The Malthusian Conspiracy?, The Possible Big Picture Options

[grizz]

Yikes!

[George Hayduke]

Oh, yeah, and the chocolate chip in the bullshit is the lessons of history they don't tell us. You can sit in a Poli-Sci class anywhere and argue to the death with a prof that the U.S. is an empire. He'll argue otherwise. Know why? Because history has a fu*ked up lesson for us. That lesson is: Empires crash. The bigger they come, the harder they fall, thank you Mr. Tosh. They always fall. Always. So to admit we're in an empire is to admit that TSWHTF and it'll be bad, man, bad.



This post has been edited by George Hayduke: Apr 23 2008, 01:03 PM

[Timothy Osman]

Yikes!

Yikes alright, one of the biggest pieces of global alarmist bullshit sites I have ever wasted five minutes on.

Intense human activity, which demands excessive consumption of energy, is responsible for global heating, rapid degradation and the imminent collapse of ecosystems.

Global energy consumption for 2006 was a staggering 507EJ [one exajoule, EJ, is 10 exponential 18 joules] equivalent to the energy released by detonating 25,437 Hiroshima-sized A-bombs each day, or 9.3 million bombs throughout 2006. Our estimate for global energy consumption in 2007 is 531EJ (9.73 million A-bombs). [Sources: EIA, BP.]

At current consumption rates, the runaway positive feedback loops and mechanisms that are destroying Earth’s ecosystems including ozone holes, global heating, extreme climatic events, toxic pollution, resources depletion, unethical conduct, war, and disease pandemics would overwhelm Earth’s life support systems rendering most of our population centers unsustainable in a very short time, possibly by as early as 2015.

To prevent the complete collapse of ecosystems, we believe the global energy consumption must be rapidly reduced to about 60EJ. This level of consumption is about 11.9 percent of global energy consumption in 2006.

The 286-Watt Community¹
To prevent the total collapse of ecosystems and preserve as many lives as possible, we recommend the following csteps:

1. Establish intelligent communities to provide food, basic amenities, education, jobs and security. The communities would serve as blueprints to help redesign, rearrange and retrofit existing population centers to conform to a global energy policy that rapidly reduces the consumption of fossil fuels towards zero.

2. Change the system of economy from an exponential growth economy to the Great Economy for Community of Life.

3. Stabilize the world population, especially the populations in countries with large ecological footprints, at current levels of about 6.65billion (estimated world population, Late 2007 - Early 2008). [http://math.berkeley.edu/~galen/popclk.html] and [http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html]

4. Reduce global energy consumption rapidly to about 60EJ/year. The optimum per capita energy consumption should be capped at 286W.

5. Redirect all available resources to provide clean air, freshwater, food, shelter, health and education for the world population.

Note: To arrive at the optimum energy use per capita, the ‘safe’ consumption level of 60EJ is divided equally by the world population. ²

Calculation:
(I) 60EJ [safe level of global energy consumption] / 6.65 billion people [world population stabilized at early 2008 levels] = 9.03GJ [world per capita safe energy consumption in gigajopules]

(II) 9.03GJ [world per capita safe energy consumption in gigajopules] / 31,556,926 [number of seconds in a year] = 286 Watts [world per capita safe energy consumption in Watts, or joules per second]

Ecosystems vary from place to place and in time regardless of human activity. Global arbitrary 'solutions' to National, State or local problems are the wet dream of the elite.

[George Hayduke]

Sure Tim. How 'bout you let me take you camping. We'll go out in the woods and I'll point out some things to you. Like the plastic trash that can be found in supposedly the most remote areas. Like the dead animals around cell phone towers, now on every hillside and mountain. Like the lack of amphibians or crickets or apex predators. We'll walk around under the trees and I'll point out how they're almost all exclusively new growth; how old growth vegetation is almost extinct; and how the new growth is predominantly non-native, meaning subject to vulnerabilities and alien to the local ecosystem, thus setting that system up for collapse. I'll point out how every body of water on Earth is now undrinkable unless treated, a phenomenon that has arisen only in the last 50 years.

Sure, environmentalism has been politicized by the slave masters. I can see that. But let me make one thing clear, we're f*cking this planet up in a major way. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. The bath water is the politicization of environmentalism. The baby is, the Earth is a living thing and thus something that can be killed.

I tell you what. I'll make you a deal. You come here and I'll take you to the three nearest rivers. They're all basically sewers now with flotillas of garbage and films of petrochemicals and the stench of dead fish and with mutated amphibians on the shores. You can pick one of the three. And jump in, bro. Take a swim in that brown, sludgy goodness. Why with a nuke plant up river and with a factory farm up river and with a couple of huge cities that dump their parking lot runoff into the waterways, and with the sewers all ruptured and flowing into the aquifer, you jump on in there big guy. You swim around in it, you know diving down and getting that good, clean water in your eyes and ears and mouth, chug some of it, stay in it for an hour. Get you a few swallows of it for good measure. You do this, and I'll give up environmentalism cold.

The lesson is the fucks invade everything and wreck it. They infiltrate every movement. This doesn't mean the movements are bunk. This doesn't mean they don't have a point. This doesn't mean they aren't right. It just means that they will seek to control everything. Everything.

Cancer is everywhere. Everywhere. And this is a new phenomenon. It is due to pollution. Plastic in the food chain. Strontium in the air and soil. Don't dis environmentalism.

And yeah, I'm a depop guy. I think there are way way way too many dipshits out there. I'd rather cut the head off a moron than cut down a tree. And I feel like this because I spend time among the trees, which I bet you don't. Because if you did, you'd hear what the trees say. They have something to say. And what they say is, don't cut any more of us down. There are too few of us as it is. Once, they say, there was a time when Mr. Squirrel could go from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River without setting foot on the ground, going from treetop to treetop. I also spend time among morons. They say some stupid sh*t, like the Earth can just give and give and give ad infinitum. I've found out I prefer the trees to the morons. That's just me. Enjoy your cancer. Embrace it. Because your cancer is your alienation from your Earth mother manifested.

Keep cutting down the trees and see what happens to ye! If you can escape my wrath, you likely won't escape Mother's.

[painter]

. . .
Keep cutting down the trees and see what happens to ye! If you can escape my wrath, you likely won't escape Mother's.

In 1970, one of the lesser known but nevertheless great geniuses of the last century, anthropologist, sociologist, biologist, psychologist and one of the founders of Cybernetics, Gregory Bateson, presented the Nineteenth Annual Korzybski Memorial Lecture. Alfred Krzybksi was the founder of General Semantics and coined the phrase "The map is not the territory." Bateson's lecture entitled, Form, Substance and Difference, was an attempt to bring together the concepts inherent in General Semantics and that of Cybernetics, where Bateson had been working to establish "the essential units of 'mind'"

This is a long excerpt and admittedly intellectually dense but the point I wish to make with it is that the problems we are facing today were being considered a generation ago -- and at very high levels of academia as well as very deep levels of the human psyche. The question is, given that some of the best minds of the time were aware of these problems -- the whole connected relationship between the individual and social groups and social groups and the larger, planetary environment -- how is it that little of it rose to the level of leadership and policy making that might have helped us ameliorate if not avoid the predicament we find ourselves in today?

The bold, below, is mine. The italics are in the published text.

. . .

Having sated this relationship between biological part and whole, I can now go on from the notion of creatura as mind in general to the question of what is a mind

What do I mean by "my" mind?

I suggest that the delimitation of an individual mind must always depend upon what phenomena we wish to understand or explain. Obviously there are lots of message pathways outside the skin, and these and the messages which they carry must be included as part of the mental system whenever they are relevant.

Consider a tree and a man and an ax. We observe that the ax flies through the air and makes certain sorts of gashes in a pre-existing cut in the side of the tree. If now we want to explain this set of phenomena, we shall be concerned with differences in the cut face of the tree, differences in the retina of the man, differences in this central nervous system, differences in his efferent neural messages, differences in the behavior of his muscles, differences in how the ax flies, to the differences which the ax then makes on the face of the tree. Our explanation (for certain purposes) will go round and round that circuit. In principle, if you want to explain or understand anything in human behavior, you are always dealing with total circuits, completed circuits. This is the elementary cybernetic thought.

The elementary cybernetic system with its messages in circuit is, in fact, the simplest unit of mind; and the transform of a difference traveling in a circuit is the elementary idea. More complicated systems are perhaps more worthy to be called mental systems but essentially this is what we are talking about. The unit which shows the characteristic of trial and error will be legitimately called a mental system.

But what about "me"? Suppose I am a blind man, and I use a stick. I go tap, tap, tap. Where do I start? Is my mental system bounded at the handle of the stick? Is it bounded by my skin? Does it start halfway up the stick? Does it start at the tip of the stick? But these are nonsense questions. The stick is a pathway along which transforms of difference are being transmitted. The way to delineate the system is to draw the limiting line in such a way that you do not cut any of these pathways in ways which leave things inexplicable. If what you are trying to explain is a given piece of behavior, such as the locomotion of the blind man, then, for this purpose, you will need the street, the stick, the man; the street, the stick, and so on, round and round.

But when the blind man sits down to eat his lunch, his stick and its messages will no longer be relevant—if it is his eating that you want to understand.

And in addition to what I have said to define the individual mind, I think it necessary to include the relevant parts of memory and data "banks." After all, the simplest cybernetic circuit can be said to have memory of a dynamic kind—not based upon static storage but upon the travel of information around the circuit. The behavior of the governor of a steam engine at Time 2 is partly determined by what it did at Time 1—where the interval between Time 1 and Time 2 is that time necessary for the information to complete the circuit.

We get a picture, then, of mind as synonymous with cybernetic systems—the relevant total information-processing, trial-and-error completing unit. And we know that within Mind in the widest sense there will be a hierarchy of subsystems, any one of which we can call an individual mind.

But this picture is precisely the same as the picture which I arrived at in discussing the unit of evolution. I believe that this identity is the most important generalization which I have to offer you tonight.

In considering units of evolution, I argued that you have at each step to include the completed pathways outside the protoplasmic aggregate, be it DNA-in-the-cell, or cell-in-the-body, or body-in-the-environment. The hierarchic structure is not new. Formerly we talked about the breeding individual or the family line or the taxon, and so on. Now each step of the hierarchy is to be thought of as a system, instead of a chunk cut off and visualized as against the surrounding matrix.

This identity between the unit of mind and the unit of evolutionary survival is of very great importance, not only theoretical, but also ethical.

It means, you see, that I now localize something which I am calling "Mind" immanent in the large biological system—the ecosystem. Or, if I draw the system boundaries at a different level, then mind is immanent in the total evolutionary structure. If this identity between mental and evolutionary units is broadly right, then we face a number of shifts in our thinking.

First, let us consider ecology. Ecology has currently two faces to it: the face which is called bioenergetics—the economics of energy and materials within a coral reef, a redwood forest, or a city—and, second, an economics of information, of entropy, negentropy, etc. These two do not fit together very well precisely because the units are differently bounded in the two sorts of ecology. In bioenergetics it is natural and appropriate to think of units bounded at the cell membrane, or at the skin; or of units composed of sets of tiers at which measurements can be made to determine the additive-subtractive budget of energy for the given unit. In contrast, informational or entropic ecology deals with the budgeting of pathways and of probability. The resulting budgets are fractionating (not subtractive). The boundaries must enclose, not cut, the relevant pathways.

Moreover, the very meaning of "survival" becomes different when we stop talking about the survival of something bounded by the skin and start to think of the survival of the system of ideas in a circuit. The contents of the skin are randomized at death and the pathways within the skin are randomized. But the ideas, under further transformation, may go on out in the world in books or works of art. Socrates as a bioenergetic individual is dead. But much of him still lives in the contemporary ecology of ideas.

It is also clear that theology becomes changed and perhaps renewed. The Mediterranean religions of 5000 years have swung to and fro between immanence and transcendence. In Babylon the gods were transcendent on the tops of hills; in Egypt, there was god immanent in Pharaoh; and Christianity is a complex combination of these two beliefs.

The cybernetic epistemology which I have offered you would suggest a new approach. The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a subsystem. This larger Mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by "God," but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology.

Freudian psychology expanded the concept of mind inwards to include the whole communication system within the body—the automatic, the habitual, and the vast range of unconscious process. What I am saying expands mind outwards. And both of these changes reduce the scope of the conscious self. A certain humility becomes appropriate, tempered by the dignity or joy of being part of something much bigger. A part—if you will—of God.

If you put God outside and set him vis-a-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races and the brutes and vegetables.

If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or, simply, of over-population and overgrazing. The raw materials of the world are finite.

If I am right, the whole of our thinking about what we are and what other people are has got to be restructured. This is not funny, and I do not know how long we have to do it in. If we continue to operate on the premises that were fashionable in the prescybernetic era, and which were especially underlined and strengthened during the Industrial Revolution, which seemed to validate the Darwinian unit of survival, we may have twenty or thirty years before the logical reductio ad absurdum of our old positions destroy us. Nobody knows how long we have, under the present system, before some disaster strikes us, more serious than the destruction of any group of nations. The most important task today is, perhaps, to learn to think in the new way. Let me say that I don't know how to think that way. Intellectually, I can stand here and I can give you a reasoned exposition of this matter; but if I am cutting down a tree, I still think "Gregory Bateson" is cutting down the tree. I am cutting down the tree. "Myself" is to me still an excessively concrete object, different from the rest of what I have been calling "mind."

The step to realizing—to making habitual—the other way of thinking so that one naturally thinks that way when one reaches out for a glass of water or cuts down a tree—that step is not an easy one.

And, quite seriously, I suggest to you that we should trust no policy decisions which emanate from persons who do not yet have that habit.

[George Hayduke]

Pin it!

[maturin42]

The dark scenario that has to be pondered when you consider the convergence of forces - population pressure, impending food shortages, peak oil, global warming (I know, that thread already exists), mass extinctions, and water shortages is this. If there is such a thing as an "elite" that is planning for the end game, the protection of the North Slope and offshore oil can probably be seen as the "reserve" that they plan to use after the big die-off.

Wow! What a world in which such things are imaginable.

[painter]

Pin it!

I'm inclined to agree but I think we need another forum for this and other threads having to do with environmental impact and the global big picture. I'll take this up with the other admins.

[painter]

The dark scenario that has to be pondered when you consider the convergence of forces - population pressure, impending food shortages, peak oil, global warming (I know, that thread already exists), mass extinctions, and water shortages is this. If there is such a thing as an "elite" that is planning for the end game, the protection of the North Slope and offshore oil can probably be seen as the "reserve" that they plan to use after the big die-off.

Wow! What a world in which such things are imaginable.

I agree with the sentiment. Clearly we are at a major turning point in human history. I view it as a conflict between at least two distinct paradigms of social organization: One is the old hierarchical 'top down' pyramid and the other is a newer egalitarian model. The former is inherently fascist (the acquisition of power and authority in the hands of a few) where the latter is inherently decentralized (the distribution of power and authority across a broad spectrum of interests).

There is much to be considered about this. The revolution that established this nation was a stab at the heart of the old system, which is why the City of London has been working ever since to re-establish centralized control of wealth creation. They have succeeded, at least thus far.

[Timothy Osman]

And yeah, I'm a depop guy. I think there are way way way too many dipshits out there. I'd rather cut the head off a moron than cut down a tree. And I feel like this because I spend time among the trees, which I bet you don't. Because if you did, you'd hear what the trees say. They have something to say. And what they say is, don't cut any more of us down. There are too few of us as it is. Once, they say, there was a time when Mr. Squirrel could go from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River without setting foot on the ground, going from treetop to treetop. I also spend time among morons. They say some stupid sh*t, like the Earth can just give and give and give ad infinitum. I've found out I prefer the trees to the morons. That's just me. Enjoy your cancer. Embrace it. Because your cancer is your alienation from your Earth mother manifested.

Keep cutting down the trees and see what happens to ye! If you can escape my wrath, you likely won't escape Mother's.

I enjoyed your post George thanks.

I'm with you on the moron factor and you have my permission to behead as many as you can. As for being a tree hugger no I'm not, I have been into bushwalking and camping since I was about 15 years old and used to go off into the valleys and gorges of the Blue Mountains for days on end. Sometimes alone since I was a pretty weird kid.
What we have is a different perspective of the human question, probably because we come from different parts of the planet. I know that here in Australia ecosystems vary vastly from sub tropical rain forest in the mountains I just mentioned to savanna country, dessert, pure tropical rain forest, alpine you name it. The two things all these ecosystems have in common is that if a man tries to survive by hugging the base of a large tree he will die, depending where the tree is from being eaten by green ants, shagged to death by a yeti or photographed into a coma by Japanese tourists. The second is that the best people to maintain the balance between human needs and those of the immediate ecosystem are the people living with it, not some prick in New York or Geneva.
Humans impact ecosystems to survive, to deny that is hypocritical because it's what we do. It's all we can do and what we have done since day one. It is our technical ability which has allowed us to flourish as a species and It's that very same technical ability which is our only hope of maintaining a balance with nature. It's this technical ability which is being hamstrung deliberately by forcing the prolonged use of fuel sources which can be manipulated into scarcity, by the forging of trade agreements globally with the removal of national tariffs which protected sustainable farming and on and on...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZi1QTt9iWQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB1JiEYpc8A...feature=related

[Timothy Osman]

And, quite seriously, I suggest to you that we should trust no policy decisions which emanate from persons who do not yet have that habit.

The problem is our policy makers operate only on a second tier. National governments of the west implement the policies of the paradigm of the faction, for the lack of a better word in power. The will of the people is shaped into this factions paradigm with the use of overwhelming propaganda led by the media and education.

The two major global factions

Today there are two major factions within the Western political power establishment internationally. They cooperate and share broad elitist goals, but differ fundamentally on how to reach these goals. Foremost is their goal of sharply controlling global economic growth and population growth. The first faction is best described as the Rockefeller Faction. It has a global power base and is today best represented by the Bush family faction which got their start, as I document in my book, as hired hands for the powerful Rockefeller machine. The Rockefeller faction has for more than a century based its power and influence on control of oil and on use of the military to secure that control. It is personified in the man who is since 2001 de facto President in terms of decision-making—Dick Cheney. Cheney was former CEO of Halliburton Corp., which is both the world’s largest oilfield services company (now based in Dubai for tax reasons), and the world’s largest military base constructor.

The second faction might be called the Soft Power Faction. Their philosophy might be summed up that they think its “possible to kill more flies with honey than with vinegar.” Their preferred path to global population control and lowering of the growth rates in China and elsewhere is through promoting the fraud of global warming and imminent climate catastrophe. Al Gore is linked to this faction. So is British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. They see globalist institutions, especially the United Nations, as the best vehicle to advance their agenda of global austerity.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created by the United Nations Environment Programme. Its reports have been demonstrated to be fundamentally flawed in scientific methodology, yet they are aggressively being promoted as revealed truth by the powerful media behind this faction. Others in the circle include billionaire speculator George Soros, parts of the British Royal family and representatives of European “old money.”

With the meteorological evidence of their claims for global warming dissolving as the ice forms anew, it is not surprising that news of the Arctic refreeze and other contrary evidence to their doomsday thesis are kept from mainline international media.

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8583

I don't believe the term factions does them justice since they obviously serve each other in turn. This is best illustrated by the term of Clinton in which he held his boot on the neck of Iraq with the endorsement of the UN. Now we see the most hated and reviled US government having played the role of war mongers and global warming deniers about to be replaced by either more of the same in MCCain or the soft power factions Obama.

[Timothy Osman]

The Ethanol Hoax, Monsanto and Ug99

Best Financial Markets Analysis ArticleA deadly fungus, known as Ug99, which kills wheat, has likely spread to Pakistan from Africa according to reports. If true, that threatens the vital Asian Bread Basket including the Pu nj ab region. The spread of the deadly virus, stem rust, against which an effective fungicide does not exist, comes as world grain stocks reach the lowest in four decades and government subsidized bio-ethanol production, especially in the USA, Brazil and EU are taking land out of food production at alarming rates. The deadly fungus is being used by Monsanto and the US Government to spread patented GMO seeds.
Stem rust is the worst of three rusts that afflict wheat plants. The fungus grows primarily in the stems, plugging the vascular system so carbohydrates can't get from the leaves to the grain, which shrivels. Ug99 is a race of stem rust that blocks the vascular tissues in cereal grains including wheat, oats and barley. Unlike other rusts that may reduce crop yields, Ug99-infected plants may suffer up to 100 percent loss.

In the 1950s, the last major outbreak destroyed 40% of the spring wheat crop in North America . At that time governments started a major effort to breed resistant wheat plants, led by Norman Borlaug of the Rockefeller Foundation. That was the misnamed Green Revolution. The result today is far fewer varieties of wheat that might resist such a new fungus outbreak.

The first strains of Ug99 were detected in 1999 in Uganda . It spread to Kenya by 2001, to Ethiopia by 2003 and to Yemen when the cyclone Gonu spread its spores in 2007. Now the deadly fungus has been found in Iran and according to British scientists may already be as far as Pakistan .

Pakistan and India account for 20 percent of the annual world wheat production. It is possible as the fungus spreads that large movements could take place almost overnight if certain wind conditions prevail at the right time. In 2007 a three-day wind event recorded by Mexico's CIMMYT (International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center), had strong wind currents moving from Yemen, where Ug99 is present, across Pakistan and India, going all the way to China. CIMMYT estimates that from two-thirds to three-quarters of the wheat now planted in India and Pakistan are highly susceptible to this new strain of stem rust. One billion people who live in this region and they are highly dependent on wheat for their food supply.

These are all areas where the agricultural infrastructure to contain such problems is either extremely weak or non-existent. It threatens to spread into other wheat producing regions of Asia and eventually the entire world if not checked.

FAO World Grain Forecast

The 2007 World Agriculture Forecast of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome , projects an alarming trend in world food supply even in the absence of any devastation from Ug99. The report states, “countries in the non-OECD region are expected to continue to experience a much stronger increase in consumption of agricultural products than countries in the OECD area. This trend is driven by population and, above all, income growth – underpinned by rural migration to higher income urban areas...OECD countries as a group are projected to lose production and export shares in many commodities… Growth in the use of agricultural commodities as feedstock to a rapidly increasing biofuel industry is one of the main drivers in the outlook and one of the reasons for international commodity prices to attain a significantly higher plateau over the outlook period than has been reported in the previous reports.” (my emphasis—w.e.).

The FAO warns that the explosive growth in acreage used to grow fuels and not food in the past three years is dramatically changing the outlook for food supply globally and forcing food prices sharply higher for all foods from cereals to sugar to meat and dairy products. The use of cereals, sugar, oilseeds and vegetable oils to satisfy the needs of a rapidly

increasing bio-fuel industry, is one of the main drivers, most especially the large volumes of maize in the US , wheat and rapeseed in the EU and sugar in Brazil for ethanol and bio-diesel production. This is already causing dramatically higher crop prices, higher feed costs and sharply higher prices for livestock products.

Ironically, the current bio-ethanol industry is being driven by US government subsidies and a scientifically false argument in the EU and USA that bio-ethanol is less harmful to the environment than petroleum fuels and can reduce CO2 emissions. The arguments have been demonstrated in every respect to be false. The huge expansion of global acreage now planted to produce bio-fuels is creating ecological problems and demanding use of far heavier pesticide spraying while use of bio-fuels in autos releases even deadlier emissions than imagined. The political effect, however, has been a catastrophic shift down in world grain stocks at the same time the EU and USA have enacted policies which drastically cut traditional emergency grain reserves. In short, it is a scenario pre-programmed for catastrophe, one which has been clear to policymakers in the EU and USA for several years. That can only suggest that such a dramatic crisis in global food supply is intentional.

A plan to spread GMO?

One of the consequences of the spread of Ug99 is a campaign by Monsanto Corporation and other major producers of genetically manipulated plant seeds to promote wholesale introduction of GMO wheat varieties said to be resistant to the Ug99 fungus. Biologists at Monsanto and at the various GMO laboratories around the world are working to patent such strains.

Norman Borlaug, the former Rockefeller Foundation head of the Green Revolution is active in funding the research to develop a fungus resistant variety against Ug99 working with his former center in Mexico, the CIMMYT and ICARDA in Kenya, where the pathogen is now endemic. So far, about 90% of the 12,000 lines tested are susceptible to Ug99. That includes all the major wheat cultivars of the Middle East and west Asia . At least 80% of the 200 varieties sent from the United States can't cope with infection. The situation is even more dire for Egypt , Iran , and other countries in immediate peril.

Even if a new resistant variety was ready to be released today it would take two or three years' seed increase in order to have just enough wheat seed for 20 percent of the acres planted to wheat in the world.

Work is also being done by the USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS), the same agency which co-developed Monsanto's Terminator seed technology. In my book, Seeds of Destruction I document the insidious role of Borlaug and the Rockefeller Foundation in promoting the misnamed Green Revolution as well as patents on food seeds to ultimately control food supplies as a potential political lever. The spreading alarm over the Ug99 fungus is being used by Monsanto and other GMO agribusiness companies to demand that the current ban on GMO wheat be lifted to allow spread of GMO patented wheat seeds on the argument they are Ug99 stem rust resistant.

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article4161.html

An Mp3 with Engdahl on Biofuels.

http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/prin...hl_Biofuels.mp3

[albertchampion]

some would say that borlaug was the most evil f*ck in the history of the world.

his "green" revolution has improved no lives other than those who operate hydrocarbon extraction entities or inhabitants of the principally "white" race countries.

it is fitting that he was a nobel laureate.

[dMz]

What we have is a different perspective of the human question, probably because we come from different parts of the planet. I know that here in Australia ecosystems vary vastly from sub tropical rain forest in the mountains I just mentioned to savanna country, dessert, pure tropical rain forest, alpine you name it. The two things all these ecosystems have in common is that if a man tries to survive by hugging the base of a large tree he will die, depending where the tree is from being eaten by green ants, shagged to death by a yeti or photographed into a coma by Japanese tourists. The second is that the best people to maintain the balance between human needs and those of the immediate ecosystem are the people living with it, not some prick in New York or Geneva.

Humans impact ecosystems to survive, to deny that is hypocritical because it's what we do.

Well said Tim, and that is a sentiment shared by at least several thousand ranchers, lumberjacks, and "aboriginals" here in the western US. I can drive about 16km and go from alpine, through [arid] woodland, to barren desert in my nearby vicinity (with urban "downtown" centers about another 30 km away). One can't learn a whole lot about forest/woodland/desert by sitting in a plush, air-conditioned Sierra Club office in Downtown Los Angeles IMHO.

Pity about the Aussie firearm "roundup" years back IMHO- that was a boon for fascist globalism, I'd say. Oh well- pitchforks, shovels, and pick-axes eventually get the point across just as well (if somewhat slower and messier).

EDIT: Whoops! The Sierra Club is apparently based in San Francisco... (IMG:http://pilotsfor911truth.org/forum/style_emoticons/default/dunno.gif)

This post has been edited by dMole: Apr 28 2008, 02:50 AM

[painter]

I'm not sure I'm understanding what is being said. The impact we are having on our environment can't be grasped only by what we see in our local vicinity. The reason for that is that we are using resources that are non-local. In fact, there is damn little of anything we use every day that didn't come from a long way away. We live in a global economy and take for granted, more or less, a way of living that is composed of materials extracted from all over the world. For the most part, even our food is not grown locally. The energy we use to cook our food and to communicate comes from far and wide.

So when you say, "the best people to maintain the balance between human needs and those of the immediate ecosystem are the people living with it," is only accurate when WE (that is, those of us who utilize global resources in our day to day affairs) begin to grasp that our "immediate ecosystem" is GLOBAL -- when we understand that the ecosystem we inhabit isn't just a distance we can see or drive across or walk through. We couldn't be having this conversation in this medium if it were any other way.

I agree that the people living within the immediate ecosystem, Earth, are the best to "maintain the balance" between human needs and the environment. Problem is, we aren't doing it.

[dMz]

The reason for that is that we are using resources that are non-local. In fact, there is damn little of anything we use every day that didn't come from a long way away. We live in a global economy and take for granted, more or less, a way of living that is composed of materials extracted from all over the world. For the most part, even our food is not grown locally. The energy we use to cook our food and to communicate comes from far and wide.

The "global economy" and "for granted" parts are not 100% absolutely true in the "local" area that I inhabit. Here's a list of "products" that are grown or produced locally (within 50-300 miles of where I live):

copper ore, silver ore, gold ore, lead ore, iron ore, hydroelectric power, geothermal power, natural gas wells, coal mines, corn, sorghum, barley, wheat, alfalfa, potatoes, apples, peaches, various berries, oil wells, solar and wind power, reservoirs, underground aquifers, fish, cattle/dairies, sheep, pigs, deer, elk, moose, antelope, flowing wells, ...

Unfortunately, many of these items are under global-corporate control. Therein lies much of the problem, by my math. 50 miles is also within a couple of day's ride on horseback for me, however. We all should take an inventory of what items we "need" to survive, then find ways to sustainably produce our own "needs." Unfortunately, many urban and sub-urban dwellers haven't the means or knowledge to do so.

I agree that the people living within the immediate ecosystem, Earth, are the best to "maintain the balance" between human needs and the environment. Problem is, we aren't doing it.

If painter will extend the "immediate ecosystem" to the full boundaries of the physical universe (wherever that lies and whatever shape that is), it would certainly solve a few of the scientific issues that I have with the current state of Thermodynamics AS TAUGHT. (IMG:http://pilotsfor911truth.org/forum/style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

We definitely need to change our [energy and other] paradigm as individuals and as a society, however.

[Omega892R09]

We definitely need to change our [energy and other] paradigm as individuals and as a society, however.

Its all the fault of entropy, dMole.

The drift in this thread touches on things that have been clear to me for some time. The ever pervasive need to show an increase of year on year profits is just daft. The manipulation of the stock markets is a cancer that needs cutting - but then watch folks moan about their pension funds (if they are not in deep brown do-do already). The fact that city boys get fat Christmas bonuses (allowing them to skew the housing markets and cripple the economies of rural areas by buying holiday homes) whilst so many essential workers are reduced to below inflation pay rises and tax hikes is ethically reprehensible. At the same time these essential workers have to cope at work with the effects of money grabbing privatizations in health (increases in MRSA and C-difficile infections through shortcomings in contract cleaning, surgical instrument chaos from sterilization outsourcing), education and fire service.

This thread is IMHO, one of the most important on this forum, and I am late to the party I know [1], except of course it does little to get us nearer an answer to the events of 9/11 and which is one small event in this global historical geo-political roller coaster.

GH’s April 21st post encapsulating that important list of human induced or enhanced self-defeating occurrences ‘Dynamics of Collapse’ from:

http://edro.wordpress.com/collapsing-cities/

is spot on and a must pay attention to.

This makes it clear that a parochial perspective, such as Tim appears to advocate, will not work.

We have arrived at this point through a slow process of ever increasing co-operation (with many set backs by the self-interested) which began when the first proto-humans took up hunting. Catching larger or faster prey required co-operation and the development of language. It also required well developed memory to store the patterns of weather, astronomical movements, seasons all of which had an effect on how prey species behaved. As an adjunct to this the ability to track a number of different prey animals, and competitors, required an ever increasing brain capacity to make sense of the small nuances from the formation of foot prints. A lame animal will favour one foot or another, a fast running animal will produce different prints to a slow animal. How long the print has been there can be judged by the amount of infill from wind. All these factors demand careful judgment for the hunter to succeed in catching enough material to feed and cloth himself and his dependants. The most successful of course survived to produce the most offspring – such is evolution.

The above is a long winded way of saying that the problems that are the result of extreme evolutionary development to work in groups requires a group solution.

Unfortunately I am not sanguine about the ability of all the various groups to work together to halt the already well advanced destruction of our environment. The population at large is too ill-informed, and we all know why this is, to even begin recognizing the true nature of the dark-brown-smelly-stuff we are in.

I guess I should cite a few books that have informed my opinions. But maybe promoting the purchase of books is a bad idea after all leading to the demise of even more trees. Imagine if the majority of the population of the world collected books at the rate of some of us around here.

Topsoil, what topsoil? They use what amounts to fancy chemically enhanced blotting paper these days. No time to preserve the miniature eco system that is a proper nutritious self sustaining life support system for plants and by extension animals.

Meat is an ecologically expensive source of protein. That is why the top predators exist normally in small numbers, the top of the pyramid. Unfortunately humans have now destroyed any balance. This is why so many top predators are now endangered species.


[1] – SWMBO (she who must be obeyed) is starting to moan about the amount of time I spend at a computer. She asks, ‘What do you do that takes so long’?

‘Research’, I reply.

She enquires, ‘Researching what’?

‘All manner of things’, I reply. Where could I even begin, she does not see the limitations of the MSM etc and her reading is restricted.

This post has been edited by Omega892R09: Apr 28 2008, 08:18 AM

[Timothy Osman]

So when you say, "the best people to maintain the balance between human needs and those of the immediate ecosystem are the people living with it," is only accurate when WE (that is, those of us who utilize global resources in our day to day affairs) begin to grasp that our "immediate ecosystem" is GLOBAL -- when we understand that the ecosystem we inhabit isn't just a distance we can see or drive across or walk through. We couldn't be having this conversation in this medium if it were any other way.

I agree that the people living within the immediate ecosystem, Earth, are the best to "maintain the balance" between human needs and the environment. Problem is, we aren't doing it.

Damn I had to re-read my post but what I was referring to was blanket top down legislation concerning the environment. Lets face it we trusted our governments with our environments and all they did for the most part was have it raped by the highest bidders until they took off overseas for more plunder. Imagine an even higher authority.

Unfortunately, many of these items are under global-corporate control. Therein lies much of the problem

Exactly.

[Timothy Osman]

Money as Debt

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=...h&plindex=0

This excellent video describes perfectly the predicament we're in. For us to maintain our economies of perpetual growth to service perpetual debt is impossible on a planet with finite resources. Something the Malthusian banking elite and their government and media henchmen don't mention, instead all the blame is placed on the symptoms us.

[Timothy Osman]

This makes it clear that a parochial perspective, such as Tim appears to advocate, will not work.

I'm not sure how anyone can still believe after reading this thread that our best solutions can be found in some global government. This parochialism is the only defence of people who are not the chosen ones, less than white or less than useful. With China being the example of usefulness and any non Anglo Europeans with resources being out of the development loop.

Global alarmism is their favored method of manipulation with Californians driving their Toyota Prius's full of Ethanol across bridges built over scum filled creeks to go and protest about Brazilian peasants trying to avoid starvation in the Jungle. These same Latin Americans are clearing rainforest not to plant food crops but fuel crops so wealthy gringo's can by a tank full of smug.
The new smug juice is needed now, according to the script because It's renewable and Green. It's real you beaut attributes are that It's a good little earner for the arseholes selling it and that it leads to starvation. Just one little example of Malthusian globalist manipulation.

Farms and People Pollute

The clincher to all this economic warfare against nations, was the post-1968 culture of pessimism, epitomized by the founding of Earth Day in 1970. The theme was that the Earth's resources were depleting, and population must be curbed. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich's book Population Bomb was released. William Paddock, unofficial State Department advisor (1975-80), wrote Famine 1975, saying that famine was inevitable. In 1972, the Club of Rome was founded, releasing the book Limits to Growth, to assert, by computer simulation, that the world's limits to growth had been reached, and zero growth must be enforced..A slew of media operations and new agencies were mobilized to pound on this message. With the rock-drug counterculture under way as part of the campaign, the degradation operation proceeded.

In 1974, several key events in agriculture policy occurred. A World Food Conference was convened in Rome, to address how to defeat hunger. However, Secretary of State Kissinger was sent at the last minute to represent the United States, after an orchestrated scandal cancelled the trip of Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz-an "old school" farm advocate. Instead of addressing the need to rev up agriculture capacity, Kissinger's theme was that nations should try to help the needy with a little food aid. Meantime, in December, he signed a secret National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM 200), calling for the deliberate suppression of 13 strategically important nations, so that they would not be using up resources that the United States and its allies want. The nations were India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, Turkey, Ethiopia, and Colombia.

Along with these specific and other government actions, a set of non-governmental agencies was created, to proliferate propaganda that the Earth's resources are limited, technology is dangerous and can't overcome scarcity, etc. In 1974, the Worldwatch Institute was established in Washington, D.C. (see appendix). In 1982 the World Resources Institute was founded, headed by Gus Spaeth, to issue pseudo-scientific tracts saying that expanding the food supply and population destroys the environment. Al Gore is on their board today.

Over the 1970s, there were intense operations by the World Wildlife Fund (founded in 1961), run in tandem with the Conservation Foundation (a U.S. continuation of a pre-World War II Europe-based, eugenicist "nature" society). In 1991, the two merged, and subsequently became known as the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF).

Their assault on food and agriculture was profound. They mounted a campaign to force governments to remove land from agricultural production, in the name of "conserving" scarce resources. In the United States, an entirely new program was established, the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). As of today, it has over 30 million acres locked up, out of a crop base of 365 million acres. The "Wetlands Reserve" is taking still more land out of production.

Lyndon LaRouche led a pitched battle over the 1970s against these networks, operations, and especially the science fakery. As a Presidential candidate in 1976, he was on the ballot in 26 states, under the U.S. Labor Party banner. The symbol of his agro-industrial campaign was a high-tech tractor. Over 1979-80, local tractor protests occurred; and a huge tractorcade of farmers streamed into Washington, D.C. to protest the takedown of the U.S. farm sector. Their immediate burden came from a crushing debt load caused by underpayment for their commodities, and double-digit borrowing costs.

Other statesmen continued the fight. On March 18, 1980, Mexican President José López Portillo called for a national food self-sufficiency policy, called the Mexican Food System. He called for building 20 nuclear power plants. On food, he said, "The objective of the Mexican Food System is to reach self-sufficiency in each of the key subsystems of national nutrition: grains, edible oils, fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, milk, and eggs...." It wasn't to be.

http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blo...ne_kill_the_wto