Mar 31, 2013

The House I Live In

 




This is a very insightful yet disconcerting documentary of the utter failure of America’s drug war. Comprehensive in scope and interviewing some of the most enlightening scholars such as Michelle Alexander and Charles Ogletree, this film also offers hope and the potential to effect change. There were some jarring moments in this piece such as the following observation by a noted scholar who spoke of an insidious chain of destruction that is repeated over time, decade after decade, century after century all over the world in different societies. This chain of destruction begins with the following links... 

(1) Identification - This is when a group of people are identified as the scourge of society. People start to perceive their fellow citizens as bad and worthless 

(2) Ostracism- This is when we learn to hate the people identified as "bad" and deny them access to jobs and resources thus making it hard for them to survive/succeed..people lose their dwellings and forced to live in ghettos where they are physically isolated and separated from the rest of society

 (3)Confiscation- People lose their rights/civil liberties..the laws change thereby making it easier for people to be stopped and searched and property confiscated (which leads to the people themselves being thrown in the slammer) 

(4) Concentration - This is when people get concentrated into prisons/camps and stripped of all of their rights (can't vote, their labor is exploited in a systematic way, etc) 

(5) Annihilation - This may be indirect like withholding medical care, withholding food, etc. It can also be direct where death is inflicted 

All of these steps proceed at the their own momentum without anyone forcing them to happen. That this is happening in America comes at no surprise to the poor and black/brown communities who have suffered in unimaginable ways for quite a long time. Of course, assholes abound & they argue that what is happening to "those people" has absolutely nothing to do with them. Until their teenaged offspring gets into trouble do they stop to consider just what the hell is going on.

Please take the time to watch this important film and have your children watch it as well.

OneLove

:::MME:::

Mar 30, 2013

Why Climate Change Matters: A Three-Minute Analogy






If you’ll forgive me for stating the obvious: Most people don’t understand climate change very well. This includes a large proportion of the nation’s politicians, journalists, and pundits — even the pundits who write about it. 

One reason for the widespread misunderstanding is that climate change has been culturally coded as an “environmental problem.” This has been, in all sorts of ways, a disaster. Lots of pundits, especially brain-dead “centrist” pundits, have simply transferred their framing and conception of environmental problems to climate. They approach it as just another air pollution problem. However, there are two features of climate change that make it importantly different from other environmental problems, not just in degree but in kind. And these differences have important public policy implications.

The first difference is that carbon dioxide is not like other pollutants.

To make this clear, let’s use the old bathtub analogy. The faucet is the source of the pollutant. The tub is the environment. And the drain represents the means by which the pollutant exits the environment. The key fact to remember: the damage to public health is determined by the total amount of pollutant in the tub.

Take a familiar air pollutant like particulate matter. We are spewing it into the air from tailpipes and smokestacks (the faucet). It leaves the air through simple gravity (the drain). Most of it falls to earth in days or weeks.

"We absolutely cannot afford to wait. There is no benign neglect possible here. Neglect is malign."

So when it comes to the particulate-matter bathtub, the drain is very large. We can reduce the total level of particulate matter in the tub any time we want; all we have to do is turn the faucet down, or off, and the tub will drain rapidly.

Carbon dioxide is not like that. Once it’s in the tub, it stays there for up to 100 years before it drains out. And the drain in the bathtub (so-called “sinks” that absorb carbon out of the air, like oceans and forests) is comparatively small relative to the enormous amounts coming out of the faucet. And by the way, we’re actively making the drain smaller by cutting down forests and carbon-loading the oceans.

This makes for a very different situation. Even if we cut our emissions by a third tomorrow, we would still be increasing the total amount in the bathtub:


The typical climate-policy targets that get thrown around — reducing emission rates by 80 percent by 2050, for example — are relatively meaningless. They focus on the rate of flow from the faucet. But that’s not what matters. What matters is the amount in the tub. If the tub fills up enough, global average temperature will rise more than 2 degrees Celsius and we’ll be in trouble. Avoiding that — staying within our “carbon budget” — is the name of the game.

The public-policy implications are straightforward: Because CO2 is slow to drain, and the damages are cumulative, we need to reduce the amount of CO2 we’re spewing out of the faucet now, as much as possible, as quickly as possible. Yes, we’ll need new technologies and techniques to drive emissions down near to zero, and we should R&D the hell out of them. But we absolutely cannot afford to wait. There is no benign neglect possible here. Neglect is malign.

The second difference is that climate change is irreversible.

As Joe Romm notes in a recent post, New York Times columnist Joe Nocera slipped up in his latest column and referred to technology that would “help reverse climate change.” I don’t know whether that reflects Nocera’s ignorance or just a slip of the pen, but I do think it captures the way many people subconsciously think about climate change. If we heat the planet up too much, we’ll just fix it! We’ll turn the temperature back down. We’ll get around to it once the market has delivered economically ideal solutions.

But as this 2009 paper in Nature (among many others) makes clear, it doesn’t work that way:

This paper shows that the climate change that takes place due to increases in carbon dioxide concentration is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop. Following cessation of emissions, removal of atmospheric carbon dioxide decreases radiative forcing, but is largely compensated by slower loss of heat to the ocean, so that atmospheric temperatures do not drop significantly for at least 1,000 years. [my emphasis]
This is not the time cycle of particulate pollution — days or weeks — it is the time cycle of the Earth’s basic biophysical systems, which move much more slowly. A thousand years is not “forever,” but in terms of human agency it might as well be.

The damage we’re doing now is something the next 40 to 50 generations will have to cope with, even if we stop emitting CO2 tomorrow. And the CO2 we’ve already released has locked in another 50 or 100 years of damage (because of the slow draining). There is no “reversing” climate change. There is only reducing the amount we change the climate.

Both these facts about climate change set it apart from other environmental problems. They also, for what it’s worth, set it apart from social problems like poverty, crime, or poor healthcare. All of those problems are serious; they all have an impact on public health. But they can all be measurably affected by public policy within our lifetimes. They are bad but they are not cumulative. They are not becoming less solvable over time.

Climate change, on the other hand, is forever.

                                                 (by  David Roberts (from Grist) )


OneLove


 :::MME:::

Mar 22, 2013

Have No Fear





 As the classic song "Wake Up Everybody" by Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes goes:

Wake up everybody
No more sleepin' in bed
No more backward thinkin'
Time for thinkin' ahead

The world has changed
So very much
From what it used to be
There is so much hatred
War and poverty...


The world won't get no better
If we just let it be

The world won't get no better
We gotta change it, yeah
Just you and me




OneLove 

:::MME:::

Mar 21, 2013

Musings



OneLove

:::MME:::

An Animated History of Taker Culture in 4 Minutes




Man's relationship with the natural world is dysfunctional. Many of us are already aware of this, but what are we gonna do about it? 

OneLove 

:::MME:::

Mar 20, 2013

Ever More Shocked, Never Yet Awed: Iraq's 10th Anniversary





(..and yet another hell on Earth unleashed...Syria...Iran....the fire rages on...)

OneLove

 :::MME:::

A Legend Departs: Bobbie Smith (1937-2013)


What a loss....Bobbie Smith had one of the most distinctive & soulful voices I've ever heard. When you think of the golden age of soul music, his voice ranks up there with the likes of Levi Stubbs (Four Tops), Marvin Junior (Dells),  Russell Thompkins Jr (Stylistics) & Maurice White/Phillp Bailey (Earth, Wind & Fire). His voice has left an indelible imprint on the hearts of many with songs like "Sadie", "Games People Play" & "Ghetto Child", to name a few.

Thanks for the memories, brother. 

(Check out some of his classics here).

OneLove

:::MME:::

Mar 17, 2013

What A Way To Go: Life At The End of Empire

 


This is a very interesting documentary about the current situation facing humanity/the world. It discusses issues ranging from peak oil to species extinction which is fact-filled and downright chilling. My only critique of the piece was the lack of any mention of capitalism itself (its current manifestation anyway) as the root cause of many of the current problems we are facing. Although the tagline of the documentary is, "A middle-class white guy comes to grips with Peak Oil, Climate Change, Mass Extinction, Population Overshoot and the demise of the American lifestyle", I felt that the cast of experts could have been more  interesting (the inclusion of folks like Slavoj Zizek, Noam Chomsky, Joseph Stiglitz, Naomi Klein, Amy Goodman, Paul Hawken or Vandana Shiva,  would have given the piece more edge, in my opinion).  

What a way to go, indeed......

OneLove

:::MME:::


Mar 14, 2013

A Dangerous Spirituality


Over the years, I have noted multiple authors who have cited the works the highly respected and influential theologian/philosopher/author/educator/civil rights leader, Dr Howard Thurman. Not only was he the spiritual advisor to Dr Martin Luther King, but he was also a major influence on many Civil Rights leaders, academics and countless others who were fortunate enough to hear his sermons - simply put, he stamped his spiritual influence on an entire generation. Thurman's incredible insights are as pertinent today as they were back in the day, even more so now, in my opinion. His conversations with Gandhi broadened his theological and international vision, &; in his autobiography, With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman,Thurman said that in his meeting with Gandhi in 1935, the Mahatma expressed his wish that the message of non-violence be sent to the world by African-Americans.  How prophetic was that? It was King himself who catapulted non-violent resistance to the entire world about 30 years after Gandhi's meeting with Thurman! Here are some of my favorite quotes by Dr Thurman which are deeply inspiring treasures worthy of serious reflection.....

Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. 
 
A strange and wonderful courage often comes into a man's life when he shares a commitment to something that is more important than whether he himself lives or dies


We are apt to be more influenced by the image we have of ourselves than by the fact of ourselves.  

"He who has more than he needs for efficient work is a thief."  The essential point was quite clear and convincing.  There is no moral justification for having food and a surfeit of creature comforts at one's disposal while numberless people all over the world in every country are without the necessities to survive. 

 Any person who questions the grounds of the society, who raises a primary question of human values, is in truth a disturber of the peace and a troublemaker.  


How to feel, and at the same time be intellectually self-respecting, makes for real conflict.

Whatever may be the tensions and the stresses of a particular day, there is always lurking close at hand the trailing beauty of forgotten joy or unremembered peace

There is no more searching question than this: Under what circumstances would you yield your life with enthusiasm?  As long as a man holds his physical existence of supreme importance, then he cannot make the surrender inherent in any profound commitment.

  It is my belief that in the Presence of God there is neither male nor female, white nor black, Gentile nor Jew, Protestant nor Catholic, Hindu, Buddhist, nor Moslem, but a human spirit stripped to the literal substance of itself before God.
 
In the conflicts between man and man, between group and group, between nation and nation, the loneliness of the seeker for community is sometimes unendurable. The radical tension between good and evil, as man sees it and feels it, does not have the last word about the meaning of life and the nature of existence. There is a spirit in man and in the world working always against the thing that destroys and lays waste. Always he must know that the contradictions of life are not final or ultimate; he must distinguish between failure and a many-sided awareness so that he will not mistake conformity for harmony, uniformity for synthesis. He will know that for all men to be alike is the death of life in man, and yet perceive harmony that transcends all diversities and in which diversity finds its richness and significance.

The burden of being black and the burden of being white is so heavy that it is rare in our society to experience oneself as a human being. It may be, I don't know, that to experience oneself as a human being is one with experiencing one's fellows as human beings. It means that the individual must have a sense of kinship to life that transcends and goes beyond the immediate kinship of family or the organic kinship that binds him [or her] ethnically or "racially" or nationally. He has a sense of being an essential part of the structural relationship that exists between him and all other men [and women], and between him, all other men [and women], and the total external environment. As a human being, then, he belongs to life and the whole kingdom of life that includes all that lives and perhaps, also, all that has ever lived. In other words, he sees himself as a part of a continuing, breathing, living existence. To be a human being, then, is to be essentially alive in a living world.

..there are many, many good people around, but very few who are good enough to disturb the peace of the devil.

OneLove

:::MME:::

Mar 12, 2013

Poet's Nook: "Once Upon a Time" by Gabriel Okara






Once upon a time, son,
they used to laugh with their hearts
and laugh with their eyes:
but now they only laugh with their teeth,
while their ice-block-cold eyes
search behind my shadow.

There was a time indeed
they used to shake hands with their hearts:
but that’s gone, son.
Now they shake hands without hearts:
while their left hands search
my empty pockets.

‘Feel at home’! ‘Come again’:
they say, and when I come
again and feel
at home, once, twice,
there will be no thrice –
for then I find doors shut on me.

So I have learned many things, son.
I have learned to wear many faces
like dresses – homeface,
officeface, streetface, hostface,
cocktailface, with all their conforming smiles
like a fixed portrait smile.
And I have learned too
to laugh with only my teeth
and shake hands without my heart.
I have also learned to say, ‘Goodbye’,
when I mean ‘Good-riddance’;
to say ‘Glad to meet you’,
without being glad; and to say ‘It’s been
nice talking to you’, after being bored. 

But believe me, son.
I want to be what I used to be
when I was like you. I want
to unlearn all these muting things.
Most of all, I want to relearn
how to laugh, for my laugh in the mirror
shows only my teeth like a snake’s bare fangs!

So show me, son,
how to laugh; show me how
I used to laugh and smile
once upon a time when I was like you

.
OneLove

:::MME:::

Mar 11, 2013

Musings

                                                               (drone)
“We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world, a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us. No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we'll kill you. Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush? They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill Vietnamese. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us; they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis. And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. F**k them.”
- Hunter S. Thompson

The Heat Is On


"Under all plausible greenhouse gas emission scenarios," the world is on track to surpass temperatures not seen since the dawn of civilization, according to new research. Confirming "unprecedented" global warming, the new study published in Friday's issue of the journal Science shows that the earth's temperatures catapulted in just the last century at a rate that had previously taken 4,000 years. By 2100 global temperatures will be "well above anything we've ever seen in the last 11,000 years." "The climate changes to come are going to be larger than anything that human civilization and agriculture has seen in its entire existence," NPR quotes Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, as saying. "And that is quite a sobering thought." (Source

Most of us will be dead by 2100, but our grandchildren will be catching hell because of our colossal ignorance/negligence. Our progeny's future is toast......damn!

OneLove

:::MME::::

Mar 10, 2013

An All-American Crisis by Marian Wright Edelman




We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr
 ,
,
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote these words in his April 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail, in the same passage with his well-known warning that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” A few months later, Dr. King wrote that the same culture of violence that killed Medgar Evers in Mississippi in June 1963 and four little Black girls in Birmingham in September 1963 had finally killed President Kennedy in November 1963 reminding us that it’s not possible to confine injustice, hatred, or violence to one group or community. What is tolerated in one place will eventually infect and affect everyone. People walk from the U.S. Capitol to the Washington Monument in Washington, Saturday, Jan. 26, 2013, during a march on Washington for gun control.
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When many people think about gun deaths in America, the first stereotype that comes to mind is urban gun homicidea crisis that disproportionately affects the Black community. As a result, too many people assume that despite recurring cases of often labeled “isolated” or “unpredictable” mass gun violence primarily committed by White male shooters, “ordinary” gun violence is mostly a Black problem that is or should be the Black community’s responsibility alone to solve. This is simply not true, although the Black community must mount a much stronger and more persistent voice against gun violence. The fact is that most Americans killed by guns are White, and most Americans who kill themselves or others with guns are White and our nation’s gun death epidemic is not simply a White or Black crisis but an American crisis.
.

Between 1963 and 2010, 73 percent of gun deaths in America were among Whitesover one million deaths. Large numbers of White parents have borne the terrible burden of losing their child to guns: Whites comprised 62 percent of child and teen gun deaths between 1963 and 2010—exceeding 100,000 deaths. In 2010, 65 percent of gun deaths among Americans of all ages were among non-Hispanic Whites, as were 34 percent of gun deaths among children and teens. Gun deaths were the second leading cause of death for non-Hispanic White children and teens that year, second only to motor vehicle accidents, and the fourth leading cause of death among non-Hispanic Whites ages 1 to 64 after cancers, heart disease, and non-gun accidents. Eighty-three percent of White gun deaths were suicides, 14 percent were homicides, and two percent were accidents. Among White children and teens, 63 percent of gun deaths were suicides, 26 percent were homicides, and nine percent were accidents.
.

The state with the highest overall number of gun deaths among non-Hispanic Whites in 2010 was Texas, with 1,620, followed by Florida, California, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Ohio, Georgia, Tennessee, Arizona, and Michigan. The ten states with the highest rates of gun deaths among non-Hispanic Whites were Nevada, New Mexico, Alaska, Wyoming, Arizona, Mississippi, Montana, Alabama, Louisiana, and West Virginia.
.

The total of 31,328 people of all ages who died from guns in 2010 included 20,427 Whites, 7,291 Blacks, 2,943 Latinos, 378 Asian-Americans, and 289 American Indians and Alaska Natives.
.
 Where do all of these deaths leave us? Fifty years later, it leaves us right back with Dr. King: there is no point making gun violence just one group’s problem because we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality without a place to hide from pervasive guns and gun violence. Gun violence is a White problem because most gun death victims in America are White. Gun violence is a Black problem because Blacks are disproportionately more likely to be gun death victims. Gun violence is a Latino and an Asian-American and an American Indian and Native Alaskan problem because shamefully children and people of all races are dying from guns.
.

Gun violence is an urban problem that devastates cities like Chicago, and Detroit, and Tucson, Arizona, and Washington, D.C. Gun violence is a suburban, small town, and rural problem that devastates places like Newtown, Connecticut, and Conyers, Georgia, and Littleton and Aurora, Colorado, and Pearl, Mississippi. Gun violence is a problem in states with strong gun laws because guns still travel in from states next door. Gun violence is a problem for parents who would never dream of owning a gun and for parents whose guns are stored responsibly and safely because their children share the same playdates and parks and schools and universities and movie theaters and streets as children and adults who do have access to guns and whose family members and friends do not store them safely.
.

Gun deaths are a tragedy for families whose loved ones are murdered. Gun deaths are a tragedy for families whose loved ones commit suicide. We should take our blinders off because when the 2010 gun death rate for non-Hispanic Whites in the United States was nearly eight times higher than the average gun death rate in 25 other high income countries—and the overall gun death rate for all Americans was seven and a half times higher than the average gun death rate in those countries—and when children are killed or injured by guns every 30 minutes, gun violence is an all-American crisis. Other countries have already made the decision to say no more. It is time for all Americans to stand up, speak up, work together and do the same for our children and all of us.
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OneLove
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:::MME:::

Mar 8, 2013

A Great Injustice Has Befallen Us

 
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.
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Many moons ago, I read a cover story in the Washington Post magazine entitled, "The Mystery of Goodness", which featured an exceptional individual by the name of Bryan Stevenson. I was deeply impressed by this brother's convictions, energy & vision. At that time, I felt like my life really wouldn't amount to much unless I gave more of myself. I remember venturing out to become part of several community organizations like For The Love of Children, PIRG, Amnesty Int'l, to name a few. This elusive "goodness" that we all seek, can take many forms, and sometimes one runs into many stumbling blocks along the way, but we should never allow negative people/circumstances deter us from our goals, no matter how many times we fall short. Like Bryan Stevenson once stated, " I want to feel the pleasure of God....to be a witness for hope and decency and commitment". With that said, we need to acknowledge that there is a great injustice being foisted upon our young by a deformed criminal justice system which is sending generations of mostly non-white youths to prison for non-violent crimes. We need to act.

Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of Equal Justice Initiative, shares stories about America's justice system and illustrates the imbalance of justice along racial and economic lines. He also takes on the death penalty and the alarming conviction error rate. "One of out three black men between the ages of 18 and 30 is in jail, in prison, on probation or parole," Stevenson said in his talk. "... We have a system of justice in this country that treats you much better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes." Also check out Angela Davis & Michelle Alexander expand upon these issues:




...\
OneLove
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:::MME:::

Mar 3, 2013

Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us


 .
.
Food companies have known for decades that salt, sugar and fat are not good for us in the quantities Americans consume them. But every year, people are swayed to ingest about twice the recommended amount of salt and fat — and an estimated 70 pounds of sugar. Michael Moss' new book, "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" breaks it down in vexing detail. In a multi-year investigation, Moss explores deep inside the laboratories where food scientists calculate the "bliss point" of sugary drinks or the "mouth feel" of fat, and use advanced technology to make it irresistible and addictive. As a result of this $1 trillion-a-year industry, one-in-three adults, and one-in-five children, are now clinically obese.(Source)

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OneLove
 ..
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:::MME:::
 

Mar 2, 2013

Food Democracy by Dr Vandana Shiva




The biggest corporate takeover on the planet is the hijacking of the food system, the cost of which has had huge and irreversible consequences for the Earth and people everywhere.

From the seed to the farm to the store to your table, corporations are seeking total control over biodiversity, land, and water. They are seeking control over how food is grown, processed, and distributed. And in seeking this total control, they are destroying the Earth’s ecological processes, our farmers, our health, and our freedoms.

It starts with seeds. Monsanto and a few other gene giants are trying to control and own the world’s seeds through genetic engineering and patents. Monsanto wrote the World Trade Organization treaty on Intellectual Property, which forces countries to patent seeds. As a Monsanto representative once said: “In drafting these agreements, we were the patient, diagnostician [and] physician all in one.”

They defined a problem, and for these corporate profiteers the problem was that farmers save seeds, making it difficult for them to continue wringing profits out of those farmers. So they offered a solution, and their solution was that seeds should be redefined as intellectual property, hence seed saving becomes theft and seed sharing is criminalized. I believe that saving seeds and protecting biodiversity is our ecological and ethical duty. That is why I started Navdanya 25 years ago.

Navdanya is a movement to occupy the seed. We have created 66 community seed banks, saved 3000 rice varieties, stopped laws that would prevent us from seed saving, and fought against biopiracy.

Corporations like Monsanto have created a seed emergency. This is the reason I am starting a global citizen’s campaign on seed sovereignty. I hope you will all join. The lawsuit that 84 organizations, including Navdanya, have filed against Monsanto in New York through the Public Patent Foundation is an important step in reclaiming seed sovereignty.

The next step in the corporate control of the food supply chain is on our farms. Contrary to the claims of corporations, the chemical-based “green” revolution and genetic engineering do not produce more food. Navdanya’s report on GMOs, Health per Acre, shows that the GMO emperor has no clothes. Biodiverse organic farming protects nature while increasing nutrition per acre. We have the solutions to hunger, but it’s not profitable for major industrial agriculture companies like Monsanto and Cargill to implement those solutions.

Cargill, the world’s biggest grain giant, wrote the WTO’s agriculture agreement, which has destroyed local production and local markets everywhere, uprooted small farmers, devastated the Amazon, and speculated on food commodities, pushing millions to hunger. A global corporate-controlled food system robs farmers of their incomes by pushing down farm prices, and robs the poor of their right to food by pushing up food prices. If a billion people are hungry today, it is because of greed-driven, capital-intensive, unsustainable, corporate-controlled globalized industrial agriculture. While creating hunger worldwide, agribusiness giants collect our tax money as subsidies in the name of removing hunger.

This system has pushed another 2 billion to food-related diseases like obesity and diabetes. Replacing healthy, local food culture with junk and processed food is achieved through food safety laws, which I call pseudo-hygiene laws. At the global level these include the Sanitary and Phyto-sanitary agreement of the WTO. At the national level they include new corporate-written food safety laws in Europe and India, and the Food Safety Modernization Act in the US.

The final link in the corporate hijacking of the food system is retail giants like Walmart. We have been resisting the entry of Walmart in India because Big Retail means Big Ag, and together the corporate giants destroy small shops and small farms that provide livelihoods to millions.

We must Occupy Our Food Supply because corporations are destroying our seed and soil, our water and land, our climate, and biodiversity. Forty percent of the greenhouse gases that are destabilizing the climate right now come from corporate industrial agriculture. Seventy percent of water is wasted for industrial agriculture. Seventy-five percent of biodiversity has been lost due to industrial monocultures.

We have alternatives that protect the Earth, protect our farmers, and protect our health and nutrition. To occupy the food system means simultaneously resisting corporate control and building sustainable and just alternatives, from the seed to the table. One seed at a time, one farm at a time, one meal at a time — we must break out of corporate food dictatorship and create a vibrant and robust food democracy.

About Dr. Vandana Shiva:
Before becoming an activist, Dr. Vandana Shiva was one of India’s leading physicists. She holds a Master’s degree in the philosophy of science and a PhD in particle physics. She is the director of the Research Foundation on Science, Technology, and Ecology, the author of many widely-translated books, and a leader in the International Forum on Globalization, along with Ralph Nader and Jeremy Rifkin. Shiva is also the founder of Navdanya (“nine seeds”), a movement promoting diversity and use of native seeds.

Mar 1, 2013

An Act of Aggression

 
Stay alert, y'all.....
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OneLove
 .

 :::MME:::

Cyborg Nation by Stephanie Krasnow

We are breeding a new generation of human beings who will learn more from a machine than from their mothers


.

It took millions of years of evolution for life on Earth to move out of the oceans onto land, where our
phylogenetic ancestors gasped  for their first breaths on a pebbled beach. Now, some 590,000,000 years later, we find ourselves panting  for air on a virtual  shore.  In the span of just one generation. we've been completely wooed over by the entirely. cerebral  and wholly virtual adventures  accessed when our fingertips apply light pressure  to a plastic mouse.

Today, teenagers in America spend seven hours on a screen each day, eleven if you include multitasking hours. This is more time than human  beings spend doing anything  else. including sleeping. Teenage girls send over 3,700  texts a month,  and even twelve-year­ old girls have over 500 Facebook  friends,  250 of which are total strangers  to them . The combination of online sexual coercion  in chat rooms and cyber-bullying  drove a young Canadian  girl, Amanda  Todd, to suicide.  And just think, it's only been thirty  years- even less for most- since the world wide web came into our lives.

Initially. the internet  was created  by and for the military. For several decades after  that it was used only in emergencies,  and later on by computer engineers.  IT professionals or for the back-end of a few businesses and institutions.  But then came the commercialization of the internet  in 1995, the invention of search  engines in the mid-late 90s, Google in 1998, BlackBerry in 2001, Facebook in 2004,  and the first iPhone in 2007. These events have all occurred in less than twenty years. The most current trend,  the personal computer revolution - where everyone, everywhere, is online, nearly all the time- is very new, less than  five years old. It is this latest trend  which has impacted  our lives the most dramatically, and in a remarkably  unprecedented way if you consider the vast timeline of our development on planet Earth. We are no longer homo sapiens: we're cyborgs.

Our common  understanding of cyborgs are Hollywood cliches: rogue robot with human  skin pulled taut over sleek mctal wiring, and ON/OFF buttons  tucked away in thigh or knee crevasses.  But we don't  have to wait until we embed chips beneath  our skin, nor till we get Google Goggles as contact  lens glued to our eyes, to earn  our status as cyborgian.  As Donna  Haraway famously suggests, we are entirely cyborgs just as we appear  now - with smartphones tucked snugly in our pockets for every minute of every waking hour, held as close as possible to our skin in a hard- to-access area, much like a sacred amulet  was once worn around one's neck in a burlap pouch. In her Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway collapses the boundaries between  human/animal,  and human/machine, suggesting  that there is as much artifice as there is "nature" in human  nature. Our cyborgian condition was not begot by some sinister mutation, rather, we are vitally and inextricably  entwined  with machines  as we are with the bacteria in our intestines.  As Marshall McLuhan  said, "we create machines in our own image and  they, in turn,  recreate us in theirs."

Years before the techno-prolifia  we live in today, McLuhan wrote an eerie forecast that has perhaps now come true: "Man would become ... as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine  world reciprocates  man's love by expediting his wishes and desires,  namely, in providing hirv with wealth."

The bond between man and  machine  indeed glows with eroticism. Technically speaking though,  this relationship is an endosymbiotic  one (a reciprocal  relationship where one being lives within  the body of the other, merging with it). But is it us who live inside the machine, as its
sex organs, or does the machine  live inside us? Contrary to McLuhan, Freud believed the machine lives on us, as an appendage that has enabled  us to become God-like. We're omnipotent,  since we've overcome nature where we can; and, thanks  to Google,  we feel omniscient.  In 1929, Freud wrote in Civilization and its Discontents:

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary  organs he is truly magnificent;  but those organs  [...] still give him much trouble at time:;. Future ages will bring with them new and possibly unimaginably great advances in this field of civilization and will increase man's likeness to God still more. But in the interests  of our present investigation, we will not forget that present-day man does not feel happy in his God-like character.

Generations before Tamagotchi,  Facebook and iPads, Freud sensed  that there was something  primordial  being forsaken as humans  became  more and more civilized, and  he warned  that the prevalent disavowal of our animality  would have costs - psychically, physically, socially, erotically.

Today's most popular  gadgets - those palm-sized avatars of hyper-activity and hyper-connectivity - are precisely so seductive  because they compensate for the physical, social and erotic losses that  technological  advances bring. Every ding,  tweet, ring, and vibration promises a
social, sexual, or professional opportunity. And in less than a decade, our  brains  have been reprogrammed to respond to these dings,  tweets,  rings and vibrations with rushes of dopamine and adrenaline, such that our brains on smartphones look, on an MRI scan, identical to those of an addict on drugs.  The internet's  effects on the brain is the subject  of Nicholas Carr's  bestseller,
The Shallows: What  the internet is doing to our brains, which was nominated  for a Pulitzer  Prize. The latest studies in neuroscience confirm Carr's suspicions that the internet is a detriment to cognition,  concentration, contemplation and psychological  health. These studies are finding that what's  most addictive about the internet is not the technology itself, nor the content,  but these jolts of energy we get from habitual  use of internet application. which foster and  promote  compulsive behaviour.

Peter Whybrow, the director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human  Behavior at UCLA, explains that "the computer  is like electronic  cocaine," instigating cycles of mania followed by periods  of depression. "There's just something  about  the medium  that's addictive," adds Elias Aboujaoude, a psychiatrist who manages the Obsessive Compulsive  Disorder  Clinic at Stanford  Medic<'i School. "I've seen plenty of patients who have no history of addictive  behavior - or substance abuse of any kind - become addicted  to the internet  and these other  technologies." Scientists  at Oxford  University warn that children  who spend  too much time on social network sites could suffer from personality  and brain disorders.  Research  published  in China  discovered links between internet  addiction  and "structural abnormalities in gray matter," that is, a fifteen percent shrinkage in the area of the brain that controls  speech,  memory, motor control, emotion, sensory  and other  information. This shrinkage is cumulative:  the more time online, the more gray matter shrivels. From follow-up studies, we learn that it doesn't  take even many hours  online for these changes to occur. Gary Small,  head of UCLA's Memory and Aging Research  Center, documented that even just five hours of internet  use, for web-virgins, substantially rewired  the prefrontal  cortex  of the brain. So we can infer what happens as we spend  more and more hours online. Tbe amount  of time one spends  online is directly correlated  to depression, obesity, ADD,  ADHD,  OCD, and anxiety. New studies  are showing  that internet  and social media use contribute to or instigate  even bigger mental breakdowns: split-personality disorder,  delusional and paranoid  thought,  even psychosis ... psychosis, that is defined as, a loss of what is real.

This research  must not be misinterpreted to suggest that those who've become addicted  to Facebook, smart­ phones, gaming, chatting, or the internet  in general are entirely to be blamed. Is this really their own issue, or is it society's ill? Most people don't  want to be online all the time. But it's a necessity of today's urban, capitalist society tbat employees keep their Blackberrys on and within  reach, even during  holidays and private moments. Many work places  now require  employees to spend at least  eight hours  a day sitting  at a desk staring at a screen. After-hours, the compulsion seeded  by the habits of the workday to surf  the web, refresh email, tweet, update your status  and feel plugged in at all times continues late into the night. How many hours of the day are we not feeding and pruning our virtual alter egos? How many hours of our life are we not busying ourselves, hunting  around  aimlessly on virtual shores? What ways of being, beliefs and  values come along with this new digi-virtual  media realm we are all being sucked into?

We must never lose sight that the internet  is a solipsistic universe - everything you take in is stuff  made by and for humans. No animals,  no trees, no lichen, no insects, no fungi,  none of those beings who help us breathe, none of the creatures who help us play are here. We are just stewing  in our own  juices. For those who do worry over what's  happening  to nature,  there are online portals  which exist to compensate  for this feeling of lack: 360-degree landscapes.  from Peru to the Arctic, all online  to explore, digital animal daemons who'll accompany you on an online adventure. These online animal  avatars are designed  to assuage your anxiety, to help you feel more "natural" and at ease as you muck around  in an entirely digital realm. The YouTube showcase of a starry  sky, the pictures of dogs, the representations of a representation of the real thing out there - offline - this is all wonderful,  this is all we need. The internet  is like humanity's neural network. It mirrors the brain with its networks,  coding systems, information storage and with its highly abstract  and  purely conceptual language.  We feel proud as we look in this mirror.  As we surf the net, we feel a deep sense of awe over our human ingenuity. Permanent browsing has become not just a
vital part of contemporary lifestyle, but a new modality of human  being. Accordingly, the values and meaning with which we imbue life in this world are becoming more and more narrowly  anthropocentric, and more and more cerebral,  abstract, detached  and disembodied.

A word of advice: don't  get too attached.  We're still in a honeymoon  phase with this new technology. The wonders  afforded  by the internet  are still so dazzling  to us that we can't  really question  it, or take into account that this invention  may just be the leading cause of the mental  breakdown of our species. Some 400,000 years ago, Homo Erectus  discovered  how to control fire. Humanity's first technology. As we learned with fire, we must work to master  our inventions in order  to augment their potential,  else they will go out of control, and we get a nuclear  burn.

The internet  enthusiasts who are no doubt severely agitated  by this idea, who are assuming  the author is a primitivistic  luddite overlooking  all the good brought into the world by the world wide web, consider  this: for 100 years we celebrated  the automobile as the ultimate achievement  and invention of our species! What  extraordinary feats we were suddenly capable
of in locomotion and adventure! Not until generations later did we realize  that cars were a leading villain in the destruction of the planet. What will we discover in 100 years about  the internet,  smartphones and other harbingers of virtual life?

Already, our enthusiasm about cyberspace is turning against us, for all the information about ourselves which we volunteer to share online, and the data-trails we leave in our wake as we navigate, are being used against us in the war that's underway against our civil liberties. The obliteration of privacy comes with the appropriation of the internet by Big Daddy as the ultimate surveillance  tool. And the radical potential we've seen in social media is being stolen from us: the insidiousness of advertising is all the more in your face on the internet, more so than it ever was on TV. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, pitched Facebook as the ultimate advertising platform to Madison Avenue businesses in late 2012. She assured the industry  people that Facebook's number one prerogative is to serve $ucce$$ for those that advertise on it. The internet,  to some, is a crystallization  of, and homage to, the nearly miraculous things human beings can do. We hang on to our God­like abilities attained  via technology because they make us feel invulnerable.Though, a cosmic perspective will always put our precarity back in the spotlight. Amidst these ongoing solar storms, it's possible that one of these gigantic solar flares could hit the planet, and all the electronics and gadgets would he wiped out in an instant.

Stay Alert

OneLove

:::MME:::

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