The tragic sinking of Carnival's 'Costa Concordia last Friday off the Italian Isola del Giglio is symptomatic of a greedy cruise ship industry fanatical about cramming as many paying passengers as possible on bigger and more ships, while driving a cost-cutting culture to constantly boost profit performance for shareholders on global stock markets. These days modern cruise ships are expected to be unsinkable. Almost exactly one hundred years ago, people expected the same of the Titanic. People thought the Titanic was unsinkable because it was so large and mighty. Today, people marvel that a ship like the Concordia could have run aground while sailing a routine course.. The parallels between the underlying causes of the Costa Concordia sinking and the Titanic are disturbingly similar.

On 15th April back in 1912, the passenger liner RMS Titanic struck an iceberg off Newfoundland and sank in three hours. The Costa Concordia struck a rock that got stuck inside the left side, making it lean over and take on a lot of water in the space of two, three minutes. The Titanic had 2,223 passengers on board, but only carried lifeboats for 1,178. The media have reported that the Costa Concordia had over 4200 passengers on board at the time of running aground on the rock, although the bookings website states a 3000 passenger capacity.

The Titanic was the biggest most luxurious ship built to date in England at that time, being nearly 900 feet long, standing 25 stories high, and weighed an incredible 46,000 tons. With turn-of-the-century design and technology, including sixteen major watertight compartments in her lower section that could easily be sealed off in the event of a punctured hull, the Titanic was deemed an unsinkable ship. According to her builders, even in the worst possible accident at sea, two ships colliding, the Titanic would stay afloat for two to three days, which would provide enough time for nearby ships to help. The Titanic's engineers, believing a ship so large and powerful was unlikely to sink anyway, neglected to take into account the fact that the bulkheads dividing the 16 compartments came up only 10 feet above the waterline, meaning water could still flood the closest compartments even if intact.

Owned by giant US cruise line Carnival Corporation, the Costa Concordia is the world’s 26th largest passenger ship and the biggest ship built so far in Italy. The 950-ft Costa Concordia was built in 2005 and (was) the largest and most luxurious in the Costa cruise fleet, boasting bars, restaurants, a gym, large spa and several lavish suites and eleven decks! The Costa Concordia boasted as being the largest, longest and best ship in the Costa fleet for fitness and relaxation. It had a Fitness Area on two decks, covering a total of almost 20,450 square feet, four swimming pools, two with retractable glass roofs. There were 13 bars, 4 restaurants, a club, a theatre and 500 cabins with balconies. It had a 4 star rating.

Perhaps more money ought to have been spent on training its crew. Had the Captain of the Costa Concordia stayed in deep water, the compartmentalization of the ship's hull would likely have kept the ship afloat and life boats could have been used. Instead he tried to bring it closer to shore which frankly was really stupid. He ran it aground-still to far to swim- and the boat tipped over. I would know better than to do that. Or maybe it was the First Mate who screwed up and the Captain was dining with passengers as they are wont to do.

It is not yet public how many lifeboats were on board, but reports are than many were inaccessible due to the degree of listing of the ship. Many passengers aboard the Concordia have complained the crew didn't give them good directions on evacuating and waited so long to lower the lifeboats that many couldn't be released because the ship was listing so heavily. One passenger accounted "We couldn't get the lifeboats off and the life rafts that the staff use were stuck to the side of the ship. It was frightening." He used his height to bridge a gap between decks three and four as a human ladder and help passengers reach lifeboats. There were negligent delays in effecting the evacuation. The public announcements misleadingly advised passengers of an electrical problem for a critical 45 minutes. Robert Elcombe, 50, from Colchester but who now lives in Australia, said he and his wife Tracy got into a life boat – but were ordered out again when staff said it was ‘only a generator problem’ that could be fixed.

Originally, a lifeboat drill was scheduled to take place on board the Titanic on April 14, 1912 - the day the Titanic hit the iceberg. However, for an unknown reason, Captain Smith canceled the drill. Many believe that had the drill taken place, more lives could have been saved.

Costa Concordia passengers said the line did not have a muster/lifeboat drill for passengers prior to departure or on Friday night. Lifeboats also are required to be capable of being loaded, launched and maneuvered away from the ship within 30 minutes of the Master's signal to abandon ship. But unlike many cruise lines that routinely operate a full-blown muster/lifeboat drill an hour or so prior to departure, Costa apparently had scheduled the lifeboat drill for late Saturday afternoon. The International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), an international treaty which governs safety on ships, only requires ships like Costa Concordia to have a safety/lifeboat drill within 24 hours of sailing. So while Costa’s procedure to hold a lifeboat drill on Saturday appears to be acceptable by law, from a feasibility standpoint some guests – particularly new cruisers -- may not have known exactly what to do and where to go at the time of the accident.

The average tonnage of cruise ships has doubled in the last decade makes a full-scale evacuation at sea more problematic.

The British inquiry into the Titanic's sinking confirmed that the sinking was exacerbated by the ship's "excessive speed" in its collision with the iceberg. This was Captain E. J. Smith's retirement trip. All he had to do was get to New York in record time. Captain E. J. Smith said years before the Titanic's voyage, "I cannot imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that." Captain Smith ignored seven iceberg warnings from his crew and other ships. If he had called for the ship to slow down then maybe the Titanic disaster would not have happened.

The Master of the Costa Concordia, Captain Francesco Schettino, was sailing off course. "The route of the vessel appears to have been too close to the shore, and the captain's judgment in handling the ­emergency appears to have not followed standard Costa procedures," a statement said. Initial assessment points toward Captain Schettino deliberately maneuvered the ship too close to the island to provide a "beautiful spectacle," for the tourists of Giglio. He has admitted that he tried to maneuver the ship close to the island as part of "tourist navigation," suggesting that he deviated from the permitted navigation route to entertain the islanders. The ship was a mere 150 metres from the shore when it ran aground.

Both captains were reckless and grossly irresponsible. Both companies were/are contributory in the respective disasters due to the inadequacies and failings of their systems/procedures and perhaps even corporate culture and so culpable.

The cruise industry has boomed since the 1980s, with more than 19 million passengers taking one last year and nine or more newly-built cruise ships of 100,000 tonnes or greater being built every year for the past decade. The cruise industry has become the fastest growing travel sector in the world. In 2010 the total cruise industry economic impact in the U.S. was $37.85 billion of gross output, a 7.8 % increase over the previous year.

But with increased demand has come increased competition. Carnival Corporation, owner of the Costa Concordia, has grown by revenues and acquisitions to become the world's largest cruise ship operator, headquartered in coastal Southampton, England. Besides the Carnival cruise line, the company owns Princess Cruises, AIDA Cruises, Seaborn, Costa Cruises, Cunard, Holland America Line, ibero cruseros and P&O Cruises. The cruise offerings from Carnival provide cruise vacations around the globe from budget cruises to the highest levels of high-cost luxury. At the end of 2010, Carnival owned 98 cruise ships with capacity for over 190,000 guests.

Carnival is a globally listed company traded on both the London Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange. Increasing bottom-line profits is the main challenge for Carnival in an environment of rising fuel prices, low value of the US dollar, high shipbuilding costs, and increasing expectations of passengers. So far Carnival has managed to return a reliable profit hovering around 5% p.a after a gross profit margin of 30%.

Perhaps more of that profit needs to be put back into quality control of operations and risk management. The cruise ship industry has focused on cramming as many paying passengers as possible on bigger and more ships. Going aground in relatively warm protected waters off Tuscany is a dire warning. A similar incident with Carnival's Antarctic or Alaskan cruises in freezing remote seas would truly be another Titanic disaster.

The guest speaker at the AGM will be Kelvin Thomson, Federal Member of Parliament for Wills and advocate of sustainable population. He will speak on: "A bigger Melbourne is not a better Melbourne”. All are very welcome to the meeting.

Protectors of Public Lands Victoria Inc (PPL VIC) Annual General Meeting Saturday 28 January 2012 Flemington Community Centre

Here are the arrangements:

Time: 1:45 pm for a 2 pm start

Date: Saturday 28 January 2012

Event: PPL VIC AGM 2011. (It had to be deferred from 2011)

Venue: Flemington Community Centre, Debneys Park, Mt Alexander Road, Flemington.

Transport: Parking is available at the Centre. There is a tram along Mt Alexander Road. (Note, however, that you will have to get off the tram at Stop 22 before the Centre OR at tramstop 25 further up the road beyond the Centre, as there are works in progress on a supertram stop outside the Centre.) There is a nearby train station and cycle trail along the Moonee Ponds Creek which comes out at Mt Alexander Road under the 'Sound Tube" connection with CitiLink. Melways Map Reference: 29 12 A .

Speaker: Kelvin Thomson, Federal Member of Parliament for Wills and advocate of sustainable population. He will speak on: "A bigger Melbourne is not a better Melbourne”. All are very welcome to the meeting.

Topics for Discussion: In addition to the overpopulation crisis, we can discuss of the looming threat of revived State Governmet plans for the East West Link and other sections of the freeway network plus the need to advocate for public transport improvements, in particular railways.

Nomination of PPL VIC Committee: Attached please find a nomination form for the Protectors of Public Lands Victoria Inc. committee positions. Note we are required to circulate the form under incorporation regulations before the meeting. Please return via email or send a hard copy to our post office address (see below)

Please Circulate this notice to members of your group (if you have one) plus anyone interested in the key issues of the day which are to be discussed at the meeting.

Julianne Bell
Secretary
Protectors of Public Lands Victoria Inc.
PO Box 197
Parkville 3052

Mobile: 0408022408

Alan Thornett, an ecosocialist, amazes positively in this thoughtful review of yet another pseudo-environmental book. Simon Butler and Ian Angus's Too Many People predictably attempts to stifle linking population numbers to ecological survival. (Simon Butler is co-editor of the Australian publication Green Left Weekly.) "Unfortunately it is the authors themselves who continue to draw false lessons from the past: i.e. that the left should leave this subject alone, keep out of the debates, and insist that there is nothing to discuss. The problem with this is that it is not just wrong but dangerous. If socialists have nothing to say about the population of the planet the field is left open to the reactionaries, and they will be very pleased to fill it. And one thing the authors are certainly right about is that there are plenty of such people out there with some very nasty solutions indeed." Even more surprisingly, this article was first published by a British Trotskyist organisation.

Introduction to this review:

Candobetter Editor: Candobetter.net wants to believe that there is a socialist organisation out there that is in favour of free speech, science, and rich ecology. One of our tests for this is sound environmental thinking on human population numbers and ecology. The review below, published by Socialist Resistance, demonstrates sound thinking, in our view on ecology and on democracy. Socialist Resistance describes itself as "the ecosocialist magazine in Britain, has relaunched itself as the British section of the Fourth International, the worldwide socialist organisation. A national conference on July 4 completed a regroupment process begun a year earlier." But, one swallow does not a summer make, and Trotskyist organisations (i.e. socialist organisations aligned with the Fourth International) have notoriously been infiltrated by the establishment, and push growth by aggressively opposing the anti-growth lobby, thereby defending the growth lobby and the kinds of planners, developers and governments, who are destroying democracy, abrogating land-rights, and placing whole populations in precarity all over the world. We are therefore keeping our fingers crossed about the Socialist Resistance, but not holding our breaths.

Too many people? A review

First published here: http://socialistresistance.org/3013/too-many-people-a-review

Alan Thornett reviews Too Many People? by Ian Angus and Simon Butler published by Haymarket at £13.99.

As a long-time comrade of Ian Angus, a fellow ecosocialist, and an admirer of his work on Marxism and ecology, I am disappointed by the tone he has adopted in his new book on population Too Many People?—which he has authored jointly with Simon Butler, co-editor of the Australian publication Green Left Weekly.

The thesis they advance is that the population of the planet is irrelevant to its ecology, and that even discussing it is a dangerous or even reactionary diversion—a taboo subject. They even argue that such discussion is divisive and detrimental environmental campaigning. [page 97]

The book appears to be a response to Laurie Mazur’s very useful book published last year A Pivotal Moment— Population, Justice and the environmental challenge. This was reviewed by Sheila Malone in SR (July 2010), as part of a debate on the issue.

Mazur argues that it is not a matter of choosing between reactionary policies from the past but that “we can fight for population policies that are firmly grounded in human rights and social justice”. I agree with her on this point, though not with everything in her book.

I didn’t expect to agree with Ian’s book as such, since I have differed with him on this issue for some time. I did expect, however, an objective presentation of the debates without the ideas of fellow ecosocialists being lumped together with those of reactionaries and despots.

What we have is the branding (in heavy polemical tones) of anyone with a contrary view to the authors as ‘Malthusianist’—i.e. supporters of the 18^th century population theorist the Reverend Thomas Malthus who advocated starving the poor to stop them breeding—or more precisely as ‘populationist’, by which the authors mean neo-Malthusianist.

They explain it this way: “Throughout the book we use the term ‘populationism‘ to refer to ideologies that attribute social and ecological ills to human numbers and ‘populationist’ to people who support such ideas.” They go on: “We prefer those terms to the more traditional Malthusianism and Malthusian, for two reasons”. The first is because not everyone is familiar with Malthus and the second is because most of their protagonists don’t actually agree with what he wrote. The “more traditional term”, however, never goes away. [page XX1]

This leaves the book stuck in the past, more concerned with rehashing the polarised conflicts of the last 200 years than engaging with the contemporary debates.

The authors are right to say that population is not the root cause of the environmental problems of the planet. It is capitalism. They are also right to say that stabilising the population would not in itself resolve them. But they are wrong to say that it is irrelevant. The fact is that current rate of increase is unsustainable were it to continue—and whether it will continue or for how long no one knows. What we do know it that it has almost tripled in just over 60 years—from 2.5bn in 1950 to the recently reached figure of 7bn.

According to UN figures it will reach between 8bn and 11bn (with 9.5bn as the median figure) by 2050. After that it could begin to stabilise—possibly doing so by the end of the 21^st century. Even this, however, is highly speculative. Long-term population predictions, as the authors themselves acknowledge, are notoriously inaccurate. Meanwhile nearly half the current world population is under 25—which is a huge base for further growth.

Yet throughout the book the charge of ‘Malthusianism’ or ‘populationism’ is aggressively leveled against anyone who suggests that rising population is a legitimate, let alone important, subject for discussion. These range from those who do indeed see population as the primary cause of the ecological crisis to those who blame capitalism for it but see population as an important issue to be addressed within that.

This is reinforced by a sleight of hand by the authors over the term population ‘control’. They refuse to draw any distinction between control and empowerment and then brand those they polemicise against—including fellow ecosocialists who advocate empowerment—as being in favour of population ‘control’. This allows them to create a highly objectionable amalgam between every reactionary advocate of population control they can find—and there is no shortage of them including Malthusians—and those who are opposed to such control. This is then referred to throughout the book as “the populationist establishment”.

My own views would certainly fall within this so-called establishment. Yet I am opposed to population control and support policies based on empowerment—policies based on human rights and social justice, socially progressive in and of themselves, which can at the same time start to stabilise the population of the planet.

Such policies involve lifting people out of poverty in the poorest parts of the globe. They involve enabling women to control their own fertility through the provision of contraception and abortion services. It means challenging the influence of religion and other conservative influences such as patriarchal pressure. They involve giving women in impoverished communities access to education.

These are major strategic objectives in their own right, with the issue of rising population giving them an additional urgency. Yet the book dismisses them as secondary, as issues already dealt with! This reflects the fact that the book has nothing at all to say on the substantive (and huge) issue of women and population.

Some important progress towards empowerment policies was made at the UN conference on population and development held in Cairo in 1994. This, for the first time, pointed to the stabilisation of the global population through the elimination of poverty, the empowerment of women, and the effective implementation of basic human rights. That its proposals were sidelined by a vicious pro-life backlash and the arrival of George W Bush on the world stage does not invalidate the contribution it made.

The above approach, however, along with the Cairo Conference, is heavily slapped down in the book. In fact this is one of the author’s principal preoccupations. Empowerment is presented as the slippery slope to not only population control but “at its most extreme” to programs, human rights abuses, enforced or coercive sterilization, sex-selective abortion, female infanticide, and even to ethnic cleansing! [page 94]

The authors put it this way:

“Most supporters of population control today say that it is meant as a kindness — a benevolent measure that can empower women, help climate change, and lift people out of poverty, hunger, and underdevelopment. But population control has a dark past that must be taken into account by anyone seeking solutions to the ecological crisis.”(page 83) They go on: “…At its most extreme, this logic has led to sterilisation of the ‘unfit’ or ethnic cleansing. But even family planning could be a form of population control when the proponents aim to plan other people’s families.” [page 84]

The term population ‘control’ is again perversely attributed to anyone with contrary views and we are again warned of the ‘dark past’ of population debates and the dangers of engaging in them—and anything can be abused, of course, including family planning. But only enforced contraception, which we all oppose, could rationally be seen population control—not the extension to women of the ability to control their own fertility.

Equally mistaken is the crass assertion that to raise the issue of population under conditions where fertility levels are highest in the global south and declining in the north is in some way to target the women of the south and to blame them for the situation. For Fred Pearce, who endorses the book, makes advocates of empowerment into “people haters”: “How did apparently progressive greens and defenders of the underprivileged turn into people-haters, convinced of the evils of overbreeding amongst the world’s poor”.

What the empowerment approach actually targets, of course, is the appalling conditions under which women of the global south are forced to live and the denial basic human rights to which they are subjected. It demands that they have the same opportunities and resources as the women of the global north.

Even more confused is the allegation that the provision of contraception to women in the global south is in some way an attack on their reproductive rights; an attempt to stop them having the family size they would otherwise want — a view which appears to be endorsed in the Socialist Review review of the book. If that were the case, of course, it would not be the right to choose but enforced contraception.

In any case the proposition that most women in the global south, given genuine choice, would choose to have the large families of today is not supported by the evidence. Over 200m women in the global south are currently denied such services and there are between 70m and 80m unintended pregnancies a year—of which 46m end in abortions. 74,000 women die every year as a result of failed back-street abortions—a disproportionate number of these in the global south.

After attacking empowerment from every conceivable angle the authors then appear to accept at least the possibility that not all of us who think population is an important issue to discuss support enforced sterilisation and human rights abuses:

“We are not suggesting that everyone who thinks population growth is an ecological issue would support compulsory sterilisation or human rights abuses. Most modern-day populationists reject the coercive programmes of the 20^th century, but that does not mean that they have drawn the necessary lessons from those experiences.” [page 95]

Unfortunately it is the authors themselves who continue to draw false lessons from the past: i.e. that the left should leave this subject alone, keep out of the debates, and insist that there is nothing to discuss.

The problem with this is that it is not just wrong but dangerous. If socialists have nothing to say about the population of the planet the field is left open to the reactionaries, and they will be very pleased to fill it. And one thing the authors are certainly right about is that there are plenty of such people out there with some very nasty solutions indeed.

You've got to see this video. Salt and cronies rattling on at an industry talk-fest.
Warning: Likely to cause anger, nausea or both. An even bigger chance of dying laughing at these unselfconcious antics of the Property and Growth Lobby.
http://australianpropertyforum.com/topic/9032052/1/

The powerpoint slides and Salt monologue give way to footage of Co-conspirators... well conspiring.
One of those present is the CEO of Parramatta Council. All those on-stage seemed completely naive to the notion of democracy or the public interest. This was a 2011 talkfest by KPMG and the Property Council of Australia which has been sitting in our draft articles for some time, but age has not tarnished it.

Debating them would be like debating the three stooges - which is perhaps why they never debate any of the counter-growth lobby.

They seem utterly clueless regarding the nature of their opposition.

There are comments below the video on the above site from people who seem amazed at these antics. Most of candobetter.net's readers would not be amazed, but amused to see what we knew to be true actually played out on stage. There are also comments about some nasty sock-puppets who seem to be located in Prosper Australia. One of them is noted to attack people who want to stop undemocratic population growth in Australia. The same guy seems to get around a lot - from the Refugee Alliance and their friends in Right to Life, amongst shouter-downs in the Greens, the Socialist Alliance and even in Bicycles Victoria. (What do all these organisations have in common that could interest him? - Political turf.)

This page from another site also carries the same video and discusses the issue of online property shills and astroturfing.

http://www.differenthere.com/2011/08/on-internet-nobody-knows-youre-dog-or.html

This page, also from the site above, is also very interesting. It discusses the commercial collapse of The Block'

http://www.differenthere.com/2011/08/real-estate-in-crisis-block-auction.html

Here's an example of a comment posted after watching this video:

"This is very disturbing.

KPMG's Bernard Salt is advocating the creation of groups of paid shills and spruikers, backed by big business and the property industry, to 'counter the negativity' by posting on opinion pages of newspapers, forums, social media, twitter and the blogosphere. He wants these groups to take on the 'doomsayers' by seeking out and 'balancing extreme views'. He says individuals can't do it but there are ways to fund groups to do it.

His guests say the property council used to do this a lot to promote the property industry but vacated that space in recent years and he recommends they return with broad campaigns at the PR level to fight negative sentiment in the property market.

It makes you wonder whether they've already been successful in doing this, and the bulls and spruikers on forums like this one are bankrolled by the real estate industry and big business to sow seeds of uncertainty and doubt among the dominant (and correct IMO) bearish viewpoint. Would it surprise you if our one-eyed permabulls and their socks are puppets of the propaganda arm of the real estate industry, here to manipulate public opinion and drown out reality? Who to trust?"

Resource scarcity is the root of war and terrorism, and liberty is the first casualty of conflict. But as oppressive as state surveillance and detention can be, nature's noose will be even tighter.

The Window For Protest Is Rapidly Closing

The window of opportunity is shutting down for all of us everywhere. In Canada, the United States, Britain....and as you can see here, Australia as well. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-01-07/brown-slams-spying-on-environmental-activists/3762308 We are being monitored, and as surveillance cameras track us, legislation is being prepared or has been prepared to give governments emergency powers to arrest and detain us without further ado. Consider the stakes----trillions of dollars of oil, natural gas, coal, hydro-electricity, pipelines and transmission lines that need to be marshalled for the insatiable and desperate appetite of our voracious industrial economy. Surely it would be naive to think that the fate of this goliath of capital investment would be put at risk by any democratic indulgence. Corporations and governments have a kit bag of dirty tricks to reach into, and a media that can spin the news to depict us as enemies of the people. Why do we think that we are exempt from the fate that has befallen protesters in other lands without democratic traditions, people who stood in the way of logging in Sumatra or environmental vandalism in Nigeria or the former Soviet Union? One could recall the prescient remark of Louisiana's Huey Long, after he was asked in the 1930s if fascism would ever come to America. "Yes," Long replied, "only they'll call it anti-fascism". American resource analyst Chris Clugston has made a similar prediction:

"Interestingly, those who claim today that any and all forms of "uncivilized behavior" are despicable and unacceptable, will be those who will justify them in the next few years, in the name of "the people". Those who protest now are considered "extremists"; those who protest in the future will be considered "enemies of the people", and will be dealt with according to the provisions of laws such as the Defense Authorization Act. It will be like Nazi Germany on steroids... NNR scarcity is like a vise around the collective skulls of humanity; a vise that tightens at the rate of 1/1000 of a turn per day. While the incremental pressure is almost imperceptible on a daily basis, the handle on the vise will turn 3 full revolutions in 10 years, and 6 full revolutions in 20 years. Somewhere along the line, humanity will crack. Given such phenomena as the incessant global riots, the OWSers, and our persistent global economic malaise, I'd say we're showing signs of stress already."

Idiot America And The Death Of Democracy

Democracy needs an educated, vigilant and assertive citizenry. Do you see that now in Idiot America? How many of the 99% bothered to get off their duffs or make a statement about our current predicament? Statistically, quite few. And the few who did were far from clear in their message. The Department of Education spent over $67 billion on dummed-down "education" in the United States in 2009, and the result? A population most of whom believe in the literal truth of Genesis, and a generation of teenagers whose conversation is much like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0i_5YBnQdac&feature=relmfu

Think about it. This you tube got 10 million hits, while this you tube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTWduFB_RX0 about our critical overpopulation crisis will be lucky to be seen by five percent of that number. And just for good measure, for the ten or fifteen percent of the population who do understand that something is terribly wrong or dysfunctional about the "system", our so-called environmental "watchdogs", flush with corporate donations, and the "progessive-left" media, stand ready with greenwash and politically correct euphemisms to further stupefy us.

The Language Of Insight Has Been Hijacked

As Orwell told us, the purpose of "Newspeak" is to narrow our perceptions by limiting our vocabulary, to render us incapable of thinking "outside the box" by robbing us of the words we need to get there, to channel our thinking along prescribed lines. Language is now more a tool of deception than elucidation. Some of us may know that the system is broken and the industrial machine is rigged for destruction, but having gotten by that first line of defence, we can't go further because we can't identify root causes for want of verbal precision and the critical thinking it permits. The language of radical insight has been coopted and twisted to mean its opposite. What remains are the time-worn shibboleths of the civil rights movement and various identity groups, including the pathetic lexicon of a rejuvenated Marxism that dresses up in green colours to beguile a new generation while preaching a line so obsolete that it would be comic if not so dangerous.

A Generation Stuck In Ideological Ruts

As John M. Owen IV recently wrote in the NY Times ("Why Islamism is Winning" Jan. 6, 2012)), the ideology that harvests current discontent can be compared to a channel dug by one generation of activists and kept open, "sometimes quietly", by their successors in the next generation. "When the storms of revolution arrive, the waters will find those channels." Thus it is the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic extremists who will reap the dividends of the Arab Spring, and I would add, just as the myths of the New Left were launched from the platform of the Old Left, this generation of so-called "Eco-socialists" and "climate justice" or "environmental justice" activists carry on to lay down the channels of thought and discourse which form concrete conduits that steer the digital generation away from any real grasp of biophysical laws or the concept of ecological limits. They don't see overpopulation or the terminal and unrelenting decline of non-renewable resources because they live in a conceptual straitjacket defended by impenetrable jargon and politically incorrect no-go zones. They have a religious conviction that poverty is merely a function of maldistribution and the profit motive and some even have the cheek to call this conviction "scientific" socialism. Theoretically, an equal division of the global economic pie would indeed, for the time being, secure a per capita income equivalent to a decent 'Brazilian' lifestyle. The problem however, is that the pie would continue shrinking as affordably accessible non-renewable resources upon which we all depend remorsely diminish.

We Can Shut Down A Pipeline But We Can't Shut Down Peak Non-Renewables

The point is, we are hemmed in on both sides. On one side by those who would physically quarantine us as security threats, and on the other side by those who would quarantine our ideas because they contest their version of radical change, the managed dissent of fake rebellion. Lenin said that the best way to beat the opposition is to lead it. It looks like corporations have it all covered. They fund Green Inc. and then let their useful idiots on the green-left lead a charge down a blind alley. The truth is, direct action can theoretically shut down a pipeline or an energy project, but it cannot solve non-renewable resource shortages. We can protest against envrionmental devastation, but nature is deaf to any protests against peak oil, metals and minerals. There are too many of us, we consume too much, and more than that, our existence depends on consuming stuff that cannot be replenished. The language of social justice and equality apparently does not have a word for that kind of scarcity. Like the inmates of a remote Siberian gulag amidst an endless frozen wasteland, we don't really need Patriot Acts, surveilance and prison guards to control us---- nature is our ultimate jailor. Amoral, indifferent and unmoved by our pleadings for justice and fair play.

Tim Murray
January 9, 2012

ABC News

January 07, 2012

Greens leader Bob Brown has accused Federal Resources Minister Martin
Ferguson of turning Australia into a police state, after reports he
pushed for increased surveillance of environmental activists.

A report in Fairfax newspapers details documents, obtained under Freedom
of Information laws, that show Mr Ferguson requested additional
monitoring of anti-coal mining groups and other environmental groups.

Senator Brown claims coal and fossil fuel companies pressured Mr
Ferguson into having the federal police spy on environment groups who
protest against energy companies.

Senator Brown says tens of thousands of dollars of taxpayers' money is
being spent having private contractors monitor activists.

"That paying of private corporations to spy on community groups is an
abuse of taxpayers' money," he said.

"Martin Ferguson should never have been allowed to promote that and it
should be stopped.

"The Attorney-General, if not the Prime Minister, should see that it
stops immediately."

A spokeswoman for Mr Ferguson says governments are concerned with
maintaining energy security.

She says this includes maintaining the rule of law and energy supply,
where issues-motivated groups seek to engage in unlawful activity.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-01-07/brown-slams-spying-on-environmental-activists/3762308

Talk by Dr. Chris Busby about scientific dishonesty in nuclear issues at the Royal Society in London last November. How do the government committees work? How are scientific papers selected or deselected for publication in the mainstream journals? How does scientific fraud become established knowledge, thereby sweeping the illness and death of thousands of people under the carpet to protect the use of nuclear materials for military purposes? It's all in here... Powerpoint presentation added on 11 Jan 2012.

I think it's well worth your time to see the video and hear what Chris Busby has to say!
Or Download the 1.92MB powerpoint presentation here.

Dr Chris Busby at the Royal Society: Scientific Dishonesty

Final comment: If this is happening in the UK, what do you think is going on in Japan, the USA, and also in Australia? And not just over nuclear issues - how about BSE, GE crops and food, biotechnology in general, and global warming?

Thanks and have a nice day!

Global economic turbulence and the prospect of deep recession as we move towards an energy crisis, presents huge challenge. There has been little forewarning and planning. Every local and national authority needs to start now to address these challenges seriously, yet still we carry on with our head in the sands, wasting resources on an epic scale.

According to a little noticed report in 2009 by the respected (US) Energy Information Administration, the supply of the world's most essential energy source is going off a cliff. Not in the distant future, but within two years. It says Production of all liquid fuels, including oil, will drop within 20 years to half what it is today, when energy demand is rising rapidly. And the difference needs to be made up with "unidentified projects".

If the EIA is right – and it has been endorsed by the US joint military command, we stand on the edge of a precipice, with no prior warning from either the industry or governments, which ostensibly protect the public interest.

A huge problem is nearly all alternative energy sources are poor energy performers because they need a high-energy input to provide a given energy return.

Already there is a crisis in ‘business as usual’ capitalism, with little sign of recovery, warns Robert Peston in his December 11 BBC programme, ‘The Party’s Over’.

Many world leaders are spending billions they haven’t got in a panic “to restore growth,” whatever it takes, in a world of rapidly depleting resources. Maybe we should be welcoming this warning for the endless "growth is good" mindset that will devour our planet. Do we plan for a secure and better life or do we carry on blindly toward a minefield of lethal limits?

The perpetual growth myth knows no ecological bounds. Damage to ‘the environment’ is considered to be a mere externality. Resource shortages can be relieved just through expanding trade and technology will find a substitute for any depleting resource. Perpetual growthists regard any critics as imposing a dangerous drag on the world’s growth-based pursuit of progress.

The crisis has revealed the fragile interdependence of the globalised economy, where many countries can be involved in the supply chain to produce a component manufactured in one of them. In a few years, the markets will face another major trauma when they realise that once plentiful oil supplies are running down rapidly and the 'globalised' economy this has supported will have to rethink completely.

A clear opportunity now exists to transform our economy and our society for the better. The current global recession should be an opportunity to forge a new economic system able to avoid the shocks and negative impacts associated with our reliance on endless growth. Where is the strategic thinking to build a dynamic, steady state economy in a sustainable environment?

The UK-based New Economics Foundation publishes a "Happy Planet Index," which shows that it is possible for a nation to have a strong sense of well-being with a lower consumption and ecological footprint.

Some Inconvenient Facts for Growthists
If prosperity depended on growing populations to feed economic growth, the Philippines and many countries in Africa would be rich, not poor.
According to the World Bank, the top ten wealthiest countries, as measured by per capita GDP, were, in order of wealth: 1. Luxembourg: 491,000 people. 2. Norway: 4.8 million people. 3. Singapore: 4.8 million people 4. USA: 306 million people 5. Ireland: 4.5 million people 6. Switzerland: 7.7 million people 7. Austria: 8.3 million people 8. Netherlands: 16 million 9. Iceland: 319,000 people 10. Sweden: 9.1 million.

Many countries have small populations and are quite prosperous and successful - New Zealand and Botswana are examples. Of the ten countries listed, all but one, the United States, have small total populations and The United States, with runaway population growth in the past two decades, has not been doing well of late.

Japan is often seen as a forerunner of all that is doomed in the economies of the euro zone and the United States because of its ‘ageing population’ and what is seen as a static economy. But look at Japan's economic performance over the past ten years and "the second lost decade", if not the first, is a misnomer. More than half its population is over 45, but most Japanese have grown richer. In part, because its population has shrunk whereas America's population has increased rapidly.

In aggregate, Japan's economy grew at half the pace of America's between 2001 and 2010. Yet if judged by growth in GDP wealth per person over the same period, then Japan has outperformed America and the euro zone.

Relationship between Growth and Prosperity in 100 Largest U.S. Metropolitan Areas (Eben Fodor, December 2010. www.FodorandAssociates.com)

Most cities operate on the assumption that growth is inherently beneficial and that more and faster growth will benefit local residents economically. The report examined the 100 largest metro areas, representing 66% of the total U.S. population, finding those that did best have the lowest growth rates.

The annual population growth rate of each metro area from 2000 to 2009 was used to compare economic well-being in terms of per capita income, unemployment rate, and poverty rate. The report found:

- Faster growth rates are associated with lower incomes, greater income declines, and higher poverty rates.
- The 25 slowest-growing metro areas outperformed the 25 fastest growing in every category and averaged $8,455 more in per capita personal income in 2009.
- The policy of pursuing growth is enormously expensive, costing local taxpayers more than a hundred billion dollars every year for the new infrastructure alone.

Australia’s GDP per person for the December 2008 quarter fell in every state – linked to population growth, says Dr John Coulter, former President of Sustainable Population Australia. Tasmania, with the lowest population growth, showed only a 0.1% fall per capita. Western Australia, with the highest rate of population growth, showed the second largest fall in per capita GDP at almost 2%. South Australia with a high rate of population growth relative to the economy had the largest decline in per capita GDP at 2.5%.

For centuries, before the industrial revolution humans have lived in a relatively steady state economy. There was virtually no interest in economic growth as a policy objective anywhere before 1950. Yet, by the 1960’s, rapid economic growth had bubbled to the top as the overriding objective of policy to remedy all the ailments of western economies.

Jobs
In 2010 the United States population reached 308 million and is (conservatively) predicted to grow to 430 million in the next 40 years – an increase of 122 million people. Taking a (modest) average household size of 4 people and a modest 1.5 jobs per household, this means an extra 95,000 jobs need to be created every month for the next 40 years just to meet minimum demand for new jobs. US unemployment is currently around 9% (officially) and unofficially significantly higher.

Globally - present population around 7 billion, at a conservative estimate population in 2050 will be 9.3 billion - increase 2.3 billion, Assume five people in family unit instead of the four in the US calculation, and assume only one job per family unit. Based on those estimates we need to provide over one million new jobs per month for the next 480 months.

Can we really meet such relentless demand in a world of diminishing resources?

The world’s largest economy created 64,000 private sector jobs in September 2010 and lost 95,000 jobs overall. (US Labor Department). Over the last decade net job creation in the United States was zero.

UK data extrapolated from Summary of National Labour Force Survey Data Table 1.
United Kingdom Age 16+ (Thousands) seasonally adjusted
Total in Employment
Quarter January-March 1971 24,613,00m
Quarter February-April 2011 29,239,000m
Change in 40 years + 4.6 million
Of the total 29,239m, 7,953m worked part-time. 15.6% wanted but could not find full-time work. (Table 3)

The world was completely transformed by oil for the duration of the twentieth century, but if the EIA graph is right, within 20 years it will be vastly depleted as we face rising demand and trying to support over 4 billion more people in just 40 years. Here are just some of the issues:

- planning for the replacement of oil in its essential role in EVERY industry;
- planning how to replace cars and transport in our daily lives, and distribute agricultural produce and manufactured goods;
- manufacturing and installing millions of home energy installations to replace fossil fuel-sourced heating;
- planning how to replace and fuel the largest military establishment in history, almost completely dependent upon oil;
- supporting a global population that, at currently fertility rates, is heading for over 11 billion people by 2050 (UNPD) - without the "green agricultural revolution," made possible by the age of oil and where over two billion are already suffering from malnutrition;
- re-powering tractors essential to producing food on a large scale;
- securing imperilled water pumping and sewage plants, dependent on fossil fuel energy to work.

There will be few oil-burning ships transporting grain and other goods to the billions now dependent on them, or oil-burning airlines serving the world's major cities and the vital global tourist economy. Yet in September 2011 the Airbus Company predicted that the global passenger plane fleet will more than double by 2030. They are in dreamland.

– not least greater national food security, not more speculative office blocks on prime agricultural land. There is a vast amount that could be done without impacting on our quality of life. Some reductions many people would welcome. To name just a few:

- reducing unnecessary road lighting in the country and reduced but better lighting optics in our towns, along with cutting office lighting at night;
- cutting TV advertising screens in supermarkets and multiple TVs in bars;
- controlling the mass of unsolicited mail-shots falling out of papers and through our doors;
- cutting multiple daily flights on short-haul routes, by expanding high-speed train networks;
- cutting production of gas-guzzling performance vehicles.

Every local and national authority needs to start now to address these challenges seriously and examine services considered most vulnerable to long-term reduction in available fuel supplies. Still we carry on with our head in the sands, wasting resources on an epic scale. There has been little forewarning and planning. Our children won’t thank us for inheriting a world taken to an abyss.

The events of “Arab Spring” have given the United States an opportunity to reevaluate our entire foreign and military policy. That reevaluation has not yet happened, but it must. End the empire!

See also: thepatriots.us.

The events of “Arab Spring” have given the United States an opportunity to reevaluate our entire foreign and military policy. That reevaluation has not yet happened, but it must.

Candobetter Editor: We welcome essays and papers from Dr Robert Bowman. Robert Bowman was in charge of the program to build an outer space missile defense shield in the early 1970s under Presidents Ford and Carter. He retired in 1978. In 1980, when President Reagan took over the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) it was put into the hands of a group of people who wanted to turn it into a means to launch a first strike nuclear attack against the Soviet Union. Many of the top brass under Reagan were opposed to this but could not speak out publicly. Robert Bowman, as he was already retired, was free to speak without incurring any penalty. Because he was free to speak, the top generals, who themselves felt unable to speak up, appealed to Robert Bowman to use his voice to stop the SDI. Bowman gave thousands of public speeches against the SDI and, of his own efforts, turned American public opinion around, so that the SDI, as a first strike weapon, had to be abandoned.

Arab Spring

Most of the revolts of 2011 have been popular uprisings against aging dictators who have for decades kept their people in poverty and without a voice in their governance. The successful revolt against Hosni Mubarak in Egypt is a good example. It was a genuine popular uprising of ordinary people. The protesters were unarmed and mostly peaceful. They quickly gained the support of people all across the country and from all walks of life. Even the Army refused to fire on them. The media called them “pro-democracy” forces, but most of the demonstrators had little interest in “democracy” as such, and little understanding of what it is. What they wanted was a better life. They were demonstrating against unemployment, poverty, and hunger. And they succeeded. It is doubtful that any meaningful democracy will result, but the Egyptian people at least have a chance for a better standard of living. The dictator they overthrew, Hosni Mubarak, was an ally of the United States and Israel. But he was not deemed essential to our elites. We did not interfere. After all, puppet dictators come and go. Once in a while, you have to throw one of them under the bus.

It’s another story in Yemen and Bahrain, where the local dictators have given us military bases and active cooperation in our “War on Terror.” In these countries, the dictators are brutally repressing the demonstrators and killing unarmed civilians, with our tacit approval and probably with the assistance of the CIA. Having armed these dictators, we don’t have to send troops in to help them (that the American people would not stand for). But we certainly won’t help the “pro-democracy” demonstrators. For them, “Arab Spring” is nothing but a long, hard winter of discontent.

Libya

So what’s goin on in Libya? Why are the vast majority of the Libyan people standing behind Moammar Khaddafi? And why are we sending the full air power of NATO to assist a small band of armed revolutionaries in Libya?

The answers are simple. First, Khaddafi has been, for the most part, a benevolent dictator. He has enormously bettered the lives of his people until their standard of living is the highest in the Arab world. Education is free. Medical care is free. Housing is free. Automobiles are heavily subsidized, as is the gasoline to run them. Young married couples start wedded life with a $50,000 subsidy. Every Libyan man, woman, and child gets something like $500 a year directly from the oil profits. Khaddafi has built the world’s largest public works project, pumping rivers of fresh water from aquifers under the desert of southern Libya north to the cities along the Mediterranean where the people live. This has allowed the people to have clean drinking water, and has enabled agriculture. In short, the economic factors behind most of the revolts of “Arab Spring” are absent in Libya. No wonder the people, for the most part, support him (democracy or no).

Then who are the armed rebels, and why are we supporting them? Easy. They are Islamist malcontents. Some of them are unhappy that Khaddafi is taking a leading role in uniting African countries. They look down on black Africans, and want Libya to align itself with Europe. Some have long been CIA operatives, fighting against the Russians in Afghanistan, and now against the Americans (like so many “Al Qaeda”). Having no political loyalties, they are happy to accept CIA and NATO help in taking over Libya as an Islamist state.

For our part, we are using them to get rid of a thorn that has long been in our side. All of the dictators (former puppets of ours or not) that we have turned on (Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega, all the way back to Mossadegh in Iran) have committed one of these two cardinal sins: (1) they have nationalized the oil industry, denying the Western oil companies billions in profits, or (2) they have declared independence from the global banking cartel, refusing to borrow from the IMF and World Bank. This has cost the banks billions in interest, and prevented them from imposing harsh austerity measures which impoverish the people and make them permanent debt slaves. Khaddafi committed BOTH of these cardinal sins. First, he nationalized the oil industry, kicking out the western corporations. Instead of having a central bank under the thumb of the Rothschilds (like the US, Greece, Ireland, etc), Khaddafi printed his own money, backing it with gold from oil sales. He used the money to better the lives of his people.

These actions sealed Khaddafi’s fate. The West has been waiting decades for an opportunity to take him out. The NATO “no fly zone” and the incessant bombing of Tripoli have nothing to do with protecting civilians from the Libyan army. They, like all our military adventures since World War II, have to do with protecting the global financial interests of multinational corporations and banks and the billionaires who own them. It’s a desperate attempt to maintain the financial empire which owes no loyalty to this or any other country, which pays no taxes to our government, but which somehow has gotten control of our government and both major political parties, uses our sons and daughters as cannon fodder in their wars of aggression, and (believe it or not) gets us taxpayers to pay for it all!

Are we stupid or what?

Syria

As we write this in mid-June, it appears that Bashar al-Assad of Syria may be the next dictator to feel the wrath of US military power. He and his father Haffez al-Assad before him have been closer to Russia than to the West, allowing Russia access to Naval bases on the Mediterranean. They have also been supporters of Hezbollah and Hamas. But they have (like their fellow Ba’athist in Iraq, Saddam Hussein) also opposed militant Sunni Islamists, and allowed significant religious freedom to their Christian minority (about 10%).. That did not save Saddam, and it won’t save Assad.

Afghanistan

Our ten-year war against Afghanistan has nothing to do with 9/11 or our national security. It is a war to secure the oil pipeline through Afghanistan that the Taliban refused to give to Unocal. It was planned in detail before the attacks on 9/11 (which the Taliban had nothing to do with). (According to the FBI, we don’t even have any evidence that Osama bin Laden had anything to do with 9/11.) Like all the others, it is a war of Empire.

Iraq

The war against Iraq had even less justification than that on Afghanistan. Since there was no connection whatsoever between Iraq and 9/11, the G. W. Bush administration invented the WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) excuse — one they knew was false. Would our generals have massed 150,000 troops in one spot in Kuwait if they thought there was any chance Saddam had even one WMD that could wipe out our entire force with one attack? No. But Iraq was the centerpiece of the grand plan of the Empire to establish 14 permanent military bases in Iraq, from which they (according to their own PNAC document) could control the entire Middle East and its tens of trillions of dollars in oil and gas.

End the Empire

We have hundreds of thousands of troops on over 700 bases in nearly 200 countries. After 56 years, we are still occupying Germany and Japan. It’s time to end the Empire, bring all our troops home, end the corporate wars of aggression, give up our foreign military bases, abolish the CIA, and adopt a Constitutional foreign and military policy that uses our Armed Forces to protect our borders and our people — period. No more puppet dictators. Let the corporations and banks protect their own financial interests, and pay for it out of their own ill-gotten profits. We must take political power away from the corporations, banks, and billionaires so we can, once and for all, end the Empire!

By Dr. Bob Bowman, Lt. Col., USAF, ret.
National Commander, “The Patriots”
[email protected]

See also: thepatriots.us. (In spite of not being as current as Dr. Bowman would wish, it is, nevertheless, a fantastic resource.)

Robert Bowman writes about the need to restore the Constitutional rights of American citizens, enhance their national security through a return to Constitutional foreign and military policies, and rebuild their economy by providing financial security to American families. None of these things can be accomplished so long as the giant multinational corporations, the banks and financial service companies, the insurance industry, the fossil fuel conglomerates, the weapons manufacturers, and the billionaires are running the US government. Therefore the first priority of American patriots, he says, has to be separating big money and political power.
by Dr. Robert M. Bowman, Lt. Col., USAF, ret.
National Commander, “The Patriots”
www.thepatriots.us

Since we Patriots are both liberal and conservative, we won’t all agree on every policy issue. But there are core issues that devolve from our basic mission statement: “Follow the Constitution, Honor the Truth, Serve the People.” We seem to all agree that we need to restore the Constitutional rights of American citizens, enhance our national security through a return to Constitutional foreign and military policies, and rebuild our economy by providing financial security to American families. We also agree that none of these things can be accomplished so long as the giant multinational corporations, the banks and financial service companies, the insurance industry, the fossil fuel conglomerates, the weapons manufacturers, and the billionaires are running the government. Therefore our first priority has to be separating big money and political power. Once we do that, we can then accomplish the rest of our agenda.

So let’s define our core agenda as follows:

(1) End big money control of government.
(2) Restore Constitutional rights.
(3) Enhance Constitutional National Security.
(4) Rebuild Economy & family security.

Now you may note that there is nothing in there about the size of government or about raising or lowering of taxes. Those are strategies for accomplishing the agenda, and are subject to debate. My personal belief is that we need a government big enough and strong enough and (most importantly) independent enough to protect the American people from the global corporations, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank (WB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Bilderbergers, the Trilateral Commission, the Federal Reserve, and the for-profit disease treatment industry. Compared to this central task, the job of protecting the American people from foreign invasion is duck soup.

Let’s now flesh out the above four core agenda items, for each one listing specific actions needed and recommending concrete pieces of legislation required.

1. End big money control of government.

1.1 End corporate “personhood”. The absolute first necessary requirement is to reverse the Supreme Court’s erroneous decision that says that corporations have a constitutional first amendment free speech right to spend as much money as they want buying up elections, voters, and legislators. To accomplish this, we must amend the Constitution, restoring its original meaning. The required amendment (which I call the “Granny D Amendment” in honor of Doris Haddock, who worked tirelessly against corporate control) reads as follows: “Corporations and other fictitious entities are not ‘persons’ under this Constitution, and shall have none of the rights and privileges thereof.”

1.2 Revise electoral system to exclude big money and empower the people. The required reforms include (1.2.1) prohibiting private money (including the candidate’s own funds) in campaigns, funding them instead with public money and free TV and radio time to qualified candidates. (1.2.2) abolition of burdensome petition requirements for independents and third parties. (1.2.3) adopting preference voting (sometimes called instant runoff voting) so that nobody is forced to choose between the lesser of two evils or risk “throwing away” their vote. (1.2.4) outlawing any method of voting that does not produce a paper ballot that can be counted, recounted, and audited as necessary. Paper ballots should be counted by hand in public. This is the only way to prevent corporate programmers or partisan hackers from stealing elections.

1.3 Reform corporate law so that boards and CEOs are not only responsible to maximize profits to shareholders, but also have responsibilities to their employees, their community, and the environment.

1.4 Mandate open, truthful, and accountable government. (1.4.1) Pass a federal sunshine law similar to that of the State of Florida, allowing the public an insight into how Congressional and administrative branch decisions are made. (1.4.2) Require identification of all those proposing “earmarks.” (1.4.3) Prohibit secret meetings such as those between Vice President Dick Cheney and oil company executives to draft energy policy. (1.4.4) Repeal and prohibit unfunded mandates to state and local governments (such as “No child left behind”). (1.4.5) Revoke presidential “Fast Track” authority and reclaim the Constitutional right and duty of Congress to regulate trade. (1.4.6) Pass a bill stating that no agreement such as the Strategic Partnership for Prosperity (SPP) or North American Union (NAU) which diminish American sovereignty or give up territory can take effect without the full participation and approval of both houses of Congress, and that no funds may be expended for studies relating to such agreements without the approval of Congress after consultation with the American people. (1.4.7) Establish truly independent investigative commissions to study controversial historical events such as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the murders of soldiers like Pat Tillman and LaVena Johnson. These commissions should have significant input from those who are critical of the official stories, and should have a co-chair from among their ranks.

1.5 Re-regulate the media. Return to the pre-Reagan prohibition on ownership of multiple media outlets. Family-owned newspapers and radio and television stations will prevent corporate monopoly media from brainwashing the public and censoring facts which expose government lies.

2. Restore Constitutional Rights for Americans

2.1 Abolish the Department of Homeland Security. We don’t need an agency whose mission is to protect the government from the American people.

2.2 Repeal the misnamed “Patriot Act,” the Military Commissions Act, and any other act which attempts to take away rights guaranteed in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

2.3 End the threat of martial law. The President should revoke Presidential Directives 20 and 51 which give him dictatorial powers, and should close the concentration camps Halliburton has built or refurbished around the country.

2.4 Release political prisoners like Mumia Abu Jamal and Leonard Peltier, and all those being detained without charge. End torture and rendition, and prosecute those who authorized and carried out these illegal and immoral practices. Pardon all those incarcerated for possession or use of marijuana and end the failed “war on drugs.” Repeal federal laws against marijuana and hemp.

2.5 Pass a Congressional resolution stating that the separation of Church and State means that no government at any level may interfere with churches in setting requirements for receiving sacraments. Every denomination has the right to decide whether or not to grant the sacrament of matrimony to same-sex couples. At the same time, no governmental body may discriminate on the basis of gender by refusing adult couples wishing to enter into a civil union.

3. Rebuild Constitutional National Security

3.1 End the phony war on terror. Pass a resolution stating that terrorist attacks like that on 9/11 are criminal acts and will be investigated and prosecuted as such. The perpetrators do not deserve the exalted status of “warrior.”

3.2 End the illegal occupations. (3.2.1) Pass an authorization bill stating that no funds may be used for military activities in Iraq or Afghanistan, except for carrying out an orderly and rapid withdrawal. (3.2.2) Declare that it is US policy to vacate military bases in occupied nations such as Afghanistan and Iraq, and to give up oil and mineral rights and pipeline routes. If corporate entities wish to retain these rights, they must negotiate directly with the sovereign governments involved.

3.3 Return to Constitutional foreign and military policies. (3.3.1) Declare that the Armed Forces of the United States will be used only for the protection of our borders and our people, not the global financial interests of multinational corporations. The only exceptions will be for voluntary participation in UN peacekeeping forces or humanitarian missions such as natural disasters. Declare that any attack on Iran or any other country not specifically authorized by Congress with a Declaration of War is an impeachable offense. (3.3.2) Except for small Marine detachments guarding our embassies, bring home all our troops from around the world, returning all foreign bases to the host countries. (3.3.3) Cancel all contracts with mercenaries such as Blackwater (or Xe as they call themselves now). (3.3.4) Cancel all weapons development and procurement contracts not required for the Constitutional mission of national defense. Tell the contractors there must be no layoffs. If we can pay farmers not to grow crops, we can pay engineers and machinists not to build weapons. (3.3.5) Return all National Guard units to the control of the governors of the states. (3.3.6) Release Reserve units and excess personnel for transfer to alternative duties such as border patrol, disaster relief and cleanup, and rebuilding infrastructure. (There should be no forced separations.) The personnel and the budget to support them can eventually be transferred to other agencies. (3.3.7) Reorganize the Department of Defense and adjust the Defense budget to reflect the new mission. Once the transition is complete, the DoD budget should be around 20% of its current level. (3.3.8) End the embargo of Cuba and begin establishing normalized relations. (3.3.9) Terminate all covert actions and propaganda campaigns attempting to undermine other countries such as Iran and Venezuela. The fact that a country chooses not to cooperate with multinational corporations is no business of our government.

3.4 Abolish the CIA. Presidents Kennedy and Carter learned that it was impossible to get rid of the “dirty tricks” side of the CIA while retaining the intelligence gathering and analysis function. The CIA has continued to foster instability, insurrection, tyranny, torture, terrorism, murder, and war around the world, causing millions of deaths and creating millions of enemies for the United States through fear and hatred. We must drive a stake through its heart. The many good analysts may transfer to the DIA.

3.5 Honor and care for our Veterans. The fact that current and past wars are Unconstitutional, illegal, and destructive of our national security does not diminish the dedication, bravery, and sacrifices of our veterans who were lied to. They served in the belief that they were protecting our freedoms. We must see that they are cared for. The care of our soldiers wounded in action, suffering from PTSD, and poisoned by Depleted Uranium (DU) is not a discretionary expenditure to be avoided by delay, denial, and bureaucratic red tape. It is a solemn obligation of our government, and it must be met. (3.5.1) Fully fund the VA. (3.5.2) Direct the VA to recognize Gulf War Syndrome as a service-connected disability. (3.5.3) Direct the Department of Defense to root out prejudice against soldiers seeking help for PTSD, and to halt the practice of giving them drugs and returning them to service. (3.5.4) Direct the VA to halt the practice of some examiners who routinely deny benefits for PTSD claims because they “don’t believe in it.” (3.5.5) Direct the DoD and the VA to strengthen programs to ease the transition from combat to civilian life. There have been too many cases of domestic violence, murder, and suicide by veterans unable to make the transition. (3.5.6) Order a permanent halt to the use of DU munitions and armor. Destroy all existing supplies and store it as radioactive waste.

4. Rebuild Economy & Family Security

4.1 Expose the trickle-down myth. Both political parties promote the myth that the way to build the economy and jobs is to reduce taxes and regulations on businesses. The Republicans add a related myth that reducing taxes on millionaires will cause them to create jobs. All these myths are false. Neither businesses nor millionaires create jobs. CONSUMERS create jobs! Government can totally eliminate taxes on businesses and the super-wealthy, banks can offer business loans at zero interest. Yet not a single job will be created unless there are consumers willing and able to purchase the products and services offered. Businesses and millionaires will only create new jobs when the DEMAND can’t be met without them. At present, the demand isn’t there, because workers and the middle class can’t afford to buy. Those who still have jobs are afraid to buy because they may either lose their job or have unforeseen medical expenses. Job loss and medical bills are the leading causes of personal bankruptcy and home foreclosure, and most of us are subject to be impoverished by either one … or both. So we don’t spend our meager savings (if any) unless we have to, and we are afraid to go further in debt. The gap between the rich and the workers has gotten so big that there’s precious little left to pump to the top, and whatever goes to the top never trickles down. So the gap gets bigger. In spite of soaring productivity, real wages today are a third of what they were in the 1950s. This is unsustainable. Henry Ford used to pay his workers well, because he wanted them to be able to buy the cars they built. And both he and his workers thrived. He understood that economics was not trickle-down, but bubble-up. The only way to rescue the economy and guarantee jobs for those who want them is to make every American family financially secure, eliminating the worry that either the paychecks will stop or that medical bills will swamp them. Then people will buy things and businesses will hire more people to meet the demand. Everyone will prosper, including the rich, but only when every family gets an adequate, regular paycheck and health care when they need it.

It is here that those of us who are libertarian in ideology will diverge from those of us who are progressive. We will not agree on how to go about providing every family with paychecks and health care. But however we do it, it must be done. My prescription is outlined below in Sections 4.2 and 4.3. Those of us on the left and right come back together again on Banking Reform and Tax Reform, covered in 4.4 and 4.5. These are also vital to our economic development and to financial security.

4.2 Guarantee paychecks for all. (Don’t worry. I’ll discuss how to pay for all this in Section 4.5.) (4.2.1) The simplest solution would be to send every American family, rich or poor, a paycheck every month. Call it “Social Security for all.” Start with $800 for each adult and $200 for each child, with the amount indexed for inflation, just like Social Security. Like Social Security, it would be taxable after your other income rose above a certain level. (4.2.2) A more modest (perhaps interim) proposal is to extend unemployment benefits indefinitely — no maximum number of weeks, no expiration date. (4.2.3) The most satisfying way to provide paychecks, of course, is through jobs. I am convinced that if you provide the regular paychecks first, the jobs will follow (because paychecks will create demand). But there are other steps we should take as well. Until the demand creates sufficient private sector jobs, the government should offer jobs to anyone wanting one. Let the WPA live again. (4.2.4) In order to reinvigorate our manufacturing capability, the government should end subsidies to companies moving jobs out of the country and should use tariffs to level the playing field. Suspend NAFTA and all other “free trade” agreements (they are really free investment agreements) until our trade partners extend the same benefits, union rights, protections for health, safety, and the environment, and wages as we require of businesses here. It should be no cheaper to build widgets in Mexico or China and import them than to build them in Scranton or Detroit or Oshkosh. (4.2.5) Make it just as expensive for companies to hire undocumented workers as American citizens. Use a non-forgeable ID card with Social security number and status. Require non-citizen workers be given minimum wage and other protections accorded citizens. Offending employers would be jailed. (4.2.6) Index the Minimum Wage for inflation and gradually raise it to what it would have been had it been indexed for inflation when it was created at a dollar an hour. (That would currently be about $16 an hour.)

4.3 Health Care for all. (4.3.1) As a conservative, I believe that the only fiscally-responsible way to provide health care is to eliminate the profit, the overhead, the red tape, the interference between doctor and patient, and the interference in our political system of the insurance companies by kicking them out of health care altogether. We must finally join the rest of the civilized world and adopt a single-payer national health system. (4.3.2) A modest proposal to achieve such a single-payer system is Medicare For All. We can start with a bill expanding Medicare to cover pregnant women, infants up to age six, and seniors starting at age sixty. Include pre-natal care, well baby care, and preventive care with no co-pay. The bill should state that it is our policy to gradually expand and improve Medicare until it covers all Americans for medical , dental, vision, hearing, mental health, home health, and long-term care, with deductibles and co-pays limited to what is affordable to families on minimum wage. (4.3.3) Medicare Part D should be repealed, and prescription drugs should be covered as a standard part of Medicare Part B, just like x-rays or doctor visits.

4.4 Banking Reform. The banks take high-risk gambles with our money and lose. Then they go to the federal government for a bail-out. The government goes to the Federal Reserve (which is about as federal as Federal Express) to borrow the money. The Fed then creates the money out of thin air and loans it to the government (at interest which we taxpayers have to pay). The government then gives it to the banks, who are supposed to loan it to us (again at interest, so we’re paying double interest on the same money). The banks then use the money to buy up other banks (including foreign banks) and to pay themselves huge bonuses. The stockholders of the Federal Reserve make hundreds of billions of dollars on money which was never theirs in the first place. They never have a penny of their own at risk! Some sweet deal, isn’t it? But not for us. In this system, all money is created as debt. But where does the money come from to pay the interest? More loans. They can never be paid off. It is a huge pump, pumping money from workers to the ultra-wealthy who own the banks. Both conservatives and liberals agree that this must end. (4.4.1) Pass legislation abolishing the Federal Reserve and eliminating our debt to it. (4.4.2) Pass legislation ending the debt-based monetary system and returning to Congress its Constitutional responsibility for creating money … without debt. The government should print greenbacks and use it for government purposes — including building roads and bridges, caring for disabled veterans, and providing universal health care. (4.4.3) Audit the big banks and financial service companies and nationalize those who are insolvent. They can then be run as non-profit government banks, providing low-interest loans to individuals and small businesses.

4.5 Tax Reform. We have proposed significant government expenditures for guaranteed paychecks and health care for Americans. It is fair to ask where the money is going to come from. For centuries, governments have been using taxes to control behavior. They tax what they want to discourage (like smoking, for example). So why do we tax employers for providing jobs? Payroll taxes are counter-productive. They are especially burdensome on small businesses. The minute you hire one person, you have to hire another to figure out income tax withholding, FICA taxes, unemployment insurance taxes, workers comp taxes, ad infinitum. It’s no wonder most new businesses fail before they ever make a profit. Businesses should only be taxed on profits.

Similarly, we discourage those on welfare from taking a job, because we tax them so highly. If you find a job that pays the same as welfare, and you take the job and the welfare is stopped, you have in essence been taxed 100% on your new job. Even if your new job pays twice what you got on welfare, the effective tax on it is 50% — and that’s before you pay any income tax. Then there’s the FICA (Social Security) tax, the most regressive tax of all. A minimum wage earner pays about 8%. The owner of a Mom & Pop business pays 16%. But a basketball player or CEO making $40 million a year only pays 0.02%. We’re supposed to have a graduated income tax. Yet because of the tax break on unearned income (like dividends and capital gains), the wealthy pay a much smaller percentage of their income than low-wage workers. Someone once challenged corporate executives to find one who paid a higher income tax rate than their secretary. None were found. All this suggests several ways to reform the tax system. (4.5.1) Remove the cap on earnings subject to Social Security tax. This would make it a flat tax, and would keep Social Security solvent forever. Better yet, do away with the FICA tax (and all payroll taxes) completely, compensating by increasing income tax rates or with new taxes (like the tariffs and Tobin tax discussed below). (4.5.2) Restructure the income tax to incorporate a negative income tax (similar to the guaranteed paychecks discussed in 4.2.1) and slowly rising tax rates, with a top rate (probably around 70%) sufficient to make the whole thing revenue neutral. No one with an income of less than $500,000 per year would have a tax increase. (4.5.3) Remove the favored treatment of unearned income, but index the cost basis of property subject to capital gains for inflation, so that only real gains are taxed. (4.5.4) The cost of universal health care will be much less than the current cost, since the roughly 30% skimmed off by the insurance companies will be eliminated. There will be considerable savings because conflicting and overlapping coverages (like Medicaid and VA) will be eliminated. Individuals will be relieved of the expense of private insurance policies and supplements. Businesses of all sizes will be relieved of the burden of supplying health coverage for their employees and (most importantly for companies like General Motors) for their retirees. Yet the cost to the government will rise, and must be offset by taxes. An increased tax rate on corporate profit is reasonable, especially since they will benefit so much. (4.5.5) Introduce the Tobin tax on financial transactions. There is so much gambling going on in the currency markets and stock markets that the total amount of trades is truly staggering. A tax of even a tenth of one percent would bring in enough money to pay for the new programs we have proposed and (quite possibly) make the income tax unnecessary. Such a tiny tax would not deter legitimate investment, but might put a brake on some of the lightning computer trading which goes on today. So the actual revenue created will not be known until it is implemented. (4.5.6) Go back to using tariffs (one of the few types of tax authorized in the Constitution) to level the playing field with trading partners who welcome our investments, but put up barriers to the sale of our goods in their country. Tariffs can halt the flight of jobs from our country, as discussed in 4.2.4. (4.5.7) Pass legislation limiting the corporate income tax deduction for executive compensation to twenty times the salary of their lowest paid worker (legal or illegal). The ratio between CEO pay and worker pay used to be 20 to 1. It is now over 600 to 1. This is a free country. Corporations can pay their executives whatever they wish. But we don’t have to give them a tax deduction for it.

Concluding Remarks

There are countless important issues we haven’t dealt with in this Patriots’ Agenda (like education, the environment, etc.). You can see my position on every conceivable issue on the web site www.thepatriots.us . What we have done here is to identify four core agenda items that are absolutely critical to our future as a nation. We’d love to see them taken up in the lame duck session this month. But I’m not holding my breath. My hope is that millions of Americans across the political spectrum (and perhaps a few Patriots in a future Congress) will take up an agenda like this and, one of these days, force our government to honestly deal with it. Until then, hang in there, keep the faith, and may God help us all.

(NOTE: This article is a slightly updated version of the Legislative Agenda I submitted to Congress when I was running for Congress in 2006. It resulted in me being invited to join the Veterans Affairs Committee “when you’re elected.” Although exit polls had me winning the election by 12 points, the electronic voting machines said otherwise.)

Dr. Robert M. Bowman, Lt. Col., USAF, ret.
National Commander, “The Patriots”
1494 Patriot Dr, Melbourne, FL 32940
Home: (321) 752-5955
Cell: (321) 258-0582
Email: [email protected]
Alt: [email protected]
Web: www.thepatriots.us

The joke is on you, you green fool! You and your idiot faith without evidence! Your techno-optimism and cornucopian denial! Renewable technology? What a laugh! Who did you think you were kidding? Mr. Jevons? What a paradox! Smart growth? Ha! What's next, "Smart" cancer? "Smart" extinction? "Smart" deforestation?

We're Screwed! We're Buggered! Cooked! Done!
Ha ha! We thought we were smart enough to manage complex systems!

The joke is on you, you green fool! You and your idiot faith without evidence! Your techno-optimism and cornucopian denial!
Renewable technology? What a laugh! Who did you think you were kidding? Mr. Jevons? What a paradox! Smart growth? Ha! What's next, "Smart" cancer? "Smart" extinction? "Smart" deforestation? Oh and "Sustainable" Growth! I love that one, and I laughed even harder at Sustainable "Development"! Nice try. As Garrett Hardin said, we got a moratorium on thinking with that one! Mr. Greenwash you really have a sense of humour---too bad your euphemisms didn't fool Mother Nature! But I must at admit you sure put one over on the Sierra Club membership! You even had them believing that we could "de-couple" economic and population growth from environmental degradation! Those comedians from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the Eco-Socialists, what a piece of work they are! And then there is the Queen of Smear from Hampshire College! Good work on character assassination babe! You, Morris Sleaze and the Center for New Community make a great team shutting down debate about crucial environmental concerns !

Were goin' down folks! It's Good Night Gracie! Another failed evolutionary experiment for the fossil record! Ha ha!

Doomsday Auction

Ladies and Gentle....men! Welcome to the Doomsday Auction. What we have here tonight is Human Catastrophe offered to you at an incredible price. This is a once-in-a-life time opportunity to make a claim on that disaster which will end civilization as we know it. You have been brought here by special invitation. All of you here are prominent and credible threats to humankind, but your challenge tonight is stake a claim to catastrophe by producing evidence that you have the largest constituency of public opinion behind you. That is, the more people who take you seriously, the more attention you deserve. And if you command the most attention then you, and you alone, can take home the prize of being Boogeyman Number One, The Top Dog of Human Catastrophe!

First, let me introduce viewers to the contestants. We have, in no particular order, Nuclear Accident, Terrorist Attack, Global War, Cyber War, Global Warming, Economic Collapse, Fuel Shortage, Oil Spill, Industrial Accident, and Famine. Sorry, but even though we now have over 7 billion people, "Overpopulation" was not invited to this auction because mainstream environmental organizations refused to size its nomination papers in deference to their corporate donors and political correctness, and the eco-socialists claimed that he was a rich racist who was trying to blame the global poor for his own excesses. "Natural Non-Renewable Resource Shortages" are not here either because Peak Oilers protested that it was all about energy and that the shortage of minerals and metals vital to an industrial economy were not deserving of a voice---a view seconded by PC book publishers who won't print any manuscripts from Chris Clugston.

OK, lets get rolling. Let’s start the bidding at 5%. Who will offer 5% of public opinion to back their claim to fame as a credible and lethal threat to civilization and life as we know it?

Industrial Accident? Thank you. Industrial Accident bids 5%. Now Oil Spill bids 6%. Famine? Famine bids 8%! Cyber War has matched you but Fuel Shortage doubles the offer at 15%. Its Fuel Shortage at 15%. Do I hear 16%? Global Warming raises the offer to 22%! 22% of the people worry about Global Warming. Now Nuclear Accident bids 25%! Its 25% going once, 25%...What’s that? Global War says 27%! Ladies and Gentlemen its 27%..... now Global Disease Outbreak makes it 33%. It looks like we are witnessing a contest here! And yes, yes....Terrorist Attack I hear you. You bid 44%! Now Natural Disaster sees you and raises that to 46%! It’s 46% once, 46% twice, 46%.....Economic Collapse, do I see your hand, yes! Is that right? 63%? You have 63% of folks worried about you? Do I hear 64%? Anybody at 64%? It’s 63% going once, 63% going twice, 63% SOLD to Economic Collapse because you sir look like your looming just around the corner!

Well Ladies and Gentlemen I guess you could have seen it coming. Economic collapse is keeping us awake at night. That wolf at your door has certainly got your attention hasn’t it? Greens have tried to take your eye off the ball with global warming but who the (expletive) cares about another metre or two of rising sea water in 60 years when you will be on the bread line tomorrow, and you will have give away your kids to an orphanage!

If that is not worry enough for you, come back next week and maybe, just maybe, Overpopulation, Peak Everything, Depleting Aquifers, The Collapse of Biodiversity Services and Critical Metal and Mineral Shortages will show up! That's if tensions in the Gulf don't trigger a nuclear exchange!

Have a safe journey home now---- that's if it hasn't been foreclosed on you! As the saying goes, if the bailiff doesn't get you the Grim Reaper will! Now go back to sleep and have an American dream!

Tim Murray
January 2, 2012

Cf. The National Survey of Pandemic Awareness and Attitudes October 28-31
http://www.ecohealthalliance.org/sup/downloads/EcoHealth%20Alliance%20Survey.pdf

Thanks to Emily Spence for bringing this survey and article to my attention through
http://www.ecohealthalliance.org/sup/downloads/EcoHealth%20Alliance%20Survey.pdf

(Photo courtesy of Gallery of Beltway Schmoozers and Useless Tits)

Robert Engleman
Know-it-all
World Watch Institute
Washington, CP (City of Players)

Are you vexed by human population overshoot? Is 7 billion too much for you? Well you have come to the wrong place. If you want to find help to reduce our population from 7 billion, forget it, because we have already resigned ourselves to 9 billion. But if you want to settle for Plan B, then call our Help Line.

Call 1-800-LESTERBROWN

Voice mail recording:

“Hello, welcome to the World Watch Institute Help Line. All of our representatives are currently busy boring people on the Washington cocktail circuit with bland and ineffectual palliatives to overshoot so that the problems they are hired to solve remain unsolved. Please stay on the line because although your call is not important to us, your donation sure as hell is. We accept Money Orders, Visa or Mastercard and but not any criticisms of our underlying assumptions. However, criticisms of the Chinese One-Child-Per-Family Law which each year has saved humanity from an extra 1.8 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions are welcome.We are insistent that all human rights must be respected except the right of our species to survive this century if survival means violating our current cultural and ethical guidelines. Things are bad, but not that bad. Just because we have increased our population by nearly 250% in the last half century is no reason to believe that emergency measures are required to deal with our emergency. It's incrementalism or bust baby.

To receive our automated reply to all of your inquiries press 1 followed by the number sign....... You have dialed "1", The World Watch Institute Help Line For Those Looking For Politically Correct and Inadequate Answers To Human Overpopulation Whose Solution Can Only Be A By-Product Of A Social Justice Agenda as approved by a panel of Hartmanite Feminists, Eco-Socialists And Monbiotists Who Couldn't Care Less How Many People There Are.....

Hello, I'm Bob Engleman and welcome to the World Watch Institute’s Demography-For-Dummies-In-A-Nutshell line.

Here it is stupid----- all we want you to know. The Conventional Cant which if repeated often enough will convince polite company that nothing you think is dangerous---to them or their funding sources. Are you ready? Now repeat after me:

Educate women, educate women, educate women.......

Voluntary family planning, voluntary family planning, voluntary family planning........

Women everywhere want only two children, women everywhere want only two children, women everywhere will want only two children....

Stopping at two will do, stopping at two will do, stopping at two will do..........

Chinese methods are stupid and unnecessary, Chinese methods are stupid and unnecessary, Chinese methods are stupid and unnecessary........

If Kerala, Thailand and Bangledesh can do it, so can everyone else, if Kerala, Thailand and Bangledesh can do it, so can everyone else, if Kerala, Thailand and Bangledesh can do it, so can everyone else.........

The Demographic Theory of Transition is a fact, The Demographic Theory of Transition is a fact, The Demographic Theory of Transition is a fact............

Prosperity is the best contraceptive, prosperity is the best contraceptive, prosperity is the best contraceptive......

Sustainable development is not an oxymoron, sustainable development is not an oxymoron, sustainable development is not an oxymoron......

We must find a way to feed 9 billion, We must find a way to feed 9 billion, We must find a way to feed 9 billion......

The birth rate is dropping, The birth rate is dropping, The birth rate is dropping.....

Forget demographic momentum, forget demographic momentum, forget demographic momentum......

2 billion is sustainable, 2 billion is sustainable, 2 billion is sustainable.......And we can take our sweet time in getting there.......And we can take our sweet time in getting there....And we can take our sweet time in getting there......

Don't criticize Green Icons, they are on our side and above reproach......Don't criticize Green Icons, they are on our side and above reproach.....Don't Criticize Green Icons, they are on our side and above reproach........Spare your criticisms for the enemy......Spare your criticisms for the enemy.......Spare your criticisms for the enemy...

For further information, contact our foundation grant-makers who will supply you with all the politically correct solutions that we advocate to satisfy their stipulations.

PS If your concerns relate to climate change, please be advised that Bill McKibben can no longer be reached at 1-800-350.ORG . His new number is now 1-800-400.ORG because that was the only politically realistic number that he could negotiate at the present time. Note, he will not talk about over-population because it is irrelevant---all we need to do is find a way to "de-carbonize" an economy of 9-15 billion people. Appeals can be made to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund at 1-800-1SKY350.ORG

If you find the forgoing offensive and unfair, then please phone in your complaint to:

Tim Murray
1-800-GETSERIOUS

Hello, you have reached the 1-800--GETSERIOUS line. BTW, WTF are you playing at? This is not a drill. Repeat. This is not a drill. We are facing the end of our civilization and/or human extinction---get it? The politically possible is not the ecologically necessary. So make the necessary possible---- or get off the stage. Are you in it for the game---or the result? Then go with the science and let the political chips fall where they may. EFA doesn't tell half the story. It is not about renewables, it is about NON-renewables. Forget for a moment about bio-capacity and start thinking about carrying capacity, the precarious carrying capacity of a global industrial civilization enabled by a diminishing supply of fossil fuels, metals and minerals. Start thinking about how we shrink the population fast enough so that the per capita share of this shrinking resource base does not become so low as to trigger civil massive unrest and global conflict. Can't be done? Fine. Then stop shopping your green delusions and half-measures, shut up and let logic and hard numbers do the talking.

Gail Graham's 17 year old son, Jimmy, was brain injured when his car ran into a tree in Queensland. The accident was unwitnessed and Queensland has fault-based law and insurance for traffic accidents. Because Jimmy was too injured to say what had happened and no witnesses came forward, he was uninsured. You might expect that medicare would pick up his medical bills, and it did, but the care it subsidised was hardly care at all. In a sublimely logical response to an utterly absurd situation, Mrs Graham came close to murdering her son's doctor.


Gail Graham's 17 year old son, Jimmy, was brain injured when his car ran into a tree in Queensland. The accident was unwitnessed and Queensland has fault-based law and insurance for traffic accidents. Because Jimmy was too injured to say what had happened and no witnesses came forward, he was uninsured. You might expect that Medicare would pick up his medical bills, and it did. The problem was that the medical fraternity failed to recommend Jimmy for any significant rehabilitation and seemed to collude to neglect him so that he would die. Moving from Queensland to Victoria to be closer to his parents made little difference. His mother, Gail, who was a journalist, soon got the message that he was being allowed to die without ordinary rehabilitation services because he only had Medicare. Pure bad luck meant that he fell through the holes in the private accident insurance net and therefore was judged by a series of doctors to be too costly to treat and a drain on the public purse. His mother put Jimmy's pension away every fortnight until she had saved up enough to employ a private physiotherapist. The hospital tried to dissuade her from using a private therapist and pointed out the cost. When Gail told them that she had saved up his pension, they sent her a bill amounting to the total for the use of his hospital bed. Read on:

The End

"It was the end.

There would be no money for occupational therapy, no money for any therapy at all. The administrative officer had been right when she pointed out that occupational therapy cost far more money than the average family - or even the above average family - could afford. And that was just occupational therapy. What about physiotherapy? What about speech therapy?

Frantic, I rang the Mont park Brain Trauma Unit and asked to speak to Diane McLachlan. She'd helped Jimmy once. Maybe she could tell me what to do now.

Diane was sympathetic, and surprised that the hospital would actually do such a thing. But they were quite within their rights, she said. There was nothing she could do about it. There was nothing anybody could do about it. The best thing for me to do would be to stop fighting XX Hospital and either put Jimmy in a nursing home or take him home. Perhaps I could appeal to some of my local charitable organizations for help ...

You keep saying that there's nothing you can do! I screamed at her. Everyone keeps saying that there's nothing they can do! There's nothing the Health Commission can do! There's nothing the politicians can do! There's nothing the lawyers can do! There's nothing the media can do! The doctors can do anything they like and there's nothing anyone can do to stop them!

I'd finally lost control. But I couldn't help myself, couldn't stop myself. I just kept screaming at her.

What are you all so afraid of? I wanted to know. Why are you all so afraid? Doctor F. is afraid of Doctor H. and so are all the rest of you! Why are you all so afraid of Dr H.? I'm not afraid of Doctor H.! I screamed. I'm not! And I'll tell you what I'm going to do! I'm going to kill Doctor H.! I'm going to take a gun, and I'm going to go down to his house and wait for him to come home tonight, and then I'm going to kill him! And I' going to tell everybody why I killed him! I'm going to tell them that I killed Doctor H. because he refused to let my brain-damaged, eighteen-year-old son have any therapy at all, because he's letting my son die like an animal and because I can't stand to watch it any more! and then the media won't have to worry about defamation suits, because it won't be defamation. It'll be murder! There isn't a jury in Australia that'll convict me, and even if they do, all that will happen is that they'll say I'm crazy and lock me up for a couple of years. But Jimmy will get a bed in a rehabilitation hospital, and that's all that matters to me! Do you understand? That's the only thing that matters to me!

I was gasping for breath, almost choking. Diane was saying soothing, reasonable things, but I wasn't even listening to her. In the midst of that uncontrollable burst of anger and hysteria, I'd stumbled on the answer. I would kill DoctorH. And then I would tell the whole world exactly why I had done it.

I'd tell them what it was like to watch my son turn into a living skeleton. I'd tell them what it was like o watch his arms and legs fold up and become useless. I 'd tell them what it was like to beg for the most minimal maintenance physiotherapy, only to be told that he wasn't worth the effort. I'd tell them what it was like to look at his eyes and know that he understood everything that was happening to him. I'd tell them what it was like to be powerless to do anything but watch him die.

If I could tell my story to the public, Jimmy would get the care he needed. I knew that.

Georgina wouldn't approve of murder, but Jimmy was running out of time. He was dying. Already, he was little more than shriveled flesh and bone. He was so weak. All it would take was the slightest germ or virus or infection, and he'd be gone. He couldn't' wait for a miracle, and neither could I. [...]."

Gail Graham's book, Staying Alive HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd (June 1, 1985), ISBN-10: 020715189X
ISBN-13: 978-0207151897 is a very well written, readable work that grips you from beginning to end with its truth. The author paints a humanistic picture of the moral frailty of health profession teams and the unwillingness of any to break out from the 'just following orders' excuse for standing by and allowing unnecessary suffering. Her account is memorable because she also shows how professionals will not only stand by, but actively defend the indefensible.

The book was written in 1983 but nothing much in the way people with serious brain injuries are undertreated when their injuries occurred outside an insurable situation.

One thing has changed, however, and that is Australia's laws of defamation, due, as I like to point out, since it seems so surprising to many, to the intervention of that much hated 1990s Australian immigration minister, Philip Ruddock.

When this book was written, it was almost impossible to name names even if you had proof and truth on your side. In 1983 Australian defamation laws meant that you could be dragged into court and sued several times over for one document if a party objected to a term used more than once in that document. And it didn't matter if you had right on your side, if the other party had more money, they could drag the matter out and bankrupt you. In 1983 our defamation laws were so bad that even newspapers would not name doctors because it is relatively easy for a doctor to claim large sums in loss of livlihood if the public are alerted to a mistake. So Gail Graham, when she was writing, could only refer to doctors as DrH., Dr F., etc and to specific hospitals as X and XX hospital. If she had written today, with the evidence she had, she could name those doctors. I wish that she would republish and do so. They deserve to be named. Graham does name a couple of politicians, Mr Roper and Mrs Hill, both Labor politicians, describing how she approached them with detailed information and begging for help dealing with the hospitals and doctors in question, yet both Roper and Hill failed miserably to help her. They were not the only ones.

Gail Graham wrote a sequel, which I have not read but have ordered as an interlibrary loan. She has also written several novels and other books, including a biography of Chairman Mao. Her blog is at http://www.gailgraham.net/3.html, and she has just brought out a new novel, which is digitally available.

This article, which is a book review, is the first in a series we hope to invite contributions to, about brain injury. The Australian Government currently has a project to publicly insure all seriously disabling accidents, called the National Disability Strategy.

On 16 September 2010 I attended an unusually inspiring political and humanistic movement amid the half-deserted towers of Melbourne's sparsely populated but nature-poor Docklands. (Ed. Some small changes made on 22 Jan 2012 due to mistakes in transcription being picked up by a reader.)

Some mindboggling social and legal concepts about copyright and patents here. Take a look at this film if you want strong intellectual stimulation and a wild ride.

On 16th September 2010 I attended the Free and Open Source Software and Gnu/Linux users' conference. I hadn't had as much fun and political stimulation since an Indymedia day more than a decade previously about making digital movies. The two days had in common their political themes of digital democracy. There was so much to listen to and such great speakers and interactions and I took so many notes that my rendering of and publishing of this article was hopelessly delayed. In the end I concentrated notes from the first talk, on Free and Open Software, by Ben Sturmfels, and have had to give up on the idea of reporting on the equally interesting and stimulating workshops that followed it. Notable among these was one run by Kathy Reid who gave a more prompt report on the Open Day events along with a better account of who was who.

Digital Democracy gives ordinary people global power with local roots

Victorian Free and Open Software (FOSS) and Gnu/Linux Users (Linux Users Victoria - LUV) are in a position to organise politically and all vocal participants on this day (they were a chatty lot) seemed to share an intense social concern and responsibility.

FOSS/LUV et al is a group of people (men mostly) who are keen to reach out and have a lot to offer. Many people would call them 'nerds', and they are endearingly conscious of this, dutifully engaging in group self-consciousness, when they talked about attracting new people.

"How do we get our nerds who dress badly and don't change their shirts or wash to behave in a more socially acceptable way?" " "Can we make rules to say that a person cannot attend a conference two days running in the same shirt?"

Perhaps I am a nerd too, but everyone there struck me as unusually well-socialised, with relatively sophisticated social concerns about preserving community values, freedom etc. and tuned into a bunch of indicators, wondering what they all lead to. And so keen to get involved. JP Sartre would have been very jealous. And, another concern, "How do we attract women to our cause?"
Amazing!

Software Freedom Day is an annual event in Victoria. Every schoolchild and public servant should attend. Last year it was held at the state library in Swanston Street, Melbourne.

Much of the rest of this article is adapted from a talk by Ben Sturmfels, a free software developer who writes computer programs and gets paid to do it. Sturmfels is based in Melbourne. He spoke about software freedom day activism as well as about what free software is.

What is proprietary software?

The proprietary software business model is based around a software developer, whether they're a company or an individual, producing some software and then licensing it under a restrictive license to the person who gets to use it. Those licenses tend to apply restrictions on what you can do with the software. These might be something like, 'You may only be able to use this in an educational setting' or 'You may only use this for 30 days' or you might even be able to use it as long as you don't say anything against the company that wrote it. There are software programs that have license like that.

Other restrictions they tend to place on software are that you may not actually study the code it contains to see what it's doing. You cannot actually see what it's doing under the surface. You are not supposed to look at what it's doing in your computer. You may have no idea of what it's actually doing, whether it's connecting to the internet, or accessing you files or communicating with somewhere else.

That's a little bit worrying because most computers are connected to the internet all the time and we keep everything of importance in our files.

This is not just a concern with regard to personal computers but also for companies and government data bases in departments, services and utilities, including hospitals and traffic lights.

There is another problem with not being able to see what the software does or to look at its code, and that is that you are usually forbidden to modify the software. If the software has a bug in it or doesn't do what you need it to do, you are not allowed to fix it yourself. You need to take it back to the person who made it and get them to fix it. That's fine, as long as that person is still around and wants to fix it and you can afford to pay what they ask.

It's one of those situations where monopolies tend to occur. So you often find that there is only one company that will fix you proprietary item and, if they won't fix it, or you cannot afford to pay them you have to throw it away.

(Ed.An example of this is proprietary movie-editing software on digital movie cameras. You buy the digital camcorder, struggle with compatibility on your proprietary computer, then, just as you become adept at using it, after days spent editing and reediting a movie, it develops a bug, such as losing the sound. You go on-line with the problem and have to register and buy an upgrade that costs a lot and probably won't work with your next camcorder.)

Another restriction of a lot of proprietary software normally are rules on whether you can share it or not. Normally the restriction goes, "You may not share this piece of software with anyone." Essentially what is being said is, "You can use it on you computer, but you can't give a copy to a friend who might like a copy." And you can't donate it to a school or something like that.

So, those are four restrictions that are normally placed on proprietary software.

Proprietary software is also described as 'non-free' software because you don't have the freedom to do these useful things.

What is Free Software?

Let's now contrast 'proprietary software' with 'free software', where the idea behind it is that you can do all of these things.

You can look at the software to see what it's doing. You can use it to do anything you want. You can modify it to suit your needs and you can also share it with other people.

It's probably important to point out that the expression, 'free software' can be confusing because we use 'free' for a number of things, including 'free of charge'. In this case, Ben explains, we mean 'free' as in 'freedom', 'free as a bird'.

Free Software Background

Richard Stallman began a movement. He worked in MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Artificial Intelligence labs and found he was more and more restricted by the software he used. He had grown up in a software tech culture where sharing was just the way it was. The software didn't come with restrictions on it. Software was just software and if you were a programmer, you could modify it; or you could get someone else to modify it for you if you couldn't do it yourself.

More and more he began to see companies trying on this proprietary business model, trying to restrict what people could do with their software. This was around 1983. He started this project called the GNU project. You may have heard of it. The project was to build a free software operating system. Start from scratch and build it with these free software values built into it - the ability for people to use it for anything - to study or modify it to suit their needs and to share it and to share their modified software.

It took a little while and in 1985 he started a Free Software Foundation as a non-profit group to channel funds into the project and manage its direction.

After a few years they built a whole load of really useful free software, such as compilers and debuggers, terms which may mean little to you if you don't write software. Basically they are little pieces of all the operating system. They built most of the operating system, but they still had one part they needed and that was the kernel that coordinates all the programs your running, that tells them to take things in turn. They found that in the kernel Linux in around 1991.

It's come a long way since then but it's still pretty young in the scheme of things.

The situation we have now is the Gnu system or Gnu/Linux or just as Linux.

Some of the parts in free software are the best that's out there. The fastest, the most reliable, the cheapest often. Often, whilst free software means 'freedom' it's often free of charge as well. It is actually the envy of a lot of software companies now, this free software can be plugged into all kinds of things. For instance your own browser may be free software (e.g. Mozilla) and your on-line telephone. Things like that.

It's all really exciting at the moment. It's really starting to broaden its reach. The other aspect of that though is that, as it becomes more entrenched in the general culture, the values of the system start to be a little more in doubt. Without "Open" days like to day (celebrating the meaning of 'free software'), we tend to somehow lose some of these values.

For instance, some of the problems we see include where free software operating systems originally designed as such, these bugs creep in - the bugs being that they have non-free software elements, including such things as drivers for video cards, and plug-in things for Firefox and things like Adobe flashplayer and things like Skype, the telephony program.

This is kind of unfortunate because you have this free software and then non-free components have been added, actually devaluing the original philosophy of it.

So, that's just about my summary of free software in itself.

I would like to add that it's actually important that we talk about gnu-plus linux o gnu/linux as the name of the operating system, rather than just linux. There are a few reasons for this and some people have different reasons. The thing I think is most important is that the people who write the Linux kernel software don't tend to talk about freedom as an issue. They are actually agnostic to that. If they publicly stated their views, they are not really that concerned about freedom as a general issue.

By adding the word 'gnu' out the front, so GNU+Linux or gnu/Linux, we actually add the philosophy of gnu to this word, when we are spreading it around.

Whilst we are all free to do what we want, please consider using the terms gnu plus linux or gnu slash linux.

Free software Activism

Work on software patents gives one an interest in seeing how these sorts of things happen. One does not tend normally to think about it, but how did the Women's Rights movement happen and how did the Environmental movement happen? These have impacts on what we are trying to do because 'activism' is really just ... it's people wanting to see positive change in the world and actually stepping up and giving it a go. It's interesting to look at some of the techniques people have used to do this and to try to apply that to free software activism.

It is really interesting to see how free software has been promoted in the past and how it has grown because no-one could deny the major success of this system and the free software movement because, from nothing twenty-eight years ago, we now have a fully free operating system, which is just incredible.

The Amazing Richard Stallman

The large corporations take decades to build these sort of things and the community and people stand all over the world and built this operating system. People often criticise the free software movement and people in it such as Richard Stallman, because he is incredibly intelligent and logical, which makes him a fantastic programmer, but people can sometimes find him a little bit abrasive because he's less tolerant of people who don't understand what he's talking about. He doesn't go for the social graces that maybe people are used to often when someone's explaining something that they don't understand. If you've attended one of his talks, people come away feeling really angry and frustrated about this whole thing because it criticised something they in themselves believed and didn't find him to be a ... Well, if you go on line and listen to one of his talks on you-tube, for instance, you may see what I mean. The question time is quite interesting and the short answers for questions. And I think about ... is that the right way to do it? Because you're putting people off who are just interested in learning about the project. And then I think, well, maybe it's not perfect, but it's certainly worked. Like he built this operating system. He's done it in a way that most of these social movements couldn't do. Like most of these social movements are based around changing people first and then changing the world, but, with free software, he's gone and changed the world underneath us all.

He's built this free software operating system. Now the world just has to catch up. That's not to say it's him on his own at all. Certainly not. There are a lot of other people involved.

We are at a point where some of these other movements are really quite interesting. We may be getting to a point where there is an educational phase in free software, because we have this mostly complete free software operating system now.

Ben described how he works as a software developer and in the course of that he does graphics, music and other things. He says that, although free software doesn't do everything and often does some things particularly poorly, it does everything I need. It plays most of the videos I want to watch now. The web and the multimedia sphere has flourished with developments in video formats being released and new browsers coming along. These are really exciting things.

He suggested that We're getting out of "this lock-in with the Adobe flashplayer and things like that," suggesting that Adobe flashplaye was mostly only used for video these days and that hardly anyone would bother using it fo animations now.

He has been using his free operating system every day for all his work and everything else he needs to do on the computer for about five years.

That indicated to him that we have reached a stage where we can use the operating system without much mucking around. He remarked that he had certainly spent quite a lot of his time mucking around with free software in the past, ut he feels now that most of it is so good that these times are now past.

The Ride to School program

Ben talked about the Ride to School Program, which is a group about healthy change for kids, getting them involved in healthy lifestyles, such as walking to school or riding a bike after school, and things like that. He said that this is the kind of the behaviour-change step he felt that the free software community were at.

The free software community are at the point where their activities are focused on bringing the notion of and availability of free software into the minds of the wide community.

A good start to this was open source and free open source software days like this one, where he was speaking.

He remarked on how interesting it is to see the things that people are making in cyberspace these days, such as 'hackerspaces' and 'Arduino' projects. The rise of such things where you can actually do things yourself, without needing to go and buy it from somewhere and use it for its one purpose then throw it away. You can actually make [cyber]things yourself.

It helps the free software movement for people to understand that they can do that with... their phone ... or they can change their little robot... Their mindset changes. They realise that everything isn't set in stone by proprietary software. With twenty years of proprietary software, they've got into this idea that everything is just as it is sold. No, don't touch it or it won't work anymore. And, make sure you get your virus updates from people who supply virus updates and everything will be okay.

The world really has changed beneath us. Education about free software will take a long time. It may be decades before the general populace understand some of these issues, but it's really about just being persistent and that's what activism is about. It's about having a long term view of these things.

Suggestions about activism.

One of the tricky things about free software we find in Australia is that most of the action that we see on the internet and in the news is in the U.S. and it feels a long way away. You can feel quite disconnected, even lonely, in software.

This was one of the reasons that Ben started a group in Melbourne, Australia to talk about free software. He said that they do some political things from time to time, but often it's just hanging around talking about some of these issues because it's actually nice to talk with another human being about it. Reading about it on the internet and watching videos isn't quite the same.

Open days like this one were where it is really at though, for building a community.

It is important to live according to your own values. There are a lot of people trying to push their values on to other people and it is really important that the audience understand that Ben was not telling them, "You must use a free software operating system for your work." That was a conclusion they needed to come in themself if they wished to, to be comfortable in themself. If that is the conclusion you come to, then you probably should go home and use a free software operating system, despite what your brother o your friend might say. You need to do whatever makes you happy. And that applies to everything - not just free software. You need to be confident in your own opinions to be happy.

Speaking at an event like this is the easy route - preaching to the choir.

But the really hard thing is to go and talk to other people where our views might conflict with theirs, but the good thing about having a whole lot of people is that people respond really well to people who they feel are the same as them and have similar opinions. We can each try to educate the people we mix best with, who are likely to trust our opinion.

You do, however sometimes need to step outside your comfort zone and talk to people who may initially disagree. Free software is actually a mindshift because it's just so heavily drummed into people the way proprietary software is. People use emotive words like "piracy" and "hacker" to make non-proprietary software seem really negative. I'm not saying that copyright infringement is a good thing. You should not infringe copyright.

Ben said that it's often really difficult to talk to close family and friends. Let them love you for who you are if they aren't receptive to your interest in open software.

Comments from the 'audience'

The 'audience' is highly participatory in this talk.

One comments that it is important to go and find a community where you can resonate and strengthen yourself.

Another audience member describes how his aunt and his mother were terrified of computers, having had a bad experience with one where their computer was set up in such a way that it took hours to even open their first program, but, at their request, he installed Linux and they were much happier with their system afterwards.

Another member of the audience asks Ben if he thinks in the long run there will be an innate technical advantage to open source software. He talks about how ten years ago Open Office was a little bit clunky, although it had most of the function present, but of course, now, there seems to be no reason whatsoever for a person to use proprietary software like Microsoft Office. He added that the early Gnu-ey interfaces fo Linux were not always very accessible, but today you can introduce complete novices to Linux and they will find that the work involved is actually less than in the proprietary operating system. It made him think that the speed of improvement in opensource software is faster than the speed of improvement in proprietary software. He said that this led him to hypothesize that there is actually a technical inevitability... that there is something in the way that opensource does things that means that you actually cannot lose in the long run.

Another member of the audience responds by saying that this is probably true in relation to specific versions like mysql. He had read a book which suggested the idea might be true.

Ben introduced the idea that an important kind of activism is to donate you own time to promote a cause. Another thing that could be extremely beneficial was if you had a good job and enough money to do the things you need to do, giving financial support to some sort of activism is often one of the best things you can possibly do. There are a lot of people around helping who lack funds to do these sorts of things.

The Free Software Foundation

Ben gave the example of the Free Software Foundation as worthy of peoples' consideration if they were interested in donating money. He said that those assembled heard about them all the time. They had done so many campaigns that free software movement people were aware of and they were in the news and provided speakers who came round the world to talk to people. People might be surprised to hear that there are only have about ten people in their office - a tiny little non-profit group.

He was telling us this to give us an idea of how much they did without very many financial resources.

"One of the best things, if you so chose, would be to become a member and give some money to them. That would actually be very beneficial. Likewise giving money to any other free software project."

Keep positive because we have this fantastic free software operating system out there and we just need to tell people about it.

More remarks from the audience.

Richard Stillman has made people very aware of the fact that all Linuxes are not equally free.

"A lot of social movements like free software are somewhat of a journey. So people might start dabbling in free software and using maybe Ubuntu or something that's very user-friendly and accessible. That's fine. It's good. But it's also good to have people at the other end, like Richard Stallman, who are pushing towards an entirely free software. We need to recognise the value at both ends of the spectrum."

A response it that Richard Stallman's attitude is admirable. He even refuses to use some websites because they contain non-free code.

"I work for an organisation and he wouldn't do the renewal on the website ... It's interesting particularly because he recognises that it asks your computer to download software and run it off your computer...."

"Yes."

"And he says, 'No, I don't want your free software running on my computer..."

"No, no, actually...I admired that!"

"He's certainly consistent!"

Murmurs of approval.

"It's worthwhile pointing out that that's one activism technique. Polarising the debate and saying, 'This is okay. No, this is not okay. And here is the line...."

"He's a great role model."

"But, the phones I've been convinced by some friends to buy, in my pocket. It's not running free software. What do I do. What rights do I have with that software on this device that I supposedly own?

I recently upgraded from a phone that's seven years old - obviously there were no free software operating phones at that time - to an android phone. But, because I see myself moving along that continuum, I'm now running an operating system that's a whole lot more free than it used to be. I'm not there yet, ut so long as I only move forward, I consider that progress."

Another voice: "There are some areas that have an enormous way to go before satisfying free software. The graphics design area is a blatant example because, as somebody studying graphics design, it's virtually impossible to use things like Gimp, things like Photoshop and Adobe products are set in the course as a compulsory tool and the problem with something like Gimp is the Pantone proprietary colouf scheme is just something you've got to have for professional work and there is progress that some people want to see towards an open colour scheme ..."

"That's a separate issue," says someone else. "I think that's ... I don't consider Richard Stallman an extremist. But I believe he has actually missed a political tool. If you are going to expound a philosophy and you say, okay I'm willing to make a concession and that concession you make is essentially, [to say that] yes, the other side does have a valid point. [...]

"You say in 20 or 30 years down the track there's going to be a shift, but I reckon that if there is going to be a fundamental shift, it's going to catch everyone off-guard..."

"I guess that because there is the software out there that the change is already en route. I mean, we are not trying to play catch-up with building the infrastructure. The infrastructure is already there."

"There does need to be more support available so that people can ring up and ask for help with problems. As slowly the business model grows. Not quite viable yet."

"I really appreciated your point that, unlike other social justice movements, we're in the interesting position that we don't have to anymore convince people to build this stuff. There's already a huge amount of people building this stuff, particularly to improve it. So we can say, 'Here's something really useful and here's why it has been built."

"I think I would like to modify [what you have said] a little bit because I think we still need to convince corporations that it's a good idea... and professionals ..."

"Yes, we are no longer in a position where no-one is doing this..."

"Yes, we are trying to move everyone toward it. There's a whole lot of people already there and so, let's go join those people."

"Another thing is that if someone doesn't want to give money another way you can help is get onto mailing lists and answer peoples' questions..."

"Yes, that's extremely helpful."

"I see a lot of people with proprietary software be surprised that the support with free software is actually better than what's available with proprietary software ... people transitioning from having to call Microsoft and realising the forums for open source are actually providing better support in a lot of cases than paid support."

"It's important that non-technical people go out and tell people about the software as well. Because it's not just about developing the software, it's about people knowing it exists out there, to work from the software and knowing how it fits a particular need."

"I think there is scope to promote free software to other people who are interested in the [same] values, like the Environmental Movement and other Social Justice movements as well, cause in many ways it fits quite nicely with the values that people hold with those movements."

"Often they're going to make that jump quite easily."

"Yes. And it is quite an easy jump to make depending on the kind of software that you need to run. Promoting the values as well as the technical stuff. And it also helps to disperse the stereotype of the geeky Linux guy, which I admit I held until I got to know the community better." (Girl linux user speaking)

Editorial comment: We need Open Source Automobile software

Does it exist? Remember when every third male and some females tinkered with their own cars, stripped them down, greased them, replaced parts, tuned them ... all in the back yard? Aside from the fact that backyards are going extinct due to artificially induced population pressure, cars have become so proprietorially automated, that no-one who doesn't have $20,000 of brand-specialised electronic service equipment can fix them. Where we should be maintaining and improving old cars, built to last, we are fast being forced to commute in small automated plastic bubbles with rapid built-in obsolescence that hold us to ransom with their tuning, parts and service because we don't have the right or the equipment to fix them ourselves.

This is an industry and a social situation where opensource software is sorely needed.

Resources

Hack Melbourne, an enthusiastic group of hardware hobbyists and/or software programmers in Melbourne, Australia.

Electronic Frontiers Australia

Melbourne Free Software interest group

Melbourne's environment is steadily deteriorating as rapid population growth continues but some are insulated by wealth against the effects of this.Article first published January 1, 2012 but republished after site damage on January 6, 2012. I had over 100 reads when it was lost.

In city and suburbs trees fall victim to greed,
Backyards are demolished for a so called need
Of people awaiting all our precious spaces
And we give them up and then turn on the *races.

Our surroundings decline as we stand by and watch

And try to explain it in terms in terms of *“hop scotch”
“If you move to there these ones can move in
Then cover your garden, it’s no longer a sin.”

We think ourselves rich but sometimes we wonder
When our Bay is “un-swimmable” after rain, hail and thunder,
Was it like this when we were all kids?
The Melbourne environment is now on the skids!

But to our weekenders, some of us go

To beaches and sun or to ski in the snow
It still seems to the lucky ones everything’s dandy,
While for the rest of the people there’s little that’s handy.

“Have you heard of Peak Oil ?” I hear someone say,
“No problem” ‘s the answer, “Make fuel out of hay!”
“There’s plenty of growth still there in the system,
It’s elastic, you know- build ‘em higher and list ‘em

On domains that take in the populous places
I care not about problems that everyone faces

When too many people chase scarce flats and houses
I’m content with my mansion and grey suit and trousers.”

*"races" broadcast horse racing in Australia a favorite diversion from anything serious.
*"Bay"-Port Phillip Bay, the shallow lake like sea that get's filled with ordure, a danger to health when it rains heavily.
*"hop scotch"-Old children’s game where players move around different parts of a diagram drawn into the ground

A German animal liberation group slip into a pig-farm and give the pigs a nice Christmas. (Film) Originally posted on 1 January. by Jan 4 it had over 150 reads. Reposted January 6th after loss due to site damage.

Twas the day before Christmas and the silence was deafening of billions of animals locked away in factory farm sheds, laying on concrete blocks and unable to turn around, in agony awaiting their slaughter for the insatiable appetite for meat.

This group prepares fruits and veggies and sneaks into a factory pig farm in Germany. You can see that many of the pigs are unsure of what to do with the fresh food as they have never had it before.
These exceptional beings living in filth--doomed to a hell.

When humanity stops these atrocities towards our fellow creatures, only then will this time of year be a "celebration and peace to all"

Below are two films which show what life looks like for pigs in their native habitat. What a contrast.

For the Animals

Jaylene Musgrave
Vegan Warriors

On the brink of new year it is tempting to think about our financial situation in the months to come

On the brink of next year we wait apprehensive
For what will befall us and power expensive,
We think it’s our due to turn lights on with abandon
We’ve always done this in Carlton or Cranbourne

A financial crisis may come again
It’s a shame we don’t know quite how or quite when,
We hang onto our shares and still listen credulous
To financial “gurus” with notions so nebulous.

Of how endless growth will fulfill our need,
For amassing a fortune by thought, word and deed
To support our retirement that’s not going to happen
We’ll need an alternative else we’ll be caught nappin’

The task is impossible one hapless man says
To his realistic client who usually says “yes”
“I know” says the client, “there’s no growth to be had.
When there’s not enough oil, things have to be bad!”

“It’s the point we have reached I’m afraid to say
And I’ll get the sack for telling you today
I’m supposed to shut up and pretend that it’s good
And all will rebound and put us back in the mood.

Of investing our money, trusting everything rises
And patience will win us financial prizes.
But those days are over both you and I know it
We reap what we do and we know we have sown it.

So free and so easy we took what was on offer
It’d ever been thus and we knew no other.
It wasn’t our fault; we’re but cogs in the wheel
But we know know our *“party” had an amazing feel.

It’s over I know it and here is the crunch,
What will we do in future for dinner or lunch?
Old age isn’t easy and worse in the unknown
World of depleted resources and with crowds overblown.

Twenty twelve is a mystery as we turn over the page
Of Twenty eleven in its final stage
A doomer or gloomer will see our backs to the wall
The rest will not worry, no not one bit at all!

*For more about the "party" see "The Party's over" by Richard Heinberg.

"Common Dreams" is one of the plethora of so called "progressive" organizations that masquerade as grassroots movements of opposition to the corporate agenda---except that part of the corporate agenda which is most vital to corporate ambitions: the unfettered movement of capital and PEOPLE across borders. Apparently, to be "progressive" in America is to support the displacement of indigenous workers or the suppression of their wages through the relentless flow of cheap imported labour---legal or illegal. It is an attitude common to even to those in the Occupy movement . Such is the perverse mentality of a generation that has been fed a sanitized version of history purged of the anti-immigration sentiments expressed by icons like Caesar Chavez, black Congressional Rep Barbara Jordan and the founder of Earth Day, Democratic Senator Gaylord Nelson. Forty years ago, a progressive was someone who understood that population growth was bad news for both for the environment and the working class. Today, like so many other words, it has come to mean something entirely different, and the cause it serves has become obsessed with fund-raising.

Dear Common Delusions:

So "we need each other", do we?

Maybe you need me, but I don't (expletive) need you and your open-borders gospel.

Why don't you respond to my emails? Cat got your tongue? Or could it be that you haven't got any answers, or any justifications for supporting the corporate agenda---that is----the free unfettered movement of capital AND PEOPLE across borders. Your brand of "progressivism" is a JOKE. Trouble is, I stopped laughing decades ago because I heard the punch line 500 times before. Moreover, the joke is in bad taste because the environment bears the brunt of it.

Shock me by actually replying to my emails. Am I talking to a machine or a brick wall?
How many of your solicitations must I reject before you stopping shaking your tin cup at me?

What that reader in California---that guy on social security who praises you for your outstanding job in ignoring the elephant in the room----really needs is not "Common Dreams" but common sense------ an organization which will stand up against amnesty, the Dream Act and the deliberate unenforcement of federal immigration law. Does half of Mexico have to move to California before this 'progressive' reader you refer to understands that MORE PEOPLE=SMALLER PER CAPITA SLICES OF THE RESOURCE PIE? It is obvious that you are not going to help him reach this understanding. Your focus is on the equal and fair division of that pie. News flash---- the pie is shrinking and your recipe ----"social justice"----will not sustain everyone indefinitely.

You complain that Republican Congressmen and Senators are in denial about climate change. Why are you in denial about overpopulation? How can you achieve a sustainable America when you turn a blind eye to rampant ongoing population growth? There are 100 million more consumers in the United States now than there were when Nixon left office. Do you think that the country can absorb another 100 million in the next forty years and still reach that progressive utopia you dream of?

Get real.

I don't need you because we already have enough money-grubbing green-left NGOs on the landscape to soak up our dollars and aggressively misinform us.

Try finding a niche that no one else fills. Try being the first "progressive" entity to tell progressives the truth about limits. Try telling them that confiscating the wealth of the 1% would only provide temporary relief and respite from the remorseless rise in the underlying resource costs that will shrink the economy and shrink the budget for all the entitlements you think are our birth right. Try replacing the dated rhetoric of the sixties civil rights movement with the language of hard numbers and logic. Try educating your readership with the instruction of Bartlett's 16 Laws of Sustainability and the insights of William Catton. Try teaching the fundamentals. Try telling them that it makes no sense to negotiate for the politically possible when what is required is the ecologically necessary. Half-solutions are not solutions. I get enough emotive sentimentality from Chris Hedges and his legion of clones and groupies. I don't need your green delusions and McKibbenisms.

There is another Californian who you need to hear from, but he's not on your subscription list: Sgt. Friday. Just give him the facts m'am. Just the facts.

Tim Murray

(Note: Sgt. Friday was the star of a weekly TV police drama, set in L.A., called "Dragnet". His trademark expression---when interviewing victims and witnesses --was, "Just give me the facts m'am, just the facts.")

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On 30/12/2011 10:02 AM, Common Dreams wrote:
> Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community
>
> December 30, 2011
>
> Dear Tim,
>
> It’s a fact: our readers sustain us.
>
> Two days ago, I received this nice note from a reader in California:
>
> “You do an outstanding job. Congrats and thanks. Keep it up. Unfortunately I am retired on Social Security. I need you more than you need me.”
>
> We need each other.
> We Can't Do It Without You!
> I know that many of our readers are unable to financially contribute right now. And that’s OK. We need to take turns taking care of each other.
>
> I really hate to ask our readers for contributions. But I know that if we didn’t ask for help, we wouldn't survive.
>
> And it’s the end-of-year gifts from our readers that sustain us through the year. Right now, with only 2 days left in 2011, we are $18,000 short of reaching our critical goal.
>
> Can you make a tax-deductible contribution right now?
>
> 2012 promises to be a turning point year. We will be here for you.
>
> And, with your help now, we will still be here for you when you are retired on Social Security.
>
> Contribute right now before our midnight deadline on December 31st!
>
> In gratitude,
>
> Craig Brown
> for the whole Common Dreams team
>
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> www.commondreams.org

HA NOI — Significant outcomes have been attained in curbing population growth in Viet Nam, with 18.5 million people lower than estimated by 2010, according to health officials. "Achievements of population activities have contributed much to spur the country's socio-economic development, realise Millennium Development Goals, and combat hunger and poverty."

Originally published as "Nation checks rising population," in the In the Vietnam News

Nurses care for newborn babies at Saint Paul Hospital in Ha Noi. For the past 40 years, the average number of children per woman has fallen from 6.3 to 2. — VNA/VNS Photo Huu Oai

HA NOI — Significant outcomes have been attained in curbing population boom in Viet Nam, with 18.5 million people lower than estimated by 2010, according to health officials yesterday.

The success was hailed at a ceremony to mark the 50th anniversary of the Vietnamese Population Day (December 26) in Ha Noi.

President Truong Tan Sang presented the first class Independence Order to the population and family planning sector for their achievements in national socio-economic growth.

The Ministry of Health statistics showed that during the period of 1960-2010, the average number of children for a woman of reproductive age had reduced from 6.3 to 2.0.

Life expectancy had increased from 40 to 73. Population growth rate also had reduced from 3.8 per cent to 1.05 per cent. The availability of contraceptive measures had increased the number of married couples of reproductive age.

Director of the General Office for Population and Family Planning Duong Quoc Trong said scientists had estimated that the population scale of Viet Nam would reached 105.5 million in 2010. In fact, the country population was 87 million last year.

"Achievements of population activities have contributed much to spur the country's socio-economic development, realise Millennium Development Goals, and combat hunger and poverty," said Trong.

However, Health Minister Nguyen Thi Kim Tien said, Viet Nam was facing problems in handling emerging issues in population activities such as the difference in birth rate between regions, areas and provinces nation-wide, the imbalance in gender at birth and low population quality.

The health ministry reported that the imbalance of the sexes at birth has been at an alarming level where the sex ratio (the number of males per 100 females) at birth had increased from 110 in 2006 to 111.9 in 2011.

The rate of new-borns with congenital deformities also was on the increase. Situation of early marriage and in-breeding in some ethnic and minority groups were problems causing race degradation.

"An intervention plan should be programmed to actively control the population growth rate due to increasing demands of family planning," stressed Tien.

Tien said that intervention measures should be brought forwards faster with an aim to improve population quality and control population growth rate and unbalanced sex ratio in Viet Nam.

Closely collaboration between ministries and sectors was needed for the perfection of law and the regulation system on population and family planning and implementation of the population and reproductive health strategy of Viet Nam during the 2011-20 period. — VNS

This article, by Frosty Wooldridge, is simply the best damn summation of the human costs of the Iraq War I have yet read. IMHO, Wooldridge is the best writer in the business. He has three things going for him. A firm grasp of reality, a command of the facts, and the creativity to write about them---- driven by the rocket fuel of rage and passion. Say no more. Tim Murray

This month, our combat troops of United States military withdrew from Iraq after nearly a decade of killing 100,000 Iraqi citizens of all persuasions, being murdered themselves by insurgents who infiltrated past check points, thousands were killed or maimed by countless IEDs, and, as time plays out over 100,000 American combat troops are predicted to commit suicide from their brains being scrambled by the horrors of war. Thousands of marriages will fail and countless children will suffer the horrors of war as their fathers live in Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome purgatory.

As to the first question of who won: no one. As to the second question of who lost: everyone. As to the third question of who got screwed: America’s military and America’s sons and daughters that served.

Of all the stupid, needless, meaningless and painful wars the United States has created, George W. Bush and the Military Industrial Complex, along with other war profiteers should be sent to prison for their lies, fraud and deception against the American people. “Weapons of Mass Destruction” will become the poster-phrase for our leaders lying, cheating and swindling the American people. George W. Bush cajoled, coaxed and coerced us into war with Iraq.

The German Nazi beast Hermann Goring said it 60 years ago:

“Naturally the common people don’t want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them that they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

Vietnam killed 58,300 kids, wounded 350,000 young men and created havoc across our country. It started our national debt into the trillions of dollars. It split families and it too was based on a lie: the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave President Lyndon Baines Johnson the “reason” to massacre over 2.1 million Vietnamese in 10 years of war. No negotiation, no conversation, no attempt at understanding—just go in to Nam and blast them back into the stone age. Trouble was—they pretty much lived in the Stone Age in the first place. Because of his sickening choice, Johnson died of depression and a very sick and sad man the last years of his life. He actually “got it” as to what he did. It will be interesting to see if former President George W. Bush ever “gets it” as to the astounding amount of death and horror he created. He may end his life inside a bottle of booze where he started it.

From the war in Vietnam, I wrote a piece showing a doctor’s research whereby somewhere over 175,000 to as high as 225,000 American combat troops that left Vietnam in one piece, killed themselves from their emotional wounds from their service in Vietnam. The alcoholism and drug addiction from that war grew beyond imagination. It continues today in veteran homelessness, poverty, broken families, drug and alcohol use and nameless children that never enjoyed a healthy father.

The human misery that George W. Bush created in Iraq and Afghanistan may go much higher than 225,000 suicides of U.S. troops. If you start counting the human misery of 2.5 million Iraqi refugees and incredible displacement of their society, the human misery factor extends off the charts.

As you noticed this past week, the Sunni and Shiites are already bombing each other into more violence. One bomb in Baghdad killed 69 people and wounded over 100 others. Sectarian violence will continue.

Our “moment” (10 years) over there might be likened to a person sticking his or her hand into a bucket of water. While our hand remained in the water, the level of the water changed and we created cause and effect. When we withdrew our hand, it all returned to the same as before we left. As Richard Engel said to NBC’s Brian Williams on Friday, “Their sectarian violence is just beginning and will implode Iraq. Iraq’s President Maliki cannot control what’s coming.”

In other words, their endless tribal wars will re-convene. Which means, all our nearly $1 trillion dollars of U.S. taxpayer money will have gone for all the death and destruction—for nothing. In the meantime, our own country’s educational systems, infrastructure and cities crumble before our eyes.

Saddam Hussein was no more a threat to the United States than a baby in a sandbox 10,000 miles away. To remain in Afghanistan for 10 years defies logic, reason and common sense. If we are to be the police-nation of the world to bring all the dictators to justice, we would have to attack, occupy and dominate North Korea, China, Pakistan, Republic of Congo, Somalia, Sudan and two dozen other countries around the world. It’s absolutely absurd what we allowed the Military Industrial Complex to perpetrate on our citizens and our country.

But because we now support an all volunteer army, no one blinks at the deaths and costs. More disturbing, we spend more money on war than most of the rest of the world combined. In the meantime, we suffer 42 million functionally illiterate Americans, 46 million Americans living on food stamps, another 15 million unemployed and 13 million children living in poverty. We’re losing the middle class while our prisons house 2.3 million suffering souls. We have millions of foreclosures of homes for Americans and we can’t pay our teachers a decent wage while our schools fail.

When will this president address America’s rebuilding? When will this Congress “attack” America’s problems? When will Americans speak up for America’s future?

When will 535 members of Congress grow a brain, spine and conscience to represent peace, common sense and reason? When will we elect presidents that studied history, learned critical thinking and understood logic? When will America become an instrument of peace in the world?

If I were a betting man, some president in the future will “create” another war guided by the Military Industrial Complex that creates another generation of suicides, fatherless families, plastic legs, arms and PTSD military veterans. And the American people? Too apathetic to get off the couch to speak up against war!

Frosty Wooldridge

22nd September signs that Tony Burke is listening. WSCA had been lobbying Tony Burke for nearly two years to ensure guarantees in place that all of the promised $530 million conservation fund be spent within Western Sydney to protect bushland remnants promised as offsets.

Cautious optimism

On 22nd December, the Western Sydney Conservation Alliance (WSCA) cautiously welcomes the announcement today by Tony Burke that he will sign off on the Strategic Assessment of the Sydney Growth Centres. WSCA had been lobbying Tony Burke for nearly two years warning him not to rush in and sign off on the plan unless guarantees were in place to ensure that all of the promised $530 million conservation fund (the money promised to offset the destruction of 2000 ha of bushland within the growth centres) was spent entirely within Western Sydney protecting bushland remnants promised as offsets.

The NSW Government had been shifting towards raiding this $530 million conservation offset fund and spending up to 75% of it outside of Western Sydney in order to get more bang for its buck.

Tony Burke

"Tony Burke has listened to our concerns about this looming rip-off and has inserted new conditions into the plan guaranteeing that the entire $530 million fund would be spent in western Sydney. This may have saved thousands of hectares of rare bushland from the O'Farrell Government who intended to raid the $530 million conservation fund and spend it outside of western Sydney. The O'Farrell Government has a plan to increase urban sprawl in Western Sydney beyond development within the Growth Centres and that would have been made all the more easier if the majority of the $530 million fund disappeared from western Sydney.

Thanks to local Labor members

We specifically thank local Labor Members: Michelle Rowland, David Bradbury and Ed Husic for helping to stop this rip-off. They shared in our concerns about the inequity of the NSW Governments plans.

We believe the new conditions insisted upon by Tony Burke include that all the $530 million be spent in western Sydney and that only in exceptional circumstance could it be considered going off the Cumberland Plain to acquire offset lands. That exceptional circumstance would have to be approved by a new committee."

"That committee needs to be thoroughly transparent and it would be good if the community had a say in any decisions."

Growth Centers remain on-course for environmental disaster

"We must not lose sight though that the Sydney Growth Centres is an environmental disaster that will clear about 2000 ha of endangered woodland including about 9% of all remaining Cumberland Plain Woodland. So this announcement, whilst promising much in terms of a future conservation fund, also heralds the destruction of large areas of western Sydney's irreplaceable natural heritage"

Comments: Geoff Brown President WSCA - 0431 222602 www.wsca.org.au

Media Release
Western Sydney Conservation Alliance Inc

22nd December 2011

Growth Centres Plan go ahead by Tony Burke
Federal Government rescues bushland from O'Farrell Government

Santa is feeling the pressure of increased work as population and density of housing in cities increases. He sympathises with the nurses.

‘Twas the night before Christmas and Santa was stressed
His elves overworked but doing their best,
To keep up the good work which grew more and more
To satisfy children entitled by law,
To a visit from Santa on December 24
Down steep sooty chimneys and then out the door.

“There're too many houses and too many toys
To make and distribute to girls and to boys!”
Cried the elves overworked to skin and to bone ,
Stressed out of their brains while they talked on the phone,
Of how to deliver those millions of presents
When the moon on that night would be only a crescent

And since their last trip,10 million new houses
Awaited delivery of toys and of blouses,
They knew from last year the work had expanded
Crafting millions more toys e’er Santa landed
Back at the north pole from his twenty ten orbit,
Which took him so long he was candidly morbid

Crying “How can they ask for more work each year?
Productivity improvements come very dear
To us in our workplace we cannot do better
Please think of our health and do not send letters!
There’s too many of you and too few of us,
Our reindeer hang in there and don’t make a fuss

But when they look for a house and then they find eight.
Poor Santa gets worried as he’s running so late!
Those planners and pollies do not think ahead,
Not even to the night when their kids go to bed
Expecting one man to come to ever more homes
With wonderful trinkets and be-jeweled combs."

"It’s all very well for them and for theirs
I now have to climb all those millions of stairs!
I’m not getting younger and neither are they
But their superannuation will save the day.
Like all those dear nurses, I love what I do
But pressure from others just stuffs me up too.”

It is typical of the English speaking world that governments that pretend to be democratic, use planners to ride roughshod over the rights of citizens. Here is something from Los Angeles: "In the name of updating its zoning code, Los Angeles is on the verge of overriding community plans across the city by carving out "overlay" neighborhoods in which city employees can approve — by decree and without a hearing or Environmental Impact Report — residential and commercial projects of far greater density than now allowed."

"Future Shock"
By L.A. Weekly
published: January 20, 2011

"Our website comment section lit up last week after Steven Leigh Morris — surely the Earth's only combo theater critic and growth-and-development specialist — wrote about the city's attempt to quietly push through a major planning change ("L.A.'s Church of Our Holy Density," Jan. 14). In the name of updating its zoning code, Los Angeles is on the verge of overriding community plans across the city by carving out "overlay" neighborhoods in which city employees can approve — by decree and without a hearing or Environmental Impact Report — residential and commercial projects of far greater density than now allowed. Commenters are of two minds. Some think opponents of the code revisions fail to recognize that Los Angeles will continue to grow and must prepare for higher density. Others see the revisions as a power grab by the city and developers that mostly cuts the public out of the process.

Reader Rick Abrams writes: "These zoning changes have one goal — to hasten the mega-densification of Los Angeles. Council President Eric Garcetti's and Councilman Tom LaBonge's New Hollywood Community Plan calls it Vertificalization. The Prop. X — Inventing the Next L.A., to which the article referred, called 'yards' a waste. They wanted apartments in people's backyards. They also proposed building Public Housing Projects over all the wide medians along various L.A. streets. They see this green space as waste."

More of this article here.

Wednesday 21st December 2011 - press release from Kelvin Thomson, MP.
You can reply here and you can reply on Mr Thomson's blog.

Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that, with the exception of Singapore, during the last 5 years Australia ran far and away the biggest per capita migration program in the world – 11.1 migrants per thousand people per year. After us came Italy, with 6.7, Canada 6.6, Sweden 5.8, Hong Kong 5.1, the United States and the United Kingdom 3.3, and New Zealand 3.1. In fact we could cut our migration program to 74,000, rather than 174,000, and we’d still be running one of the biggest per capita programs in the world – as big as the UK, Italy and Sweden, and bigger than the US and New Zealand.

I believe the Australian people are instinctively generous and good-hearted, but their tolerance has been stretched to breaking point by the quadrupling of the skilled migration program over the past 15 years, which has generated competition for jobs and housing and put pressure on family living standards.

As a consequence the debate about asylum seekers is very divisive. It is doing nothing for our sense of national unity and respect for each other.

We should not expect the Australian people to accept an increase in the refugee intake in isolation. It should be part of a package where skilled migration is cut by 50,000. There are many good reasons to cut our migration program, and one of them is that it is likely to lift public support for an increased refugee program, which I think it’s something we have to bring to the table when we are working with our regional neighbours on the asylum seeker issue. Furthermore the Australian people have said over and over that they think our migration level is too high, so cutting our massive migration rate is giving the Australian people what they want.

In fact we could cut our migration program to 74,000, rather than 174,000, and we’d still be running one of the biggest per capita programs in the world – as big as the UK, Italy and Sweden, and bigger than the US and New Zealand.

Stable Population Party Australia has finalised its core values and posted them to their website. In 2012 they say that they will be calling for new policy suggestions that align with these party values. Take a look...

Philosophy, Objectives & Core Values

(Click here to go to the SPPA site.)
Australia has a rich tradition in migration and choice regarding family size. Long may this continue.

The Stable Population Party is made up of Australians from all backgrounds who support an ongoing, balanced and flexible migration program. We also reject government interference in decisions regarding family size, including offering irresponsible 'bonus' cash incentives for children. Responsible population policies are urgently required for Australia, in order to avoid draconian policies in the future.

Stabilising as soon as practicably possible will deliver us an optimum population target of around 23-26 million through to 2050. Australia's fertility rate, currently around two children per woman, and average life expectancy would largely determine the exact number. Population growth in Australia is a big problem but it is easy to solve, if our politicians have the courage.

Philosophy

The Stable Population Party is committed to a stable, sustainable, open and tolerant Australia.

Objectives

The key objectives of the Stable Population Party are as follows:

To stabilise Australia's population as soon as practicably possible, aiming for a population of around 23-26 million through to 2050; and
To provide leadership and support to other countries experiencing rapid population growth, so as to help them stabilise their populations, and thus help stabilise global population.

Core Values

To enhance the prosperity of all Australians, our children and grandchildren, and create a better quality of life for all, the Stable Population Party upholds the following core values:

1. Sustainable living

Australia should progress economically and socially using resources in ecologically sustainable ways to protect the environment and the natural world. The aim is wellbeing for all Australians, present and future, and to preserve the biodiversity of our ecosystems, with enough space and resources to live well and in balance with each other. A sustainable Australia starts with a stable population.

2. Egalitarian democracy

All individuals should have equal opportunity to take part in the democratic process. We are committed to honest administration that prioritises the public interest and does not pander to vested interests. Public policy should be based on objective evidence-based advice in light of wider social, economic, environmental, national security and cultural concerns. Importantly, we Australians must be allowed to democratically choose our own population size, mindful of our finite resource base and likely future global challenges.

3. Fiscal responsibility

Public finances and resources should be properly managed and accounted for, so as to ensure Australia lives within its means, without indebting our children and grandchildren or running down our environments. This includes properly accounting for the costs of population growth, like infrastructure, the depletion of our mineral and energy wealth and the growing impacts of our waste.

4. Global citizenship

Through partnership, example and assistance, Australia should help other nations to live well and plan their own future within their sustainable resource base. While welcoming our fair share of genuine refugees, we should acknowledge that overpopulation drives the resource scarcity behind most current conflicts and forced migration. By stabilising their populations through voluntary family planning and empowerment of women, nations protect their food security, improve infant and maternal health, maximise resilience to climate change, free up investment to build prosperity and avoid labour exploitation. All people should be able to live in peace and harmony in their homeland.

5. Productive innovation

We encourage innovation and sustainable development. In economic, environmental, social and cultural fields we advocate renewed investment in research, training and higher education. The aim is to support a skilled, productive and creative nation, allowing Australians to fulfil their potential.

Many people have chosen to limit their family size and in some cases even elected to remain childless, but in almost all cases, they have done so for personal, not ecological reasons. Is the notion that they would make those same choices in the interest of our collective well-being and survival as a species asking too much of them? Is it too much to ask of us to over-ride our genetic and cultural programming to procreate in the interests of a greater good? Perhaps it is. Perhaps the "mutual coercion" that Garrett Hardin talked about, the imposition of birth control laws, can never be "mutually agreed upon" on a scale that would produce meaningful results in the very short time frame we have to avoid disaster. The best people to ask are ordinary people. Would grandmothers choose a world with fewer grandchildren?

Nearly two years ago, I received news that there was a new addition to my family. My niece Gethsemane had just given birth to my "grand-nephew", Oliver. That morning, my friend Michael noticed that my face carried a different expression than was customary. It was a blend of expression of pride and sadness. As soon as I told him about the birth, Michael reflexively congratulated me, and when I confessed reservations, he was perplexed. "You should be happy!" he exclaimed. I tersely responded, "Why?" His answer was equally terse, and I think, profoundly revealing of our predicament. "It's renewal!", he proclaimed.

At that point I wanted to tell him the truth. I wanted to tell him that we were already getting 350,000 cases of "renewal" every day, that we are adding more than 150 people to our numbers every minute, and 200,000 every day---that's right----one city the size of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan every day-----and nearly 80 million every year. I wanted to tell him that were now more people being born every day than there are primates in the world. That we are pushing 50 other species off the plate every day, and pushing people in our own species off the plate every day in the competition for scarce resources. I wanted to tell him this, but didn't. I didn't because he was among those vast numbers of people who didn't even understand that there was a problem. So where could I begin, and when? Certainly not on a Tuesday morning when he was busy with so many errands.

I faced a similar situation later that month. My neighbour Peter announced that they had a new grandson. And not long after that, another neighbour, Rob, made a similar announcement. Both were bursting with pride. How could I dare to introduce the topic of overpopulation?

Now, earlier this week, I received a photo of my grand-nephew, Oliver, just a month shy of his second birthday, sitting on Santa's knee for the very first time. It instantly reminded me of my first time some 56 years ago. The memories are still vivid. As soon as I saw Oliver, my heart warmed with delight. My Malthusian beliefs were instantly overwhelmed by a raw emotional bond with this little guy. If that was my reaction, you can imagine how the rest of the people on the email list responded. They were, for the most part, grandmothers. People over 60. They all gushed at this cute young boy.

All of us on the list replied with our thanks for having been chosen to share this wonderful moment. But one of them responded to me as well. She was once my sister-in-law, now a 65 year old woman and grandmother of two. She noticed my email address, "gloomndoom". Like Michael, she was perplexed. What was there to be gloomy about? Doom? What doom? Am I depressed about something? Did a friend of mine die? Did I have a breakup with someone? Do I have a severe illness? Once again, I initially wanted to tell her the whole truth, but then I realized that now was not the time and place, and that it would take more than one conversation to make her understand why there was cause for gloom. I would need to walk her through a serious of mental decompression chambers. Telling her, from the outset, that she was a murderer, or that we were in overshoot by a factor of 100 would not likely secure her audience. She would more than likely take it as an insult from a madman. I am obviously deranged, or in the depths of clinical depression.

What lesson can I draw from the forgoing experiences?

Jack Alpert believes that we can build a grass roots "belief" consensus for RPD (Rapid Population Decline) by first targeting grandmothers. The kind of ordinary grandmothers who look at young children like Oliver and find in them a source of love, pride and hope. He thinks that you-tubes like the ones he has made can convince them to over-ride their natural preferences and come to accept the bitter medicine of RPD and very low fertility rates. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lz5xKaBCSA To test his theory he has asked us for our input----people who have a much higher base-line of understanding than the grandmothers he hopes to reach. Whatever our reactions, Jack is testing the wrong market. He needs to run his stuff by some grandmothers.

That is why I have suggested that he develop three versions of one of his you-tubes. The mild, the not-so mild and the harsh-truth versions of overshoot. And that he select three focus groups of average grandmothers, and have each set of them view one of the versions and report their reactions. Each person tested would be required to respond in isolation of other viewers so that peer pressure was not a factor in the answers they gave. I think that by conducting such an experiment, all of us, including Jack, would get a much better handle on the "perception gap" between those of our ilk and the general public. I suspect that the results would prove quite sobering.

We know that we have our work cut out for us, but I think that it is very much more than the most pessimistic of us can really imagine. While many people can agree, on an intellectual level, that we are very much in overshoot, on a personal level, those very same people apparently find no reason not to get in on the party. We love kids and we love the idea of leaving a legacy. It's in our cultural and genetic DNA. It's the tragedy of the commons....

If RPD is the solution, or part of the solution, or part of a strategy which would mitigate the pain of our long and unstoppable descent from industrialism, then it might be asking too much of us. It might be that it is a sales pitch that can never be persuasive no matter how it is presented.

I like Jack's videos, but I am not the norm. I am not a grandmother.

Tim Murray
December 19/ 2011
Originally posted by Jon Cooksey at http://frogblog.howtoboilafrog.com/2011/12/7-billion-and-one.html
To learn about Jon Cooksey’s fast-paced, entertaining and informative documentary on our crisis, “How to Boil A Frog”, go to his site: http://www.howtoboilafrog.com

Go to youtube.com/watch?v=VMUZIVYuluc to find embedded YouTube Broadcast embedded above.

A search using the terms:

Republican Primaries

... confirms that Ron Paul's campaign to win the Republican Party preselection for US Presidential candidate has been blacked out by the international corporate news media.

No mention of Ron Paul is found until page 3. Stories currently listed on page 3 are as follows:

• Fed Up With Bias, Ron Paul Supporters Boycott Advertisers
  Fed up with a very overt strategic exclusion of Ron Paul during the coverage of the 2012 Republican Presidential Primary race, Ron Paul supporters are ...

• Ron Paul's Shot at Victory? Nolan Chart LLC
• http://hotair.com/archives/2011/12/14/ron-paul-im-not-sure-i-have-the-stamina-for-a-long-primary/
• Ron Paul first choice for SD GOP, says poll? Daily Republic
• Examiner.com - Northern Voices Online
• ...

More than anyone else I can bring to mind right now, Max Hastings has demolished any possible view that the Second World War was not a ghastly tragedy for most people affected by it.

I think, however, that All Hell Let Loose fails to adequately address one of the most vital questions that should concern anyone who takes the trouble to study this war:

That question is, once the war began, could the leaders of the anti-fascist alliance -- Britain, the US, the Soviet Union, etc. -- have won the war more rapidly and with less bloodshed and destruction? Was it necessary for all of 60 million to die to rid the world of the evil that caused the Second World War?

Western allies war against Hitler needlessly prolonged

Even Max Hastings acknowledges that opportunities that the Western Allies had to rout the Axis armies in North Africa and Southern Europe were thrown away, , time and time again, by what he depicts as poor judgment or incompetence on the part of a number of generals[1] charged with running the ground war in North Africa and Southern Europe.[2]:

• General Montgomery's overly cautious pursuit of the German and Italian Armies following the British victory at El Alamein in 1942, which allowed them to escape;
• The failure of the Americans and British to stop German and Italian forces escaping from Sicily across the straits of Messina to mainland Italy in 1943; and
• The failure of the American and British to prevent the invasion of Italy by Germany after Mussolini was overthrown in 1943. (This is only touched on by Hastings.) Had the US with their vast air superiority simply bombarded the railway line at the Brenner Pass bordering Italy and Austria, there is no way that sufficient German forces to impose German rule could have moved into Italy.

I could add a number of other examples not raised by Hastings.

Had the British and American leaders acted more decisively, Germany's war machine would have collapsed in 1943, if not earlier, but it seems that Western governments found two more bloody years of war and destruction preferable to the collapse of the Third Reich.

Why?

Could it be that an unstated war goal of Western governments was for stable capitalist rule to be maintained? Had the German Army collapsed in Western Europe, popular Communist-led partisans who triumphed in Yugoslavia would have also triumphed in Italy, Greece and possibly elsewhere.

As it was the de-facto co-operation given by the Western Allied military to the Wehrmacht in its suppression of partisans in Greece and Italy ensured the triumph of right-wing forces, including many former collaborators in the Western sphere of influence. Stalin also contributed to the triumph of right-wing forces, through, for example, his cynical betrayal in 1944 of triumphant Greek communist partisans, whom he ordered to lay down their weapons before the British,

Need Eastern front war have been so costly?

A more vexing question is how the terrible bloodshed on the Eastern Front, in which the vast majority of lives were lost, could possibly have been reduced.

Surely, it should have been possible for Stalin to have offered Germany peace in return for reparations and punishment for the leaders who had caused the war and those German soldiers who had committed the worst crimes against Soviet citizens?

If that had been done, say, after the German offensive against Moscow was stopped in 1941, and Germans, who surrendered, treated humanely, then surely fewer and fewer Germans would have seen reason to continue to fight for Hitler.

Instead, the brutal conduct of the war against all Germans, with no realistic prospect of peace with dignity offered to them, ensured that most fought ferociously until the very end, making the toll paid by the Soviet Union much higher than it need have been. The brutal treatment of Eastern Germany by its Soviet occupiers after 1945 would have helped confirm in the mind of many former German soldiers that they were right to fight to the end.

Footnotes

1. I don't necessarily include General Eisenhower in this. He started the war as a relatively junior officer (Lieutenant-Colonel, I recall) and was promoted to Supreme Commander of the Western Allied armed forces because of his demonstrated ability. It seems that 'mistakes' which served to prolong the war, were made on a number of occasions by officers junior to him, including, in Sicily, by Patton and Montgomery. He may have had, at the back of his mind, his experiences in the Second World War, when in January 1961, in his departing speech as US President, after JFK had been elected, he warned against the "military-industrial complex".

2. I haven't yet reached the part of the book which describes the ground war in Northern Europe from June 1944.

Ideological gap or Generation Gap?

I recently received an email from an American conservative action group that caught my attention. It made a point that is similar to the one that I have been trying to make for some time now. That is, our inability to harness effective support for immigration reform is more reflective of a generation gap than an ideological one.

The "under 35s" live in a different world that we do. "We" meaning the largely computer-illiterate boomers. In fact, today's generation "gap" is arguably much wider now that it was in the fabled 60s. What accounts for this division? There are two variables at play, I think.

The One-Party Classroom

One is that colleges and universities have become what David Horowitz describes as the "One Party Classroom". Cultural relativism and historical revisionism form the undercurrent of almost every subject taught today, at least in the liberal arts. Two generations of students have been taught to believe that all cultures are created equal, that we do not have a legitimate made-in-Canada or made-in-America cultural identity deserving of protection, that ours is a nation of immigrants with no right to restrict the volume of newcomers, that our democratic heritage of free expression must be restricted to protect immigrants and minorities from 'hate speech', that affirmative discrimination (aka preferential hiring) is justified as a measure to fast-track such groups to coveted positions and that immigration driven-population growth has nothing to do with environmental degradation---we can have 'green growth'. This orthodoxy apparently cannot be challenged. Whereas once universities represented an oasis of free debate in a sea of societal repression, they now represent a training ground for the One Party State, a state that conceals its determination to grow our population and remake our culture in the corporate image by showcasing a fake pluralism of Tweedlee and Tweedle-dummer.

A generation that speaks a foreign language in a foreign medium

The second variable that accounts for this generation gap is digital technology. I believe it to be an even more decisive factor in creating the two solitudes than the classroom indoctrination I referred to. Younger people are speaking a language we don't understand and in a medium that we don't participate in---- or even comprehend. They speak MSN text language. Their messages are terse and rife with acronyms, and written with such impatience that no care is given to spelling or diction. It is as if they are all speaking on walkie-talkies---Roger,over and out. And the technology they use to say it is something out of Dick Tracy or Star Trek. No sooner are we introduced to it when it is superseded by another upgrade. Cell phones to smart phones. Emails to twitters. Our heads are spinning while the young take it in stride, and actually, even embrace it. What seems remarkable to us is that they seem to have an obsessive need to report every move and every thought at every moment. They don't seem to be able to tolerate silence or down time. I am certain that interaction with this technology has quite literally 're-wired' or re-structured their brains. The increasing need to interact with smart phones and computers is a chemical addiction. The human brain seeks balance, and has a mechanism to achieve it. Pleasure-enhancing dopamine receptors respond to an overload of pleasurable electronic stimulation by shutting down, forcing the tech-user to compensate by flooding his brain with even more stimulation. This accounts for the increased impatience which marks this digital generation. They are hooked to stimulation and more and more of is required to get the same fix. This is classic "down-regulation" at work.

We can't close the generation gap if WE don't change

The forgoing is not meant to be a condemnation of the younger generation---simply an explanation of what I believe to be an observable fact. So how does that affect us----the over-50s and 60s who want to impart what we think is important information that affects their future? We have two liabilities. Firstly, our message is not congruent with the world-view that they were taught in school. They have been taught to believe in "one world", a world without borders, and a Canada that is "Home to the World"---the slogan that was voted most appropriate and descriptive of our national mission by National Post readers. The idea that this country has a right to preserve both its cultural and natural heritage from the incursions of mass numbers of migrants is not only incomprehensible to them but outrageous. Secondly, even if we broke their programming and packaged our message in a way that would resonate with them, we would have to do it where they live----in the social media. But we are old dogs who don't want to learn any new tricks. We are not apparently interested in making you-tubes, holding demonstrations outside CBC headquarters, going to Occupy protests to hear what youth are saying or performing any creative stunts that would attract media attention. Instead, we want to plod along writing books, research papers and issuing staid press releases. We are like silent film stars who refuse to understand that with the advent of 'talkies', our talents are less and less marketable as time wears on.

Our ideas and our methods of conveying them are an anachronism. I wished it wasn't so, but there it is. Adapt or perish. The choice is ours.

Tim Murray
October 26, 2011

PS I am neither pro or anti Obama. Democrats and Republicans are merely two sides of the corporate coin, and it is a matter of complete indifference to me which growthist party takes office. If I had my druthers they would all be on the bread line. I use the following example just to illustrate how access to the social media can define political loyalties among the younger generation.

Here was the email I referred to:

Dear ______,

Of all the news you and I have shared together, this could be the most worrisome I've ever sent you: Barack Obama is still the hero of voters 18-34, who swept him into office overwhelmingly in 2008 — and are poised to do the same in 2012.

You know I don't scare easily. But if we don't act together now, Obama will win in 2012 — by reaching younger voters where they live — online, with email, on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and cell phones. And that scares me.

We can't afford a blowout like 2008 again. But it's in the cards... because we're still miles behind the Obama machine when it comes to reaching younger voters.

Internet Tactic: 2008 Presidential Race

Facebook friends on Election Day Obama 2,397,253 McCain 622,860
Unique visitors to the campaign website for the week ending November 1 Obama 4,851,069 McCain 1,464,544
MONEY RAISED ONLINE Obama $750 million McCain $370 million

That's why Human Events, the national conservative newsweekly, has launched Click to Victory 2012, an urgent campaign to create a dominant new conservative web site targeting voters 18-34 — and to use all the Obamacrat tools and tactics to convince them they must overthrow Obama in 2012.

VicForests up before the Supreme Court - again - for alleged illegal logging, thanks to the amazing avatars of Environment East Gippsland. Dig into your pockets, folks! EEG does more for you than your taxes!

Wednesday 14th December 2011

VicForests is again being sued in the Supreme Court over what an environment group believes is illegal logging of a very significant protected rainforest area. Environment East Gippsland, which successfully sued VicForests last year, is lodging papers for an urgent injunction this morning in the Melbourne Supreme Court to stop the logging.

“This is the third case of what we believe is illegal logging that VicForests will have to answer for”, said Jill Redwood, coordinator of the group. “The public thinks this type of lawless destruction of protected primary forest and rainforest only occurs overseas”.

“VicForests is still refusing to pay our legal costs of around a million dollars from last year, despite this being a clear court order. If they think this is preventing us taking further legal action, it’s not working. The public is so outraged about their criminal destruction, they have already donated enough for us to get this next legal action rolling.”

“In a proper democracy it should not be up to the public to enforce the law over an uncontrollable government entity. We should not be forced to ask the courts to ensure VicForests abides by the law. We are a developed country. We give millions to other countries to help them stop illegal logging of their rainforests. But in Victoria we are seeing the same happen with full support of the Baillieu government. Exploiting industries seem to be writing the government’s laws and policies now”.

This stand of forest was blockaded for 5 days last week and was broken up by police on Monday.

“It doesn’t take long for a determined crew of logging contractors to cut down the tall trees and smash down a forest of tree ferns”, said Jill Redwood “We hope this injunction will be successful”.

For comment - Jill Redwood: 51540145, Liz Ingham (in court for EEG): 0409 333 595