Are humans individuals with personalities or are we simply portions of a greater whole, with little claim to individuality? Some thoughts on cellular arrangement and the end-game thermodynamics of progress ideology. The tension between a glimpsed view of living wholeness and the steady extrusion of deadness that is crushing around and upon us. I wonder how many other people see this?
Life support systems
The appearance of being discrete individuals fully captures most people's perception and belief. In reality however, our form is a fleetingly arranged and fluid part within a basically cellular, holistic global life-form. The shape and content of this overall form shifts and changes over time as and when factors vary within it and around it. Matter and energy flow through and around it like tides and rivers. Life continues as it must in accord with the prevailing conditions. We come and go within this cadence, and are always entirely and imminently recyclable within its constantly alloying form, as individuals, as clans, as a species. Doubtlessly though we do have the very considerable power to engineer the early disposal of ourselves and much of the living infrastructure around us. We could perhaps trigger the reductive disappearance of entire biological classes and perhaps even phylum. What extent of planetary upheaval would be required to take life back to a bacterial drawing board? Would a combination of extreme climate change and thermo-nuclear resource wars tip such regressive imbalance?
Dualism and civilisation
Our sense of separation from the dynamically creative whole is due in very large part to our mono-theistic training, inculcated widely and intensely over relatively recent times, to assist our tolerance of and compliant function within the development of large, hierarchically deep socio-economic systems. This social format is most commonly referred to as 'civilisation', a somewhat benign euphemism considering its essential function of metastasis upon surrounding societies, their resource bases, and within life itself as a whole unit.
Progressive Self-Destruction
Characteristically this form identifies with an existential purpose of 'progress' along a notional linear direction. This view is very militantly at philosophical odds with the comparatively 'aimless' existence of 'uncivilised' society and its accord with, and deference to, repetitive natural cycles. This linear path heads to a destination that is not clearly defined, and is certainly not objectively measured, anywhere within the 'civilised' project. The destination is given various names such as heaven or utopia. It is also embodied in various allegorical forms such 'the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow', which is almost self-deprecating in its inherent impossibility. Materially the pathway equates to a relentless and ever expanding extraction and depletion of natural planetary resources. Properly recognising this core function within the linear pathway of progress, the destination's objective definition can really only be eventual expiration of 'progress' and collapse of the socio-economic project, amidst crushing resource depletion.
Fossil-fuel-powered religion and secular delusion
Modern times, and the intoxicating experiences afforded by abundant fossil energy, have seen the traditional theistic mechanism translated into some variously powerful secular forms. Humanism and capitalism are two of these. Capitalism and its omni-present, omniscient, omnipotent Market-god now reign supreme within the modern global zeitgeist. In its superiority it is quite ecumenical toward the lesser theistic forms. Intense delusions of personal freedom are a central seduction toward common self-imprisonment within and supplication to the Market order. Capitalists can readily include humanism or any of the traditional religions to add flavor to their state of imagined separation from all other living things. The sense of separation is the vital function that is uniformly maintained. It is what enables us to perceive the accrual of individual benefits from the progressive destruction of our own living form.
The Expanding Dead Zone
Accordant with all of this, I am struck in particular by the way we surround ourselves with dead things. We turn life into death and then form the detritus into myriad shapes and mechanisms that we use to facilitate and adorn our lives within our delusion of separation. This constructed dead zone then further obstructs our view of life, it better reflects our illusion about ourselves, and thus it better enables us to wreak even further and more rapid decimation upon our global life-form in a deranged perception and pursuit of our expanding 'needs'.
Zombie Economy
We animate our dead things with a rich fossil energy stream, distilled from many trillions of days of ancient sunshine and now drawn down to nearly half its extent in just over one hundred years. This animated array performs a zombie caricature of real life and real life systems. It instills us with a loin-stirring sense of an invincible power to prevail over any challenge or circumstance. But these machines and constructions are just dead things. They're doomed to stillness and utterly fatal deficit once their immense hunger for the expensively manufactured energy stream overwhelms its limited supply reserves. Our marvelous dead things then become our graves and our tombstones.
Zombie Dreaming
I acknowledge that I'm surrounded with dead things of my own choice and accumulation. I'm complicit in the fabrication that deludes others and which anchors my own delusion. Accumulated doubts and insights have rent many small tears in my inherited cultural fabric. I can peer through this perforated curtain and grasp part glimpses of the total living form that pulses beyond its stifled confines. I can sense the wholeness of this vast organism and can begin to wonder at its profound function. I can feel deep joy and strength flow from this immense beauty however I simultaneously feel viscerally injured by the senselessly violent and rapacious destruction being wrought upon it.
My perception flickers between this glimpsed view of living wholeness and the steady extrusion of deadness that is crushing around and upon me. The shifting, variously composite view between the two states poses a variously decorated, essentially lonely and potentially crazed schizophrenia. I wonder how many other people see this?
Like Australia, Latvia is (mis)ruled by a government which sends its armed forces to fight illegal wars such as those being fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.
However, the people of Latvia have never given their Government a mandate to wage these wars on its behalf. The following is a statement from Latvian anti-globalists published on Global Research on 7 September.
Riga, 7th September 2011
To all peoples of the world, NATO nations and NATO occupied countries
1.Following the 10 year anniversary of the 9/11 event and the evidencethat this was pre-arranged as an excuse for further illegal global invasions in the Middle East (Iraq, Libya, Syria etc.) to succeed earlier invasions in the Balkans and Afghanistan.
2.Whereas the government of Latvia and the Parliament members have not been elected constitutionally because the Constitution of Latvia (Satversme) requires that all citizens have the right to become Parliamentarians. It therefore follows that for the last 20 years the country has been governed illegally by a minority chosen out of the 1% who are Party members. The word “Party” does not occur in the Latvian Constitution.
3.In view of the worsening military and political situation in the Middle East, and because these developments may lead to a 3rd world war.
4.Because the government and the Parliament do not take into consideration the will of the Latvian people and since also for years these authorities have been exceeding their mandate in sending Latvian soldiers to wars without the express sanction of the Latvian people.
For these reasons set out above and for others, we, the Latvian Antiglobalists:
1)Have published (www.antiglobalisti.lv Latvian language only, currently has no English translation)) the names and Party affiliations of those parliamentarians who have voted to send the Latvian troops in support of NATO colonization operations,
2) Invite the people to write to those on this list, who are responsible for the deployment of Latvian troops in these NATO colonization operations, and state that they will hold them personally legally responsible in the future for any deaths or injuries sustained by the troops or combatant or non-combatant individuals in the areas of conflict in which they are operating and for all economic or political consequences,
3) Affirm that any Latvian soldier involved in any NATO-led or sanctioned action does so without the authority of the Latvian People.
See video of the Latvian Antiglobalists action at the US embassy Spring 2011 which is embedded above, also at youtu.be/FenvRdgSzis.
Three hippos hanging their heads sadly, looking down into a shallow pool of foul brown water, seemingly reluctant to bathe or drink... A lone tiger walking restlessly, desperate for shade ... Two scrawny lions pacing inside their enclosure, suffering from a lack of food. These are just some of the more than 1,000 war-torn animal victims still trying to survive in Libya's Tripoli Zoo after NATO's war against Libyan supporters of Moammar Gadhafi.
You may have seen some of the disturbing media
images already...
Three hippos hanging their heads sadly, looking down into a shallow pool of
foul brown water, seemingly reluctant to bathe or drink...
A lone tiger walking restlessly, desperate for shade ...
Two scrawny lions pacing inside their enclosure, suffering from a lack of
food.
Zoo animals are often the first to be neglected when cities are hit by human-made or natural disasters. Just ten members of the 200-person zoo staff return periodically...struggling to keep up with so many animals to water and feed: hyenas, bears, monkeys, deer, emus and more. But it's the big cats, the tiger and lion meat-eaters, that are especially difficult to provide for in this heat.
The zoo has received an emergency grant from IFAW to buy food to last a few days, but your gift will help us send medicine and more money to provide ongoing support for the animals caught in the middle of the war in Libya.
How can you know that your gift can help rescue animals in the middle of a warzone?
Because with your help, IFAW has done it before.
In 2003, IFAW rushed a team of experts and supplies to the Baghdad Zoo to ensure the well-being and survival of over 400 animals during the Iraq War. And during the political unrest in the Middle East last spring, IFAW stepped in to help feed animal residents of the Tunis Zoo in Tunisia.
Author Margaret Warner has produced a new fun book and guide for teachers and children to learn about an animal that should be celebrated and honoured as endemic to Australia, and one of the world's most recognizable national symbols.
Targeted for ages 7 - 12 years, with all pages photocopy masters suitable for school use.
"Kangaroo Footprints - Fun activities and fascinating facts about Australia's remarkable kangaroos"
Author: Margaret Warner 2011
Designer/Illustrator Gail C Breese
Front cover photo Brett Clifton
Targeted for ages 7 - 12 years, with all pages photocopy masters suitable for school use.
Author Margaret Warner has produced a new fun book and guide for teachers and children to learn about an animal that should be celebrated and honoured as endemic to Australia, and one of the world's most recognizable national symbols.
The kangaroos' ancient story starts in early history of Australia. It's written in a way children can easily understand.
A brief historical basis
Over 200 million years ago, the continents moved apart to form Australia, India, Antarctica, South America, Africa and the island of Madagascar. The story of our kangaroos starts with Ngamaroo, ancient ancestors of our modern kangaroos. Their story then moves on to the Giant Kangaroo, about one million and a half years ago.
The kangaroo's history is also contained in Aboriginal tales and mythology, "How the Kangaroo Got Her Pouch", a story of the Wiradjuri people.
Children can relate to the importance of kangaroos due to our Coat of Arms, with red kangaroo and emu holding up the six state crests. They are an important part of our unique national and natural heritage.
The remarkable story of our continent and unique flora and fauna starts as Gondwanaland, when the Earth was in its infancy.
Most macropods have hind legs larger than their forelimbs, large hind feet, and long muscular tails which they use for balance. The word macropod actually means 'big foot'.
Kangaroos consists of two family groups.
Kangaroos, wallabies, pademelons and tree kangaroos make up one family,
while rat-kangaroos, bettongs and potoroos make up the other.
There are 45 species of kangaroos and wallabies.
The what is a kangaroo section identifies kangaroos on a social dimension. They have strong family bonds and they communicate with their young and each other with coughs and croaks.
Some of the more common species are described, with their birth, sizes, and life cycles, and threats. Each is accompanied by easily understood follow-up creative, cross-curriculum, language stimulating and thinking activities on pages that can be reproduced.
Numeracy skills are included, with magic squares, along with crafts, design challenges, riddles, research questions and reference to the Kangaroo Trail map at href="http://www.rootourism.com.au"> Roo Tourism where they can see all the species of macropods from the big Red Kangaroo to the small Musky Rat-kangaroo.
"Kangaroo footprints" - the title of the book - is interesting as it shows how these animals have adapted to give them the best chance of survival across Australia. Each part of the foot has its own function in helping it search for food, defend itself, give support and balance, and tread softly on the landscape.
There's a bit of nostalgia too, with "Skippy the Bush Kangaroo" who became an ambassador for Australia and our wildlife.
There are some kangaroo heroics, with Lulu the hero and Neil McCallum who saved a young kangaroos from the surf and Raymond Cole who saved a young kangaroo in Queensland's floods.
There's a section about Wildlife carers and the wonderful work they do for injured animals.
There is a further reading list and a certificate at the end for KIDS WITH KANGAROOS AWARD!
Answers are at the back.
kangaroo propaganda
Unfortunately,current propaganda and "management" of kangaroos is justified on the grounds that it is said that European settlement has been to the advantage of larger-bodied kangaroos. They have increased access to water and grazing land and are less preyed on by dingoes. Their numbers have increased, which can cause "detrimental environmental, economic and social impacts". Much larger and heavy-footed bulldozing by humans and livestock is conveniently ignored by those making these extreme claims.
These same animals have at least 16 million years of living in Australia's environment harmoniously, unlike those who align kangaroos with feral pest-species. Australia has changed irrevocably since 1788 when Europeans settled here with livestock and other deliberately introduced animals. The book is clear that there are many threats to kangaroos' survival, and gives a balance to what they might hear from the media.
Recommendations
A book about kangaroos for Australian children is one that is timely and should clear away some of the populist myths and political-historical propaganda that label our kangaroos as "pests" and little more than vermin to be "managed". It is a book full of information and fun activities that celebrate Australia's unique kangaroos.
The book is $20 with free postage in Australia and is available for order via the Kangaroo Book page on the website www.kangaroofootprints .com.au
The 1951 Refugee Convention is a Post-WWII international agreement that sought to deal with the humanitarian consequence of a global war.
It has become a means for the 'have-nots' to economically migrate from the Third World to the perceived First World 'haves'. But the definition is relative.
Worse, the problem is not solved, just shifted geographically. Emigration is a consequence of a failure to contain and resolve internal humanitarian problems. It is easier to remove a nation's people than to solve a national social problem, but the human burden is simply relocated.
The UN has proven to be an abject failure, repeated in every incident of national unrest. Too little, too late, default reliance upon charities like the Red Cross and Medicines Sans Frontiers. Recall Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq, Sri Lanka, and now Syria. No one would leave their country of birth if they had a choice for a safe and prosperous life. Yet is does precious little to curb the international arms trade. Where did Gadafi and Syria obtain their military hardware? - from the Chinese Government.
'CHINA appears to have offered to supply massive amounts of weapons to the crumbling Gaddafi regime during Libya's civil war, violating UN sanctions and casting serious doubts on its public switch to support the rebels after it saw they were winning.
The revelations including the proposed sale of rocket launchers and anti-tank missiles may prove problematic for China as it tries to protect and extend its investments in the Libyan oil sector following the country's leadership change'. [Source: Sanction-buster China caught out offering to sell Muammar Gaddafi arms].
The peoples of the First World have been made to feel guilt-ridden by their wealth, and so obligated to open their home country to the world's people, unconditionally.
Britain has. German has, France has. What is the consequence? Who is measuring the economic, social and environmental results? Who is the watchdog of such 1951 policy? Sixty years later, is anyone questioning its merits or evaluating it?
The Refugee Convention does not set limits. It talks in humanitarian terms of persecuted individuals, not what happens when hundreds of thousands of such individuals seek asylum in First World countries. It arrogantly fails to set a quota, so by consequence imposes no limits on intake.
What is stopping the entire population of the horn of Africa, fleeing famine and persecution, from applying for asylum in Australia - all 100 million of them?
Australia has signed the Refugee Convention so OneWorldists like Sarah Hanson Young of the Australian Greens will make us all feel guilt ridden if we don't open our homes to the world's hoards! In their ideal vision...'local forgo local rights', 'my backyard is the world's commune', irrespective of how hard I may have worked for it. Private property becomes the world's property.
We are told that the new world order is a global village with no borders!
Then we give the the baby bonus and all Australia's infrastructure is overrun. Human population sprawls over remnant islands of habitat of threatened species of wildlife.
Such ecological compromise has afflicted the Australian Greens since the OneWorldists infiltrated and sidelined its foundation environmentalists.
The Refugee Convention ignores the rights of the people in the recipient countries to have a say.
It ignores the UN responsibility of containment of social unrest, instead allowing it to spill over to become a global problem.
It ignores the carrying capacity of recipient countries and any performance assessment of social receptiveness by recipient nations, of refugee social/economic adjustment, of maintenance of social cohesion, of cultural assimilation.
Like most Departments of Immigration, the Refugee Convention is an idealistic protocol that conveniently ends at Customs, without pragmatic long term settlement solutions and imposed undemocratically on society's that are expected to adapt to foreigners , not respectfully the other way around.
The Refugee Convention is big brother and right out of George Orwell's 1984.
By making wealthy nations guilt ridden, risks repeating the reaction of the Treaty of Versailles.
Tolerance in our time. Any wonder extreme right groups are re-emerging. Such open door immigration is fueling their membership of disaffected, unemployed locals.
The Refugee Convention is simplistic utopian Left Wing extremism. Like all extremism, it is fanatical and incites political polarisation and eventually a pendulous swing to the extreme opposite.
Conservatives wake!
Most people these days won't know of the famous last words of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in September 1938, but some learning of history would help us not repeat its failings.
Chamberlain said unto to the people of Britain outside 10 Downing Street:
"My good friends this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace in our time."
A year later Britain and Germany started World War II.
Tigerquoll
Suggan Buggan
Snowy River Region
Victoria 3885
Australia
How many other "solutions", detention centres, unaccompanied children, unidentified entrants and money must be spent on failed policies to address the asylum seeker issue? The government is trying to please too many lobby groups - those who want the economic benefits of population growth, and those prefer to act with compassion and humanity.
The High Court made permanent injunctions preventing the removal of asylum seekers to Malaysia.
More "boat people" will come
Immigration minister Chris Bowen conceded that there would be more "boat people" after the High Court was convinced to block the "Malaysian Solution".
We have had many failed "solutions" to control asylum seekers arriving randomly on our shores? The size of the "welcome mat" to take risky voyages and increase people smuggling has become larger.
Julia Gillard needs to show some leadership on our behalf. The reason for all the detention centres, unaccompanied minors, armed guards and the processing of claims is because we are enslaved to a relic of a different era with our agreement to the 1951 Refugee Convention.
We are a sovereign nation, not a colony subservient of the UN, and we should be free to make our own policies, and decide who and how many people come here. Malaysia is not a signatory.
The flow of "boat people" is a political smoke-screen to hide the real source of our population boom - economic immigration.
John Howard's asylum-seeker smoke-screen
Prime Minister John Howard claimed to have "stopped the boats", but there was no mention of any plans to increase overall immigration numbers, or whether the meatworkers and fruit pickers, skilled temporary workers, were given preference over those with professional qualifications, like trained doctors or accountants.
Back in 1988 Howard said he didn't want to see the rate of Asian immigration increase any further.
Heart of the "Australian story" ?
Howard also said: To an extent greater than almost any other country, we are a nation of relatively recent immigrants. Immigration has been at the heart of the Australian story because, without it, the country we now know could not have come into existence. What was the "heart of the Australian story" should not become an epic, or tomes to fill a library! Our early childhood experiences and memories don't have to be lived and recreated throughout our lives as we reach maturity. What was beneficial in our infancy is not necessary to continue, and can be detrimental. It's like trying to relive childhood, and retain the benefits of it instead of moving on to maturity.
Growth is only one stage of a community's or nation's lifecycle. Malignant growth continues.
All evidence shows that Australia as the “Lucky Country” has already gone into history. No politician is considering reviving or reliving this part of the “Australian story”.
So while Australians felt secure that our borders were tightly protected from "boat people", polls showed that they were relaxed and comfortable about immigration despite the substantial increase in the intake from under 100,000 to over 200,000 a year during Howard's era. The impacts weren't immediately noticeable, and the use of asylum seekers as a smoke screen to disperse the economic immigration debate worked successfully.
By contrast, the return of significant discontent intensified with the Rudd Government’s further expansion of immigrant numbers to over 300,000 a year, relative reduction in the skilled proportion of the intake and, perhaps most significantly, loss of control over unauthorised boat arrivals. Kevin Rudd's popularity severely plummeted when he unapologetically supported a "big Australia"!
John Howard never wanted to talk about his booming immigration program. Kevin Rudd didn't want to either. Why not? Because it just doesn't fit. Immigration adds to the demands for labour as well as supplying it, and these families need food, clothing, shelter and all the other necessities. They also add to the need for social and economic infrastructure: roads, schools, health care and all the rest – requiring public funding.
Easy to obtain PR in Australia
It's actually very easy to obtain PR in Australia. The immigration
figures speak for them selves. We have the highest population growth in the developed world, and of course this is a magnet for those seeking a new country.
We already have our own displaced in Australia, with growing homelessness and poverty
The "immigration" debate is largely about asylum seekers, while the real source of our population growth is economic immigration - students, skilled workers, and family reunions.
Small numbers of humanitarian refugees
Australia could easily disband on the UN's outdated refugee convention, and manage the surge of asylum seekers ourselves. We could slash or disband our discriminatory economic immigration policy and increase our humanitarian intake – off-shore.
Our of our net migration of 185,000, only 14,500 are humanitarian - selected off and on-shore - yet they consume the "immigration" focus.
The government is trying to please too many lobby groups - those who want the economic benefits of population growth, and those prefer to act with compassion and humanity.
Our government only wants the ready-education and well-off to provide willing casual workers, and people to buy into property - not the displaced, unskilled, needy and poor.
With so many contradictory policies coming from our mainstream political parties, it indicates they are in a quandary about retaining "popularity" with voters, being seen to address overarching national and global issues, retaining their power, and at the same time appeasing their powerful corporate supporters and their growth-agendas.
The fact that our State and Federal government decided to create a Melbourne @ 5 million , and the "big Australia" policies, contrary to consultation and democratic principles is due to our governments' direction mainly coming from big businesses, global and national corporations, and very large and powerful lobby groups.
Voters and grass-roots interests are increasingly being ignored in favour of the elite, and those with economic and political power.
Plans are now about defining the details of how are communities are to accept the growth that's taken to be already decided, not whether it is in our interests.
Sham "consultations" are on how, not "yes" or "no" do we want them, or whether they in our best interests.
Family-hostile high rise apartments are not appropriate in Australia, and at a time we are often preached to about being sustainable. It's given lip-service in reality!
Melbourne's "activity centres" of high developments mean energy-guzzling lifestyles with little options for alternative living and self-sufficiency. EnergyAustralia NSW and the Australian Conservation Foundation (download main findings report) have both come to the same conclusion that high-rise living, as more people are being forced to "choose" due to population growth, means much higher per capita greenhouse gas emissions that villas, townhouses or separate dwellings. The NSW Energy Australia study revealed that high-rise apartments use 30 per cent more power than a typical detached house. Much of this is in the common areas such as foyers and car parks where lights are often inefficient and are left on night and day. They are ineligible roof-top solar photovoltaic (PV) systems and water-tank harvesting, or the ability to enjoy the benefits of eaves, the shade of trees or the self-sufficiency of home gardens.
Capitalism is a great ideology and can achieve many wonderful things and open doors, but unchecked, it can undermine democracy and the will of a nation's citizens. Former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, by over-riding the concerns of the Australian people regarding population growth, saw his popularity plummet after he gave his unapologetic support to a “big Australia”. It was also his lack of action on climate change and the power of mining giants that undermined him too.
The groundswell against atrocities committed to Australian cattle sent to Indonesia was overlooked in favour of the power of the livestock industries and their well-financed lobby groups. Politicians are funded by big corporations and they will never “bite the hand that feeds them”.
Despite the overwhelming majority of Australians who don't want population growth, it is foisted upon us by compliant politicians pandering to the greed of big business, the banking sector and developers.
As a society we are succumbing to Stockholm syndrome - where victims start to comply with their prisoners - as we allow capitalist excesses to wreck our land, our cities, and clear bushland and wipe out the habitat of flora and fauna. All for greed and profits – even risking endangered species in the process,
Profits now come before people, profits before environmental sustainability, profits before community. It's money before life itself. The self-destructive human gene is being allowed a free reign to support “economic growth” at all costs, and allow us to collectively ignore the converging signs on our planet that should indicate our time of growth is OVER. Nothing living can keep growing without it becoming detrimental and destructive - to internal vital organs and infrastructures, and on a macro planetary level.
With so many contradictory policies coming from our mainstream political parties, it indicates they are in a quandary about retaining voter "popularity", being seen to address overarching national and global issues, retaining their power, and at the same time appeasing their powerful corporate supporters. Such contradictory forces are hard to reconcile.
This article makes it clear that energy consumption and its fall-out, pollution, have enormously increased over two or three generations, to a point where actions commonly recommended to minimise them, are laughably inadequate. It also highlights a tendency for one generation to be encouraged to blame another generation for overconsumption, rather than to blame the market system, which benefits from the social conflict.
In the line at the store, the cashier told an older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.
The woman apologized to him and explained, "We didn't have the green thing back in my day."
He responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment."
He was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing in its day.
Back then, we returned milk bottles, soft drink and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so the same bottles were used over and over. So they really were recycled.
But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.
We walked up stairs, because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks.
But we didn't have the green thing in our day.
Back then, we washed the baby's nappies because we didn't have the disposable kind. We dried clothes on a line,not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry the clothes. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their siblings, not always brand-new.
But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.
Back then, we had one TV or radio in the house, not several. And the TV screen was the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not as big as the size of a blanket!
In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us.
When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used screwed up old newspaper to cushion it, not styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.
Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn fuel just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.
But we didn't have the green thing back then.
We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water.
We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.
But we didn't have the green thing back then.
Back then, people took the train or a bus, and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of their mums being a 24-hour taxi service.
We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint !
But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the green thing back then?
Please forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smart ass young person.
Article by Junko Edahiro
First published in the Japan for Sustainability Newsletter, #105, May 31, 2011, Copyright (c) 2011, Japan for Sustainability[1]
On March 11, 2011, the Great East Japan Earthquake hit, causing devastation to the Tohoku District, and compounded by the massive tsunami and subsequent earthquakes. The death toll exceeded 15,000 and nearly 10,000 people are still missing. From April 29 through to May 10, I stayed in the city of Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, one of the worst affected areas, to help out at a local office of JEN, an international nongovernmental organization (NGO) engaged in disaster relief (originally established as "Japan Emergency NGOs").
Ishinomaki is the second largest city in Miyagi Prefecture, with a population of about 160,000. Almost 3,000 lives were lost in the disaster here, and a large number of houses were swept away by the tsunami. Two months after the earthquake, more than 8,000 residents, accounting for nearly 5 percent of its population, were still living in over 100 shelters scattered across the city.
On my trip to Ishinomaki, I took a two-hour ride from Tokyo to Sendai on the Shinkansen bullet train and then a 90-minute ride on an expressway bus. The rail line, named the Senseki Line, runs from Sendai to Ishinomaki along the coast and was badly damaged by the disaster. I heard that it might take several years to be completely restored. When I entered the city, I was surprised at the sights I saw, totally out of the ordinary. Along both sides of the roads were piles of various abandoned household goods that had been washed up by the tsunami.
Furniture, household appliances, tatami mats, bedding, and more. The tsunami had reached several kilometers inland. I saw some houses still standing, but their first floors appeared no longer habitable.
I took a taxi from Ishinomaki Station to JEN's local office. I didn't ask any personal questions on the way, but the elderly taxi driver started to tell his sad story bit by bit: "I'm staying in a shelter at an elementary school; I had never imagined that my home would be hit by a tsunami. During the first ten days after the earthquake, the shelter was so crowded that I couldn't even find a space to lie down to sleep. I can't live in my destroyed home, and I don't have enough money to rebuild it. To move into a temporary housing unit, I have to win a highly competitive lottery. Even if I did win, that house would only be a temporary residence, after all. I have no place to go. Many neighbors around me were killed by the disaster. Everybody told me that I was lucky to have escaped death, but I'm not so sure. Survivors like me have to keep on living with all sorts of worries. If I had died, I might have felt pain, but it would have been just for a moment. I wonder sometimes which would have been better."
After a visit to JEN's office, I went by car to a seaside area and was stunned by the scene before me. Heaps of rubble stretched as far as I could see. Destroyed and covered by mud were parts of houses such as pillars and boards, along with furniture and various typical household items. Cars were scattered all around; some just the body frames, others upside down. I saw signs saying "Already Searched" on car windows, wheelchairs left overturned, and stuffed toy animals peeking out of the mud.
I also visited some shelters. In the gymnasium of one elementary school, each evacuee had a space measuring roughly a few square meters as temporary accommodations, and they were using cardboard cartons as partitions for each household. Meals were bread, cup noodles, and boxed meals distributed by the city or delivered as food assistance from all over Japan, or warm meals served by personnel from the Japanese Self Defense Forces. In some shelters, evacuees took turns preparing meals.
However, inadequate nutrition, caused especially by lack of vegetables, is a general concern for evacuees.
Other people not in shelters were staying temporarily with relatives or friends. Although about 10,000 temporary houses are needed in Ishinomaki alone, the number of houses under construction or even being planned was barely 1,800 (as of the end of April), since it is still difficult to secure available building sites in the area. The administration of procedures required to construct any temporary houses are divided up among government offices as follows: the central government, for procuring materials; the municipal governments, for procuring sites; and the prefectural government, for arranging construction. With these offices smoothly coordinating the work, I hope that everyone who needs a house will be able to move into a temporary one as soon as possible.
The experience of personally seeing damaged sites and hearing what had happened provoked a lot of thoughts, one of which was about humanity's "coexistence with nature." Being a land of frequent earthquakes, Japan has experienced many huge tsunamis in the past. Typhoons also hit it as many as 10 times a year sometimes. As it is located in the monsoon climate zone and nearly 70 percent of the land is covered with steep mountain forests, the country often experiences natural disasters such as floods and landslides caused by heavy rains.
Ishinomaki had a solid embankment built along the shore. The city and its residents believed that it would provide sufficient protection against a tsunami, but this time the tsunami was much higher than the embankment and it devastated the area, leaving behind massive damage. I keenly felt the weakness of humans and human-made things in the face of natural threats like earthquakes and tsunamis.
We often use the expression "coexistence with nature." It's often found in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports of companies, and it definitely becomes a topic when discussing town-building activities.
After seeing the situation in Ishinomaki, however, I began to think the expression is used merely superficially and is too optimistic. I think we refer to coexistence with nature when we establish a natural environment around us as something we can appreciate, which would never attack us, as if it were a miniature garden.
Most Japanese towns, including Ishinomaki, were planned and built based on the idea of combating threats from nature with technology. In this case it was to establish a solid embankment that could withstand a tsunami, but at Ishinomaki the embankment was destroyed because the tsunami was much bigger than people using modern technology had predicted. What do we need to do now? Is a more fortified and higher embankment the solution?
The city of Kamaishi in Iwate was also badly damaged as the tsunami surged and overflowed its embankment. It had built a huge one after learning lessons from the earthquake and tsunami in Chile in 1960, but it was still useless.
The city of Miyako in Iwate also suffered considerable damage from the tsunami, but in contrast the people from the city's Aneyoshi region were all found safe. This region was once destroyed almost completely when it was hit by the Meiji Sanriku Tsunami in 1896 and the Showa Sanriku Tsunami in 1933. The number of survivors from these tsunamis was said to be two and four, respectively. There is a stone tsunami marker erected on a mountain path about 500 meters away from the shore, on which warnings are inscribed to be passed on to descendants to remember the importance of having houses on a hill. People from the region have kept in their mind the warning on the marker: "The tsunami reached here." "Do not build houses below this point." "Be cautious even after years have passed." Every house in the region is built on sites above the marker, so no damage to people and houses was reported here.
Open floodplains used to be found in many monsoon regions in Asia.
Although heavy typhoon rains cause flooding and overflowing rivers, they also contribute to bringing nutrients from upstream, which in turn help boost crop harvests. I learned that people in the old days didn't try to stop flooding. They left spaces open for flooding on the floodplain in case of any overflow and avoided living there. People were adjusting their own activities to natural rhythms.
As the population has continued to grow and people thinking that they can build houses anywhere they want as long as they pay for them, they began building houses on flood plains and ended up suffering from greater damage caused by typhoons and flooding. For people living by a river with a high risk of flooding, it is now normal to expect engineered high embankments to contain the enormous threats from nature.
"All life, including human beings, is sacred and kept alive by everything in the universe." This is an eastern idea. The concept means that we live in a web woven of all that exists, both animate and inanimate.
The ancient Chinese philosophies of Laozi and Zhuangzi include the basic concepts of "naturalness" and "non-action," suggesting that instead of trying to manipulate or resist nature, fitting ourselves into the natural world is the most appropriate attitude.
A woman who was evacuated to a local temple and now takes care of dozens of evacuees including elderly people at the shelter said, "I love the sea. The tsunami hit and swept my house away, but it can't be helped.
Television broadcasts reported about people who felt betrayed by the sea or blame it on this disaster, but I have never felt like that. I live close to the sea because I love it, so I don't blame it. I'll live by the sea again, although I'm thinking about living somewhere uphill next time." She reminded me of the concepts of non-action and naturalness.
"Naturalness" here is a mode of being in accordance with the ways of nature. To gain such naturalness, Laozi and Zhuangzi preached that non-action is important. In their idea, the opposite of non-action is "artificiality," attempts by people to put something natural under their control. Examples of artificiality here are trying to block tsunamis or flooding with engineering technologies.
Should humanity regard nature as an object that needs to be suppressed and controlled, or just let it go and go along with its natural oscillations? The earthquake and tsunami disaster has given us an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between humanity and nature and how we should perceive it.
People in the disaster areas, including those in Ishinomaki, have started discussing and working on reconstruction plans. Some towns might choose to build higher and stronger seawalls, while others might decide to pass on the tough lessons from the tsunami disaster this time to future generations by telling them that we should not live too close to the water's edge because it is the realm of nature. There is no single and ultimately correct answer. Yet I strongly hope that future city planning is developed with longer time perspectives to enhance resilience, not just short-term efficiencies, and that planning and reconstruction in the affected areas are carried out using the hard lessons learned from this disaster.
Japan for Sustainability (JFS) is a non-profit communication platform to disseminate environmental information from Japan to the world, with the aim of helping both move onto a sustainable path. See what's new : on our web site E-mail: info[AT]japanfs.org
In the 1980s I made a survey of Trading Post advertisements selling dangerous dog breeds before Trading Post became cautious about such advertisements. While there were 101 advertisements for primarily pet, show, racing or working dogs, there were 158 ads selling larger guard and hunting dogs - the sort that can scare or menace the young and the old - even if foxies may be quicker on the nip. Some cross-breeds sounded doubly or triply dangerous, for example, "Sire Staffordshire Bull x heeler, bred for pig dogs" and the possibly ultimate combination, "American pit bull terrier cross bull terrier cross boxer bull mastiff”. Most of the advertising owners and breeders lived in Melbourne’s rural fringes and north-east and north-west outer suburbs, where life and people are perhaps correctly seen to be tougher.
Some of the fiercest dogs advertised in Trading Post are probably kept safely as guard dogs sitting in vans or within fenced properties. But quite often the ads in newspapers as well as in Trading Post, emphasised the eagerness of the dogs to 'have a go' at pigs and goats, and what great hunters of pigs and goats they will be, that one wondered what may happen to anything else alive when they go hunting. Or do they all go hunting? An Agriculture Departmental report on pit bull terriers in 1987 raised the public question of bull terriers used in pit bull fights, to explain why such ferocity is prized. And abandonment of unwanted pets who are feral and dangerous is already a problem in some hill and semi-rural areas.
Writer Val Yule, Daughter, grandchild, and Tangles, who was killed by a pit bull terrier.
The Royal Children's Hospital alone treated more than eighty children in one year (1987) for serious bites from dogs. Numberless other bites would have been treated elsewhere, and most attacks are not even reported.
Dog-lovers often insist on Victim-Onus - saying that dogs attack because children or adults provoke or show fear. This is not fair to all the children, adults or small dogs who may be attacked simply because others have provoked the irritable dogs in the past, or those who cannot reasonably be expected not to show fear of a menacing animal.
Terror is inflicted on many children and older people by vicious owners who laugh when their dogs frighten people.
The pitbull terrier that killed our harmless little dog in a park was on a lead, but the foul-mouthed owner could not restrain it. Two earlier attacks requiring costly veterinary attention and bills were by unleashed dogs. All these dogs are still free until they savage people. Pitbull terriers have burst off muzzles as they rush to kill, too strong for their owners.
• Dogs bred to attack should be labelled and treated as dangerous dogs whether or not they have attacked anyone before. If people who say their attack-dog is perfectly safe and gentle wanted a perfectly safe and gentle dog they should not choose an attack-dog. These are harder to train to be safe. They can choose dogs bred to be lapdogs, retrievers, water=dogs . . Guard dogs are bred to guard, not to attack. Many types of dogs should not be kept confined in urban areas at all.
• There should be some places specifically labelled as places where dogs can run free for exercise, since it is cruel for dogs not to have plenty of exercise.
• Free therapy for people with psychological needs to have dogs that terrorise others.
• Owners of attack-dogs and their cross-breeds pay double licence fees to discourage irresponsible people. Irresponsible abandonment of unwanted pets who become feral is already a danger in some hill and semi-rural areas.
• Licences refused, until owners demonstrated that such a dog will not lunge at weaker creatures, and will respond immediately to the command ‘Let Go’. Pitbull terriers can’t let go even when their owners swear at them and hit them.
• Licenses required for owners, once any dog of theirs has a vicious record.
• Better ‘dog-owner’ training, including DIY videos available in libraries and secondary schools, so that bad owners will not turn dogs of any breed vicious.
• RSPCA or local papers as places for reporting all unprovoked dog attacks in public places. This would show how much sorrow and fear is caused by savage, badly trained animals, while usually the owners cannot be traced to pay medical costs. Add in figures for psychological trauma and fear from being snarled at, knocked over and nipped. Long-term fear, and even disablement and disfigurement can be greater than many other types of psychological trauma cases that are awarded damages of thousands of dollars.
• Even the nicest people may like owning a threatening animal that makes visitors cower while they laugh, “It’s quite all right. His teeth don’t meet.” Watch people encouraging puppies to snap. Ideally, our whole society could change, to enjoy peaceful pursuits, civilised entertainment, safe homes not needing guarding, and ideals of masculinity that called for courage not cruelty - so that nobody would want to have rottweilers, pitbulls or terrifying cross-breeds.
Citizens in Australia’s major cities are becoming increasingly unhappy about what they perceive as the escalating deterioration in their quality of life - traffic congestion, overloaded public transport, unaffordable housing for young people, increases in the costs of basic services and overcrowding. There is little doubt that recent election results and unfavourable opinion polls are partly an expression of this dissatisfaction. (Article first published on On-Line Opinion, where you may also currently make comments.)
Citizens in Australia’s major cities are becoming increasingly unhappy about what they perceive as the escalating deterioration in their quality of life - traffic congestion, overloaded public transport, unaffordable housing for young people, increases in the costs of basic services and overcrowding. There is little doubt that recent election results and unfavourable opinion polls are partly an expression of this dissatisfaction.
‘Save Our Suburbs’ believe that these adverse trends are the result of high-density policies that have been imposed onto communities by state governments. Due to the misleading misinformation that has accompanied these policies, the public may not fully realise the connection between these policies on the one hand and deteriorating standard of living on the other. It is only when one sweeps the propaganda veil aside that one realises how shallow, trivial and sometimes downright deceptive the spin has been.
We should start out by making it clear that we have no issue with anyone that prefers living in a high-density area or with the free market construction of buildings to fulfill this preference. The issue we have is with the enforced imposition of high density housing upon the bulk of Australians that don’t want it.
The premise behind this government totalitarianism is that high-density living is better for the environment. They say that people will use their cars less and that greenhouse gas emissions will be greatly reduced. While these two propositions sound very much like commonsense the unfortunate fact is that the data does not bear them out. An idealised Melbourne study currently being quoted assumes that people, no matter where they live, will drive to the central business district daily. This is a completely unrealistic assumption. Only 9.9 per cent of employment in Melbourne is in the CBD. The majority of destinations for most people in the suburbs lie close to where they live and they do not in fact make daily trips to the CBD.
To get a better understanding we should look at the Australian Conservation Association’s Consumption Atlas, which shows greenhouse pollution per person in each postal code. The underlying research shows that the actual travel energy used by dwellers in inner Sydney suburbs is more than those in the outer suburbs, even when air travel is excluded.
When domestic energy is added to travel energy, the energy total for people in the inner suburbs is 22 per cent more than those living in the outer suburbs. This is because of energy needed in high-rise buildings for communal lifts, scores of individual clothes driers and ever-present security lighting in foyers and garage spaces.
While we do concede that private transport generates somewhat higher greenhouse gas emissions than public transport, the difference is not nearly as much as people think. Greenhouse gas emissions per passenger kilometre on Sydney City Rail are 105 gm. The figure for the average car is 155 gm. It is much less for modern hybrid vehicles, being a mere 70 gm.
Furthermore, a study of Melbourne areas shows that the people squeezed into newly converted dense areas did not use public transport to any greater extent and there was little or no change in their percentage of car use compared to living in the previous low-density.
In fact, traffic congestion increases whenever high-density policies are imposed wherever you are in the world. Any slight increase that may occur in the proportion of people using public transport is overwhelmed by the greater number of people squeezed into that area. The resulting congestion causes higher fuel consumption and dangerous exhaust emissions. The authorities fail to admit that many people still require their cars for getting to the many workplaces, sporting facilities, and relatives and friends homes not easily reached by public transport and for transporting items that are impractical or illegal aboard public transport such as weekend recreation equipment and the family pet.
High density advocates claim that high-density saves money. This is palpable nonsense. We are all acutely aware that high-density policies have resulted in a dramatic rise in the price of housing, due to the government enforced infill policy causing land scarcity, thereby locking out an entire generation of young people from the housing market. We are also conscious of substantial rises in the cost of services such as electricity, water and sewerage due to the incredibly inefficient modifications required to increase capacity in areas originally designed for lower densities.
A tragic and often overlooked failure of high-density policies is the adverse effect on human health, especially mental health. There is a considerable body of peer-reviewed research proving the link between density and ill health. An article published on 23 June 2011 by eleven authors in the prestigious scientific journal, Nature, states that the incidence of schizophrenia in city dwellers is double that of people living in less crowded conditions. This article has received worldwide media attention. In view of the serious mental health situation existing in our society, those forcing high-density onto communities that do not want it, should hang their heads in shame.
We reiterate that we have no issue with those of us that preferliving in a high-density area or with the free market construction of buildings to fulfill that limited demand. What we object to, is having draconian high density policies based on demonstrably faulty premises forced upon the 83 per cent of people that Australian research shows prefer to live in a free-standing home.
This is especially so when the result is maddening traffic congestion, more greenhouse gases, a creaking and overloaded infrastructure, the young and disadvantaged unable to afford their own home and poorer health outcomes.
Dr Tony Recsei has a background in chemistry and is an environmental consultant. Since retiring he has taken an interest in community affairs and is president of the Save Our Suburbs community group which opposes over-development forced onto communities by the New South Wales State Government. You can find the Youtube site here; and the blog here.
Cynthia McKinney is an unusual black US former congresswoman who has risked her life to report on the situation in Libya from Libya on what she calls the "Truth Tour". The article below contains her most recent report, which contains parts of alternative journalists' articles and criticises mainstream journalism. The video where she speaks, included here, is an addition. It is quite rivetting stuff.
From Cynthia McKinney: "Still in the Truth Tour"
Thanks to all who have come out and participated in the Truth Tour. I have almost come to its end. Last night in Detroit, several of the women were moved to tears as I explained the situation in Libya right now as I know it to be. Every venue has had every seat occupied or was filled to capacity with standing room only.
Detroit's young singer and band, Sister Ziyah and Black Rain were phenomenal and their music set the tone for the event: first song, Kickstart the Revolution; second song, Good Morning, America; third song, Today, I'm a Better Me.
This Truth Tour has been unique because the true peace people in this country have revealed themselves by their willingness to step forward and be counted against this war in the very midst of the worst deceit and demonization ever. NATO war crimes are being excused, discounted, or covered up by those who posed as supporters of justice and peace. It is never OK to bomb people. And it is never OK to ask the peace-loving people of this country to sacrifice Social Security and Medicare and education and housing--and I could go on and on--so that war profiteers can fatten their ill-gotten coffers.
I agree with Stephen Lendman and others who have written that the war propaganda against Libya reached heights higher than that for the war against the Iraqi people. The deceit continues to this day from the most respected "news" outlets. Now, we know them as what they really are, too.
Here are a few items that I had to wake up early to get to you before I board the plane for my next destination: it seems that the "Mighty Wurlitzer" could use a tune up because it has even ratcheted up a notch in its noise factor with this war. Watch the BBC descent from journalism to the absolute lowest depths with this:
For more information on the current deceptions and machinations regarding the US/NATO war against the people of Libya, listen to this conversation between Dedon Kamathi (who was a part of the DIGNITY Delegation of alternative journalists who traveled with me to wartime Libya) and Don Debar (who traveled with me to Libya in 2009 as a part of the DIGNITY Delegation to learn more about The Green Book:
Here's what Glen Ford wrote that moved me to tears:
"The Libyan Soldier: The True Heroes of NATO’s War," Wed, 08/24/2011 - 13:02 — Glen Ford
"NATO has proven it has the capacity to kill thousands of Libyan soldiers from the skies, but it cannot “convey honor and legitimacy” to the rebels under its killer wings. “They are little more than extras for imperial theater, a mob that traveled under the protective umbrella of American full spectrum dominance of the air.” The incinerated bodies of her soldiers have secured Libya’s place in history.
“The Libyan armed forces maintained their unit integrity and personal honor, with a heroism reminiscent of the loyalist soldiers of the Spanish Republic, in the late 1930s.”
The story is not over – not by a long shot – but the saga of the Libyan resistance to the superpower might of the United States and its degenerate European neocolonial allies will surely occupy a very special place in history. For five months, beginning March 19, the armed forces of a small country of six million people dared to defy the most advanced weapons systems on the planet, on terrain with virtually no cover, against an enemy capable of killing whatever could be seen from the sky or electronically sensed. Night and day, the eyes of the Euro-American war machine looked down from space on the Libyan soldiers’ positions, with the aim of incinerating them. And yet, the Libyan armed forces maintained their unit integrity and personal honor, with a heroism reminiscent of the loyalist soldiers of the Spanish Republic under siege by German, Italian and homegrown fascists, in the late 1930s.
The Germans and Italians and Generalissimo Franco won that war, just as the Americans, British, French and Italians may ultimately overcome the Libyan army. But they cannot convey honor or national legitimacy to their flunkies from Benghazi, who have won nothing but a badge of servitude to foreign overseers. The so-called rebels won not a single battle, except as walk-ons to a Euro-American military production. They are little more than extras for imperial theater, a mob that traveled to battle under the protective umbrella of American full spectrum dominance of the air. They advanced along roads already littered with the charcoal-blackened bodies of far better men, who died challenging Empire.
“The so-called rebels won not a single battle, except as walk-ons to a Euro-American military production.”
One thing is sure: the Americans and Europeans have never respected their servants. The so-called rebels of Libya will be no different. Washington, Paris and London know perfectly well that is was their 18,000 aircraft sorties, their cruise missiles, their attack helicopters, their surveillance satellites and drones, their command and control systems, their weapons, and their money, that managed to kill or wound possibly half the Libyan army. Not the rabble from Benghazi.
The rebels should not take too seriously being fawned over by the ridiculous hordes of corporate media tourists that have come to Tripoli to record the five-month war's finale. They are highly paid cheerleaders. And, although it may appear that they are cheering for the rebels, don't be fooled – at the end of the day, the western corporate media only cheer for their own kind. They are celebrating what they believe is a victory over the Libyan demon they have helped to construct in their countrymen's minds. Next year, rebel, that demon might be you.
Or next year, it might be many Libyans, including those who were no friends of Col. Moammar Gaddafi. The Americans treat their native minions like children in need of supervision – and there is a certain logic to this, since whoever would entrust his nation's sovereignty and resources to the Americans is, surely, either exceedingly stupid, or hopelessly corrupt. But Libya's honor and her place in history has already been secured by a small African army that held out nearly half a year against the NATO barbarians.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at [email protected].
Never Forgive, Never Forget
And here is what Stephen Lendman wrote:
"Never Forgive, Never Forget," by Stephen Lendman
After covering Libya's rape since last winter in dozens of articles, no forgiving or forgetting is possible for one of history's great crimes. Nor is ignoring those responsible, condemning them forthrightly, and explaining why all wars are waged.
NATO outdid Orwell on this one, killing truth by calling war the responsibility to protect - by terrorizing, attacking, and slaughtering civilians like psychopathic assassins.
As a result, honest historians will redefine barbarism to explain NATO's savagery. It includes ongoing crimes of war and against humanity for the most malevolent reasons.
When is war not war? It's when committing cold-blooded murder is called the right thing. When major media scoundrels cheerlead it, and when most people believe it because they're too indifferent, uncaring or lazy to learn the truth.
NATO's rape of Libya is too ugly for proper words to describe. Only honest images can do it, and lots of them.
Instead, the Big Lie substitutes for honest journalism, especially on television where real (not fake) visuals can show mangled bodies, mass destruction, and other evidence of NATO crimes.
Where civilian deaths can be shown graphically in living color. Where responsibility can be placed where it belongs. Where right and wrong can best be explained. Where repetition can arouse public outrage. Where proper analysis in advance perhaps can prevent all wars.
None are liberating, lawful, or virtuous. All are shamelessly exploitive. Libya's one of the worst - unscrupulously benefitting powerful interests criminally, ruthlessly, and diabolically.
It doesn't get any worse than that. Ask Lybians. They'll explain.
The New York Times is America's lead propaganda instrument, its reports getting enough global coverage to make a difference.
From the start, it cheerled war with Libya. It played the same role in Afghanistan, Iraq, and all previous US wars, deceiving its readers by dishonest journalism, commentaries, and editorials.
August 26 was no different. Two articles among others stand out. David Kirkpatrick wrote one headlined, "As Qaddafi Forces Retreat, a Newly Freed Imam Encourages Forgiveness," saying:
Pro-NATO Sheik Abdul Ghani Aboughreis helped incite last winter's uprising "with a fiery Friday sermon at the Mourad Agha mosque. His words sent thousands of demonstrators pouring into the streets. (His) mosque and neighborhood became a center of revolt and resistance...."
After six months of shamelessly supporting death and destruction against his own people, he now encourages "forgiv(ing) each other, to make sure to leave it to the law and not take revenge on each other."
As in all his Libya war articles, Kirkpatrick left unexplained months of crimes of war and against humanity, committed by NATO and paramilitary killers.
Instead, he highlighted alleged evidence of ongoing Gaddafi loyalist crimes.
In times of war, both sides commit them, but whatever government forces did pale compared to NATO's savagery and its hired assassins. Kirkpatrick and other Times writers failed to notice.
Anthony Shadid and Kareem Hahim were no better headlining, "Grim Evidence of Fighting's Toll Becomes Clearer in Libya," saying:
"As the fighting died down in Tripoli on Friday, the scope and savagery of the violence during the nearly weeklong battle for control of the capital began to come into sharper focus."
Evidence he cites is a shameful Amnesty International report (based on freed Al Qaeda and other paramilitary prisoners), saying:
AI "uncovered evidence that forces loyal to (Gaddafi) have killed numerous detainees held at two military camps in Tripoli on 23 and 24 August."
Perhaps so if other insurgents freed them, attacked Gaddafi forces in the process, and they fought back.
Instead, AI said:
"Loyalist forces in Libya must immediately stop such killings of captives, and both sides must commit to ensuring no harm comes to prisoners in their custody."
Like UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, AI tries to have it both ways, ruining everything it gets right by reports like this - equating horrendous NATO crimes with lesser ones committed by Gaddafi forces, perhaps many less than imagined. The fog of war makes it hard to know precisely.
Instead, Shadid and Hahim's article was shamelessly one sided. While citing clear evidence of rebel-committed atrocities, their article claimed:
- Tripoli violence is now subsiding when, in fact, it rages;
- rebels say Gaddafi loyalists killed their own, an absurdity on its face;
- it's hard "to ascertain the fate of....dead men" in hospitals, as well as chaos committed inside; AP and Reuters reported it resulted from rebel-committed terror;
- Gaddafi's "cloak of secrecy (and) mercurial rule" are being revealed, leaving unexplained why Washington and its NATO partners wage all wars;
- slogans are being displayed, saying "Libya is free" and "Misurata is steadfast," though still Gaddafi controlled, it's believed, what Shadid and Hahim ignored, as well as not debunking claims of Libya's freedom; and
- documents in Gaddafi's compound "seemed to show that (his) adopted daughter Hana, who was supposedly killed at age 4 in (1986), was alive (and) working as a doctor." The key words "seemed to show" both Times writers implied were proof, adding that Tripoli Central Hospital workers claimed "a spacious and well-appointed office" there was hers.
Throughout the conflict, Times articles, op-eds and editorials backed it. Their unstated message is war is good, the more the better when America wages them.
Sadly, that's the state of managed Western news and opinion. It's a shocking indictment of its support for wealth and power, no matter how lawless and harmful to billions exploited ruthlessly, shameless, and repeatedly.
Final Comments
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) reports continued fighting in Tripoli, inflicting many casualties. Moreover, many injured can't be treated because of ongoing violence, inadequate staff, and enough supplies and capacity at local hospitals.
In addition, "numerous arrests" were made, "including foreign nationals." Their welfare is very much at risk, especially those singled out for revenge.
Fierce fighting also continues around Misrata and elsewhere. The end of conflict is nowhere in sight. Brega "look(s) like a ghost town."
In different areas, people are endangered by unexploded ordinance, as well as shortages of food, clean water, drugs, other medical supplies, and spotty or no electricity.
Washington-led NATO turned Libya into a hellish inferno - step one before occupying and exploiting its resources and people. Months ago its wealth was stolen. Ahead will be its future if Libyans don't struggle and win their freedom.
On August 26 on Russia Today (RT.com), journalist Pepe Escobar said Abdelhakim Belhadj, a former Al-Qaeda insurgent/now CIA asset commands rebel forces in Tripoli. He explained that he was trained in Afghanistan by a "very hardcore Islamist Libyan group." Earlier he was captured in Malaysia, detained and tortured in Bangkok, then transferred back to Libya and imprisoned. In 2009, he made a deal for freedom, in return for serving Western interests, Escobar says: "I can say almost for sure with 95% certainty that this is the guy" heading insurgents in Tripoli. It shows how Washington both demonizes and uses Al Qaeda advantageously, including bin Laden. He was a longtime CIA asset until his death in December 2001 - not from Obama's staged raid. Notably, Al Qaeda was a 1980s CIA creation during the Soviet-Afghan war. Moreover, Washington both supports international terrorism covertly and battles it by imperial wars and persecuting Muslims for their faith. It's part of the fog to scare people enough to believe waging wars remove threats that, in fact, don't exist. So they have to be invented to enlist public support, unaware of the harm caused abroad and at home.
Only war profiteers benefit, not taxpayers they steal from or victims they attack. At the same time, corrosive militarism, financial wars, and other destructive policies destroyed America's soul. Its future as a free country is next.
So focused on bread and circus distractions, most people don't notice. How else can Washington get away with murder!
Finally, the fate of independent journalists trapped in Tripoli's Corinthia Hotel remains unclear. They're still in harm's way because a chartered ship for their safe passage out either hasn't arrived or it's too unsafe to reach it.
In conclusion, Law Professor Francis Boyle's morning email said the following:
"After Six Months of fighting by the most powerful military alliance in the history of the world, Ghadafy has now become the Greatest African Warrior since Hannibal against the Romans - predecessors to the Americans."
"Generations from now, people will sing songs, write poems, and compose odes to Ghadafy all over Africa, the Arab World, the Muslim World, and the Third World long after Obama is dead and disparaged and discredited."
Sic transit Gloria mundi (Thus passes the glory of the world)!"
Keep Libya's freedom flame alive no matter how imperial monsters try to destroy it! We're all Libyans now! Their struggle is ours!
It's high time we matched their courageous spirit against the world's most pernicious/destructive force. Bowed perhaps, they're not broken! Isn't that enough to raise our consciousness to support them!
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
But rather than replying to a comment to that article by way of a response comment, this article takes its place. The recent austerity measures imposed on the people of Ireland and likewise by selected European countries are treasonable. Insolvent developers and bankers have wrongfully been absolved from their reckless gambling. Governments bailing out these gamblers with public moneys have immorally burdened the public with private debts of the reckless. This is gross malfeasance and blatant betrayal of national wealth and so is treason. I fail to understand why civil rebellion has not broken out and call for the guillotine.
Back in October 2010, The Irish Times published the following article of a reader's response to her government's announcement of the possible €50 billion bill for the bank bailout. Eviction of Thomas Considine, Tullycrine, Ireland, July 1888
'I am a citizen of this country and I am angry'
by Barbara Scully in The Irish Times, 2nd October 2010.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2010/1002/1224280160745.html
'It didn't look like a Black Thursday. September 30th in Dublin was a lovely mild day, blue skies with a smattering of white clouds. No breeze and just the slightest hint of autumn in the air. A day to be glad you were alive. A day when the earth was trying her best to distract us with her beauty and her benign nature.
On Twitter others noticed the beauty of this day, too. Mark Little (@marklittlenews) posted a beautiful photo of the early-morning city. There was a softness to the day that belied what the news was about to bring us. As Morning Ireland came on air, Twitter began “discussing” the current state of affairs.
There was a building sense of seriousness. The jokey tone of a couple of weeks ago was gone. The main feeling was one of disbelief. I continued to scroll, reading each comment. In 140 characters there is nowhere to hide. No room for flowery language. Twitter tells it like it is.
I phoned my husband, who was already out chasing up work, and told him not to turn on the news. Tune your radio to Nova and listen to rock music all day, I commanded. As a self-employed sole trader he has more than enough on his plate wondering about paying next month’s mortgage. He didn’t need to know about another harsh budget in December. Not today anyway.
As I hung up the phone, I began to get angry. I am a housewife and part-time writer. I have no degree in economics or politics. I don’t understand bond markets. But I am not stupid. I run a home, write, support my husband’s business and raise our children. I am a citizen of this country and my opinion counts. And I am angry.
I am angry that the Government which presided over the Celtic Tiger (some would have us believe they actually created it) and allowed the property market to run amok over a number of years is still in office.
I am angry that we are two years into this banking crisis and, despite all the rhetoric, things just continue to get worse.
I am angry because I feel we have been misled by our Government on Anglo Irish Bank.
I am angry because there are still fat-cat bankers, the very ones who contributed hugely to this mess, who are still fat cats. There has been no accountability.
I am angry because our Taoiseach, at such a critical time, saw fit to go on the piss a few weeks ago. I am angry that he then thought it acceptable to address the nation on the economy after very little sleep, with seemingly little preparation and clearly hungover.
I am angry that there seems to be no credible opposition to this lame Government.
I am angry that the politicians continually put their own egos and quest for power before what’s best for our country.
I am angry that we are being told there will be major cuts in the next Budget. I can tell you that this family, like many others, has nothing left to give. The past two years have eroded any savings we had for our children’s education. We have cut all that can be cut in our own budget, and every week it is a struggle to pay the bills.
I am angry that I have to watch my husband run himself ragged as he tries to earn enough each month to keep our boat afloat.
But most of all I am angry because I know I am not alone. I am one of thousands of women all over Ireland in the same situation.
I love this country. I think Irish people are articulate, creative, compassionate and brave. I do not understand how we have so few politicians who reflect these attributes.
I call on every TD in Dáil Éireann, from all parties and none, to set aside their political differences and come up with a cross-party strategy to deal with the financial mess. I am clinging to the hope that we have the brains, creativity and energy to begin the process of fixing our banks and our economy.
In extraordinary times, extraordinary measures are called for. I challenge our politicians to take such extraordinary steps as are now necessary.
History will not forgive them if they don’t. And neither will I.'
In a brilliant new paper released this morning, Labor MP Kelvin Thomson has proposed his "Witches' Hats" theory of government -- a theory that places central importance on rates of population growth.
Democratic politicians, says Kelvin, are often bluffed by lobbyists who convince them that what is good for business is good for their or their governments' political longevity -- and that since population growth is good for business (or at least for big business, since it provides more customers) it must good for the Parties they belong to.
The reverse is the case, he says. It's not just in unstable states that rapid population growth is bad for political stability. Even in securely democratic countries, population growth destabilises leaders and governments.
One striking example is the amazingly rapid fall of Kevin Rudd, the (once) extremely popular Australian prime minister who pushed Australia's annual population growth in 2009 to 2.1%, nearly six times the average for industrialised countries, told the electorate "I support a big Australia" and had a meteoric fall in the opinion polls -- and from office. But Kelvin Thomson argues in his The Witches’ Hats Theory of Government: How increasing population is making the task of government harder that this connection is far more widespread than politicians and political analysts have yet recognised.
Why? Because staying in power, and keeping the electorate happy is a little like an advanced driving course, one in which a government is required to thread a kind of slalom course between a series of witches' hats -- meaning the orange inverted cones that mark out the course. These hats, which the government, like the driver, needs to avoid knocking over, include such things as keeping electricity and water costs down, reducing hospital queues, keeping housing affordable, preserving the environment, providing full employment, restricting inflation, etc.
And the faster a country’s population is rising, the harder it is to do this, says Kelvin Thomson. It’s like trying to negotiate the course at double speed.
"Countries with stable populations, like the Scandinavian nations, tend to have stable governments. I’m suggesting that the life-expectancy of a democratic party or a particular Prime Minister may be crucially affected by how fast the population is growing. Governments that preside over rapid population growth tend to have short honeymoon periods, and soon find themselves on the nose with the electorate.
"I recently headed a parliamentary delegation to the Solomon Islands and Samoa. At the time of independence, the Solomon Islands had a population of 170,000 – now its population is three times that, over 500,000. It has seen frequent changes of Prime Minister, and the other countries in the region have troops stationed there to keep the peace. Its Parliament has not met this year, and our Delegation was told that this was because the Prime Minister was afraid of a Parliamentary vote of no-confidence.
"Samoa by contrast has had a relatively stable population of around 170,000 to 180,000 for decades. It has had the same Prime Minister for nearly 20 years, and the same governing Party for nearly 30 years."
"So when politicians are puzzled by their ratings and ask “Why don’t they like me?”, the answer might well be that they are driving the car too fast and knocking over those witches’ hats. They should slow the car down and focus on solving people’s real-life problems."
We are republishing this message because we agree that nothing can go ahead as long as the public messaging system is held hostage by a corporate media monopoly. Avaaz organisation says that, "Prime Minister Gillard may finally be about to order an inquiry into Rupert Murdoch's stranglehold on our media, but insiders say she is wobbling under direct pressure from Murdoch's lobbyists. Let’s flood her cabinet members with calls today and give them the public mandate they need to take a strong stand and hold the PM steady in her decision." See also "Concentrated media ownership: a crisis for democracy" Remember, the Murdoch press wants our population to increase and is against protection of the environment and of workers' rights.
Candobetter.net does not know how true this view of Gillard is, but we certainly agree with the sentiment. It is true that Murdoch media sure does not act like a friend to Julia, so, if she knows what is good for her, she will increase Australia's media diversity and downsize the Murdoch press. But she may also rely on 'friends' of the Murdoch media - which means nearly every 'successful' mediocre politician around. They will stand in her way by protecting the Murdoch press. The extremely weak response to the recent Murdoch scandal by Australian politicians and parliament is indicative of how bad the situation is. Is there no politician left who does not kowtow to Rupert?
Avaaz suggests that you "Take a moment and call these numbers now -- the talking points below will help guide you in what to say:
Kate Ellis: (02) 6277 7630
Tanya Plibersek: (02) 6277 7200
Anthony Albanese: (02) 6277 7680"
And, how about signing this petition which has been going now for several weeks, as well? (Image: Rupert Murdoch, courtesy Rex Interstock) Sign this online petition advocating a comprehensive Inquiry into the Australian media industry. #AusPol http://fb.me/18xDXIEuv1 day ago
Talking points
I believe that there should be a robust inquiry into Australia’s media because current regulation doesn’t protect media diversity and News Limited controls 70% of what Australians read in the news every day.
I encourage you to firmly remind the Prime Minister that she has an overwhelming public mandate to call for this inquiry -- thousands of Australians have called on her to bring this inquiry.
I believe we need a “fit and proper person” or public interest test to determine if media acquisitions are in the interest of our society.
Australia needs a balanced privacy law that protects people from invasive and ruthless journalism without stifling free speech or public interest reporting.
The concentration of media power in just a few hands undermines the heart of a democratic society -- the ability of people to access a variety of viewpoints and form their own opinions.
Remember to be polite: we’ll be far more convincing if we are reasonable and courteous. After the call share your experience with others across the country in the live chat on the right.
Fidel Castro, Muammar Gaddafi and Hugo Chavez are three men of different eras who have lived a similar desire to defend the rights of the nations they represent and to network with other struggling regions over international trade and political representation. The nations and regions they have championed all have suffered greatly at the hands of the United States. These leaders have confronted political realities that simply are not acknowledged in the mainstream western press. Chavez recently spoke again about Libya and of the danger of the predatory US taking advantage of his current illness, for which he is being treated in Cuba.
These leaders survived the oil shocks and forged 3rd World Alliances
Castro came to power in 1959 and only recently stepped down in favour of his brother.
Gaddafi came to power in 1969 and led the formation of OPEC, which supported the rights of 'developing' Arab countries, most of them colonies, and their independence from oppressive and exploitative western powers. [Read about the history and future of OPEC here.]
Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela has been at the forefront of attempts to form associations with other 'developing' countries, particularly oil and mineral producers, since he won government in December 1998. He personally visited many of the leaders of oil producing nations around the world, and hosted the first summit of heads of state of OPEC in 25 years, and the second ever held.[Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Venezuelan_oil_industry#cite_note-Wilpert-1] The impact of this is that South American, African, Chinese and other powers might take precedence over the usual dominant countries - the UK, the US and their European allies. These previously dominant countries need to negotiate in good spirit and to downsize their demands for oil in line with depletion protocols - not bomb the daylights out of any country that stands up to them - which is what is happening in Libya.
"Libya: Chavez denounces the European and US massacre"
Hugo Chavez is furious about the bombing by NATO forces and rebel forces which daily kill innocent people in Libya: "We pray to God for the peole of Libya. Innocent people must be spared; peace must reign over the world! Since the beginning of the war which began last March, the Venezuelan President has called for a cease-fire to stop the butchery.
Because, for Chavez, the US and European military attacks are causing a veritable massacre among Libya's population. Chavez has nil approval for support by a part of Europe and by the United States for the rebel forces opposed to Colonel Gaddafi. In one of his famously passionate speeches, Chavez described how appalled he felt: "These false-democracy proselytisers are bombing Tripoly and destroying schools, hospitals, houses and factories." Over last weekend, conflicts caused 1300 dead and 5000 wounded. For Chavez, the USA and its allies are creating a true precedent by attacking an "independent country in order to steal its natural resources."
For this reason, Chavez is asking his supporters to remain vigilant in the face of a possible attempt to destabilise Venezuela [itself] at a time when its President [Chavez is undergoing treatment for cancer] seems diminished by illness. "Obama and the Americans spread violence everywhere they go. The destroy and cause death in the name of peace. But the only thing that really interests them is to get hold of oil."
"Remember that Venezuela has the biggest oil reserve in the world, with 296 billion barrels." [Editorial: This last statement fails to articulate the fact that most of these reserves are in the form of tar sands - which are very energy-intensive to mine and environmentally costly. "Based on data from BP at the end of 2009 the highest proved oil reserves including non-conventional oil deposits are in Saudi Arabia (18 per cent of global reserves), Canada (12 %, mostly oil sands), Venezuela (12 %, mostly tar sands), Iran (9 %), Iraq (8 %), Kuwait (7 %), UAE (7 %) and Russia (5 %). Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves#cite_note-TI2011-1]]
Where does Australia fit in?
Postscript: What does this all have to do with Australia? Well, in the early 1970s Whitlam, with Rex Connor, attempted to make Australia nationally self-sufficient in energy - including gas and oil. This was a step towards Australian independence and we might just have become another independent oil and gas producer. As many Australians may still remember, however, Primeminister Whitlam was removed from office by an agent of the Queen of England. Shortly after Primeminister Fraser began policies to sell off assets in exchange for equity, in order to develop Australia's mineral and fuel resources. Thus our country, which at the time of Whitlam had the lowest foreign ownership, became a largely foreign-owned country with only token democracy. Was this fate preferable to the one that Libya now faces or is the shock-doctrine treatment we are currently being dosed with by our Treasury just a foretaste of much worse to come, with local oil depletion well in train and overpopulation causing dispossession, displacement through migrant-worker schemes in the context of detoothed labour laws, and Saudi-like desalination projects where elites engineer water costs that will ultimately rise beyond the reach of ordinary people, along with food. On the history of oil policies pre-Oil Shock and after, and the details of the Khemlani loan and Whitlam's removal, and cabinet papers on Rex Connor's project see Chapter 7 of The Growth Lobby in Australia and its Absence in France
Hugo Chavez est outré par les bombardements de l’OTAN et des forces rebelles qui tuent chaque jour des innocents en Libye : « nous prions Dieu pour le peuple de Libye. Epargnons les innocents, il faut la paix dans le monde ! » Depuis le début du conflit qui a démarré en Mars dernier, le chef de l’état du Venezuela s’empresse de demander un cessez-le-feu pour arrêter la boucherie.
Car pour Chavez, les frappes militaires américaines et européennes provoquent un véritable massacre parmi la population. Chavez n’approuve pas du tout le soutien d’une partie de l’Europe et des Etats-Unis aux forces rebelles opposées au colonel Kadhafi. Dans une diatribe dont il a le secret, Chavez exprime son désarroi : » ces faux démocrates sont en train de bombarder Tripoli et détruisent des écoles, des hôpitaux, des maisons et des usines." Lors du dernier week-end, les affrontements ont fait 1300 morts et plus de 5000 blessés. Pour Chavez, les Etats-Unis et ses alliés créent un véritable précédent en s’attaquant à « un pays indépendant afin de lui piquer ses ressources naturelles. »
Pour cette raison, Chavez demande à ses supporters de rester vigileant face à une possible tentative de déstabilisation du Venezuela, au moment même où le chef de l’état semble diminuer par la maladie. « Obama et les américains étendent la violence partout où ils passent. Ils détruisent et provoquent la mort au nom de la paix. Mais ce qui les intéresse, c’est de prendre le pétrole. »
Rappelons que le Venezuela a la plus grande réserve de pétrole au monde, avec 296 milliards de barils.
I have learned that, far from being a bloody despot or a fool, Muammar Gaddafi was, and is, a courageous and visionary leader of the Libyan people. I learned this, of all places, from a broadcast embedded in the pages of an article in Rupert Murdoch's Australian newspaper. Elsewhere, the Australian has been feeding the public the lies used by NATO to justify its criminal war against the people of Libya. Viewing this video has caused me to realise what a tragic loss for all humankind it would be if Muammar Gaddafi were to perish at the hands of NATO and its TNC puppets.
Anybody with an inquiring and critical mind, access to the Internet, and sufficient time would long ago have seen through the deceit in the mainstream media's coverage of the Libyan conflict.
If Muammar Gaddafi's Government had been anywhere near as dictatorial and unpopular as has been claimed, there is no way that the Government could have lasted more than a few weeks against the massive material and financial support that the Transitional National Council (TNC) has received from NATO countries and the aerial surveillance and huge aerial and naval bombardment of Libya by NATO. Instead, the Libyan Government of Muammar Gaddafi survived for over seven months.
After these months of relentless war against the Libyan people, TNC had succeeded in conquering much Tripoli on the night of 22 August.
The survival of the Libyan Government for seven months against such overwhelming military might and in the face of such terrible hardship and tragedy is surely evidence of the strong support of the great majority Libyan people for their Government.
Libyans, loyal to Gaddafi are continuing to resist NATO and the TNC and it is still not clear if the rebels and NATO will emerge triumphant.
Despite this, it was still possible - even for people sympathetic to Libya - to view Gaddafi as an erratic leader, whose poor judgement in past years had provided NATO with pretexts to invade Libya. The T-Shirt Gaddaffy Duck character, based upon an amalgamation of the Warner Brothers Daffy Duck cartoon character and Muammar Gaddaffy seemed to me to be not too far off the mark.
I believed this kind of cartoon representation of Gaddafi until about 24 hours ago, when I watched a YouTube broadcast A look at the Gaddafi era, embedded, of all places on a page of Rupert Murdoch's Australian newspaper which has, elsewhere, done so much to deceive public opinion about Muammar Gaddafi and Libya. The article was "More than six months of conflict in Libya," of 22 August. (It is also embedded below). As already noted elsewhere, the article does contain a useful chronology of the conflict.
Whilst it is difficult for me to date that YouTube broadcast, its content suggests that it may have been produced 2 years ago.
I was expecting the broadcast to depict Gaddafi essentially as he had been depicted elsewhere in the Murdoch newsmedia, as a brutal dictator with the blood of many thousands of Libyans and others on his hands, or, at best, deserving only ridicule.
To my astonishment, the broadcast has caused me now to view Muammar Gaddafi to be highly admirable and a true giant amongst today's world leaders.
I can't say if that was the intention of the producer, Deborah Lutterbeck, but the material contained in that broadcast, in addition to what I already knew of Gaddafi, has made me realise that he was, at the outset, a courageous and visionary leader of the Libyan people and remains that to this very day. His rule has greatly helped the people Libya and, indeed, all of humanity.
Whilst Western propagandists have been able,at times, to depict Gaddafi, at his age, as unstable and erratic, they could not have hoped to have done so to the much younger and handsome officer who deposed the former King Idris in a bloodless coup in 1969. That same young Gaddafi used his country's oil wealth for the benefit of poor Libyans and stood up for international justice on the world stage for decades.
In the whole 4 minute video, I could find only two things that could conceivably have been held against Gaddafi by anyone striving for a more just and peaceful world:
Accusations by the US that he had ordered the bombing of a German night club frequented by US Marines in 1986
Al-Megrahi, an employee of the Libyan Government, had been found guilty by a Scottish court for the bombing of the Pan AM flight 103 in the skies above Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988 which had caused the deaths of 270 passengers
It has been shown that the latter was the result of a mistrial and the fabrication of evidence. For more information, please read The Framing of al-Megrahi by Gareth Peirce and readers' comments in the London Review of Books of 24 September 2009.
Transcript of YouTube broadcast, A Look at the Gaddafi Era
"Muammar Qaddafy first entered the world stage in September 1969 when he led junior army officers in toppling King Idris in a bloodless military coup. One of his first tasks was building up the armed forces, but he also spent billions improving living standards, making him popular with the poor.
Inspired by Arab nationalist sentiment, he abandoned ties with Western powers and pursued aims of uniting Arab countries, instigating the Arab Federation with Syria and Egypt in 1971 which soon broke down in argument and recrimination.
Gaddafi's relations with the West became increasingly strained, leading to accusations in 1986 that he sent agents to blow up a Berlin night club frequented by American marines. The US responded with air raids hitting one of Gaddafi's homes and killing his adopted daughter.
He poured money into projects like the great man-made river, a scheme to pipe water from desert wells to coastal communities, a project which Qaddafy described as the 8th wonder of the world, estimated to have cost about 20 billion dollars.
When Pan Am flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland in February 1988, killing 270 people, Western intelligence agencies were quick to point the finger of blame at the Qaddafy regime. Former South African president, Nelson Mandela played a key role in persuading Qaddafy to surrender two Libyan Nationals suspected of involvement in the bombing. A specially convened Scottish court found (Abdel Basset Al-Magri) guilty of mass murder, sentencing him to 27 years in prison. He was later freed ahead of fulfilling the term on health grounds.
Gaddafi's quirky style was legendary, once pitching a tent in Cairo's presidential compound on a visit. He also ignored traditions of his conservative society, surrounding himself with women bodyguards toting assault rifles.
He frequently criticised Arab leaders with attacking Saudi Arabia in 2003 for hosting thousands of US troops since the 1991 Gulf War.
Later, in 2003, he caught the world by surprise, announcing plans to abandon Libya's weapons of mass destruction program. The announcement drew swift praise from London and Washington and an end to international isolation with the US and the UK ending a broad trade embargo and resuming full diplomatic relations.
In June 2009 Qaddafy arrived in Rome for a 4 day visit, his first visit to Libya's former colonial ruler, where he was welcomed by Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.
In 2009 in his first visit to the US since taking power 40 years ago, Qaddafy accused major powers on the UN security council of betraying the principles of the UN Charter. Qaddafy never held an official state position and was known simply as "Brother leader and guide of the revolution."
Postscript: The YouTube broadcast now also includes content transcription of the content. The date of the post, which included transcribed text, is 22 Aug 2011 which actually precedes the date of this article. I think I recall either transcribing it myself or else asking another candobetter contributor to transcribe it for me. I don't recall copying the text from YouTube, yet the respective dates of the publication of the transcriptions suggest that that is what happenedl To have manually typed text that had already been typed elsewhere on the World Wide Web would have to be a pointless waste of effort. All the same, it is good that the above text is also on the same page as the broadcast. That considerably adds to YouTube's value. Whilst I rarely listen to a YouTube broadcast more than once, I often revisit pages of text pages I have read as it takes considerably less time and effort to find and make use of the useful text than to again watch and listen to the whole broadcast to get to the parts of the broadcast of most interest. Let's hope that more YouTube broadcasts include transcriptions. 15 December 2011
Though Japan's nuclear-safety experts recommended dispensing pills immediately, Tokyo didn't order pills be given out until five days after the March 11 accident, the documents show.
Potassium iodide, which blocks radioactive iodine from entering the thyroid gland, is most effective when taken just before exposure, or within two hours after. It has little effect when administered days after the release of radiation.
Naoki Matsuda, a professor of radiation biology at Nagasaki University and an adviser to the Fukushima prefecture government, recalled a meeting with prefectural staff after a day of screening local residents on March 14. They reported gauges on radiation monitors set for 13,000 cpm going off repeatedly. "It was very clear the previous level of 13,000 cpm wouldn't work," Mr. Matsuda wrote in an essay posted on the university's website. "We discussed how the staff should turn off alarm sounds and refrain from wearing protective suits and face masks in order not to fan worries among residents."
So on March 14, the Nagasaki University professors were already engaged in damage limitation for the nuclear industry??
...
Small hydropower plants keep it local - All renewable energy forms are going to have their problems. They need to be sited in appropriate locations in order to reap the full benefits and they must be operated by people who know what they're doing. The real proof of renewables will come after fossil fuels become very expensive and unavailable in a couple of decades' time from now (or less?). Then what? Please look at the photo and tell me how you are going to repair that turbine if it breaks down in a world where fossil energy is no longer available. Most people will not be able to. That's why I keep saying that a society/economy that runs on renewable energy forms will be transitional to what comes after that. Which is what? What do you want it to be? How are you going to ensure that you get there?
According to an announcement by the Japanese Government's Japan Atomic Energy Commission on September 27, published on the front page of the Akahata newspaper on September 28, opinions solicited from the Japanese public concerning nuclear power showed that 98% were in favor of an immediate or gradual nuclear phase-out. Of these, 67% were in favour of the immediate shutdown of nuclear power stations and a switch to renewable and other energy forms, and 31% were in favour of a gradual nuclear phase-out with a switch to renewable and other energy forms. 1.5% were in favour of maintaining the status quo or increasing nuclear power and 0.5% were in favour of nationalization of nuclear power stations. 10,189 opinions were received and of these 3,060 were drawn at random for the survey. So I suppose if the politicians, bureaucrats, business people and so on want to argue with that they are welcome to, but at some point it might just snap back in their faces.
It (TEPCO) is also considering cutting expenses through suppression of repair and maintenance costs...
Are they mad??? How do they expect to maintain safety if they do that???
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The waste from the Japanese earthquake and tsunami - This is just horrific! I have heard that there was a plan put out that was rejected by the government and the powers-that-be. The plan was this: Take all the tsunami waste, whether it contains a certain amount of radioactive material or not, and pile it up all along the shoreline as a tsunami barrier against future tsunami. Once it is piled up to a certain extent, cover it with earth and then continue to pile up more on top, then cover with earth again. Repeat until the barrier contains all the debris and then cover with earth one more time, and then finally with concrete. The barrier might be 20 m high and two or three hundred meters wide. Since people should not be living where tsunami might strike anyway, the people should be compensated for their land and move to higher ground. It's a huge project, but at least it does not mean that the debris has to be transported very far and the result is that you have a tsunami barrier right up and down the coast where it is required. There may be problems with this idea, and there may be better ideas, but I haven't heard them yet...
#Fukushima I Nuke Plant Reactor 2 Achieves "Cold Shutdown" - Oh, this is great - more self-delusion again! I already did a rant on "cold shutdown" on September 25, so I am not going to repeat that sad story again here. Please take a look at the diagram (from the Yomiuri Shimbun): It tries to indicate "where the molten fuel is thought to be." But there is no direct evidence that that is where the molten fuel actually is, and therefore no assurance that the the thermometer is measuring the temperature of the molten fuel, or just the wall of the reactor pressure vessel. It's clear that the thermometer is measuring the temperature at the base of the reactor pressure vessel, but the chances of most of the molten fuel being there are remote. There may be a little remaining there, but since the control rods enter through the base of the RPV in this kind of reactor, the molten fuel has likely burned through the control rods or their lower supports and exited through the holes into the drywell, and then perhaps into the suppression chamber, and then perhaps out onto the concrete floor of the containment building, where it might have stopped. This has been suspected since about mid-May (before that for some people), so again TEPCO is trying to fool the general public with very possibly false information. Probably lies, since it is very likely that TEPCO knows roughly where the majority of the molten core is. HOW ABOUT THE TIMELY AND ACCURATE INFORMATION YOU'VE BEEN PROMISING FOR SEVERAL MONTHS NOW, TEPCO, INSTEAD OF THIS MEANINGLESS DRIVEL DESIGNED TO LULL THE GENERAL PUBLIC INTO A FALSE SENSE OF REASSURANCE???
"These things need to be done properly. Otherwise the amount of debris becomes huge. I hope that we can give some advice," Amano said.
Yes, I hope so too, and I hope it will be good advice that will really help the people who are living in Fukushima Prefecture and in other places badly affected by the radioactive contamination. However, as hinted at the end of the article, the idea that decontamination can be done "properly" (and since the Japanese government has lost a great deal of credibility over the last six months it now needs the backing of a 'credible' UN agency such as the IAEA) may simply be a substitute for evacuating people from areas which are really too contaminated to live in, especially for children and pregnant women. "Proper" decontamination will take years, whereas the only sure way to protect people in contaminated areas is to move them away as quickly as possible. It's not too late even now.
Most countries, however, notably in the developing world, still want to expand their use of nuclear power, with the IAEA projecting between 90 and 350 new reactors will be built worldwide by 2030.
The idea that a "compact and dedicated action team" under the IAEA could prevent nuclear accidents from occurring in the roughly 440 commercial nuclear reactors around the world is 'interesting.' Reading the article, it seems there are countries which are not terribly keen on getting involved of 'providing resources' for the team to do its work "properly." I can see how this "action team" - imagine them dressed in their Superman outfits and arriving unannounced at ancient nuclear power stations in a swirl of helicopter dust, pushing the plant managers aside and fixing the station's safety problems in a couple of hours! - might have some effect if they focus on older and potentially dangerous power stations first, but if they are underfunded and the countries (and power companies) involved are not going to be cooperative, then how are they ever going to prevent the next nuclear disaster from happening? And, anyway, why should some countries be negative about Mr. Amano's proposals? Aren't they interested in preventing accidents? (Think - money.)
Regarding the construction of new nuclear power plants, he said, "It's unrealistic. We'll decommission end-of-life reactors."
However, Noda slightly changed his position when he was responding to questions by the SDP's Abe in the Diet session on Sept. 27. "It's difficult to build new nuclear reactors, but there are those that have been almost completed. We'll make a decision on a case-by-case basis while listening to opinions from local residents."
For an angle on "opinions from local residents, please see the following article..."
A total of about 4.5 billion yen had been given to the town in nuclear-related subsidies by the end of the fiscal year through last March. Of the town's roughly 4.4 billion yen budget for the current fiscal year, about 1.1 billion yen came from such subsidies.
'Interesting' to see what will happen. Governor Nii of Yamaguchi Prefecture has stated that he will not renew the licence of the power company to develop the site when it comes up for renewal in October next year, making construction of the power station effectively impossible. However, that's still a year off, so he might find some reason for changing his mind in the meantime.
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Industry ministry underreported opponents to reactivation of nuclear plant in Kyushu - One is left wondering why the 100 people presumably opposing the restart of the nuclear power station did not send their emails in until after the deadline. However, the official says, "We stopped accepting opinions during the broadcast, calculated them and released the results during the program." Oh. Sending in an email opinion while the meeting is still in progress is pretty tough since most people probably want to see how the meeting turns out before they send in their opinion...
Ruling party panel approves tax hike plan - Get this: "more than ¥11 trillion to pay for reconstruction following the March 11 calamities." Oh, come on, is this coincidence or some kind of sick joke??
Japanese Researcher: 2,600 Bq/Kg of Cesium-137 from Rice Grown on Soil Taken from Iitate-Mura - Nice to know that the transfer rate of Cs-137 was 0.05 (in this case), and that maybe for Cs-137 + Cs-134 the transfer rate will be about 0.1 - 10%. So if the soil is 'mildly' polluted at about 100 Bq/kg Cs-137 and about the same for Cs-134, then I should expect 20 Bq/kg in the unprocessed rice grains. I have also heard that much of the radiation in the seed is in the husk, so when I mill the rice it will be a fair bit less. Rough, but gives you a rough rule of thumb to use if you happen to know roughly how contaminated the soil is...
In the last few days I have mentioned PM Noda's speech at the UN, but we should remember that he wasn't the only thing that was happening at the UN Meeting on Nuclear Safety and Security. If you go to Green Action you'll see quite a lot about the UN meeting, including a link to this useful page at The Energy Net. It is not pleasant reading, because it is clear that the UN has been quite actively complicit in the nuclear industry's promotion of nuclear power. What else would you expect the nuclear industry do do? But then whose side would you expect the UN to be on? And whose side would you expect the government of whichever country you live in to be on? You'd almost certainly be wrong. That's the problem, and that's the problem we all face in Japan now, especially those who live in contaminated areas, such as in Fukushima Prefecture, but also parts of Ibaraki, Chiba, Tochigi, Miyagi, and perhaps Tokyo and Iwate.
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I mentioned the growth fantasyland yesterday - here's a reference to fantasy in economics -- Terry Smith says the world is living in a fantasy -- There's a link to the original BBC interview (6:19) on the page - why doesn't the BBC allow people to download mp3s of interviews...?
On the other hand, the fossil fuel and nuclear power lobbies insist solar energy is an unsafe, prohibitively expensive and unstable power source, as electricity output varies according to the amount of sunlight.
Well, nuclear power is unsafe, prohibitively expensive and unstable, and fossil fuels will be prohibitively expensive before very long, so what's the big deal? There is a certain amount of interesting cost comparison data in the article, but in general nuclear power costs are calculated far too low (as I have shown in an update on April 30 - Nuclear Power Isn't Cheap!) and should be about 11-12 yen/kWh rather than the 5 yen/kWhr that is often quoted (the article says 5 cents in the US, so that's very roughly the equivalent of 5 yen). And then, of course there is the nuclear waste problem. Solar is no angel either, as I mentioned at the end of the update for September 24. The renewables should be very useful for helping "us" make the transition for whatever is coming in the 22nd century, but nothing much more than that. Once nuclear and fossil fuels become unavailable/unusable by about the middle of this century (I'm talking more about Japan than anywhere else), renewables will make the transition a little more comfortable till people figure out what the 22nd century is about.
Oh, I liked the little dig about electricity output varies according to the amount of sunlight - very funny! As if they hadn't heard of lead-acid batteries! Other kinds of batteries and capacitors may help this along in a few years. Come on, people, even the Karen in the mountain villages of northern Thailand have solar panels with lead-acid batteries in the houses so they can have lights and watch TV or DVDs at night! What do you want? In the rural areas of Japan, i.e. where I live, according to my mother-in-law's elder brother's diary from around 1930, parts of which I read a little while ago, when it got dark, people went to bed. So my wife's uncle was writing that in the winter months he was going to bed at about 18:30! So? They would then get up fairly early in the morning and do farmwork or whatever they had to do on the day. No sunlight? Light a fire outside and roast some chestnuts. Cold and dark in the morning? Light a fire outside and boil up some water for tea, then stand around warming yourself and talking to other people till you feel like going somewhere to do some work. That's how the Karen live. It's OK. You should try it. Stop pretending that fantasyland is the only possible way to live!
Speaking of the Karen, NHK broadcast an interesting program on their 'General' TV channel last night (21:00-21:49)...The Wonderful Forest of Kuniko Obaba (sorry, Japanese only) , about the last person in Japan to do swidden (slash-and-burn) farming. Good documentary. It's a shame to see that her knowledge and skills will soon be gone. I was surprised to see that she and her family do their swidden family in a very similar way to the Karen in northern Thailand, the only two major differences being that Kuniko Obaba's rotational period is 30 years, whereas the Karen rotate in 6 to 12 years, and the main crop is soba (buckwheat), whereas in Thailand it is rice. There is some very deep similarity between the Karen and the Japanese - when I visited a few Karen villages with my wife some years ago, she said "Oh, just like Japan when I was small," i.e. in the early 60s! It wasn't really until the 80s that Japan became some kind of fantasyland - only 30 years ago. Most people won't have a great deal of trouble going back. Those under 30 might have a bit of a problem adjusting to it. The older nuclear power pushers would simply find it a bit nostalgic, but they probably won't be around to see it happen.
He added: "I also suspect that full disclosure of such data is not in the interests of the Japanese nuclear industry."
Irradiated food poses moral dilemmas - Yes, like the immorality of having nuclear power in the first place. Don't blame me or the Japanese people for that. We weren't given any choice and are still not.
However, Ishii said it is just not realistic for the group to keep the old standard, as it is not able to compensate the huge numbers of farmers who would be affected.
"It's totally understandable for consumers to turn to us, looking for radiation-free food," Ishii said. "But the truth of the matter is that there is no Noah's Ark (to take people away from all this)."
Ishii also voiced fears that much of the nation's primary industry could be obliterated if the farmers and fishermen in the Tohoku and northern Kanto regions have safety standards imposed on their produce that are beyond their power to achieve.
Japan's primary industry is about to be obliterated anyway by TPP if the business circles and their politician friends get their way. What a wonderful mess they have made out of the beautiful Japanese countryside!
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#Radiation in Japan: Evacuation-Ready Zone to Be Abolished on September 30 - I feel very sorry for the people who come from those towns and villages. Will they really return? I know I would want to if I were one of them. But do they trust the government, which is effectively still trying to convince them that nothing really all that serious has happened?
Yesterday, I tried to catch up with my self, but made a bit of a mess of it - I hope you did not find it too overwhelming. Despite the fact that the crisis has now been going on for well over six months, there is still too much information to digest coming out every day, unless you dedicate most of the day to reading it. That may seem strange to people overseas, but the links I paste here are by no means all of them - I'm a little bit selective and try to emphasize the material that has some direct relationship with the situation at the nuclear disaster site. Anyway, things are a little more relaxed today, so I'll try to do a "normal" update and hope that things will continue like this for a few more days.
"We will release all information about the accident in a prompt and accurate manner to the international community," Noda said.
He also indicated that Japan will continue to export nuclear power plant technology with heightened safety features to newly emerging nations.
"We will respond to the interests of nations deciding whether or not to use nuclear energy," he added.
Problems:
1) It's been said many times before, but this term "cold shutdown" refers to a nuclear reactor that is shutdown according to the normal sequence of shutdown operations (for regular maintenance, or to prevent an accident from occurring) not to one (or more) that is being cooled and so on after a disaster. Surely, PM Noda must know by now that the true state of the reactors 1-3 at the Fukushima nuclear disaster site is that the nuclear cores have melted down and have dropped to the bottom of the containment, and that in at least one of them the molten core material has penetrated through the containment into the ground below. There is just no way that resolving this situation (what does a resolution mean, anyway?) can be termed a cold shutdown.
2) "We will release all information about the accident in a prompt and accurate manner to the international community," Noda said. But not to the general Japanese public, I suppose. If it were, then all the known facts about the situation in 1) would now be full public knowledge, but they are not and we have to rely on fragments of information, mostly in independent Internet media, to have any idea at all of what is going on at the nuclear disaster site.
3) As mentioned yesterday the government of Japan has no grounds for talking about enhanced safety for the export of nuclear power while the Fukushima nuclear disaster is still ongoing. If they want to export nuclear power to other countries (and many Japanese people do not want that, and the neither do the majority in the importing countries - it is of course the elites who want it because they can make large amounts of money from it and also build nuclear weapons. This has very little to do with the lives of ordinary people, who generally have to suffer the negative consequences. Saying that the electricity produced is 'a benefit' is fine, but there are other ways of generating electricity that do not involve the kind of Faustian bargain, health problems and anxieties that nuclear power offers) then let them prove it by running all their nuclear reactors to the end of their stated lifetimes. That will take at least another 20 years. Until that time, stop talking about exports, please.
4) Fine. Please respond to the interests of the people of THIS nation about whether they want to use nuclear energy or not! Talking of the "interests of nations," I assume PM Noda is talking about the interests of the elites of those nations, not 'ordinary' people.
Toyohiro Nomura, 68, a law professor at Gakushuin University, and Tadashi Otsuka, 52, a Waseda University law professor, accepted monthly payments from the Japan Energy Law Institute (JELI) based in Tokyo's Minato Ward.
Of course you'll have to read the whole article for yourself to see the full extent of the problem, but it looks like at least four of the nine people selected for the panel should have been ruled ineligible if the ministry (MEXT) had done a 'proper job' of looking into their professional backgrounds. If I were a Fukushima Prefecture resident (or former resident) about to claim compensation, I would be very angry about this kind of thing, which shows once again the relaxed and business-as-usual attitudes people (even those directly involved with the Fukushima nuclear disaster in some way) in Tokyo and other areas have to the plight of those who have been affected (and that includes earthquake/tsunami disaster victims in Miyagi and Iwate Prefectures as well.)
According to the prefectural government, 500 becquerels of radioactive cesium were detected in a rice sample collected on Sept. 12, and soil in its paddy field contained 3,000 becquerels of cesium per kilogram. Rice crops from 11 other locations in the Obama district had from undetectable amounts up to 212 becquerels of cesium.
No big surprise, I think. This was bound to happen in some locations right from the start. What is interesting is how they will finally deal with it. Previously, I have predicted that irradiated rice would be mixed (clandestinely?) with radiation-free rice to bring the radiation level down to some "acceptable" level. Will there be a suspicion of this kind of thing happening, or will the disposal process be fully reported and transparent?
Also interesting is that "priority test areas" will get two testing locations per 15 hectares of land. Sounds too large to me. I would test one location each hectare, but then that might not be realistic under the circumstances. Suppose you have 1000 ha (10 sq km) and each reading takes 15 minutes, the process will take about 10 days. With 10 teams doing the readings it will take a day. If this calculation is roughly correct, is it such a big problem??
105,600 Bq/Kg of Radioactive Cesium from Apartment Bldg Rooftop in Yokohama City -- The photo is really interesting. The top comment, "Decontamination with a broom. I love it," is also right on target. The whole thing is so relaxed. Professor Shun'ichi Yamashita should use this photo in his PowerPoint presentations. Radiation? No worries, mate!
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Evacuation revelations shocking -- A response to the article Exodus eyed early in nuke crisis linked to in yesterday's update. Indeed, how would the government have evacuated the whole of Tokyo if it had proven necessary?? Was it actually necessary, or are "we" (or you people who live in Tokyo) basically happy with the way things have turned out? My friend in Kyushu says that the whole thing may have hung on something as simple as the "divine wind" - the fact that for much of the time in the few days following the nuclear disaster the wind was blowing out to sea. If it had been blowing landwards, many, many more people would have had to be evacuated. But the radioactive material that did blow out to sea, where did it go? Into the sea (and of course the 'seafood') and over to North America. People here like to think that it just disappeared, or got very diluted, which is essentially the same thing (?), but that is probably a far too simplistic way of looking at the situation. In any event, Tokyo was not evacuated (though some people have left) and now will not be (we hope).
Sorry about the lack of updates again. I was so busy earning money (gasp!) for a few days that by the time the evening rolled around I was too tired to do anything but sleep. And then this site got hacked (so now you know we are telling the truth!) and I could not update last night, but it's back again now so I'll try to catch up on the Japanese nuclear news for the last few days.
~~~TEPCO Stuff and the Situation at the Nuclear Disaster Site~~~
Exodus eyed early in nuke crisis -- Tokyo faced evacuation scenario: Kan - In the press recently, whenever we see the name "Kan" it is prefixed withe the adjective "unpopular", but this article suggests to me that former PM Kan was probably unpopular with TEPCO and the nuclear industry rather than with the Japanese people, and that it was the nuclear people who wanted him out of office as quickly as possible.
Japanese PM Noda's speech at the U.N. Nuclear Safety Meeting - I thought this was a very poor and weak speech, but probably the pro-nuke lobby does not think so. I will not pull it apart sentence by sentence - you can do your own deconstructing if you like - but I did think it was a great sell-out of the Japanese people and a big nod (since he is a "nodder") in the direction of the nuclear industry. Basically, all the things that the Japanese people do not want to hear at the moment.
Obama, Noda vow to push economic growth - Which must mean that nuclear power stations are necessary because you will find it difficult to stimulate economic growth without growth in relatively cheap energy (although it is not impossible given strong energy-saving measures, but at least it would have to mean that energy costs did not rise much - however, stopping nuclear power plants means using fossil fuels, mainly oil, to generate electricity, and that will entail higher energy prices. See next news item.)
Energy imports snuff out export recovery -- Trade deficit for August soars to 32-year high on nuclear outage - So oil and LNG imports, increasing due to lack of electrical power generated by nuclear power have pushed Japan's trade balance into deficit in August. This is the future. Even if all the nuclear power stations in Japan are brought back online next year, they won't last forever. Japan's trade balance will worsen due to the need to import ever-more-expensive fossil fuels. Expect food prices to rise in coming years; this will make Japan's situation worse. Renewable energy will help, but will not solve the basic underlying problems. Sooner or later, Japan will have to look the future square in the face, and it is not a pretty face. But the problem with oncoming crises is that the longer you wait before introducing mitigating measures, the longer and deeper the crisis will be. So PM Noda et al. need to get real with Japan's particular problems: Low ability to produce energy from domestic resources and low ability to feed a population nearly four times larger than it was 140 years ago, plus the need to deal with the ongoing crises in northeast Japan while government finances slip further into the debt mire. It's not easy, but extricating Japanese politics from the growth fantasyland might be a good first step...
Current nuclear debate to set nation's course for decades - Well, yes and no... If the politicians, business circles and the nuclear industry/lobby/village push too hard they may find themselves facing a surly population at election time. Since TPP seems to be one of the cards that fits in with the politico-business-nuclear industry 'hand,' things could get out of hand far quicker than the much out-of-touch (with the ordinary people of Japan) elite seem to believe at the moment. This is no longer 1972 - the game has changed beyond recognition, but the dinosaurs have not seen how the goalposts have moved, do not know what the 21st century is about (especially for Japan) and do not have a clue where "we" may be going in the 22nd century. Do you?
Japan reports possessing 30 tons of plutonium - Er... to do what with? To keep where? That's the problem, isn't it? What are all those pro-nuclear people planning on doing with the thousands of tons of nuclear waste that they are literally planning on producing? That's a jolly nice little legacy they are going to leave for future generations (ask the people of Fukushima Prefecture about that one). There's really no escaping this one; the vision of a nuclear-powered society with nuclear waste piling up and nowhere to put it is something I don't even want to contemplate in my worst nightmares. Have you seen Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange? Not the same thing, but bad enough...
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VIDEO from Arnie Gundersen on 19 Sept - It's quite interesting near the end, where Arnie talks about the cost-benefit analyses that have been applied to safety measures (in the US), as it seems that the (money) value placed on human life and the costs associated with post-accident clean-ups have been evaluated too low (so safety measures never get implemented). But that's exactly what's happening in Fukushima now. TEPCO and the Japanese government are refusing to admit that anything serious has happened, thereby avoiding responsibility and the need to take any action to protect local citizens from radiation beyond the simple evacuation of severely contaminated areas. Effectively, they have said, "It's not worth spending any money on trying to help these people or clean up their lands," with the inference that the value of the people and the lands is not sufficient to warrant paying out the sums of money that might be necessary to do the job. I think any sane person (who would not be running nuclear power stations anyway) would place a far higher value on people's lives (infinite?) and their lands and would be determined to spend their very last penny to help. What do you think, Mr. Noda?
Photographs of 60,000-Strong Anti-Nuke Demonstration in Tokyo: Japanese MSMs Called It "A Parade" - A friend of mine was unable to participate in the demo because when she got to the nearest station the platform was so jam-packed with people that those on the train could not get off! She gave up and went home. Maybe other people did too. This was no funny parade. It was by FAR the largest ever anti-nuke demonstration in Japan and ought to send a message to PM Noda and pals that a large section of the population (polls say 85%) want to see a nuclear phase-out, gradually, say over the next 10-15 years. The bottom line on this seems to be, "You can have your nukes for now, if you can guarantee to run them safely (which no one can) but you MUST stipulate a date before 2030 for the final phase-out." This will defuse the political situation immediately. However, there appears to be quite a number of people among the elite who are adamantly against stating a date for a nuclear phase-out. They are very powerful, but only a minuscule percentage of the population. It appears that this is how Japanese democracy operates.
Sorry about the lack of updates in the last few days - I was very busy for a few days and then had to goof off for a while before driving up to Sendai and back - up and down radiation alley between Koriyama and Date Cities in Fukushima Prefecture - and then a day to recover yesterday...
"Shutting down a nuclear plant brings a huge cost on the operator, so we can't order a shut down lightly. Amidst societal and political demand to promote nuclear power, it was not easy for courts to make decisions that would get in the way of that."
Er... sure, but if NPPs are dangerous then they have to be shut down. Why did we have to wait for this disaster at F#1 to figure that out??
"The government and TEPCO need to admit to the crime they’ve committed. Then they need to work on making amends. This accident was not a natural disaster. It was caused by humans," he said.
"They’re just dealing with paperwork. They’re cold, like stones," said Baba. And there is a lot of paperwork to be done. Displaced individuals are getting small payments, but businesses that have lost revenue as a result of the nuclear meltdown need to go through an arduous 60-page application process for compensation.
Yes, that is the reality of the situation. Despite the horrific disaster they have caused and bear responsibility for, the officials are cold, distant and aloof, as if they are trying to pretend that nothing much has happened. TEPCO, the government and bureaucracy, the whole lot of them - not a sympathetic heartbeat from the whole crowd of them!
S.Korea minister blames blackout on weather, reports - Ordinary Japanese people were quite shocked about this sudden and very extensive 5-hr power cut. Despite the problems, nothing nearly this bad has happened in Japan (oh, except the F#1 nuclear disaster, that is!).
Nuclear miscalculation: Why regulators miss power plant threats from quakes and storms - Long but fairly interesting article on NPP safety issues. Easy to see how the power companies have managed to wiggle more and more out of taking safety measures that really should be required. Another example of something people used to do fairly conscientiously but is more recently deteriorating because doing it 'properly' costs too much money. Nuclear accidents, of course, can cost more money than the power company has and so the people end up paying from taxes or increased electricity bills...
High-level waste arrived at Mutsu-Ogawara Port near Rokkasho Village in Aomori Prefecture this morning.
[Photos by Citizens' Nuclear Information Center]
In the top photo you can see a long grey 'cask' being shunted towards a container by a crane. I suppose that's it. In the lower photo, another photo with the crane area enlarged, it looks like there is one 'cask' on the left and another being shunted over by the crane, but seen end-on. Quite interesting just to see a couple of photos of what is happening. Please see the Bloomberg article posted on September 7 for more details of what this is about.
This high-level waste is presumably arriving back from Sellafield in northwest England. Sellafield is basically a reprocessing facility that reprocesses nuclear waste (from nuclear power stations) to get the remaining uranium and plutonium out of it and to reduce the volume of the waste somewhat. Britain does this to try to alleviate the nuclear waste problem at nuclear power stations, create more fuel, and provide material for nuclear weapons. The service is also provided to other countries, such as Japan, for a certain fee, which I am sure is not cheap. The problem is that in the process of doing this Sellafield pollutes the surrounding area and the Irish Sea with radioactive pollution, including uranium, plutonium and other radionuclides. Some of the pollution in the Irish Sea ends up polluting the coastline of Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales, from where it is blown back onto the land and causes health problems for the people who live near these coastlines. The most documented areas are the east coast of Ireland, directly across the Irish Sea from Sellafield, and the coast of Wales, especially the north coast. Much of this work has been done by Chris Busby. To read more about this, please see Chris Busby's Wings of Death (1995), and Wolves of Water (2006) and also Marilynne Robinson's Mother Country (1989).
In his first speech to the nation as prime minister Sept. 2, Noda said it was "unrealistic" to build new reactors and that existing reactors would be decommissioned at the end of their life spans.
Oh. That's not much different from what I've been saying. But will he do it? And what about nuclear power stations currently under construction? And what's the plan to dispose of nuclear waste?
Japan's nuclear disaster - six months on - A short list of some of the problems. Doesn't mention any of the spent fuel pools and the 100s of tons of spent fuel in them, one of the big worries still remaining at the disaster site. Also says that local areas may not be habitable for "years". Try "decades". In some areas of Iitate Village (30-40 km away from the disaster site to the northwest), it could be more like "centuries" before things get back to anything like what one would call "normal". Mentions "meltdowns" but not melt-throughs - I think we have at least one - perhaps reactor 1. There is highly radioactive steam emanating intermittently from cracks in the ground (after an earthquake in August) near the reactors, so the likelihood of at least one melt-through is high. Also says, "Units one and three are showing temperatures below 100 degrees Celsius." What, in the reactor where the nuclear fuel USED to be? That's a bit of a macabre joke, no? Oh, well, the article is OK, I suppose, but somehow does not quite convey the sense of the complete and utter horrible disaster this is, continues to be, and will remain for years, if not decades, into the future.
UN nuclear chief calls for post-Fukushima action - I found this article to be badly written and hard to understand. However, one thing that is clear is that even if a pro-nuclear organization such as the IAEA (so-called "watchdog" but with false teeth) calls for safety measures, certain countries immediately come up with objections and want to water them down! I have a really, really huge problem understanding these people. We DO want safety with our nuclear power, don't we? I mean, I'm not really sure about this since TEPCO have been acting for about the last two decades as if there were no need for safety at nuclear power stations, and now that we've had the biggest ever nuclear disaster here in Japan TEPCO is still trying to act as if it's no big deal! At the risk of sounding extremely boring, can I ask one more time why it is, if nuclear power is so "safe," that nuclear power stations are not placed where the power is most needed - in or very near large cities? (Because they are dangerous. OK, if they're dangerous, why is it that the operators do not seem to be terribly interested in safety measures? Aaaahhhhhhhh!!)
Research on US nuclear levels after Fukushima could aid in future nuclear detection - Quite interesting, but needs to be read with care. A bit like walking into a supermarket; first the loss leaders to make you go "Oh!" and then later the same old stuffy goods putting you back to sleep again. Basically, the article is about the detection of Xenon-133 on the west coast of the USA. How about Uranium, Plutonium, Caesium and Strontium, then??
I now have normal access to this page again after five days of not being able to log in to Candobetter. The owners of the host server have given me an explanation which makes very little sense to me (not in terms of technical content but in terms of what they say happened) and tends to suggest that the ISP I am using in Japan is playing funny games with my Internet access (see below). I'm not going to go into details, because if this is the case I do not want the 'authorities' to know how we solved the problem. Alternatively, it was just a simple Internet glitch and I am being neurotic :-) I think the best way to proceed is to resume the 'service' again tomorrow (I'm too tired tonight) and see what happens. In case it isn't clear, the reason I am doing this is 1) because the virtually the whole Japanese media, and so by inference the English media, though that may not be entirely true, is merely toeing the government line, which is to play down the nuclear disaster as much as possible and attempt to persuade the population, especially in Fukushima Prefecture, that there will be no or very few adverse health effects from the disaster, and 2) the overseas (English) media have now mostly stopped reporting on the Fukushima nuclear disaster because it is 'old' news. Thus there is a need to have the day-to-day developments noted in English so that 'we' can remember what has happened and what is going on now. I'll try to post the main items of news about the nuclear disaster each day.
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September 10 I AM NOW FINDING IT VERY DIFFICULT TO ACCESS THIS SITE IN ORDER TO UPDATE THIS PAGE. I MAY BE MISTAKEN, BUT IT WOULD APPEAR THAT ACCESS TO THIS SITE IS BEING BLOCKED DUE TO THE PERCEPTION THAT THE CONTENT OF THIS PAGE IS 'MISTAKEN' IN SOME WAY. MY FEELING IS THAT IF 'AUTHORITIES' HAVE A PROBLEM WITH THE CONTENTS OF SERIOUS AND CONSCIENTIOUS WEBSITES THEY SHOULD ENGAGE IN DEBATE WITH THE AUTHORS RATHER THAN ARBITRARILY BLOCK ACCESS TO USERS. IT SHOULD BE CLEAR TO ANYONE WHO READS THESE PAGES AND THE PREVIOUS UPDATES THAT ONLY PUBLISHED SOURCES ARE REFERRED TO (LINKED). COMMENT, OF COURSE, HAS A CERTAIN BIAS, BECAUSE THE AUTHOR, BEING HUMAN, HAS CERTAIN STRONG OPINIONS ABOUT THE CONTENT (OTHERWISE WHY BOTHER DOING IT?). THE HINDRANCE TO THE FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION REPRESENTED, I BELIEVE, BY THE ARBITRARY BLOCKING OF WEBSITES SUCH AS CANDOBETTER IS SYMBOLIC OF THE MOVEMENT AWAY FROM THE PROTECTION OF BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS THAT HAS BECOME CONSPICUOUS IN MANY COUNTRIES SINCE THE 1990S. ONLY BY OPPOSING THIS ARE WE EVER GOING TO FIND OUR WAY TO A MORE HUMANE, PEACEFUL AND SUSTAINABLE WORLD. THANK YOU.
I would appear that releases of radioactive materials from Fukushima No.1 are two to three times those of Chernobyl. If you think there's a mistake somewhere, please leave a message in the comments section below. Please remember that these are all Japanese government figures, so if you have a problem with them, in the end you will have to take it up with the Japanese government.
Industry minister Yoshio Hachiro said Tuesday that the number of Japan's nuclear power plants would be "zero" in the future, based on Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda's policy of not building new nuclear power plants and decommissioning aged ones.
That'll be very nice, if it's true. The problem will be, as mentioned in the article, whether to go ahead with the reactors that are currently under construction. Something of a fight looming over that I suppose, though the "political decision" is pretty much a foregone conclusion. PM Noda et al. do not seem to wish to state a phase-out date - too early yet for that perhaps - though that is one thing they should do if they are really committed to going down this road.
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Japan Prepares for First Radioactive Waste Import Since Quake - Right. Enough material here for a good, fat book, but the point is that this links up very nicely with the article posted above. I.e. if PM Noda et al. are serious about a nuclear phase-out then (for the reasons mentioned in this article - the nuclear waste situation and what to do about it) it needs to be sooner rather than later. Certainly before 2030.
It's been a busy week, but I'll try to revive the updates and get back up to speed in the next few days...
Some thoughts on Junko Edahiro's article and the recent typhoon
I have just read Junko Edahiro's article Coexisting with Nature: Reflections after the Devastating 2011 Earthquake in Japan, posted on this site. Quite true. Japan is often known as the "natural disaster country, Japan." Over the weekend (3-4 September 2011) typhoon number 12 (for this year) just swept over the western part of the country, leaving 20 dead, 55 missing, and goodness only knows how many people injured and houses destroyed or flooded. It happens once or twice each year. We know it's going to happen. On NHK TV this morning (Monday) we were shown a river with what looks like a very strong and tall wall (levee) protecting the houses right by the river, but two sections of the wall (about 20 meters each) have broken off where they were joined together and the houses that were once inside the wall have been flooded and partially destroyed, perhaps now uninhabitable. I'm usually watching TV in the morning as I have breakfast with my wife, Chisato. I mention that it's a pity the wall did not protect the houses. Chisato says, "Yes, but the people living there ought to know what the dangers are. Japanese people know that you cannot live on the banks of a river!" (Right, this is true if you live on the coast, or near a nuclear power station or anywhere in Japan, since all of Japan is vulnerable to earthquakes at any time.) But people still do live in these places, though you'll note that in Junko Edahiro's article she mentions that in some areas people do not live closer to the sea than the markers showing where previous tsunamis have reached up to.
But in Japan there are two (at least) factors that have to be taken into account. The first is why are people living in these obviously dangerous places, like sea or river floodplains, or near nuclear power stations. The answer is a) because the local authorities permit it - there used to be laws that prohibited dwellings in these areas, but these have been rescinded, presumably as the population grew and land for housing became scarce. If you sense a little political corruption going on here, you may well be correct. Chisato definitely thinks so. And b) because 'Japan' wants nuclear power, and nuclear power stations have to be sited somewhere, and if one of them is near you, then it's just your tough luck; you have the option of moving away if you wish to. We already know about the dangers of constructing and operating nuclear power stations in Japan and what a total mess of big money political corruption that has been and still remains today. Does Japan really 'need' nuclear power? Only if you subscribe to a particular view of society and economy - one that is still strong today, but is becoming increasingly outdated and dangerous, as well as becoming increasingly unpopular among large sections of disgruntled populations.
The second factor is, I think, a little more problematical. Behind all the problems mentioned above lurks the historical demographics of Japan. Before the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan had a population of about 30 to 33 million. Roughly a quarter of today's 127.5 million (which has been slowly declining since 2004). In the Edo Period, the era of about 250 years before the Meiji Restoration, the population of Japan rose only very slowly. There were several well-known famines during that period. So what is a country with this kind of natural endowment doing quadrupling its population in about 130 years, and did this happen simply by 'chance' or just in the natural course of events? Of course not; Japan's 'decision' to become a rich and powerful nation was an ideological one based on the imperatives of the time (late 19th century) and the desire of those who stood to gain immensely from the (at the time) new, modern economic development. Thus, IF population is at least one important factor driving 'natural' disasters in this country, and from the above it would seem so, then these typhoon, earthquake + tsunami, and now nuclear disaster(s) can be seen not as 'natural' or 'man-made,' but rather 'ideological' disasters, since a different ideology in Japan (NOT expanding the population for military and economic reasons, and NOT allowing people to live on sea and river floodplains, and NOT constructing nuclear power stations, because they were not necessary at the population and production level of the country) would have resulted in a different outcome: fewer disasters - not fewer earthquakes and typhoons, but fewer people seriously affected.
The drift of this argument should also lead us to the realization that unless this ideological background is unmasked and consciously rejected by the Japanese people, these disasters will continue. If the Japanese people wish to have fewer people seriously affected by these kinds of disasters, then they need to think about how they want to live in the future - a re-evaluation of values and a change of ideological course. That's where Japan stands now. I suppose we'll see whether or not the Japanese people are actually waking up at the next general election.
Yesterday I said METI minister Banri Kaieda was unlikely to be the next Japanese PM, and then this morning the Tokyo Newspaper is screaming headlines at me from the front page, saying, "(Ichiro) Ozawa backs Kaieda for PM," which means that Kaieda might have a good chance of becoming PM on Monday. Oh. We've mentioned Mr Ozawa before (see Rolling Update No.3, May 29) with rather emotional statements about the nuclear disaster. Now, he's backing Banri Kaieda for PM, and you really cannot get much more pro-nuke than that, so what is going on. I don't really know :-) but it would seem that all the politicians who have any power at all in this country have been lined up and most sternly told that they WILL back nuclear power or become toast. I don't see any other explanation, do you? If you do, write it on a soy bean and plant it. If the soil is nicely polluted with Caesium 134 and 137 and lots of other goodies you can't see, taste, smell or measure, then you might end up with Jack's beanstalk. Then you can climb to the top and have an audience with the big bad giant in his castle. Ask the giant from me if he's having a nice day.
Speaking of nice days, I have to drive to Sendai tomorrow (actually, I don't have to drive, but it's now easier and cheaper than taking the train because the generous government in its wisdom has allowed us folks who live in the 'disaster-affected areas' to use the expressways (freeways, or feeways, if you like) for free, though they are threatening to rescind this because lots of people are making very good use of this timely measure. (On the theory that if it's good and it works, rescind it quickly before anyone actually starts to feel happy. Don't forget the crisis. No one is supposed to be happy now. All go around wearing long faces, please. Happiness is now immoral. If people start to look happy, we're going to slap them down with some stiff new taxes and payments that will take their breath away, especially if the US dollar finally keels over and dies.) Anyway, to achieve this journey I have to drive straight up radiation alley between Koriyama and Fukushima City. Here's a good map. About 50-60 km to the west of the nuclear disaster site you can see a string of five cities running north-south. The southernmost one is Koriyama, the fourth one, in bold, is Fukushima, and then I go about 60 or 70 km north to Sendai. I will be there for nearly a week as I have courses to teach at the university. I do 'Food and Energy' at grad school level for three days (riots in the aisles this year, I think) and then help the undergrads with Ag Sci English for a couple of days. Then I get in the car and drive back down radiation alley again. Such fun. Hope you all have a nice week too.
As the brown rice grown in Hokota City in Ibaraki Prefecture was found with radioactive cesium, Governor of Ibaraki Masaru Hashimoto answered the reporters on August 19 and said "There is no problem with safety. After the formal testing is complete by the end of August, we will persuade the consumers that there's nothing to worry about consuming Ibaraki rice", and that he will do his best to counter the "baseless rumor".
Mmmm... so cool, you all, to be living in a prefecture 'governed' by such a personage as Mr Masaru Hashimoto. I feel so... lovingly and tenderly cared for. If you've never seen Mr Hashimoto, he's like a big, friendly soft toy. Frankly, I'm not even a little bit surprised that the rice grown here is contaminated with radiation. The nuclear disaster site is only 100 and something km north of here. (I am a little surprised that rice grown in Nihonmatsu and Motomiya Cities, in the radiation alley I mention above, is found to be uncontaminated.)
Anyway, if the US dollar really does keel over and die, what's going to happen in Japan? I do not think it will be business-as-usual, somehow. Especially if economic activity crashes in the US, will Japan still be able to receive the millions of tons of delicious soy, wheat, maize and so on that it has been receiving from the US over the last half-century or so? If not, who will care if the rice is polluted at 499 Bq/kg or 501 Bq/kg? If food imports from the US drop precipitously we'll be lucky to get enough rice to eat. Oh, we grow our own, by the way. We are doing so this year and intend to carry on doing so. The rice is probably going to be mildly polluted, but what the hell, the air, the water and everything in the whole environment is polluted. Ask me about it in 10 years' time. Of course, I'm very, very 'angry' about it, but what do you suggest I do about it? Write it on a soy bean?
Japan enacts key bills, clears way for Kan to go - Uh-huh. Time for the next unpopular PM to be installed. By the way METI minister Banri Kaieda, unlike PM Kan, failed to make good on his promise of several weeks ago to resign over the spoofed emails to the 'public' meeting about restarting the Genkai NPP. Since Kan's cabinet is having to resign en masse, Kaieda will also lose his position, but it will be 'interesting' to see who becomes the next PM and what will happen to Kaieda (since he is unlikely to actually be the next PM). And don't speculate on the energy policy of the next PM - all the candidates are pro-nuke of one ilk or another, so there will basically be no change. Perhaps the 85% of Japanese people who apparently wish to see a nuclear phase-out (well, those who responded to the opinion poll) would like to have something to say about it...?
The biggest hurdle to geothermal, most experts agree, is the high initial cost of the exploration and drilling of deep earth layers that contain hot water, and of then constructing the plants.
Another problem is that Japan's potentially best sites are already being tapped for tourism with popular "onsen" hot spring resorts or are located within national parks where construction is prohibited.
- a) Nuclear power stations are also expensive. b) OK, so keep the onsens but build more NPPs?? Not possible to have the geothermal plants and have the onsens too??
Scientific sources and some math: By EAMON WATTERS - I think he's OK on geothermal, but it should not stop anyone from trying since Japan actually has very good geothermal technology (see above article). Partly right on solar: many of the panels can be placed on existing roofs, along roads and need not be taking up a lot of flat land otherwise usable. Again, partly right on wind - a bit too pessimistic about the problems - wind turbines are now a fairly established technology. (See this article about Brazil) - Admittedly, Brazil has a lot more available land than Japan. Nuclear power: I have shown a calculation elsewhere (see Rolling Update No.3, April 30) that gives the cost of nuclear power as over 12 yen/kWh. That compares well with the 9-14 yen for wind power. However, if you count in the costs of stupidities like reprocessing plants and fast breeder reactors (Monju) that don't work and then look at the fact that no one has yet figured out how to manage nuclear waste for 100,000 years (and how can you cost it if you don't know how you are going to do it?) AND the REAL cost of the Fukushima disaster and other potential disasters that are waiting to happen in Japan, that does not exactly result in cheap energy, does it? Might not even be as good as the 49 yen/kWh of solar. And if solar pollutes, OK, let's not do it!! This one I liked: Dr. James Hansen, considered by many to be the world's pre-eminent climatologist, considers investments in fourth-generation nuclear power essential for the survival of civilization. What a joke! What civilization would that be? Unless you've been asleep for most of the year, you might have realized that what we are living in now is not much of a 'civilization'. When the financial crash occurs (some are saying September or October this year) it will be even less of one. Oh, are we talking about the carbon dioxide hoax again here? I thought that one died a long time ago, and anyway, nuclear power is not the answer for it. Nuclear power is not the answer for anything. Nuclear power is the 20th century's mistake and the quicker we give it up and get down to what the 21st century is supposed to be doing (inventing clean, sustainable, low-energy societies) the better!
“There is no safe level of internal radiation exposure, especially for children,” Tatsuhiko Kodama, head of the Radioisotope Center at Tokyo University, said in an interview this month.
Can't be said enough times. This needs to repeated over and over again till the politicians, bureaucrats, businessmen, academics and other apologists for nuclear power understand it, digest it, internalize it and start acting on it!
Well I guess they don't buy the argument of Russian scientists about the "ecological half life" of radioactive cesium in Chernobyl area being 62 to 420 years.
Very much worth your while reading this article and thinking about what the govt is doing... and what it is not doing. It feels very scary in the sense that it's clear that there is very little sympathy, wisdom or willingness to learn in the Tokyo govt offices.
Japan utility knew of tsunami threat: government - Yes, apparently, this particular story began in 2006, but TEPCO took no concrete measures up to March 2011. The fact they they reported the result of their study to NISA on 7 March 2011 is just now coming out. Oh. All that rubbish about a large tsunami being 'beyond assumptions' in the weeks after 3/11 - just what was that all about??
74 percent favor gradual reduction of nuclear power plants: Mainichi poll - Are the newspapers and journalists afraid to write up the story properly or something?? Yes, the headline says 74 percent favor gradual reduction of nuclear power plants, and then in the article it says only 11 percent demanded an immediate halt to nuclear energy, so what most normal people would do is add those numbers to get a massive 85% of those polled who want to see nuclear power ended in Japan (whether immediately or gradually). So why not say that? In general, if you get 85% of the population lined up against one broad idea, as the results of this poll suggest, it's a pretty conclusive statement about public values. Politically, this should mean you stand a good chance of committing political suicide if you go against these values in an election. However, only Mizuho Fukushima of the Shaminto (Social Democratic Party) seems to be taking the idea of a nuclear phase-out seriously. Maybe PM Kan does, but it's only his 'personal opinion' and he is getting pushed out for it, only to be replaced soon by a new PM who does not espouse a nuclear power phase-out - we already know that because all the candidates for the leader of the Japan Democratic Party have been surveyed and none of them are in favour of a nuclear phase-out! So the money clout of TEPCO and all the other big businesses counts for more than public opinion/values?? Perhaps the ballot box will shock politicians back to their senses. Unlikely. the end of the article mentions that 22% support the LDP while 49% do not support any political party. What that means is if there were to be a general election next week, voter turnout might be low and the LDP would be back in power. The only alternative is that the 49% undecided suddenly decide to vote for Mizuho Fukushima and the Shaminto and any other alternative candidate who will stand on an anti-nuke platform, but the likelihood of that happening is pretty slim. So here we are with public opinion/values which are unlikely to be realized at the ballot box. Japan.
Fukushima officials worry new discovery of radioactive beef will harm reputation more - Of course the farmers should be compensated for loss of income. There are also a lot of other things people in Fukushima should be concerned about as well as rumours and loss of reputation (when the nuclear disaster will end and the health of future generations for starters...)
Interview with Professor Shun'ichi Yamashita: Studying the Fukushima Aftermath -- 'People Are Suffering from Radiophobia' - See if you trip over the contradictions and attempts to make himself look good at the expense of the the Japanese government and TEPCO. However, the real problem here is that he is stuck on a radiation health effects model that does not take internal radiation as seriously as it needs to be taken. Why is this? Simply, it is because heath effects from atomic bombs and from nuclear power station disasters are not the same. E.g. Prof. Yamashita says:
From radiation biology we also know that smaller doses can damage human DNA. But the human body can effectively repair those injuries within a short time; this is a natural intrinsic protective mechanism. That is what I am trying to tell the people.
However, if you check out pages 50-70 of Chris Busby's book Wolves of Water (2006) you will find that recent research shows the above statement to be patently untrue. How is it that "one of Japan's leading experts on the effects of radioactive radiation" doesn't know this? Isn't he reading recent research on the subject? Is he unwittingly telling the people of Fukushima "lies"?
Another article...
Poisoned Fields - The Painful Evacuation of a Japanese Village - Oh, dear. Perhaps you didn't want to read this article. Wouldn't blame you. I don't think these people are living the lives they wanted to. Although nowhere near as bad as this, I'm not living the life I want to either. Since 3/11, the nuclear disaster has taken over everything - every spare minute I have. How are you going to compensate for that, TEPCO, the nuke pushers, the academics, the bureaucrats, the politicians who think nuclear power is OK? How are you going to compensate all of these people for what you have done to their lives? I've been saying you're wrong since the early 80s. Some people have been saying it a lot longer than that. You people didn't listen. Now we're all paying for your absolutely horrific mistake. Lies, procrastination, meanness and coldness are all we are going to get from you.
Japan's polarised industrial culture, which veers between the heedless pursuit of short- term interest, on the one hand, and confessions, tears, and apparently heartfelt apologies when things go wrong, on the other, makes it an extreme case. But the same factors are at work in every country that has a nuclear industry. The impulse to minimise the inherent risks of the most dangerous technology man has ever tried to master, the tendency to conceal or downplay accidents, the assertion that each succeeding generation of plants is foolproof and super safe, and the presumption, so often proved wrong by events, that every contingency has been provided for, all these have been evident again and again. Angela Merkel, one of the few leading politicians who is also a scientist, saw the writing on the wall. Her decision to phase out nuclear power has revived a global debate which has been dormant for far too long.
- And the people have been dormant for far too long too: Held in thrall by the media and government propaganda bought by power company money. Waking them up from this isn't going to be easy. It's quite clear that the power companies are working hard on the media, politicians, bureaucrats and academics to get back to business as usual ASAP - before the populace wakes up to what is going on.
One of the central ideas of Governor Murai is to build a big museum to commemorate the earthquake/tsunami of March 11, and build a memorial park around the museum. His other ideas include high-rise towers and high-rise residential buildings to separate out the living space and work space (farmers and fishermen would "commute" to their work which would be organized like corporation).
Children of Fukushima ask the government for a secure life - 20 minute video in Japanese. I hope there will be an English translation soon. This meeting took place in the evening of 18 August in one of the Diet Members' buildings behind the main Diet (parliament) building. Ten government representatives, from the cabinet office nuclear disaster countermeasures headquarters and the Ministry of Education sat facing the children and the audience. The second girl to speak, a junior high school second year student said, "Despite this huge disaster, you're still trying to restart nuclear power stations. I find this hard to understand." She also said, "We want you to get rid of the nuclear power stations quickly and thoroughly clean up Fukushima Prefecture."
When asked if it was possible to implement a mass evacuation of schools, the ten officials could not answer. In the end, two of them did give vague answers about school decontamination, but would give no clear answer on the mass evacuation of schools. I would seem they have been told quite clearly what they can and cannot say.
At the end, the junior high school girl said, "When we grow up, we want to live in a society without nuclear power."
Europe's current debt crisis has been blatantly caused by well known financially reckless governments. But the problem of the reckless is being allowed to drag down sound responsible economic states into bailing out the financially reckless ones. Why?
Why dig a bigger hole? The only benefit offered is to maintain unity for unity sake. But the 'rescue package' repeatedly talked about does not address the underlying causes of the financial problem, nor entail removing the culpable captains of the reckless spending and borrowing. It is past time to cut the tether to prevent the ship sinking.
Ireland, Portugal, Greece, Spain and Italy have all but become insolvent sovereign states. Since their respective governments allowed their debt to spiral out of sovereign control, they have breached the European governance standards of being sovereign members. They should be declared bankrupt and expelled from the European Economic Community.
But do reckless governments have a representative right of the people to make responsible decisions? No. So the vote needs to be democratic.
The vote is one of direct democracy.
Instead, European 'groupthink' has prevailed into a 'eurothink' allowing the euro zone debt crisis to escalate. Ultimately, the governments of sound financial managers Germany and France are retrospectively assuming guarantor financial responsibility for reckless gamblers - Ireland, Spain, Greece, Portugal and Italy.
But government aristocrats have no democratic right to commit their people to external debt, with a plebiscite. Going guarantor for the hundreds of billions of unpayable debt of these countries means raising taxes, and sovereign financial exposure (bonds) to another countries debt.
The euphemism 'rescue package' is misleading.
Germany needs to get out quick or be dragged into a spiral of uncontrollable debt.
No responsible leader in Europe has yet postulated the ultimate risk scenario for Europe, but it is very real. Is it worse for insolvent member countries to be expelled from the EEC, or for Europe to financially collapse outright?
Europe's government aristocracies are transfixed in 'Eurothink' and the people recognise this whole issue as patently anti-democratic.
When it comes to ultimate risk, the consequences for group-think decision-making, risk becoming catastrophic.
Mornington Peninsula Ratepayer's and Residents' Association says that Mornington Peninsula shire has earned the disgraceful reputation of being the worst financial performing council in Victoria in 2011-12, that its liveability statement is spin, and that they can't understand why the Council ignored the call by many in the community to advertise for a CEO who can control rate increases.
The Mornington Peninsula Shire Mayor, Cr Graham Pittock's spin says the shire budget is a “liveability budget” because rates will only increase 6.8%. However we are confused by his logic.
The fact is that this year the budget shows that ratepayers will be contributing an additional $10.269 million or 9.85% in rates and charges to the shire's “bucket of cash”. This is before the bucket overflows with an additional $1.41 million increase in charges for tip fees.
The Municipal Association of Victoria's list of rates and charges for Victoria's 79 councils shows that only West Wimmera, Murrindindi and Baw Baw have increased rates and charges per assessed property more than the Mornington Peninsula.
West Wimmera and Baw Baw were affected by the recent floods. Murrindindi includes the townships of Marysville and Kinglake and is rebuilding after the 2009 bushfires when 95 people in the shire perished.
The Peninsula escaped relatively lightly compared to these shires and has no excuse to raise the rates to the same extent.
In addition, an examination of the financial statements for the 79 councils in Victoria shows that the shire has the second highest level of borrowings and that the Mornington Peninsula (apart from the major cities of Melbourne and Geelong) has the second highest level of total current financial liabilities of the other councils.
The Ratepayer's Association says that this earns the shire the disgraceful reputation of being the worst financial performing council in Victoria in 201112, that the liveability statement is just further spin, and they can't understand why the Council ignored the call by many in the community to advertise for a CEO who can control rate increases.
Source:
MORNINGTON PENINSULA RATEPAYERS' AND RESIDENTS' ASSOCIATION INC
PO Box 4087 Rosebud Vic 3939 Email:[email protected] Tel:0413457092
If we had direct democracy and referendums in this country, the Wonthaggi Desal would never have got up - but we don't, yet. Andrew Chapman is leading a fight for water justice for Victorians to find out how on earth the Brumby government got away with this one. The project is currently estimated to cost $5.7b and it is thought that Victorians will be paying $600m/year for it whether or not the water is required. It will also tax Victoria’s electricity supplies. See also: More on Wonthaggi Desal plant and history of Royal Commission movement
Ted Baillieu MP
Premier of Victoria
1 Treasury Place
Melbourne 3002
Dear Premier,
Victorians are to pay for a desalination plant when Melbourne’s water storages are over 60% capacity and continuing to rise. Because it is unlikely that desalinated water will be required in the foreseeable future Victorians have a right to know how the government made the decision to proceed with this project.
Melbourne's water storages
Melbourne’s water storages are designed to incorporate short and long term fluctuations in climate and provide for population growth and water is retained by introducing restrictions when dryer periods become apparent. The Bracks government failed to take appropriate measures to conserve stored water then decided to construct a desalination plant at Wonthaggi. The decision preceded an EES, public consultation and statutory planning procedures and the subsequent EES did not properly consider alternatives, including the doing nothing option. The project is currently estimated to cost $5.7b and I understand Victorians will be paying $600m/year for it whether or not the water is required. It will also tax Victoria’s electricity supplies.
Given the project’s significant social, economic and environmental impacts I ask that the Premier initiate a public inquiry with the sole purpose of determining just how the desalination plant was approved. The scale of the project is such that the approval process should be examined by no less than a Royal Commission.
A Royal Commission should examine the following:
* The management of Melbourne’s water storages including how and when water restrictions were introduced,
* The reports and data on which the Bracks government based its decision to adopt desalination as a method of meeting Melbourne’s water needs,
* The reports and data on which the Bracks government based its decision to build a desalination plant at Wonthaggi,
* The expert reports which formed the basis of the EES and whether or not they contained bias,
* The EES panel’s consideration of evidence contained in submissions to the EES and
* How the panel report came to recommend in favour of the desalination plant.
On closer examination by your office there will no doubt be additional matters that are found to warrant examination.
A Royal Commission would discover whether or not decisions were guided by appropriate professional expertise and its purpose would be to minimise the social, economic and environmental harm from this project and ensure that this situation does not occur again.
Yours sincerely
Andrew Chapman
Inverloch 3996
Victoria, Australia
Fax: +61 3 56743732
Mob: 0438567412
(Belated) update (30/4/2016). Not long after this article was published, the GetUp site administrator suddenly and without warning deleted this proposal together with the many other posts, all of which enthusiastically supported my proposal, as I recall. Had we been warned at least we could have retrieved copies of the posts that were of interest, before they were deleted. Given this outrageous treatment of a proposal which is clearly consistent with GetUp's purported goal "to build a progressive Australia and bring participation back into our democracy", GetUp cannot be what it claims to be.
To vote on this campaign go to http://tinyurl.com/3nmwwjq . Yesterday, I made a proposal on GetUp that GetUp launch a campaign to have the Australian constitution changed to include provisions for Direct Democracy similar to what is practised in Switzerland. Whilst the response has not yet been overwhelming, I see no reason why a campaign for Direct Democracy now in Australia should not be able to gain sufficient support to force the Government make it law. But to succeed the campaign needs your support. To find out what you can do, please read this article and the previous article, particularly, that article's What You Can Do Section.
Could I first express my thanks to Jill, Vivienne, Menkit, Sheila and others for your support for my Direct Democracy campaign?
But so far, now at 2.20pm, 18 hours since I first launched my campaign with e-mails to several dozen contacts at 8.10PM last night and over a day after I posted my proposal to GetUp, I have to say, I am underwhelmed at the response. Although the response is a long way short of what I had hoped -- only six votes in favour so far [1] -- I don't think that that is yet cause to be disheartened. Given that it was Sunday night when I posted the e-mail and that so many I e-mailed would have immense constraints placed upon the time and energy that they needed to deal with my e-mail (which Sheila has advised me is somewhat more verbose than needed) it is hardly surprising that many recipients weren't immediately convinced that it would have been worth the effort to read my e-mail.
However, I still feel confident that at least a small number of those I e-mailed will take the trouble to read my e-mail, come to see that it would be well worth their time and effort to follow some of my suggestions and do what they can to broaden support for Direct Democracy.
Once only a few extra become interested, it should only be a matter of (not too much more) time before they should be able to convince others around them that my proposal has merit and would be well worth any time and energy they could put into it. When this occurs, I believe we will have achieved a critical mass of support.
Once this campaign has a critical mass of supporters, we should face little difficulty in getting enough votes to have it officially launched it as a GetUp campaign.
Because Direct Democracy essentially takes the concept behind GetUp to its logical conclusion, I think that it is likely that this proposal will be read by a considerably greater number of recipients than most GetUp proposals. I think that few who take the trouble to read it will not become convinced of the merits of Direct Democracy. Once this occurs the campaign should have achieved a sufficiently high profile to attract support from much broader sections of the Australian community.
Make this (song about the apology to the Stolen Generations) a Hit
Roll Back, Not Roll Out (GetUp investigation of Fraser Government intervention in Northern Territory)
One very worthwhile outcome was the outcome of the "Save the Net" campaign which succeeded in stopping of the Federal Labour Government from subjecting all Internet traffic to mandatory filtering for the spurious reason that this measure was supposed to help stamp out child pornography on the Internet.
Whilst the "Save the Net" campaign and a few the other GetUp campaigns have considerable merit, the vast majority of causes that Australian communities have fought in recent years, and are fighting today, are missing from these pages. This would seem to indicate that many serious political campaigners see little reason to hope that having GetUp take up their cause would substantially increase their prospects of success.
Currently, my proposal for a Direct Democracy campaign has attracted only 6 supporters on GetUp. Perhaps those on candobetter, who have demonstrated that they understand the urgent need for Direct Democracy could consider taking a little more effort to help me achieve the critical mass of interest I need in order to progress.
Please consider acting upon some of the suggestions I made in my previous article.
If you haven't voted for my GetUp proposal, please vote for it now. You will need to be a member of GetUp in order to be able to vote. If you haven't joined, please do so now;
Please raise this issue again with each of your contacts, whom I probably have already e-mailed or spoken to. Point out to each of them that if Direct Democracy were to become law in the not-too-distant future, then whatever cause they are now fighting so hard far now would have much better prospects of success. In future they can expect to have to spend far less of their own time, energy and money to achieve similar outcomes. So, whatever time and effort they put into supporting this campaign now could easily be repaid to them many times over in future.
Vivienne, in her comment on GetUp, made a very god argument which backs up the point I made in the seconf of my above suggestions:
There are too many action, lobby, environmental and animal rights groups all in opposition to government policies, and our election system does not address these multiple concerns. We need a true democratic system in Australia, not the farce we have.
Footnote[s]
1. [back] As of 4.00PM on 15 August, 20 hours after I launched the campaign, the support for my campaign still seems very modest: only 6 votes for of a total of 16 votes. Presumably as many as 8 GetUp members voted against my proposal, which is a cause for concen. The given 'avg vote' figure is 2.33 votes. That figure bears no relationship that I can work out with the previous two numbers I have given. The overall rank of my proposal (out of over 1,000 as I recall) is 438. (As of 6.14PM the proposal has 10 supporters and is ranked 318 - still a long way to go.)
You can help bring Direct Democracy to Australia. To vote on this campaign go to http://tinyurl.com/3nmwwjq
John Marlowe first wrote an article about Direct Democracy late last year on 17 November 2010, the same day as an excellent episode of Rear Vision about Direct Democracy was first broadcast. Today, I made a suggestion to GetUp that they conduct a campaign for the Australian constitution to be changed to include Direct Democracy as it is currently practised in Switzerland. It is easy for anyone who agrees with the aims of GetUp to join in order to vote for my proposal. What you can do.
The article below, except for theWhat you can dosection, was originally Posted to GetUp on 15 August 2011.
GetUp should run a campaign to make provision in the Australian constitution to include Direct Democracy as it is currently practised in Switzerland. The recent experience of Swiss direct democracy and its broader history was described in the excellent 17 November 2010 episode of the ABC Radio National Rear Vision program (see http://www.abc.net.au/rn/rearvision/stories/2010/3047700.htm for transcript, podcast is here.)
A proposal for a new law, an amendment to an existing law or repeal of an existing law could be launched by a group of concerned citizens in a way similar to campaigns now run through GetUp.
However, if Australia had Direct Democracy in its constitution, the campaign would most likely end with the proposal becoming law, provided that a "double majority", that is a national majority of voters and majorities of voters in a majority of states, (or 'cantons' in Switzerland) votes for it at a referendum.
The number of signatures required to have a national referendum put is 100,000 of Switzerland's population of 7,860,000. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland#Direct_democracy). The equivalent proportion of Australia's current population of 22,677,40 is 288,278, so a more appropriate rounded number of required signatures for a national referendum to be held in Australia could be 250,000. (Given that many of Australia's people live further apart from each other than do people in Switzerland a still lower threshold could be justified.)
Under the laws of Direct Democracy, if the required number of signatures are obtained, then the proposal must be put to the Swiss people at the periodic multiple national referenda that are held in Switzerland. If the proposal is voted for by a double majority, then it becomes law.
Direct Democracy differs from the way representative democracy is practised in most countries formally labeled 'democratic'. I believe that few of those countries, notably Australia, can be described as truly democratic in the sense of "government of the people by the people and for the people". If those countries adopted Direct Democracy, then they could become truly democratic.
On many occasions, in at least the last four decades Australia, has experienced Parliaments which have inexcusably ignored the clear wishes of the Australian people.
A probable reason why Australians have quietly accepted this is subtle indoctrination through the mass media. The mass media markets the questionable idea that politicians as a whole, having the best interests of their constituents at heart, are better able to judge than their [implied] mostly less educated and less knowledgeable constituents what is truly in the best longer term interests of those constituents.
In fact, the record shows that on nearly every occasion on which politicians have over-ruled the wishes of their constituencies, their judgment has not been better, or that they had been putting the welfare of powerful vested interests above the welfare of their constituents.
Often decisions which have harmed both our national prosperity and the interests of the least wealthy Australians have been reached against the known views of the majority of Australians. Sometimes there has been no electoral mandate and, on some occasions, decisions have actually run counter to specific promises made in elections.
On many other occasions, whilst decisions may not have been opposed at the time by the majority of Australians, neither would a majority of Australians have been in favour. There certainly was no informed consent.
Examples where the known wishes of the Australian public have been disregarded include: the privatisations of Telstra, the Commonwealth Bank, the State banks and State insurance offices, the abolition of protection for Australia's manufacturing which commenced during the years of the Whitlam Labor Government, John Howard's Goods and Services Tax (GST) and "Work Choices", the 1991 and 2003 wars against Iraq.
Few other privatisations -- railways, other public transport, power generation, roads, water -- have not been imposed contrary to the known wishes of the Australian public. Certainly almost none have been done with the informed consent of the public.
Examples of actions, which were certainly taken without the informed consent of the Australian public, include: the floating of the Australian dollar and the financial deregulation of the early years of the Hawke and Keating Governments, Malcolm Fraser's emasculation of Medicare, Malcolm Fraser changing investment laws to allow overseas investors to buy up Australia's mineral wealth, the Whitlam Government's failure to legislate to index taxation scales in line with inflation, Australia's participation in the invasion of Afghanistan, the attempted use of mercenaries to break the Maritime Union of Australia by John Howard in 1998, the privatisation of retirement income, otherwise known as "Superannuation", by the Hawke government.
If Direct Democracy had been law in Australia for the last four decades, little of the harm described above would have occurred. Where Governments may have succeeded in having legislation detrimental to the public interest initially passed, more than likely, the damage would have been quickly undone through the provisions of Direct Democracy.
If you are already a member of GetUp, vote for my proposal that GetUp launch a campaign for Direct Democracy. If you are not a member, join GetUP;
Please tell your friends family, neighbours and all other contacts, including community groups, you are a member of, about Direct Democracy and ask them to also support my proposal and vote for it;
If you have your own blog or web-site, please post information about Direct Democracy onto it. Feel more than welcome to post this article, parts of this article and links to this site and to my GetUp proposal onto your site;
Write a letter to your newspaper editor in support of Direct Democracy. Be sure to send us a copy;
Ring up talk-back radio and tell them about Direct Democracy and be sure to also tell us;
Post Direct Democracy material onto any on-line discussion or mailing list in which you are participating where you think others are likely to be interested;
Post your thoughts about Direct Democracy, including any you may have expressed elsewhere, onto this page;
Consider writing articles about Direct Democracy for candobetter or otherpublications which support truth and democracy;
Post notices about Direct Democracy onto any community notice board that you can. These could be in your sports club, local library, college school, church, community hall, university or local shop.
Contact your local, state or Federal representative and let him/her know of your wish for Direct Democracy;
If you are a member of the Greens, the Labour Party, the Liberal Party, the National Party, the Australian Protectionist Party or another minor party, ask your elected representatives to speak in favour of Direct Democracy in the Council, State Parliament or Federal Parliament. Move resolutions in support of Direct Democracy at conference or at your local branch. If you are an office holder put a motion in support of Direct Democracy to your committee;
In light of the riots in Britain, we are publishing an article based on some correspondence from the "Trotskyist", "socialist" and "revolutionary" UK group, Workers' Liberty[1], first published in 1995 at http://www.workersliberty.org/node/4900 on 30 September, 2005. The correspondence calls into question, especially now, different attitudes on the likely consequences of high immigration and population growth in Australia and Britain among other countries mentioned. Describing himself as still a socialist internationalist at heart, James Sinnamon writes that, however, "today the ideal of unconditional internationalism is an unachievable pipe dream, and, in fact, dangerous [because] that ideal has been subverted to suit the needs of globalised capitalism."
The correspondence below began as a private exchange in 2005 between James Sinnamon and Martin Thomas, and so its appearance on the Workers' Liberty site came as something of a surprise to James at the time, as he was not asked permission or told it would be used to construct an article. The correspondence actually originated after James spent an evening with Martin Thomas at Thomas's invitation. During that evening they put their respective views about politics which, as the article below, shows, differed quite markedly. This experience caused James to compose and send an e-mail to Martin Thomas to explain more precisely and in greater detail, his differences with Martin Thomas and, among other things, why he felt that continuing high immigration served the needs of capital and was against the democratic and human rights of the receiving countries and international socialism. The published correspondence includes a letter from candobetter site contributor James Sinnamon, who agrees that he had indeed posted that letter to Martin Thomas in 2005. It was published on the Workers' Liberty site during a past stay in Australia by Martin Thomas. Thomas was a qualified teacher and able to teach both in Australia and the UK. During one of those stays in Australia in 2005, Martin Thomas contacted James in order to re-establish his previous contact when from 1984 and 1985 when James had been an active supporter of the Australian group affiliated to Workers' Liberty, then known as "Socialist Fight."
Sinnamon expressed his opinion that open door immigration policies would give rise to dangerously high immigration and population growth. He warned that, whilst benefiting rich globalists, for everyone else, rapid population growth carried high risks of poverty, linked to fuel shortages and the socially unsustainable inflation of housing prices and basic natural resources, like water and land. He argued that this outcome would be environmentally dangerous to survival. Martin Thomas expressed the view that unlimited immigration was an overall good and that if receiving countries did not embrace it, they would be invaded forcibly, under threat of nuclear war, by sending countries like India and China.
A number of other writers responded to the views of James and Martin, and we also include their correspondence below. It all makes interesting reading.
The correspondence below talks about the rights of sovereign nations to defend themselves generally against the ravages of global capitalism, which also deploys high immigration (in open-door policies) as a weapon against democracy. Whilst thus utterly failing to support the right of peoples to self-government and self-determination, phony socialist organisations continue actively to waste the energy of their many young, enthusiastic and trusting supporters by diverting their attention to phony progressive causes.
The correspondence published below throws some light on the attitudes associated with undemocratically high levels of immigration and population growth and the problems it creates for self-government and self-determination, resource depletion and inflation.
For more about the publication, Workers' Liberty, see footnote [2]
A letter from James Sinnamon and a reply from Workers' Liberty Australia.
Hi comrades,
Further to last night's conversation. Towards the end I frankly expressed my thoughts on what have been taboo subjects within socialist circles, that is, population levels and immigration.
These issues are an aspect of a question which, as I have said, has been avoided by almost the whole socialist movement, that is the finiteness of this planet, and how we can hope to create a stable basis for a sustainable society within the constraints of the physical limits of our planet, given the unprecedented population levels of well over 6 billion.
If we can't achieve this, our future may be too awful to contemplate.
As I said in less than two hundred years, less than a blink of an eye in human history, we have dug up and burnt off energy stored in carbon, which took tens or hundreds of millions of years for the earth to accumulate thorough biological and geological process (I wrote this in a letter which was printed in March this year in The Canberra Times and The Australian)
This, to me, is an astonishing and frightening fact.
We have increased global populations because we have squandered what should have been treated as a priceless resource for this and future generations.
In our discussion, it didn't strike me that you fully appreciated this fact and all the implications of all of this.
In Australia, we are close to exceeding the carrying capacity of this country if we have not already. As just one example, planners don't know how either NSW or South East Queensland can establish sufficient supplies of water to satisfy the needs of the current population, let alone the additional 1,000,000 (that will be allowed to move here by 2025 in order to satisfy the needs of the property speculation 'industry').
Many informed people believe that the current population levels are already well in excess of this country's carrying capacity, especially if you take into account that our economy largely depends on non renewable petroleum. Coal may be a possible alternative, but an expensive and dirty one, which is also finite. In any case it may increase CO2 levels in our atmosphere to unacceptable levels. Even if Peter Beattie's recent claim that we have 300 years worth of coal left in Australia is true, that is still a blink of an eyelid in terms of overall human history.
No socialist current has ever given a clear answer as to what it thinks the population levels of this country should be and hence what the levels of immigration should be. Your response last night is that firstly you still supported open door immigration and that you didn't believe that that many people would want to come here anyway, so it is not really an issue.
With one billion on the planet in dire poverty living in shanty towns on the outskirts of cities (see New Left Review Article, "Planet of Slums") I would suggest that the potential for Australia's current population to be easily overwhelmed many times over if an open door policy were to be adopted is beyond doubt.
Which one of these one billion people, do you believe would not come to a county like Australia if given an opportunity?
And let's not forget 100,000 largely wealthy business migrants who are already coming here every year. The surest way to gain resident status these days is to have money to buy a house and thereby to add to the already obscene levels of housing hyper-inflation.
Of course I am not being judgmental about these people. They are only doing what I would do, if I were in their shoes[3], and I dare say if they were in my shoes they would in all probability adopt the same attitude that I have adopted.
Already the increased levels of population have clearly had detrimental effects for the existing population : housing costs gone through the roof (property speculators are open about this, if your read their literature), the quality of life largely destroyed in cities like Sydney, water supply crises as I mentioned earlier. These are just not even broached in any socialist literature that I have read.
In my heart I am still a socialist internationalist, but today the ideal of unconditional internationalism is an unachievable pipe dream, and, in fact, dangerous. As a friend put it so well a few months ago, that ideal has been subverted to suite the needs of globalised capitalism.
For the past generation, the whole of the left has had no answer to the developments that have not only harmed the interests of ordinary Australians, but have threatened our sustainability: off-shoring of jobs to countries like China and India, privatisation, deregulation, lifting of limitations on foreign investment, allowing foreigners to buy and speculate in Australian property, with disastrous consequences for ordinary home buyers. To have raised objections to these developments would incur accusations of nationalism and sometimes, even racism.
We need a serious answer to this and that answer must be a pragmatic compromise between socialist internationalism and the recognition of our own collective interests as a national community.
I hope that you all will all come to understand the sense of what I am saying, and quickly ditch the cornucopian baggage carried by the socialist movement up to now. If you do so, then I think there is a hope that you will be able to contribute positively to the future political development of this country, and even the rest of the world, if not, I believe that you will continue to be regarded as irrelevant by all but a small minority of our population.
If you cannot do so right away, please at least start to acknowledge these questions in your newspaper and try to refute what I have said.
Reply from Martin Thomas
Dear James,
You raise two issues: the threat to human life on the planet Earth from the exhaustion of fossil fuels, and the threat to conditions in Australia from increased openness to the world, including immigration. You draw two conclusions: global reshaping of human society to reduce the use of non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels; and immigration controls (tighter than the present ones, if I have understood you right) for Australia.
I think your two lines of thought contradict each other. On an ultra-optimistic scenario such as some neo-liberals project, it would make some macabre sense to support tight immigration controls. They could serve as a way to avoid disruption and "jumping the gun" - to keep order in a queue from which everyone will eventually reach a Californian middle-class lifestyle.
If rural China, Bangladesh, and Nigeria will all in the due course of industrial development reach that Californian level, then their people, or at least enough of them, may be willing to wait.
But if humanity faces ecological catastrophe, then it makes no sense to argue that the people of the regions which will "go under" first will lie down to die quietly while the people of global "gated communities"
continue to live in plenty.
China and India, after all, have nuclear weapons. If in a few decades' time, they face mass starvation, while Australians continue to live comfortably behind a big wall inscribed "Yellow and brown-skinned people, keep out!", then why would any conceivable Chinese or Indian government not use those nuclear weapons to break down that wall?
Presumably your support for barriers to protect relatively advantaged countries applies generally, not just to Australia. It would apply, for example, in countries with land borders. It would apply in South Africa, for example, where hostility to Nigerian and Mozambican immigrants as a supposed threat to conditions is already widespread among black as well as white South Africans.
But if the prospect is not just for Nigeria and Mozambique lagging behind South Africa, but of human society collapsing - and for sure it would collapse in Mozambique and Nigeria a long while before it collapsed in relatively well-off South Africa - then how would any restrictions imposed by any South African government hold the desperate human tide?
Global catastrophe would not happen through peoples quietly dying off one by one, each dutifully taking its turn. If, in the run-up, the richer countries had been trying to seal themselves off as "gated communities", the first step towards extinction would be world war in which the peoples of the poorer countries sought, quite literally, space to live in.
The greater the risk of global ecological catastrophe, the greater the need for human solidarity and cooperation in dealing with that risk - and the more disastrous a policy of "looking after number one" will be.
I agree that there are grave ecological dangers. More urgent than the threat of fossil fuels being completely exhausted is the threat of disruption through global warming arising from their use; but both threats are real. It is not possible, even if it were desirable, for the whole world population to live in big air-conditioned houses, eat highly processed and packaged food, use clothes dryers and dishwashers, go round in four-wheel drives, take frequent trips by air, etc. - any more than in the 19th century socialists could think that in the future everyone could live in houses with teams of domestic servants.
It is even arguable (I'm not sure about this) that ecological sustainability requires converting more of the population to a vegetarian diet.
But we know that capitalist consumerism is not an unavoidable part of human nature. There have been societies where out-consuming your neighbour is considered foul, not a cause for pride. Many studies have shown that people get happier with increasing material wealth up to a definable point - but that beyond that point, already passed by the Californian middle class, they do not.
In a society of solidarity, people could live in "abundance", on a rule of "to each according to their needs", with comfort and some luxuries - while accepting that some sorts of consumption must be restrained for ecological reasons. But only in a society of solidarity! In a capitalist society, both capital's drive for profit and the consumerist drives instilled in the mass of the population by the workings of commodity fetishism make impossible the development of any such collective responsibility for the sustainability of our society.
You agree in general, I think. You write that some form of socialism is the only sustainable future. But if the ecological problems are global, then, more than ever, this socialism must be global - based on a recognition of a common humanity, and a common human interest in sustaining the Earth's environment - not a socialism of "gated communities".
And, in any case, how can we possibly hope that working classes preoccupied with keeping up the barriers around their relatively favoured patches of the Earth's surface, or wondering how they can possibly jump those barriers to escape their earlier-doomed patches, will ever achieve any form of socialism? If the working classes of the world are turned towards that way of thinking, then there will be no socialism.
I think I have a less catastrophist view of future energy supplies than you do, if only because I have no objection to the development of nuclear power with safeguards of democratic and working-class control. Its risks are far less than those of continued escalating use of fossil fuels, or of leaving a large part of humanity without electricity.
Nuclear fission draws on finite resources, but with a much longer span of availability than fossil fuels. Nuclear fusion - if it can be developed workably, and a prototype nuclear fusion power station is already under construction - can draw on practically infinite resources.
Of course I am also in favour of the development of renewable energy sources - hydroelectric, wind power, tidal power, solar power, etc. At present none of these sources has the portability and the capacity to produce energy round the clock which fossil fuels and nuclear power do.
But I agree that there are real ecological threats. Only, I conclude that to tackle them we need a global working-class solidarity, and moves to raise higher barriers between countries run directly counter to that.
But, you say, open borders are unworkable, even if they might be desirable. Open the borders of Australia and tens or hundreds of millions of paupers would flood here the next day, creating social disaster.
In the first place, such immigration as has been allowed to come to Australia has clearly benefited the people of this country. An argument could be made against that immigration, that it consists of robbing many poorer countries of some of their most educated and energetic people, but for Australia the immigration has plainly been beneficial.
Working as a high school teacher, I can see this every day: the higher proportion of immigrant kids in a school, the better the education, the lower the level of social despondency.
Even where immigration is less selective than in Australia - in Britain, for example - the benefits, both in bringing new productive person-power and in cultural enrichment, are clear.
If there is a level at which immigration becomes unworkably disruptive, we are certainly nowhere near it now.
Would "open borders" bring us there? Well, the USA had open borders up until 1921. A transatlantic boat trip, or a journey across the Rio Grande, was more expensive and difficult than analogous journeys today, but not prohibitive even for very poor people in Europe and Central and South America. Millions of people migrated to the USA, many of them fleeing starvation or extreme poverty in countries like Ireland and Italy. The result was the richest and most dynamic country in the world.
Argentina and Brazil, which also received mass transatlantic migration, also developed - as capitalist economies, to be sure, with all the cruelties and inequalities that implies, but they developed.
They did not collapse.
Today there are "open borders" within the European Union, a population of 460 million. There are still some restrictions on the movement of people from the poorest EU countries in Eastern Europe, but some richer countries, the UK for example, do not apply those restrictions, and in those that do apply them, like Germany, the restrictions are easily evaded.
National income per head in Luxemburg is six times what it is in Latvia, or five and a half times what it is in Poland. Will opening the borders of Luxemburg to all those Latvians and Poles lead to catastrophe? On all the evidence, no. In the UK, we have a lot more Poles in London since Poland joined the EU, but no catastrophe at all.
The USA does not have open borders, but geography makes it practically impossible for it to police its southern border. The US government estimates that the USA has at least seven million illegal immigrants living it. That they are illegal creates a heap of problems. As workers, they have no usable legal rights. But on the evidence, the fact of having seven million more people, doing jobs otherwise hard to fill, benefits their fellow-citizens rather than harming them. If the border were made legally open, rather than just practically hard to police, things would be better.
Israel has had an "open border" for Jews since 1948, and as a consequence its society - a mere 650,000 Jews in 1948 - has received large and unpredictable inflows of Jews from the Arab world in the 1950s and after 1967, and from Russia and Eastern Europe after 1989. On a tiny patch of land with few energy resources and scanty water supplies, its population has been increased to 6.5 million. Israel has had to build desalination plants to extract fresh water from the sea (a technology used more extensively by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states), but it continues to develop.
It would develop much better, to be sure, if it would cease its oppression of the Palestinians, withdraw from the Occupied Territories, and recognise the right of the Palestinians to a state of their own. But its policy of unlimited immigration has not wrecked it.
Germany has "open borders" for anyone who can claim German origins.
In 1945 west Germany had to deal with some 13 million Germans forcibly expelled from Eastern Europe. After 1990 it received a new flood of immigrants from the East. Again, no catastrophe.
According to Nigel Harris, author of a recent book arguing against immigration controls, "Thinking the Unthinkable": "There were up to two hundred econometric studies done in the United States in different localities at different times in order to try to detect whether there was a decline in wages or an increase in unemployment of native workers as a result of a significant inflow of immigrants and in general they could find no trace whatsoever. And that is because the immigrants are moving into the jobs that the native workers won't do..."
In Britain, according to Kenan Malik, "a Home Office study published last year concluded that 'the perception that immigrants take away jobs from the existing population, or that immigrants depress wages of existing workers, do not find confirmation in the analysis of the data'."
Teresa Hayter, in her pamphlet "The Case Against Immigration Controls", pursues the argument:
"There are many who say that the abolition of immigration controls is a desirable goal, one they themselves would like to see achieved, but that it is politically impossible in a world in which there are severe international inequalities. But the argument that, without controls, there would be 'floods' of migrants who would overwhelm the rich countries some of them go to is little more than scaremongering.
"The fact that there are huge international inequalities in material wealth does not mean that, as neo-classical economists might predict, there would be mass movements of people throughout the world until material conditions and wages equalised. It is true that if there were no controls there would probably be more migration, since the dangers and cost of migrating would be less; how much more is impossible to estimate...
"[But] most people require powerful reasons to migrate; in normal circumstances they are reluctant to leave their countries, families and cultures. When free movement was allowed in the European Union, some feared there would be mass migration from the poorer to the richer areas; the migration did not happen, to the chagrin of the proponents of flexible labour markets. The great desire of many who do migrate is to return to their own countries, when they have saved enough money, or if conditions there improve. Immigration controls mean that they are less likely to do so, because they cannot contemplate the struggle of crossing borders again if they find they need to".
History backs up Harris's and Hayter's arguments. And the urgency of global solidarity also means that it is urgent to fight against immigration restrictions.
Submitted by Anonymous on 11 December, 2005 - 16:03.
Martin's argument seems to be that the third world will invade the first world unless there are open borders. He also implies that high rates of immigration in the US and in Germany are overall beneficial and manageable. His opinion is also that Australia's schooling system benefits from a stream of immigrants to that country, which he implies would be depressing without that stream.
He gives no evidence for this opinion. It is merely his opinion apparently that no stable polity can be a happy place and that all communities must be in constant turmoil to be cheerful.
He relies on worker solidarity to engineer a future low consumption economy. He does not mention how workers have been consistently seduced to consume and endebt themselves in the process, thus contributing to the upkeep of their opressors and the upkeep of our tragic gobbling up of fossil fuels and cooking of the planet.
My conclusion is that the benefits from the current situation outweigh the negatives for Martin, and that he has decided that what is true for him must be true for others.
James discloses a quite different point of view, which he came round to after living for a while a Martin perspective.
My view is that human population has only been able to outgrow its dependency on trees and dung for fuel since coal and oil. This overgrowth and outgrowth that we call the Industrial Revolution started in England around 1750 and was the first time that human populations began to grow unsustainably on a very large scale. So far those countries which were able to gain power over fossil fuel resources have been able to feed their vast populations, but most indicators of quality of life and standard of living, industrial rights etc, and rate of endebtedness, have been falling.
The poor have been the losers in the West as in the third world. I do not see any prospect of the third world rising to meet the first world. All I see is an international clique of rich people organising the poor to serve them. In Australia this movement is very pronounced.
I think that the socialist movement, to restore credibility, must support the rights of the poor in Australia, by refusing to support immigration until such time as industrial law protects all workers equally - imported and locally born.
This is not the current outlook.
Martin seems to be suggesting that we should let things get worse and worse and then that the workers will rise up. In the mean-time the capitalists are reconquering the land, purchasing water and power. The workers have less and less access to land, which is the only thing that can ever make them independent of capital.
I don't see business as usual, i.e. economic growth, an employer/employee society with no protection for workers, and high immigration as sustainable or fair. I don't think the revolution will bring about justice either. I think it is too late.
I would like to see the natural world protected as much as possible and permaculture to be taught along with self-sufficiency. The capitalist/labour paradigm seems to be nearly dead in the water. We have the corporate/slave paradigm waiting in the wings.
Submitted by Arthur Bough on 11 December, 2005 - 17:46.
I thought this was an excellent discussion to which I would like to make just a few points. The first point is in relation to earlier emigrations say to the US. I remember asking Sir keith Joseph when he made a visit to my old University how he reconciled his belief in the free market, including the free movement of labour with his support for Immigration Controls. He had no good response to make. However, in response to this point when I have debated with US Libertarians they do have a response which is we have no objection to open borders as a means of free movement of labour, if it is combined with the abolition of welfare payments so that the influx of labour reduces wages to absorb the increased supply of labour, and so that this influx does not just consume more benefits leading to increased taxes etc.
The US, Brazil etc. at the time of the large emigrations not only had a lot of land that could be settled, but also had no welfare payments.
The argument is not really comparable with the situation today where welfare payments, minimum wage agreements etc. are in place.
Consequently, where immigrant workers do come in to do jobs that indigenous workers will not do there is a base put underneath the level to which the wages can fall. To a certain extent this reduces the attraction of bringing in foreign labour for anything other than the most unpopular jobs, or leads to the kind of abuses of illegal immmigration and slavery whereby those employed never appear on the official statistics, and can therefore be employed at whatever wages the gangmasters see fit. The other area where immigration arises, for example with Poles coming to Britain, is where the worker has a specific skill, for example as plumbers, which either is in short supply and normal wages would be significantly higher than the minimum wage, or where the worker can become self employed in which case minimum wage regulations do not apply.
I can envisage conditions in which a socialist society might wish to have immigration controls, just as it would want to have a monopoly of foreign trade. But the aim of such a society would be to work with workers in other countries to raise their standard of living and to try to plan co-operatively the movement of labour along with the planning of other aspects of economic activity. But that is no reason for promoting immigration controls under capitalism. For one thing, it sends out the message that economic problems (or environemntal problems) are caused by immigration rather than capitalism.
As far as global environmental problems are concerned as martin argues the best means of solving this problem (if we are not already too late) is by international workers co-operation and solidarity to develop means by which the living standards of everyone on the planet can be raised to a decent standard by means which do not threaten its very existence. I'm not sure I agree with Martin about nuclear power because every economic study shows that its cost is greater than its benefit, but I do believe that a socialist society would be far less wasteful than capitalism and so energy and resource use would be lower in relation to the quantity of use values produced. Moreover, the use of technology to produce bio mass or other renewable energy close to its point of use (30% of electricity is lost in transmission), the use of individual power generators such as windmills on every home, heat exchangers etc. could vastly reduce energy production requirements, along with the use f fuel cells, clean coal technology etc. mean that energy requirements should be capable of being met. The individual electric cars which run on a track being introduced at Heathrow Airport also seem to me an excellent means of combining the requiremnt for meeting the individual need for flexibility with the public need to reduce resource usage, energy production, and congestion.
I think we have the basis for resolving all the problems of humanity in the 21st century, but capitalism will only employ them if it is profitable to do so. Only a socialist society based on co-operation can begin to introduce the changes necessary, and the basis of that has to be international working class action, not allowing the ruling class to divide us by artifical boundaries.
Submitted by Arthur Bough on 14 December, 2005 - 10:01.
In reference to Martin's points about vegetarian diets, and the possibility of needing to convert people to them for sustainability I read the following today in the Daily Reckoning e-letter, by Dan Denning.
"- "Ninety-five percent of the nitrogenous fertilizers used in America are made out of natural gas," observes Jim Kunstler in his book, The Long Emergency, "and so it has become indispensable to US agriculture."
- What happens to global agricultural production, therefore, when natural gas soars to an all-time high, like it did yet again last week? Let's query the experts...
- "A world of 6.4 billion people, on the way to 9 billion or more, needs more protein than the planet's croplands can generate from biologically provided nitrogen. Our species has become as physically dependent on industrially produced nitrogen fertilizer as it is on soil, sunshine, and water," writes Stan Cox, a scientist at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas.
- "Vaclav Smil, distinguished professor at the University of Manitoba...has demonstrated the global food system's startling degree of dependence in nitrogen fertilization. Using simple math[s] - the kind you can do in your head if there's no calculator handy — Smil showed that 40 percent of the protein in human bodies, planet-wide, would not exist without the application of synthetic nitrogen to crops during most of the 20th century."
- "That means that without the use of industrially produced nitrogen fertilizer," he concludes, "about 2.5 billion people out of today's world population of 6.2 billion simply could never have existed."
- Simply stated, therefore, no cheap natural gas, no cheap fertiliser, less food. Or to put it another way,< natural gas shortages in Britain and the US could lead to soybean shortages in China, which could lead to rising soybean prices.
- For some background, let's talk about protein. "Proteins are made up of smaller units called amino acids," the Vegetarian Society explains. "There are about 20 different amino acids, eight of which must be present in the diet. These are the essential amino acids. Unlike animal proteins, plant proteins may not contain all the essential amino acids in the necessary proportions."
- "Protein quality is usually defined according to the amino acid pattern of egg protein, which is regarded as the ideal," the vegetarians continue. "As such, it is not surprising that animal proteins, such as meat, milk and cheese tend to be of a higher protein quality than plant proteins. This is why plant proteins are sometimes referred to as low quality proteins. Many plant proteins are low in one of the essential amino acids. For instance, grains tend to be short of lysine whilst pulses are short of methionine."
- It's clear human beings need protein. We can get it from plants or we can get in from animals. Most of us get it from both. And China, lately, has been getting an awful lot of protein from soybeans, many of which are grown in North and South America. You might say, as Jim Kunstler implies, that China's rise would not have been possible without the oil boom of the 20th century. No natural gas, no soybeans. No soybeans, no extra protein boost for factory workers working longer hours.
- China's soybean imports for the first 9 months of 2004/2005 (October-June) have jumped more than 8%. Obviously, this is good news for soybean producers and exporters, the biggest of whom are in the United States and Latin America. Chinese demand, by itself, provides very solid support for a soybean bull market, even before one considers the supply-limiting impact of rising natural gas prices.
- Following a similar line of thinking, Steve Belmont, Senior Market Strategist for the Rutsen Meier Belmont Group in Chicago, also suggests a bullish position in the soy market, specifically soy meal. "Asian affluence, bullish seasonal patterns and low prices mean it's time to take a look at the long side of soybean meal," Belmont suggests.
- "Livestock and poultry operations the world over depend heavily on soybean meal as a key source of feed, especially since the threat of bovine spongiform encephalopathy [Mad Cow Disease] has sharply curtailed the feeding of rendered parts [ground up offal]. Not surprisingly, Chinese consumption of soybean meal has been rising rapidly."
- Soybean production is dependent upon copious amounts of nitrogen fertiliser. Nitrogen fertiliser is made from natural gas - which as we write this, is trading at roughly 3 times the price fifteen months ago.
- "Cheap nitrogen fertilizer fuels the big yields that have made soybeans and by extension, soybean meal, cheap. Remove the nitrogen fertilizer or make it prohibitively expensive for farmers and soy meal supply could be negatively-affected."
- "Soy meal's portion of protein feed demand has increased markedly since the early 1990s, rising from less than half of global demand in the 1993/1994 growing season to well over two-thirds today. We expect solid demand from the growing nations of Asia and the potential for lower soybean yields due to expensive nitrogen fertilizer to provide soybean meal with long-term support."
- "But that's not the only reason to like soy meal...Similar to soybeans and corn, soybean meal has a seasonal tendency to make important lows in the winter and rally during spring and early summer. Soybean meal is unloved and oversold. Therefore, we believe it may be a good time to pick up some call options."
- The world needs protein as much as it needs oil...and with oil over $60 per barrel, protein is about to become much more expensive."
Submitted by seanysean on 14 December, 2005 - 20:06.
My diet is vegetarian + fish. I choose this diet because I believe its unfeasable for the world's population to consume large quantities of beaf, pork, lamb, etc. and people are going hungry in the third world so the west can gorge itself on meat. I also don't trust the meat industry to put food safety before profit. Lastly, I couldn't bring myself to slaughter an animal so I'm not comfortable with the idea of eating one.
I'm not sure what is the point of the above post. Is it saying people should be vegetarians? Or is it saying being vegetarian will get more expensive? Furthermore, soya is not the be all and end all of vegetarianism. Guess what! There were vegetarians long before people started eating soya protein.
Submitted by Arthur Bough on 15 December, 2005 - 14:44.
What it is saying in short is that all food is going to get much, much more expensive as a result of diminishing supplies of oil and natural gas, and consequently of nitrogenous fertiliser. As the article argues a considerable amount of agriculture is now dependent upon such fertiliser in order to produce the quantities required. Without that fertiliser, or with the cost of that fertiliser increasing dramatically the cost of agricultural products will rise considerably.
Firstly, plant sources of food will increase in price. Secondly, because animal production is dependent on the production of plant feedstocks the cost of animal protein will rise considerably. Finally, because China has increased its consumption considerably and relies on Soybean production as animal feedstock the cost for the type of animal protein most frequently consumed in China, poultry, will rise considerably. Given China's position as workshop of the world, increasing food costs for China will also have considerable knock on effects for the rest of the world economy.
Submitted by seanysean on 16 December, 2005 - 17:18.
...does this mean people should consider converting to vegetarian/low meat diets? Or has it got nothing to do with that?
I am asking because you say at the start of it you say "In reference to Martin's points about vegetarian diets, and the possibility of needing to convert people to them for sustainability..."
Submitted by Arthur Bough on 16 December, 2005 - 23:33.
Yes, it does mean that. Although as the article says meat protein tends to be of a different type to plant protein, the nutrition obtained from a certain quantity of plant food is greater than that obtained from animals which have had to be fed on plant food in the firt place. To make that clearer a loss of nutrition occurs as a result of feeding plnts to animals and then eating those animals compared to consumin the plants or their equivalents that were fed to the animals.
If everyone had a vegetarian diet, therefore, more nutrrition could be obtained for the same amount of cost, and resource inputs. However, what the article is also pointing out is that whether such a switch occurs or not the cost of food is likely to rise substantially, both in terms of meat, and of plant food for the simple reason that one of the primary input costs - nitrogenous fertiliser - is going to become much more scarce, and its cost is going to rise.
My personal view is that the world could produce a vast quanity of food in excess of what it produces now, if the world's resources were used rationally, even without massive use of fertiliser, or GM plants.
Vast swathes of potential agricultural land are not used in underdeveloped countries, because of the structure of world trade, and the impossibility of small farmers and peasants in these reas epanding production. That is not even taking into consideration the fact that a number of studies has shown that the biggest increases in agricultural output result from simple capital invetsment such as better drainage etc.
But it is not in capitalism's interest to do that. World Trade remains dominated by the interests of the most powerful capitalist nations, and agribusiness is now a powerful force within those countries. High prices go with relatively stable longer term business plans that these businesses need in order to plan investment. They also form the basis of high profits for these businesses. It is not in their interests to introduce competition into this process from potentially lower cost producers in underdeveloped countries, who can utilise extensive rather than intensive farming methods.
Ironically, it is probably not in the interests of consumers in the Wrest either. There is an economic theorem called the cobweb theorem.
It shows that for products such as agricultural products where supply can only respond to price with considerable lags i.e. if the price of potatoes is high now, it will encourage farmers to plant potatoes but those potatoes will only become supply next year, then instead of the price mechanism acting to bring about equilibrium it actually acts to create greater and greater disequilibrium. Prices rise farmers plant that product in great quantities at the expense of other products. Next year the result is a glut of this particular product and shortage of other products. Prices of that product collapse because of the glut, and rise for other products now in hsort supply. The collpase in the price and increase in price of other goods causes farmers to abandon growing the product and switch to others. The following year there is no supply and prices rocket, and so on creating greater and greater disequilibrium.
It is the reason most countries intervened in agriculture, and the reason for the CAP.
Arthur Bough
Footnotes
NOTES
[1] The included article was originally published on 30 September 2005 on the web-site of the UK group Workers' Liberty
[2] More about the publication, Workers' Liberty: Although the organisation which produces that publication describes itself as a socialist organisation, and says it is against the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), which is an expanding military alliance of capitalist governments, it has nonetheless supported NATO's current war against Libya. This amounts to Workers' Liberty supporting the furthering of the interests of capitalism in British and US private profit military industrial complexes. (See "Left-wing" groups and "social movements" support US war against Libya?! of 9 July.) This support for an illegal war against the sovereign nation of Libya, whilst surprising for an organisation that purportedly champions the rights of poor nations against capitalist domination, is only the latest in a line of confusing alliances with global capitalist causes for Workers' Liberty . These include failure to question the false flag terrorist attack of 9/11 in New York which continues to be used to justify the NATO occupation of Afghanistan and indirectly, by sleight-of-hand, the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq. Workers' Liberty has also fallen in with the mainstream line which dismisses the achievements of US President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, which include his prevention of global nuclear war on at least three occasions. Workers' Liberty also has consistently failed to seriously discuss important evidence of a conspiracy to murder Kennedy in 1963.
Their overt stance in support for the war against Libya formally distinguishes Workers' Liberty from most other 'socialist' organisations. Informally, however, the silence of other 'socialist' groups on the rights of Libyans, must have an equally devastating effect on the people of Libya. Such a stance utterly fails to support the right of sovereign nations to defend themselves against the war.
3 [back] Having given some more thought to this some years later, I don't necessarily agree that I would necessarily only do what intending immigrants would do if I were in their shoes. Whilst, obviously, I now, in many ways, prefer the more materially affluent (if wasteful and ecologically damaging) lifestyle of the country I live in to the lifestyle of most third world countries in which many intending immigrants live, I would also want to do what I could to help solve the world's ecological, social and economic problems. That would almost certainly be far better served if I were to remain in the third world country in which I lived and do my best to solve the political and ecological problmes of my country and bring about population stability than if I were to migrate to an industrialised nation.
(Original title of this article was Australians let us all regret what is happening to land around Melbourne.) The second verse of Australia's national anthem speaks of infinite availability of land. To the well meaning composer and author of the lyrics, this may have seemed true in the nineteenth century but now it is a different story. which would be much harder set to poetry and music.The second verse of Australia's national anthem speaks of infinite availability of land. To the well meaning composer and author of the lyrics, this may have seemed true in the nineteenth century but now it is a different story. which would be much harder set to poetry and music.
The cruel irony of Australia's national anthem...
"Australians all let us rejoice,
For we are young and free;
We've golden soil and wealth for toil;
Our home is girt by sea;
Our land abounds in nature's gifts
Of beauty rich and rare;
In history's page, let every stage
Advance Australia Fair.
In joyful strains then let us sing,
Advance Australia Fair.
Beneath our radiant Southern Cross
We'll toil with hearts and hands;
To make this Commonwealth of ours
Renowned of all the lands;
For those who've come across the seas
We've boundless plains to share;
With courage let us all combine
To Advance Australia Fair.
In joyful strains then let us sing,
Advance Australia Fair."
Development locust devouring Melbourne's green space
Land all around Melbourne is being swallowed up with development or else it is being re-zoned and ear marked for future development. You can be as sure as you are sitting here reading this that Melbourne will continue to expand and that land now zoned rural will gradually be incorporated into the expanding metropolis As a painter loves a few blank canvasses on which to make his marks, a developer and a pro -development government love land on which to plonk unimaginative cloned housing developments and generic shops. Many land holders in rural areas see the re-zoning of their land into residential as their “superannuation” or windfall since once zoned for housing the land owners can sell the land to developers for a far greater sum than they could as acres for farming.
History of Melbourne's Green Wedges
In 2010 the then State Labor government was able to push through Parliament, with the aid of their main opposition the extension of the Melbourne Urban Growth Boundary into what is known as the “Green Wedges” – land set aside during the reign of a past conservative Premier, the late Sir Rupert Hamer, to be the lungs of the city of Melbourne. In 2010 43,600 ha of Green Wedges were lost to future urban development.
In 2011, 30 years after Rupert Hamer left office Victoria has another conservative government with a different level of respect for undeveloped land towards the outer rim of Melbourne than that shown by that far sighted premier of yore. For the present day rulers it seems, it is treated as an opportunity to secure space for housing development for endless population growth. A new “terra nullius”? This current government early in its 4 year term is inviting local councils and land holders in rural areas to apply for even more “logical inclusions” to be re zoned residential.
Land-grabs juggernaut too rapid for busy people to defend against
Most Victorians are probably unaware of the extent of the land grab that is happening around them and what is happening to their heritage. It’s not as though they cannot find out but so much is going on all at once! One can be forgiven for confusing one issue with another and thinking that we are only being attacked from one side. The government seems to have done a great sleight of hand job of further undermining the Green Wedges at the same time as a report by a body called the Victorian Environment Assessment Council issued a report on public and Crown land in metropolitan Melbourne. In the same week, Melbournians learned that the administrators of a western suburbs municipality called Brimbank, (where the local government was sacked by the previous state government) propose to sell off 14 areas of open space currently used as parks! As someone exasperatedly remarked to me “They’ll get us to the stage we won’t know whether our arse is bald or barbered!”
How could all this happen in one week in a sophisticated, multicultural, well educated developed city like Melbourne? “Are they cleverer than the general populace?” I mused rhetorically to the friend with colorful language “They’ve got money and they’ve got staff. They’ve got bureaucrats sitting down thinking about this all day. The Victorian government is funding it……… I mean that’s their agenda!” he added.
Pro-development propaganda marketed as news, leaves democracy go begging
The "news" from V.E.A.C. telling Victorians that they are going to have less space for exercise and recreation in the future, the extension of the Urban Growth Boundary and the current attack on Green Wedges, not to mention Brimbank, represents an onslaught…
Melbourne’s Urban Growth Boundary is not really a boundary but a movable grazing fence, and it is moving again with new “logical inclusions” potentially taking it beyond a 60km radius in some directions from the GPO.
Overwhelming, distressing
It is overwhelming and exhausting for those who care about this and want to salvage something, confusing for those on the periphery and impenetrable to those who can’t or don’t apply themselves.
There is no doubt about it, our land is under intense pressure with councils ready to sell off public parks whilst at the same time the need for open space increases with population growth. High rise developments (i.e. no land) are endorsed by councils and the state government and small blocks of land in the Geelong (near Melbourne) area are sold as “smart blocks”. We are building on our race courses which provide a certain relief from the built up environment and we are selling golf courses and bowling greens for yet more housing. There is no escape from this process. If you live in a “growth corridor” you have the anguish of seeing once pretty hills, trees and paddocks disappear under the paved uniformity of early 21st century housing estates. “Frances” who lives in one says she has to continually alter her route whilst driving so that she is not confronted with these serial losses to her local environment. If you live in an established suburb, old houses on generous blocks of land go down like nine pins to make way for bulky town house development. Often the block is mined from perimeter to perimeter revealing the clay substratum to provide parking for 10 times the number of vehicles previously garaged at that address. There is little point in moving house if you don’t like this build up around you because it can happen anywhere.
Drop the 'boundless' rhetoric in favour of democracy
If Australia had “boundless plains to share” they would not have to be shared at all because they would be infinite. I will take that line in the Australian National Anthem to be poetic license but the contradiction of the enormous amount of land that Australia is supposed to have and the pressure and focus on it by governments, and the obvious effect that its scarcity is having on people, highlights a contradiction.
This verse from the national anthem should be deleted. It is simply not true. There is a modest amount of land where people want to live; it is mostly around the coast and we’re fighting for it, and paying a lot of money for it.
The government is not representing the interests of most Victorians both in pushing for higher population growth and for quietly rolling out more land for development.
Quality of life is diminishing and the people of Melbourne must realise it.
In 2001, the UK had the second highest child poverty rates in the European Union. Ten years on they have grown into angry disaffected youths
.
The police brutality issue and the case of the police killing of Duggan is a legal issue and likely a police cultural problem associated with the UK riots last week.
But Duggan's killing belies broader and deeper social problems across English urban societies. The rioting thus far has been in England (London's underprivileged Tottenham, Hackney, Croydon, and working-class English cities of Birmingham, Manchester, Nottingham, Liverpool and Wolverhampton). It has not spread to Scotland, Wales, Ireland, or Northern Ireland yet - why?
Rioting though has also copycatted to the more rural privileged English towns of Cambridge, Gloucester, Bristol and around County Kent - why? What is the common denominator? All riots involved youths and Y-Gens committing break and enter and burglary of retail shops and communicating with social media mobile devices, notably Blackberry's.
It is convenient knee-jerk ignorant simplism by the English government and the media attributing blame to just 'criminals', poor-parented youth, opportunistic hooligans, and gangs.
Poor understanding of social problems by any government will not enable its social problems to be addressed. Inept media analysis also confuses the situation.
Prime Minister Cameron, with his elite background is distant and aloof to England's urban social problems. His ideological mindset as a Conservative is centred upon national economic prosperity, which presumes social good flows from economic growth and prosperity. He seems incapable of recognising the disconnect between the parallel economy of the 'haves' and the 'have nots'.
Cameron is narrow-minded in his reading of the situation. He has said in Parliament last week that what the nation had witnessed was criminality "pure and simple". He said his government would do "whatever it takes to restore law and order". How easy and simplistic it is for Cameron to blame criminals? He sees it as a matter of parental discipline and a lack of responsibility in society. Cameron rejects the suggested underlying causes of underclass and poverty in Britain. He says: "This is not about poverty, it's about culture...a culture that says everything about rights, but nothing about responsibility." Impressive words, but when the leader of country is in denial about the causes of widespread urban riots being more than criminal opportunists, the root causes are ignored and the problems risk getting worse.
Cameron clearly has inherited a depressed and debt-ridden economy from Labor and the GFC. He came to office with an economic mandate to restore sound economic management and this has necessitated severe austerity measures reducing government public service delivery. But by simplistically focusing on addressing the economic ills will not auto-address social ills. Economic and economic policy is a subset of sociology and social policy. Societies don't magically become healthy by delivering on economic policy. Did Blair's Labor window of opportunity for social reform deliver to British have-nots? If not, how could British 'have-nots' have appealed to opposition Conservatives for recognition through the Blair years? What political party was listening to the plight of British underclass who probably voted informally anyway?
David Cameron, like his counterparts in Greece and Italy, are "flat-footed, reactive, trapped in double-talk, these are second-rate political creatures unprepared to deal with those responsible for the crisis". Even Barack Obama has been spineless. Hence the blunt words of Jacques Delors, three times president of the European Commission: "We don't just need firefighters; we need architects too."
A British blogger responding to the riots in Britain agreed: "WTF is going on with this government? Are they deliberately trying to rub our noses in it, or do they just have a tin ear? What a frightening bunch of amateurs."
With injustice now the blighted face of democracy, cynicism and fatalism gain ground. "What's the best way to deal with this crisis?", runs a popular Japanese joke. The answer: "Let the system collapse." The panacea looks more plausible by the day.' [Professor John Keane, 12th August 2011].
Cameron needs to get out more and listen to the ordinary citizens of urban England. He is sending an arrogant classist message by taking foreign holidays in Tuscany, while England's poor and unemployed are suffering abject downtrodden hopelessness. The public's perception that the government has let the banks and financial gamblers get away with rampant insolvency and handballing the corporate debt to the State is not helping matters.
England's and Britain's demographic been allowed to radically alter as a consequence of open door immigration. Whilst the country side may be relatively similar, Britain's urban demographic has little similarity to that of the 1960s or even the 1980s. Immigrants are a dominant characteristic of British urban society. What was the population policy plan and intended outcome? Where was the social investment in making multiculturalism work? There has been none. Since Thatcher economics has been rather liberal and laissez faire. Problem is the same approach has been taken of changing urban society. Economic theory is inappropriate for social re-engineering. Much of urban England and Britain is characterised by inter-generational unemployment, truancy, child poverty, broken homes, domestic violence and street crime.
What causes thousands of people in multiple urban centres to riot, commit violence, arson and loot shops? Recognise no single one cause. Many are clearly opportunists. Not all are disaffected underclass. But as to the underlying causes, start where people see injustice. Examine the social problems in England urban centres over the past twenty years. Who sent the messages inciting the riots? Controlling street violence is essential in the short term, and I am sure we will see the water canon armoured vehicles in London reminiscent of their use in the Northern Ireland riots of the 1970s. But water canons can't prevent riots and can't address the causes.
In 2001, the UK had the second highest child poverty rates in the European Union. [Read More]
Well those children are now adolescents and many have nowhere to go and no hope for the future. And dangled in front of them and in the media constantly is the government's Olympic decadence.
Cameron's Olympics do not have a happy outlook. English urban society has a far bleaker outlook.
London 2012 Olympics logo - it may well become a legacy of English society divided
Tigerquoll
Suggan Buggan
Snowy River Region
Victoria 3885
Australia
Interesting perspective on the riots in Britain. Well commentated, with lots of useful statistics that reflect the British bias to produce a landless proletariat that gets discarded when it cannot be absorbed by industry. Says how the tax system encourages people to have children, but with fathers and mothers living separately. Final parts notes how civil war in the Middle East has coincided with very high food prices and how in Britain food prices have risen to three times the level in other parts of the EU. The video identifies itself as a "True News" service.
Police victim, Mark Duggan, with his first born child
Online investigation of the current UK Riots reveals that the riots have been part seeded by immigrant concentration and unemployment; but more so by youth underclass reacting to the UK's conservative government's austerity cuts in public funding in response to the GFC failures, which themselves are perceived by many people to have been caused by the corporate sector - banks, stock market, corporates, the rich, the government, the police. Hence the riot targets have been corporates, the perceived 'haves' (business owners, McDonald's, commercial retailers displaying spoils of wealth). Cameron's arrogant Tory image must be reopening memories of Thatcherism. Cameron was holidaying in Tuscany at the time thanks very much - so his forced return must have had some sense of win by the mobs.
England's disenfranchised urban youth have had this sentiment played on by various radical, extreme Left and anarchist movements. There has been recent history of violence with comparable modus operandi. All it has taken is idle youth over a hot summer and a trigger - the police shooting of a young black man, Mark Duggan.
See messages on the following UK websites. Some of these web sites are quite scary in what they are advocating...
But when you listen to the British media, they seem to not have a clue about any real cause behind these riots. They just naively attribute the rioting to youths spontaneously reacting to a police shooting of a man with a gun in Tottenham, and otherwise out for a bit of fun over the hot August summer break. Simultaneous riots in multiple urban centres around England strung out over four days. Yeah right! These riots are clearly co-ordinated, but their perpetuation reveals broader and deeper anti-government sentiment . Philadelphia in the US has also experienced rioting over the same weekend. "Police are blaming riots and looting in London and other United Kingdom cities on flash mobs organized with social media like Twitter. Incidents in Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights join disturbances such as one in Philadelphia last Sunday. [Read More].
Clearly, the social media organisations, Facebook, Twitter and Blackberry Messenger, used by the mobs to incite violence, looting and vandalism; need to be held partially responsible just as Murdock's print media have been recently held legally to account for unethical behaviour.
The pertinent social question is do the UK riots have common causes to those recently in Greece?
Anyone kindly giving the above listed lot the benefit of the doubt about their propensity for violence, search Google, type 'anarchist violence' and select Googles images option, then double click on any image result.
In Tottenham last weekend, McDonald's was one of the first targets for arson
Anarchists attack London last April
'If a copper has to die to get our point across then so be it,' an anarchist known as Seth said. 'I'm happy if the filth get sent crashing to the floor and don't get up - then we've had a good day out.'
Human population growth, deforestation and epidemics, Frank Ryan's theory in Virolution: Recently I listened to Lord Monkton whilst looking at his slides about global warming. Why did I listen to Lord Monkton? Because I was irritated at the ad hominem and unscientific religious terminology of some of those trying to combat global-warming-denialist arguments. Before he ever got to global warming science, however I became frustrated at Lord Monkton’s simplistic opinions about the use of DDT and malaria rates. Didn’t he realize that the application of DDT failed with malaria as the mosquitoes adapted their habits to avoid the use of the poison and as they developed immunity to its effects? But the disease of malaria and that of other zoonosias is far more complicated than that because these kinds of disease involve a wide range of mosquito and other vectors with many different habits, in a wide range of landscapes among a wide range of humans with many different habits. Cites some little-known research from French epidemiologist historian Chantal Beauchamp. I hope the reader will find the following discussion interesting and possibly contribute more discussion. Much of this article comes from a book in progress by Sheila Newman (me) about population numbers and capitalism.
Virolution
Since the mapping of the human genome we have discovered that virus material comprises a substantial portion of animal and plant cells, and is treated by organisms as part of themselves, because it has, in fact, evolved with that organism. Frank Ryan’s book, Virolution, Harper-Collins, UK, 2009, advances a theory about one of the roles of the virus material that all species carry as part of their genomes. Because their presence is deeply symbiotic – indeed it is just another part of the animal - so the animal is “immune” to the virus.
However, different animal populations carry different viruses as part of their genome, and sub-populations of species may carry viruses that are dangerous to other members of the same species. Ryan discusses this prospect in a study of different populations of koala in Australia, for instance. [1]
Ryan goes on to write about how it is likely that certain diseases, including diabetes mellitus and multiple sclerosis, result when this mutually beneficial relationship breaks down in humans for reasons that need more exploration. This is also an explanation for cancer and the increase in cancers in elderly people whose systems, as they become more disorderly, are unable to maintain an effective immune system.
Back to how the endemic viral material of different populations and species can be dangerous for that of other populations and species: The fact that viruses embodied in animal cells are dangerous to other populations which are not immune to those viruses, means that where one population – of the same species but from a different area - encroaches on another population’s territory, the encroaching population runs the risk of succumbing to viruses carried by the first. Other species can also be affected.
Hendra Virus, bats and invading horses and humans
It seems likely that recent infections of horses, humans and a dog by the Hendra Virus in Queensland demonstrate the Virolution theory. Under Queensland government policy, stable natural environments have been rapidly cleared for agriculture, tourist infrastructure and housing, to accommodate intrastate, interstate and international human immigration.
Humans and their horses have encroached on the territory of wild species, and have exposed themselves to viruses from the species they have invaded.
The species which are suspected of having transmitted the viruses will themselves have been impacted by the diseases that travel with humans and their domestic animals. We should be studying our effect on the bats, in order to learn more.
Australian natural history is a sad tale of vegetation and animal species depletion. For instance, native cats (quolls) have virtually disappeared from some states, probably succumbing to parvovirus borne by imported cats and dogs that accompanied land-clearing humans.
Hendra virus is not the only case where the forest has fought back. Australians have for some time coexisted uncomfortably with Barma Forest virus and Murray Valley Encephalitis. As we continue to push our ecological environment beyond the limits, we can expect this mix to become more ferocious and that this will be compounded by the absolute whirlpool of human population movements and activities globally.
Other places, other plagues, other times
This tale of the Australian ecological disaster can also be told of every other country where humans have, through the development of agriculture and new ways of traveling, rapidly and massively extended their footprint.
The Black Plague and ecological theory
There are theories that the Black Plague of the 14th century in Europe was not really rat-borne bubonic plague, but a zoonotic hemorrhagic fever. There are a few reasons to think this might be so, including an absence of reports of dying rats preceding the black plague, and the mortality rate, which was not really typical of bubonic plague. [2] Note, however, that several kinds of forest animal can carry plague and that rats may live in forests as much as they live in cities and on ships.
The plague, whatever it really was, greatly reduced population numbers in Britain and permitted forests to grow back and damaged soil to regenerate. The risk of malaria in England declined during this arboreal renaissance, probably because of a concomitant reduction in well-lit still-water pools. It would also have declined due to decline of the infection pool.
By the time of King Henry VIII, England's forests inspired envy elsewhere.
“The forests in the south of England, decimated by Roman iron smelting centuries before, had long since regenerated. England’s relatively rich endowment of wood provoked the admiration of the Venetian ambassador to King Henry VIII’s court whose country was then, for the most part, bare of trees. He wrote of the great bounty with which nature had provided England, allowing the English to have firewood in abundance. Indeed, in contrast to Venetian territory, ‘no lack of timber was felt or feared’ when Henry VIII ascended the throne.” (From John Perlin, A Forest Journey) [3]
Henry, however, saw Britain as backward and made haste to clear the forests for industry, importing skilled workers and capital to develop new industries, many of which depended on cheap fuel from burning plentiful wood, the prospect of which attracted capital.
With the addition of new immigrants, the human population began to grow and its activities to expand again in England. Where the trees were cleared, the water would rise and new swamps formed.
Little Ice Age and Malaria (1500-1750): exploiting the coastal niche in the Netherlands and England:
Adding opportunity for malaria in Britain was the rash of canal building, led and financed by immigrants from the Netherlands, where there was also a high rate of malaria. Malaria, which 20th century people tend to associate exclusively with the tropics, became a chronic scourge in England and continental Europe and would have impacted both on population numbers and on life expectancy. [Remark about Henry VIII edited out] [3A]
This was the time of the “Little Ice Age” (1500-1750), which Malaria Epidemiologist Otto S. Knottnerus describes as “the high days” of malaria around the North Sea in Europe, coinciding with this rush to exploit the “coastal niche” (made available by falling sea-level).
“... but its high-days were the Little Ice Age. After 1750 the disease retreated until it disappeared in the 1950s. The hotbeds of malaria were largely restricted to brackish coastal zones, where the mosquito Anopheles atroparvus could thrive. In these zones death-rates were 25-50 pct higher than in inland areas.” [4]
He attributes the increase in malaria in the Netherlands in part to resettlement around the polders (dykes), where malaria carrying mosquitoes which could live in quite salty water found conditions conducive. [5] This resettlement in the Netherlands was associated with massive land and water disturbance of a relatively chronic nature in conjunction with rapid population growth and the accumulation of high densities around cities. Around this time, as well, swamp draining and the building of sea-walls was ongoing across the sea, in England. [6]
Was the rising incidence of malaria in the late middle ages due to the new habit of digging canals and the denser settlement that brought relatively dense populations of humans in contact with malarial mosquitoes or the mosquitoes in contact with malarial humans including new immigrants from the Netherlands, where similar conditions prevailed?
Disease, mortality and environment in early modern England
Using data sets of demographic indices ranging from 1600 to 1800 AD for more than 1000 parishes in three counties of South East England, Mary Dobson, in “Disease mortality and the environment in early modern England,” [7] showed that death rates in marshland parishes were much higher than they were for other places in England. Mortality ran at over 50 in 1000 in such places and infant mortality was as high as 250 to 300 per 1000. These figures are comparable for death rates in tropical African countries where malaria prevails. They also reflect seasonal and annual changes in weather consistent with mosquito activity.
Paul Reiter, in “Defoe and Beyond,” [8] cites Defoe,
“a strange decay of the [female] sex here … it was very frequent to meet with men that had had from five to six, to fourteen or fifteen wives… the reason… was this; that they [the men] being bred in the marshes themselves, and seasoned to the place, did pretty well with it; but that they always went into the hilly country … for a wife: that when they took the young lasses out of the wholesome and fresh air, they were healthy, fresh and clear, and well; but when they came out of their native aire into the marshes… they presently changed their complexion, got an ague or two, and seldom held it above half a year or a year at most; and then …[the men] would go to the uplands again, and fetch another; so that marrying of wives was reckoned a kind of good farm to them.”
Diseases associated with marshes in England
Malaria was not the only disease associated with water in England.
“Altitude and drainage: water-borne diseases and the role of human pollution. One striking and repeatedly observed characteristic of the Southeast England data as the apparent significance of altitude and natural drainage in determining variations in death rates. Low-lying communities, especially those close to rivers and streams, while not as mortal as coastal and estuarine marshland parishes, nevertheless had consistently higher death rates than ‘dry upland’ settlements, defined as those situated above three or four hundred feet where there was often an absence or scarcity of surface drainage and water was obtained from wells or natural springs. …Low lying riverine parishes has average background mortality rates of the order of 30 to 40 per 1000; infant mortality rates between 150 and 200 per 1000; life expectation at birth in the thirties…” [9]
Why did Malaria disappear in Europe?
Malaria rates dropped after 1750 and slowly receded to almost vanishing point around the 1950s.
Decline in malaria incidence is often attributed to the introduction of quinine. Others, however, suggest that the doses and administration of quinine were probably epidemiologically ineffective in areas with high rates of endemicity. [10]
Among the technologies and practices known to Rome but reintroduced over the early 17th C was the technology of draining swamps. This technology, imported from Italy via Holland, came to England around 1614. [11] It is frequently claimed that this did much to reduce the very high mortality from malaria in England, but it has also been pointed out how mosquitoes did not always disappear. [12]
Another factor cited is climate change.
“Only two hundred years ago ague (malaria) was prevalent in the marshy lands of Norfolk, England. At that time the climate was more continental, giving very hot summers and cold winters. The disease as thus able to develop in the vector, Anopheline mosquitoes, in the summer and so spread from host to host, while it overwintered in man. The climate has changed now and the cooler summers are not favourable for the mosquito’s development.” [13]
Swamp draining and malaria in humans
The draining of swamps to enlarge agricultural land is often considered largely responsible for the reduction of mortality from malaria, in addition to other changes to agriculture. Some of these changes were the introduction of root crops such as mangel-wurzels and turnips as winter fodder for animals, which supplemented herd diets and meant carrying capacity was augmented. It is thought that this herd-boosting effect may have given mosquitoes a wider choice of targets. The mosquito is ‘zoophilic’, meaning that it has an eclectic taste in species. (The African anopheles mosquito is considered an exception, having seemingly developed a strong preference for human hosts in cohabitation with humans since farming in Neolithic times. This may be a reason it seems much harder to eradicate in Africa. On the other hand, continuous friction between humans and their disrupted natural environment might have more to do with this, as Robert Desowitz suggests, exposing more water to sunlight and therefore improving fertility opportunities for mosquitoes.) The introduction of machinery took men out of the fields and would therefore have lessened their availability to mosquitoes. New materials and construction methods made houses more mosquito-proof. More medical care and lower cost for quinine (the first treatment for malaria) reduced the amount of mosquito parasites in the blood and the amount of time they remained in the blood stream. This would have reduced the opportunities for mosquitoes to obtain infected blood from hosts. [14]
Chantal Beauchamp’s contribution to the epidemiological debate on malaria decline
Explanations do not always coincide with the epidemiological reality though. Malaria remains a mystery. When swamps are drained, water often appears elsewhere. The actual mosquito population may not diminish, but the incidence of malaria does.
War and malaria
In Chantal Beauchamp, “Fièvres d'hier, paludisme d'aujourd'hui. Vie et mort d'une maladie,” [15] Beauchamp describes how, between 1920 and 1930 in Spain, there was a massive organized fight against malaria, employing researchers and doctors in central and regional locations. Malaria rates fell until the time of the Spanish Civil War, when a new wave of malaria was largely blamed on infections originating in Morocco, plus disorganization of epidemiological medical services by the war. The anti-malarial war was relaunched with more services in 1944. In 1946 DDT was used in a few regions to kill anopheles mosquito vectors, although these mosquitoes were not common in Spain. Statistics of the time collected by Fernandez Maruto (see Figure, “Life and Death of a Disease”) showed a massive decrease between 1900-1918, followed by a couple of blunt spikes, then renewed decline after 1920, with this decline continuing until about 1938 when rates of malaria in Spain spiked to 1922 levels in 1943 or so, after which they declined precipitously to where the graph ends in 1960. Maruto attributed this decline to the medical approaches which had preceded it.
European Commission to fight malaria
As Chantal Beauchamp comments, however, it is obvious that the decline in malaria had begun well before 1920 when the European Commission to fight malaria and its [medical] services had first been organized and deployed. So, what really caused the decline? she asks. Perhaps anti-malaria combat simply needs sustained efforts and the interruption by the Spanish Civil War interrupted these? No, says Chantal. Malaria came back in Corsica at the same time, despite there being no civil war there and no mass arrival of troops from Morocco.
Quinine and malaria
Beauchamp also discusses the role of high and low doses of quinine in France, Corsica and Spain, finding that, high or low, quinine had impact, but cannot explain the whole story. Later drugs also had impact, but are still not sufficient. The success of campaigns against anopheles and other mosquito vectors is undermined by comparison with other countries which can be cited as ‘controls’. There are so many problems in identifying species of mosquitoes and determining their impact over many different regions that conclusions are difficult.
Herd-keeping and malaria
The role of changes to ways keeping herds is examined and found to be contradictory. In some countries the practice of putting animals in stables seems to have been accompanied by a decline in malarial predation on humans. In other countries, however, where herds were not enclosed, malaria also declined in humans.
Marsh-draining and malaria
Next, elimination of sundry water-sources such as marshes, ponds and puddles, coincided with a decline in malaria. Unfortunately for this theory, malaria also declined where water remained as it was.
On page 255 Beauchamp gives this example of how malaria declined in some regions of France whether or not swamps and similar water-sources were drained. Furthermore, in these cases, variations in the density of anopheles populations fails to coincide with variations in the rate of malarial infection in humans.
“In France, in three regions justly reputed as malarial because they were marshy – Brenne, Sologne and Dombes – health measures involving draining marshes were only temporary in Dombes, very patchy in Sologne, and non-existent in Brenne. Despite this, malaria disappeared in these areas between 1880 and 1890. Marsh draining, limited or absent, had practically no impact on the anopheles mosquito population, of which the density today is similar to the density it would have had in the 19th century, when malaria was rife. In some cases the ponds and marshes have become even more extensive than they were last century [19th], and the presence of anopheles mosquitos is even greater. This is also true of the dead arms of the Rhine River and the length of the Il in Alsace. We can say the same for the Languedoc, where, despite the growth in rice-paddies and the expansion of larval niches from 1914, no expansion of local malaria has been observed.” [16]
Human vectors and malaria
Beauchamp then notes that human malarial infection ultimately depends on human vectors. High birth rates tend to coincide with high rates of malaria, and declines in malaria rates with declines in birth rates. Unfortunately this coincidence doesn’t explain why the rate of malaria jumped over the period of 1937 and 1943 in different places.
Improvements in living standards and malaria
Next she notes how improvements in living standards have often been cited as responsible for declines in disease rates – for malaria and for many other maladies. The details of cause and effect, however, are lacking and the evidence is often contradictory:
“In its detail however, the relation between economic standard and standard of health is much less clear. From 1948 malaria mortality rates declined to the levels of 1936, but in 1955 agricultural production was 18% less than in 1930 and the availability of cereals per inhabitant was 35% less! It is only in 1962 that agricultural production in Spain again attained the level of 1931-1935. To explain the regression of a disease after the Second World War on economic development in Spain seems a little quick. In that period it seems that organized epidemiological approaches were the decisive factor in the eradication of the disease.” [17]
Ecological degradation and malaria
She refers (p.258) to Pérez Moreda’s ecological theory that changes to the landscapes of agricultural holdings in the 18th century, with neglect of huge ranches [latifundios] in the South and the center of the country, coincided with the rise of malaria in the same period. Deforestation caused by overgrazing, and soil degradation through environmentally destructive farming practices, were two important factors in the expansion of the disease.
For Moreda, ecological degradation with thinning of vegetation layers assisted the development of anopheles larval niches in the soil, while deforestation provoked mosquito migration on a grand scale.
Presence of humans and their activities and malaria
So, what are we to conclude?
That we are invisible to ourselves, perhaps. That we lack insight into our own presence on the planet.
Beauchamp concludes that the presence and activities of humans are not properly taken into account in the history of malaria.
My reason for exploring the relationship between population numbers and malaria was because, when I started a book I am currently writing about population numbers and the rise of capitalism, I had assumed that population numbers had risen in Britain because of the availability of coal as fuel. I discovered, however, that the numbers had begun to rise just before the actual industrial revolution. One reason for this seems to have been a decrease in rates of malaria.
“Retreat (1750-1950): The retreat of malaria has not yet been sufficiently explained. During the 18th century mortality rates in some regions were falling rapidly, whereas in others they remained largely the same. Particularly in Southeast England and the western districts bordering the Wadden Sea (Friesland, Groningen and East Friesland) population growth started early. But in Holland, Zealand and many German districts figures remained stagnant until the 19th century, whereas mortality rates were high up to the 1850s (Dobson 1998:81-159; Knottnerus 1997:38; Norden 1984). Moreover, in the German Lower Rhineland as well as in the Baltic unprecedented outbreaks of malaria took place during the first half of 19th century (Jaenson & al. 1986; Anderson 1980; Kortenhaus 1928; Wesenberg-Lund 1920-21:172). In general, tertian fevers got a more epidemic character instead of remaining endemic, whereas quartan fevers tended to become rare. As malaria outbreaks became more uncommon, seasonal peaks shifted from late summer to early spring (Swellengrebel and De Buck 1938; Seventer 1969).” [My translation][18]
What caused the decrease? It is possible that Britain's environment became more stable after 1750, and that between 1600 and 1750, destruction of the natural environment was at its height, but after 1750 there was either very little natural environment left and/or human settlements and activities took on an urban character which did not bring large numbers of people into contact with mosquitoes, soil and water. Around this time, enclosures reduced land for peasants, and forced people to seek work in cities.
London and Queensland: Plague and Hendra Virus
At the time of the civil wars in Britain, people in London went into the countryside and attacked the forests for wood to burn for fires. This was part of an orgy of forest destruction that went on preceding and during the time of the last big black plagues in England, which hit London badly.
Was the forest fighting back?
Is the forest fighting back again against the insightless destruction by humans of their natural environment in Queensland? Should we modify our behaviour?
NOTES
[1] Ryan also makes a remarkable mistake about the numbers of koalas in Queensland, which I brought to the attention of the publishers and the Koala Foundation of Australia. I think that he confused the number of Queenslanders with the number of koalas somehow, because he came up with 4 million!
[2] Source: G. Christakos, Interdisciplinary Public Health Reasoning and Epidemic Modelling: the Case of Black Death (2005), pp. 110-14.
[3] John Perlin, A Forest journey, the story of wood and civilisation, The Countryman Press, Woodstock, Vermont, USA, 2005, p. 163.
[3A] On 21 April 2013 I edited out the following remark because I cannot find my original source for it and because it seems to be contradicted by dates of usage of malaria: "Henry VIII, by the way, was an early user of quinine and may have suffered from malaria."
[4] Otto S. Knottnerus, “Malaria Around the North Sea: A Survey,” in Gerold Wefer, Wolfgang H. Berger, Karl-Ernst Behre, Eynstein Jansen (ed.), Climatic Development and History of the North Atlantic Realm: Hanse Conference Report. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2002, pp. 339-353 http://www.xs4all.nl/~ottoknot/werk/Malaria.html
[6] From historical records, we know that a malarious illness referred to as “the ague” or “intermittent fever” caused high levels of mortality in the British marshlands and fens from the 15th to the 19th century (4, 5). Robust evidence that the illness was malaria emerged in the early 19th century, when the increasing use of quinine and advances in fever diagnosis and pathology created a distinct separation from other acute fevers. Source: Katrin Gaardbo Kuhn, Diarmid H. Campbell-Lendrum, Ben Armstrong, and Clive R. Davies, “Malaria in Britain: Past, present, and future,” National Academy of Sciences, 2003, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC188345/
[7] Dobson, Mary J., “Contours of Death: disease, mortality and the environment in early modern England”, Health Transition Review, Vol.2, Supplementary Issue, 1992, p.81.
[8] Paul Reiter, “From Shakespeare to Defoe: Malaria in England in the Little Ice Age”, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Vol.6, No.1, Jan-Feb 2000, Center for Disease Control and Prevention, San Juan, Puerto Rico, p.7.
[9] Dobson, Mary J., “Contours of Death: disease, mortality and the environment in early modern England”, Health Transition Review, Vol.2, Supplementary Issue, 1992, p.82
[10] Chantal Beauchamp, “ Fièvres d'hier, paludisme d'aujourd'hui. Vie et mort d'une maladie,” Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, Volume 43, Issue 1, 1988, pp. 249-275, p.258, and J. Callot, “Un problème complexe : la régression du paludisme en France,” Annales, Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, Vol2, Issue 3, 1947, pp. 328-335, p.332.
[11] Joan Thirsk, “The Rural Economy”, in Ed. Jerome Blum, Our Forgotten Past, Seven centuries of Life in the Land, Thames & Hudson, 1982, p.86.
[12] Chantal Beauchamp, “ Fièvres d'hier, paludisme d'aujourd'hui. Vie et mort d'une maladie,” Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, Volume 43, Issue 1, 1988, pp. 249-275, p. 255.
[13] The Larousse Encyclopedia of Animal Life, Hamlyn, London, 1972, p.27
[14] Paul Reiter, “From Shakespeare to Defoe: Malaria in England in the Little Ice Age”, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Vol.6, No.1, Jan-Feb 2000, Center for Disease Control and Prevention, San Juan, Puerto Rico, p.7. and Robert S. Desowitz, New Guinea Tapeworms and Jewish Grandmothers,W.W. Norton and company, New York, London, pp20-21 and 50-51.
[15] “Fièvres d'hier, paludisme d'aujourd'hui. Vie et mort d'une maladie,”Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, Volume 43, Issue 1, 1988, pp. 249-275
[16] Chantal Beauchamp, “ Fièvres d'hier, paludisme d'aujourd'hui. Vie et mort d'une maladie,” Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, Volume 43, Issue 1, 1988, pp. 249-275, p.258, and J. Callot, “Un problème complexe : la régression du paludisme en France,” Annales, Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, Vol2, Issue 3, 1947, pp. 255.
[17] Chantal Beauchamp, “ Fièvres d'hier, paludisme d'aujourd'hui. Vie et mort d'une maladie,” Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, Volume 43, Issue 1, 1988, pp. 249-275, p.258, and J. Callot, “Un problème complexe : la régression du paludisme en France,” Annales, Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, Vol2, Issue 3, 1947, pp. 257-258.
[18] Otto S. Knottnerus, “Malaria Around the North Sea: A Survey,” in Gerold Wefer, Wolfgang H. Berger, Karl-Ernst Behre, Eynstein Jansen (ed.), Climatic Development and History of the North Atlantic Realm: Hanse Conference Report. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2002, pp. 339-353 http://www.xs4all.nl/~ottoknot/werk/Malaria.html
The Honourable Ryan Smith MP, Minister for the Environment, has confirmed that he will upgrade the status of the Frankston Reservoir to a Nature Conservation Reserve. A delegation, including the Member for Frankston Geoff Shaw MP, met with the Minister in March to discuss the many issues surrounding the future of this significant bushland. The extraordinary quality of this remnant wilderness comes from the fact that there has been no public access for 90 years. Full protection of this reserve will protect the fauna and flora, and guard the “sanctuary” and “solitude” experience of this unique natural heritage for Frankston residents and all Victorians.
Designation as a Nature Conservation Reserve ensures that the protection and enhancement of the flora and fauna of Frankston Reservoir is the primary focus for the future management of this area. The change in classification to Nature Conservation Reserve will require an act of parliament to amend the Crown Land Reserves Act and it is anticipated that this will take place later this year.
The upgrade in the designation seizes this unique opportunity to fully protect the very last area of highly significant bayside vegetation and fauna that lies between Portsea and the city of Melbourne. Moreover, for a society increasingly beset by the nature deficit syndrome, it also offers an exceptional opportunity for people to connect directly with the landscape and fauna that is as the first settlers saw it.
The Frankston Reservoir site supports nationally, state and regionally significant flora and fauna species, plant communities and fauna habitats, including 6 ecological vegetation classes (EVC’s) of State significance. The most extensive of these EVC’s is the endangered Grassy Woodland, which is one of the most species rich ecosystems in the temperate world and is particularly rich in native grasses, orchids and lilies. 215 indigenous flora species are recorded at the 90 hectare site and over 100 fauna species including the nationally threatened Growling Grass Frog and state significant Musk Duck. Koalas, sugar gliders and echidnas also continue to enjoy the habitat of the Frankston Reservoir.
The extraordinary high quality of this remnant wilderness can be attributed to the fact that there has been no public access for 90 years while it was under the control of the water authorities. The full protection of this reserve will not only protect the fauna and flora, but it will also guard the “sanctuary” and “solitude” experience that this unique piece of our natural heritage can offer, not just Frankston residents, but all Victorians.
Are humans individuals with personalities or are we simply portions of a greater whole, with little claim to individuality? Some thoughts on cellular arrangement and the end-game thermodynamics of progress ideology. The tension between a glimpsed view of living wholeness and the steady extrusion of deadness that is crushing around and upon us. I wonder how many other people see this?
Three hippos hanging their heads sadly, looking down into a shallow pool of foul brown water, seemingly reluctant to bathe or drink... A lone tiger walking restlessly, desperate for shade ... Two scrawny lions pacing inside their enclosure, suffering from a lack of food. These are just some of the more than 1,000 war-torn animal victims still trying to survive in Libya's Tripoli Zoo after NATO's war against Libyan supporters of Moammar Gadhafi.
How many other "solutions", detention centres, unaccompanied children, unidentified entrants and money must be spent on failed policies to address the asylum seeker issue? The government is trying to please too many lobby groups - those who want the economic benefits of population growth, and those prefer to act with compassion and humanity.
This article makes it clear that energy consumption and its fall-out, pollution, have enormously increased over two or three generations, to a point where actions commonly recommended to minimise them, are laughably inadequate. It also highlights a tendency for one generation to be encouraged to blame another generation for overconsumption, rather than to blame the market system, which benefits from the social conflict.
Illustration by High Moon, 
In the 1980s I made a survey of Trading Post advertisements selling dangerous dog breeds before Trading Post became cautious about such advertisements. While there were 101 advertisements for primarily pet, show, racing or working dogs, there were 158 ads selling larger guard and hunting dogs - the sort that can scare or menace the young and the old - even if foxies may be quicker on the nip. Some cross-breeds sounded doubly or triply dangerous, for example, "Sire Staffordshire Bull x heeler, bred for pig dogs" and the possibly ultimate combination, "American pit bull terrier cross bull terrier cross boxer bull mastiff”. Most of the advertising owners and breeders lived in Melbourne’s rural fringes and north-east and north-west outer suburbs, where life and people are perhaps correctly seen to be tougher.
Writer Val Yule, Daughter, grandchild, and Tangles, who was killed by a pit bull terrier.
Citizens in Australia’s major cities are becoming increasingly unhappy about what they perceive as the escalating deterioration in their quality of life - traffic congestion, overloaded public transport, unaffordable housing for young people, increases in the costs of basic services and overcrowding. There is little doubt that recent election results and unfavourable opinion polls are partly an expression of this dissatisfaction. (Article first published on On-Line Opinion, where you may also currently make comments.)
Cynthia McKinney is an unusual black US former congresswoman who has risked her life to report on the situation in Libya from Libya on what she calls the "Truth Tour". The article below contains her most recent report, which contains parts of alternative journalists' articles and criticises mainstream journalism. The video where she speaks, included here, is an addition. It is quite rivetting stuff.
Eviction of Thomas Considine, Tullycrine, Ireland, July 1888
In a brilliant new paper released this morning, Labor MP Kelvin Thomson has proposed his "Witches' Hats" theory of government -- a theory that places central importance on rates of population growth.
http://fb.me/18xDXIEuv
Fidel Castro, Muammar Gaddafi and Hugo Chavez are three men of different eras who have lived a similar desire to defend the rights of the nations they represent and to network with other struggling regions over international trade and political representation. The nations and regions they have championed all have suffered greatly at the hands of the United States. These leaders have confronted political realities that simply are not acknowledged in the mainstream western press. Chavez recently spoke again about Libya and of the danger of the predatory US taking advantage of his current illness, for which he is being treated in Cuba.
Continuing the updates on the Fukushima No.1 Nuclear Power Station in Japan from...
Mornington Peninsula Ratepayer's and Residents' Association says that Mornington Peninsula shire has earned the disgraceful reputation of being the worst financial performing council in Victoria in 2011-12, that its liveability statement is spin, and that they can't understand why the Council ignored the call by many in the community to advertise for a CEO who can control rate increases.
If we had direct democracy and referendums in this country, the Wonthaggi Desal would never have got up - but we don't, yet. Andrew Chapman is leading a fight for water justice for Victorians to find out how on earth the Brumby government got away with this one. The project is currently estimated to cost $5.7b and it is thought that Victorians will be paying $600m/year for it whether or not the water is required. It will also tax Victoria’s electricity supplies. See also: 
You can help bring Direct Democracy to Australia. To vote on this campaign go to 
In light of the riots in Britain, we are publishing an article based on some correspondence from the 
In 2001, the UK had the second highest child poverty rates in the European Union. Ten years on they have grown into angry disaffected youths
Human population growth, deforestation and epidemics, Frank Ryan's theory in Virolution: Recently I listened to Lord Monkton whilst looking at his slides about global warming. Why did I listen to Lord Monkton? Because I was irritated at the ad hominem and unscientific religious terminology of some of those trying to combat global-warming-denialist arguments. Before he ever got to global warming science, however I became frustrated at Lord Monkton’s simplistic opinions about the use of DDT and malaria rates. Didn’t he realize that the application of DDT failed with malaria as the mosquitoes adapted their habits to avoid the use of the poison and as they developed immunity to its effects? But the disease of malaria and that of other zoonosias is far more complicated than that because these kinds of disease involve a wide range of mosquito and other vectors with many different habits, in a wide range of landscapes among a wide range of humans with many different habits. Cites some little-known research from French epidemiologist historian Chantal Beauchamp. I hope the reader will find the following discussion interesting and possibly contribute more discussion. Much of this article comes from a book in progress by Sheila Newman (me) about population numbers and capitalism.
The Honourable Ryan Smith MP, Minister for the Environment, has confirmed that he will upgrade the status of the Frankston Reservoir to a Nature Conservation Reserve. A delegation, including the Member for Frankston Geoff Shaw MP, met with the Minister in March to discuss the many issues surrounding the future of this significant bushland. The extraordinary quality of this remnant wilderness comes from the fact that there has been no public access for 90 years. Full protection of this reserve will protect the fauna and flora, and guard the “sanctuary” and “solitude” experience of this unique natural heritage for Frankston residents and all Victorians.
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