Planet Earth Will Give Humans A Rough Ride By Mid Century

“The raging monster upon the land is population growth. In its presence, sustainability is but a fragile theoretical construct. To say, as many do, that the difficulties of nations are not due to people, but to poor ideology and land-use management is sophistic.” Harvard scholar and biologist E.O. Wilson

At the incredible rate of adding 1 billion humans every 13 years to this planet and reaching close to 10 billion by mid century, Mother Nature will not tolerate such devastation to her eco-systems as being wrought by 21st century humans. By burning 84 million barrels of oil daily around the planet, humans do not realize their impact on the ecological balance of this remarkable sphere somewhere in deep space. In a story by The Age, 2/21/11, we may find ourselves in hot water beyond our solving it.
“A growing, more affluent population competing for ever scarcer resources could make for an “unrecognizable” world by 2050, researchers warned at a major US science conference Sunday,” reported The Age. “The United Nations has predicted the global population will reach seven billion this year, and climb to nine billion by 2050, “with almost all of the growth occurring in poor countries, particularly Africa and South Asia,” said John Bongaarts of the non-profit Population Council.”

“To feed all those mouths, “we will need to produce as much food in the next 40 years as we have in the last 8,000,” said Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).”

“By 2050 we will not have a planet left that is recognizable” if current trends continue, Clay said.

“Somehow, we have come to think the whole purpose of the economy is to grow, yet growth is not a goal or purpose. The pursuit of endless growth is suicidal.” ~ David Suzuki

“The swelling population will exacerbate problems, such as resource depletion, said John Casterline, director of the Initiative in Population Research at Ohio State University,” reported The Age. “But incomes are also expected to rise over the next 40 years — tripling globally and quintupling in developing nations — and add more strain to global food supplies.

“People tend to move up the food chain as their incomes rise, consuming more meat than they might have when they made less money, the experts said.

“It takes around seven pounds (3.4 kilograms) of grain to produce a pound of meat, and around three to four pounds of grain to produce a pound of cheese or eggs, experts told AFP.

“More people, more money, more consumption, but the same planet,” Clay told AFP, urging scientists and governments to start making changes now to how food is produced.

“Growth for the sake of yet more growth is a bankrupt and eventually lethal idea. CASSE is the David fighting the Goliath of endless expansion, and we know how that one turned out.” ~ David Orr

“Population experts, meanwhile, called for more funding for family planning programs to help control the growth in the number of humans, especially in developing nations.

“For 20 years, there’s been very little investment in family planning, but there’s a return of interest now, partly because of the environmental factors like global warming and food prices,” said Bongaarts.

“We want to minimize population growth, and the only viable way to do that is through more effective family planning,” said Casterline.

One thing remains certain. We cannot continue on the current path of human population growth. It portends horrific human die-off in the 21st century.

Dr. Paul Ehrlich said, “All causes are lost causes without limiting human population.”

“Most Western elites continue urging the wealthy West not to stem the migrant tide [that adds 80 million net gain annually to the planet], but to absorb our global brothers and sisters until their horrid ordeal has been endured and shared by all—ten billion humans packed onto an ecologically devastated planet.” Dr. Otis Graham, Unguarded Gates

The green revolution was instigated as a result of the efforts of Norman Borlaug, who, while accepting the Nobel peace prize in 1970, said: “The green revolution has won a temporary success in man’s war against hunger and deprivation; it has given man a breathing space. If fully implemented, the revolution can provide sufficient food for sustenance during the next three decades. But the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral only.”

Immigration Demographic Disaster Grows

In this continuing series, my long time friend Donald A. Collins attempts to educate Americans as their long term predicament stemming from relentless immigration.   We’re up to our ears folks in too many people, but our Congress keeps injecting them into our country.  If you do nothing at all today, join www.numbersUSA.org in order to stop this madness.

“Democrat In DC Notes Establishment Shock, Shock! As Demographic Disaster Unfolds” by  Donald A. Collins.

What are you seeing unfold Mr. Collins? www.Vdare.com

“A number of recent Washington Post stories about growth in our DC-area counties struck me as sharply ironic,” said Collins. “Our leaders and our mass media are crying out for “green” behavior from us all—you know, recycling, less petroleum use, etc., But the massive immigration-driven demographic change relentlessly predicted by VDARE.com and others continues right on target, and will overwhelm all our efforts.”

Examples:

• Minorities fuel Charles County’s 22 percent population growth, By Michael E. Ruane, February 10, 2011
• Frederick County population grew 20 percent from 2000 to 2010 Census, By Michael S. Rosenwald, February 10, 2011
• Minorities are majority population in Montgomery County, By Carol Morello and Dan Keating, February 10, 2011
• Hispanic population in Prince George’s doubles, fueling much of county’s growth, By Miranda S. Spivack, February 10, 2011

“Many officials in these counties expressed surprise at these new numbers,” said Collins. “I can only wonder why. My late friend, the Californian demographer Meredith Burke , often asked: “If we are going to double the population of the USA shouldn’t we at least have a debate about it?” But our leaders never have allowed a full, rational debate over how many do we need.

“We know that the cheap labor business crowd has teamed up with the Catholic Church and the ethnic lobbyists such as La Raza and LULAC to push for more and people,—who happen to be largely of Hispanic origin.

“The ethnicity question has never been my concern. I fear any kind of discriminatory racism. My position has always focused on utility, need, and therefore numbers. And we have long ago overshot our needs by millions and millions.

“I am a long-time liberal Democrat focused on social issues such as family planning. I believe this widely-held business belief that growth is good and more growth is better has long been proven fallacious. Over a million work visas were issued to immigrants this past year and for many prior years, despite our Great Recession which many see going on for a long time.

“Displacing our own citizens to satisfy the cheap labor greed of special interests is an old game. You know, business makes the profit and lays the externalities on the taxpayers.

“The Economist’s dictionary describes an externality as a cost which can arise when people engaged in economic activity do not have to take into account the full costs of what they are doing. For instance, car drivers do not have to bear the full cost of exacerbating global warming, even though their actions may one day impose a huge burden on society. One way to reduce externalities is to tax them, say, through a fuel tax. Another is outright prohibition—say, limiting car drivers to one gallon of fuel per week.

“All this has to do with limits. How many people, how much consumption? And who pays the bill? As these floods of immigrants arrive, the young and strong get enslaved at poor wages,creating profits for their employers. But the cost down the road, as they and their children use our tax-supported services, is the mechanism that has put 49 of our 50 states into a budget deficit position.

“Now the new House majority talks of cutting costs. Not very hard.  But mentioned first are the Environmental Protection Agency and other important benefits to the poor, while CEO payrolls rollick to new heights. Certainly not enough to pay down our debt, which is now north of $14 trillion (up from under $1 trillion in 1981) or even to reduce our annual deficit by a meaningful amount.

“The most obvious action we can take now raises the inevitable objection from businesses. The Post’s February 11, 2011 Washington Business headline says, As lawmakers look at E-Verify, businesses fear expansion of immigration program. [By Shankar Vedantam] Of course they fear expansion of E-Verify—they’re employing illegals.

“Fortunately, Elton Gallegly, the new chairman of the immigration subcommittee, has put E-verify at the top of his list, saying “making [E-Verify] universally mandatory would ease the cumbersome and easily manipulated I-9 process employers now use to screen employees. It would also greatly reduce the number of illegal immigrants in the American workforce.”

WAPo’s  Vedantam explains:

“Gallegly was referring to the I-9 form, which employers must have job-seekers fill out. It requires documentation, such as a Social Security number, that the applicants are eligible to work in this country. With E-Verify, employers can run the information through federal databases to confirm it or identify people who are not legally authorized to work.”

“Naturally Randel Johnson, senior vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and thus the representative of that implacable enemy of our 20 plus million unemployed or underemployed citizens, complained: “I have a real mixed reaction from my members. Some find it workable, and others do not.”

“We could easily make sure it is “workable”—by making it mandatory, with fines for failing to use it against executives personally.

“In our present techie age, Johnson’s statement, “With some companies, it is the logistical problem of having a computer on your construction site” (to run the online queries) is truly laughable. And what does Johnson mean by this sentence?—”If you are running a small business, there is aversion to a new system that will make things more complicated.”

Vedantam reported an encouraging case in point:

“The fast food company Chipotle Mexican Grill was recently asked to turn over I-9 information about employees at 60 Washington and Virginia restaurants to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. The chain was forced to fire suspected illegal workers at its Minnesota restaurants after a similar probe. Chipotle spokesman Chris Arnold said that restaurants in Arizona and the Carolinas currently use the E-Verify system and that the company is weighing whether to expand its participation in the program nationwide.”

“Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, noted the Pew Hispanic Center’s estimate that “7 million people are working in the U.S. illegally. These jobs should go to legal workers.”

“I have not ever been a fan of the Washington Post’s immigration reporting. But this article had the integrity to tell its readers

“Independent analyses of the E-Verify program by the Government Accountability Office and a Maryland research group known as Westat show that the overwhelming majority of those legally allowed to work in the country are quickly approved. A thriving market in fake Social Security numbers, however, means that the program fails to spot many undocumented immigrants.

“To deter fraud, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency, which runs E-Verify, is increasingly using passports and employment-authorization documents that contain photo identification, said spokesman Chris Bentley. New efforts are underway, he added, to spot applicants who proffer fake driver’s licenses.”

Again, WaPo surprised me by printing this quote:

” ‘Critics of E-Verify claim illegal immigrants hold jobs that Americans won’t do. But even in the agriculture industry, where amnesty supporters insist we need illegal workers, 50 percent of the agriculture jobs are held by U.S. citizens and legal immigrants,’ [Lamar] Smith said. ‘And if farmers really need foreign labor, they can get it legally—we have a guest worker program for agricultural workers that has no numerical limit..”

“The growth of legal and illegal immigrants in our country since 1965, for no good reason except greed, represents a government failure. It could be fixed, but like our national debt and current deficits that seems always to be deferred for our children and grandchildren.

“The ultimate irony—we claim we love them. But what are we leaving them?”

In a few words: a gargantuan nightmare!

Visit www.Vdare.com for more outstanding work from Don Collins.

Interview with Craig LaMay

All free speech systems are works in progress: Prof. Craig LaMay…

Craig LaMay is an associate professor of journalism at the Northwestern University. H is a former editorial director of the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center and editor of Media Studies Journal; and a former newspaper reporter. LaMay’s articles and commentaries have appeared on New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Newsweek, Communication and the Law and a number of other media outlets.

LaMay has published several books on journalism and mass media of which we can name Journalism and the Problem of Privacy (2003), Commercial Transformation of the Nonprofit Sector, with Burton Weisbrod (1998) and Abandoned in the Wasteland: Children, Television and the First Amendment with Newton Minow (1995).

Prof. LaMay joined me in an exclusive interview to discuss the constraints of journalism in the United States, freedom of speech in the EU, the performance of local magazines as opposed to the national news outlets and the gradual disappearance of traditional media with the emergence of new internet-based technologies.

What follows is the complete text of my interview with Prof. Craig LaMay of the Northwestern University.

Kourosh Ziabari: Dear Craig; there’s a belief with regards to the mass media in the Western countries in general, and the United States in particular, which is undisputedly accepted by the international community: the widely-accepted belief is that the Western media are unrestrictedly free to publish whatever they want, to publish the viewpoints of the opponents of the government, the political dissidents and anti-governmental activists, without being harassed. Is it true that the mass media in the West are absolutely free to publish whatever they want? Isn’t there any implicit pressure on the media to publish the news and analysis in a way which is favorable to the interests of the government?

Craig LaMay: That belief is overstated.  In the United States, for example, it has always been the law that restraints on publication, gag orders, are facially unconstitutional, and where they occur they get an immediate judicial review.  Nonetheless, it is also the law that some materials are subject to what we call prior restraints, or injunctions against publication.  Those materials fall into three broad categories: obscenity (which is subject to community standards, and thus what is ‘obscene’ in Alabama might not be so in New York); incitements to violence, but only when violence is likely and imminent, not when speech is mere advocacy, even advocacy that the government be overthrown by force; and risks to national security.  The last of these is the most contentious for journalists, since even benign governments are apt to see national security threats where there are none.

In Western Europe, there is no rule against prior restraints even if the principle against them is generally accepted.  So information that is libelous or invasive of privacy can be enjoined before publication.  Particularly notable is the high regard that EU law, and many national laws, have for personal privacy, not only for private citizens but also for celebrities and public officials.

As for implicit pressure, there’s another matter. In any media system — ours or yours — it is much more that state control that determines what is published. So do social norms (ie, ethics, or cultural judgments about propriety and personal dignity); markets (ie, the decision about the costs of gathering and publishing some stories that might be hugely expensive to report in terms of personnel and legal costs, of interest to only a few people, the possibility that if a piece offends readers it might lead to loss of subscription, revenue, etc.);  and last of all system architecture (ie, how you actually build your system to support free speech, eg, the Internet as a platform that anyone can use as opposed to a television station, where prerogatives belong to the owners).  As you can imagine, each of these is linked to the other — none works entirely independent of the other.

KZ: In the majority of European countries, there are laws which restrict the publication of materials, articles, news and op-eds about Holocaust. Much of the journalists and academicians who publish materials which dispute the veracity of Holocaust get incarcerated immediately and have their respective media outlets banned or penalized with punitive measures. Isn’t this a violation of freedom of press and information on behalf of those who introduce themselves as the pioneers of freedom of speech?

CL: Interesting question.  From the American point of view, the answer would be yes. But law is never abstract; it is always born of experience.  The natural state of Europe for the last thousand years has been war, under Charlemagne, then Napoleon, then Hitler.  The core purpose of the EU is to prevent future conflict, and in that system, and given the European experience with hate speech, it is hardly surprising that nation states from France to Austria would ban speech directed at certain minority populations.  I get that. BUT, this does not explain the virulent anti-immigrant and racist speech you find all over Europe at any football game, for example, but also in public discourse. Sarkozy’s expulsion of the Roma last fall was the largest mass expulsion in Europe since the Holocaust, and yet it seemed to trouble few Europeans. The rise of anti-immigrant parties all over Europe is also a concern.  So the problem the Europeans have, it seems to me, is that they have chosen to ban some hate speech directed at some minorities, but not all. I would say, however, that ALL free speech systems, including the United States’, are works in progress.  The ideal of Europe regarding speech is contained in Article 10 of the EDHR, but it is far from realized.

I have to say also, as someone who has worked in developing media systems and post-conflict societies for many years — from Guatemala and Indonesia to Serbia and Chile — that it both unrealistic and chauvinistic to assume that every media system should look like, say, ours.  It shouldn’t.  The British system is very different from ours, for instance, and in ways works better than ours. And vice versa.

KZ: What’s in your view, the main difference between the local newspapers and magazines, with the national/international media outlets? Aside from the extent and area of their coverage which varies from the local media to the national and international media, what are the major differences in the mechanisms of performance, distribution of facilities and approaches to the current affairs in these media?

CL: The main difference I think is economic and have to do with audiences.  Local media are often hyper-local, since that’s what people want to know about — their own neighborhoods, not the goings on in Washington or Tehran.  And people consume much more local than national media.  Our national media run the gamut from very good (eg, the NYTimes) to very bad (FOX News), but the difference there is, to me, economic. Each of those two media serve a small but well-paying audience.  That market is only so big, and at the local level it is often too small to sustain anything of quality.

KZ: What are the main features and qualities of being a journalist in the United States? How should one’s performance be so as to keep up with the stream of professional journalism and avoid falling behind in contest with the other journalists? You have the experience of writing for several newspapers which are considered to be belonging to the category of “mainstream media”. What standards does a journalist need in order to secure a berth in such mediums? Do mainstream media investigate the journalists ideologically in order to hire them for cooperation?

The qualities one needs depend, I think, on the work one does.  Many “prominent” journalists in the US, for example, have never spent a day in journalism school. Many also have poor reporting skills and poor ethics, too, though many are also exemplary. If your primary business is entertainment (FOX News), then reporting skills matter much less than personality does.  If your business is highly specialized information with high market value (financial news perhaps), then you need research skills and real knowledge about your field.  Assuming one is serious about news, however, the skills one needs today now include a host of production skills we did not used to worry about. So, for example, if you’re in Cairo right now it’s not enough to send back written copy. You need to be able to shoot and edit your own video, gather and edit audio, write for the Web and the newspaper, and to a TV stand-up from the hotel lobby. You need, in other words, to have at least the skills of the so-called “citizen journalist” with his cell phone and twitter account.

I personally believe — and here I am at odds with the tradition of US journalism — some real knowledge of history, economics, natural and physical sciences.  It is shameful that so many of our national media in Egypt right now are there to interview not Egyptians, but other Americans and Westerners.  It’s because most reporters there know little or nothing of 20th-century Egyptian history or that of the region, except in the most sketchy ways.  You see the same thing in coverage of, say, global warming, where reporters — in the name of being objective — think it’s okay to know nothing about the actual science of their subject.  This is unprofessional and irresponsible, it seems to me, but it is very, very common.

What’s in your view the main responsibility of a professional journalist? What qualities and characteristics make a professional, responsible, committed and reliable journalist?

This is a question for the ages, so I’ll give you a short answer.  The responsibility of the professional journalist is much the same as that of the professional scholar:  to give evidence.  It is never to think that because something is possible it is either plausible or probable.  It requires one to investigate, to be self-consciously open to other points of view, to study one’s subject.

And on the ethics side — it is to remember above all that free speech has a cost (as, in economic theory all “free” things do; if something is free that means its cost has been shifted to someone else). In journalism, the cost of free speech can be born by someone else who is publicly humiliated or ruined, a community harmed, a country undone.  To me, ethics means remembering that God does not think I’m special, and I could be completely wrong and should be humble in case I am.

KZ: When we look at the list of the world newspapers by circulation, we find that Japan has occupied the first five ranks. What does this fact signify? What qualities do the Japanese newspapers have that have made them so powerful and influential?

CL: Some cultures are well known as ‘reading’ cultures and others as ‘visual’ ones.  Americans get most of their news from TV, for instance.  The Japanese are a reading people. It is also true that Japanese media post-WWII were developed as mostly national media, designed to serve the entire nation.

KZ: If you were to analyze and investigate the problems of newspapers and media outlets in the developing world, what main points would you have identified? Why don’t the people in these countries have an inclination and appetite for reading the newspapers and magazines?

CL: In the developing world the problems are many.  One is the lack of civil society organizations, particularly in post-conflict or post-authoritarian states, where civil society was largely stamped out.  A second is that these countries often have media laws left over from the old authoritarian or colonial regime, and those laws tend to be oppressive. A third is that these countries often have large and dominant state media sectors — in TV and print — and they essentially take over the market for advertising and other revenues, making it all but impossible for private media to sustain themselves.  A fourth is that many developing countries are poor, and poor people aren’t going to spend money on newspapers that they need for bread.  A fifth is that many developing countries have high illiteracy rates, and so TV and radio are much more important than print. This is the case over much of Latin America and Africa, for example.

There is a well-known economic principle called “rational ignorance.”  It says that rational people in functioning markets do NOT, as much as we might think they should, consume public-affairs news and information.  They would rather be entertained.  And that’s because they know, or think they do, that their participation in electoral politics will make little difference to the outcome of an election.  And so it is more efficient (rational) for them to spend their time and money doing other things than becoming well informed citizens.  Obviously if large numbers of people reach this conclusion, democracy can become hollow and dysfunctional. As it often is.

KZ: Which is more powerful; the written media such as newspapers and magazines or the audiovisual media such as TV channels and radio stations? What’s your estimation of the rivalry between the newspapers and magazines with the audiovisual media outlets? Who will be the winner? Which factors make one more privileged than the other?

I have no particular insights on the future.  I am biased, too, and favor the written word, which is infinitely better at explanation, detail, complexity and nuance than TV or radio.  So I naturally think serious people are print people.  At the same time, radio is the world’s most ubiquitous and popular medium, and I get most of my daily news that way.  It goes places where print cannot or does not (eg, rural and far-flung parts of a country).  TV is the last survivor of the digital revolution — American still spend 5 hours a day watching one, more time than they spend with any other medium, including the Internet. As for “privilege” in media, that is often a matter of system architecture and law.  The West European countries, for example, hold on vigorously to their large public broadcasting systems (eg, the BBC), which are supposed to serve specific public interests, and provide specific public goods, that private media will not.  I think that’s a good thing.  So I don’t imagine that there will be one winner.

KZ: Will the emergence of new media outlets, including blogs, social networking websites and electronic magazines endanger the life of the traditional media? Will the people put the newspapers and magazines aside at some point?

CL: Clearly they already have, mostly by further dividing audiences and, more important, undermining or destroying the financial foundations of old media.  US newspapers, for example, used to get most of their revenues from classified advertisements , but lost all of that advertising long ago to the Web, to which they have also lost readers and other forms of advertising.  It is also the case that for many serious subjects — military affairs, the environment, international law and politics, health care, trade and commerce — I can and do get my best information from blogs, not TV or newspapers.  I imagine you do, too.  That said, my favorite regular media are traditional — a magazine and public radio.

I hope, for your sake and mine, that there will always be a place for honest inquiry and serious discussion, and above all for understanding.  For that, you need journalists who are humanists, not mere technicians, not mere businessmen.  When I work overseas I am always impressed by how little I know, how much I need to understand.  I think, I hope, that makes me a better journalist, a better person.

The War – Did We Sacrifice a Million Lives and a $Trillion Cash Just to Hand Our Jobs to China? Part Four

While the Tea Partiers and the liberals squabble over important domestic issues, America’s corporate and military titans, at the expense of America’s workers and taxpayers and with the blessing of Congress and the President, are creating China’s economic miracle. The military, at a cost of over $1 trillion, has paved the way for China to acquire and the U.S. to lose access to vast mineral and petroleum resources. The oil industry, with U.S. government assistance, is building a safe haven in East Asia from the imminent crash of oil everywhere else. And foreign investment, largely American, is giving China on average nearly one million new jobs a month while American unemployment soars.

This is a four-part series. Part One discusses why and how the oil industry could create a safe haven from its own collapse, and why it might choose China for the project. Part Two discusses how East Asia became “the right market” for the world’s remaining oil reserves, endangering everyone else. Part Three discusses how the US military has turned Afghanistan and Iraq into China’s good buddies. Part Four takes a broader view of what has happened and what if anything can be done about it. Enjoy.

Part Four of Four. What’s Really Going on Here?

Several months before the 2009 auction in Iraq, Michael Economides, editor of the industry newspaper, Energy Tribune, had described the changing roles of the West and China in petroleum acquisition in a virtual script for the up-coming Iraqi auction:

“It is certain that large Chinese oil acquisitions will become commonplace . .. . .Almost overnight, the US and the EU will be reduced to mere bystanders while China moves into the geopolitical major leagues. Massive Chinese acquisition of energy assets will lead to a transfer of political and economic power that the modern world has rarely seen. Why the US would be willing to give up competing for what has arguably been the world’s most vital commodity and for which there is no credible alternative, is mystifying.”¹

Mystifying indeed. Economides attributed the Western lassitude to too much “philosophizing on the future of the planet.”² Hmmm. Is that what motivated the US oil companies in sitting out the 2009 auction? Somehow it seems even less likely than the idea that the war has been an aging imperialist nation’s gambit to “crush the growing ambitions of China.” We all allow our vision to be clouded on occasion by our determination to blame things on our favorite enemies. Were we “philosophizing on the future of the planet” when we killed one million Iraqis? Were we “crushing the growing ambitions of China” when we imposed “regime changes” in which the new rulers fell over backwards to give China their geological crown jewels? I don’t think so.  And yet the BEHAVIOR of both the US Government and the US oil companies is as if they do not want Americans to have oil in the future.  An environnmentally admirable position to take if the oil were not going to be used anyway, but the safe-haven-in-China motive and Maresca’s assurances that Asia is the “right market” ring more true to this observer at least, especially given that the Waxman and Kerry global warming bills were drafted apparently so that the oil industry would be saved from doing more than “peak oil” would require.  See www.countercurrents.org/arguimbau230410.htm (“Imminent Crash of the Oil Supply . . .”), .

Good cop, bad cop

So we go into Afghanistan, rough everyone up, put “our” man in charge and tell ‘em it’s time to have a democracy. Folks aren’t terribly impressed. Then right behind us comes China, which “hearts and minds ‘em,” and they lay out the red carpet. The scene repeats itself in Iraq, where there’s a literal red carpet at the 2009 petroleum auction.

It’s a classic “good cop bad cop” routine. For those unfamiliar with it, the routine originated in police interrogation techniques. The “good cop” ingratiates himself to the suspect, offers him food or drink, explains that he wants to get him the best possible deal and may be able to do so if the suspect cooperates. The “bad cop” is standing by, seething, seemingly willing to beat up the suspect at the least excuse if he fails to cooperate. When the routine works, the suspect ultimately does what the “good cop” wants out of gratitude for having an alternative to the “bad cop.”

In context, China, playing “good cop,” is in a strong position to negotiate favorable contracts for pipeline corridors, oil or other resources from a country that has been subjected to US military intervention. The countries holding natural resources or pipeline corridors coveted by China may choose between China’s “carpet of gold” and America’s “carpet of bombs.”

³ To the casual observer, the “good cop” and “bad cop” have conflicting goals, but in fact they are one and the same.. As Chinese analyst Liu Xuecheng puts it as quoted at the opening of this article, the US wages war while China “tries to help.”

You have to admire China’s chutzpah. China avoids blame for engaging in imperialist war, China carries off the spoils, United States soldiers bear the casualties, United States taxpayers shoulder the bill, the United States takes the exclusive blame for yet another immoral war, AND China purchases bonds, about one trillion dollars, altogether, on which U.S. taxpayers will be paying interest for decades, to cover the cost.⁴ As writer William Schneider asks, “Isn’t there something worrisome about Communist China financing operations of the U.S. government?”⁵ But that’s a question for another day.

OK, what’s goin’ on here, if it isn’t clear already?

So what IS going on here? Let’s make a list:

1. In 1992, there began a massive foreign investment in China. Annual foreign investment multipled by more than 10 in five years to around $70 billion per year by 1997, an influx of “stimulus money” every year greater relative to the size of the GDP, than the US stimulus package of 2009. China, which had been stagnating in the years just prior to that influx, boomed. And for the last decade, investment has been by far the largest contributor to China’s GDP growth, eclipsing its phenomenal export volume,.⁶ And for the last five yearshas contributed an average of 750,000 jobs per month to the Chinese economy.One might surmise that the oil industry had something to do with that, given its abundance of cash, but this writer lacks the data.
2. John Maresca made his famous 1998 speech on invitation of Congress and DOE explaining why the Taliban needed to be booted from power in Afghanistan to make way for a pipeline that could get oil to .”the right markets” – namely East Asia rather than the western markets.
3. The Clinton and Bush administrations negotiated with the Taliban over the pipeline corridor up until August, 2001. The US negotiator made the famous “carpet of gold or carpet of bombs”warning shortly before the negotiations collapsed.
4. 9/11 happened, apparently as the brainchild of Osama Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda, and in response the “War Against Terrorism” began. At the time, these folks were in fact in Afghanistan
5. The US delegated capture of Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda to local fighters, the “Northern Alliance,” who allowed Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda to escape into Pakistan, where we let them be. The US forces themselves went after the Taliban and ousted its government, replacing it with Hamid Karzai.
6. These events led the left and much of the European press to conclude that a major and perhaps exclusive purpose of the US in ousting the Taliban was that the war was “for oil,” when the logical inference to be drawn was that it was for “oil companies” who wanted the oil itself to go to East Asia.
7. China particularly, plus other East Asian nations,, have profited magnificently from the war the United States has fought at tremendous cost in Afghanistan and Iraq., and could not otherwise have profited unless they had gone to war themselves.
8. The Energy Tribune concluded prior to the Iraqi auctions that neither the United States nor its oil companies are any longer seeking to secure oil rights for Americans, and are abandoning the field to China.
9. The US oil companies were “no shows” at the major 2009 Iraqi auctions, and China and Malaysia secured the great majority of he contracts.
10. (10) Everyone agrees that China’s ability to do business in Afghanistan and Iraq has been helped, and America’s ability has been hurt, by America rather than China having had the military presence.
11. (11) Despite enormous expenditures of money and loss of lives, the United States has made negligible progress for itself, but has made enormous progress getting oil to the “right markets,” where its use in a declining oil industry will automatically mean that the Western markets will have substantially less.

There have been a multitude of analyses why the Afghan/Iraq war cannot be considered to be exclusively or even primarily a “war against terror,” a war against “weapons of mass destruction,” or, since we have had an opportunity to see the “changed regimes” in action, a war for US energy security. This writer submits, however, that the simplest explanation that fits all the facts,⁷ is that it has been from the start a war to ensure that as much oil and other natural resources will get to the “right markets” – namely, East Asia, as possible. Because oil production is no longer growing, every new barrel of oil for East Asia is a barrel less for the remainder of the world.

What about our hypothetical plan’s objective of depriving the “nonwnners” of as much oil as possible as quickly as possible? That is where things get scary. As noted above, the current trend has China increasing its share of oil consumption exponentially at 1%^/yr, meaning that its share, if the trend could continue, would reach 100% of the then-available total, with no one else having anything China didn’t want to give them, by 2025. With the support of the US military in the form of security, and the support of the oil industry in the form of subsidies and “no-shows,”   there is no obvious insurmountable hurdle. And as long as China and the US can continue playing “good cop bad cop” to a gullible world, China has nothing to lose and everything to gain. Could the hypothetical conspirators be so demonic? Well, there’s nothing new about this. Psychopathy is not-unheard-of even among supposedly sane U.S. geopolitical planners.⁸

If something like this weren’t happening, we would have no viable explanation for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we would have no viable explanation for what is happening to the oil industry’s probably enormous postpeak profits. And with China and the US Government working in harmony, there is no obvious reason why China will not acquire the whole remaining oil supply in short order. Is that at least part of the reason

• Microsoft is making major investments in China,⁹
• GM, raised from the dead by United States taxpayers, has put most of it hopes for the future in China, where its sales already exceed its sales in the US,¹⁰
• business invested in only 39,000 new jobs in the US in November as compared to the 750,000 jobs per month, 45 million total over the last five years that foreign investors have created in China¹¹ and
• American oil companies were “noticeably absent” from the Iraq auction, the editor of Energy Tribune says Europe and the United States are no longer trying to compete with China for oil, and private oil companies are building refineries and gas stations in China?

Do they all know something we don’t know about where the remaining oil is going to go?

But Hold On, Oil’s Chinese Safe Haven Isn’t Quite Built Yet

There’s always a possible glitch. China has a legitimate ability to sap the American economy: the extreme disparity between wages here and there, which is ultimately unsustainable. But China does not have a legitimate expectation that the United States will provide military assistance at our taxpayers’ expense to forward Chinese imperialist designs. Nor does China have legitimate expectation that the United States will assist in creating a Chinese safe haven from the end of oil, allowing American companies to pick up their marbles and take them away with impunity, taking our jobs with them. In fact there should be no safe havens from the end of oil, because they are inconsistent with climate stabilization,. Nor does China have a legitimate expectation that it can take charge of companies built by and for Americans, leaving behind lifeless skeletons like Detroit.

The fundamental reason that this was able to occur, was that we allowed oil and banking interests to corrupt or at least control our government so completely that we cannot even call the military our own. So we must all work to end that, starting by making sure we all agree we will not allow anyone to be elected who has accepted contaminated money in their public lives. No more voting for “lesser evils” who support our particular concerns but continue to accept oil money, Wall Street money, etc. We need to end the ability of corporate “persons” to spend billions influencing elections. We need to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan NOW, and restore the constitutional principle that our presidents cannot engage in war without a declaration of war setting its boundaries. The books need to be opened as to major investments by Americans and American businesses in foreign countries, and in particular as to the use of any “bailout” funds for investment in China. Steps must be taken to preserve or replace at the cost of the investors, jobs jeopardized through foreign investment. These things are unlikely to occur while we have a Congress and President so removed from those they ostensibly represent that they will engage in war at our expense with the intent or effect to take our jobs away.

We must also remember that the pay disparity between developing countries and the US is a legitimate threat to the US economy wherever and whenever it exists. Consequently, it is in our interest to work for healthy labor conditions and fair compensation EVERYWHERE.

And we, individually and collectively, need to go all out to minimize our petroleum use because (a) it is necessary for saving the earth, (b) it is necessary for dispelling our ugly public image, and (c) if China and industry succeed with the “safe haven,” we;d better get used to it FAST.

Finally, we must remember what we did when Sputnik crossed our skies. We didn’t just whine. We started a crash program in technical education to assure that our workers would continue to offer unique talents to the world. The time has come again for that. The United States has the best educational institutions in the world (although China is rapidly outstripping us) but by no means the best educations. Over the long haul, we have to expect our paychecks to correlate better with our talents than they do today, which means doing what it takes to improve American education.

So we have our work cut out for us. We don’t have much time, because with the active support of our government and businesses and no significant opposition, China may be able to achieve 100% control of the oil reserves by 2025.  We need a government that will not “give away the store,” as both parties have become accustomed to doing with impunity.

NOTES

1. Economides, “China’s Oil Power Play,” Energy Tribune, August 27, 2009, http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm/2199/Chinas-Oil-Power-Play

2. Economides, “China’s Oil Power Play,” Energy Tribune, August 27, 2009, http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm/2199/Chinas-Oil-Power-Play

3. Cf. threat made by US negotiators with Taliban shortly before 9/11 concerning an oil pipeline corridor to the Indian Ocean, as quoted in the French book by two reputable investigative reporters, published November 15, 2001, “Bin Laden, la verité interdite” (”Bin Laden, the forbidden truth”):”Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.”http://archive.democrats.com/view.cfm?id=5166. The threat has never subsequently been denied by the US.

4. “Who Owns the US National Debt?” Business Insider, January 14, 2011.http://www.businessinsider.com/who-owns-the-us-national-debt-2011-1

5. William Schneider, “Re-evaluating U.S. Debt,” Atlantic Monthly, 10/ 2005, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/10/re-evaluating-usdebt/4396/

6. “An old Chinese myth. Contrary to popular wisdom, China’s rapid growth is not hugely dependent on exports.” The Economist, Jan 3rd 2008, http://www.economist.com/node/10429271?story_id=10429271

7. Occam’s Razor, or as Einstein put it, “Everything should be kept as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Wikipedia, “Occam’s Razor,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam’s_razor

8. Daniel Ellsberg’s Website, September 13, 2009, “U.S. Nuclear War Planning for a Hundred Holocausts,” describing the approved US plan for eliminating one billion civilians in a nuclear first strike against the Sino-Soviet bloc, http://www.ellsberg.net/archive/us-nuclear-war-planning-for-a-hundred-holocaust s

9. See for example, CIIP.con, “Microsoft steps up its expansion in second-tier cities,” January 4, 2011, www.ciipp.com/en/index/view-285257.html ; Agence France-Presse, “Microsoft Plans $1 Billion Investment in China R&D,” November 13, 2008,” http://www.industryweek.com/articles/microsoft_plans_1_billion_investment_in_ china_rd_17808.aspx

10. Bloomberg News, “GM’s First-Half China Sales Surge Past the U.S.,” 7/2/10, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-02/general-motors-first-half-china-sale s-rise-48-5-pass-u-s-for-first-time.html

11. China News November 8, 2010, “China’s FDI to hit 420 bln U.S. dollars in ‘11th Five-Year Plan’ period . http://news.xinhuanet.com/eng

Davos Elites Enjoys The Global Depression

When Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum started the yearly pilgrimage to the inner sanctums of the Swiss Gnomes, he could hardly conceive that the ritual would turn into a celebrity bash of the super rich. The Davos venue is appropriate. Only rarified air is suitable for the global Mattoids. Billed as an assembly of business moguls, it really is more of an audition of well-heeled speculators vying for inclusion into the real power elites who make or break governments, economies and political destinies.

Using a combination of a Hollywood press agent, Madison Avenue ad firm and a media business channel the CNBC cheerleaders, the Davos clan relishes in their ill-gotten privilege and influence. The too big to fail mantra fits into the nihilism of their cult devotion of manipulated markets.

Globalism is god in Davos. Genuine entrepreneurial business creation shares the wealth across a broad spectrum of contributors. Not so, with those who revere monopolies and use the tools of derivative financing as a means of cabal consolidation. Globalism has achieved one dominant objective; namely, the separation of most depraved from the stark reality of those who pay the price of Free Trade oppression. Feed and fuel the appetites of the Masters of the Universe are on the permanent agenda of the Davos screen.

So what drives these parasites who despise any trace of free markets?   Paul B. Farrell in Market Watch pulls no punches with his answer. “But the real motives of the Super Rich are personal wealth, political power, glory. They care little for the masses. They are myopic narcissists, like Blofeld’s Angels of Death, trained solely to laser in on profit opportunities, marginalizing risks. Sadly, they will never see the next big catastrophe in time, will not act till it’s too late”

Mr. Farrell quotes Francis Fukuyama, author of “The End of History”,

“It is well established that income inequality has increased substantially in the United States over the past three decades, and that gains from the prolonged period of economic growth that ended in 2007–08 have gone disproportionately to the upper end of the richest layer of society.”

Yes, Super Rich billionaires grabbed the bulk of economic prosperity since Davos was launched. Fukuyama says “a study by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez shows that between 1978 and 2007, the share of U.S. income accruing to the top one percent of American families jumped from 9% to 23.5 % of the total. These data point clearly to the stagnation of working-class incomes in the United States: Real incomes for male workers peaked sometime back in the 1970s and have not recovered since.”

A joint House and Senate federal government report, Income Inequality and the Great Recession states,

“Over the past three decades, income inequality has grown dramatically. After remaining relatively constant for much of the post-war era, the share of total income accrued by the wealthiest 10 percent of households jumped from 34.6 percent in 1980 to 48.2 percent in 2008. Much of the spike was driven by the share of total income accrued by the richest 1 percent of households. Between 1980 and 2008, their share rose from 10.0 percent to 21.0 percent, making the United States as one of the most unequal countries in the world. Moving even further up the income distribution, the share of income accruing to the wealthiest 0.1 percent of households – those with incomes of at least $1.7 million in 2008 – has grown sharply as well. In short, the evolution of income inequality in the United States is largely driven by the trends at the very top of the income distribution, as very wealthy households have continued to accrue an ever-greater share of the nation’s total income”.

In an important Atlanta Magazine article, The Rise of the New Global Elite, Chrystia Freeland echoes the same conclusions. She quotes from a recent interview of a U.S. based CEO of one of the world’s largest hedge funds. In a recent internal debate, he said, one of his senior colleagues had argued that the hollowing-out of the American middle class didn’t really matter. “His point was that if the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad trade,” the CEO recalled.

Freeland goes on to quote Thomas Wilson, CEO of Allstate, who also lamented this global reality: “I can get [workers] anywhere in the world. It is a problem for America, but it is not necessarily a problem for American business … American businesses will adapt.”

By now, it should be exceedingly clear that the economic “best interests” of the American middle class is a non-concern for the Globalists. Just how different and removed from normal life are these self-ordained arrogant elites? Based upon money and the power that derives from its use, the Davos crew of post-graduate criminal enterprises stands as high as the Alps.

IBT cites according to Forbes magazine, 69 billionaires from 20 nations are scheduled to attend the economic forum in the Swiss ski resort. By Forbes’ calculations, the assembled elites have a total net worth of $427-billion, greater than the aggregate GDP of Israel and Egypt combined.The mentality and disconnect from reality that comes of total disdain for American citizens is embedded in the international mindset.

The basis of Totalitarian Collectivism stems from a total rejection of authentic moral principle and respect for individual humanity. The next insight from Ms. Freeland defines the context of the despotism. She cites a 2005 Citigroup report to investors, “the World is dividing into two blocs—the Plutonomy and the rest”:

“In a plutonomy there is no such animal as “the U.S. consumer” or “the UK consumer”, or indeed the “Russian consumer”. There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the “non-rich”, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie”.

Davos Globalism is a celebration of the worst in human nature. Greed, self-centeredness, egotism and obnoxious pride underpin the culture of condescension narcissism. An optimistic forecast of a global economic recovery is mere camouflage for rationalization that “Corporatists” are endowed with special privileges that give them the power to rule over the rest of civilization.

Even Nouriel Roubini a rock star at the Swiss resort bemoans a lack of joined-up global leadership. He describes trade imbalances, capital flows, water resources, immigration and climate change as “G Zero”. “There is complete disagreement and disarray”, “There is no agreement on anything. We are in a world where there is no leadership”. Yet he defends the global economic model and cautions that protectionism is a threat to the internationalists.

If the Davos buzzword is “G Zero” maybe the current transnational system is just buying time until the natural reaction from middle class exploration finally erupts. In her conclusion Chrystia Freeland warns,　

“The real threat facing the super-elite, at home and abroad, isn’t modestly higher taxes, but rather the possibility that inchoate public rage could cohere into a more concrete populist agenda—that, for instance, middle-class Americans could conclude that the world economy isn’t working for them and decide that protectionism or truly punitive taxation is preferable to incremental measures such as the eventual repeal of the upper-bracket Bush tax cuts”.

A Soros world only benefits the Davos crowd ‘I think there is a big push now for a financial transaction tax and that I think could be the basis for some action and it could also be used for fighting climate change and so on,’ said Soros.

Nouriel Roubini and Clay Shirky

Free Trade bears barren fruit for the populace. The Davos sect pontificate on saving the planet from global warming as they roast their compatriot chickens on a spit made by slave labor and imported tariff free. Only the monopolists benefit from an economic system void of genuine free enterprise.

Language used to convey a shared meaning. A common history used to be the bond of a native country. The nomenclature of economics once was based upon objective standards of accounting. The sovereign debt time bomb is proportional to the synthetic accumulation of booty at the expense of a supply and demand axiom. Governments are used as tools by artificial transnational trading schemes that manipulate every aspect of the legal and banking systems. Exploration is a consistent theme in all human endeavors, but in today’s New World Order matrix, the final coup de grâce comes at the hands of a global guillotine.

The public exposure from attending Davos suggests that the nouveau riche see this cabaret as a coming out party. The real controllers of the world economy are busy doing the sinister business of consolidation of global resources and finance. SPECTRE may be a fictional global terrorist organization in Bond films. However, the real originators of Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion are the outlaws that pull the strings of the fraudulent global financial system.

The Davos gang revels in the subjugation of the masses in their depression that is now a new way of life for many of our fellow citizens. Elites believe they are beyond the trials and tribulations of ordinary existence. The flight path of a Gulfstream 5 knows no boundary other than gravity. Soon that same gravitational force will extract a sharp pain in the neck. The cry “off with their heads” is one commodity that derivatives cannot hedge.

A Conversation with Derrick Jensen

“We need to stop this culture before it kills the planet”

As you begin reading this interview, take a look at the nearest clock. Now, dig this: Since yesterday at the same exact time, 200,000 acres of rainforest have been destroyed, over 100 plant and animal species have gone extinct, 13 million tons of toxic chemicals were released across the globe, and 29,158 children under the age of five died from preventable causes.

Worst of all, there’s nothing unique about the past 24 hours. It’s business as usual, a daily reality—and no amount of CFL bulbs, recycled toilet paper, or Sierra Club donations will change it even a tiny bit.

As you do your best to convince yourself of the vast chasm between the two wings of America’s single corporate party, I suggest you listen carefully to hear if even one of the politicians mentions any of the following:

• Every square mile of ocean hosts 46,000 pieces of floating plastic
• Eighty-one tons of mercury is emitted into the atmosphere each year as a result of electric power generation
• Every second, 10,000 gallons of gasoline are burned in the US
• Each year, Americans use 2.2 billion pounds of pesticides
• Ninety percent of the large fish in the ocean and 80 percent of the world’s forests are gone
• Every two seconds, a human being starves to death

This is just a minute sampling, folks, and sorry, but your hybrid ain’t helping. That reusable shopping bag you bring to the market has zero impact. Your home composting kit is not gonna start a revolution.

In fact, even if every single person in the US made every single change suggested in the movie An Inconvenient Truth, carbon emissions would fall by only 21%—in contrast to the 75% emissions decrease that scientific consensus believes must happen…now.

None of this, of course, is news to Derrick Jensen. He is the author of essential works such as A Language Older Than Words and Endgame. His worldview has nothing to do with party politics, incremental reform, leftist in-fighting, corporate compromise, or anything that seeks to tweak but ultimately maintain the ongoing global crime we call civilization.

“My loyalty,” he told me, “is with the nonhuman and human victims (or targets) of this culture, and my work is toward stopping this culture’s assaults on nonhumans, on the land, on the planet itself, on women, on indigenous peoples, on the poor.”

If you’ve grown weary (and wary) of the entrenched Left and all the words left unspoken, you owe it yourself to read the rest of our conversation below. Afterwards, you just might start realizing that you also owe to the planet to get busy.

Our exchange took place during the week of January 17 and went a little something like this…

Mickey Z.: We’re starting this conversation as another MLK Day is observed. Not much of a chance that we’ll hear this Dr. King quote—”The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be”—mentioned much by the corporate media, huh?

Derrick Jensen: Just today I read an article stating that, no surprise, industrial-induced global warming will be far worse than estimated, and if carbon emissions continue as expected, could render much of the planet uninhabitable within 100 years. Even now, 150-200 species are driven extinct every day. This culture extirpates indigenous peoples. The oceans are being murdered. And today I saw a study of rates of fire retardant in every fetus. And on and on. And yet those of us who are working to stop this planetary murder are sometimes characterized as extremists.

I think the real extremists are the people who value capitalism over life, the people who value civilization over life. I cannot think of any more extreme position than valuing this insane culture over life.

MZ: Not surprisingly, another major African-American figure from the 1960s—Malcolm X—had some positive words for extremism in the name of toppling that insane culture. Using Hamlet as a springboard, Malcolm wrote:

“(Hamlet) was in doubt about something—whether it was nobler in the mind of man to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune—moderation—or to take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. And I go for that. If you take up arms, you’ll end it, but if you sit around and wait for the one who’s in power to make up his mind that he should end it, you’ll be waiting a long time. And in my opinion, the young generation of whites, blacks, browns, whatever else there is, you’re living at a time of extremism, a time of revolution, a time when there’s got to be a change. People in power have misused it and now there has to be a change and a better world has to be built and the only way it’s going to be built with—is with extreme methods. And I, for one, will join in with anyone—I don’t care what color you are—as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth.”

DJ: I think the key has to do with wanting to change this miserable condition.

I try to be fairly inclusive of the people I would work with, but I’ve realized over the past many years that I’m not working toward the same goals as many of the environmentalists who are explicitly working to save capitalism or to save civilization, rather than the real world. In talks and interviews I often ask what all of the so-called solutions to global warming or the murder of the oceans, or biodiversity crash, etc, all have in common. And what they all have in common is that they all take industrial capitalism as a given, and the natural world as that which must conform to industrial capitalism. That is literally insane, in terms of being out of touch with physical reality. I mean, look at Lester Brown’s Plan B 4.0 to Save Civilization. What does he want to save? Could he be any more explicit? He wants to save civilization. But civilization is killing the planet. It’s like writing a book about how to save a serial killer who is murdering so many people he’s running out of victims. We see this attitude all the time. When people, for example, ask how we can stop global warming, they’re not asking how we can stop global warming; they’re asking how we can stop global warming without changing the physical conditions (burning oil and gas, deforestation, industrial agriculture, and so on) that lead to global warming. And the answer to that question is that you can’t. Likewise, when they ask how we can save salmon, they aren’t really asking how we can save salmon, they’re asking how we can save salmon without removing dams, stopping industrial logging, stopping industrial agriculture, stopping industrial fishing, stopping the murder of the oceans, stopping global warming, and so on.

A question I keep asking is: with whom (or what) do you identify? Where is your loyalty? Whom, or what do you want to save? And if what you really want to save is this “miserable condition”—capitalism, civilization, what have you—at the expense of the planet, then we’re not really working toward the same goal, are we? My loyalty is with the nonhuman and human victims (or targets) of this culture, and my work is toward stopping this culture’s assaults on nonhumans, on the land, on the planet itself, on women, on indigenous peoples, on the poor.

MZ: It’s a testament to the power of propaganda how even well-meaning folks will choose the options—both public and private—that work against their own interests. Gay rights activists are currently applauding the alleged repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” In the name of promoting diversity and inclusion, they are celebrating the ability to volunteer for an institution that exists to violently crush all diversity and inclusion.

The conditioning is so interwoven throughout every aspect of our culture that even respected Leftist thinkers simply cannot comprehend your comment, “civilization is killing the planet” and resort to retorts about “misanthropy.”

So, the question must asked, Derrick: Can these people be reached with the message that we can’t have industrial capitalism as a given without all the murderous side effects?

DJ: There’s a great line by Upton Sinclair about how it’s hard to make a man [sic] understand something when his [sic] job depends on him not understanding it. I think that’s true even more for entitlement. It’s hard to make someone understand something when their entitlement, their privilege, their comforts and elegancies, their perceived ability to control and manage, depends on it.

So much nature writing, social change theory, and environmental philosophy are at best irrelevant, and more often harmful in that they do not question human supremacism (or for that matter white supremacism, or male supremacism). They often do not question imperialism, including ecological imperialism. So often I feel like so many of them still want the goodies that come from imperialism (including ecological imperialism and sexual imperialism) far more than they want for these forms of imperialism to stop. And since the violence of imperialism is structural—inherent to the process—you can’t realistically expect imperialism to stop being violent just because you call it “green” or just because you wish with all your might.

Here’s another way to say this: as I say in Endgame, any way of life that requires the importation of resources will a) never be sustainable and b) always be based on violence, because a) requiring importation of resources means you are using more of that resource than the landbase can provide, which is by definition not sustainable (and as your city grows you’ll need an ever larger area to harm); and b) trade will never be sufficiently reliable, because if you require some resource (e.g., oil) and the people who live with or control that resource won’t trade you for it, you will take it, because you need it. It’s inherent. One of the many implications of this is that if you don’t question imperialism itself, the solutions you present will be absurd, and either irrelevant or harmful.

Here’s a story. A couple of weeks ago a tree fell down in a storm and knocked down an electric wire in this neighborhood. My neighbor told me about it, and when I saw the downed tree I looked and looked and looked for the stump, to see where the tree came from. I couldn’t find it. I’ve looked again every time I’ve gone by that place. Well, today I was walking and I saw where it came from. The top of a big tree had broken off. It was really obvious when I looked up instead of down. Point being (instant aphorism): You can search as thoroughly as is possible, but you’ll never find what you’re looking for if you’re looking in the wrong place.

This applies to everything from personal happiness to solutions to global warming.

But the problem is worse than mere entitlement. RD Laing came up with the three rules of a dysfunctional family:

Rule A is don’t.

Rule A.1 is Rule A does not exist

Rule A.2 is Never discuss the existence or nonexistence of Rules A, A.1, A.2

This is as true of dysfunctional cultures as dysfunctional families. So we cannot talk, for example, about the fact that this culture is only one way of living among many, that this way of living is based on conquest and the acquisition of power, that this way of life systematically destroys landbases, other cultures, and on and on. Systematically, functionally.

But it’s worse than this. In the 1960s a researcher attached electrodes to people’s eyeballs to track where they looked, and then showed them pictures. What the researcher found is that if the photo contained something that threatened the person’s worldview, the person’s eyes would not even track to it once: they would evidently see it out of the corners of their eyes, and know where not to look. So far too often you can make the point as reasonably as you can, and the person will have no idea what you are talking about.

MZ: Considering the glacial rate by which most humans – myself very much included – recognize and address destructive or self-destructive patterns in their personal life, it’s difficult to imagine a lot more humans allowing their eyeballs to focus in on global crises and their obscured causes. High Noon is approaching and it seems most of us don’t even know how to tell time.

Speaking of High Noon, I recently watched the classic 1952 film and found myself focused on the moment when Amy (Grace Kelly), the pacifist wife of Marshal Kane (Gary Cooper), shoots and kills a man to save her husband’s life. Earlier in the film, Amy had declared: “My father and my brother were killed by guns. They were on the right side but that didn’t help them any when the shooting started. My brother was nineteen. I watched him die. That’s when I became a Quaker. I don’t care who’s right or who’s wrong. There’s got to be some better way for people to live.”

However, she not only ends up shooting a man, she also fights off the main villain, which allows Marshal Kane to finish him. Now, before some readers run and tell Gandhi on me, what I’m proposing as the lesson is that when faced with the clarity a crisis can sometimes inspire, we can recognize that those clock hands are inching towards noon and surprise ourselves (as Grace Kelly’s character did) with our ability to take things to a new level.

If not, what chance do we (the animals, the trees, the eco-system, etc.) have?

DJ: Very little chance. Even if people don’t care about nonhumans, recent estimates are that billions, literally billions, of humans will die in what is beginning to be called a climate holocaust. This is if the temperature rises 4 degree Celsius.

And the most recent estimates are revealing that global warming is far worse than previously believed (have you ever noticed how the previous estimates were always low?), and could go up 16 degrees C within 90 years, rendering much of the planet uninhabitable (“Science stunner: On our current emissions path, CO2 levels in 2100 will hit levels last seen when the Earth was 29°F (16°C) hotter—Paleoclimate data suggests CO2 ‘may have at least twice the effect on global temperatures than currently projected by computer models'”). This means that there are young people now who will die in this climate holocaust. And there are too many people who prefer this wretched, destructive way of life over life on the planet, and literally over their own children. We need to stop this culture before it kills the planet.

MZ: Although I feel there’s way too much hand-holding in the realm of activism and far too many progressives sitting idle as they wait for a leader to give them direction, I must ask you this: What types of immediate direct action might you suggest to those reading this interview, in the name of stopping this culture before it kills the planet?

DJ: I think the important thing is that they start doing some form of activism. I can’t tell people what to do, because I don’t know what is important to them and I don’t know what their gifts are. But the important thing is that they start. Now. Today.

So how do you start? The problems are so huge! Well, the way I started as an activist was the result of the smartest thing I ever did. When I was in my mid-20s I realized I wasn’t paying enough for gasoline (in terms of including any of the ecological costs, etc), so for every dollar I spent on gas I would donate a dollar to an environmental organization (never a national or international organization, but rather local grassroots organizations), but since I didn’t have any money I would instead pay myself $5/hour to do activist work, whether it is writing letters to the editor or participating in demonstrations. My first demos were anti-fur demos and anti-circus demos. And don’t let your perceived ignorance stop you: I had no idea what exactly was wrong with circuses, but I knew they were exploitative of nonhuman animals and so I showed up, and other people handed me signs. If anyone asked me, What’s wrong with circuses? I just pointed them to the person standing next to me. I went from there to other forms of activism, including filing timber sale appeals, and so on. The point is that I started. At the time it cost $10 to fill my tank with gas, and if I filled it once a week, that meant two hours per week. And I started having so much fun with the activism that I stopped keeping track of how many hours I was doing activism, and just did it. But the important thing is that I got off my butt and started doing something.

It’s also important that when people do activism, that it not simply be personal stuff: environmentalism especially has gone down the dead end of lifestylism, where people think that changing their own life is sufficient. Just today I read an article that said, about water, “First of all, turn off the water when you don’t need it. It’s that simple. I don’t want to sound too preachy, but, according to UNICEF and the World Health Organization, lack of access to clean drinking water kills about 4,500 children per day. The water won’t magically travel from our taps to someone in need, but creating a mind-set of conservation will certainly help. There is absolutely no purpose served by letting water you are not using run down the drain.” This is just absurd. Yes, lack of access to clean water kills 4500 children per day, but it’s not because of my own water usage. 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. So all these environmental pleas for simple living are tremendous misdirection: these children (and what about the salmon children, and the sturgeon children, and so on) aren’t dying because I brushed my teeth: they’re dying because agriculture and industry are stealing the water. Just yesterday I read that Turkey is sacrificing all nature reserves to put in dams. This is not so people can have showers. It’s for agriculture and industry.

I live pretty simply, but that’s because I’m a cheapskate. I turn off the water while I brush my teeth, too. Big fucking deal. That is not a political act. There are no personal solutions to social problems. None.

So when I say that people should do some activism, I mean do something good for your landbase. Stop destructive activities. Do rehabilitation. Or if your primary emergency is violence against women, then do work against domestic violence, or against pornography, or against the trafficking in women. Get started.

Like Joe Hill said, “Don’t mourn, organize.”

MZ: I like to tell people that we live in the best time ever to be an activist. We’re on the brink of economic, social, and environmental collapse. What a time to be alive. We can take part in the most important work humans have ever undertaken. How lucky are we? In this era of “hope and change,” I say action is always better than hope. Or, as Rita Mae Brown said, “Never hope more than you work.”

DJ: Yes, I get so tired of people saying they hope salmon survive, or hope this or hope that. But what is hope? Hope is a longing for a future condition over which we have no agency. That’s how we use the word in every day language. I don’t say, “Gosh, I hope I put my shoes on before I go outside.” I just do it. On the other hand, the next time I get on a plane I hope it doesn’t crash. After I get on the plane I have no agency. Think of this: if a parent says to an eight-year-old child, “Please clean your room,” and the child says, “I hope it gets done,” we all know that’s ridiculous. I asked an eight-year-old what would happen if she said that to her parents, and she said, “Someone has to clean the room!”

That kid is smarter than a lot of environmentalists. It’s ridiculous to say we hope global warming doesn’t kill the planet when we can stop the oil economy that is causing global warming. I’m not interested in hope. I’m interested in agency, and I’m interested in people no longer waiting for some miracle to solve their problems. We need to do what is necessary.

MZ: When you first began writing and speaking about civilization and the eventual collapse, did you ever truly imagine that you’d be around to see things as bad as they are right now?

DJ: No. And even though I wrote in The Culture of Make Believe about the ways in which economic collapse can lead to more and more over brownshirt-ism and fascism, I’m still kind of stunned at the way it is happening here. But more to the point, even though I’ve written something on the order of fifteen books about this culture’s insanity, I still cannot believe this isn’t all a bad dream, with this frenzied maintenance of this culture as the world is murdered. I keep wanting to wake up, but each time I awaken this culture is still killing the planet, and not many people care.

MZ: I’m sure you can’t even calculate how many times you’ve been interviewed but I’m wondering if there’s a question you always wished you’d been asked but so far, no one has done so. If so, by way of wrapping up, please feel free to ask and answer that question.

DJ: Four questions:

Q: You’ve said many times that you don’t believe that humans are particularly more sentient than other animals. Where do you draw the line?

A: I don’t draw the line at all. I don’t see any reason to believe anything other than that the universe is full of a wild symphony of wildly different voices, wildly different intelligences. Humans have human intelligence, which is no greater nor less than octopi intelligence, which is no greater nor less than redwood intelligence, which is no greater nor less than flu virus intelligence, which is no greater nor less than granite intelligence, which is no greater nor less than river intelligence, and so on.

Q: How did the world get to be such a beautiful and wonderful and fecund place in the first place?

A: By everyone making the world a more beautiful and wonderful and fecund place by living and dying. By plants and animals and fungi and viruses and bacteria and rocks and rivers and so on making the world a better place. Salmon makes forests better places because of their existence. The Mississippi River makes that region a better place because of its existence. Bison make the Great Plains a better place because of their existence.

Civilized humans do not make the world a better place because of their existence. They are collectively and individually making the world a less beautiful and wonderful and fecund place. How can you make the world a better place? What can you do to make the landbase where you live more healthy, more beautiful, more fecund? And why aren’t you doing it?

Q: What will it take for the planet to survive?

A: The eradication of industrial civilization. Industrial civilization is functionally, systematically incompatible with life.

The good news is that industrial civilization is in the process of collapsing.

The bad news is that it is taking down too much of the planet with it.

Q: So if industrial civilization is collapsing, why shouldn’t we just hunker down and make our lifeboats and protect our own, and basically take care of our own precious little asses?

A: I would contrast the narcissism and cowardice of this attitude with that expressed by Henning von Tresckow, one of the members of the German resistance to Hitler in World War II. When the Allies invaded France in 1944, anybody paying any attention at all knew that the Nazis were going to lose: it was just a matter of time. So some members of the resistance suggested that they stop working to take down the Nazis, and instead just protect themselves until the war was over, basically hunker down and make their lifeboats and protect their own. Henning von Tresckow responded that every day the Nazis were killing 16,000 innocent civilians, so basically every day sooner they could bring down the Nazis would save 16,000 innocent civilians.

There is more courage and wisdom and integrity in that statement than in all the statements of all the craven lifeboatists put together.

Between 150 and 200 species went extinct today. They were my brothers and sisters. It is not sufficient to merely hunker down and wait for the horrors to stop. Salmon won’t survive that long. Sturgeon won’t survive that long. Delta smelt won’t survive that long.

Here’s another way to say all this. I would contrast the narcissism and cowardice of the lifeboatists with the attitude expressed by my dear friend, and the person who really got me started in environmentalism, John Osborn. He has devoted his life to saving as much of the wild as he can, through organized political resistance. When asked why he does this work, he always says, “We cannot predict the future. But as things become increasingly chaotic, I want to make sure that some doors remain open.” What he means by that is that if grizzly bears are around in 30 years they may be around in fifty. If they are gone in 30 they are gone forever. If he can keep this or that valley of old growth standing, it may be standing in 50 years. If it’s gone now, it will be gone for a long, long time, maybe forever.

As you said, Mickey Z, we are living at a time when we have perhaps more leverage than at many previous times. Any destructive activity we can halt now may protect that area until the collapse: people couldn’t realistically say that in the 1920s. I believe it was David Brower who said that every environmental victory was temporary while every loss was permanent. I think we are quickly reaching the point where every victory can be permanent.

One final thing: the single most effective recruiting tool for the French Resistance in WWII was D-Day, because the French realized once and for all that the Germans weren’t invincible. Knowing that this culture is collapsing should not lead us into narcissism and cowardice, but should give us courage, and should lead us to defend the victims of this culture.

For more about Derrick Jensen and his work, you can find him on the Web here.

The Sun Rose 2 Days Early in Greenland

By Wynne Parry | livescience.com…

Residents of a town on the western coast of Greenland may have seen the sun peek over the horizon 48 hours earlier than its usual arrival on Jan. 13, sparking speculation, and disagreements, over possible causes.

The town of Ilulissat sits just above the Arctic Circle, meaning its residents had been without any sunlight for a good chunk of the winter, and traditionally they’d expect to see their “first sunrise” on Jan. 13.

News that the sun had peeked over the horizon on Jan. 11 appeared onlinein British and German-language publications and it appears to trace back to a story by the Greenland broadcasting company KNR that quotes residents who noticed the change.

Of about half a dozen scientists contacted, most were unaware of the report, which was circulating on the Internet. They offered a number of hypothetical explanations, including an illusion caused by an atmospheric effect and conflicting opinions about whether global warming might be to blame for melting along the edges of Greenland’s ice sheet. With less ice, Greenland’s elevation may take a dip such that the sun would have less distance to travel before appearing over the horizon.

How it works

The sun comes up each day because Earth rotates once on its axis every 24 hours or so. Seasons are a result of Earth being tilted 23.5 degrees on its spin axis coupled with the planet’s 365-day orbit around the sun.

The Arctic Circle, a line at 66 degrees north, marks the latitude at which the sun does not set during the summer solstice (when the top half of our planet is facing directly toward the sun), the longest day of the year, nor rise during the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice. The farther north you move from the line, the longer the period of night-less summer or sun-less winter. Ilulissat is located about 3 degrees north of the Arctic Circle, so residents spend the middle of winter without any sunlight.

At the North Pole, the sun rises only once a year — at the start of spring. It gets higher in the sky each day until the summer solstice, then sinks but does not truly set until late September, at the autumn equinox.

Not a global phenomenon

While they disagreed on the cause of the town’s early sunrise, experts did reach one consensus: This was an isolated event, not a sign of earlier spring around the Northern Hemisphere.

“In a nutshell, there can’t be a change in the true sunrise, because that would require the Earth-Sun orbital parameters to change,” said John Walsh, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Fairbanks is located about 1 degree of latitude south of the Arctic Circle, far enough south that it does not completely lose its sun in winter, and this year the sun has followed its typical pattern in Alaska, he said.

“No changes here,” he said. “We would have heard about it.”

Walsh and other scientists agreed there is absolutely no evidence of a shift in the tilt of the Earth’s axis or any other change that might alter the arrival of the seasons around the globe.

An atmospheric illusion?

Other causes can be ruled out, including the effect of the approaching leap year in 2012, since in and around leap years, the sun is slightly lower in the sky in the Northern Hemisphere around Jan. 11, according to Thomas Posch, of Austria’s Institute of Astronomy.

The most likely possibility was the refraction of sunlight at the horizon, he told LiveScience in an e-mail. Most of the other scientists interviewed agreed this was the most likely culprit.

It is, in fact a common phenomenon, according to Walsh. Light bends as it travels through layers of air with different densities, and as a result the sun is normally a little bit below the horizon when we can first see it. But an unusual stratification of the air over Greenland could have led to a stronger bending of the sun’s rays, making the sun appear to arrive earlier than usual, he wrote in an e-mail.

Climate change?

“It is well known that global warming is causing most of Greenland’s outlet glaciers to melt faster and draw down the inland ice, and the details of that are quite complicated,” said Tim Dixon, a professor of geodesy at the University of Southern Florida, who has studied the effects of the melting ice sheet that covers Greenland.

On average, the ice sheet has lost considerable mass over the last 10 to 15 years, he said.

Ilulissat is located on land next to the point where the Jakobshavn Isbrae outlet glacier meets the ocean. The outlet glacier is a long tongue of ice that drains from the main ice sheet to the west, through the coast into the water.

It is unlikely that the melting of the edge of the ice sheet would change the timing of the first sunrise, because the ice is east of the town, while the sunrise would take place almost due south.

Even so, Dixon did not completely dismiss melting ice as a cause, suggesting that perhaps the absence this year of a floating ice shelf in the inlet to the south may have allowed the sun to rise earlier.

Not enough information

But without information about the observations behind this report, it’s difficult to speculate as to what may have caused an early sunrise, according to Richard Alley, a professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University who spent several days in the town.

“When my wife was a child, she and her siblings would go to the beach, watch the sun set, and then run up the hill really rapidly, ‘unsetting’ the sun so they then could watch the sun set again,” Alley wrote in an e-mail to LiveScience. “Where you are matters.”

Given the information available, or lack of it, Alley said the possibility of a “mirage” where atmospheric conditions make it possible to see something that would not normally be visible was more likely, he wrote.

But he wrote that he was concerned about the reliability of the report.

Downsize or Modify? A Conversation with Noam Chomsky

While Noam Chomsky surely needs no introduction, as they say, that doesn’t mean interviewing him has to follow a blueprint. So, after seeing him in a video called “Are We Running Out of Oil?” I decided to initiate a conversation about the future…or perhaps lack thereof.

What will happen if activists don’t kick things up a few thousands notches and provoke massive changes in the way humans currently live? Chomsky and I, of course, agree it’d be best to create such change and learn the answer to that question. On a few other points, we didn’t agree.

Our discussion went something like this…

Mickey Z.: I recently watched a video on climate change in which you were one of the featured interviewees. You talked quite somberly about the recent elections being a “death knell” for humanity and us “kissing our species goodbye.” I’ve read your work for decades but can’t seem to recall you using such language in this context. In your view, have we humans waited too long to take action? Do you believe we can/should downsize our industrial culture before it downsizes itself?

Noam Chomsky: If I said the elections are a death knell, I went too far. But I think it’s fair to say that they do threaten that outcome. Even the business press is concerned. Bloomberg Business Week reported that the elections brought into office dozens of climate change deniers, swelling support for Senator James Inhofe, who has declared global warming to be the “greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people” and feels “vindicated” by the election. He probably is also celebrating the ascendance of representative John Shimkus who assures us that God would prevent dire effects of climate change; analogues would be hard to find in other societies. And probably is also celebrating the fact that according to recent polls, barely a third of Americans now believe that human activities are a factor in climate change – very likely the result of a major corporate propaganda offensive, openly announced, to achieve this result. It’s important to bear in mind that those who orchestrate the campaigns know as well as the rest of us that the “hoax” is real and ominous, but they are pursuing their institutional role: maximizing short-term profit and putting aside “externalities,” in this case the fate of the species. Modifying the core institutions of the society is no small challenge. This confluence of factors should serve as a grim warning. If the US continues to drag its feet on addressing these grave problems, the rest of the world will have even less incentive to proceed with serious measures. I don’t think that entails downsizing industrial culture. Rather, converting it to sustainable form to serve human needs, not private profit. For example high speed rail and solar technology do not downsize industrial culture.

MZ: When I say “downsizing industrial culture,” I’m suggesting that any lifestyle based on relentless resource extraction is by definition, un-sustainable. So, I would counter that “serving human needs” is partly what got us in this mess in the first place. Considering that 80% of the forests have been destroyed and 90% of large fish in the ocean are already gone, maybe we need a more holistic perspective on “needs”?

NC: I’d still give the same answer. Human needs are served by a sustainable lifestyle, almost by definition, if humans include coming generations. And a shift to such technologies as high-speed rail instead of maximizing fossil fuel use, and solar energy, is not “relentless resource extraction.”

MZ: I guess what I mean is what about non-human needs? We can’t survive without a functioning eco-system and most of the accepted suggestions—recycled goods, CFL bulbs, etc.—are way too little, way too late. As someone who has surveyed the shifting tides of human culture, can you foresee Americans stepping up to make the kind of changes and sacrifices required to ensure “coming generations”?

NC: I’m not sure what you mean by “non-human needs.” A functioning eco-system is a human need.  Are you thinking of the needs of non-human animals? Say beetles?  They’ll probably survive whatever we do to the eco-system. I quite agree that the standard suggestions are too little. If they are too late, then it follows, logically, that we really can kiss each other goodbye. But I think that’s too grim a forecast. On whether Americans can step up, it’s hard to be optimistic. Certainly current trends are in the opposite direction, as I mentioned.

MZ: So, if you’re not optimistic about Americans stepping up, what it is that keeps you from maintaining as “grim” a forecast as I?

NC: Because not being optimistic falls a long way short of predicting that all is finished. There are still options. If you really think the game is over, what’s the point of even discussing these topics?

MZ: The only game I feel is over is the widespread belief that minor tweaks and changes can make enough of a difference. What I’m sincerely wondering is what, as you see it, are the options that remain?

NC: I think we agree on that. The options that remain are much more dramatic and far-reaching initiatives, and the sooner the better.

MZ: Which brings me back to my initial point about downsizing. High-speed rail requires unsustainable and toxic practices like mining, etc. Solar energy is obviously better than fossil fuels but isn’t truly sustainable if it’s solely used to replace fossil fuels in the name of supporting an unsustainable industrial/technological culture. As for those beetles you mentioned earlier, surely you know that valuable insects like bees are being wiped out by this same human culture. So what I’m asking is for a clearer idea of what you see as the dramatic and far-reaching initiatives we need.

NC: Bees are being wiped out, but beetles aren’t. The choice today is not between eliminating transportation and wasting fossil fuels, but between more and less wasteful forms of transportation. Same with regard to solar energy. There’s no point discussing options that haven’t even a remote chance of being implemented, and would be massively destructive if they were. What has to be done today is (1) large-scale conversion (weatherizing, etc.), (2) sharp change in transportation to greater efficiency, like high-speed rail, (3) serious efforts to move to sustainable energy, probably solar in the somewhat longer term, (4) other adjustments that are feasible. If done effectively, that might be enough to stave off disaster. If not, then we can give up the ghost, because there are no alternatives in this world, at least none that I’ve seen suggested.

Also, I do not see how we can rationally oppose high speed rail because of the environmental and other costs without considering the social and human consequences of the radical elimination of transportation that this entails.

MZ: I do so because I feel the “environmental and other costs” are virtually indistinguishable from the “social and human consequences.” Preserving the unsustainable system that has put all life on earth at risk, to me, carries far worse potential consequences than beginning the process of dismantling that system. Neither option is even remotely appetizing but only one option accepts the inherent destructive nature of the industrial infrastructure as it stands now.

NC: Your reply illustrates exactly the problem I see constantly. You are certainly entitled to this opinion, but merely asserted it cannot carry any conviction. I’m sorry that you don’t see that your comment does not address the issue.

MZ: I’m sorry that you can’t see how it does.

NC: Then we agree.

MZ: Although we continued talking at that point, this marked the end of our official interview. However, I feel I would be remiss if I did not voice my fervent disagreement that there are “no alternatives in this world” to the four options Chomsky lists above.

Setting the stage for America’s degraded future—population impact

Part 1…

By writing about severe consequences heading, like a Hurricane Katrina, toward not just New Orleans five years ago, but every state in America–readers chastise me. They question past titles like, ‘Consequences of Too Many People; ‘Too Many People, Too Few Solutions; and ‘America’s Coming Overpopulation Crisis’. They feel the columns’ themes did not apply to them or wouldn’t happen to them. They are correct—it won’t happen to them—it will happen to their children.

If our nation keeps thinking like the people of New Orleans–that it won’t happen to them–think again. Look at millions living in the earthquake arena of California. It is not a question of if, but when the 9.5 scale quake hits. New Orleans was not a question of if, but when. Same goes for those living in Florida’s hurricane alley. If you travel west, you see people building homes on the cliffs of California when contractors told them that rains would cause slides. They built anyway and look what happened the last two years during the rainy season. What about those building in fire areas of California? Did you not see their homes burn in the past two years?

What I seek to convey to the American public stems from my bicycle travels on six continents and through the most densely populated countries of the world. I’ve seen the misery, suffering, debasement of human living conditions and I’ve witnessed that once human numbers exceeded carrying capacity, all life suffers. Examine China, India, Africa and Bangladesh for starters. They grow worse by the day. They can’t solve their numbers once manifested.

Several readers ask if I follow Thomas Malthus’ “Essay on the Principle of Population,” or, they don’t agree with me based on the size of the United States. Many who pursue a religious course, say “God will provide.”  What they neglect to realize is, according to the March 14, 2005, issue of Time Magazine, 18 million people starve to death around the planet annually. Therefore, it is not an issue of Malthus or God; it is an issue of a growing reality that humanity is outstripping the planet’s ability to feed, water and clothe the growing ‘human storm’ on this planet.

More sobering, humans add 80 million net gain annually on our way from 6.8 billion to 9.8 (high estimate by Population Reference Bureau and supporting estimates by www.balance.org and www.npg.org) billion around 2050.

Anyone can live in denial all they want, but like Hurricane Katrina, reality will strike when the storm hits. In other words, those that scoff at me can sit back just like five days before Katrina hit, and drink coffee on the back porch. But when it hits and you didn’t evacuate, you become one of the victims. And, as Time and Newsweek graphically reported, our children. We failed the most innocent of all by our lack of action.

In this two part column, I quote many brilliant people who know this ‘population Katrina storm’ heads our way. At the end, I add my own quote to the fast approaching crisis of overpopulation.

When I talk about the crisis of overpopulation in America, plenty of already manifested realities sober any rational mind. The quality of our lives deteriorates daily as we add three million people annually to our shores. The standard of living drops like a brick with millions of added people. But let me quote those who know more and are the leaders from the past and present.

“We must prevent human tragedy rather than run around trying to save ourselves after an event has already occurred. Unfortunately, history clearly shows that we arrive at catastrophe by failing to meet the situation, by failing to act when we should have acted. The opportunity passes us by and the next disaster is always more difficult and compounded than the last one.” Eleanor Roosevelt

You may not like Eleanor, but her words ring true. What if former President George Obama had been a competent president and installed a competent man as director of FEMA? Instead, he appointed an incompetent man, Mike Brown, who was fired from a ten year job as president of an Arabian horse association. How was he supposed to lead a major federal agency with his ‘good ole boy’ connections? Obama’s ineptness and his own incompetence expressed itself in Brown who manifested incompetence before and during Katrina.

We must endure two more years of Obama’s lack of understanding of our predicament. Obama manifests the “Peter Principle” (most persons in corporate America rise to their highest level of incompetence; once there, they make everyone under them miserable, and they can’t grab the reins). Obama lacks the intellectual or cognitive ability to grow out of his incompetence.

Eleanor stands right on the money and we will pay the consequences for such observable incompetence as Obama muddles through his last two years. When it comes to the immigration invasion of three million people crashing onto our shores annually, Obama doesn’t have a clue as to the critical impact and danger to future generations due to sheer numbers.  He’s like a blind watchmaker.

So what do other brighter minds say about the worsening crisis of overpopulation in America?

“Immigration of the kind and on the scale America has had for the last three decades is in effect, a recipe for cultural suicide and squandering of a rich national heritage.” Dr. Lee Marland

Look at that quote and tell me you don’t feel it in your community with all the illegal aliens and non absorbing legal immigrants who can’t and won’t speak English, but use and abuse our system for their own purposes. Tell me you think our country can continue, with dozens of other languages and Stone Age cultures that don’t assimilate into what is America as a First World country.

“The two-generation indirect immigration, i.e., including the births to foreign-born mothers, explained the incredible 98 percent of California’s growth between 1990 and 2000.” Dr. Leon Bouvier

Anyone want to move to the beautiful Los Angeles area anytime soon? I would need my head examined for sanity if I wanted to move into that grinding traffic, three million illegal aliens and nine million legal immigrant quagmire. Immigration provoked growth from 17 million in 1965 to over 38 million today. They suffer gridlock, air pollution, crime, disease, mountains of trash, Mexico’s slums and a non English speaking populace, which is more anti-American than Castro.

As you sit reading this column, are the lights turning on? Are you connecting the dots? Do you see the growing calamity about to visit, possibly not you, but definitely your children here in the once limitless USA? Exploding gas prices present harbingers of our future. Air pollution grows thicker with every added person. Farmland diminishes as  asphalt and concrete cover it. I spent the summer bicycling 4,000 miles across the USA. Gas costs $3.00 a gallon.

In Europe, gas costs $6.00 a gallon and as high as $8.00 a gallon in places. Forests have vanished under farmland. People live, not in homes, but are stuffed into apartments. They drive automobiles that feature only two doors for the driver and passenger and their feet are almost touching the bumper of the Smart cars—that look like upside down teacups. If you crash, sorry, you’re toast.

In the second part of this series, we will pursue the growing realities of ignoring the current population growth of America at five million annually. When you take five million and multiply by 60 years, you add 300 million or a doubling of the US population from 295 million to 600 million. If you think the gridlock, air pollution, acid rain, diminishing cropland, congestion, failing health systems, global warming, species extinction is bad now, you ain’t seen nothing yet! In other words, Population Katrina will hit all 50 states in 2035. But even before that date, it will degrade all our lives with too many people, shrinking freedoms, diminished resources, water wars, diseases, maddening traffic and worsening air pollution.

I’m going to add my quote to all these other people. THE MORE EXTREME OUR NUMBERS, THE MORE EXTREME OUR CHILDREN’S CONSEQUENCES.

Unless, of course, you decide to get involved in your children’s future.

Mental Ghettos Weaken the US

So many intelligent Americans believe, say and do stupid things. When a large fraction of the population is like this, a nation rots from the inside and succumbs to external forces.

I have always searched for the simplest yet best ways to explain what I see as a multi-decade decline of every aspect of the United States, especially its political system and government. I keep coming back to the inescapable logic that a large fraction of Americans, regardless of their education, economic status and political alignment, must suffer from delusion. This delusion produces denial about hugely important subjects and issues.

Like a law of physics, this combination makes people seem incredibly stupid to others disagreeing with their positions. Stupid, because they are unable to accept facts and truths that conflict with their views.

This special kind of stupidity is independent of inherent intelligence. In this case brain power is overpowered by psychological deficiency, namely self-delusion.

This delusion is not genetically produced, but is a result of external influences, notably political, government, media and corporate propaganda intentionally designed to produce delusional beliefs and thinking. Who does this? All sorts of commercial and political interests. The result is a series of biases and blocks, such as cognitive dissonance, to objective facts and information that creates denial about very important conditions affecting the planet, the nation and individuals. People afflicted with this deadly combination appear stupid to those outside their mental ghetto that they gladly inhabit, along with similarly afflicted people.

National unity breaks down with countless mental ghettos that span economic, political and geographic boundaries.

Conservatives see liberals as stupid and vice versa. Democrats see Tea Party adherents (who only support Republican candidates) as stupid and vice versa. Those seeing climate change and global warming as serious phenomena posing real threats see deniers as stupid. People who give a high priority to tax cuts that mainly benefit the rich and superrich seem stupid to those who recognize that the wealthiest Americans have hijacked the US economy, as shown by endless statistics that reveal their preferential financial benefits. Those who reject religions think the religious stupid. People who shun social networking sites see those addicted to them as stupid. Growing numbers of obese people seem stupid to those eating healthy and exercising regularly to maintain healthy weights.

A prime example of a mental ghetto is the collection of radical, terrorist Muslims sharing hate and violence and blocking out teachings from authentic Muslims about peace and love.

You surely can think of classes of people who seem stupid, because of a particular belief or viewpoint rather than across-the-board limited intelligence. With conversations that have nothing to do with their position (or maybe several), you would likely think of them as reasonably intelligent and smart, not stupid. In other words, stupidity is often topic or issue specific.

Here are two examples of what I call psychological stupidity with their powerful implications for understanding why the nation is seen on the wrong track by so many Americans who cannot unite behind solutions.

There is no mystery why the top 20 percent of the population in terms of wealth votes for Republicans, but they are not enough to win elections. What makes far less sense is why many more middle class Americans vote for Republicans. They seem stupid in voting against their own economic interests because Republicans pursue policies that preferentially reward the richest Americans. This behavior can only be explained by the success of Republican propaganda (mainly trickle down prosperity), lies and deceptions that instill a set of biases and beliefs that enable Republicans to win elections. A prime example is obtaining broad support for keeping taxes on really rich people low.

On the other side, are millions of people who vote for Democrats because they have been sold rhetoric about reforming the government system, as if Democrats are not also in the pockets of a number of special interests that will not accept truly needed deep reforms. Why have we not seen President Obama pursue punishment of many people and companies in the banking, mortgage and financial sectors that caused the economic meltdown? He had received huge campaign contributions from them and then surrounded himself with cabinet officials and advisors from them. Otherwise intelligent people vote for Democrats because of their psychological stupidity based on false promises of change and reform that they have succumbed to.

Psychological stupidity has become a kind of cultural epidemic that no one is addressing, so it just gets worse. It invites manipulation and the continuing corrosion and corruption of government. The rich and powerful know how to take advantage of this stupidity, obtaining government policies and programs they want, selling products and services that consumers do not really benefit from, and grabbing more of the nation’s wealth.

Those afflicted with psychological stupidity are also likely to exhibit moral superiority, making it even more difficult to have intelligent and productive conversations with them. Such arrogance strengthens their defenses against facts and information that conflicts with their cherished views. The answer: Associate with others having exactly the same views and only get information from like-minded media sources, creating mental ghettos (such as the Tea Party and Fox News) that others can take political or commercial advantage of (Republicans and companies selling gold).

Self-deception is the widespread legal narcotic lubricating the slide of American society into the toilet that other once great nations ended up in. Maybe this old Arab proverb warrants respect: People who lie to others have merely hidden away the truth, but people who lie to themselves have forgotten where they put it.

Which mental ghettos do you belong to?

January-October 2010 Emerges as the Warmest Period in the Instrumental Record

According to a new report “State of the Climate – Global Analysis, October 2010” published by National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?report=global the combined global land and ocean surface temperature for January–October 2010 was +0.63°C above the 20th century average of 14.1°C and tied with 1998 as the warmest January–October period on record (see Figure 1).

The data indicate mean temperature changes in the Arctic of up to +5^oC relative to the 1961-1990 base period, leading to progressive loss of Greenland ice sheet and Arctic sea ice, which in October 2010 was 17% less than during October periods of 1979-2000.

Consistent with elevated radiative forcing by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, leading to high temperatures, strong evaporation and abrupt precipitation events, 2010 has seen a string of extreme weather events, including heat waves and fires (Russia), severe droughts (Brazil, Mexico), cyclones (USA, Caribbean) and floods (Pakistan, western China, Australia) (see Figure 2).

That extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and intensity is shown in figure 3, showing the number of cyclones increased by a factor of about 2 and floods by a factor of about 3.

Mean global high temperatures persisted despite a prevalence of La-Nina conditions ( http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/indices.shtml ;http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/) which resulted in below-average temperatures across the equatorial Pacific).
Thanks to the surrounding oceans Australia has been mostly benign in terms of temperature. The decrease in mean temperatures in Australia (Figure 1) is related to the increased rainfall, clouding and evaporation/cooling effects. For Australia the year 2010 (to November) ranks in the top 10 for rainfall due to a confluence of seasonal drivers – ENSO and IOD.

Much of the rainfall occurred as abrupt precipitation events, less beneficial and often destructive as compared with gentler Mediterranean-type precipitation. A significant drying up continues in southwestern Australia, which had record low winter season rainfall, continuing a trend that began around the 1970s. This year SW WA had little inflows into its dams.

The rise in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events around the world implies models suggesting gradual climate transitions, such as projected by the IPCC-2007 (http://www.ipcc.ch/), require revision in terms of the effects of tipping points, consistent with recent research ( http://www.pnas.org/content/105/6/1786.long, http://researchpages.net/ESMG/people/tim-lenton/tipping-points/).

According to a new report by the Global Carbon Project ( http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2010/s3072556.htm) “the growth rate in emissions is going to make it increasingly difficult for us to constrain climate change to levels of around 2 degrees of warming above the pre-industrial temperatures.“ .
According to Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, +2 degrees may result in tipping points ( http://universitypost.dk/article/two-degrees-warmer-may-be-past-tipping-point ).

Ignoring reports by the world’s major climate science organizations (NASA/GISS, NCDC, Hadley-Met, Potsdam, BOM, CSIRO), governments continue to consider the issue almost exclusively in economic $ terms, the ultimate Faustian bargain.

Most are oblivious to the calamitous consequences of inaction or of limited action falling short of arresting climate change. Current negotiations regarding climate mitigation  ( ) and debates regarding carbon tax versus CPRS schemes ( http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-16/australian-carbon-price-would-unlock-free-market-genius-gillard-writes.html ), ignore the implications of the rise in extreme weather events.

Extensive media cover-up, coupled with well funded climate denial campaigns ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/24/tea-party-climate-change-deniers/print , http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/18/AR2010111805451.html ), are on the rise. Emergency climate mitigation measures, including draw-down of atmospheric CO2 using soil biochar, chemical sequestration and extensive reforestation, may have a chance of slowing runaway global warming.

Figure 1.
Temperature anomalies October 2010 with respect to October periods 1961-1990
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?report=global

Figure 2
Selected significant climate anomalies and events, October, 2010
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?report=global

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Figure 3.
Trends in climate disasters compared with earthquakes showing tripling of the
annual frequency of floods and doubling of frequency of cyclones.
http://www.extremeweatherheroes.org/science-of-extreme-weather/globalevidence.aspx

The Fuzzy Logic of Useful Idiots

By Giordano Bruno

Neithercorp Press…

It hurts to be wrong. Not just emotionally, but physically, especially when it’s public, like swimming headfirst into a school of very ill-tempered jellyfish…..or maybe piranha. The horror of it is almost cinematic. The more artificially pumped your ego, or the more brainwashed with academic pretension, the more terrifying that moment of realization is, that moment when all your assumptions are dashed aside like a three-year-old’s alphabet blocks. To a certain point, it is understandable why so many people live in such violent denial, however, this does not detract from the perils of that denial…

Americans are masters of avoiding responsibility for bad assumptions. I have seen middle-aged women cry, actual tears, because they have been proven incorrect on something as simple as the price of dishwashing detergent at the grocery store. I have seen full-grown men throw wild-eyed tantrums and even threaten people with death because they couldn’t handle being wrong about the correct score of a football game. I once saw a man froth at the mouth and shout vicious obscenities for 20 minutes straight because he refused to believe there where more than three ‘Jaws’ movies (I wish ‘Jaws: The Revenge’ didn’t exist either, but I’m not going to have a spasm over it). I have seen little old ladies physically attack people because they were embarrassed to be wrong, not realizing that their response was far more humiliating and self deprecating than just being “mistaken”. I have, indeed, seen the glory of overgrown babies in action.

America is not the only culture prone to this, Americans just happen to be the worst losers. We lash out when we are wrong, while most Europeans tend to intellectualize ideas that challenge their false perceptions, as if they are “above” even considering them. They are masters of rationalizing the facts away, while we are masters of brutalizing those people who are messengers of the facts.

Some of these unfortunate members of our society are merely lemmings; sheep following each other mindlessly without questioning the purpose or the destination. They are spectators in world events, and nothing more. While others are far more dangerous because they take an active role in the shaping of events, not knowing that their idiocy is contributing to the suppression of the truth and even the downfall of our nation. They help elitists to dismantle dissent and in the process damage their own future. It sounds insane, and in a way, they ARE psychologically ill, but in a manner that has been deemed tolerable (or even practical) by society. We call these people “Useful Idiots”.

How does one know when he has encountered such a person? How does he cope? Let’s examine some of the telltale signs of the useful idiot…

Just Smart Enough To Be Stupid…

Learning is a full time job, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, until the very moment your ticker tocks and you find yourself sporting a cloud and a harp. Some people, though, seem to think that retirement on learning starts at around age twenty. Useful idiots are commonly men and women who are intelligent enough to retain information but not driven enough to research its validity, or to follow a thought through to its logical conclusion. They very often work in professional fields such as law, business, medicine, politics, engineering, media, entertainment, etc. (though there are many others in these fields who are not caught up in their own delusional worlds). These are people in a position to influence others just by the virtue of their work, regardless of how clueless they actually are.

Lacking knowledge is not such a terrible crime as long as you are willing to admit that you do. There is always someone out there who is going to know more than you about some things, if not many things. That’s life. Useful idiots, on the other hand, are rarely willing to admit that they are lacking in any department. They usually have just enough knowledge to make themselves “convincing” to those who don’t recognize them for what they are. In this way they are a sort of mini-Chernobyl, waiting to spew radioactive waste (disinformation) at any given moment, mutating public opinion.

Their ability to think is limited to memorization. The problem with this way of viewing the world is that it excludes critical thought, intuition, empathy, and wisdom. It traps us in a box composed of all the things we have been TAUGHT, but keeps us from the things we could discover on our own. Useful idiots are walking talking toasters; all they take is bread, and all they make is toast (and the occasional pop tart). Frankly, I’m bored with toast.

One need only take into account the vast number of so called financial analysts in the mainstream media who denied there was any threat of economic collapse back in 2006/2007. How many of them stopped to consider the consequences of ignoring the facts because of their egomania and inability to think beyond their conditioning? How many lives and nest-eggs have been destroyed, or are waiting to be destroyed, because of them? How many of these useful idiots ever apologized for their blundering? I can’t think of any…

Reacting To The Truth, Instead Of Absorbing It…

Useful idiots talk, they don’t listen. They ask lots of questions, but never wait to hear your answers. For them, questions are not a search for information, but rather a method of antagonism. It is a way to keep everyone else on guard while making themselves feel superior. In this game, the useful idiot never has to expose his ignorance because he never has to enter into a meaningful dialogue with anyone who has an opposing view. All he has to do is attack, attack, attack.

I have seen all kinds of reactionary tactics from useful idiots, but I find that the most common one for the American brand is the application of overt bravado. They turn everything into a joke whether it is funny or not. Laughing at that which we don’t understand sometimes makes things less frightening, but it also makes us more passive. Dedicated clowns, for all their theatrics and daring, are generally impotent historical figures. How many clowns or comedians have ever really dared to break the establishment mold and aim a magnifying glass at the true absurdity of our system or our culture? How many have inspired legitimate and original thought? I can think of only a handful, and almost all of them remained tied back by the entertainment industry for their beliefs.

The clowns that are the most “successful” are those that follow the establishment guidelines and play on them as if they might dare break the barrier of lies, but they never do. In Medieval times, even the most blood thirsty king would allow the court jester to make jokes at his expense. Why? Because the jester was an inconsequential figure, a powerless and non-threatening being. A jester can verbally thrash a tyrant, but nothing ever really changes, because deep down, though they make us laugh, nobody really cares what clowns have to say. Now imagine a whole subsection of our country emulating this dynamic. Imagine all these people deluding themselves into thinking that being a slave isn’t all that bad, as long as you’re the funny slave.

When confronted with a truth that threatens their established world view, useful idiots will do anything to distract or derail the exchange. Making bad jokes, resorting to childish ridicule, ignoring cold hard logic, making threats, denying you are qualified to present the facts, even though the facts speak for themselves no matter who is relaying them, etc. Rarely will they confront the truth you present on its own terms. Instead, they will try to make YOU the issue of discussion, and not your information.

Skewed World View…

Is it really that hard to double check a piece of data to confirm whether or not it is true? Apparently, it must be, because so many Americans have decided to believe whatever they are told without a second thought as long as the guy telling them is in a suit or a white lab coat. If a guy in a lab coat told you that cyanide makes you more desirable to the opposite sex, would you slam down a glass before hitting the singles bar, or would you verify the info and actually research the damned subject before hand?

You might say “well cyanide is poison, everybody knows that!” Yes, people know that because they research it. But how many other poisons do Americans ingest daily because some official gave the thumbs up? Mercury (thimerosal), aspartame, high fructose corn syrup, fluoride, rBGH, Bisphenol-A, and numerous others. One stop at the computer would produce thousands of pages of research which shows the volatile nature of these chemicals and the consequences of exposure. Why do we contaminate our guts with this garbage on pure faith? Welcome to the realm of the useful idiot…

The useful idiot is not just the guy chugging down GMO milk filled with udder puss, anyone can do that and not be useful. No, the useful idiot is the FDA official or the corporately paid scientist who SELLS us on the purity of the milk. He’s the local dentist who laughs at you when you question the safety of all that fluoride accumulation in your bloodstream. She’s the nurse who threatens to call CPS because you don’t want your newborn baby injected with half a dozen mercury laced vaccines two months after they exit the womb. The useful idiot is the guy who received his standardized academic neuron rinse but never learned that the first rule of academia used to be ‘question everything’.

World view is really a battle between inherent conscience, common sense, and the conditioning of our era. Even a single root misconception, like the belief in the legitimacy of the false left/right political paradigm, could easily skew the whole of a person’s vision to a sea of truths. The useful idiot is not only conditioned himself, but he also becomes an agent of that conditioning in others. When confronted with a truth outside of his established world view, he almost short circuits. He has lived most of his life with the ideas and propaganda of others slogging around in his skull. To be faced with the possibility that all of that time, energy, and devotion, was worthless, is almost too much to bear.

Making A Difference, One Lost Freedom At A Time…

Sometimes the best qualities of good people are ironically the worst qualities in the useful idiot. Useful idiots love to participate…in anything…as long as it’s sanctioned by a recognizable organization. Bless their hearts, they just want to get out there and make a difference! Go team!

This is a serious issue with those on both sides of our fake political spectrum, left and right. How many people clamored to be a neo-con after 9/11, only to find that in their quest for public safety, they wrongly supported the weakening of Constitutional freedoms, the destabilization of our economy, not to mention the invasion of Iraq, a country that had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 (even if you believe the official story) or any other terrorist attack in this country? How many liberals ran screaming like schoolgirls at a Justin Bieber concert towards the global warming and carbon tax scam, only to find out that the climate labs responsible for all the research they had been eating up without question was actually using contrived and in some cases completely fabricated data? I won’t even get into the Obama-fever thing, mainly because my stomach isn’t strong enough at the moment.

The problem with useful idiots is that they want to participate TOO much. So much that they’ll jump on any bandwagon that is well funded and flamboyant enough to pique their interest. They are joiners with highly superficial standards, like brownshirts, or lice. This is where they do their worst damage…

Participation, for the useful idiot, is not about making a difference; it is about feeling like they are making a difference. In some cases, it’s about “hope”, but not real or effective action. In other cases, it’s about vengeance and malice, but not justice or integrity. In either scenario, the key missing factor is the truth, which is neglected or traded for a quick boost in self esteem. This makes the useful idiot the prime target of elitist disinformation. Nearly all criminal actions by governments receive their primary support from this portion of the citizenry exactly because they are so ridiculously eager. They are the zombie ditch diggers of the globalist infrastructure, chopping away at our liberties in search of brains.

Confronting The Useful Idiot…

Why bother trying to communicate with these dimwits at all? Are they not the very definition of a lost cause? Perhaps. I can say with a certain authority, though, that some of them can be introduced to awareness, especially since I used to be one of them…

I was the Democrat putting up Kerry stickers and handing out buttons back in 2004. I was the guy who shut down any conservative viewpoint no matter how accurate or valid because Bush was the devil incarnate (and also because I was uninformed enough to believe that neo-cons were actually conservative). I was the guy at those protest rallies where no one including myself really understood the topics we were speaking out on. I knew corporations were the enemy, but I didn’t understand why. I knew the wars were dishonest, but I thought they were all about oil. I knew the economy was in trouble, but I barely knew what the Federal Reserve was, let alone fractional reserve banking or fiat currency. It took many years to fully remove my head from my ass, but I did. I see no reason why others could not do the same, given the right prompting.

The useful idiot has to be faced with queries he can’t weasel out of or deflect. That means continually asking him questions and demanding he support his responses with concrete proof. He has to be shown beyond a doubt that at least one of his precious ideals is unfounded and unsupported by the facts. Just one. After that, he can no longer assume that any of his other views are rock solid either. He will be forced to finally check his sources, which usually leads to a terrifying epiphany; he knows nothing! It’s like falling down a bottomless South American sinkhole with nothing to grab onto. I know, because I felt it once.

Eventually, he accepts the loss of his old identity, the foolish man that was so confident and certain, and moves on towards a frightening world where he must teach himself, instead of waiting around for others to teach him. The empowerment and the awe of this process is nearly indescribable, it has to be experienced to be understood. It’s like being able to see and to speak clearly for the first time. You never knew what you were missing because you had nothing to compare it to; only that unsettling knot at the pit of your stomach, telling you that something was very wrong. Now, to go back would be unthinkable, even hellish.

Nobody sees themselves as a useful idiot serving the interests of tyrants in the oppression of their fellow man. But, the fact remains that many Americans are in just such a position. You can hate them, you can even wish them ill, but don’t give up on them all. Contesting ignorance is not just the civic duty of the informed, it is also an act of compassion towards those who are not.

You can contact Giordano Bruno at: 

Alien Forest, Alien Ocean, Alien Sky

What is the endgame of chemically altered skies and waters and genetically altered plants and animals?

Imagine our declining pollinators – bees, moths, butterflies and bats – coming upon thousands of acres of toxic trees, genetically engineered so that every cell in the tree exudes pesticide, from crown to root. Imagine a world without pollinators. Without seed dispersers. Without soil microbes.

It would be a silent forest, a killing forest, an alien forest. No wonder Vandana Shiva scoffs at the moniker, biotechnology. “This is not a life technology. It’s a death science.”

Genetically engineered forests are a holocaust on nature. An award-winning documentary, (2005, 46 mins) details the appalling effects. (You can buy the full length film at )

Global Justice Ecology Project director, Ann Petermann defines the issue: “Genetically engineered trees are the greatest threat to the world’s remaining forests since the invention of the chainsaw.”

Jim Hightower calls them, “wildly invasive, explosively flammable, and insatiably thirsty for ground water.”

If planting a sterile, killer forest isn’t freaky enough, some GM trees will be viable and can and will contaminate natural species. Tree pollen can travel over 600 miles, according to a model created by Duke University, reported Petermann in 2006. Another study found pine pollen 400 miles from the nearest pines. This year, a scientist was surprised to find viable seeds 25 miles offshore.

“Sterile trees would also be able to spread their transgenes through vegetative propagation,” notes Petermann. Unlike with animals, being sexually sterile does not preclude reproduction when it comes to plants.

GM contamination occurs around the globe, as documented by GM Watch and the GM Contamination Register (among others). The technology cannot be contained. Genetically modified organisms are dominant over natural species and will forever alter Earth’s natural plants.

By the way, the latest batch of approved GM trees – 200,000 eucalyptus for seven southern states (Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida and South Carolina) – are engineered to be cold tolerant. A lawsuit has been filed to overturn their approval.

Chemically altering the atmosphere to be cooler

Not only are the powers-that-be genetically altering trees, food crops and animals, they’re also chemically altering the atmosphere. In 1976, the United Nations banned hostile environmental modification, after investigative reporter Jack Anderson uncovered its use in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Next month, October 2010, the UN will vote on a resolution to stop all EnMod activities.

While the thought police label chemtrails a “conspiracy theory,” it’s unlikely that the UN scientific body calling for their termination would base such a recommendation on fiction. Those interested in scientific and legal proof can review the sources in my piece on atmospheric geoengineering.

Climate change is still being debated, especially after the University of East Anglia was caught publishing false data showing temperature increases. Significant errors in a report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where it also falsely asserted as fact that Himilaya glaciers would melt by 2035, also fuel the debate.

Recently, an independent investigative body told the IPCC to stop lobbying on behalf of global warming programs. Members of the IPCC were also ordered to reveal their financial connections to such programs.

The temperature of the planet is characterized as too warm, and so the wealthy and powerful want to cool down the planet. If they do, those cold-tolerant GM trees will survive.

Altering the chemistry of the hydrosphere

Governments also support altering the chemistry of the hydrosphere. There is still much debate as to whether iron-seeding the oceans can remove enough carbon from the atmosphere to actually cool the planet. But, like the Cap and Trade scam, profit can be made so policy makers still support the idea.

Beyond deliberate attempts at geoengineering, we also have industry to blame for doing so. For over a century, humanity has been conned into poisoning the environment with toxic chemicals that end up in our streams, lakes and oceans. “Conventional” agriculture and industrial pollution is killing us.

Corporations profit by this, of course, enabled and protected by governments. The most recent example, allowing BP to spray at least two million gallons of toxic oil dispersants into the Gulf of Mexico, is a case in point. This is after the Earth Day Blowout that released up to 350 million gallons of oil into the Gulf. Those dispersants enable oil to more readily penetrate the bodies of sea life, and they interfere with oil-eating microbes.

They’re destroying an ocean and the US Senate is giving BP a pass. It to grant subpoena power to investigate, let alone criminally prosecute. Forget partisanship, says Dateline Zero, “they are the same party, and they get their money from the same people, they get their orders from the same people — and that includes big oil.”

The actions of the corporations involved and the governmental agencies charged with regulating them have caused an ongoing Extinction Level Event.

This is happening all over the world. Corporations are destroying the planet under the guise of seeking profit. But their ecocidal activities are so horrendous and so ubiquitous that profits seem hardly plausible as authentic motive.

When taken together – chemically altered skies and waters and genetically altered plants and animals – reasonable minds cannot but wonder at the alien transformation of Planet Earth that we are witnessing.

John McCain’s Attack On Liberty

Anyone paying attention knows that John McCain has been a Big-Government Globalist Neocon (BGGN) for virtually his entire senatorial career. As with many BGGNs hiding out in the Republican Party, McCain likes to talk about smaller government, but his track record is littered with the promotion of one big government program after another. But, what else would one expect from a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)?

Lately, however, McCain has outdone himself. He has introduced two bills in the US Senate that are about as Machiavellian as they could be. I am referring to S.3081, a bill that would authorize the federal government to detain American citizens indefinitely without trial, and S.3002, a bill that would authorize the federal government to regulate vitamins, minerals, and virtually all health and natural food products.

According to Examiner.com, “John McCain introduced a bill into the U.S. Senate which, if passed, would actually allow U.S. citizens to be arrested and detained indefinitely, all without Miranda rights or ever being charged with a crime.”

The Examiner report continued by saying “This bill, introduced by McCain, who despite overwhelming evidence, claims to be a ‘conservative,’ would not only take away our right to a trial, but would also allow the federal government to arrest and imprison anyone the current administration deems hostile.

“Of course, that would be the same administration whose Homeland Security Secretary has classified veterans, retired law enforcement, Ron Paul [and Chuck Baldwin] supporters, and conservatives as ‘terrorists.’”

The Examiner report concluded by saying “If it was not clear before, it should be now that John McCain has as little respect for the Constitution as he does for our borders.”

Amen!

If McCain gets his way, your constitutional right to a speedy trial by jury is gone, as well as your constitutional right to Habeas Corpus. But, of course, they would attempt to justify this by claiming it is being done in the name of national security and the war on terrorism.

See the Examiner report at:

http://tinyurl.com/examiner-mccain-s3081

Regarding McCain’s desire for the federal government to take over the vitamin industry, attorney Jonathan Emord wrote, “If you had any doubt about whether John McCain is a limited government conservative, you may put that doubt to rest–he is not. On February 3, 2010, John McCain introduced to the United States Senate the Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2010. Reflecting upon this poorly written bill, I am struck by the fact that John McCain apparently sees little difference between fissile material and dietary supplements. He is intent on regulating supplements as if they were radioactive enriched uranium rather than bioactive vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and botanicals that more often than not help people.

“The Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2010 enjoys support from the most liberal members of Congress. It is an invitation for the FDA to assume broad new powers and replicate here the system now operating in Europe over dietary supplements where dietary ingredients are presumed adulterated and unlawful to sell unless pre-approved by the government. In short, good bye free enterprise, good bye limited government, and hello more heavy handed, arbitrary and punitive FDA bias against the beleaguered dietary supplement industry.”

See Emord’s column at:

http://www.newswithviews.com/Emord/jonathan118.htm

Please remember, this is the same John McCain who, during the 2008 Presidential campaign, said he would “order the secretary of the treasury to immediately buy up the bad home loan mortgages in America.” Of course, McCain didn’t explain where this authority would come from, because such a proposal has no legal or constitutional authority. And, by the way, this one little sentence, if implemented, would cost taxpayers some $300 billion.

McCain also said he wanted to tap Mr. Climate Change Wacko himself, Al Gore, “to work in his administration on developing a new and much tougher U.N.-sponsored global warming treaty.”

(Source: Cliff Kincaid. See his column at:
http://www.newswithviews.com/Kincaid/cliff260.htm )

This is the same John McCain who addressed the Hoover Institution on May 1, 2007, and said if he were elected President, he would create a new international organization known as the “League of Democracies” (LD).

In advancing the LD, McCain said, “We should go further and start bringing democratic peoples and nations from around the world into one common organization, a worldwide League of Democracies.” He then added, “The new League of Democracies would form the core of an international order . . .”

See McCain’s speech to the Hoover Institution at:

http://www.cfr.org/publication/13252/

If McCain and his CFR buddies get their way, this new LD would be a United Nations on steroids! As I said all over America on the campaign trail in 2008, “John McCain is a globalist.” Of course, so is Barack Obama. In fact, every President since (and including) George H.W. Bush has been a full-fledged, rotten-to-the-core globalist.

And, yes, this is the same John McCain who was one of the primary movers and shakers (along with Obama, Lindsey Graham, and G.W. Bush) who attempted (and would again) to provide amnesty to illegal aliens and open America’s borders to illegal immigration.

And now McCain wants the federal government to take over the vitamin industry, and he wants to give the federal government the power to jail American citizens indefinitely without trial.

The citizens of Arizona can do the American people–and liberty itself–a great favor this year by giving Senator John McCain his walking papers. Big-Government dinosaurs like McCain are an albatross around the neck of freedom and constitutional government. If we don’t send them packing now, the shackles they put around our throats will become insufferable.

Materialism that Sustains the Western Democracies is Exhausting Itself

Interview with Fredrick Toben…

Dr. Fredrick Toben is a German author and founder and former director of the Adelaide Institute. He has written numerous books on education, political science and history and is best known as a historical revisionist who has extensively argued the veracity of Holocaust accounts by the Jewish historians. Due to his holocaust denial, he has been imprisoned three times in Germany, United Kingdom and Australia.

This is an in-depth interview with Dr. Toben in which we’ve discussed his viewpoints regarding holocaust, the unconditional supports of the United States for Israel, the plight of Palestinian nation under the Israeli occupation and the fate of Middle East peace process.

Kourosh Ziabari: Western politician usually boast of their commitment to liberal values and democratic principles such as the freedom of speech and human rights; however, you were sentenced to prison two times as a result of expressing your viewpoints and ideas. Should the same case happen in a third-world, non-aligned country such as Iran, one can hardly imagine the extent of international condemnations and criticism that would come next. Aggregately, you spent 12 months in prison and this should be very painful. Tell us about your experiences in the prisons of Germany, United Kingdom and Australia.

Fredrick Toben: I think the best way to begin answering this question is by repeating my sometime misunderstood quip: ‘The world is my prison’. This realization has been strengthened by my regularly visiting Iran since 1999 when I left Mannheim Prison after seven months and spent a week in Teheran. I was impressed with the Iranian youth who had a strong national bond with their country, so different to the Germans and other peoples in the so-called western democracies.

This difference is one of mindset. In the West we have pushed the hedonistic-consumer life-style to the point where individuals self-destruct through substance abuse and nihilistic thought processes that suggest life is fun and games. As a teacher I opposed such a world view because the act of thinking about things is actually hard work. Admittedly, for some it is easier than for others but all of us should have to think about our value system, the guide that enables us to lead a productive and balanced life.

I was impressed how determined Iranian students are in their attitudes towards life. Admittedly, it helps that there are still some legal constraints that support a form of public modesty, something we have lost in the west. I was also impressed by the wisdom they expressed, for example, some could not understand why in the West an individual who has personal problems, as if that is an abnormal thing, goes off and pays money to a stranger who then listens to his personal problems, often about his most intimate problems. I was informed that in Iran this matter is handled by a person visiting family and friends, cousins, aunts or uncles, who then advise on how best to solve a pressing problem. I have been advised that now there is also a new growth industry – psychological counselling, which is a brain-child of the Freudian mindset, and in turn its wellspring is found in Talmud, the Jewish moral guide. It is little wonder that too many individuals cannot accept such thoughts intruding into their value system and becoming a part of their Weltanschauung-world view.

Just getting back to freedom as such, if we use the concept freedom then we must always ask the questions: freedom from what and freedom for what? In the West we have the freedom to self-destruct, this being the logical consequences of consumer society’s motor that predatory capitalism has constructed for us. I have just returned from a seven-week American tour and saw the tragedies being played out as the financial system is crashing all around and vainly trying to resurrect itself. The home foreclosures are a catastrophe, but as is fitting within the hedonistic blame-game, the individuals who received loans from banks that they could never repay are blamed for causing their own destruction. This is sad because we should be looking at the system operating in one of the wealthiest countries in the world that permits poverty and homelessness to flourish while individuals within that system receive millions of dollars in performance bonuses.

As far as my prison time is concerned, I refuse to adopt a victim mentality because that is unproductive. As Captain Eric May’s wife, Gretchen, reminded me when I visited them in July this year in Houston, as she tended to her totally disabled husband, “It’s useless to sit on the pity-pot and better to get on with the job’. That’s the imperative, to get on with the job, and if your body gives up on you, then it is the brain that sees you through. This is also true of prison itself. The authorities may have your body but they still do not have your mind, not yet. There were moved afoot to declare individuals who refuse to believe in the ‘Holocaust’ as ‘delusional’, the first step to have them psychiatrically committed. But then we know how such a story tragically ends, as in the 1962 novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

In 1999 I spent time at Yalta, Crimea, where I met a psychiatrist who informed me how he had to certify insane any Soviet Union dissenter. Anyone who refused to go along with Marxism as a state ideology would be given the treatment. In Poland up to 1989 it was a dogma to believe that the Germans perpetrated the Katyn Massacre, when in fact it was the mainly Jewish staffed Soviet secret service that did it. The ‘Holocaust’ has reached this stage in a number of European countries – and we have to ask ourselves why this is so.

The usual response is that questioning the ‘holocaust’ is hurtful to the survivors and it is defaming the memory of the dead, and it is also diminishing the Nazi war-crimes and will lead to a re-surgence of Nazism. All of these reasons are baseless because history does not repeat itself in any such detail. Further, any ‘Holocaust’ trial is a mere show-trial reminiscent of the Soviet show trials where the accused is already guilty but where a confession of guilt helps to minimize the sentence. During the witch trial era a show of contrition and remorse helped to make the execution a little swifter because it eliminated torture sessions prior to being executed.

Any country that enacts such laws on the pretext of protecting the ‘Holocaust’ is perverting its legal system. The Austrians, Germans and Swiss have done it, but the Anglo-Common Law countries are resisting it vehemently because they can see that it could have a backlash on its own system of law, which guarantees basic individual rights.

But it must be remembered that all western democracies have that far more subtler mechanism of imprisonment for its people, namely the financial straight jacket. In today’s world the only value that a person needs to develop is his credit worthiness, while such things as character are irrelevant. A person’s credit rating supersedes all, until one begins to question the underpinning ideology of this financial system, which, among others, is upheld by the ‘Holocaust’ ideology.

KZ: Let’s talk about the main issue of our concern. Some scholars and thinkers believe that, in order to escape from the responsibility of hosting the Jewish immigrants who were displaced following the Second World War, Canada, the United States, Germany and Britain, planned the establishment of a Jewish state on the Palestinian land so as to get away with the burden of receiving the Jewish refugees themselves. What do you think about this viewpoint?

FT: The Second World War’s legacy is still with us to this day and that is why it is important to have an historical perspective on all this, namely that World War One and World War Two were actually a 30-year war period, which can be called a European civil war. The outcome was the establishment of the State of Israel that is quite clear when one asks: who benefited from this conflict? The Zionist program of the 1890s had come to fruition at the expense of the Palestinians. The fabricated ‘Holocaust’ narrative assists in cementing the myth that Palestine was a land without people, and the world knows that to this day ethnic cleansing continues unabated with the western democracies not lifting a finger to stop this process.

When White House correspondent of over 50 years, Lebanese Helen Thomas, was asked about the Palestinian crisis she responded honestly: send the Jews back home. Where is home, she was asked. Germany and Poland, she replied. The next day she apologized and lost her job.

It must be remembered that any kind of war is multi-faceted, as we witnessed in our time with the Iraq-Iran war, the 2003 Iraq invasion by the Anglo-American-Zionist forces, the Afghan conflict and the current intention by these forces to attack Iran.

The ideological battle lines are still national versus international, and not the false dialectic of left and right-wing politics, as Anthony Lowenstein wishes to believe. As a Jew Lowenstein opposes the Zionists but believes in the ‘Holocaust’ ideology-lies as well as in the Marxist-Trotskyist nonsense that is based on Talmud thinking.

KZ: Your viewpoint regarding Holocaust has been usually distorted and misrepresented. What’s your exact stance on it? Did the mass killing of Jews by the Nazi forces in concentration camps take place? Has its extent been exaggerated by the Israelis to attract the commiseration of the Western powers? Is it being employed as an instrument of subjugating and oppressing the Palestinian people?

FT: I follow Professors Arthur Butz and Robert Faurisson in their deliberations on this topic, and both conclude that the premise, pillars on which the ‘Holocaust’ narrative rests, 6 million Jews killed, systematic state extermination policy, murder weapon a gas chamber, cannot be sustained as being the truth of the matter. As Butz says, it is rubbish to hold such a view, and Faurisson calls it a lie. It is not for Revisionists to prove their assertions but for those who believe in the ‘Holocaust’ to prove their case, which to date has not been done. Faurisson’s challenge: ‘Show me or draw me the homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz’ has not been taken up by anyone. What does happen is legal persecution that leads to personal and financial ruin and imprisonment. That speaks for itself, and then there is the defamation of those who refuse to believe in the ‘Holocaust’ with the following shut-up words, hater, Holocaust denier, antisemitist, racist, Nazi, and even terrorist.

It is thanks to the courageous Iranian President, Dr Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who informed the world that the ‘Holocaust’ is being misused by those who oppress the Palestinian people. This linkage is fundamental in solving the crisis facing the Middle East, and only after its resolution will the area come to rest. The focus on Iran as a rogue nuclear state is a mere pretext used by the Anglo-American-Zionist powers to retain the myth of the Zionist entity called Israel.

KZ: You’ve proclaimed that Germans never gassed anyone during World War II and have no need to feel guilty about anything except for neglecting their cultural roots. We may accept the notion that Holocaust did not happen during the Second World War and was minimally a lie which the Zionists fabricated to take advantage from Europe; however, we have a number of renowned Holocaust survivors such as Elie Wiesel, Władysław Bartoszewski, Eric Kandel, Jack Triemel and Arek Harsh who have retold their own accounts of those days and even seen the demise of their relatives and family members in person. What do you say about that?

FT: The fact that serious Holocaust questioners are routinely legally silenced speaks for itself. Only in the USA with its First Amendment is there still absolute freedom to discuss this topic. But even now there are moves afoot to eliminate the First Amendment, and the recent appointment of Elena Kagan to the US Supreme Court may cause this to happen.

In my book Arbeit Macht Frei: Impertinent Incarceration, I make reference to a television program, ABC Good Morning America, 18 February 2009, where a Herman Rosenblat admits he has not been telling the truth about his concentration camp experience, but for him this made-up story was truthful because he imagined it to be true! Such nonsense is well documented as typical ‘Holocaust’ material.

The above individuals would have great problems in a court of law where truth-telling is still demanded. For example, in the 1988 Zündel Toronto court case Professor Rauol Hilberg, the author of the definitive 1985 book: The Destruction of the European Jews, stated that the mentioned two written Hitler orders did not exist. We are thus led to believe that Germans began the extermination process without a plan, without an order, without anything except an intuitive feel of what Adolf Hitler wanted them to do. Such premise is a nonsense because anyone who knows how societies work and how bureaucracies don’t move unless there is a written order.

That Elie Wiesel is a fraudster has been well established and Google will produce the goods on this, but he has academic tenure, which protects him, and so the mythology will continue until he is no more.

KZ: Why does the United States support Israel so unconditionally? In actuality, Israel has been immune to all of the international laws and regulations without being questioned by any of the international bodies. It has attacked Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Tunisia since its establishment and recurrently subjugated the Palestinian people, killing the innocent civilians, destroying their homes, building illegal settlements and above all, possessing nuclear weapons in violation of the UNSC resolution 487. What would happen if any country rather than Israel had committed such inhumane crimes?

FT: Essentially, Israel embodies the New World Order that emerged out of the World War Two conflict, and this NWO is crumbling because of its own internal contradictions, something that the Iranians have recognised so well. However, the materialism that still physically sustains the western democracies is exhausting itself. This is so evident by the number of countries where US troops are stationed. This physical overreach has a negative impact on the US itself, one being that its physical infrastructure is falling apart. The Arizona effort to secure its won borders from Mexico is a mere symptom of a national resistance against the internationalism preached by the proponents of the NWO.

An additional problem to this is that the proponents of this new internationalism in the form of the New World Order requires a steady tax life-line. The aim of the carbon tax that was supposed to help us fight climate change/global warming/greenhouse effect/ozone hole, etc. was designed to give the NWO that steady sustaining tax income. It has not happened and one consequence in Australia of that failure was a change in Prime Minister. Mr Kevin Rudd was a strong proponent of this internationalism in the form of the climate change ideology. His attendance at the 2009 Copenhagen conference aimed to establish a global tax system that the World Bank or the IMF would administer.

KZ: On March 14, you quoted Herald Scotland’s reporter Rob Edwards as writing that hundreds of powerful US “bunker-buster” bombs were shipped from California to the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in preparation for a possible attack on Iran. Do you take these actions seriously? Israel and United States, over the past 6 years, have been threatening Iran with an imminent war recurrently; however, their threats never went beyond mere propaganda. Will the United States and Israel be attacking Iran over its nuclear program?

FT: The problem faced by the western predatory capitalistic war machine is the financial collapse that is built into its faulty model. The cycle is grow and bust, then plunder and recede and enjoy. The 9:11 tragedy of 2001 managed to hide one such a ‘bust’ but by 2008 there was another one and the end is not yet in sight. Countries that are reasonably self-sufficent will survive the crash, while others dependent on world markets will not.

Such economic model; was opposed by the National Socialists under Adolf Hitler who withdrew from international financial agreements because it was causing too much fain for its people. The new policy was to become AUTARK, self-sufficient and not as is the case so markedly, a network of interdependent enterprises that produce goods as cheaply as possible without having any allegiance to a community, except that of the international banking system’s set of values, which is profits above social wellbeing of individuals.

The scenario for war against Iran is a logical step within the Anglo-American-Zionist’s war machine strategic planning, and the Iraq and Afghan wars are not enough to sustain the global economy. The overreach is becoming evident as, for example, US soldiers return from tours of duty totally crushed by the hopelessness of the situation, by the conflict dragging on too long.

Such weariness is also felt in Israel where individuals cannot anymore participate in being members of an army that is administering a state. The flight of Jews from Israel to Germany, the USA-Canada, Britain and Australia-New Zealand is seriously undermining morale. It is only a matter of time that there will not be any one willing to continue the occupation. We see similar trends within the US military where aliens join up to fight and their reward is receiving US citizenship. This gives the notion of a mercenary army, as was the French Foreign Legion, a new meaning. It is essentially an outsourcing of military services, something detrimental to a national state.

The Iranian nuclear program issue, like the ‘Holocaust’ is a smokescreen that hides far deeper issues with which the Anglo-American-Zionist war machine has to come to terms with.

KZ: Do you differentiate between Zionists as the followers of an expansionistic, racist ideology whose ultimate objective is establishing a state with its frontiers spanned from Nile to Euphrates and the Jews as the followers of a monotheistic, divine religion? It’s been seen frequently said that the Zionists and Jews have been conflated unjustly. What’s your take on that?

FT: My academic training has been in philosophy and that enables me to think and work in universals, truth, honour, justice, etc. I have difficulties thinking in racial terms because I follow Carl Jung’s mindset, as opposed to Siegmund Freud’s infantile emphasis on sexual matters. Jung’s archetype thinking postulates that humans have a common denominator that expresses itself in character types.

I vividly recall my teaching time in Nigeria where I came across individuals who were eager to learn and develop their minds, and for a teacher this is inspirational. As I retuned to Australia I came across students who didn’t want to learn because for them thinking was hard work and they were not imbued with such mindset because our education philosophy is still based on hedonism, learning has to be fun. To that I say, yes, let’s have fun but then let’s also do some serious thinking, and that’s hard work.

The Jews are not a race and to have Zionists calling themselves Jewish is a contradiction in terms. It is much like Antony Lowenstein fighting the Zionists-nationalists but at the same time calling himself an atheist but also a Jewish Trotzkyist who believes in the ‘Holocaust’. Out of this Talmudic mindset emerges a victim mentality that is played to the full when it is a matter of the battle-of-the-wills. If a person does not get their way, then they play victim, of discrimination, etc. When they get their way, they become tyrannical in their behaviour, as we see the Zionists behaving in Palestine. It is the case of the man who kills his parents, then pleads before a judge for mercy because he is now an orphan.

I cannot discriminate against individuals who hold a firm and sincere religious belief, and that is why I cannot accept that being Jewish is a racist matter. For example Sir Yehudi Menuhin’s son, Gerard, who wrote the Introduction to my book 50 Days in Gaol, is anything but a Zionist and like his father opposed the settlements. In 1991 before the Israeli parliament he said, among other things:

“This wasteful governing by fear, by contempt for the basic dignities of life, this steady asphyxiation of a dependent people, should be the very last means to be adopted by those who themselves know too well the awful significance, the unforgettable suffering of such an existence. It is unworthy of my great people, the Jews, who have striven to abide by a code of moral rectitude for some 5,000 years, who can create and achieve a society for themselves such as we see around us but can yet deny the sharing of its great qualities and benefits to those dwelling amongst them.” Jerusalem Post, 6 May 1991.

Nathan Chofshi of Herliza, one of the pioneer Jewish settlers in Palestine, said in the Jewish Letter, New York, February 9, 1959: “We came and tuned the native Arabs into refugees, and still we dare to slander and malign them, to besmirch their name. Instead of being ashamed of what we did and trying to undo some of the evil committed….we justify our terrible acts and even attempt to glorify them.” This is what the Zionists did to the world, which then “bowed down to them.”

This above quotations, of course raises further issues but it follows the line of reasoning that the UN Security Council gave on 1 April 1948: “The occupant does not in any way acquire sovereign right in the occupied territory but exercise a temporary right of administration on a trustee basis….”

But it’s not only the Jewish world that is at fault, and my quip: Don’t blame the Jews, blame those that bend to their pressure, still holds. For example, there are Israel’s supporters who let all this happen at the expense of the peoples them residing in Palestine.

Think of the following: The “Provisional Government of Israel” consisted of international Zionists gangsters, aliens from many foreign countries throughout the world; How could Israel possible convert robbery, looting and its acts of crime into an act of benevolence or transmit them into acts of decency and transform aggression into “peace-loving?” Many leading Americans defended and praised this atrocity. Voices such as the following were in the minority: Father Ralph Gorman, Editor of the Sign Magazine, wrote in February 1960: “We aided and abetted the Zionists and Israelis who drove nearly a million Arabs from their homes and replaced them with a million Jewish immigrants.”

The UN Charter admits as a member “A peace-loving State which accepts the obligations of the Charter – is able and willing to carry out these obligations”. This the Jews have never recognized but instead have ignored the UN and the Security Council ever since. In any case a so-called state of Israel never existed in fact or in law or in history and so it is nothing but an illegal “proclamation” and an illegal occupation of Palestinian land.

The demographic factor in this area, of course, is also of importance and were there any democratic solution drawn up in time the Palestinians would outbreed the Jews living in Israel and a solution would emerge where Arabic-speaking Palestinians would hold the majority vote. For the ultra-Orthodox Jews this is untenable because they want to be by themselves, even not associate with their ‘secular’ Jews. This latter point could develop into a societal implosion, something that has already begun with Israel relying on migrant workers to keep the country going. Add to that the legal definition of who is a Jew and many more societal problems will emerge, which perhaps will rescue the dogmatic into yielding to the inevitable – a one-state solution as proposed by Iran.

Finally: Let’s remember that the international Zionists leaders led by David Ben-Gurion committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in Palestine as defined by Article 6 of the Nuremberg Charter by which the German National Socialist leaders were convicted by the International Military Tribunal and hanged…but there is a pragmatic and non idealistic mindset that aims to establish physical facts on the ground that sets a new dialectic, then physical force enables them to exercise power over others. The latest example that particularly succeeded before the lie became evident was the insider-job of 9:11, which pitted the so-called western democracies against the world of Islam on the pretext that the west is bringing freedom and democracy to the Muslim world where there is no freedom and democracy. But thinking along such lines goes beyond this current interview – and I thank you for the opportunity for giving me a say.

Gulf Oil Gusher: Methane, Climate & Dead Zones

By DK Matai…

Gas and Methane Levels At Record

As much as one million times the normal level of methane is showing up near the Gulf of Mexico oil gusher, enough potentially to create dead zones in the water. “These are higher levels than we have ever seen at any other location in the ocean itself,” according to sources cited by Reuters. The “flow team” of the US Geological Survey estimates that 2,900 cubic feet of natural gas, which primarily contains methane, is being released into the Gulf waters with every barrel of oil. The constant flow of around 65,000 barrels of crude oil places the total daily amount of natural gas at over 188 million cubic feet. So far, over 13 billion cubic feet may have been released, making it one of the most vigorous methane eruptions in modern human history. The crude oil from the “Macondo Prospect” well contains around 40 percent methane, compared with about 5 percent found in typical oil deposits. To add to the challenge, methane and other toxic gases are trapped in deep water locations. Methane measurements can give a view to the extent of the oil gush in the Gulf of Mexico. Note our previous briefing: “Gulf Oil Gusher: Danger of Tsunamis From Methane?”

Accelerating Effects

Like-for-like, methane is 23 times more potent than Carbon Dioxide or CO2 at trapping solar radiation, as recognised within the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. Methane is far more reflective and calculated over a period of 20 years, as opposed to 100 years, its radiative force is 72 times that of CO2 emissions. This makes vast releases of methane very powerful “positive feedback” loops that accelerate global warming.

Volatile Dead Zones

Dead zones are large regions of water that are very low in oxygen, a condition known as “hypoxia” and therefore they can’t support life. At times in earth’s history, the ocean currents have failed to stir the deepest waters. That is true today of the entire Black Sea, for instance. In those cases, whole ocean basins have stagnated. Conditions there eventually become anoxic — without oxygen — as the oxygen in the water disappears denying life. Above the water, the dead zones don’t look any different from the surrounding waters. But along the bottom, there’s practically no oxygen — so fish don’t swim in it, and bottom dwelling creatures die off.

Underwater toxic clouds of oil and methane gas have now been confirmed as originating from the Gulf of Mexico oil gusher. One of these clouds, encompassing an area the size of San Francisco and 600 feet thick, was found at 3,000 feet or more beneath the surface. Researchers studying the clouds have found concentrations of methane up to 10,000 times greater than normal and oxygen levels depleted by 30 to 40 percent below normal, according to various agencies. Given the rising number of numerous underwater clouds of methane of various sizes, what is the likelihood that they make their way to the surface either gradually or explosively?

As a result of the toxic methane clouds, oil and dispersants, organisms in the Gulf of Mexico are suffocating and it also explains why microbes that require oxygen to break down the oil are not cleaning the spill naturally. Worse is that long-lived “dead zones”, ie zones without oxygen are likely, drifting through the Gulf of Mexico and perhaps over deep-water ecosystems where recovery time can be centuries, or not at all. Other larger clouds have been reported, and a large-scale coordinated effort is in motion.

Methane Driven Oceanic Eruption

It is worth considering the following scenario based on a volcano-like release of methane. Prof Gregory Ryskin, associate professor of chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern University in the US, suggests that the culprit for the Permian extinction event may be an enormous cascading eruption of natural gas — primarily methane –coming from the ocean depths. In a scientific article published in the September 2003 issue of Geology, Prof Ryskin suggested that huge combustible clouds produced by methane gas trapped in stagnant bodies of water and suddenly released could have killed off the majority of marine life and land animals and plants at the end of the Permian era — long before dinosaurs lived and died. According to Prof Ryskin, “Methane Driven Oceanic Eruption” is nothing new. Gigantic eruptions of methane gas dissolved in the deep ocean waters have occurred regularly throughout history, including ice ages and perhaps even the Biblical flood. “That amount of energy is absolutely staggering,” according to Ryskin. “As soon as one accepts this mechanism, it becomes clear that if it happened once it can happen again.” However, Prof Mark Maslin, director of the University College London (UCL) Environment Institute, points out that the conditions during the end of the Permian may have differed in comparison to the modern world, in terms of temperature, circulation and oxygen level within oceans.

Like A Volcano

Unlike oil, significant amount of methane gas dissolves in deep cold water. However, as that methane-water rises, the gas comes out of the solution and creates a methane mist, whose volume is seven times greater than pure water because of much reduced pressure. The resulting eruption is likely to spread quickly and release a part of the ocean basin’s worth of natural gas in great clouds into the atmosphere. These could ignite because the amounts of flammable gas would be enormous. The subsequent fires and explosions would be catastrophic. A similar process is responsible for the most violent, explosive volcanic eruptions such as the eruptions of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE or Mount St Helens in 1980. Those eruptions were driven by the escape of gases — primarily water vapour — dissolved in the liquid magma. However, in the underwater case the gas would be methane dissolved in liquid sea water with a similar result. A detailed description is available in Prof Ryskin’s paper — “Methane-driven oceanic eruptions and mass extinctions” — with multiple citations of the paper by well known peers across the world.

Climate Domino Effects

Scientists have been discussing a number of scenarios of methane escaping from the ocean floor for some time. The sudden release of large amounts of natural gas — primarily methane — could be a cause of past, present and future climate chaos. It is believed that the release of trapped methane is a main factor in the global warming of 6°C that happened during the end-Permian extinction. “Methane Driven Oceanic Eruption” also predicts this will greatly affect available oxygen content of the atmosphere. As temperature rises, the permafrost is likely to melt. The methane released from beneath the permafrost could increase temperatures further, melting the permafrost faster, releasing even more methane, and so on. It is feared that such a scenario would accelerate Global Warming to the point where nothing humankind could do would reverse the problem. Note our previous briefing: “Butterfly Effect, Oil Gusher & Edge of Chaos: World Wide Summit?” However on the positive side, Prof Maslin in London points out that our estimates of the amount of methane locked up in gas hydrates on the planet have dropped over the last 3 decades as we learn more. A summary of our current knowledge can be found in “Gas Hydrates: Past and Future Geohazard?” by Maslin et al published in 2010.

Difference Between Methane and Gas Hydrates

Methane Clathrate — also known as Methane Hydrates or Gas Hydrates — is a form of naturally occurring water ice that contains a large amount of methane within its crystal structure. Methane Hydrates — “the ice that burns” — are one of the alternative sources of hydrocarbon fuels — and one with reserves estimated to be larger than those of oil, gas and coal combined. Methane hydrates were first discovered in the 1970s. Their unique characteristic is that they are seemingly frozen and yet flammable. Over the last few years, China and India have reported massive finds of frozen methane gas off their coasts, which they hoped would satisfy their energy needs.

Environmentalists have expressed their concern that tapping methane hydrates could have adverse effects on the world climate from escaping methane that comes from the ocean floor. They believe that this methane could heat up the world’s climate to a far greater extent than coal, oil and natural gas do today. However, this number is constantly being revised downwards and Prof David Archer et al at the Department of The Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago, suggested in 2009 that methane release from gas hydrates could add a maximum of another 0.5°C to global warming by 2100.

Global Warming & The Gun Hypothesis

Although not related to Prof Ryskin’s “Methane Driven Oceanic Eruption”, the clathrate gun hypothesis works on the basis that rises in sea temperatures can trigger the sudden release of methane from methane clathrate compounds buried in seabeds and permafrost. The methane itself is a powerful greenhouse gas and this leads to further temperature rises and methane clathrate destabilisation — in effect initiating a runaway process as irreversible, once started, as the firing of a gun. There is stronger evidence that runaway methane clathrate breakdown may have caused drastic alteration of the ocean environment and the atmosphere of earth on a number of occasions in the past. The seminal paper in this regard is the “Methane Hydrates in Quaternary Climate Change: The Clathrate Gun Hypothesis” by Prof James Kennett et al, at the Department of Geological Sciences and Marine Science Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara, published in 2003. Prof Maslin points out that subsequent scientific research has shown that though this was a very nice theory at the time, recent evidence suggests that the expansion and contraction of both tropical and high latitude wetlands control the long term evolution of methane in the atmosphere.

Oceanic Methane’s Significance

What caused the worst mass extinction in earth’s history 251 million years ago? An asteroid or comet colliding with earth? A greenhouse effect? Volcanic eruptions in Siberia? Or an entirely different culprit? There is strong evidence that a runaway methane driven oceanic eruption may have caused drastic alteration of the ocean environment and the atmosphere of earth on a number of occasions in the past, over timescales of tens of thousands of years; most notably in connection with the Permian extinction event. Though these extremely low probablity high impact events from the past seem like science fiction, they do provide evidence of how the Earth System can operate. Prof Maslin in London suggests that methane release from gas hydrates is an additional effect. This could potentially be another geohazard, alongside natural gas or methane release in large quantities. We need to study methane gas emissions and monitor methane hydrates to ensure we understand the explosive potential of these reserves and the likelihood of tsunami generation, in combination, or on their own.

Conclusion

It is important to recognise the role that methane has played throughout history in causing massive turbulence within the Earth System. At this stage of the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe, it is important to pay close attention to the role that methane is playing in creating dead zones and potential sources for volatile eruption that could affect not just sea-based, but also land- and air-based life. Although a global-scale methane driven oceanic eruption is highly unlikely at present, there may be stagnant, oxygen-poor basins in the ocean where methane might accumulate to dangerous levels. Even a small explosion of that methane could cause a catastrophe. Imagine what would happen if such an event occurred. Tsunamis could be generated in continuous waves. Methane and water clouds would auto-ignite and the massive fires could cause widespread destruction. Consequences could be global. “I have little doubt there will be another methane-driven eruption — though not on the same scale as 251 million years ago — unless humans intervene,” says Prof Ryskin. Even if there is only a small probability that such eruptions could occur, we should start looking for areas of the ocean where this might be most likely, beginning with the underwater gas clouds and dead zones now being spawned by the Gulf of Mexico oil gusher. Could the methane also be mined using techniques developed within hydro-pondages? Maybe we could tap the methane as an energy source and burn it to produce electricity before it gets into the atmosphere. What would be your suggestions for diffusing those very large underwater methane clouds especially if, on their way to the surface, they could erupt explosively?

[ENDS]

Related Briefings

Butterfly Effect, Oil Gusher & Edge of Chaos: World Wide Summit?

Gulf Oil Gusher: Danger of Tsunamis From Methane?

Japan Takes Lead in Wireless Power? 21stC Global Energy Supply

Wireless Power: Has The Time Come?

Beyond Oil: Beginning of a New Era?

What Is the Key to Survival in a Constantly Changing Environment?

Underwater Dirty ‘Black Gold’ Volcano: Unprecedented Environmental Emergency

References:

Methane-driven oceanic eruptions and mass extinctions

Active methane venting observed at giant pockmarks along the US mid-Atlantic shelf break

Analysis of methane and sulfate flux in methane-charged sediments from the Mississippi Canyon, Gulf of Mexico

Life at the edge of methane ice: microbial cycling of carbon and sulfur in Gulf of Mexico gas hydrates

Methane-induced dolomite “chimneys” on the Kuroshima Knoll, Ryukyu islands, Japan

Gas hydrates: past and future geohazard?

Solubility of crude oil in methane as a function of pressure and temperature

A review of methane and gas hydrates in the dynamic, stratified system of the Blake Ridge region, offshore southeastern North America

The Sissano, Papua New Guinea tsunami of July 1998 — offshore evidence on the source mechanism

Tsunami deposits in the geological record

Tsunamis and Tsunami Sedimentology

Tsunami hazards in Europe

Nonlinear analysis on dynamic behavior of buoyancy-induced flame oscillation under swirling flow

The structure of buoyant methane and propane diffusion flames

Effects of temperature and wave conditions on chemical dispersion efficacy of heavy fuel oil in an experimental flow-through wave tank

Source: www.mi2g.net

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