Volatility

July 31, 2018

Strict Mores

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The record is clear that the USDA and EPA intend and desire all the harms and failures of poison-based agriculture. Pretending to deal with the dicamba crisis the EPA explicitly endorsed part one of my corporate template with this quote: “We’re committed to taking appropriate action for the 2018 growing season with an eye toward ensuring that the technology is available, number one, to growers but that it is used responsibly.” Throughout the crisis the agency has provided Monsanto with its imprimatur, as per part three of the template. The EPA itself refused to perform or require volatility testing in the first place. Therefore both Monsanto and the EPA strictly admit the volatility of Monsanto’s XtendiMax. Such an admission is always implicit where those with the resources and responsibility to test refuse to do so and work to prevent anyone else from doing so. In the broad sense this is Strict Proof that the corporations and governments know or believe pesticides and GMOs to be harmful to human health. If they didn’t believe this they certainly would have performed legitimate safety tests instead of promulgating the religious lie of “substantial equivalence” along with a passel of methodologically fraudulent tests and rumors of “secret science”, a contradiction in terms. We know that the worst we can speculate is in fact true. The corporations and governments themselves admit this, proven by their consistent pattern of action.
 
In the same way, any consistent course of action on the part of those who can choose a different course proves their Strict Intent to cause all the consistent significant effects of their consistent course of action. Here we see the intent of Monsanto and the US government to wipe out all non-GM soy, as much of any other kind of farming, gardening, ornamentals, and wild plants as possible, and along the way to poison the soil and environment as totally as possible. Whatever human and animal health effects soon arise from the atmospheric suffusion of the dicamba zone also have been intended by these organizations.
 
Monsanto and the US government want to maximize dicamba use. The corporations of course want to maximize sales, from a mundane profiteering point of view. But far beyond mundane profits, maximal poison deployment is intended to masximize monoculture power and control. The corporate-technocratic system seeks this regardless of destructive effects, and intentionally to maximize the destruction. By Strict Intent there’s no practical difference between willful premeditated nihilism and the active will and premeditation to destroy. Therefore there is no moral difference, and there should be no difference from the perspective of the law or policy. This doctrine is necessary especially in a case like poison drift where it’s difficult to impossible to pinpoint responsibility for specific damage and where, even if this circumstance of non-responsibility hadn’t been anticipated and pre-planned, all the perpetrators rush to take advantage of it in a deliberate, systematic way.
 
Therefore it follows that abolitionist doctrine must be to impose Strict Liability upon all participants in the poison racket, from developers to sellers to users. It’s the same principle as for any other criminal conspiracy: The guy driving the getaway car is just as guilty of murder as the robber inside the bank who pulls the trigger, even though he never left the car. Everyone knows how toxic and destructive all these chemicals are, the corporations and regulators most of all, so no one can claim innocent ignorance. This is a core movement principle and the movement must promise to put this into effect wherever it gets the power. This principle follows practically from the principles of Strict Proof and Strict Intent.
 
The same principle applies to all programs of ecological and social destruction, all the actions of the economic civilization. If there was ever a time when anyone could claim to be innocently mistaken about the consequences of Mammon, of capitalism, of empowering corporations, most of all the consequences of treating our only home the Earth as a resource mine, waste dump, and subject of sadistic vandalism; if there ever was such a time (I doubt it myself), that time is in the distant past. No one has been innocent for a long, long time. Most of all, it’s beyond any dispute that the cadres of government, corporations, academia, and media are fully conscious, or willfully ignorant, of all the primary consequences of the system’s anti-ecological and anti-human assaults. They are all Nuremburg criminals to their rotted soulless core. We can no longer think in terms of questions or doubt. The crimes and the culpability are existential.
 
Everyone, abolitionists and reformers alike, should take up these doctrines, make them mainstays of philosophy and political communication, and promise to make them the law of the land.
 
 
To prevent confusion, I’m not saying there’s a master cabal somewhere consciously plotting out all the evils, though for example in the case of poison agriculture Monsanto certainly is conscious of much of it. I’m describing an existential inertia and a biological campaign. Therefore we’re only dealing proximately with conventional moral philosophy. Rather, we’re dealing with an elemental process whose morality we must view more primally in terms of its consistent action rather than foolish speculation about the “consciousness” of the creatures driving it. You might as well speculate about the consciousness of corporations, patents, and dollars while you’re at it. Anyway, in this case the primary organisms involved are Agrobacterium tumefaciens; soybeans, corn, and cotton; weeds like Palmer amaranth; pathogens like salmonella and botulins. The humans involved behave according to the same patterns. The technocratic propagandists who exalt corporate personhood, artificial intelligence, and robots are similarly disparaging their own role on the other, “post-human” end.
 
We see how inadequate conventional moralizing is to the crisis. Rather we need the strict morality of Strict Intent, Strict Proof, Strict Liability. We must apply it to the corporations, the regulators, the scientific establishment, academia, the mainstream media, the technocratic political class in general.
 
 
Adapted from part four of my series on the dicamba crisis.
 
 
 
 
 

July 30, 2018

We Need Renewable Ideas, Not Stale Ones About “Renewables”

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They may say I look like Don Quixote, but they’re the ones charging a mirage.

 
 
Industrial renewables are unsustainable because of their dependency on a foundation of cheap plentiful fossil fuels: Especially, they and the industrial economy they’re supposed to rescue would continue to be completely dependent upon fossil fuels for transportation. Industrial renewables also are bound up in ecological destruction: The destruction of arid ecosystems for CSP monocultures, the murder of rivers for hydroelectric, the straight extractionist rape from the metals mining it requires. And of course the wholesale massacre of birds by industrial windmills. It takes a special kind of depravity to call this “environmentalism”, and only today’s corporate environmentalists could reach such a level of depravity.
 
The main evil of the propaganda of a large-scale industrial renewables buildout is that it’s supposed to replace fossil fuels in powering what would otherwise be the same corporate globalization regime. This is no improvement. Centralization itself, gigantism itself, is at the core of the crisis. No one who would want a high-consumption grid based on CSP and industrial wind mega-farms would care about replacing fossil fuels anyway; they’d only want to supplement them. If the paramount imperative is to feed the monstrous consumption maw (and for the advocates of the industrial civilization this is the only imperative), then the climate crisis and all other environmental crises can’t have any importance at all, other than as propaganda gambits on behalf of further escalated destruction. On the contrary, if averting the worst of the crises was any kind of goal, then the goal of maximizing energy production automatically would be downgraded severely.
 
What’s most promising about renewables is their decentralized, non-grid potential to contribute to a decent life for human beings, such as the great potential of passive solar heating. Just as with agroecology, here we can provide warmth and comfort and sufficient electricity for family and community use, as opposed to the productionist mindset which only wants massive corporate-controlled electricity generation for its own sake. It’s the same as how growing food for human beings is vastly more productive and healthy in every way than producing agricultural commodities from which food is then supposed to trickle down as an afterthought. It’s true that acre for acre agroecology is far more productive in every way – calories, nutrition, biodiversity, every other ecological function – than industrial monoculture, whereas decentralized renewables would produce less gross energy quantity than any kind of industrial generation. But the better quality of life provided by a decentralized ecological society would more than make up for that.
 
Anyway, industrial-scale renewables never could be self-sustaining rather than dependent upon a fossil fuel foundation. Therefore the whole quantity-vs.-quality debate is moot since the quantity couldn’t be sustained anyway.
 
All this must be placed in the context of humanity’s great need to abolish the onslaught of industrial poisons. This is a more immediate and dire threat even than climate change, as pressing as that’s becoming. (But these two crises are completely intertwined and cannot be separated. What drives one drives the other, and the only solution for one is the only solution for the other.) Many of those who tout industrial renewables want to use this to prop up poison-based agriculture. Obviously it won’t be possible really to do that once the necessary cheap, plentiful fossil fuels aren’t available. But the idea itself is pernicious since it’s part of the “delayer” form of denialism, the de facto denialism of the climate crocodiles shedding their usual crocodile tears.
 
That too is a reason to reject any version of the call for productionist Business As Usual, including the version which would have it all powered by industrial renewables. Such a program, if it were possible and actually carried out, would continue destroying the Earth and would continue to drive the climate crisis since it would continue destroying the forests, grasslands, and soil.
 
No aspect of the modern technocratic-corporate system is redeemable. Productionism, capitalism in itself is the most evil of all ideologies and systematically maximizes all other evils because it can’t use or tolerate anything that’s good in people or the Earth, only the bad, destructive, and wasteful.
 
We must reject concepts of absolute production and consumption, but rather think and speak only in terms of what’s sufficient and desirable. This includes the social/community element. All the worthless high-maintenance material junk which has been available to the Western rich and middle classes and their apes around the world have not made them psychologically secure, content, happy. On the contrary, it’s evident how unhappy, insecure, insane and deranged the “modern” human type has become.
 
Conversely, and as a corollary, people still close to an indigenous or national way of life, or who faithfully seek such a life, don’t need more “stuff”. We can benefit from modern agroecological science (which is knowledge, not imported junk like commodified seeds and poisons) and some of the medical knowledge (there too, it’s basic knowledge and low-tech practice which helps most, not modern high-maintenance technology; the fact is that most of the modern medical gains were achieved by things like better sanitation, while hi-tech modern medical science has had a much smaller and diminishing-returns role, and in any event is increasingly impossible financially for most people even in the West). Agroecology is not a revelation to people still close to the Earth, but builds upon and modifies traditional knowledge.
 
For the physical reasons of Peak Oil, the climate crisis and the many other environmental crises, driven by the socioeconomic and spiritual evils of productionism and corporate capitalism, all our ideas about energy and technology must mean finding the level which is best for the most constructive and fulfilled human experience and interaction within the ecology, our only home. The workable political and economic level for the ecology is also the best level for human happiness and contentment, on an individual and community level. All the evidence says this level is low in terms of the physical technological sophistication and grossness, high in terms of knowledge. The best example is the extreme contrast of the technologically highly ramified, but intellectually and scientifically very stupid and retrograde poison agriculture regime, vs. the “low-tech” but intellectually highly advanced agroecological paradigm. The same is true for money and finance. The same is true for everything else. And the same is true for energy, where the low-hanging fruit of fully developing passive solar knowledge to provide adequate heating for home and community use, joined with the necessary social transformations, is far more promising than generating extreme amounts of electricity amid an ongoing consumer atomism while the civilization attempts to murder the Earth and commits suicide in the process.
 
 
 
 
 

July 29, 2018

Notes on the Industrial Organic Sector

 
 
1. A few years back there were some false rumors, which may have started as satire, that Monsanto was buying Whole Foods Market. This stemmed from the fact that Whole Foods Market, Stonyfield and others joined with Obama’s secretary of agriculture Tom Vilsack to try to make a “co-existence” deal with Monsanto over Roundup Ready alfalfa. This was a backdoor way to try to water down organic standards. The USDA always has wanted to include GMOs within the organic standards, and the industrial organic sector, reliant as it is on the “natural” label scam, has no objections. Lots of rhetoric followed which eventually led to the false rumors. The prosaic truth is that industrial organic is industrial first and organic a distant second. The sector is not committed to anything beyond what it sees as effective marketing and profiteering. WFM’s CEO at the time Jeff Mackey openly said that WFM touts “organic” and “natural” purely as a marketing gimmick, and he explicitly repudiated any ecological or public health philosophy beyond that. This mirrors the USDA’s appraisal of its own organic certification program: According to the agency organic food is no better or healthier than poison-based food, but is merely a kind of lifestyle ornament.
 
What’s not a rumor is the fact that BASF and Cargill are members of the Organic Trade Association. Nor is this a surprise, as the OTA represents the industrial sector and shares the USDA/WFM view of organic agriculture and food as merely a branding device. That’s why the OTA consistently has worked to water down NOSB standards, and that’s why it supported the 2016 DARK Act which put a stake in the heart of the GMO labeling movement by co-opting it in a sham fashion, as I predicted for years would happen.
 
2. Many system NGOs are dedicated to performing a pro-corporate, pro-globalization triangulator role. Some oppose pesticides and GMOs but want FDA control of produce, or of GMO labeling. Some oppose pesticides and GMOs but support expanded use of synthetic fertilizers, themselves a major pollutant, driver of climate change, and basis of pesticide monoculture. In reality it’s not possible to support synthetic fertilizers and not effectively support the entire apparatus of agribusiness and poison-based agriculture. Even the USDA organic certification acknowledges this.
 
In the guise of debunking some pro-GMO lies they reinforce others and in general reinforce the lies of corporate industrial agriculture, commodity farming, and globalization. In the course of it they implicitly attack Food First and other organizations truly dedicated to fighting hunger, and who document and publish the truths of food production and economics. Just like how industrial organic’s lobbying arm Just Label It stressed labeling but supported GMOs on other points, as well as supporting corporate agriculture and food as such, with the eventual result I predicted for years: In 2016 the labeling strategy reached its logical end with the passage of what I called DARK Act Plan B.
 
This reflects the industrial organic agenda. This globalized commodity sector: 1. Opposes food-based agriculture, just as much as the GM cartel and any other commodity sector does. 2. Joins hands with Monsanto in trying to suppress the facts and propagate lies about food production, the environment, and hunger. 3. It diverges from the GM/pesticide cartel on some specifics regarding GMOs. (But not on fertilizer.) These seem to be chosen cynically, with an eye toward continuing to receive some corporate funding. Thus EWG refutes the “feed the world” lie where it comes specifically to GMOs but supports this big lie in general, while Just Label It supported the lie that GMOs have been tested and found to be safe.
 
All this is intended to serve a gate-keeping function, since any real abolition movement would be a threat to: 1. Industrial organic’s leadership of the food movement, 2. The sector’s very existence, which after all is just as dependent on corporate welfare, the parasite paradigm, the whole globalization system.
 
As far as the official certification, organic is nothing more or less than what the USDA says it is, by definition. When the USDA issued its original proposal for an organic certification in the 1990s, this proposed rule would have allowed GMOs to be certified “organic”. Only massive pressure from farmers and consumers forced them to back down and rewrite the standard to exclude GMOs. But the agency has not changed its mind about thinking they should be allowed, just as it has never changed its official opinion that organic agricultural practices and food are no safer or healthier but just add up to a set of “lifestyle” products. The USDA’s basic position on GMOs is that they’re not only safe but normative, and that the environment and food system should maximally be contaminated and transformed. (They would say “improved” or something similar; they call GM seeds “improved seeds”.) They’ve not only approved every GMO application without exception but are doing all they can to declare whole classes of GMOs to be outside their jurisdiction and unregulatable. It’s not every day you see a bureaucracy voluntarily giving up vast swathes of its power. Only extreme ideology could drive such a thing.
 
So much for the USDA. As for industrial organic, the likes of Jeff Mackey openly say that they subscribe to no organic philosophy but view the whole thing as a marketing ploy. Gary Hirshberg never misses a chance to try to euthanize activism, like with his endorsement of the QR code as an allegedly acceptable labeling compromise*. And although the Fabers were unable to reach a deal with Vilsack and the GMA in January 2016, they rushed out to justify the basic paradigm of secret elite conclaves toward some “compromise” which then can be handed down to the people. So there’s the basic attitude of the economic and cultural elites of the movement. As for standard practice, just look at the “natural” scam which is near-universal among them. If they’re willing to surreptitiously sell you GMOs and Roundup in your food (at a premium, no less!) while calling it “natural”, they’d certainly love to do the same by calling it “organic”. They’ve already slipped such poisons as gut-busting carrageenan into the certification standards.
 
Their most clear-cut political ploy was the attempted “co-existence” deal over GM alfalfa which Vilsack tried to broker between the industrial organic sector and Monsanto. The USDA itself in its Environmental Impact Review admitted that over the long run GM alfalfa cannot co-exist with non-GM. This means that legalizing the GM product is tantamount to rendering much of certified organic meat and dairy untenable – unless the standard is changed to allow some level of GM presence in the hay. Obviously Vilsack, WFM, Stonyfield, etc. knew this when they tried to make the deal. So unless one thinks they want certified organic meat and dairy to cease to exist, the only alternative is that they want to see the organic certification standard changed to allow GMOs.
 
Why would industrial organic do such things? In their perfect world, they could sell the same industrial junk but slap the “organic” brand on it and charge a premium. They already do exactly that with the term “natural” (which is why they’re hostile toward any labeling policy like Vermont’s which would end this terminological scam). They cherish the same desire as that of the USDA, to allow GMOs under the “organic” name. That’s why they always felt dissonance and ambivalence toward the idea of GMO labeling. They got involved only as a PR campaign. But as we saw with the history of JLI, AGree, etc., what they really wanted was to control and manage the labeling campaign, in the same way EPA “manages” Roundup and dioxins, and mainstream environmental groups help the corporations manage ecological destruction. They want to control it in such a way that they get the PR benefit while forestalling any reality of a strong, honest labeling policy. JLI, Hirshberg and the GMA are Roundup-burnt peas in a pod.
 
We’ve seen how in response to the Steve Marsh lawsuit there was a major propaganda campaign to the effect that Australia’s organic standards are too strict and need to be relaxed to allow some level of “adventitious presence”. The OTA and the industrial organic sector are leading same campaign in the US. Anywhere this relaxation is enacted, the level of contamination allowed under the standard then will begin a mechanical upward creep, in exactly the same way that pesticide “tolerances” are mechanically raised by regulators as more pesticides are used.
 
That exact same mechanical raising of the allowed level of GM presence also will occur with any labeling policy which is ever enacted, which is one of the reasons why labeling was the wrong idea in the first place. In Europe the 0.9% standard is under strong pressure from the industry to be raised.
 
*The whole attitude that “compromise” is possible and desirable is the same as to say that “co-existence” with Monsanto and GMOs is desirable, and that it’s physically possible at all.
 
3. Some people are more interested in premium niche marketing than in the food sovereignty and abolition imperatives. In many cases it’s obvious, as in the long and ongoing history of small organic companies selling out to big conglomerates. No doubt they’d often claim they were under financial duress and had no choice, and maybe once in awhile that’s true. The system is heavily stacked against healthy, ecological farming and food.
 
But far more often it’s simply taken for granted on an ideological level that a successful entrepreneur sells out at some point to a big corporation. Most entrepreneurs seem to regard this as a “natural” part of some kind of business life cycle, in the same way we physically go from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. But this conventional capitalist mindset cannot coexist with the ecological philosophy and imperative, any more than non-GM crops can coexist with GM for long in the most physical sense.
 
4. Is the USDA organic certification a decadence?** People with money are willing to pay more for what’s good (or at least better) while tolerating the general deterioration, rather than resolving to put an end to what’s bad so we can all have what’s good? I’m fighting to abolish poison-based agriculture and build food sovereignty. I regard the place of organics only from a strategic and tactical point of view. But I’m certain that the goal itself isn’t to expand organics alongside the poison system. That’s impossible anyway. Coexistence is impossible, and if the poison system continues, the organic sector must eventually cease to exist in all but name, if that.
 
Foodies and corporate executives and shareholders alike (often the same people) think humanity (at least moneyed humans) can co-exist with GMOs, pesticides, climate change, etc. For them organic food, electric cars, etc. add up to an island. Monsanto’s CEO thinks he and his people eat separate food, drink separate water, breathe separate air, inhabit a separate ecology. But Certified Organic is not an island, it cannot co-exist (physically or politically) with poison-based agriculture and a poisoned environment, steadily it will be eroded, degraded, corrupted, and soon will cease to exist except in name only, if things keep going the way they are.
 
**There are several attempts underway to promulgate non-governmental organic standards which improve upon the USDA certification. These include the Real Organic Project (designed to overcome many of the abusive features of the USDA standards) and Certified Naturally Grown (designed to be more affordable for small direct retail organic farmers; the USDA system is geared to the big industrial operators). Whether any of these is a big improvement depends on the good faith of all the participants, from farmer to certifier to customer.
 
5. I write mostly about a general mindset and strategy. Most of what I write is geared to organizational and philosophical matters, not as much directly to consumer matter. But for the kind of buying follows from that, I practice and recommend doing the best one can within that framework. Buy the best you can afford, the rules being that local is better than commodified, smaller better than bigger, committed to real values rather than mercenary (especially insofar as you can perceive the mentality and goals of a producer and/or seller – is it a way of life or do they have a mini-Monsanto mentality?), organic/agroecological better than not.
 
It’s true that big corporate buyers can help all producers of non-GM crops, for food and feed, scale up to the necessary level where the products are broadly affordable for the community food sector. In other words, the more non-GM corn is bought for a big retailer’s store brand processed stuff and for their CAFO sourcing, the more affordable it will also become for small direct retail farmers to use as feed. So if producers of non-GM grain etc. saw themselves as just using the corporate sourcing toward the real goal of community sector rebuilding and stuck with that goal without becoming corrupted, the corporate sourcing would be a helpful springboard. On the other hand the more everyone, including “organic” types, see themselves as part of the same commingled commodity economic paradigm as the corporate system, the more they’ll obey the dictates of the big buyers, and the more they’ll have the time-serving house-flipping mindset that they’re only doing this for a period before they get to sell out. In that case the corporate ideology and commodity practice will completely dominate, the community food sector’s development will be hindered rather than boosted, and in the end the quality of the organic consumer product will be degraded completely like I described above.
 
6. If there arose a real movement to rebuild healthy, democratic agriculture and food, the Community Food movement and economic sector as I call it, this sector could use corporate sourcing to help scale itself up to the necessary level where wholesome food became affordable for everyone, and non-GM feed was readily affordable to direct retail farmers. The sector could build out the input and processing infrastructure it mostly lacks and badly needs. I stress, the necessary level of scaling up and building out and no bigger, based on sustainability and distribution within its own watershed and foodshed. That’s a core measure of whether such a movement exists: Is the goal to produce affordable real food for human beings, while seeking revenue only in order to support this goal and support oneself? Or is it the same old capitalism, with profit and “growth” for their own sakes (and eventually cashing in, selling out to a big buyer) the real goal, while participants just pretend to do the best they can as far as the product?
 
Obviously the big corporate buyers don’t care about these goals and want to prevent all this from being built. Which leads to the corollary that if the movement I described above doesn’t exist, if people don’t have that mindset, then not only will corporate control of the organic sector (and of much of the organic movement’s politics as well) continue to escalate, but the depressing pattern of small organic producers offering themselves to be bought up will continue. In that case the big corporate controllers eventually will erode and then gut the organic standards themselves, and that will be the end of the whole thing. They’ll do that as soon as they’re able. We already know, for example, that industrial organic is industrial first and organic second, and that they share the USDA’s goal of allowing GMOs to qualify under the “organic” standards.
 
7. Therefore I’m also not sure about even the industrial organic brands. To the extent the mindset of Food Sovereignty and building the Community Food sector actually exists, and to the extent that the growth of the organic sector helps expand and render economically more viable non-GMO sourcing for animal feed and similar staples which can then be used to build the Community Food sector – its inputs, products, and processing infrastructure – to the extent these are true, industrial organic can be a stepping stone for us.
 
But this boils down to the first question, to what extent does the Food Sovereignty mindset, as part of the public citizen mindset, actually exist, as opposed to the same old private-individual-is-an-island mindset which, even where it comes to organic and localized agriculture and food, thinks primarily in terms of “growth” and eventually selling out to a buyer.
 
And since that’s the primary question, it follows that the first necessary priority of a Food Sovereignty movement is to build this mindset, propagate knowledge of it, encourage it, recruit to it, organize on the basis of it.
 
 
 
 
 

July 28, 2018

The Lying Media-“Political” Culture of the Climate Crisis

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The corporate media has failed abysmally at preparing the public for a climate changed world, let alone reporting on it. According to a Media Matters survey:
 

Throughout the recent record-breaking heat wave that affected millions across the United States, major broadcast TV networks overwhelmingly failed to report on the links between climate change and extreme heat. Over a two-week period from late June to early July, ABC, CBS, and NBC aired a combined 127 segments or weathercasts that discussed the heat wave, but only one segment, on CBS This Morning, mentioned climate change.”

 
Ten years ago the mainstream media was full of stories about the real effects of climate change. They ran regular features summing up the science and the prognosis.
 
Today the coverage is very different. As the survey cited above demonstrates, the media has jettisoned most real-world reportage on the climate crisis. Instead they’ve gone back to reporting on “natural” disasters: (1) as if they actually were natural rather than man-made; (2) as ad hoc things that happen at random rather than part of a coherent trend.
 
The media’s coverage of climate change has departed from the real world and instead focuses only on certain fake political angles, such as “Trump” taking the US out of the sham Paris agreement, as well as the alleged virtue of the sham agreement itself. This normalizes the climate crisis, or more specifically having fervid opinions about it, as just another lifestyle ornament. Just another part of fake celebrity and culture-war pseudo-politics.
 
The main reason the media used to report on the climate crisis in a semi-serious way is that it took some years for the corporate sectors to reach a consensus on downplaying/denying the crisis. At first they left this to Big Oil, led by ExxonMobil. Other sectors were uncertain what it all meant for them. Wall Street seriously considered trying to blow up a bubble based on cap-and-trade, “offsets”, and derivatives based on such scams. The frackers took potshots at the coal industry. Monsanto and the biotech sector touted the scam of “climate-smart agriculture”, as well as fraudulently citing climate denial in their propaganda even though they themselves are climate deniers. Those are examples of why climate change used to get more play in the corporate media. But by now, although there’s still some of this exploitative propaganda, the corporations largely have decided they want to deny the whole thing. Some still engage in de jure denial, most have joined the liberals in de facto denial. This means expressing “right belief”, paying lip service, shedding crocodile tears, emitting sham proposals, but never really proposing to do anything but continue to emit and destroy.
 
The hand-wringing, virtue-signalling, and fake prescriptions of the climate crocodiles – Keep Shopping! Shopping Uber Alles! for example, replacing fossil fuels with corporate-industrial renewables; Keep Driving! hybrids and electric cars of course; never mind that most of the emissions and environmental destruction are bound up in the initial manufacturing process – fits in well with this since little of this is actually going to be done, and if it were done it merely would add to civilization’s consumption and destruction maw while doing nothing but making the climate crisis worse.
 
Meanwhile for as long as modern civilization staggers along, emissions will continue to rise and sinks will continue to be destroyed. All the other ecological crises will continue to get worse.
 
But it’s always been true that there is one and only one solution to avert the worst of climate chaos:
 
Stop emitting; stop destroying sinks; rebuild sinks.
 
All else is a lie. Most of all, the Big Lie is that that anything constructive can be done within the congenitally destructive framework of the economic civilization.
 
 
 
 
 

July 26, 2018

The Dicamba Crisis Part 5: Waging War to Seize Territory

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Parts One, Two, Three, Four.
 
1. There’s never been a clear line of demarcation between chemical weapons in war, civilian use of such weapons, and agricultural use of poisons. In World War I poison gas weapons were developed while the Haber-Bosch process was used to manufacture explosives. Following the war these technologies were seamlessly refurbished to manufacture pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. The militaristic rhetoric didn’t change at all: Pesticides were advertised as enabling the farmer and society to wage war on pests, which were demonized as evil.
 
In World War II the same factories went back to producing munitions and herbicides for military use. After the war the factories were retooled for a massive new agricultural poison onslaught which eventually developed into the “green revolution”. War use never ceased. From Vietnam to this day in Colombia and elsewhere Agent Orange and other poisons are used for military and paramilitary purposes, for war and police action. Chemical weapons always have been used for tyrannical political goals.
 
This conjunction of poisonism and militarism occurs in the context of the religious separation of “man” from “nature” and the false doctrine that these are adversaries. Man vs. nature in turn is an extension of man vs. man. Ecological domination always has been conjoined with social domination, and the former never occurs except as part of a strategy toward the latter. The war on nature always is the war on humanity. In the end, ecophobia, biophobia, are expressions of misanthropy. Civilization can be defined as a system which enables a cadre of elites to force surplus production and steal it in order to build structures and organizations which maximize their own wealth and power. This system always has been totally destructive toward humanity and the Earth. Agriculture always has been designed for enclosure, dispossession, physically destroying the land through denuding and poisoning the soil, desertification. Modern poison-based agriculture is one of the most extreme manifestations of this total destructive assault on people and ecology.
 
Agribusiness consolidates maximum control over farming and the food supply and launches a general assault on the ecology, all toward the goal of maximizing human and ecological monoculture. This is the scorched-earth terrain which provides the best habitat for pest, weed, and disease infestation, and therefore the maximum ideological and political habitat for the power claims of agribusiness, the scientism cult, and all who hate humanity and nature and who seek total domination. Poisonism therefore generates the maximal habitat for the propaganda campaign of lies, fear-mongering, and fraudulent promises that the solution is right around the corner if farmers and society only stay the poison course. This is proven every day in a hundred new articles and press statements from corporations, governments, Wall Street, academia, and the mainstream media, all speaking as one proclaiming that the only solution to the escalating crisis is to escalate the emissions and the poison.
 
2. One way to write the history of the 20th century is to trace the history of the Rockefeller Foundation and similar organizations, culminating today in the Gates Foundation, as the bodies which coordinate de jure war and sublimated agricultural war, with the close cooperation of corporations and the military.
 
As we said there never was a clear distinction between massive use of chemical weapons in Vietnam and elsewhere and massive use of chemical weapons in the green revolution. In both cases Western globalization has treated the global South as a free-fire zone, wherever a vacuum exists.
 
The corporate-technocratic elites have brought this war and its ideology back to the home countries. The pesticide/fertilizer onslaught has engulfed the West itself. Based on this historical record we know the corporate state considers America itself a free-fire zone for every kind of weaponized assault, from militarized police to militarized agriculture, wherever the state considers necessary.
 
What’s the objective difference between the Agent Orange defoliation campaign in Vietnam and today’s defoliation campaign in America based on dicamba and 2,4-D (itself one half of the Agent Orange blend)? We recognize the dicamba campaign as at least intermediate between a “regular” agricultural poison campaign and a de jure war defoliation campaign.
 
Corporate agriculture’s mass expulsion of farm communities from their land, part of the US “food weapon” strategy, is sublimated war. There is no logical difference between driving people off their land and into slums where they are utterly dependent, and physically killing them. Anyone willing to do or tolerate the former is willing to do and tolerate the latter.
 
The Rockefeller Foundation played a major role in coordinating the green revolution, pesticide/fertilizer deployment, and the development of GMOs ancillary to the poison regime. The Gates Foundation subsequently has taken the lead in aggrandizing the GMO/pesticide poison project. Gates provides organizational leadership and fraudulent “philanthropic” propaganda cover for what’s nothing but brutal corporate colonialism. This colonialism is also a testing ground for other totalitarian assaults.
 
In spite of its “humanitarian” lies (always embellished with Randroid spin that all good things can come only from total corporate control), the Gates Foundation really stands for total corporate control of agriculture and food on a monoculture commodity export basis. For decades this has been proven to do nothing but increase hunger, famine, and disease. The Gates Foundation is an extreme activist on behalf of globalization export agriculture and seeks systematically to eradicate African food production, and therefore to maximize food insecurity, hunger, and famine. Africa and elsewhere in the global South also serve Gates and Monsanto as testing grounds for ecological domination technology designed to be deployed in the Western countries as well. All of humanity which lacks monetary wealth, not just the people of the South, are slated for liquidation.
 
Today the Gates Foundation is the primary propaganda coordinator on behalf of these ideological and anti-political assaults. It’s the main coordinator among the various branches of the corporate state – the US and UK governments, the Big Ag corporations, the G7, the universities, the corporate media, and various system NGOs.
 
Economically, politically, ecologically, the corporate-technocratic state works to impose maximum monopoly monoculture control with minimum real-world apparatus or indeed contact with physical reality at all. The sector comprising corporate agriculture and food, along with its lead enablers from the state like USAID and the USDA, all coordinated by the quasi-governmental Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, thinks exclusively in terms of Mammon’s fictive numbers. The measure of agriculture is never food for human beings but sanctified fake numbers like GDP, trade balances, sovereign debt, commodity and stock prices, corporate profits, money as such. These pure fictions are rendered real only by the corporate state’s violence and the tolerance of the people. Thus the corporate/government/NGO structure is able globally to impose and enforce the agricultural model which conforms to these measures and eradicates, as much as possible, all actual food production for human beings. This physical control and destruction without responsibility is the grail of all corporations.
 
In these ways the goal is to render it as literally true as possible that food is produced by money, that food comes from the supermarket.
 
3. The military-agricultural complex I describe here is best epitomized in the Gates/DARPA joint project to develop gene drive technology. This is the most extreme example yet of a dual use military/agricultural weapon. In general, genetic engineering is becoming increasingly militarized.
 
This is the context for the propaganda campaign for gene drives being deployed against so-called “invasive” plants and animals such as rats. “Rats” should be taken as a symbolic place-holder for more far-reaching land-cleansing plans. Consider the Nazi propaganda films which equated Jews with rats, then compare the coupled campaigns of gene drive deployment vs. rats and other “invasives”, and GMO deployment as part of corporate agriculture’s onslaught seeking to drive all of humanity off the land. When we compare these we start to get a picture of where all this is heading.
 
DARPA often has partnered with Monsanto, from the deployment of Agent Orange to research into robotic bees. Continuing this partnership, Monsanto has been a key player in the anti-“invasive” propaganda. The theme of glyphosate being ecologically necessary to combat “invasive” weeds laid the propaganda groundwork for the gene drive strategy. With the collapse of glyphosate, dicamba and 2,4-D are being deployed as the “new”/old weaponry allegedly necessary to wage this allegedly necessary war.
 
Gates teams with Monsanto, Gates teams with the military, Monsanto teams with the military, we have consensus on intent and goal.
 
4. The primary agronomic feature of poison-based agriculture is the arms race between the ever escalating, ever more toxic brew of pesticides, and the resistance evolution keeps producing in the weeds, insects, fungi, and other so-called “pests”. This arms race, which in civilian language is also called the pesticide treadmill, is the context in which Monsanto and its Gates/military allies are resurrecting two obsolete herbicides, dicamba and the Agent Orange constituent 2,4-D, for a renewed assault. Monsanto, the USDA, and the media originally promised that these poisons, even more toxic and destructive than glyphosate, would be rendered permanently obsolete by the Roundup Ready GMO system. These herbicides are indeed obsolete from any sane ecological and agronomic point of view, but of the corporate-technocratic system is not sane, nor is it honest. The corporations and the US government always were lying about dicamba and 2,4-D, and in recent years they’ve been bringing them back on a massive scale, with GMOs engineered to accompany them: Monsanto’s dicamba tolerant Xtend soybeans and cotton, and Dow’s 2,4-D tolerant maize, soybeans, and cotton. The result has been the ongoing dicamba disaster. As the Enlist system is more widely propagated a 2,4-D disaster will join the dicamba disaster.
 
The dicamba GMO crisis builds on the failure of Roundup and of the pesticide model as such. It simultaneously denies evolution and drives a specially destructive mode of evolution. Herbicide tolerant GMOs systematically select for weed resistance. Dicamba-resistant weeds already are on the rise. The greater the atmospheric suffusion of volatile dicamba vapor, the faster it’ll drive weed resistance along with every other ecological and health harm. Monoculture as such, by its very simplicity, drives the development of resistance, accelerates the arms race.
 
The deliberate goal is to render all agriculture which is not engineered to resist dicamba and/or 2,4-D impossible. Both herbicides are extremely volatile and inevitably will attack and kill all other plants – row crops not engineered to resist; fruits and vegetables (commercial growing and personal gardens); trees; ornamentals; as much as possible all wild plants. This extreme volatility renders the GMO/herbicide tandem an effective weapon for area denial, seizure and domination of territory. Monsanto is succeeding in driving out all non-Xtend soybean production in the main production zones. Monsanto and Dow intend the same result for maize and cotton. 2,4-D intrinsically contains dioxins as part of the manufacturing process. (Called “by-products” or “impurities”, really premeditated and therefore deliberate.) The end goal: Vast landscapes where literally nothing grows but these three crops in their Xtend and Enlist versions. The GM seed is the vehicle to force full-season deployment of this volatile chemical warfare.
 
Volatility is dicamba’s most insidious and destructive mode of drift. Under common conditions of warmth and humidity liquid dicamba resting on plants and soil is prone to volatilize, turn into a gas, lift off the surfaces and float on the air often many miles from the site of spraying before weather conditions change and cause it to resettle on whatever plants are in the vicinity. The more dicamba is sprayed in a region the more all-pervasive the suffusion becomes. This is called atmospheric loading.
 
Dicamba’s volatility effect is well known. Monsanto and BASF promised that their new dicamba formulations, XtendiMax and Engenia, had solved the problem and would not be volatile. In 2017 when university researchers were able to purchase XtendiMax and Engenia at the store and test it for volatility (Monsanto forbade them pre-market access to XtendiMax, thus proving it was lying about the product) they found that these brand name formulations are nearly as volatile as the earlier cheap formulas. The fact is that all dicamba is volatile. Indeed there’s evidence that dicamba’s volatility is essential to it having any proximate herbicidal effect on weeds in the first place. It’s impossible to use dicamba under warm humid conditions, i.e. the way it’s intended to be used under the Xtend system, and not have it promiscuously volatilize, move off site, and kill any broad leaf crops and plants it resettles upon.
 
This proves that by design all dicamba is highly volatile and nothing can prevent it from moving off site and killing other crops and plants. Co-existence with the Xtend system is impossible. This has been a deliberate campaign. In 2018 all soy farmers have had no choice but to buy Xtend GM seeds or run the great risk of having their crop destroyed by chemical warfare. In the same way much vegetable farming and gardening as well as the existence of many other plants and trees is becoming impossible in the dicamba free-fire zones. This proves that Monsanto’s goal remains the same as it’s always been, the goal it enshrined in what it calls its “Expanded Trait Penetration” program. Monsanto’s goal always is to force farmers to buy as many stacked GM traits as possible. Xtend is the most extreme version yet of this program. Monsanto’s goal is to extort all soybean farmers, under threat of the drift destruction of their crop, into buying the Xtend seeds and the XtendiMax herbicide.
 
In turn, the dicamba offensive is the most potent assault yet seeking to bring all land and ecology under technocratic dominion. It’s an expression of the fanatical monoculture mentality which wants to wipe out all natural plant growth and reduce all cultivation, all plant growth as such, to corporate-controlled industrial monoculture. The ultimate monoculture goal is nothing less than to wipe out all biodiversity except for the pests themselves and replace it with a technocratic blank slate. The cultists and operatives first deny evolution in principle, then seek to wipe it out in practice. The goal is to use violence, technological and where necessary physical, to force their nightmare vision of technocratic “progress” onto natural succession.
 
5. This is a campaign to seize land: Economically (maximum acreage) and through physical assault. The poisoners must drive out non-Xtend/Enlist crops; drive out all food production, thus all fruit and vegetable production, because this kind of farming is closer to being actual food production for human beings; seize the land for consolidation, monoculture, and power. In this way agribusiness works to attain domination over farming. The fewer and bigger the farms, the easier they are to control.
 
They’re also looking ahead to when money will be worthless and land paramount. To forestall competition they’re not only locking up legal control of land through land-grabbing, but through poisons and soil-mining they’re destroying the land for any use but their industrial monoculture. This is a contingent salting of the earth.
 
So-called “off-target” destruction is really the destruction of a different kind of target, indeed a more important target than the weeds themselves, which are privileged plants because they provide the pretext for the whole paramilitary campaign against the real targets. By strict intent we know this is all deliberate and premeditated. (Pathogenic bacteria such as salmonella and botulins also are privileged organisms under this system: Dicamba, 2,4-D and glyphosate are antibiotics which selectively kill beneficial bacteria while sparing pathogens and creating good terrain for their proliferation, as well as helping to drive the evolution of antibiotic resistance among these bacteria. Thus the GMO herbicide campaign takes its place alongside gross antibiotic abuse in factory farming and genetic engineering as part of corporate agriculture’s deliberate campaign to foster resistant pathogens, eradicate antibiotics as a medically effective treatment, and generate lethal pandemics. This too is part of clearing the land of its human inhabitants. To say again, this is war in the most literal sense even if most people can’t yet fathom it.)
 
The entire system of poison-based agriculture is designed to bottle up and destroy the entire ecology replacing it with a technologically controlled monoculture. In this way the biotech/agrochemical cartel joins the finance sector and other core corporate sectors working to bottle up all elements of nature and the real economy, replacing these with the purely fake economy of money, corporate personhood, finance, and patents. The corporate-technocratic accumulation of wealth and power directly corresponds with the technosphere’s physical poisoning and destruction of the Earth. Accumulation naturally indicates an ecological bottleneck. Accumulation equals waste. It is pollution. Those who manipulate such wastes are merely using poison as a weapon. The modern agrochemical onslaught is the latest, worst, most literal use of poison to destroy the Earth in order to hoard power.
 
And this goes with the legal and physical condemnation of the land. The corporate agricultural campaign ultimately is a campaign of land seizure whose goal is to force all human beings off the land and enclose it within a system of a few big corporate-controlled robot-managed plantations. Herbicide tolerant GMOs are a milestone in the corporate enclosure program, designed directly to eliminate all hand-weeding jobs while enabling farmers to manage much greater acreage, thus accelerating farm consolidation and the forced exodus of humans from the land. By rendering impossible all competing forms of soybean farming and many other kinds of farming, the Xtend-dicamba system is designed to escalate this totalitarian process. The systematic refusal of government and private insurers to cover drift damage, a massive consumer fraud, is another example proving that this is economic warfare against all but the biggest farmers. As is the concurrent campaign, even among the same state governments and weed scientists who deplore the dicamba crisis, to force 2,4-D tolerant crops upon agriculture. The clear goal is an agriculture where no crop (or any other plant) not resistant to both dicamba and 2,4-D will be able to exist at all.
 
The industrial monoculture and land enclosure system also is meant to render food production as tenuous as possible by forcing all people into a condition of complete dependency upon money and the corporate system while deliberately rendering food production as vulnerable as possible to drought, erosion, pest ravages, soil degradation, intrinsic crop failure, and ultimately the guaranteed shortages of necessary fossil fuels. The corporate food system already systematically generates hunger. It also is preparing famine.
 
The dicamba GMO system seeks to eradicate actual food production at fruit orchards and vegetable farms and gardens, all of which the corporate-technocratic system views as the real “weeds”. It wants to render anything but dicamba-based commodity soybean production impossible. This is a case study in the real goal of poison agriculture. The will to continue this onslaught on the part of the corporations, the US and state governments, academia and the media proves their Strict Intent to reach an outcome of total destruction.
 
The pesticide model of agriculture is conjoined with the GMO ideology of technologically overriding and obliterating natural evolution. Pesticides are dedicated to the scorched earth monoculture model of agriculture and the ideology which regards the natural world as something to be wiped out. Poisonism is a radical rejection of biodiversity in principle and practice and comprises the will to wipe out all life except that specially selected to be part of the technocratic socio-ecological engineering.
 
The dicamba crisis is the latest and most extreme example yet of how co-existence with GMOs is impossible. It’s obviously impossible for organic farming. It’s impossible for non-GM conventional farming. With Xtend Monsanto has upped the ante, stepping up the assault on organic and non-GM farming and even rendering all previous GM soy varieties untenable. This is the first effective example of what the cartel projects as an indefinitely re-writable blank slate it can force to be continually wiped clean and rewritten, a process of destruction and re-destruction redolent of waging war to destroy in order to generate space profitable to rebuild. This is the essence of disaster capitalism. Monsanto dreams of an agriculture totally subjugated by the most profitable GM varieties, until these too are rendered obsolete and wiped out by even higher-stacked, more expensive, more extreme varieties. The technocratic civilization wants an entire planet brillo-scrubbed this way.
 
This is a modern replay of the legendary Roman salting of the Carthaginian earth. This too is a scorched-earth act of war. The system’s vision is to turn Earth into a desert and call it civilization. This requires the total deployment of the monoculture and Humanfrei imperatives. Regimentation and order, death and destruction, are the desiderata. Anathema is lack of control, wildness, diversity, beauty, freedom, “anarchy”, “chaos”.
 
(The psychotic hatred of trees and drive to murder them, from the institutionalized logging sector to the average suburban parasite, is part of this overall religious psychosis. Dicamba takes its place here as a systematic mass murderer of trees.)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

July 23, 2018

This Civilization is Collective Murder-Suicide

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The end point for everything the extreme energy civilization is doing: The Earth nothing but a desert with ruins.

 
 
1. Civilization is destruction. For humanity and the Earth it is death. We’re bogged down in it. It’s driving us to the brink of nuclear war at the same time it’s giving us all cancer. Most civilized people want the missiles to fly, and most want cancer for themselves and their children. Their actions prove it.
 
“Growth”, the idol of fundamentalist worship by all the civilized, including “environmentalists” and the climate crocodiles, is physically unsustainable and must collapse with unfathomable consequences. It is cancer as well. Symbolically growth is directly analogous to cancer metastasis, and growth’s reality depends upon physically killing us with cancer, starvation, bullets.
 
Look everywhere Western globalization has spread, look at any government, any Leader, any journalist, any academic, any NGO, see what they unanimously say: If you’re not rich, then die.
 
It is self-evident that anyone who thinks this way also will think murderously, though few are as honest as the Canadian bankster who openly says, “There are some people that are going to die in protesting construction of this pipeline.”
 
What this means is, “We should kill anyone who is in the way of our tyranny, whether as activists or simply as obstacles.” This means the entire 99%. All system cadres think this way and intend to act on this. This is the intended consummation of modern civilization, the total murder of the Earth and murder-suicide of humanity.
 
Smash the bottlenecks.
 
2. Politics is dead. Electoral democracy is a proven failure and by now a fraud. We’re bogged down in it. Its partisans – “voters” – aren’t political at all but rather are rival mobs cheering on entertainers and wrestlers, like the Blues and Greens of ancient Constantinople. Most of all they’re chanting for the missiles to fly. Only the most cloddish and inertial still dream of “alternative parties”, which invariably turn out to be new glosses on the same scam. Humanity and the Earth need something vastly greater than paltry reforms. The need is a movement and spiritual way dedicated to joining Gaia in destroying the stale and toxic anti-culture and building a whole new vision, a whole new culture.
 
Smash the bottlenecks.
 
3. Ecological catastrophe is rampant, still gathering tremendous force, and accelerating. The consequences are unfathomable but will include mass starvation and mass cancer. The campaign of destroying the Earth and provoking Earth’s kinesis in response has been deliberate on the part of all governments, corporations, the entire political and media class, the scientific establishment, all of academia, all system NGOs. It’s the intended action and goal of globalization, capitalism, technocracy, scientism, productionism, the economic/commercial civilization as such.
 
The catastrophe deniers are merely witting or unwitting tools of these destroyers of the Earth. Worst are the de facto deniers with their crocodile tears and fake “solutions”. All deniers are peas in a pod.
 
The climate chaos driven by civilization’s greenhouse emissions and destruction of sinks is gathering momentum to destroy us all unless we take action against the monstrous machine itself.
 
Here most of all we see the affinity of liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans (that is, identical Party-mongers). Both want humanity to sit still while the death machine devours us all.
 
Keep Shopping! That’s the prescription for the climate crisis propagated by liberals and scientists. This also is their prescription for all the other ecological crises. Keep Shopping. And of course Keep Driving.
 
Just shut up, sit still, stay the course. Keep voting when told. Believe your Party Leaders, and your media and academic betters. Yes, the two types of denier are peas in a pod. Just as the Dembots and Repbots are peas in a pod in every other way.
 
4. Democrat Party partisans are the most vile of all. Anti-ecology, anti-human, pro-destruction, pro-Mammon, pro-famine, pro-war, pro-police, pro-corporate, pro-technocracy – there’s not a single evil on earth the liberal Democrats aren’t doing all they can to drive to its worst.
 
That applies to America. A similar anti-political process has transpired in most or all other Western countries.
 
 
By now we have to give up on the Party people, the terminally inert, stupid, and malign. Those who even at this late date still receive their marching orders and their very ideas and words from Party Leaders, from corporations, from academic/scientific nabobs. These are nothing but purely inertial conformist non-entities.
 
 
The extreme energy civilization, having bottlenecked all human potential and driven humanity into a socioeconomic and political dead end, now drives itself into its own terminal bottleneck.
 
Do you feel ill, or your children or pets? Do you fear sickness? Do you feel financially secure? Secure in your job? Are you optimistic things will change for the better? Do you know who has destroyed all security? Do you know what’s making us sick? Do you feel safe when you look at the news from America and around the world? Do you know why the world is going insane?
 
You’re feeling the great bottleneck. Our health, our security, our peace of mind, our work, our culture, our spirit, our freedom, all are bottled up. You feel the fear, you sense our psychological, spiritual, cultural, economic bottleneck.
 
To anyone who feels bottlenecked, whatever the surface reason seems to be, you must understand that yours is a symptom of a global ecological crisis. You cannot solve your crisis within the bottleneck which causes it any more than the civilization can pull itself out of its own bottleneck.
 
All of this civilization’s bottlenecks boil down to the simple equation: Wealth and power accumulation must be accompanied by an equal level of physical, economic, spiritual, cultural, and ecological destruction. Modern civilization’s accumulation of wealth and power, which has not and will not trickle down to us even if we wanted it to at the price of murdering humanity and the Earth, equals our destruction.
 
Smash the bottlenecks.
 
 
 
 

July 20, 2018

The Road Home to Ecological Freedom

Filed under: American Revolution, Freedom — Tags: , — Russ @ 9:15 am

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Our most precious gift is faith, trust in life and Earth, our spiritual self-confidence and self-respect. With these we can attempt and achieve the impossible. Without them we can do nothing. We have total confidence in Gaia’s future, whatever balance she finds after the great Kinesis. We’ll never attain this trust and confidence through rational deliberation, rational education, all the nostrums of the Enlightenment Myth. The movement must speak first to our souls in the language of our critical need.
 
Then we present the plan which inspires the will to sacrifice, fight, endure, and win. With this we can accomplish anything. Without it, nothing. Reason and science are on our side so we can enlist them as well. But in the end this is a biological and spiritual war, and it will be fought and won on those battlefields. All our efforts, all our words, all our actions, all our thoughts, must focus first of all on those fronts. This is essential to the movement discipline we must build.
 
As we understand the spiritual, moral, rational, practical truth of everything we know and do, the path laid out before us becomes wider, straighter, suffused with light. Our fatigue evaporates, our pain flees, our desire to stop and rest transforms to an eagerness to keep going faster. We feel ourselves walking the path of necessity. This is the paradoxical essence of the community which discovers itself, its true mission, and the way to carry out that mission, by living the way of positive freedom. The essence of positive freedom: The more we attain this freedom, the more we move with unfailing certainty, in accord with necessity, each step laid out clear before us.
 
Our great task is to overcome the anti-ecological sunder in ourselves and humanity, and prepare the way home from the wilderness of civilization to the hearth of Gaia.
 
We shall discover the necessary works of the spirit reintegrating with Gaia. Socially, our movement philosophy is the true democracy, human participation in the dedicated common space. Evolution crafted us to be spiritual community animals, not atomized individuals. There’s no way to break out of the sunder and stop destroying, to resume true ecological participation, giving to Earth more than we take, other than by breaking out of civilization as a group. The true ecological polity is the only participatory democracy, and the only participatory democracy is ecological democracy, the democracy of positive necessary freedom assimilated to the ecology.
 
On this basis we’ll work to resurrect ourselves from death, reintegrate ourselves with life. On this basis we’ll build food sovereignty based on agroecology, the only possible path forward for humanity, and redeem our work for the rest of our true human needs and wants. On this basis we’ll discover the necessary works of spirit.
 
There’s no truth left outside these works. Everything outside them is wickedness, falsehood, stagnation, blockage, destruction.
 
The regular possible, the pseudo-possible, what cowards and con-men call practical and “pragmatic”, is in fact impossible. It’s also an abomination to our ecological dignity. It offers no way out. Only a miracle can bring salvation, so we believe in the miracle and in that way produce it.
 
But our miracle is earthly as well, literally grounded in the soil. Our work awaits us. It won’t perform itself, but it will be both the catalyst and the vector of our trust in the Earth, our spiritual self-respect and self-confidence. That’s how we’ll find and create these most precious gifts, and that’s how we’ll use them: To liberate ourselves, and to build the true freedom and the true soul, amid ecological necessity.
 
 
 
 
 

July 19, 2018

Mars

Filed under: Poetry — Russ @ 7:34 am

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For years I’ve gone out pre-dawn to run,
And never has Mars been so prominent,
Looming prior to dawn.
 
As if there rose a new spirit,
Or one ancient newly envigored,
Summoned from wherever portents wait,
Promising a sunrise bloody with war.
 
I feel it long familiar:
A new Mars has been looming in my mind as well.
I see how everyone wants the ultimate war,
I see new insanity at unheard extreme.
Many who I know in person,
In daily life decent and sane,
Pray all day to the god of war,
(No stranger; they’ve long supported the regular war),
Yearn for the ultimate war.
 
And look at the culture,
Long violent and crazed
As I’ve tallied with my pen these years;
Yet what psychic catastrophes range berserk today
On a blasted landscape
Of minds cleared of all thought,
As if battened down to give the coming blast waves
Ultimate free range.
 
 
 
 
 

July 3, 2018

Earth’s Call

Filed under: Agroecology, Climate Crisis, Dance of Death, Freedom — Tags: , , — Russ @ 10:51 am

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*I cry from the wilderness. I’ve warned against the physical poisons and the artificial structures which propagate the physical poisons. I continue to warn against these all, against the corporate “person”-demons, against Mammon.
 
I cry out in the streets and am invisible and cannot be heard.
 
*For years I dreamt of a globe transformed to societies based on agroecology and food sovereignty. The evidence says this physically can be done. The evidence says even 10 billion people could grow their own food agroecologically for the price of everyone working a few hours a day at the equivalent of gardening chores. The agroecological society would have nothing in common with the slavery of commodity field work. We’d be healthy and free. The only obstacles are political.
 
Be clear: Agroecology requires less space, less resources, less impact, less money, to produce food for more people, than industrial agriculture.
 
There are no physical obstacles to a global transformation of all human society to an infinitely better order. The only obstacles are political.
 
But such a political transformation would require such a radical rewiring of the inflamed brain as to render the idea of it utopian. I see no way such a political change ever could happen. “Political” types can’t even get it together to enact reforms within their civilization, let alone transform the civilization itself.
 
The only way is to channel the spirit of Gaia, help the people hear the Earth with their own ears, help them feel the Earth with their own souls.
 
*Gaia sculpted us to be hunter-gatherers. Evolution worked our clay. With sane use of the inflamed brain we figured out how to pasture animals on appropriate land, how to do horticulture and husbandry on appropriate land.
 
But agriculture and animal agriculture are the seeds and leaves of the city, corrupt seeds and poison leaves of its prison walls. These are never adaptive, never ecological. They never work for people or the land.
 
*Gaia gave us the idea of her. We’ve learned from observation and eventually from theories. We learned to understand aspects of the Earth. We learned ecology. We’ve seen with our own eyes the campaign of destruction.
 
Let’s take just one part of it, deforestation, the mass murder of trees across all zones especially the tropical:
 
1. Deforestation brings the drought, brings the desert.
 
2. It’s a major part of the ongoing sixth major extinction event in Earth’s history.
 
3. It brings erosion, brings the carbon, which brings the heating, which brings the methane, which is bringing the real heating.
 
The number one driver of global deforestation is the Western consumption maw, especially that of the US.
 
That puts in perspective the lame, fake “solutions” to climate change offered by “activists” in the US. These solutions – offsets, industrial “renewables”, hybrid cars and other product substitutions – also drive deforestation.
 
The truth is there is one and only one real solution for averting the worst of the climate crisis: Stop all industrial greenhouse gas emissions, stop destroying sinks (this means ending ALL deforestation), rebuild sinks on a massive scale.
 
Anything short of that is a lie.
 
*The injury, often lethal, is practical, directly to our bodies, directly to our ability to eat, to sustain ourselves. The injury is to our feeling of beauty and spirit. The injury is to our humanity.
 
There are those who say our humanity makes us superior to the other animals and to nature. Even leaving aside all the other reasons this is false, most of all it’s false because modern civilization, by driving the ecological sunder to its utmost and exterminating all that’s left of human spirit and culture, destroys our very humanity most of all.
 
*Watch the moon travel the sky across thirty sunrises. These are regular phase changes. Then there’s Gaia’s non-linear phase changes triggered by extreme forces. Today the berserk species Homo domesticus, civilized man, is using the billions of years of stored solar energy to murderously assault Gaia. As always Gaia will impose her correction upon this vermin affliction.
 
We can’t know exactly how Gaia’s kinesis will play out, but still we must begin work on the post-kinetic life, the village, the tent camp, whatever the form becomes. We must base our future not on where we were or what might seem to work right now, but on where the grounding of future human life will be, after the collapse. We must understand the unfolding kinesis and prepare to endure it.
 
We’re already enduring it, in the form of the depredations of the corporate technocratic civilization itself and all its horrors: Ecological, socioeconomic, cultural. Things are going to get much worse.
 
*If humanity has more days at all, the return home to Gaia must itself be part of Gaia’s phase change. Our best chance is to build the necessary ideas in our brains.
 
If we’re to have a future at all, our nation has to be phase changing right now in harmony with Gaia’s change. No longer to be the deranged parasitic squatting vandals of industrial civilization but the renaissance of primal humanity living as one with the ecology.
 
That’s what Gaia means today for us.
 
*The mass murder of the trees is one of the most savage feedback loops of ecological destruction.
 
As the trees are murdered by logging and clearance for corporate agriculture, the carbon stored in their biomass and the soil they maintain is released, and the clouds and rains they generate through their evapotranspiration fade out, bringing in their wake drought. The now unanchored soil dries and erodes.
 
The drought then helps kill more trees driving warming and drought further, bringing on the desert.
 
Modern civilization is turning the physical Earth as well as the human soul into a desert. That’s the end goal
 
Gaia will purge this vermin infestation, and she will continue in a new phase. The only question is whether humanity will continue after having done its best to commit suicide.
 
Will we?
 
 
 
 
 

July 2, 2018

The Cry of the Earth

Filed under: American Revolution, Dance of Death, Disaster Capitalism — Tags: — Russ @ 11:57 am

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All my life I’ve heard the cry of the Earth. Earth’s cry of pain, sadness, growing rage. I heard it as a child. As a young adult I tried to ignore it but it was always there. Then it came near once again, insistent, from without and within, and I could no longer ignore. As it was a cry from the Earth, I now cry from the wilderness.
 
The Earth spoke to me, through Jeremiah.
 
 
The word of Gaia came to me, saying,
Go and cry in the ears of America, saying,
Thus says the Earth; I remember you,
The kindness of your youth,
The love of your espousals,
When you went after me in the wilderness,
In a land that was not sown.
America was holiness unto the Earth,
And the first fruits of his increase:
All that devour him shall offend;
Evil shall come upon them, says the Earth.
 
 
And the Earth spoke again even more directly through Revelation:
 
 
The nations were angry,
And Earth’s wrath is come,
And the time of the dead,
That they should be judged,
And that you should give reward unto your servants the prophets,
And to the saints,
And them that fear your name, small and great;
And should destroy them which destroy the earth.
 
 
Gaia’s kinesis shall destroy those who destroy the Earth, Gaia’s unfailing way of dealing with berserk infestations.
 
 
Sometimes I transpose the Bible because Earth speaks to me through it, part of my acculturation. The same is true of some poets, philosophers, novelists.
 
And musicians.
 
 
 
 
 
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