Volatility

April 5, 2021

The Final Addiction

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A few statements from evolutionary biologists: “Immunization is also making once-rare or non-existent genetic variants of pathogens more prevalent ….…the vaccine quietly alters the genetic profile of the pathogen population ….the scientific community is becoming increasingly aware that vaccine resistance is a real risk….”
 
I used to be suspicious of vaccines produced by corporations on a profit-seeking basis but was agnostic toward the idea of vaccination in principle. I hadn’t done deep research on the question.
 
But since the Covidian assault forced me to research these most novel injections, the more I’ve learned the more I’m understanding vaccination as such to be part of the counterproductive idiocy of technocratic medicine. As everywhere else, the right path is to uphold and support natural health systems and balance them amid maximal natural biodiversity. As everywhere else, the Covidian terror-lockdown onslaught works to eradicate all natural balances in favor of stupid reductive violent technological interventions.
 
Throughout its “Covid” assault the system has kept in place all its assaults on public health and biodiversity while maintaining its hostility to all reform. It continues with its commitment to the wholesale poisoning of the air, water, food and general environment with industrial and agricultural poisons. It continues with its systematic poisoning of our bodies and defacement of our genomes. With its factory farms, pesticides and genetic engineering processes it continues its relentless drive to wipe out antibiotics as a medically effective treatment. It continues its deliberate drive to maximize cancer and heart disease.
 
The globalist system continues its ecocidal drives of deforestation, eradication of agroecology in favor of industrial agriculture, eradication of natural biodiversity, industrial mining, global heating and climate chaos, all toward the goal of discovering every novel pathogen still hidden amid the last crevices of wilderness and distributing it as globally as possible as fast as possible while also expanding the ranges and virulence of known pathogens.
 
The system continues to force the most physically and psychologically unhealthy and disease-inducing mode of existence on all people, from the cosseted Western upper classes to the masses of the global South, always touting its nightmare vision of “life” as good and anyway unavoidable. It does all it can to generate maximum stress and anxiety. The criminals of the Covid regime often have openly confessed their goal of driving maximum irrational fear and stress in order to obtain compliance with lockdown decrees, superstitious rituals like face diapers, the medically worthless and counterproductive gene-altering injections.
 
This exact same government-media system continues to reject with extreme hostility even such a modest reform as Medicare for All (in the US), while Western countries that have versions of national health systems are working to gut and abolish them. Meanwhile the most immediately murderous effect of the Covidian terror-lockdown assault has been to stampede and induce and force all health care systems to abdicate their rightful mission completely and surrender to chaos and misdirection of all their resources to their own version “Covid” hysteria and lunacy. Even the basic doctor-patient relationship, already fraught under the existing adverse conditions, is now subject to a whole new course of hoops and obstacles.
 
The propaganda and lockdowns in themselves have been forced upon the people with the deliberate intent to depress immune functioning and demolish natural immune system health. Forced sedentary incarceration amid the worse polluted indoor air, the drive to exaggerate stress and anxiety, the evil agenda to keep people out of the wholesome outdoors, this ulterior agenda being highly evident from day one (“Stay at Home”), all these have none but bad psychological and physical results. The Covidian propaganda and lockdowns never could have had any effect but to depress immune functioning. This policy-induced demolition of our natural immune systems evolved over millions of years was always the intended goal of the entire fake pandemic campaign. Now the purpose of the injection campaign is to complete this immune destruction and render us physically addicted to artificial injections to prevent our becoming sick.
 
The term “addiction” is not just metaphorical but clinically precise: Physically addictive drugs destroy natural systems and replace them with the drug’s own functioning so that in the absence of the drug the body becomes ill. In the same way the Covidian terror-lockdown-injection assault wants to destroy the human immune system and replace it with the injected gene-altering agent so that in the absence of regular injections we become sick and die.
 
Even most critics of the MRNA mass experiment still are capable of thinking only in terms of massive violent interventions by institutions and remain in a state of contempt for the natural immune system in spite of the lip service they pay to it.
 
(In the same way, mainstream climate-industrial activists are capable of reacting to the specter of intervention-driven climate change only with ever more radical, extreme, violent interventions like geoengineering, artificial carbon sequestration based on extreme-energy-extreme-maintenance technology, converting small portions of the industrial electricity maw to fake “renewables” like industrial wind, industrial solar, river-murdering hydroelectric, nukes and anything seeking artificially to “lower” global concentrations and temperatures. Any sane person concerned about the climate crisis knows there’s no question of lowering temperatures – several more degrees rise already is locked in. Rather, we think only in terms of not adding to the damage, not making it worse. So we say only – abolish emissions and stop destroying sinks. As for lowering the concentration, the only way this can be done which is not ecocidal in itself is to stop assaulting the ocean (the greatest sink of all) and let natural sinks – forests, wetlands, grasslands – resume their natural ranges.
 
It’s no coincidence that all mainstream “environmentalists” are ardent Covidians, while many among the Covidian propagandists also are crusaders for technocratic climate interventions including the specter of “climate lockdowns”. Just as how lockdowns are designed to destroy human health while imposing totalitarian control and coercion, so they also would impose coercion and control while corporate and governmental ecocide continues unabated.
 
Always, technocrats are technocrats are technocrats, and their only goal always is maximum ecocide and genocide. Any other goal their propaganda touts is never more than a pretext for mass murder.)
 
 
Since the interventionist onslaught for which the original (objectively mild) “Covid” phenomenon was the pretext has proven to be such a total counterproductive disaster from any human point of view, what kind of omnicidal maniac does one have to be to call for doubling down on interventions to deal with escalated harms and dangers which have been caused 100% by the interventions themselves? All who are involved in the propaganda and administration of the injection assault are disease vectors in the same way rats are vectors of the fleas which are vectors of plague. Humanity must purge ourselves of such infinite psychopaths.
 
In the end all technocrats are the same fanatical builders of the Tower of Babel, however much they squabble among themselves. The Tower itself has to be knocked down.
 
 
 
 
 

January 26, 2019

GM Trees (Plantations Part 2)

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“Already forests are suffering the impacts of climate change, over-harvesting, and the introduction of invasive species, diseases, and pests from out of control globalization. The last thing the forests need are risky GE trees.”
 
– BJ McManama, Save Our Roots Campaign Organizer for the Indigenous Environmental Network, opposing the cynical opportunist program to engineer blight-resistant American chestnuts.
 
In Part One we discussed the evils of industrial monoculture tree plantations. They are purely alien to the land, purely invasive even where they amass “native” species in such an anti-ecological way, purely destructive.
 
GMOs by definition are invasive and will escalate every one of the pathologies we surveyed in part one: Destruction of forest, wetland, grassland habitats; generation of desert; all at the expense of food for human beings; destruction of carbon sinks thus driving the climate crisis; biodiversity loss and mass extinction; genetic monoculture; driving people off their land and destroying their way of life; sowing poverty, hunger, malnutrition; radically escalating wildfires; slathering of agricultural poisons; corporate consolidation and land concentration, land-grabbing, socioeconomic inequality; the sham “climate movement” fiddling while Earth burns.
 
Genetic engineering automatically is non-native and invasive to Earth itself, to ecology and evolution. So in itself, even leaving aside ulterior motives and deliberate lies, GM “solutions” automatically are just building the Tower of Babel higher and more top-heavy.
 
GM trees are designed to expand the invasion range and biodiversity erasure. That’s why the corporations and governments do the research: These are guaranteed primary effects and therefore are primary intended effects. That’s why they’ve set up the plantations in the first place.
 
Plantation trees automatically spread their pollen to any related species within wind range. This is long documented with non-GM trees everywhere – poplar, willow, acacia, birch, pine, others. This genetic contamination inevitably will include GM contamination to whatever extent GM trees are deployed in the environment. This contamination already is documented in China with GM poplars. China is a world center of poplar diversity, and this already imperiled diversity is now under GMO attack as well. Meanwhile US attempts to engineer poplar sterility, allegedly in order to prevent such contamination from GM poplar plantations, have been a failure.
 
Pro-GMO activists, disaster capitalist ideologues they are, cite the many crises driven by globalization, its industrial agriculture including tree plantations, the climate crisis and other ecological crises these are causing, as the reasons society now must deploy GM trees, in order to “solve” these problems in a Tower of Babel way.
 
This already is a proven lie: Poison-based agriculture as such is a proven agronomic failure going back to the 1950s when it became incontrovertible how this model denudes the soil and sets humanity on a pesticide treadmill and arms race the resistant pests will always win. The GMO deployment since the mid 1990s has only intensified this failure. As always, the poison treadmill and the Tower of Babel never are intended to solve the crises they cause in the first place. On the contrary they depend on crisis for their power and expansion.
 
Thus tree monocultures have taken advantage of their own disaster. These can’t even pretend to be food the way GM crops pretend to do. And then their GM form is engineered to be even more disastrous: More expansive, more aggressive, more destructive, more literally scorched earth.
 
Eucalyptus plantations have a special wildfire dynamic of deliberate disaster which then is used as propaganda and pretext for the Babel tech deployment. Eucalyptus monoculture drives out most other life forms, summoning a bio-dead, pesticide-slathered space where it then dries out the land and generates wildfires. These trees evolved over millions of years to thrive on aridity and fire, to the point that they depend on fire for their reproduction since their seeds open only when subjected to the temperatures generated by wildfires. That’s why they produce such dry conditions and such copious resin-laden tinder, in order to produce the most fire-friendly conditions. Many species of pine do the same, and these same species regularly are paired with eucalyptus in mutually reinforcing plantations, as both work toward the same arid fire-scoured environment.
 
Where growing in such masses as in plantations, eucalyptus wrings the water from the soil and causes depletion of groundwater and stream flow. The ecological impact hits far beyond the plantation borders. Everywhere it’s been introduced eucalyptus soon goes feral and aggressively invades the surrounding habitat, driving out native species and proceeding to transform the environment to its further liking: Aridity and fires.
 
Even natural eucalyptus-dominated ecology in its native Australia is less diverse than other woodland communities. It drives out the southern beeches who prefer moister conditions and marginalizes even such fellow arid inhabitants as Callitris, araucarias and she-oaks. Australian plantations are worse. Invasive plantations outside Australia are much worse.
 
GM eucalyptus is designed to greatly expand the space condemned to these plantations of fire. In Brazil, agribusiness is working to develop faster-growing eucalyptus (the project is a failure so far in spite of government approval for commercialization in 2015) while in the US ArborGen is trying to develop a cold-tolerant version in order to bring the plantations to the Southeast, where the climate is still not reliably warm enough for commercial eucalyptus production though several species are invasively established.
 
Wherever they expand, GM or non-GM, in the plantation or wherever they inevitably escape, eucalyptus will be aggressive against moist forest land, aggressive against native trees and plants, aggressive in turning landscapes into wildfire alleys. Much like the introduced killer bees of the 1970s, these killer trees are driving South America’s campaign of deforestation and desertification and will soon bring their paradigm of destruction to North America if the genetic engineering project prevails. A GM eucalyptus which grows faster will more quickly deplete the soil’s water. A GM eucalyptus grown in monocultures over an ever greater northward range will bring all its pathologies with it.
 
Eucalyptus is our prime example of the intrinsic psychopathy of industrial monoculture tree plantations and the escalation which genetically engineered forms would add to the destruction. Eucalyptus automatically is destructively invasive outside Australia. GM eucalyptus would be doubly invasive.
 
Beyond eucalyptus, trees targeted for genetic modification include Loblolly pines (plantations of these already infest the US southeast; genetic engineering will attempt to render their wood more dense, for use as biomass and lumber), poplars (Bt insecticidal strains of black and white poplar have been grown in China since the 2001; current projects are trying to engineer lower-lignin types for biofuel production), the American chestnut (for decades ravaged by a fungal disease, engineers want to develop a GM fungal-resistant gene drive type even though ongoing conventional breeding programs are having some success), bananas, plums, and papayas (types resistant against viral disease; GM papayas are commercially planted in Hawaii and China and already are failing in China as the virus is overcoming the resistance gene; this is guaranteed in all cases of engineered resistance), and the “Arctic apple”, now appearing in stores, engineered to suppress visual signs of incipient rot, a pure consumer-vanity product, purely worthless.
 
We can enumerate many more harms from GM trees, both harms intrinsic to GMOs and destructive escalations of ongoing plantation harms.
 
*Tree pollen is widely wafted on the wind, and poplars and pines freely hybridize in nature. Plantations of introduced species automatically contaminate native species, harming their genetic diversity. GM contamination also will happen automatically, as it already has in China where introduced species of poplar, several varieties genetically engineered and therefore doubly invasive, contaminate native poplars amid this center of world poplar diversity.
 
*Any advantage the engineered trait confers may help feral invasives to become entrenched in the environment. Thus faster-growing and/or cold-tolerant eucalyptus, or lower-lignin poplars, may become even more aggressive weeds than feral eucalyptus already is.
 
*The known harmful effects of escape and entrenchment include how eucalyptus drive out native plants and animals and dries out the land. Then there are the unknown chaotic effects, by their nature unpredictable. We’ve seen examples in the failed field trials of GM trees themselves, the failure of FuturaGen in Brazil to sustain higher-yield GM eucalyptus results across several trial sites, and the failure of Oregon engineers to sustain uniform genomes and the engineered sterility trait in their GM poplar trials. These are two examples of how chaos quickly ensues the moment the trials leave the greenhouse lab and enter the environment, even though these were still carefully controlled field trials. Imagine the chaos of the less controlled plantation environment, and then the uncontrolled wild environment where the escaped GM trees will sojourn.
 
*If the GM chestnut project goes through, it will be the first environmental deployment of a gene drive GMO. Such GMOs are explicitly designed to contaminate all wild individuals of the same or related species. Here the pro-GMO activists admit that GM contamination is inevitable in every case, since here the technology depends on total contamination. Whereas the Terminator trait renders seeds sterile, the gene drive Exterminator trait is designed deliberately to drive one or more species extinct.
 
In this obscene inversion, the fungal epidemic which has decimated the American chestnut but which nevertheless has left some naturally resistant individuals, which in the eyes of a non-psychopath would be sought as the genetic basis to conventionally breed a resistant variety, instead is being used as the pretext to launch an extermination campaign whose explicit goal is to render the natural species completely extinct, thereby completing the work of the fungus, and replace it with an alien semi-artificial engineered species. The campaign wants to drive native chestnuts extinct (and of course render organic production impossible under the current rules).
 
*The ecocidal psychopaths working on the GM chestnut openly avow that they are using it only as a Trojan horse to help grease the skids for subsequent, directly commercial GM trees. So the anti-blight GM chestnut is first and foremost a propaganda gambit on behalf of the commodity GM regime as such, exactly like the “golden rice” hoax.
 
*As with all Bt crops, Bt poplars and any other tree engineered to resist insects harm non-target insects, birds and other animals, and damage the soil ecology. Bt toxins and crops engineered to produce them are named after the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, which naturally produces these toxins under ecologically balanced conditions in balanced amounts. Bt crops, from leaves to roots, grossly exude the poisons overcoming all balance. Typical of all industrial agriculture practice.
 
*Epidemic disease and infestation is inherent to all monocultural practice. The GMO deployment is designed to prop up this doomed, destructive, self-destructive system for a few years longer, years neither humanity nor the Earth have. GMOs and poison-based agriculture directly contradict everything we know about the climate crisis, the ongoing mass extinction event, and the general ecological crisis, everything we know needs to be done. GMOs, including GM trees, are intended to prevent any meaningful action, in mitigation or adaptation, until it’s too late.
 
*GM disease resistance won’t work in the real world. Genetic engineering is too fragile and too reliant on perfect lab conditions ever to work well in the environment. As with all pesticides since the big spray commenced in the 1950s, and as with all poison plants, all GMOs designed to express insecticides, resist herbicides, and/or resist disease, so GM trees as well will fail in the field against the insects, fungi, and viruses they’re allegedly deployed against. The pests always will overcome. And to roll out new trees is logistically a far more complex undertaking than to roll out new maize brands.
 
In reality all GMOs are hoaxes, really just carriers of an idea designed to generate profit, power, and for the scientism cult, lunatic religious exaltation.
 
*No testing ever has been done on the potential health harms of breathing GM pollen for humans or other animals. GM trees will send their toxic pollen travelling farther and wider than the much shorter maize or cotton.
 
*No legitimate testing ever has been done on the safety of humans or other animals eating GM foods (only completely irrelevant weight-gain trials on CAFO inmates, which the paid liars then fraudulently call “food safety” tests). GM apples and papayas already are tree-grown direct unprocessed GM foods in the commercial supply. If GM chestnuts are developed and deployed, this also will be a direct Frankenfood. (To say again, the GM chestnut project would use the aggressively contaminating gene drive technology. Chestnuts freely hybridize in nature already so a GM deployment in the environment, if it works as intended, will drive all existing chestnut species on the continent extinct and replace them with nothing but the GM type. Non-GM food chestnuts will cease to exist.)
 
*The successful engineering of low-lignin eucalyptus and poplar will escalate the biofuel scam.
 
*For many tribes of the First Nations, the genetic engineering of poplar is a desecration as the tree is sacred to them. At the same time, Oneidas being proselytized on behalf of the GM chestnut have said that “GM trees have no soul.”
 
This desecration is as deliberate as when the Romanized Christians cut down the Greek groves of Athena in order to insult the pagan religion. Today it’s the fundamentalist cult of scientism and technocracy which has embarked upon a fanatical crusade to eradicate all of nature and replace it with only engineered organisms. The boosters and technicians of GM tree plantations are such religious maniacs.
 
 
Every problem, every aspect of the ecological crisis, is in part directly driven by industrial monoculture, and directly or indirectly driven by the commodity system. It is impossible to solve or ameliorate any of these crises within the framework of industrial agriculture, or within any productionist framework. Genetic engineering is nothing but building the Tower of Babel higher and more top-heavy. Any time you hear any PR flack in any guise alleging any “need” for any form of genetic engineering whatsoever, you can ignore the specific words since they invariably boil down to, “We need to prop up corporate profit and the production economy no matter what the damage.” Or as George Bush put it, “The American way of life is non-negotiable. Keep Shopping!”
 
In the end it all boils down to we who recognize that globalization, commodification, production-consumption, capitalism, extreme energy, must end if humanity is to survive at all, versus those who religiously believe that these must continue and who are willing to pay the price of total global murder-suicide for the sake of this fundamentalist commitment.
 
All GMOs are hoaxes and frauds in addition to their many other evils. GM tree plantations, which add a great escalation of the direct destruction of forests to the direct and indirect deforestation driven overwhelmingly by corporate industrial agriculture, comprise a new level of criminal destruction and evil being premeditated and carried out by those responsible, from the engineers to the media propagandists.
 
GM agriculture, indelibly part of corporate industrial agriculture, offers nothing to humanity and the Earth but social and economic destruction, environmental destruction, famine, pandemics, war, and death. It’s clear that here is no way forward, only the deadest of dead ends.
 
The only way forward to survival, transcendence, and victory is the return home to the Earth. The broad highway home is the necessary global transformation to agroecology and Food Sovereignty. We must turn the clock forward.
 
The fake “solutions” of genetic engineering are nothing but the Tower of Babel. But if we have a babeling chaos, we need to stop shouting, not shout louder.
 
 
 
 
 

January 25, 2019

Tree Plantations (Part 1 of 2)

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Here in the New York metropolitan area it’s appropriate that the most obvious tree plantations are those desecrated to the pseudopagan-Christian-consumerist ritual of sacrificing young virgin conifers to the Santa-Jesus fusion god. These little trees are spruces, firs, pines.
 
The more intrepid pine and spruce plantations join the hardwood marches of poplar, willow, acacia, beech, oak, alder, mahogany, neem, teak, eucalyptus, rubber and many others expanding their empire over gross ranges of what used to be natural forest, wetland, grassland.
 
These industrial monoculture tree plantations are a key weapon of the onslaught of industrial agriculture. They eradicate natural forest and wetland, dry out the land as part of an inexorable campaign to turn all forest and wetland to desert. Plantations (and agriculture as a whole) do this through deforestation and climate change driven to a large extent by the burning of these habitats and destruction of their carbon sinks. Eucalyptus and pine plantations especially are designed to bring fire. The destroyers use fire to burn down the land and release a massive hemorrhage of carbon dioxide and methane. Then the plantation itself is a fire trap. Wildfires are a constant of eucalyptus and pine plantations.
 
Tree plantations drive the habitat destruction which exterminates everything from microbes to insects to amphibians to birds to mammals. Most of those driven extinct were never known to science. The plantations are potent weapons of mass extinction and the destruction of carbon sinks. Natural forest is the most capacious sink. Wetlands also hold vast amounts of carbon and when destroyed release it especially as methane, the greenhouse gas which ultimately will play most decisive role of all in dictating how far global heating will go and how deranged climate chaos will become. So far wetlands destruction is the number one man-made source of methane, although that’ll change fast once the great Arctic methane feedback, which will be triggered by the warming from agriculture’s habitat destruction among other massive carbon emission sources, kicks into high gear.
 
An industrial plantation itself is a dead zone just like the anoxic zones of the Gulf of Mexico and other hemorrhage points for agriculture’s nitrogen deluge, or like the vast doldrums of floating plastic spreading across the oceans, the real islands of capitalist license the libertarians babble about.
 
Industrial trees are automatic destructive invaders in three ways. Their existence in the first place requires the prior destruction of much of the natural ecology. Their ongoing maintenance requires ongoing suppression of it.
 
And then these plantations are automatic destroyers of the genetic diversity of the trees themselves. Many of the most colonized tree types – pines, eucalyptus, willows, poplars, oak, birch and others – naturally cast their pollen on the winds across large areas, and different species within a genus freely hybridize with one another. When non-native species are grown in industrial regiments amid natural centers of origin or diversity, these massed and pampered invasives assault the natural genetics.
 
For example China is a center of poplar, willow, and pine diversity and has vast plantations of introduced species of these which continually contaminate the native species. Acacias are native and diverse across the tropical and subtropical Americas, Africa, southern Asia and Australia. But the different species native to these continents have been introduced and colonized promiscuously across all these zones so that everywhere native acacias must wage civil war against invasives for land and genetic integrity.
 
We haven’t even gotten to GM trees yet, but non-GM plantation trees already comprise a massive invasive campaign of genetic contamination, homogenization, and general biodiversity death.
 
Then there’s the purely invasive trees. Eucalyptus is native only to Australia but has been introduced and industrialized everywhere that’s warm enough for it to grow. Everywhere it quickly escapes control, becomes naturalized and aggressively drives out native species while working to transform the environment to a dryer, hotter state by draining the water from the soil. There’s many examples of such aggressive, destructive invasives – pines in South America and Africa, rubber in Africa and Asia, oil palm in Asia are just a few of the worst.
 
The Chilean forestry model is morbidly typical. This Pinochet campaign is ongoing and being escalated to this day. The destroyers wipe out the native forests and the human communities who depend on them and replace them with eucalyptus from Australia and Monterey pine from North America.
 
In spite of media lies almost all plantation land is taken over from natural forest or by taking agricultural land out of food production. In both cases this drives further deforestation and destruction of marginal land. Direct logging and tree plantations exist at the direct expense of natural habitat and human food. We can add that to the long, long list of proof that the corporate “feed the world” propaganda of the Green Revolution and the pro-poison activists is a big lie.
 
This campaign of land-grabbing and land destruction is a monumental robbery of the people’s land. It physically drives out native peoples and small farming communities and destroys their natural societies and economies, their traditions, their spirit ways, their languages and cultures, their way of life. Here too the campaign of ecocide replaces diverse nature with a dead zone. Brazilians call the metastasizing eucalyptus plantations “green deserts.” Ecocide always goes together with genocide.
 
Tree plantations like any other mode of deforestation destroy forest and bring desert. They poison the soil, water, and air. They wipe out wildlife communities and drive free peoples off their land. The goal, as with all campaigns of ecocide-genocide, is to annihilate all diversity and impose social and ecological monoculture. The goal is to replace humanity and Earth with a planet-wide dead zone.
 
This includes literally burning down everything but the tree factory, as with the apocalyptic fires of Indonesia to clear the way for oil palm plantations, or the metastatic spread of industrialized eucalyptus and pine which become veritable fire trees as their massed forms dry out the land and cover it with resinous tinder. These plantations escalate wildfire ranges and extremes, as in Chile, Portugal, Spain, and elsewhere around the world.
 
Industrial plantations bring destruction by all the usual insults of poison-based agriculture. They use huge amounts of fossil-based fertilizer, denude the soil, are drenched with fossil-based herbicides and insecticides. These poisons suffuse the land, air, water, the bodies of plants and animals, human and non-human, and our homes and food. Tree plantations add a new level of attack to the poison onslaught toxifying the entire environment.
 
Per standard disaster capitalist practice, the promoters of poison claim that spraying and genetic engineering are necessary for plantations to withstand pest and disease outbreaks. In reality tree plantations, like all monoculture, clear the ground for pests and disease by destroying the balancing ecological webs that naturally keep potential pathogens under control. Therefore tree plantations, like all of industrial agriculture, select for pests, disease, and antibiotic resistant bacteria.
 
Plantations also select for pests and disease because these always quickly develop resistance to the poisons targeting them, whether these are sprayed or engineered into their tissues. As always it’s the non-target insects, birds, and microbes, especially those which beneficially predate on pathogens and pests, who suffer the worst damage from agricultural poisons.
 
Where the plantation trees are types native to the region, they help concentrate and multiply already existing pests. Where the trees are exotic, they bring new pests and disease previously not present, and open up new niches for native pests.
 
Tree plantations escalate the concentration of agribusiness power and reinforce the control-seeking, exploitation, destruction, dispossession of human and non-human animals and non-crop plants, and waste. Civilization does this for the sake of power and destruction. It organizes itself into corporations and governments to carry out this ecocide-genocide program.
 
This mode of “forestry” reinforces the colonial model by setting up sacrifice zones in order to generate raw material for the global elite consumption maw (mostly for the parasite cities). Contrary to another common lie, tree plantations don’t help to preserve natural forest. On the contrary they clear their way by destroying forests, then replace the destroyed forests with their dead zones while driving illegal logging, ranching, agriculture, and subsistence farming to deforest more land. By helping to prop up civilizational gluttony for commodity oils, pulp, lumber and other tree products they drive further destruction of forests (and therefore sinks) to meet this artificially jacked-up demand.
 
Nowhere is this more true than the “biomass” onslaught. This is the wholesale destruction of forests and wetlands to produce tree-derived biofuels and wood pellets for electrical generation and heating, all the while massively destroying sinks and emitting carbon, and doing so under the rubric of “the climate”. This atrocity is at the core of the entire climate-industrial propaganda and practice. It was officially enshrined under the 2015 Paris Sham and is lavishly subsidized by governments. The process of mass destruction of natural habitats and sinks and their replacement by tree plantations is the core action and purpose of Paris. I’ll expand on the Earth-murdering goal of Paris in an upcoming post.
 
A tree plantation is a total wash, all for gluttony and destruction for the sake of destruction. It is purely alien to the Earth, just as modern civilization is purely a parasite squatter-vandal which gives nothing to Gaia, only takes, wastes, destroys. Tree plantations comprise a prefect epitome of this productionist-technocratic system in all its evils.
 
 
In Part Two we’ll discuss GM trees, how they escalate these evils, and the added harm they bring.
 
 
 
 
 

December 1, 2018

Morally, Ecologically, COPFOs Are the Same as CAFOs

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Exploited, tortured, malnourished, poisoned, regimented.

 
 
1. Factory farms are among the worst evils of modern civilization. The civilized smugly invoke Auschwitz as a near-mythical symbol of pure evil. Meanwhile Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), identical concentration and death camps by any measure other than that of domesticated hominid supremacism, continue to multiply across America and the globe.
 
The sadistic cruelty which is the daily routine is beyond sane imagination. The living animals are packed together like dead sardines. They are driven insane with physical pain and crowding and unfathomable psychological stress. Babies are wrenched from their mothers to render the mothers “productive” again as fast as possible. The inmates are fed a gruesome poisoned grain diet which makes them sick. It’s just enough to drag their zombie forms along till they reach slaughter weight. (Producing this weight is the one and only thing GMOs ever have been tested for by the system. Never once has the system performed a legitimate safety test. Governments, corporations, academia, and the corporate and science media systematically lie about this, the ultimate fake news.)
 
Egg layers have it the worst. Broilers can’t be pushed too far into madness lest they rub their breasts raw against the wire till the flesh is stripped to the bone, much as maddened concentration camp inmates would commit suicide by trying to climb the wire. That would ruin the product. But for the layers anything goes as long as eggs can be forced from them.
 
Imprisoned in boxes, living with nothing but foul air and artificial light, never seeing or feeling the sun, or the grass beneath, or the flowing breeze, they live dead lives of misery and torment, all to satisfy the depravities of the sadistic and gluttonous civilized.
 
CAFOs are a clear and present danger to public health. They automatically incubate every kind of animal and animal-to-human disease. This, along with the hideous living conditions and toxic diet, renders the inmates chronically sick. They’re maintained on a constant regimen of antibiotics. CAFO feed also is contaminated with antibiotic resistant GM bacteria which are left over from the factory synthesis of riboflavin and other feed additives. The main effect of these practices is radically to accelerate the evolution of antibiotic resistant pathogens and the failure of drug after drug. By any rational or moral measure we must conclude that the goal of corporate industrial agriculture and government policy is the complete eradication of antibiotics as a medically effective treatment. CAFOs guarantee pandemics from this vector.
 
CAFOs also guarantee epidemics of human and non-human animal illness and environmental destruction from their massive output of air and water pollution. CAFOs spew vast amounts of particulate matter (much of it carrying pathogens), ozone smog, hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide and other pollutants. The Biblical flood of sewage which surges forth from CAFOs, unassimilable by farmland or the natural environment, is a constant volcano of methane, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, sulfur dioxide, and other potent greenhouse gases. CAFOs are among the reasons industrial agriculture is by far the number one driver of the climate crisis.
 
Agronomically CAFOs reinforce the overproduction of worthless commodity grain. This condemns to effective sterility vast spans of arable land which could be used to grow food for human communities on an agroecological basis. Instead the output of most of the land, and the ecological devastation which goes with poison-based agriculture, all goes down the CAFO rathole in order to produce cheap (at the retail checkout), grotesquely expensive (by any reality-based accounting) meat for the Western and Westernized middle classes.
 
This productionism of worthless grain, and the deployment of subsidies and propaganda in order artificially to generate such “markets” for this grain as the CAFO system, is a long-standing, perverse policy of the US government, fully supported by the entire political, intellectual, and media class.
 
Most important from the point of view of the corporate-technocratic state, the CAFO system reinforces the GMO deployment. This deployment of a worthless, extremely expensive and destructive product genre, depends completely on such artificial dumping grounds for worthless over-produced commodity grains.
 
Socioeconomically the CAFO system is a key driver of farm consolidation and the domination of farming by agribusiness. The system directly destroys small animal farms, indirectly destroys small grain farmers by reinforcing the mass commodity system.
 
CAFOs destroy the communities where they’re sited (always among lower income people of course). They foul the land, water, and air for many miles around rendering the landscape unlivable.
 
Working conditions are very dangerous, with high risks of direct injury, acute illness which is sometimes lethal (workers as well as animals often are killed outright by surges of hydrogen sulfide from manure lagoons), physical and mental disease from the fumes, chronic illness from the general disease incubation, and drowning in the manure lagoons. The working conditions and pay are atrocious. The legal “owners” of the CAFO are themselves indentured servants, forced by the corporation to take on all the work, risk, and debt while the corporation dictates all procedures and reaps all the profit.
 
In every way CAFOs add up to nothing but evil, destruction, death. A sane humanity would abolish them immediately on moral and self-preservation grounds. The fact that the masses not only tolerate but support this system is one of the direct proofs that modern civilized hominids are clinically insane, and incapable of Darwinian adaptation. This has nothing to do with lack of mediated information; mentally sound animals directly sense what will destroy them and fight or flee. Only civilized hominids have lost this core evolutionary trait. That goes for all self-destructive human “politics”.
 
 
2. Plant monocultures, which I will henceforth call COPFOs (COncentrated Plant Feeding Operations), are little better. Everything we just condemned about CAFOs – working conditions, destruction of communities, farm and agribusiness consolidation, agronomic perversity, ecological destruction, public health hazards including the epidemics of cancer and reproductive problems from poisons in the fields and food, including antibiotic resistance driven by herbicides (all herbicides are broad-spectrum biocides, i.e. antibiotics; glyphosate was patented as an antibiotic before it became part of herbicide formulations) and the promiscuous use of antibiotic resistance markers in genetic engineering – all are just as severe and destructive with COPFOs. I’ve written about this in hundreds of pieces over many years and don’t need further detail here.
 
Industrial monoculture denudes and destroys the soil, which becomes a disintegrated, inert medium in which the plants are physically propped up, jolted with synthetic fertilizer, slathered in poison which suffuses all their cells. The plants, malnourished except for a few artificially supplied (usually grossly oversupplied) macronutrients, physically weakened by being constantly drenched in poison, genetically weakened by breeding programs focused myopically on perverse traits like gross yield (meaningful only from a capitalist commodity point of view, not from any ecological perspective or the perspective of growing food for people), genetically tortured by unnecessary surgery and Nazi-style experimentation called “genetic engineering” (the scientists also torture the animals this way), too damaged and weakened to deploy their natural processes which signal one another, summon beneficial insects, and repel pests, become easy targets for pests. So they require even more poison, which then weakens the plants and soil that much further. (The eventual food quality of such crops is of course very low.) This vicious circle is deliberate and goes together with the equally deliberate pesticide-pest, pesticide-resistance arms race, the pesticide treadmill which is as old as the large-scale deployment of pesticides themselves.
 
Both CAFOs and COPFOs are radically toxic, radically polluting, radically destructive of the ecology, radically destructive of human health and well-being, radically destructive of the human community.
 
 
3. Empathy for non-human animals and the moral feeling and philosophy which encompasses them as fully as the human animal is grounded in the fact that non-human animals are as sentient as humans. They have feeling, they have emotion, they have ideas, they have language, they have culture. Only the flat-earth speciesism typical of civilized hominids would deny something so self-evident to healthy perception and so overwhelmingly confirmed by science.
 
But perception and science say we must go further than just moving the boundary of speciesism from human-vs.-animal to animal-vs.-plant. Plants too are sentient. They communicate about weather, pests, drought, they signal to beneficial insects. They can sense nearby plants being eaten and react. They make decisions. They forecast future climate conditions, water availability, and sunlight access and extend their branch and root growth ahead of time in accord with their forecasts. One species, the stilt palm, even “walks” toward a better location it has anticipated by extending new rooting stilts in that direction and detaching from the opposite stilts. Plants remember the effects of stimuli and will modify their reactions accordingly. Integrated with mycelial mats they join to form intelligent collective organisms. Botanists studying plant communication via chemicals released into the air and soil have compiled plant vocabularies of over three thousand “words”.
 
There is no more call to doubt plant sentience than to doubt animal sentience. If we find it difficult to empathize with the mind of a plant, this is no less true of the mind of a whale or dolphin, yet no one but a domestic-hominid supremacist denies the sentience of whales and dolphins.
 
(Of course, relative to potential, so-called Homo sapiens, in the form of H. domesticus, is by far the least sentient, least sapient, most stupid and “vegetative” species on Earth.)
 
 
4. In truth all of us, all plants and animals (and fungi and protozoans and bacteria), are part of the same food web. We all are “predators” and we all shall become “prey”. It’s impossible to refute this, only to deny it and lie about it. This civilization and its apostles, including almost all who claim to care about animals and/or the environment, do little or nothing but deny and lie. (It’s telling that an “or” is even conceptually possible there, yet few things are more common than reductive cherry-picking among things that in reality are inextricable and irreducible.) Thus we have corporate “environmentalists” who support CAFOs, and vegan/animal welfare types who support COPFOs. Indeed both tout such evils as part of their fake “solutions”.
 
In ecological reality, the only reality, the only possible way of life is to take responsibility for ourselves – as individuals, families, communities – as integral parts of the ecology. We must have reverence for Gaia. We must take only what we will use and give back at least as much as we take. Otherwise we’re not even predators but parasites. The modern civilized can never be anything but wasteful and destructive parasites.
 
Whether one believes in eating meat or not, either way industrial monoculture, CAFOs and COPFOs, is beyond the moral and ecological pale. Short of a complete reversion to hunting-gathering (which is not necessary, though the apostles of industrial agriculture seem intent on forcing us to that extreme once their system inevitably collapses; they intend a global Somalia of post-agricultural failure) the only sustainable future is decentralized, low-input agroecology, with or without animal pasturage. This is the great goal our movement must work toward. Meanwhile anyone smugly content to cherry-pick within the industrial commodity system and otherwise be content with that system is offering no solution at all, only a scam which is irrational, anti-scientific, anti-ecological, and morally evil.
 
 
Destroy the dinosaurs’ eggs every chance you get.
 
 
 
 
 

September 29, 2018

Elementary Notes on Bacteria

 
 
1. Bacteria are the core of most life on Earth. This has been true throughout the natural history of evolution, our bio-cultural history, and physically, today and at all times. We humans are symbiotic with our internal bacterial microbiome and dependent upon it for our physical and mental health. This is where we must start in describing the modern biological war.
 
2. Today’s bacteria are the same as the primordial bacteria, in effect the same bacteria which never died completely but continued splitting. Our symbiosis links us with this. Each of us is linked with and part of an enduring collective organism.
 
3. The human body is suffused with still-free-living bacteria (our internal microbiotia), while human cells long have been symbiotic with what used to be free bacteria (mitochondria and possibly other organelles). Lateral exchanges (horizontal genetic transfer) continue constantly. In general, complex multi-cellular organisms remain assemblages of primal microbial DNA which has changed little over time other than to collect and interlink itself more closely and symbiotically.
 
This is probably true of human consciousness as well: As neuroscience develops, the brain and nervous system are looking more and more like ramifications from primal bacterial assemblies.
 
This puts human hubris in perspective, especially the liberal/Randroid “individualist” pathology. Between the microcosmos, the impetus of bacteria and other microbes, and the planetary macrocosmos, and from there the broader universe, Homo sapiens is a tenuous, ephemeral, meaningless thing, except insofar as we give our lives meaning for ourselves. To be individualistic about it is to be even more absurd and egomaniacal.
 
This also puts idiocy like genetic engineering in perspective: The megalomaniacal lunacy of it, that such clueless puny creatures are going to murder and replace Gaia and become gods themselves; and the biological danger of it, which just like climate chaos is far more potentially disastrous to ourselves than to Gaia at large.
 
4. We’re all symbiotic with bacteria. Herbicides in the environment and diet strip us of our bacterial health maintenance, as sure as wind chill strips our cushion of air, our personal micro-atmosphere which helps regulate our body temperature. Herbicidal bacteria-killers and antibiotic abuse in factory farming and genetic engineering are trying to sunder us physically from Gaia, from our symbiosis with the permanent organism.
 
5. The emphasis on so-called “genes” is an emphasis on an arbitrary unit. This focus, which suppresses emphasis on naturally definable DNA on the one hand, or the full symbiotic organism and its communities on the other, is an attempt to expunge both ecological science and politics/culture in favor of technocracy/scientism.
 
A basic move of the junk science of genetic engineering and sociobiology is to depict “the gene” rather than DNA as the key unit of the genome. DNA, the genome as a whole, always is fluid, chaotic, unpredictable. “The gene” is supposed to sit still, remain unchanged, exert a constant predictable effect. But in reality this is a lie. There is no rigorously definable “gene”, let alone any scientific way to attribute agency (gene reductionists like Richard Dawkins are a type of animist) or causality to such an ineffable thing.
 
6. Human brains networked with bacteria comprise a larger super-organism possessing sentience. Jung expressed this with his theory of the collective unconscious. This is part of the psychological, spiritual idea and feeling of Gaia. Religiosity also arises from a potentiality and trend of the evolution of the bacteria/human brain/human social animal network, and therefore is part of Gaia. (Again, gene-based dogma is bubble-based and posits an isolated individual, and in this way seeks to smash and atomize all collective psychology and spirit.)
 
7. The technosphere is an emergent collective techno-organism with its hominid appendage, driven mainly by its own ideological logic reflected in the conscious minds of the appendages, plus a rogue bacterial strain which has become a form of aggressive vermin (the hominid appendage also is part of this vermin package). This strain operates in accord with the power-concentrating tendency of Mammon and technology.
 
James Lovelock, Lynn Margulis and others wrote of Gaia and the ecosphere, Jacques Ellul, Dmitry Orlov and others against the technosphere. The mainstream media, advertising firms, every kind of PR flack of the corporate state, comprise the technosphere’s mode of speaking, its general mode of indoctrination and propaganda. Therefore we should view propagandists, not as “wicked” but as equivalent to botulism or rabid dogs. This is precise since they are veritably the servants of such bacteria and viruses.
 
8. Agrobacterium tumefaciens is using a portion of Homo domesticus and technology to expand its domain. This includes using these to wipe out many counterbalancing bacteria in our bodies and open the terrain for a few pathogens (botulins, salmonella). Pasteurization, pesticides, antibiotic prescription abuse also are means of wiping out microbiotia and selecting for pathogens, especially those which are resistant to antibiotics. From the bacterial level we can see this as a biological war.
 
The hominids who engineer, deploy, and/or politically and culturally support GMOs and pesticides are tools of rogue bacterial evolution: 1. A. tumefaciens, 2. antibiotic resistant strains, 3. accelerated horizontal genetic transfer from and among these pathogens via supercharged genetic promoters and gene drives.
 
9. This is a thread of evolution gone berserk. A. tumefaciens plus maize, soybeans, and few other crops, plus the deranged technosphere-hominid faction, are trying to wipe out soil microbial ecology and from there all other plants. (For example, they used Agrobacterium for Xtend soybeans and cotton, in order to maximize dicamba deployment and massacre all other broadleaf plants. The proximate target is non-GM soybeans, and from there all crops and plants not technologically tolerant of dicamba.) This murder campaign is vastly greater than any intra-humanity death mission such as that of the Nazis. It seeks not just targeted genocide but total ecocide of humanity and the Earth. Humanity, of course, is inextricably part of the Gaian ecology. By definition ecocide includes total genocide, and those who seek to murder ecosystems want to exterminate humanity as well.
 
10. Such ideological notions as “the Anthropocene” or that genetic engineering is a form of conventional breeding can arise only from rogue bacterial derangement. Verily this is a biological war. We have a small but well-organized and extremely violent group of microbes, who have enlisted a small and extremely violent cadre of hominid mercenaries, launching a full scale assault against all existing ecosystems including humanity. We can either go extinct, or we can respond with our own adaptation. This has to mean organizing to fight back on the same biological level to eradicate this aggressive vermin manifestation.
 
11. Our mode of thinking and speaking seems to require that we separate reality into concepts and talk as if reality is cobbled together from separate “things”, that both physical and social reality are nothing but disaggregated atoms. This false mode wouldn’t be a lethal weakness if we could remain aware that in truth reality is not cobbled together like this but is a networked whole. But most cannot remain aware of this. So we must think, write, speak only holistically.
 
12. The constrictions of the language are reinforced because the enemy (the propaganda voice of the technosphere and the bacterial derangement) prefers the bogus construct of “the gene” (reductive, in theory technologically malleable) over DNA (too uncertain and chaotic to manipulate or even comprehend) or the whole organism (too complex to comprehend, leads toward political and social thinking which is anathema to the technocratic mentality, just as much as to the capitalist). Aristotle understood that politics is quintessentially human, which is why all bio-warfare activists hate politics, and all who want to enslave humanity hate it.
 
13. I don’t have a TV and only rarely watch at someone else’s house. But each time I do I see commercials for 23andMe. It’s a major propaganda campaign. This propaganda reruns the original racist/eugenic/Nazi program, this time with the mysticism of “blood” replaced by the pseudo-scientific mysticism of genetics. This is part of the general eugenic war plan: Agricultural GMOs, in addition to being weapons of power concentration in themselves, also are a stalking horse for GM-based animal and human eugenics.
 
14. What is the underlying biological basis of belief in corporate personhood and society’s summoning and worship of corporate demons? Or the fundamentalist cult of money? Biologically it’s destructive and self-destructive, politically and socioeconomically it’s destructive and self-destructive, psychologically it’s psychotic, religiously it’s a form of devil-worship. It’s easy to see why the destroyers of the Earth and humanity have organized themselves this way. But the broader acceptance or apathy toward corporate domination on the part of the great bulk of humanity indicates a general death wish which goes hand in hand with the death wish proven by the acceptance and apathy toward the destruction of the ecology we all depend on for our very lives. This indicates a biological poisoning and psychological cancer. The phase change in our bacterial framework, the eradication of healthy, cooperative microbiomes and their replacement with a combination of pathogens and sterility, all of this driven by the nutritional denuding and wholesale poisoning of our food, water, air, and overall environment; and the mass psychological derangement and spiritual deadening driven by all the institutions, atmospheres, ideas, and actions of modern civilization, have combined to afflict humanity with the most lethal pandemic, combined physical and psychological, in human history. It is the great existential crisis of the entire human experience.
 
15. To review:
 
A. Fossil fuels enabled the most pathological and destructive elements of human nature to run rampant. This is a reverse crippling, an alienation from intact, balanced human nature and from human holism within the ecology. This is the ultimate sundering, and the ultimate anti-ecological vermin infestation which Gaia must and shall correct by any means necessary, however harsh.
 
B. Some bacteria – A. tumefaciens, salmonella, botulins – are taking advantage. This has enabled some plants – maize, soybeans, cotton, herbicide-resistant “weeds” like Palmer amaranth and waterhemp – and insects – pesticide-resistant bollworms, rootworms, borers, and many others – to take advantage. It’s all part of the omnipresent microbial evolution. The bonfire of the fossil vanities is a release of the trapped “spirit” of long-dead plankton, algae, plants and trees.
 
C. Capitalism, Randroid individualism, scientism and technocracy are ideological reflections of this berserk drunken rampage, this kamikaze alienation. The near-universal death-wish is one of its pathologies. The Gaia-writers are mistaken to see this as continuity, and the “Anthropocene” propagandists lie about alleged continuity. But in reality it’s a non-linear break, destructive and self-destructive. The great fossil burn-off is ahistorical.
 
D. All this has powered Mammon to become a totalitarian theocracy, vastly more comprehensive, deep, profound, total than any merely political totalitarian regime ever was. And this theocracy is the perfect habitat for the pathogens and their hominid appendage organized into corporate demons to embark upon their terminal campaign of total destruction.
 
16. The only mode of defense and counterattack must meet the attack on its same ecological, biological plane. Gaia’s kinesis slowly but surely will impose the normal biological correction upon the civilization run amok. The only questions are whether Homo sapiens will survive at all, in what condition, and whether we will join this kinesis to help destroy the destroyers. The answers to these questions are in our hands.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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.
 
 
 
 
 

June 18, 2018

Joel Looks Further, to Machine Agriculture, to US Imperial War, to Gaia’s Kinesis

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1. The word of Gaia comes to us.
Hear this, you old men,
And all you inhabitants of the land.
Has this been in your days,
Or even in the days of your fathers?
Tell your children of it,
And let your children tell their children,
And their children another generation.
 
The poisons have laid the crops bare,
The chemicals and genetic vandalism,
They have denuded the flesh and the code.
They have laid the crops bare to destruction.
 
That which the armyworm has left has the earworm eaten,
That which the earworm has left the rootworm has eaten,
That which the rootworm has left the locusts have devoured,
While all is submerged in the pigweed, and the horseweed, and the waterhemp,
And all the poison of the land can only destroy us
And not kill the pest.
 
Away you drunkards,
You are drunk with poison,
It suffuses you and seeps from you,
Poison is all you are.
But your toxic wine shall be cut from your mouth.
 
A nation is come up upon the land you stole,
Strong, without number,
Whose teeth are the teeth of a lion,
Whose wings are a tornado,
Whose vines the serpents of infinity,
Who defies your poison army
And reduces it to dust.
 
The nation lays your vine waste,
Rips your bales apart,
Drowns your pods of commodity:
It lays you entire clean bare
And casts you away.
 
The poisoned meat offering and drink offering
Are cut off from your priests;
And your ministers,
Your parasite legion,
All mourn.
 
The field is wasted, the land mourns;
The spirit of the field rejoices,
The soul of the land exults;
For the corn is wasted,
The poison is dried up,
The ooze languishes.
 
Be ashamed, machine farmers,
Howl, animal destroyers,
For the toxic corn and the poison soy;
For your toxic harvest is perished.
 
You dessicated the field,
Now it dessicates complete.
 
The tomato is shriveled,
The citrus orchard withers;
The imprisoned pomegranite,
The violent oil palm also,
And the poison apple tree.
All the false crops of the field are withered:
Glee is withered from the toxic horde.
 
Gird yourselves and lament, you priests:
Howl, you ministers of the serpent.
Lie all night in sackcloth,
Sanctify a fast with another feast,
Gather all the dignitaries to Paris:
Then cry to the papers,
Alas for the day!
Gaia’s kinesis is at hand:
As destruction from the almighty shall it come.
 
The meat is cut off before our eyes,
Yeah all the glee of the killers.
The seed is rotten under the murdered soil,
The garners laid desolate,
The barns broken down;
For the corn is all dead.
 
How they’ve made the animals suffer,
Their entire nourishment from one great Auschwitz.
The herds are perplexed for they have no pasture;
Yeah, the pigs are made desolate,
The chickens insane.
 
Your fire has devoured
The pastures of the wilderness.
You burned all the trees of the land
And brought the sands upon you.
 
You stanched the rivers,
You damned the waters,
And sucked up the entire moist Earth.
Now the rivers fail you,
The aquifers run out,
And the dirt subsides and is covered with sand.
 
Your crops all die.
Your beasts of the factory and the field all die.
 
You love fire,
And your fire has devoured all the pastures of the Earth.
Now you shall eat your fire.
 
 
 
2. Let the trumpet resound across America,
Sound alarms in the mountains,
Let it ring across the plains:
For Gaia’s kinesis is at hand.
 
A time of smog and smoke,
Clouds and thick darkness
Spread as if morning spanning the peaks.
A great people and strong;
There never has been the like,
Nor shall ever again be the like
Throughout the generations.
Their frames and souls now choke
On the smog and smoke they’ve used as blood.
 
A devouring fire precedes them,
And behind them towers of flame rage.
A Garden of Eden once lay before them,
Behind them now nothing but blasted desolation.
 
They come as if metal horses,
So they gallop across the land.
Like chariots leaping from pinnacle to pinnacle
They blast open the air;
Like a flame of fire
They surge the sands,
With hissing and silence
They slash the seas.
 
In their eyes all people are pain and the target of pain,
All faces become blackened.
 
They run like mighty men, each upon another,
They climb up on the house
To cast down bombs upon the next.
 
They muster their guns
And shoot one another.
Each thrusts the next
And walks over his corpse.
Each pushes the next onto the sword
And makes sure there are no wounded.
 
They run to and fro in the city,
Shooting, stabbing, burning each other.
They surmount the walls to shoot at the sky
To bring down their own chariots.
They put guns on the hills to shoot at the sea.
 
The Earth quakes beneath them,
The heavens tremble,
The chariots blast the rock below,
The ships bombard the writhing shores.
 
The moon goes dark.
The stars stop shining.
 
And Earth will convulse
Under the berserking army
Which eats its own fire
To consummate itself.
 
The day of the Earth is great and terrible,
And who can abide it?
 
All the planes plummet in flames,
All the ships sink bleeding below,
All tanks and cars are shattered in smoke;
The final two soldiers left standing deranged,
Stab one another to death.
 
Turn back to the Earth,
Turn back with fasting and mourning.
Rend your heart
And return home to Earth.
 
Blow the trumpet for Gaia,
Sanctify a fast,
Call an assembly,
Gather the people,
Sanctify the group,
Let all come together as one to say,
Redeem us O Gaia;
We shall redeem our heritage,
Never again forever to say,
What is the Earth?
 
And Earth will answer with full reclamation,
Corn, wine and oil,
Now gleaned in peace
From Earth’s own fount,
In harmony with Gaia
Not against her.
We shall be satisfied,
And know happiness and peace.
 
We shall banish the fear of death,
And the hatred from this fear,
And we shall be satisfied
And know happiness and peace.
 
Beasts of the field,
Pastures of the wilderness in Spring,
The tree bearing fruit,
The vine yielding strength,
The constant rain returning,
The wheat abounding,
The wine and oil again overflow.
 
We shall restore the balance
With locust and worm and caterpillar,
No more shall they be an army
Reared against us by the spirit of poison.
We shall be satisfied,
And know happiness and peace.
 
We shall eat in wholesome plenty
And be satisfied with happiness and peace.
 
 
Gaia shall pour out her spirit upon all flesh,
Our sons and daughters shall channel her word,
We all shall dream and see visions all day.
 
Earth will show wonders,
Heaven and Earth,
Sun, moon, all vistas transformed
As they’re freed of the glare and smoke and stench,
Clear sensation forever.
 
And in these coming days
Whoever shall call on the name of Gaia
Shall be delivered,
Each of us home to Eden.
 
 
 
3. In those days, in that time,
The Earth shall liberate its people from their captivity,
The Remnant of the First Nations everywhere
Shall Return as the Second Nations.
 
Gaia will gather her nations
And bring them to the Valley of All Rivers;
We shall redeem our heritage
And resume our land.
 
While you who cast lots for our people,
Gave a boy for a harlot,
And sold a girl for wine that you might drink,
Yeah what have you to do with us,
New York and Los Angeles,
And all your coasts enslaved to cargo?
Will you render Gaia a recompense?
Yeah, you have offered it;
Swiftly and speedily will she return your recompense
Upon your own head.
 
You have poisoned our water,
Murdered our trees,
Raped our soil and genes,
Taken them all into your temples.
Our children you have driven and sold and killed,
That you might remove them far from your border.
 
Behold, Earth will raise them out of the pit,
And return your recompense upon your own head.
Earth will sell yours into the hands of the Earth,
To a place far off from you;
And the stars you boasted you’d grasp,
You can climb up to them alone.
 
Earth proclaims, Prepare war,
Summon the mighty forces,
All the muster of Kinesis come near:
Beat their plowshares into our swords,
Their pruning hooks into spears for us:
Let the weak say: I am strong.
 
Assemble ourselves, and come,
All we people of the Earth,
Gather ourselves together round about:
Cause our mighty ones to come down, O Earth.
 
Let us waken and come up to the valley of Dakota:
There Gaia will sit to judge all round about.
Put in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe:
Come down, the press is full, the vats overflow;
For their wickedness is great.
 
Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision:
The day of the Earth is near in the valley of decision.
 
The sun and the moon shall be darkened,
The stars shall withdraw their shining.
 
The rage of the Earth shall roar out of Siberia,
And utter its voice from the Atlantic and Pacific;
The heavens and the earth shall shake:
But Gaia shall be the hope of her people,
And the strength of the children of the land.
 
 
So shall you know Gaia dwells in the Earth,
Our holy mountain,
Then shall our Gaian city be holy,
And no strangers pass through her any more.
 
And it shall come to pass in that day,
The mountains shall drop down new wine,
And the hills shall flow with milk,
And the rivers shall flow with waters,
And a fountain shall come forth of the house of the Earth
And shall water the Valley of All Rivers.
 
The brownfield shall be a desolation,
The cities shall leave behind deserts,
For their violence against the children of Gaia,
For the innocent blood they shed on the land.
Yet even this destroyed land Gaia shall reclaim in her time
And restore to beauty and life.
 
Gaia shall dwell for the rest of time,
And her children from generation to generation.
She will cleanse our wounds:
For the Earth dwells in her and us.
 
 
 
 
 

June 17, 2018

The Billion Dollar Bug, Indeed

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“That which the borer has left, the earworm has eaten; and that which the earworm has left, the rootworm has eaten…”
 
The treadmill of planned obsolescence continues. The goal, as proven by the corporate state’s pattern of action, is to cause insect resistance to pesticides to evolve ever faster, to provide a rationale for the ever faster development of ever more complex GMO/pesticide packages. The real purpose of this technological deployment, beyond mundane profit motives, is control, war, and the total destruction of the ecology.
 
All prior anti-rootworm Bt GMOs are admitted failures. Rootworm now resists them all. Monsanto’s “SmartStax Pro” AKA “Corn Rootworm III” (MON 87411), currently in development, is the next GMO “solution” being touted for rootworm control. SS Pro is being developed with the RNA interference mode. RNAi is simply a more aggressive gene driving attack on the ecology than the regular GM contamination already driving its toxic genetics.* As for pest control, this is the exact same product as prior insecticidal GMOs and will fail just as quickly in the exact same way.
 
The piece GMWatch links, a pro-poison outlet, admits that all GMOs are a failure and that farmers have to spray just as much as before, as well as rotate crops and observe insects in the field (what radical ideas, those last two). A neutral observer might think they should admit that the pesticide paradigm is a proven failure. A neutral observer might think they have an ulterior motive for continuing to shill for pesticides even as they admit pesticides don’t work. Rootworm is indeed a “billion dollar bug” for Monsanto, Syngenta, and Dow.
 
Today most Bt GM seed in the US is sold in the form of a “refuge in a bag” (RIB). This means that non-GM seed is scattered in among the bulk of GM seed. RIB abrogates the entire notion of non-Bt “refuges”, which already were a propaganda scam in the first place.** The fact that the EPA lowered the percentage requirement from 20% for discrete “structured” refuges (entomologists originally insisted that at least 50% was necessary, but were bought off at 20%) to 5% for the diffused “RIB” shows their twisted sense of humor. To make the joke complete, they should have lowered the RIB to 0%. It would be just as effective. This is further proof that the pesticide arms race is an intentionally escalating planned failure.
 
 
*All GMOs have unstable genomes riddled with mutations, and almost all are driven by the Cauliflower Mosaic Virus promoter which has a recombination hot-spot. For both of these reasons GMOs are more likely to be vectors of horizontal gene transfer than natural plants and are more aggressive in this transfer, forcing their alien genetics into any available place including the genomes of animals that eat them. Therefore every GMO is inherently a gene drive agent and seeks to force its brutish promoter-amplified alien nucleic acids into every possible organism: Related plants and plant-eating animals. Every GMO is a cancer agent in a precise sense, just as each is a cancer cell from the perspective of the ecosystem as a whole. GMOs are cancer amid the ecosystem, and they seek to sow cancer within individual animals. In this way they work to weaken animal populations from below, while gross ecocide exterminates them from above.
 
**The pesticide treadmill of planned, deliberate obsolescence gives the lie to the whole notion of “refugia”, which are stands of non-Bt corn which the EPA and similar regulators in other countries require poison farmers to set aside. The idea is supposed to be that the non-Bt stand provides a “refuge” for insects without innate resistance to survive and interbreed with the naturally resistant ones who have survived feeding on the Bt crop. Their offspring will be less likely to inherit the resistance trait, and therefore the overall conversion of the pest population to a resistant variety is supposed to be delayed.
 
As we see, the theoretical setting aside of refuges has done little to halt the march of Bt-resistant rootworms and other resistant insects. Refuges were really a political scam in the first place. Neither the EPA nor regulators in other countries enforce them, nor were refuges ever supposed to be enforced. The idea of the refuge, as a way for regulators and corporations to reassure skeptics that the product will work, always had more significance then the real world application.
 
This is proven by the fact that, in the same way that regulators set allowable pesticide levels in water and food, not according to public health or any other scientific measure, but simply according to whatever level will result from the amount of pesticides corporations need to sell and farmers are driven to spray, so the refuge percentages aren’t set according to any scientific measure, but according to the lowest politically justifiable level.
 
Therefore although USDA entomologists recommended 50% refuge planting if the policy was supposed to have any chance of being effective, the EPA originally set the requirement at 20% for single and then double trait Bt poison crops. Needless to say Monsanto originally opposed the refuge concept as such and has always lobbied for the lowest possible level. The EPA was happy to accept the cartel’s argument that stacked varieties, by incorporating multiple poisons, would attack target insects so many ways at once that the 20% refuge was no longer necessary and could be reduced to 5%. This “reduced refuge” requirement was inaugurated with SmartStax corn in 2009, and we have indeed seen rapid results where it’s come to the evolution of rootworm resistance. RIB has further accelerated the arms race.
 
 
 
 
 

April 8, 2018

Forest or Desert

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A forest is a fountain of life. It comprises many wheels of dynamism from tree to air to soil bacteria to jaguar to orchid to frog to humus to butterfly to vine to water to parrot to mushroom to fish to tree. The forest is home and nest for the incalculable harmony of all the plants and melody of all the animals. It embodies the uncanny, endless multitudes of trees. The rain forest generates its own great cycle of water, raising an immensity of water from the soils to embody itself and transpire this immensity, so ponderous it must form immediate clouds and hurl itself back down as monumental rains which fill the soils for the trees to raise once again.
 
One of the wheels is the food cycle, from bacteria to nematode and worm to insect to frog and bird to ocelot; from humus and fungus to grass and fruiting vine to deer and monkey and macaw. One of the key transformations (though they’re all key) is animals eating plants.
 
One of the many symbioses animals depend upon is the survival in the digestive tract of plant nucleic acids and the passage of these genetic materials through the bloodstream and cell wall and into the animal’s genome, where they assist the animal’s innate genetic dynamism. The animals of an ecosystem have evolved over millions of years to assimilate the beneficial symbiotic plant material and reject whatever wouldn’t help. This is inherent to evolution’s finely tuned cuisine, part of the choreography of the greater ecosystem.
 
All GMOs have unstable genomes riddled with mutations, and almost all are driven by the Cauliflower Mosaic Virus promoter which has a recombination hot-spot. For both of these reasons GMOs are more likely to be vectors of horizontal gene transfer than natural plants, and are more aggressive in this transfer, forcing their alien genetics into any available place including the genomes of animals that eat them. Therefore every GMO is inherently a gene drive agent and seeks to force its brutish promoter-amplified alien nucleic acids into every possible organism: Related plants and plant-eating animals. Every GMO is a cancer agent in a precise sense, just as each is a cancer cell from the perspective of the ecosystem as a whole. GMOs are cancer amid the ecosystem, and they seek to sow cancer within individual animals. In this way they work to weaken animal populations from below.
 
Infinitely more violent, industrial agriculture and logging directly destroy the forest. (GMOs are designed to escalate every drive of industrial agriculture and therefore are designed to drive deforestation.) The goal is to eradicate the forest completely. This can be as little as decimating it past the breaking point where it no longer can convey enough water to generate its own clouds and rain. Beyond this breaking point, which in many cases is as low as 50% or less of the original forested range, the forest withers completely. The already cancer-undermined animal populations succumb, even prior to the complete replacement of forest by desert.
 
Even more than the extinction of species, this extinction population by population is the main vector and measure of the Sixth Great Extinction in Earth’s history. This sixth extinction event is the special project of modern civilization, its core religious goal to accompany its great imperative to release all the stored sunlight of billions of years in just a few years, driving climatic heating and chaos as radically as possible. These are the great works of our time, the work to which all of civilization has dedicated itself.
 
Total desert is the goal. The big industries directly generate it through the direct violent destruction of trees and animals. Biotech escalates industrial agriculture from above and works insidiously on plant and animal genetics from below. The eco-genocide campaign is simultaneously mass shooting and sowing cancer among the people.
 
This is the death project of civilization, with scientism its guiding religion, technocracy its cultural/political mode of organization, productionism and the useless destruction of what’s produced its fundamental action. Biotech and other high-maintenance technology suites are the modes of weaponry.
 
 
 
 
 

January 17, 2018

The Dicamba Crisis Part Four: The Strict Intent of the Destructive System

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Parts one, two, three.
 
Monsanto dubbed the 2017 dicamba disaster a “tremendous success” with “wonderful results.” What does it mean when Monsanto proclaims success?
 
Monsanto’s commitment in the face of disaster to push on aggressively with the Xtend expansion, to double down, proves that disaster is a core goal for them. In 2015 Monsanto marketed Xtend cotton seed in the absence of regulatory approval for any of the allegedly “improved” herbicide formulations. Xtend soybeans followed in 2016, still no brand-name dicamba. Therefore from the start it was evident that the company envisioned off-label use of the cheapest, most volatile dicamba formulations. This didn’t matter because Monsanto and BASF knew their own brand-name formulations also were highly volatile. In 2015-2016 Monsanto merely was setting up one of its future alibis, the lie that farmers were illicitly using cheap formulations. The company secured any future plausibility of this lie by ensuring it would be true for Xtend adopters in 2016.
 
The 2017 crisis of volatility and destruction of non-Xtend soybeans and all other broad-leaf crops and plants followed like clock-work. It was predicted, it was forecast, it was intended by the sellers of dicamba and dicamba-tolerant seeds. Anyone who now wants to continue with business as usual, full speed ahead, self-evidently is a conscious criminal. Monsanto is ardent to expand at the most breakneck speed in the most reckless way. The company proclaims its goal to go from 20 million acres of soybeans planted to Xtend in 2017 to 40 million in 2018 and 55 million in 2019.
 
Monsanto’s campaign is classic disaster capitalism: Intentionally generate a disaster then use it to maximize your profit and power. Dicamba’s volatility is a campaign of extortion designed to force all soy farmers to buy Xtend seeds. More broadly the goal is to render food production as tenuous as possible. The worst part of dicamba’s ravages is that it’s destroying produce farms and vegetable gardens, it’s destroying actual food production. If the Xtend system continues to expand it will render everything but commodity dicamba-tolerant soybeans impossible to grow across the range of the Xtend deployment. This is a case study in the real goal of poison-based agriculture. The will to continue this deployment on the part of Monsanto, the US and state governments, academia and the mainstream media proves that this destruction is the goal.
 
The evidence for these truths is patent throughout the historical record. We see it with Monsanto’s scorched-earth resistance to all temporal, geographic, and temperature limitations, and to all application restrictions except those of its own label. We see it in their systematic campaign of lies, blaming everything imaginable except the inherent volatility of their product. We see it in their campaign of lawsuits and corruption against even the most moderate, rational response to the crisis. We see it in their rebate plan for farmers who buy Xtend seeds and XtendiMax dicamba herbicide. This is the carrot to go with the Xtortion stick. Both are toward the same goal of seizing and holding arable territory, market share. The goal is to entrench the Xtend system to the point that it would be impossible to dislodge it within the context of commodity agriculture.
 
From the start Monsanto refused to allow study of the volatility of its brand-name dicamba herbicide. Weed scientists had to wait until they could purchase XtendiMax at the store in order to subject it to scientific purview. In a perfect symbol of Monsanto’s scorched-earth anti-science policy the University of Arkansas soybean test plot was wiped out by volatile drift from outside.
 
Nevertheless researchers soldiered on and proved that all dicamba is volatile, including the alleged “improved, non-volatile” formulations like XtendiMax. They uncovered another example of the fraudulent “science” typical of the corporations. The claims of Monsanto, DuPont, BASF were based on perfunctory tests performed in ivory tower labs. When weed scientists tested the same formulations in the field, i.e. under real world conditions, they found significant volatility for all the formulations. This is to be expected, since volatility is a function of atmospheric suffusion and weather conditions. How is it possible to test dicamba volatility in a lab? Only in the world of corporate fake science, the kind exalted by the STEM establishment, academia, and media. (The same scam was used by Matin Qaim to claim good yields for Bt cotton. This scientific fraud is still often cited in the mainstream media.) This also is emblematic of the limitations of lab-controlled experiment even if it were to be undertaken in good faith. Of course the corporations and government regulators never have any but bad faith.
 
In reality, dicamba is so volatile that in a normal year there wouldn’t be enough appropriate spraying days even according to the bogus regulations Monsanto “voluntarily” agreed to with the EPA and Monsanto’s own impossible label restrictions.
 
Anyone familiar with the history of bureaucracy and legalistic Catch-22s designed to turn everyone into a potential lawbreaker knows what’s going on here. Monsanto, with EPA connivance, intentionally designed the label to be impossible to faithfully adhere to. That way in every case of drift or volatilization they can play “Gotcha” and blame the farmer for improper application. This also proves Monsanto and the EPA fully anticipated the epidemic of off-site damage.
 
This proves that the product is impossible to use safely. The state regulations are bogus and that Monsanto does not intend for farmers to abide by them (just like with Bt refuges). It proves the only purpose of the regulations is as a political ploy to buy time against public unrest, and to play Gotcha with even the most scrupulous dicamba users, to keep them ready to become scapegoats.*
 
[*Poison farmers are criminals as well, but low-level ones. Monsanto and the EPA give the orders and control everything. Monsanto would prefer to maintain industrial farmers as a united pro-poison front, submissive to corporate control and working to poison the people. But setting farmers at one another’s throats as they’re doing here isn’t bad either. Note that all calls for compromise, unity, reconciliation are only on corporate control terms and implicitly assume submission to Xtend, continued submission to herbicide-tolerant GMO-poison systems as such. Also, it seems that Monsanto is being intentionally confusing in order to force farmers to sign up for its otherwise unnecessary Climate Corporation subscription.]
 
 
All this is proof of the systemic destructive totalitarian intent of the corporate-technocratic system. On Monsanto’s part this intent indisputably is conscious and willful. All their actions, most of which are premeditated, prove this.
 
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 using 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.
 
Today it’s universally acknowledged that soybean co-existence is impossible. The volatility is too extreme for even the most conscientious sprayers to prevent it. Where it comes to planting dicamba-tolerant seeds, it’s all or nothing. “We can’t co-exist. It’s so volatile and unpredictable.”
 
At the same time Monsanto also is driving the pesticide treadmill as hard as it can. The more total the Xtend deployment, the more volatility/drift/atmospheric loading with dicamba, the faster Palmer amaranth and other weeds will resist. This proves Monsanto’s strict intent to generate dicamba-resistant superweeds as fast and expansively as possible.
 
The corporations like the pesticide/superpest arms race for obvious reasons: It’s the most potent fuel driving the machine of ever more extravagant GM stacks and multi-product pesticide slatherings. This maximizes profit, control, power, and destruction. Again, the lies, extortion, rebates, legal and political lobbying, and refusal to allow study all prove the intent.
 
The USDA and EPA also intend and desire all this. 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.
 
The refusal of government and private insurers to cover off-target dicamba damage is further proof that this is a comprehensive campaign to drive out all non-Xtend soy farming. It’s government/insuser collusion against farmers.
 
 
What recourse does the imputation of justice have, what course the law? There’s a welter of lawsuits arguing correctly that the product is impossible to use safely, that the damage is the result of negligence or malice on the part of Monsanto and BASF, and that the dicamba sellers colluded to form an extortion racket.
 
We know this is true. Xtortion plus rebate is meant to add up to an offer you can’t refuse if you’re a soy farmer. Monsanto wants to maximize dicamba use (sales, from a mundane profiterring point of view; but maximal poison deployment has implications for power and control far beyond mundane profits) regardless of destructive effects, or intentionally to maximize the destruction. It makes no difference since 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.
 
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 all this out, though 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 and cotton, and weeds like Palmer amaranth. 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.
 
 
Herbicide-tolerance is a proven failed technology. Xtend and Enlist are as doomed as Roundup Ready. Any support for the continuation of this genre is automatic bad faith and automatic support for all the worst effects of the deployment. Therefore all harms caused by it are willful, deliberate, malicious.
 
The system has literally zero ideas beyond poison plants, which is all GMOs are. Literally no amount of failure and destruction could cause these creatures to think in any terms other than betting even more of the future of humanity and the Earth on an already busted hand. They are criminally insane, or analogous to pathogenic microbes, and can be dealt with only as such.
 
As for soybeans, we have to purge them from processed food and from animal feed. Once again we see the critical need to abolish factory farms.
 
 
Propagate the necessary new ideas.
 
 
 
 
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