in this ongoing fight,” the right-wing British leader said, “and we are in it for the long run.”

In the weeks ahead of Johnson’s April 9 visit, high-level diplomatic talks held in Belarus and Turkey had failed to yield a diplomatic breakthrough, though reports in mid-March indicated that Russian and Ukrainian delegations “made significant progress” toward a 15-point peace deal that would involve Ukraine renouncing its NATO ambitions in exchange for the withdrawal of Moscow’s troops.

This is the face of power, bad power, warped, upended intelligence, no gift of speaking/gab, and pure arrogance. Smiles? While the Ukrainians are in the meatgrinder?

That Nazi problem the USA and EU just sort of laughed at?

Link.

You can research Nazis and fascists in Ukraine, way way before USA ousted a democratically elected president in 2014.

In the end, though, talking about the environment like those pathetic ones in the Greta Group is appaling, totally. Sweden, where she is from, backs bombs, bullets, and boots on the ground and NATO. That is where the greenie weenies, the green washers and green porn stars go. Hate Putin, Xi, whom else?

Then, it’s about one economy over another economy?

On Tuesday, Boris Johnson spoke about “laying the foundations for decades of economic growth”. In his speech to President Biden’s climate summit, when he wasn’t talking about “cake, have, eat” (how did the interpreters cope with that?), he was saying tackling climate change would be about jobs and growth.

Jobs, yes. A green economy will lead to more than 1m new jobs in sectors ranging from renewable energy to caring in the next two years alone. But the endless pursuit of economic growth, as the lodestar of government policy, is what is driving the climate crisis.

An economy based on taking more and more from the Earth, making more, then discarding it in the pursuit of GDP growth is pushing the planet beyond its natural limits. Our life supporting system is being destroyed in front of our eyes.

It’s only when governments recognise this, and switch the focus of the economy to the wellbeing of people and the health of the planet rather than endless growth, that we will get off the road to disaster we are currently on.

You can listen to Graber:

But Beware the AI:

On this episode, Daniel Schmachtenberger returns to discuss a surprisingly overlooked risk to our global systems and planetary stability: artificial intelligence. Through a systems perspective, Daniel and Nate piece together the biophysical history that has led humans to this point, heading towards (and beyond) numerous planetary boundaries and facing geopolitical risks all with existential consequences. How does artificial intelligence, not only add to these risks, but accelerate the entire dynamic of the metacrisis? What is the role of intelligence vs wisdom on our current global pathway, and can we change course? Does artificial intelligence have a role to play in creating a more stable system or will it be the tipping point that drives our current one out of control?

An introduction to the Metacrisis by Daniel Schmachtenberger, founding member of The Consilience Project. Moderated by Niklas Adalberth, founder of Norrsken Foundation. Recorded live during Stockholm Impact/Week 2023. Stockholm Impact Week is an annual Summit hosted by Norrsken and the City of Stockholm, dedicated to defining the critical issues of our time and enabling solutions to them.

Polycrisis or metacrisis. Some reading, whew, below!

1. Energy and Human Ambitions textbook; especially Epilogue; Appendix D.5 and D.6
2. Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari
3. Human Exceptionalism (Do the Math post)
4. Daniel Schmachtenberger on The Great Simplification
5. Daniel Quinn’s books: Ishmael; The Story of B; My Ishmael; Beyond Civilization
6. Post-Ishmael Do the Math posts (Sticks; Love; Cults and a Story)
7. An Inconvenient Apocalypse, by Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen
8. We Are the Middle of Forever by Dahr Jamail and Stan Rushworth
9. Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
10. The Myth of Human Supremacy by Derrick Jensen
11. Bitter Harvest by Lisi Krall
12. Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira

We have to understand the topics of catastrophic and existential risk, civilization and institutional decay and collapse as well as progress, collective action problems, social organization theories, and the relevant domains in philosophy and science.

It takes some heavy lifting as you yawn out of the miasma of war and disaster and predatory and parasetic capitalism’s grand tour of propaganda in media, news, education, all arenas.

But it is not impossible. Don’t get bogged down in the post-graduate liberal arts language and articulation.

Fully, really, AI and sythetic biology are the rackets now, and war is now AI-MR-VR-AR, so the racket is the same as that old boy’s racket:

WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

War can be replaced by=medicine=big pharam=FIRE (finance-insurance-real estate)=AI=science.

The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes even twelve per cent. But wartime profits—ah! that is another matter—twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent—the sky is the limit. All that the traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Letʼs get it.

This edition contains a couple of other shorter pieces – a call for neutrality or isolationism (rather than the post-WWI expansionist policies pursued by the US); a mooted amendment to the Constitution which would limit military powers to defensive rather than offensive; and a collection of uncensored images from battlefields, providing corpse-heavy proof of the reality of military life. Though it’s the titular essay which demands most of the reader’s attention, these additional pieces help show how Butler’s thinking could be implemented at a governmental level.

The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labor before the nationʼs manhood can be conscripted. One month before the Government can conscript the young men of the nation—it must conscript capital and industry and labor. Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our steel companies and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted—to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.

Listen to Daniel. Understand Graeber. Work with Wolff.

But be barefoot with Manfred Max-Neef:

Manfred Max-Neef / CEPAUR/ AWARDED 1983

Place of Birth: Valparaíso, Chile/ Date of Birth: October 26, 1932 /Deceased: August 8, 2019

Manfred Max-Neef Foundation/ Headquarters: Valdivia, Chile/ Founded in: 2020

Facebook: fundacionmanfredmaxneef

For revitalising small and medium-sized communities through ‘Barefoot Economics’.

Manfred Max-Neef (1932-2019) was a Chilean economist who gained an international reputation for his work and writing on development alternatives. A committed environmentalist, passionate musician, and inspiring professor, Max-Neef was also a leader seeking to change from the bottom up. 

If the first part of his career saw him working within the internationally accepted framework of economics, his decisive step into the mud gave him a different perspective on the world and the economist’s role. At the heart of his development alternatives lies the principle of practising economics as if people matter, working for the reorientation of development to stimulate local self-reliance and satisfy fundamental human needs.

In 1993, he was the first-ever ecologist to run for president in Chile. He became known as “the candidate of the absent issues”, promoting local economies and participatory democracy.

Soylent Green is, well, WEF and Davos and UN and Bill Gates and Greta Thunberg Food

I’ll put in my response to honorable Caitlin Johnstone’s most recent Substack, The News Has Nothing To Do With Newsworthiness.

She looks at how the mainstream media has consistently played the same game, the same headlines, the same shit that ramifies Empire, Consumerism, Exceptionalism, Elitism, Manifest Destiny, the Shining City on the Hill, God’s Great Land.

Then, she brings up Noam, and well, that’s a hell of a guy, no? Groupthink, she mentions is one effect of the mainstream media playing the same fiddle as Rome burns.

Since that time I’ve learned about the groupthink effect that working in the mainstream press tends to have on people’s minds according to those who’ve made careers there, and the fact that journalists who either don’t know how to or don’t care to dance to the the agenda-setting task of the plutocratic media don’t find themselves promoted to news editor.

I don’t think righteous folk like Caitlin really know what’s going on, way beyond shit show journalism and lock-step reporting (sic).

The Tech Fascist Titans, they are now ruling the world, and the lock-step Wall Street, Black Rock, CEOs, the lot of them, are all in line to get rid of dirty, stinking, defecating, urinating, burping, complaining, accident prone, boozing, eating, fornicating WORKERS.

You think there is a complete admonishment of these freaks? Again, the die has been cast. People are either checked out, accepting, throwbacks to the lament, “if it’s capitalism, technology, to help us, then, it must be good . . . sit back and accept it, Luddite.”

The Photo is of a INHUMANE piece of shit that will continue to get more and more and more $$, power, say, prime time bullshit stories.

Tech bros aren’t always known for their sensitivity.

In a recent profile in the New Yorker, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman compared his vision of AGI — artificial general intelligence — to a “median human.”

He said: “For me, AGI…is the equivalent of a median human that you could hire as a co-worker.”

It’s not the first time Altman has referred to a median human. In a 2022 podcast, Altman said this AI could “do anything that you’d be happy with a remote coworker doing just behind a computer, which includes learning how to go be a doctor, learning how to go be a very competent coder.”

Then, here, the great prognosticators:

These fast-growing startups are on a hiring spree—many pay $100,000 or more and are remote

This is nauseating, but writers like Caitlin can’t see the forest fire for the pine back beetle trees!

Here are the top 10 buzziest startups, according to LinkedIn, along with some of their six-figure job openings based on available data on the job site in late September:

1. Ramp

What they do: A finance automation platform that provides corporate cards, expense management and payment solutions

Headquarters: New York City

Full-time employees: 675

Open roles: Senior associate of lifecycle marketing ($127,000 to $150,000); customer experience manager ($110,000 to $130,000); website growth associate ($127,000 to $150,000)

2. Liquid Death

What they do: A canned beverage company that sells water and iced teas

Headquarters: Los Angeles

Full-time employees: 200

Open roles: Director of financial reporting and technical accounting ($159,000 to $199,000); sales and distribution analytics manager ($92,000 to $113,000); senior manager of strategic finance ($122,000 to $150,000)

3. Whatnot

What they do: A livestream shopping platform for collectibles, ranging from trading cards to sneakers

Headquarters: Los Angeles

Full-time employees: 425

Open roles: Senior manager of trust and safety ($140,000 to $185,000); creative director ($240,000 to $285,000); community product manager ($153,000 to $235,000)

4. Wiz

What they do: A cloud security company

Headquarters: New York City

Full-time employees: 750

Open roles: Growth marketing manager; people operations specialist; senior marketing strategy and insights manager (Wiz did not include salary ranges in their job descriptions on LinkedIn)

5. Cohere Health

What they do: A platform that automates prior authorization for health-care services

Headquarters: Boston

Full-time employees: 570

Open roles: Training specialist; quality specialist of service operations; customer success onboarding specialist (Cohere Health did not include salary ranges in their job descriptions on LinkedIn)

6. Drata

What they do: A security automation platform for businesses

Headquarters: San Diego

Full-time employees: 475

Open roles: Director of customer and community marketing ($153,000 to $236,250); senior manager of campaigns ($142,120 to $219,450); senior manager of pricing and packaging ($115,940 to $196,025)

7. Tropic

What they do: A software procurement platform for companies

Headquarters: New York City

Full-time employees: 280

Open roles: Account manager ($70,000 to $120,000); senior data strategist ($130,000); product design manager ($170,000)

8. Charlie Health

What they do: A virtual health company that provides mental health-care services to teens and young adults

Headquarters: Bozeman, Mont.

Full-time employees: 900

Open roles: SEO associate ($50,000 to $125,000); director of learning and organizational development ($145,000 to $185,000); marketing designer ($85,000 to $135,000)

9. Dandy

What they do: A tech company that digitizes the dental lab process

Headquarters: New York City

Full-time employees: 865

Open roles: Manufacturing technician; strategy and operations manager; director of product marketing (Dandy did not include salary ranges in their job descriptions on LinkedIn)

10. Seamless.AI

What they do: An automation software platform to help sales professionals identify new customers

Headquarters: Worthington, Ohio

Full-time employees: 365

Open roles: Manager of information security; technical support specialist; product manager (Seamless.AI did not include salary ranges in their job descriptions on LinkedIn)

Oh, the Oppen-Monster-Heimers, those Sam Fascist Altmans:

In a review article published in the journal Trends in Microbiology on September 26, a team of bacteriologists and plant scientists discuss the possibility of using genetic engineering to facilitate mutualistic relationships between plants and nitrogen-fixing microbes called “diazotrophs.” These engineered associations would help crops acquire nitrogen from the air by mimicking the mutualisms between legumes and nitrogen-fixing bacteria.

“Engineering associative diazotrophs to provide nitrogen to crops is a promising and relatively quickly realizable solution to the high cost and sustainability issues associated with synthetic nitrogen fertilizers,” writes the research team, led by senior author Jean-Michel Ané of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Diazotrophs are species of soil bacteria and archaea that naturally “fix” atmospheric nitrogen into ammonium, a source that plants can use. Some of these microbes have formed mutualistic relationships with plants whereby the plants provide them with a source of carbon and a safe, low-oxygen home, and in return, they supply the plants with nitrogen. For example, legumes house nitrogen-fixing microbes in small nodules on their roots.

You see, this is the future of food — “vaccines in lettuce.”

You haven’t gotten your flak jacket out and the repeater pistol? Oh, let’s learn how to make napalm and C4 just to take a few of these fuckers out? First do no harm? Precautionary principle? DOn’t play g-d, GOD, goddamn god?

The future of vaccines may look more like eating a salad than getting a shot in the arm. UC Riverside scientists are studying whether they can turn edible plants like lettuce into mRNA vaccine factories.

Messenger RNA or mRNA technology, used in COVID-19 vaccines, works by teaching our cells to recognize and protect us against infectious diseases.

One of the challenges with this new technology is that it must be kept cold to maintain stability during transport and storage. If this new project is successful, plant-based mRNA vaccines — which can be eaten — could overcome this challenge with the ability to be stored at room temperature.

The project’s goals, made possible by a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, are threefold: showing that DNA containing the mRNA vaccines can be successfully delivered into the part of plant cells where it will replicate, demonstrating the plants can produce enough mRNA to rival a traditional shot, and finally, determining the right dosage.

“Ideally, a single plant would produce enough mRNA to vaccinate a single person,” said Juan Pablo Giraldo, an associate professor in UC Riverside’s Department of Botany and Plant Sciences who is leading the research, done in collaboration with scientists from UC San Diego and Carnegie Mellon University.

I was showing this documentary in 2004 through 2010. And here we are, who would have predicted?

The Future of Food by Deborah Koons Garcia tells the story behind genetically engineered food that ends up on grocery store shelves in the US. It investigates how these items can be unlabeled and patented, criticizing the fact that living organisms can be patented. This film examines the effect that international companies in the now globalised food industry are having on farmers. Some farmers in North America have even been sued by these large corporations. Furthermore, it argues that there is a risk if the world depends on these multinational companies that biodiversity could be negatively impacted. The Future of Food does offer hope and solutions in the form of sustainable organic agriculture. Not only would this support farmers who are being run off their land but also reduce society’s dependence on global food giants that want complete control.

Pretty “hopeful” in 2004. The people in the USA making documentaries just do not get the ile nature of American and Scientism Capitalism in the Hands of Eichmann’s and Oppenheimers and Sam Altmans and their backers/bankers/investors.

Imagine, robots, imagine, 5G, imagine satellites, wires, electricity, cloud servers, all the electric this and that? Just from thin air!

In the quest to address climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, detecting methane leaks—a potent contributor to global warming—has become increasingly vital. Researchers are harnessing the capabilities of cutting-edge satellite technology to monitor these leaks from space. The paper has been published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

How checked out is this now, satellites, again, in space, how? From cradle to grave, embedded/embodied energy, life cycle analysis, intended and unintended negative consequences.

Now, let’s talk about ‘super-emitters.’ While methane emitters refer to any source of methane ranging from natural processes like wetlands or human activities such as agriculture, methane super-emitters release a disproportionately large amount of methane compared to other emitters.

These are typically found among industrial facilities, such as oil and gas operations, coal mines, or even landfills, that have equipment or infrastructure issues leading to significant methane leaks.

These super-emitters are the low-hanging fruits in our quest to cut emissions. Fixing these super-emitters doesn’t require complex or expensive solutions. In many cases, relatively simple repairs can result in significant climate gains.

There’s a whole lot of shaking going on:

A series of shallow earthquakes has the potential to strike the Pacific Northwest of the US with similar devastating force to the San Francisco quake of 1906, or the catastrophe that killed tens of thousands of people in Turkey and Syria in February, according to scientists.

Researchers from the University of Arizona examined the rings of ancient and submerged trees to determine that several quakes that struck the western Washington region about 1,000 years ago — known as the millennial cluster — occurred either simultaneously to produce an estimated 7.8 magnitude quake, or in rapid succession, such as the powerful back-to-back temblors that devastated parts of the Middle East.

Finally, something up my ally, marine sciences, marine creatures.

Humpback whales frolicking in seaweed — a behavior known as “kelping” — is more widespread than previously thought and constitutes a “global phenomenon,” new research has found.

Kelping was first observed in 2007, and scientists have described the behavior before — but only as isolated events. It turns out, humpbacks across the world enjoy the leafy caress of seaweed on their skin, both as a form of play and as a potentially soothing body scrub. 

“It’s something they do together as a social event or by themselves,” study lead author Olaf Meynecke, a research fellow at Griffith University’s Coastal and Marine Research Centre in Queensland, Australia, told Live Science. “They put the seaweed on their head and roll around in it; they try to move it around with their pectoral fins as well.”

This is the prime time mad mad mad mad mad world of the capitalist, the Great White Man’s Burden, the shit hole that science seems to have always been in so many arenas.

The Press? The Media? Propaganda? Noam Fucking Chomsky? Shit, enough said. Here’s my response to Caitlin’s latest short piece, not that I have vented, man, vented.

Comments –

Oh, that Noam? In an interview recorded earlier this year, which went viral last month, the 92-year-old philosopher offered his views on mandating vaccines and while disagreeing with the policy, suggested those who refuse jabs “should” isolate to avoid becoming “a danger to the community”.

“People who refuse to accept vaccines, I think the right response for them is not to force them to but rather to insist that they be isolated,” Chomsky said. Asked how they would get food that way, he answered, “Well actually, that’s their problem.”

+–+

Bye Bye Chomsky.

+–+

Journalism. Yep, U of Arizona, worked for the Daily Wildcat while I studied biology and English. The school daily newspaper was run by students, not the Journalism program or professors. We worked our asses off, late nights, dug for stories, covered Tucson, the state, the college campus (40,000).

We found malfescene in the football program and animal vet program. We featured some cool research, did stories on activism, had a hell of an entertainment section, getting free back stage passes and interviews with all the rock and jazz and classical stars.

We argued like hell, our managing editor was a tyrant when it came to him marking up each published paper, as in what worked, what didn’t.

The Journalism program used our paper to show their concept of acceptable this or that.

THIS was a golden era, man. I did take some journalism courses, ended up in Tombstone on a lab newspaper, and we got internships with the various dailies and weeklies in Tucson, S. Arizona, and even in Phoenix and Flagstaff.

That was 1975-79.

Then, I worked for a small group of single owner newspapers in S. Arizona, along the US – Mexico border. More than a dozen beats, sister. Covering local politics, school boards, breaking news, cop shop, features, sports, you name it. Always on the go, nose to the community, and never ever FAKE news or BS news or spineless news.

Yes, I argued with the owner and editors, for sure.

+–+

There has been a deep quickening on many fronts in Western culture — it isn’t too complicated on how inverted totalitarianism has created fear, loathing (self), celebrity valorizing, skewed thinking, black and white fake arugmentation, top down hell, bad eduation getting worse, and the background to it all is a warring, thieving, murderous, snake oil sales, sucker born every nanosecond sort of collective ethos.

Chomsky? ANother charlatan, again, with those fake lefties (goy) bowing in his Epstein-loving presence.

Manufactured consent? His religious brother, Edward Bernays, wrote the book, Propaganda, and he coined capitalism on parasetic benders as Engineered Consent.

+–+

Oh, no, the planned pandemic and gutless Chomsky:

We can coin these colluding forces as — collective Stockholm Syndrome, Eichmann Disease, GAD — generalized Anxiety Disorder, SAD — social anxiety disorder; why not Good Little German disorder. Why not even call it brainwashing, green washing, demonization of the other. McDonaldization, Disneyfication, Walmartization, Infantilization, and on and on.

I’mm 66, lived in other countries, traveled, etc. So, as an 18 year old working my ass off at college, taking any number of courses from any number of departments, working as a real journalist, I have seen the slippage BIG time, real time.

Until 2020 hit (though some of us real journalists knew about Gates and Johns Hopkins and Event 201, and way before, we knew about bioweapons used by USA in Korean, on down the line).

These people in power are not just spineless, but monsters:

Project Censored was around when I was a college ENglish faculty at age 25. Read all about it:

https://www.projectcensored.org/top-25-censored-news-stories-2022/

Oh, Chomsky and the other non-journalist media creeps. Happy Hunting for real journalism!

+–+

In late 2021 and early 2022, it was commonplace for journalists and public intellectuals to demonize and shame “the unvaccinated,” a group that in the United States was disproportionately low income. The New York Times ran pieces like “I’m Furious at the Unvaccinated,” and “Unvaxxed, Unmasked and Putting Our Kids at Risk.” The Los Angeles Times published a column titled “Mocking anti-vaxxers’ COVID deaths is ghoulish, yes—but may be necessary.” An opinion piece called “The Unvaccinated Are a Risk to All of Us” appeared in Bloomberg, and The Washington Post printed a piece called “Macron is right: It’s time to make life a living hell for anti-vaxxers.”

CNN’s Don Lemon commented that people refusing the vaccines were being “idiotic and nonsensical.” He argued that it was time to “start shaming them” or “leave them behind.” Noam Chomsky, a self-described libertarian socialist, said unvaccinated people should remove themselves from society and be “isolated.” Asked how they would get food that way, he answered, “Well actually, that’s their problem.”

In Canada, columnists for the Toronto Star proclaimed, “Vaccine resisters are lazy and irresponsible—we need vaccine passports now to protect the rest of us” and “The unvaccinated cherish their freedom to harm others. How can we ever forgive them?” In the U.K., the Daily Mail contended, “It’s time to punish Britain’s 5 million vaccine refuseniks,” and Piers Morgan, a British presenter on TalkTV, suggested that unvaccinated people should not be allowed access to the country’s National Health Service.

Internationally, several politicians threatened to reimplement restrictions and told the public that “the unvaccinated” were at fault. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said unvaccinated people “are very often misogynistic and racist,” and asked, “Do we tolerate these people?” President Joe Biden said that his “patience [was] wearing thin” and that we needed to “protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated coworkers.” Michael Gunner, chief minister of the Northern Territory in Australia, stated that even if you are vaccinated, “if you are anti-mandate, you are absolutely anti-vax.” French President Emmanuel Macron declared that 5 million French people who remained unvaccinated were “not citizens.”

Across parts of the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe, unvaccinated people were fired from their jobs, excluded from higher education, banned from many sectors of public life, denied organ transplants, and even punished by judges in probation hearings and child custody cases. Meanwhile, COVID cases continued to rise in many highly vaccinated countries with vaccine passports and other restrictions in place.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/vaccines-never-prevented-transmission-covid-alex-gutentag

+–+ End +–+

Hell, more on that fucking Noam:

Alexander Azadgan

Back when I was a young anti-war, anti-establishment activist, I used to hold the utmost respect and admiration for Professor Noam Chomsky of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). To me, he was a firm pillar and one of the brightest minds out there: ever wise, poised, articulate, and correct on many different issues, especially those pertaining to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Many years later and wiser, I find myself having substantial differences of opinion with this esteemed octogenarian fellow professor. For starters, there is much hypocrisy in his assertions and behavior now. For example, he seems to oppose the corporate oligarchy system until every two or four years when the elections arrive during which he parrots the “lesser-evil-ism” mantra ad nauseam.

And what about the fact that Chomsky has managed to keep his employment with MIT all along, tenured and now emeritus? It is a known fact that MIT is one of the most closely-related research universities affiliated with the Military Industrial Complex. If one is a true anti-war academic and what’s more a celebrity activist, could he ever really get tenured at such a college, especially at the height of the Vietnam War when Chomsky’s career was taking off at MIT?

Here is a list of other disgraceful stances that Professor Chomsky has been partaking in:

1) Professor Chomsky supports the existence of the belligerent Jewish state.

2) Professor Chomsky opposes the principles of the gradually-supposed-to-be-effective Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement.

3) Professor Chomsky supported the “no fly zone” and the subsequent utter destruction of Libya – a country that was the most prosperous African nation under the leadership of the crazy-yet-brilliant Mu’ammar Qaddafi which thanks to NATO is now a failed state run by ISIS savage gangsters and Al-Qaeda terrorist thugs.

4) Professor Chomsky considers President Basher Assad “an autocrat” and is somewhat comfortable with the continuous bombing of the great and resisting Syrian nation. The professor recently told Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! Program: “Syria is a horrible catastrophe. The Assad regime is a moral disgrace. They’re carrying out horrendous acts, the Russians with them.” Democracy Now! begins with the leading statement of “worldwide outrage mounts over an alleged chemical weapons attack in Idlib province, which was reportedly carried out by the Assad government…” No evidence is presented to support the accusation, and the accusers are also unnamed. What kind of journalism is this, Amy Goodman?! Are you another Zionist shill? One would have hoped that a media outlet like Democracy Now! Which claims to be “independent” of the state and corporate sponsors would apply a higher journalistic standard. I guess not. It is now crystal clear that Democracy Now! Is in fact pushing the imperialist agenda for regime change in Syria. 

5) Professor Chomsky supported the US-led coup in Ukraine and the illegitimate installment of a corrupt Neo-Nazi/ NATO nurtured government in Ukraine.

6) Professor Chomsky acknowledges the one-party corporate oligarchy, but then urges everyone to vote for the lesser of two evils – just like he did in 2008, 2012, 2016, and just about every election before that. Let us keep in mind that any endorsement of “lesser evil-ism” is in essence an endorsement to maintain the status-quo and hence a system of injustice that he claims to oppose.

Naturally expected, Professor Chomsky tends to run interference for the Democrats as always. He talks like an anarchist during off years, tucks tail and comes slinking back to the Democrat wing of the corrupt establishment during election years. This is the utter hypocrisy that Professor Chomsky is used to, but one which is now coming to full surface. 

But then again, to survive at the right-wing MIT for all those years and get tenured (and now emeritus) could in-and-out-of-itself be an alarming indicator that he is yet another deeply well-positioned Zionist Mossad shill and a controlled opposition, a pro-establishment sell-out with a subtle narrative that serves the evil Anglo-Washingtonian Empire’s interests and commitment to perpetuate the status quo.

Noam Chomsky said just a few years ago that the Western military intervention was the only way to prevent genocide in Libya and supported the ‘no fly zone’ and subsequent destruction of Libya.

Every word he uttered turned out to be completely false. The allegations of abuses by the Libyan government were total war propaganda fabrications.

Look what happened to Libya, once the most prosperous nation in the African continent under Qaddafi, a proud sovereign nation who offered, public housing, free healthcare, free education among many other public benefits to 100% of the people in Libya –  including thousands of subsaharan Africans who are now being sold as slaves for as little as $200 dollars by Jihadist Wahabbi gangs who now run Libya.

What is Chomsky saying about it now?

Nothing! The octogenarian is too busy openly advocating for regime change in Syria. The shameless of “leftist” liberal intellectuals like him. Shame on you professor!

“Hunger isn’t caused by a shortage of food.” 912/2010).

(Editor’s Note: this piece continues a discussion started here about efforts to monitor and hopefully persuade organizations like the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa )

Related Stories

• Advocating for African farmers

For additional information on these topics visit here or “here, which takes you to pages by Community Alliance for Global Justice, which coordinates the AGRA Watch program.

“Hunger isn’t caused by a shortage of food.”

This oft-repeated statement may be counterintuitive or disturbing to mainstream agro-economics, but that’s the focus of global food experts, planners, civil society and peasant farmers.

“For now, the G8 and the United States continue to advocate the same disastrous policies that got us into the current mess where 1 billion people lack access to adequate food,” said Ben Burkett, an African-American farmer who has traveled around the world to support locally-based sustainable agriculture.

“A right to food framework therefore goes deeper than simply the misguided obsession with yields and productivity, and more fundamentally towards questions regarding democracy and access to resources, including land, water and credit.”

So instead of learning from the failures of the “first” green revolution, our own agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack purports that biotechnology will be the silver bullet to address hunger.

Not surprising, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved with limited public debate the “Global Hunger Security Act,” mandating the U.S. fund genetic engineering projects in foreign agriculture research. With no real coincidence, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has invested billions into their Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa – called the second green revolution.

Just surfing the Internet with hits on organic farming sites or even Wikipedia, the Green Revolution is succinctly laid out as a phenomenon that increased yields of corn, wheat and rice with seed manipulation, lots of synthetic chemical inputs, and mechanization.

Irrigation engineering also increased yields from 1960 to the 1990s. Another counterintuitive truism, thanks to the first green revolution:

– “Increased food production can – and often does – go hand in hand with greater hunger.” Fact Sheet!

So, by getting farmers “competitive” by forcing them to purchase expensive inputs, obviously, wealthier farmers will squeeze out the poor. Then, those traditional small farmers are not going to find adequate employment to compensate for the loss of farming livelihoods.

India has the highest suicide rate for farmers who have been squeezed out by the agro giants and depleted aquifers. Developing countries are hurdled with millions upon millions of unemployed pastoralists, farmers, fishers looking for something, thanks to this globalization of food and farming.

AGRA is pushing the bio-technology solution, which is basically Monsanto, DuPont, Novartis, and other remade chemical companies leading genetic engineering research and orchestrating propaganda trumpeting claims that “GE seeds boost crop yields and will feed the hungry.”

People and organizations like Burkett, AGRA Watch, La Via Campesina and others believe these technologies have questionable benefits and documented risks. The second Green Revolution they promise is no more likely to end hunger than the first.

Burket continues: “The scientific research and renewed focus on the ‘right to food’ exposes why we must move away from Green Revolution monoculture practices and instead embrace ecologically sound practices, more equitable trade rules and local food distribution systems to empower family farmers. Now the governments of the world and the Gates Foundation need to finally get the message as well.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists authored a report, “Failure to Yield: Evaluating the Performance of Genetically Engineered Crops,” showing that after more than 20 years of research and 14 years of commercialization, genetic engineering has driven up costs for farmers .

Yields have not risen significantly, and the environmental costs of so much plowing, spraying and large scale mono-cropping are beyond imagination.

\

“In comparison, traditional breeding continues to deliver better results,” Burkett said.

Proof is in the pudding, or in this case, sweet potato: Monsanto’s GM sweet potato has no resistance to a crop-specific virus while all the local varieties in Kenya outperformed the genetically modified one.

“The U.S. approach to helping Africa should not be a top-down process that excludes the voices of African farmers who have the knowledge of their land and what food to grow,” Burkett said.

Inducted: 2020 — source: heroes.coop/ben-burkett

African American farmers in the Black belt would have lost a valuable advocate had Ben Burkett moved to Chicago after graduating from Alcorn State University as he had planned. But when his father fell ill, Ben, a fourth-generation farmer stayed in Petal, Mississippi to get the family’s cotton, cucumber, corn and beans to market. Forty years later, Ben has made his mark on his community and the world as a farmer, cooperative organizer, and advocate for southern Black farmers. 

Farming is never an easy profession but in rural Mississippi long ingrained discrimination denied Black farmers open markets for their crops, access to federal and state programs and even retention of their land. “We achieved the right to vote, but we still needed to achieve the right to survive,” said Ben. Seeking better prices for their watermelons, Ben organized neighboring farm families to sell their crop in Chicago. With the assistance of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, the Indian Springs Farmers Association was born.

While continuing to farm and serve as a local co-op leader, in 1978 Ben joined the staff of the Emergency Land Fund (ELF), a non-profit whose mission was to save and expand Black farms and assist Black farmers with heirs’ property issues. His role was to identify and work with other Black farmers and land owners to protect their landholdings. When the ELF merged with the Federation of Southern Cooperatives in 1985, Ben’s role was expanded to include spreading the word about the cooperative business model and he began teaching diversified crop development for conservation and marketing purposes. Ben’s knack for connecting with rural communities in the South, his passion for farming, and unique ability to get things done made him a sought-after agricultural trainer.

Ben’s reputation as a farming and rural development expert garnered the attention of Mike Espy, former member of the U.S. House of Representatives and Secretary of Agriculture under the Clinton Administration. Espy appointed Ben to the USDA’s Farm Service Agency Committee for Mississippi and was largely responsible for the inclusion of technical assistance funds that enabled more minority farmers to qualify for USDA farm assistance. Through his work with the FSA State Committee, Ben encountered and supported Lester Spell’s candidacy for Mississippi Commissioner of Agriculture and Commerce. Key to Spell’s election, Ben was appointed to the State Marketing Board where he served two terms and continues to be involved.

Ben’s political appointments and his service in various food advocacy organizations including the National Family Farm Coalition, La Via Campesina’s Food Sovereignty Commission, the Rural Coalition and the Community Food Security Coalition helped to raise the profile of the Federation and of agricultural and handicraft co-ops throughout the South. His expertise has taken him to Africa, South America and Southeast Asia where he shared his knowledge of small-scale agriculture and the power of cooperatives.

As a tireless promoter and advocate for the cooperative business model, Ben’s knack for connecting farmers globally and bringing them together for a common cause has made him a sought-after speaker, trainer, organizer and a true example of the cooperative spirit. Ben’s work was recognized with a leadership award from the James Beard Foundation in 2014.

Public concern grows, but many feel powerless (9/11/2011)

The 2007 film “Michael Clayton” included this bit of dialogue:

Michael Clayton: You are the senior litigating partner of one of the largest, most respected law firms in the world. You are a legend.

Arthur Edens: I’m an accomplice!

Michael Clayton: You’re a manic-depressive!

Arthur Edens: I am Shiva, the god of death.

The film is a dramatization of what the boardrooms and back alleys of agro-genetic-cloning-seed-purveyor Monsanto could look like. The company Clayton works for through its law firm is U/North, which faces a multibillion dollar lawsuit from families of hundreds of people killed by genetically modified food.

Of course, a real billion-dollar company, Monsanto, is in the crosshairs of every sort of group, from small farmers in Spokane County, to cotton collectives in India, to whole milk advocates in California.

Monsanto and its genetically modified organism world of Round-up Ready corn, soy, beets and alfalfa scares the hell out of organic farmers, ranchers and dairy operators.

Another Shiva, Dr. Vandana Shiva, an Indian philosopher, environmental activist, and eco feminist with over 25 books and 600 papers under her belt, has potent things to say about Monsanto:

“The seed, the source of life, the embodiment of our biological and cultural diversity, the link between the past and future of evolution, the common property of past, present and future generations of farming communities who have been seed breeders, is today being stolen from farmers and sold back to us as ‘propriety seed’ owned by corporations like the Monsanto.”

Unfortunately, Monsanto has Supreme Court judges close to its corporate hearts – Elena Kagan went to bat for them as California’s Solicitor General. Clarence Thomas was once a Monsanto lawyer. Both have not recused themselves recently involving Monsanto cases.

George W. Bush stacked his administration with former Monsanto folk and beneficiaries of their multiple billions:

• John Ashcroft, Attorney General, top recipient of Monsanto election money.

• Tommy Thompson, Secretary of Health, was a Monsanto supporter in Wisconsin. He received $50,000 from biotech firms, and used state funds to set up a $317 million biotech zone.

• Ann Veneman, Secretary of Agriculture, was on the board of Calgene Pharmaceuticals, purchased by Monsanto.

• Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, former president of Searle Pharmaceuticals, now owned by Monsanto.

• Linda J. Fisher, a former Monsanto official, was nominated by Bush as EPA’s second-in-command. She was Monsanto’s representative in Washington from 1995 to 2000 and coordinated the company’s strategy to blunt resistance to genetically modified food.

• Mitch Daniels, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, was vice president of corporate strategy at Eli Lilly Pharmaceutical. Eli Lilly and Monsanto developed the genetically engineered bovine growth hormone. Lilly “owns” the European “franchise.”

• Stansfield Turner, former Director of the CIA and member of the Monsanto Board

• Earle H. Harbison, former president of Monsanto and CIA officer for 19 years Iraq’s fate, agronomical-wise, is tied to Monsanto’s influence on Paul Bremer’s “100 Orders.”

The U.S.’ Article 81 means Iraqi farmers must plant “protected” crop varieties, defined as new, distinct, uniform and stable (read, Monsanto-held patented crops). Seed saving is banned, and royalties are paid by the farmer to the registered seed “owner.”

Farmers must sign contracts relating to seed supply and, most probably, to the marketing of the harvest.

Where genetically-modified crops are involved (possibly in other cases), farmers must sign contracts to purchase herbicides, insecticides and fertilizers. Even President Barack Obama feels Monsanto’s presence, in the form of ex-Monsanto attorney and chief lobbyist Michael Taylor, who rejoined the FDA in July 2009, later named the Deputy Commissioner of Food.

It was one of Obama’s most controversial appointments. Taylor is called the food czar, and his big agribusiness ways rule. Obama’s presidential-bid promise to end the “revolving door” between agribusiness lobbyists and government and to “regulate” factory farms rang hollow quickly. In future parts of this GMO series, we’ll look at what Eastern Washington farmers, ranchers and food and farming advocates think about GE or GMO foods and crops.

We’ll probe movements in Seattle to create GMO-free schools, restaurants and stores, and the long reach of Monsanto, its subsidiaries and parallel biotech, drug, chemical and agriculture companies working to rule the world through food.

Congress is expected to vote on the Farm Bill in early 2012, which will have resounding implications on food security, climate change mitigation, land use and farming and nutrition policies. It’s a rallying point for food, farm, poverty, education, social justice and environmental advocates.

I attended a Food and Water Watch event in Seattle last month, tied to the Fair Farm Bill Road Trip this national group is rallying people around.

At Café Q, more than 60 people gathered for a free screening of the documentary, “What’s Organic About Organic?”

The film sort of proposes similar points discussed in films “Fresh” and “Food, Inc.”, of organics feeding the world. The fact is that Round-up Ready alfalfa or wheat will kill organics since cross contamination will render organic crops and meat and dairy products industrial.

After the viewing, a panel was convened with representatives of Food and Water Watch, Community Alliance for Global Justice, Northwest Farm Bill Action Group, Seattle Tilth and Slow Food Seattle.

Unfortunately, the Farm Bill is all about watching corporate giants take control of our food, and the audience, mostly middle aged and older, seemed at a loss as to how to fight the corporate influence on every level of politician.

What was missing on the panel was verve, fire-in-the-belly focused criticism and framing, as well as real solutions on how to tackle corporations like Monsanto, which has brought us all the “better living through chemistry” we can handle: Agent Orange, terminator seeds, Round-Up, and Genetically Engineered organisms. In the U.S., Monsanto’s influence on crops is startling: 92 percent of soybeans, 80 percent of corn, 95 percent of sugar, and 90 percent canola are GE Round-up ready.

The one main question from the audience – how can individuals stop the influence corporations have on the Farm Bill? Unfortunately, paradigm shift means a complete reworking of our society, and while people in Seattle seem more green or informed, they too are colonized by a corporate mentality dominating every portion of their lives. In future parts of this series, we’ll look at some of the goals of groups like Food and Water Watch.

For now, here’s the premise for hundreds of groups and individuals working to make the Farm Bill worthy of a healthy society, healthy environment and healthy farm-food economy, brought to us by Food and Water Watch:

What a Fair Farm Bill Means for You

• Better choices: Breaking up the agribusiness monopolies will bring a more vibrant marketplace.

• Stable prices: Restoring common-sense practices like agricultural reserves can prevent speculation from driving up food prices.

• Increased access to healthy food: More families will have easy access to healthy foods they can afford.

• Stronger local infrastructure: Reversing the consolidation in the food system would allow for more local businesses.

What a Fair Farm Bill Means for Farmers

• A level playing field: A fair marketplace for small farmers cannot exist without breaking up the agribusiness monopolies.

• Fair markets: Farm pricing and contract policies can ensure that all producers receive enough from their sales or services to provide a fair return.

What a Fair Farm Bill Means for the Environment

• Environmental stewardship: Conservation programs can improve biodiversity, minimize pollution, and conserve essential resources.

• Sustainable farming: Independent farmers will receive support to help them shift to more diversified operations.

This is the first of a series on genetic manipulation, agro-giants, and the right to farming.

David-Goliath analogy can describe lopsided opponents (re: 10/2011)

Stories

• The real scoop on genetic engineering’s close ties to corporate-political hi-jinx
• Advocating for African farmers
• Saying no to ‘GMO’

This is the second part of continuing coverage of columns on the topic of genetic manipulation, agro-giants, and the right to farming. For part 1, read here.

This fight is not a clash of the Titans. In the genetically-engineered/genetically-modified arena, we’re talking David – informed public and activists, small holders of farms, scientists not in corporations’ pockets, and peasant farmers – vs. Goliath – Monsanto, biotech companies, groups like the Gates Foundation, our own government, and scientists in the pockets of corporations.

The debate is real and has been grabbing recent headlines, including:

• Biosafety at Risk with Genetically Engineered Crops

• Future of Africa at Risk with Bioteach Companies’ Land Grabs

• Five Bowls of Rice a Day and Still No Nutrition for GE Golden Rice

• GE-resistant Superweeds Suck Soil Nutrition and Kill Food Crops

• Maize Varieties Dating Back 9,000 Years Better than GE Corn

• The Green Revolution Has Failed • More than 160,000 People Displaced After Biotech Land Steal

• 9 Million Mouths to Feed by 2050 – AgroEcological Farming Wins Hands Down And closer to home –

Eastern WA Farmers Concerned about GE/GMO Pollen and Seed Trespass

That particular piece introduced readers to Maurice Robinette, a fourth-generation rancher and farmer from the Lazy R Ranch near Cheney. His daughter, Beth, a recent graduate of Evergreen State College, is helping dad add value to organic and holistically raised beef.

We’ve featured him here at DTE – here. As a disclaimer, I served with Maurice for a time as a Leadership Team board member of Washington Sustainable Food and Farming Network (www.wsffn.org) helping frame and guide issues affecting Washington farmers and food producers from a sustainability point of view.

The issues of genetically modified alfalfa came up often in over-a-beer conversations. Maurice is up on the global scene and knows we live in a world where corn, soy, canola, cotton, sugar beets and commodities from these fuel-intensive and pesticide- and fertilizer-demanding crops like sugar (high fructose corn syrup), oils for biofuel and grains for cattle, chicken, pig and fish “farming” have taken over the marketplace.

Organic, sustainable and agroecological farmers and supporters – the Davids in the biblical archetype – are fighting back. It’s a tough row to hoe, though.

“I’m worried that genetic trespass may result in a loss of my beef customers precisely because there are no GMOs in it,” stated Robinette in a recent Crosscut article.

He’s got the credentials – a master’s in rural sociology, certification in holistic cattle ranching, work with Washington State University and others on model programs to revive grassland and protect wild native species of plant, bird, mammal and insect and soil bacteria. Robinette is not alone; there is a cadre of farmers, ranchers, producers and human food eaters who want a future for their children’s children in a world of climate disruption and energy shortages.

The goal of organic and sustainable farmers like Robinette and others is to not only make a living but to preserve seeds and heritage livestock and fishstocks so genetic pools stay vibrant and natural.

But the Goliaths, like Monsanto, supported by Bill and Melinda Gates and hedge fund impresarios and multinational outfits, have muscle behind them — $1,500 an hour lawyers, Supreme Court justices, politicians, and lobbying firms that make the propaganda machine of despots like Hitler look small-time. (Check out past DTE articles here, here and here about the Gates Foundation’s genetically engineered food program, Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa and the Seattle-based group, AGRA Watch.)

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is pushing the Frankenstein science and monopoly tactics employed by banks, governments, and corporations which are basically taking other countries’ land and resources to orchestrate a huge global experiment on seeds and crops, using lab techniques that have been proven to not enhance food security.

The basic result is a wedge into regional solutions to food and hunger, both arising in the past four decades in this so-called Green Revolution and into the future when climate change and peak oil and shortages in phosphorus and challenges of continued soil degradation and crop nutritional-drain will be the issues of the day.

“The green revolution is at the very center of the problems of agriculture in the 20th and 21st centuries. In brief, the green revolution was the export of the American-style industrial and mechanized model of agriculture to the third world… The green revolution was one of the single largest non-military undertakings of the twentieth century. In terms of massive use of human resources, first-rate scientific expertise and public funding, it was comparable to the Manhattan Project and the Apollo space program.”

“The green revolution failed. After decades of relentless work, world hunger has not been ameliorated. The world does not have less hungry people today, but more. Considering the vast human and financial resources that went into this endeavor, it is no exaggeration to state that the green revolution was one of the biggest failures of the twentieth century. In spite of its painfully obvious failure, the green revolution’s protagonists and spokespeople stubbornly refer to it as a success, that it was one of the most noble and successful humanitarian undertakings of all time. In light of the persistence of this triumphalist discourse, one can also say that the green revolution was also one of the major deceptions of the last century.”

This long passage, necessary here, I believe, is from a rare individual in the media – Puerto Rican journalist Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero who directs the Puerto Rico Project on Biosafety. He is also a Research Associate of the Institute for Social Ecology, a fellow of the Environmental Leadership Program, and a senior fellow of the Society of Environmental Journalists.

Young Seattle activist challenging multinational aid effort

Paul K. Haeder Down to Earth NW Correspondent 4/2011

Related Stories

• NW activists encourage Gates Foundation to cut ties to Monsanto
• Small local farmers taking up global fight against genetically-altered seeds
• ROOTS of hunger found at the germ plasm
• The battle against bad farming Part 1

For Janae Choquette, it’s a no-brainer to support small-scale agriculture because solutions are local-based and then set into motion through local experts. She’s co-chair of AGRA Watch, a program organized by Seattle’s Community Alliance for Global Justice, which is monitoring and trying to grow public support for using smaller-scale, sustainable farmers in the Alliance for a Green Revolution instead of larger multinational corporations.

The 22-year-old has pitted herself and AGRA Watch against the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Monsanto, which are both promoting the very noble concept of bettering the world’s food supply.

Choquette recently shared why she’s involved in this effort and why different ways should be found to get smaller farmers involved.

Not many 22-year-olds want to work part-time for no or little pay to focus on social and environmental justice. Any advice for teens interested in this path?

Organizing has shown me that people are powerful when they come together, and being an organizer has helped me find my own power to effect change. Here, I’m surrounded by community, something that’s been eroded in our society, which supports me in my growth and evolution as a human.

I am constantly developing skills and gaining new understandings from the inspiring people around me. By dedicating myself to the liberation of all peoples and living things, I am accountable to my privilege as a direct beneficiary of many forms of systemic oppression.

Give an ‘elevator speech’ about AGRA Watch.

The Gates Foundation’s Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, or AGRA, is a package of “solutions” to hunger, poverty, and climate change being imposed on the African continent by outsiders with almost no public knowledge or participation.

Besides the fact that this is undemocratic, these solutions more likely will make things worse. For example, the industrial model of agricultural development promoted by AGRA, while profitable for transnational corporations, has failed farmers, consumers, and the environment here in the U.S.

What do you see yourself doing with regards to social justice in the next 10 -15 years?

I see all of the crises we face as being inter-connected and rooted in a systemic crisis of capitalism, so it’s hard to focus on any one facet. While I’m concentrating on food right now, in the past my organizing targeted U.S. militarism and Israel’s occupation of Palestine. No matter what my specific focus, it’s important to continue making connections between seemingly disparate issues and to position anti-oppression at the heart of my work.

Social justice colleagues in other countries put their necks on the line, and fight in the streets, or at least protest and are ready to be jailed. Why can’t we see this here with youth and others?

In many ways, the stakes are much higher for other regions, where resisting the continued colonization and exploitation of their lands and peoples is a matter of life and death. In the U.S., though our “development” has come at the expense of the rest of the world and marginalized communities in our own country, we have been able to largely distance ourselves from the violence of neoliberal globalization. It doesn’t help that we don’t have a mainstream culture of dissent to begin with, or that our anger is often manipulated and misdirected (i.e. anger over the recent economic crisis being funneled into racism, Islamophobia, and anti-immigrant sentiment).

The ‘message’ is being silenced, and controlled by fewer mainstream and corporate ideologues. Is that a place AGRA Watch needs to finesse?

Beyond corporate control of the media, the growing power of industry to define academic and scientific research agendas and bury results they dislike, as in genetic engineering, is alarming. We are paying attention to the Gates Foundation’s heavy funding of media in recent years, from U.C. Berkeley’s journalism program to the Guardian and ABC. While AGRA Watch tries to access mainstream media coverage, we are aware of the limitations, and emphasize grassroots, creative avenues of outreach in our campaign and shifting public discourse.

What makes you cynical? Hopeful?

We’ve reached a crossroads in human history. The global economic crisis is being compounded by a looming environmental crisis of unfathomable magnitude, and capitalism is beginning to collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions. Though some might not agree with my analysis, I think very few people would dispute that change is going to happen. What makes me cynical is that the dominant system and ideology that brought us to this point of crisis is so deeply entrenched at every level. Our minds are thoroughly colonized, and shifting public consciousness is generally a gradual process. At the same time, the imminent threat of widespread ecological devastation we face as a species makes slow change utterly inadequate, and I’m afraid we won’t act fast enough to avert catastrophe or at least be poised to rise from the ashes. Yet as foreclosures forge brutally ahead, unemployment rises, and food banks struggle to meet skyrocketing demand, many in the U.S. have been shaken by our current situation, by failures of a system they trusted, and are looking for different answers. Whether we can effectively provide these is another question, especially as fear is cultivated to keep people divided, but I believe love is stronger than fear, and that the vast majority of people are united by a common interest in transforming systems that fail to meet our most basic physical, emotional, and spiritual needs. This is a powerful basis for building a movement toward a better world for all, if only we can tap it.

For more information about AGRA Watch and the Community Alliance for Global Justice, visit www.seattleglobaljustice.org/agra-watch.

old pieces (4/2012) showing up weirdly on the WWW

Paul K. Haeder w/ Down to Earth NW Correspondent, Spokesman Review

Related Stories

• Advocating for African farmers

It’s huge – asymmetrical, shaped like two fat boomerangs meeting in midair. Benefactors call it a campus. NBBJ architects had to design a colossal office complex of 900,000 square feet to accommodate the 1,200 employees of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

It cost around $500 million to build. It’s a prime piece of property in downtown Seattle’s Westlake area. The non-profit got the 12 acres for a relative song – $53 million after the land was appraised at $72 million.

Then the City of Seattle “gave” another $28 off the price, so this land ended up costing Bill and Melinda Gates – via their foundation – $25 million.

On March 16, more than 40 people, as part of a global day of action against Monsanto, marched to and around the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation “campus” to deliver a letter asking the foundation to divest from Monsanto (the foundation has more than $23 million in Monsanto stock as part of a very odd mix of companies in their portfolio).

Trying to eradicate developing countries’ diseases, forcing genetically modified farming into Africa, and weighing in on and lobbying for privatizing public education are just a few of the Gates Foundation’s larger goals, largely financed by $11.9 billion, with the following five top stock holdings:

 Berkshire Hathaway Inc. – 73,997,400 shares, 49.75% of the total portfolio.

 McDonald’s Corp. – 9,372,500 shares, 5.21% of the total portfolio.

 Caterpillar Inc. – 9,590,400 shares, 4.86% of the total portfolio.

 The CocaCola Company – 10,182,000 shares, 4.31% of the total portfolio.

 Waste Management Inc. – 15,716,367 shares, 4.15% of the total portfolio.

They’ve got 500,000 shares of Goldman Sachs, 7.1 million shares of Exxon Mobile and those half a million shares of Monsanto. What’s all the protesting about?

According to Dena Hoff, a diversified family farmer in Glendive, Montana, and North American coordinator of La Via Campesina,

“The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust’s purchase of Monsanto shares indicates that the Gates Foundation’s interest in promoting the company’s seed is less about philanthropy than about profit-making. The Foundation is helping to open new markets for Monsanto, which is already the largest seed company in the world.”

These aren’t sour grapes about one of the richest people on earth capitalizing on stock trading. Monsanto, who created the dioxin-leeching defoliant Agents Orange and Blue, is one of the main drivers of genetically modified foods. Heather Day, director of Seattle-based Community Alliance for Global Justice, and one of Friday’s organizers, summed up the recent news on GE crops and foods:

“Reports are coming out weekly about impending crop failures of GE corn in Africa, pesticide resistance for GE corn grown for ethanol in the US, and about indications that Bt toxins, the primary GE pesticides, especially when in the presence with Roundup, have potential impacts on human kidney cells and mammalian testis.”

Another one of the protestors-letter signatories was Les Berensen, a medical doctor who is also with GMO Free Washington. His concern is tied to Monsanto’s Roundup, which has the main ingredient of 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid. Berensen mentioned how salmon and other fish species are being affected by the huge runoffs from fields of corn, beets, soy, cotton and potatoes that are genetically modified to take up to four or five dousings of Roundup.

He likened this day and age of Monsanto as a Frankenstein era for both species in the wild and the human species. The event, like many around the world, was attended by a diverse group of people, including in Seattle: Dan Trocolli, Seattle Educators Association and Social Equality Educators; Kristen Beifus, Washington Fair Trade Coalition; and William Aal, Washington Biotechnology Action Council.

One fellow holding a corn sign and getting signatures was Travis English, University of Washington graduate student in planning and with CAGJ and AGRA Watch. He is seeing more and more destruction of departments at UW through consolidation and outright disbanding. He’s working on food policies for several cities as part of his graduate work.

“There are already many movements around healthy local food economies. There are proven projects and farms in Africa that are both sustainable and organic,” he said.

“Getting people hooked on Monsanto’s seeds and pesticides with micro-loaning that they can’t pay back will result in more farms being lost and more people moving to the cities. This is not a successful formula, and the Gates Foundation should really lead by getting rid of its Monsanto stocks, as a first step.”

Many of the protesters were in haz-mat suits, and many carried signs belying the fear of this giant genetically modified experiment taking place in mankind. Ellie Rose is working on Transition Seattle and buttressing “a culture of engagement through a group called We the People Power.”

One attendee, Karen Studders, had come from Occupy Wall Street, Zuccotti Park, where for two months she lived in a tent. Studders, in her mid-60s, once worked in big business, for government organizations, and with United Nations agencies, plying her legal and science degrees from the University of Minnesota.

“We have to act quickly. The abuse of these corporations, which is so blatant now, has got to stop. I have a lot of hope after being part of the Occupy movement, especially after we were illegally evicted.”

She not only went from tent to tent to listen to the ideas and rebellion of the youth, but she went into a self-made retreat after the police crackdown, traveling to various cities to see the Transition Town movement up close and personal.

The security at the foundation would not accept the signed letter [full disclosure: I signed it] asking the Gates Foundation to divest from Monsanto. I talked with several Foundation employees – researchers with higher degrees. They said that Foundation’s employee policy is to “not let us engage in any dialogue on any issues of controversy.”

Which means, nothing but the weather can be discussed? (Whoops, climate change seems to affect disease and crops). Additionally, any nice, well-crafted and footnoted handouts on Monsanto and Roundup pesticides they might be handed “will have to be handed over to security once we enter the building.”

Those three monkeys – see, hear, and speak no evil – seem anachronistic in the 21st century for a think tank like the Gates Foundation. Fortunately, less than a week after Seattle’s event, dozens of protesters monkey-wrenched Monsanto’s California office in Davis, an area close to the Capitol, through vocal activism.

Unlike Seattle’s event, the California activists made demands to shut down the biotech giant which has its talons in the United States government, including the Supreme Court.

“If a small group can take down their office for a day from some mild protests, a few hundred thousand can take down the entire company — permanently,” wrote journalist Anthony Gucciardi from Natural Society.