No moderate rebels in Syria

SUBHEAD: Tulsi Gabbard has destroyed America's Deep State narrative on Syrian rebels and need for war.

By Michael Krieger on 28 February 2016 for Liberty Blitzkrieg -
(https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2017/02/28/there-are-no-moderate-rebels-tulsi-gabbard-destroys-the-deep-states-syria-narrative/)


Image above: Photo of Tulsi Gabbard posing with Syrian women during her trip to that country. From (http://www.veteransnewsnow.com/2017/01/27/1013730-congresswoman-tulsi-gabbard-interviewed-after-her-trip-to-syria/).

Tulsi Gabbard has continued to impress ever since she came on the national scene last year with her courageous and very public support for Bernie Sanders in the rigged Democratic primary.

Most recently, shecontinued to demonstrate her knowledge of geopolitics and willingness to stand up to America’s unelected government, aka the Deep State, in a recent interview with CNN’s Jake Taper.

Note, the clip is about a month old, but important to watch if you haven’t. 


Video above: On 1/26/17 CNN’s Jake Tapper was crushed by Tulsi Gabbard, ‘Why is US supporting Al Qaeda? From (https://youtu.be/zE3jbbhB0eA).

If the Democrats have any hope of becoming a decent opposition party which not only resists the worst of Trump, but also rejects the perverted neoliberal/Deep State ideology currently embraced by establishment Dems, Tulsi Gabbard will have to play a key role.

As I highlighted in last February’s post, It’s Not Just the GOP – The Democratic Party is Also Imploding:

A rising star within the Democratic ranks, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, cut herself off from the party’s establishment by resigning from her post as vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee and endorsing Bernie Sanders for president.

Her position with the DNC required her to stay neutral in the primaries, but she said that “the stakes are too high.” She announced her decision on Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” and made a video where she explained her reasoning.

Gabbard, an Iraq war veteran, said she knows the cost of war firsthand. “I know how important it is that our commander-in-chief has the sound judgment required to know when to use America’s military power—and when not to use that power.”The importance of this move cannot be understated.

In no uncertain terms, this gesture publicly exposes the weakness of the “Clinton brand.” She clearly isn’t afraid of Hillary or of any repercussions from the Democratic Party elite, a fact that is underscored by the fact she came out with her endorsement after he got pummeled in South Carolina.
But let’s take a step back and think about this in the even bigger picture.

You don’t get to Congress by being a political imbecile. On the surface, this move looks like career suicide, particularly since Hillary is probably about to clinch the nomination. Recall, Rep. Gabbard didn’t merely endorse Sanders after a bruising loss in South Carolina, she stepped down from her official position with the DNC to do so.

This isn’t merely a statement, it’s the equivalent of dropping a neutron bomb on the Democratic establishment. So why did she do it?

While I think she genuinely agrees with Sanders on key issues, the reason she came out so aggressively is because she sees the writing on the wall. She’s playing the long game, and in the long game, Hillary Clinton represents a discredited and failed status quo, while Bernie Sanders represents a push toward the paradigm level change that will define the future.

When it comes to the Democrats, we need to see a lot less Pelosi and Schumer, and a lot more Gabbard.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Ms Gabbard goes to Syria 1/29/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Tulsi and Bernie 3/11/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Gabbard endorses Sanders 2/29/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Tulsi Gabbard on Syria 11/1/15
Ea O Ka Aina: Tulsi Gabbard Interview 11/14/12

 .

Protect Hawaii from pesticide drift

SUBHEAD: It’s now the state’s kuleana to act after a federal appeals court rejected local regulation efforts.

By Elle Cochran on 24 February 2017 for Civil Beat -
(http://www.civilbeat.org/2017/02/hawaii-must-protect-residents-from-pesticide-drift/)


Image above: Tractor applying pesticides to GMO experimental crops in Hawaii. From original article.

[Civil Beat Editor’s Note: This Community Voice was co-authored by 10 council members from Maui, Kauai and Hawaii Island. All the authors are listed at the end.]
[IB Publisher's note: Four council members from Maui and five from Big Island stood up for the people of Hawaii. Only Mason Chock from Kauai was not in the pocket of the pesticide companies spoiling our environment.]

County council members throughout the islands say it’s now the state’s kuleana to act after a federal appeals court rejected local regulation efforts.

As individual county council members from across the islands, we feel it’s important to publicly call for state action to protect Hawaii’s residents and natural environment from unreasonable exposure to pesticide drift.

Many of our most vulnerable populations (children, elderly) do not have a choice but to live and work in close proximity to areas where large amounts of highly toxic “Restricted use pesticides” (RUPs) are sprayed in open air field trials.

Our counties and our residents have worked hard to pass ordinances aimed at addressing the health and environmental risks of industrial agriculture and pesticide drift. Thousands of residents have marched to call for action.

The recent 9th U.S. Circuit Court decision has made it clear that this is now the kuleana of the state, and that the counties are powerless. So now, the state must act.

The scientific and medical evidence of the dangers to human health from pesticides is staggering.

The American Academy of Pediatrics published a major report in 2012 that comprehensively reviewed 195 medical studies on pesticides and found links to long-term health effects including cancer, decreased cognitive function, behavior problems, birth defects, and asthma. The AAP Report recommended buffer zones as a way to protect children’s health.

At least 27 schools in Hawaii are within 1 mile of open agrochemical research fields where large amounts of RUPs are sprayed. At Waimea Middle School on Kauai, air sampling has consistently detected the RUP Chlorpyrifos. Public records revealed that approximately 2,000 pounds of Chlorpyrifos was used on Kauai in 2015 alone.

This is a toxin which the EPA has started the process of banning for agricultural use, and which caused the hospitalization of at least 10 farmworkers on Kauai last year. It is unacceptable that we are not being more proactive to protect our children from this type of exposure.

In addition, the state and County of Kauai funded a 15-month Joint Fact-Finding Study Group (JFFG) which reviewed scientific literature and interviewed hundreds of community advocates (including agrochemical industry representatives).

One of the most important findings from the JFFG Final Report is that the state does not collect the necessary data on resident health, soil or water sampling to understand the impacts of this type of pesticide use on Hawaii’s people and environment.

With the newly-appointed hostile leadership of the EPA, the federal government cannot be counted on to protect our environment as it once was charged to do.

Our State lawmakers should wait no longer to take long overdue action to reduce pesticide exposure, and implement the Recommendations of the State and County-funded JFFG Report:
  1. Statewide buffer zone policy
  2. Statewide mandatory and thorough pesticide use disclosure and notification
  3. Comprehensive health and environmental testing in impacted communities
This can be done without burdening small farmers or food producers, because most food farmers do not use high levels of RUPs.

There are several bills in the state House and Senate this session that deserve wide support.
The people of Hawaii have the right to decide whether to expose themselves to the risks of toxic pesticides in industrial agriculture, and to take action to prevent their impacts. With the recent federal court decisions, it is clear that this responsibility now lies with the state.

As county council members, it is our duty to protect the health and welfare of our communities. We take this responsibility with great seriousness, and respectfully urge our State policymakers to take action now to implement the Recommendations of the JFFG Report.

Signed (as individual council members):
  • Mason Chock (Kauai)
  • Alika Atay (Maui)
  • Kelly King (Maui)
  • Elle Cochran (Maui)
  • Don Guzman (Maui)
  • Karen Eoff (Hawaii)
  • Maile David (Hawaii)
  • Eileen O’Hara (Hawaii)
  • Jeniffer Ruggles (Hawaii)
  • Valerie Poindexter (Hawaii)
.

A Hole in the Head

SUBHEAD: America has a hole in its head. It’s the place formerly known as The Center. Normal is no more.

By James Kunstler on 27 February 2017 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/a-hole-in-the-head/)


Image above: Squabbling Democratic and Rebublican parties. From (http://www.nashvillescene.com/news/pith-in-the-wind/article/13031002/tea-party-squabbling).

We need a new civil war like we need a hole in the head. But that’s just it: America has a hole in its head. It’s the place formerly known as The Center. It didn’t hold. It was the place where people of differing views could rely on each other to behave reasonably around a touchstone called the National Interest.

That abandoned place is now cordoned off, a Chernobyl of the mind, where figures on each side of the political margin fear to even sojourn, let alone occupy, lest they go radioactive.

Anyway, the old parties at each side of the political transect, are melting down in equivalent fugues of delusion, rage, and impotence — as predicted here through the election year of 2016. They can’t make anything good happen in the National Interest.

They can’t control the runaway rackets that they engineered in legislation, policy, and practice under the dominion of each party, by turns, going back to Lyndon B. Johnson, and so they have driven themselves and each other insane.

Trump and Hillary perfectly embodied the climactic stage of each party before their final mutual sprint to collapse. Both had more than a tinge of the psychopath. Trump is the bluff that the Republicans called on themselves, having jettisoned anything identifiable as coherent principles translatable to useful action.

Hillary was an American Lady Macbeth attempting to pull off the ultimate inside job by any means necessary, her wickedness so plain to see that even the voters picked up on it. These two are the old parties’ revenge on each other, and on themselves, for decades of bad choices and bad faith.

The anti-intellectual Trump is, for the Right, the answer to the Intellectual-Yet-Idiots (IYIs) that Nassim Taleb has so ably identified as infesting the Left. It is a good guess that President Trump has not read a book since high school, and perhaps never in his entire life.

But are you not amazed at how the IYIs of the Left have savaged the life-of-the-mind on campus, and out in the other precincts of culture where free inquiry once flourished? From the craven college presidents who pretend that race-segregated “safe spaces” represent “inclusiveness,” to The New York Times editors who pretend in headlines that illegal immigrants have done nothing illegal, the mendacity is awesome.

Something like this has happened before in US history and it may be cyclical. The former Princeton University professor and President, Woodrow Wilson, dragged America into the First World War, which killed over 53,000 Americans  (as many as Vietnam) in only eighteen months. He promulgated the Red Scare, a bit of hysteria not unlike the Race and Gender Phobia Accusation Fest on the Left today.

Professor Wilson was also responsible for creating the Federal Reserve and all the mischief it has entailed, especially the loss of over 90 percent of the dollar’s value since 1913. Wilson, the perfect IYI of that day.

The reaction to Wilson was Warren Gamaliel Harding, the hard-drinking, card-playing Ohio Main Street boob picked in the notorious “smoke-filled room” of the 1920 GOP convention.

He invoked a return to “normalcy,” which was not even a word (try normality), and was laughed at as we now laugh at Trump for his idiotic utterances such as “win bigly” (or is that big league?).

Harding is also known for confessing in a letter: “I am not fit for this office and should never have been here.”

Yet, in his brief term (died in office, 1923), Harding navigated the country successfully through a fierce post-World War One depression simply by not resorting to government intervention.

Something like the same dynamic returned in 1952 when General Eisenhower took over from Harry Truman and the defeated Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson quipped, “The New Dealers have been replaced by the car dealers.”

Ha! If he only knew! After all, who was on board as Ike’s Veep? None other than Tricky Dick Nixon, soon to be cast as America’s quintessential used car salesman.

Well, those were the days, and those days are over.

So much has gone wrong here in the past thirty years and the game of salugi being played by the Dems and the GOP is not helping any of it.  [IB Publisher's note: "Salugi" or "Saloogie" is unorganized game among NYC area children in which an article is snatched away from a victim and tossed back and forth among the tormentors; also used as a call in the game.]

And that is why the two parties are heading toward extinction. We’re in the phase of intra-party factional conflict for now. Each party has its own preliminary civil war going on.

The election of Obama era Labor Secretary and party hack, Tom Perez, as DNC chair yesterday has set the Bernie Sanders Prog troops into paroxysms of animadversion. They’re calling out all up-and-down the Twitterverse for a new party of their own.

Trump faces his own mutineers on the Right, and not just the two cheerleaders for World War Three, John McCain and Lindsey Graham.

Coming out of the Conservative CPAC meeting last week, just about his whole agenda was written off as (cough cough) politically impractical by the poobahs in attendance: reform-and-replacement of the Affordable Care Act, tax reform, the promised massive infrastructure-building stimulus orgy, the border wall, the trade blockages.

Anon, comes the expiration of the current debt ceiling, at around $20 trillion, in mid-March. Do you imagine that the two parties warring with each other in congress will be able to come to some resolution over that? Fuggeddabowdit. The Democrats have every incentive to let President Trump stew in this fatal brine like a Delancey Street corned beef.

What it means, of course, is that the US Treasury runs out of ready cash in mid-summer and some invoices just don’t get paid, maybe even some bigly ones like Social Security checks and Medicare bills. Won’t that be a spectacle? That’s where Trump becomes a political quadriplegic and the voters start jumping off the dying parties like fleas off of two dead dogs.

By then, plenty of other mischief will be afoot in the world, including the fractious outcome of elections in France and the Netherlands, with the European Union spinning into its own event horizon, and currency instability like the world has never seen before. Enjoy the remaining weeks of normality.

.

"This sucker could go down"

SUBHEAD: If the U.S. debt ceiling is breached in March there could be widespread panic on Wall Street.

By Mac Slavo on 26 February 2017 for SHTF Plan -
(http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/stockman-warns-trump-does-not-yet-understand-the-magnitude-of-the-problem-its-going-to-shock-the-system_02262017S)


Image above: Donald Trump in 2005 explaining how the World Trade Center towers were brought down by explosives and not commercial airliners flown into the buildings by Saudi Arabian terrorists. From (https://www.bustle.com/articles/101325-12-times-donald-trump-bashed-new-york-which-will-definitely-piss-off-people-who-love-the).

Though many financial pundits make the argument that the U.S. economy is booming as a result of millions of new jobs, a healthy housing market and record stock market levels, former Reagan budget director David Stockman  says that the next few months will see fiscal, financial and economic upheaval.

In a recent interview with Greg Hunter’s USA Watchdog, Stockman argues that President Trump’s stimulus packages will be ground to a halt as the U.S. debt ceiling is once again breached in March. The resulting uncertainty could lead to widespread panic on Wall Street.

The trigger, says Stockman, will be a debt ceiling crisis on or around March 15, 2017, which incidentally, just happens to be the same day that the Federal Reserve is supposed to hike interest rates:
In a typical month we have 250 to 300 billion in revenue coming in… that will easily cover the debt service for a month… that will readily cover social security and other critical payments… but when it comes to paying grants to state and local governments, contractors, or the Army Corp of Engineers, or the Pentagon, or a whole range of other activities, if you don’t have the cash you put the bills in the drawer…

I think that is what’s going to shock the system… and it will scare the living bejeezus out of Wall Street and financial markets because then you won’t have a sudden clarification or resolution to the problem.. and that could go on for days and weeks.

This is going to be a maelstrom like we’ve never seen before and the markets are not even remotely prepared for this… Fundamentals don’t matter anymore… nothing is being discounted… it’s all raging robo-machines and day traders thinking that somebody is going to come to their rescue no matter how  absurd the bubble gets or how extended the whole system becomes.
The fall out will be fast and unprecedented in its scale:
There is going to be a recession… and there is going to be no stimulus left to bail it out… and neither Trump or the Wall Street gamblers even remotely understand.

I see [President Trump] as the great disruptor… I don’t see him as someone who is going to bring about a solution… We have to have the system blow up first for all practical purposes… I think he does not yet understand the magnitude of the problem… the incorrigibility of what he’s inherited.

…He doesn’t realize that this problem he is inheriting is a thousand times greater than anything he ever imagined… this is a monster.…

Everything leaks and we’re learning in the Trump administration they’re as leak-prone as any I have seen… so it’s all going to leak out… and the stock market…the casino… is going to begin to realize the fact that there is no plan…there is no big fiscal stimulus… the whole system is heading into some kind of crash landing and that’s going to change the manic delusions that are underway today.
But Stockman says that some assets will survive the coming crash, which could see well in excess of 20% drops in stock market prices. Physical assets like gold and silver, including precious metals resource companies, may see prices go to new highs when investors shift to safe haven assets amid the panic:
There is some semblance of rationality left on the edges and corners of financial markets… some people realize that the central banks are out of dry powder… that era of massive money printing is over… In that environment there is going to be a massive reset of financial asset values and the central banks are going to be totally discredited.

There will be a dash for the only solid monetary asset left in the world, which is gold… The gold market is tiny compared to the size of the financial system… It only will take a small shift into the asset of last resort to make the price of gold really start to soar.

The best thing to do is be patient and be long gold… it will pay off handsomely when the crisis really intensifies and hits ground zero.
.

The Walking Dead in Washington

SUBHEAD: The Great Disruption is now in full swing. We face the most important choice in human history.

By Paul Gilding on 27 February 2017 for -
(https://paulgilding.com/2017/02/23/the-walking-dead-in-washington/)


Image above: Zombies stumble across the East Plaza of the U.S. Capitol. From (http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/16/politics/pentagon-zombie-apocalypse/).

We’re all focused on the drama and entertainment of Trump’s takeover of the world’s centre of military, security and economic power. For some it’s exciting and entertaining, for others terrifying and apocalyptic. I too have been glued to the news – at various times having each of those responses!

But now I’ve come back to earth, recognising it all for what it is. Important, but a sideshow to a much bigger and more important game. And on reflection, I’m glad he got elected.

How can a Trump Presidency be positive? Surely this is a major setback – to action on climate change, to addressing inequality, to human rights and global security. Doesn’t it make the world a scarier and less stable place?

In isolation, all true, but in context, not so much. The context is the key.

Trump’s election is not a trend. It should not be seen as evidence of a swing to the right, to nationalism and xenophobia etc. It is simply a symptom of the volatility inherent in the accelerating breakdown of our current economic approach and model.

What we are seeing is the last hurrah of a dying approach. A desperate attempt by the incumbents to rescue the now failing economic model that did deliver great progress for humanity but has come to the end of its road – and that road finishes at a cliff.

A cliff is the right analogy for a range of reasons. Perhaps most starkly it’s climate change and resource scarcity but also inequality and the failure of the old model to deliver further progress for most people in Western countries.

There are many other issues we face, but these two – climate change (and with it food supply and geopolitical security risks) and inequality within countries – are the systemic risks.

They define the cliff because neither can continue to worsen without the system responding – either transforming or breaking down. So the old approach is finished, along with the fossil fuel industry, and the walking dead taking over Washington won’t bring it back to life.

This leads to why, on reflection, I’m surprisingly pleased Trump was elected, rather than Hillary Clinton. I know it is hard to imagine how someone as appalling as Trump is better than the alternative, so let me expand.

We are now accelerating towards the cliff and we don’t have much time left to change course. If Clinton had been elected, we would have continued to suffer the delusion that we were addressing the systemic risks we face in an inadequate but still worthwhile way.

There would have been the same debates about fossil fuel companies having too much influence on politics, the conservative wealthy elites (yes there are liberal wealthy elites!) manipulating the system to their benefit etc. But we would have seen some progress.

Meanwhile business people would have argued the need for less regulation and “freeing up” the economy. They would have argued we needed to run the country like business people run companies, that if only we had strong (i.e. autocratic) leadership, we could get things done. And the Tea Party style extremists would have had their favourite enemy – another Clinton – to rail against and blame for it all, as they mobilized their base.

Now there’s no debate – it’s all there to see. The fossil fuel industry dominates the administration, gaining unfettered access to more coal, oil and gas. The iconic symbol and long term funder of climate change denial, Exxon has seen their CEO put in charge of US foreign policy and climate negotiations.

Trump is “the businessman in charge” and can slash regulation, free up the financial markets to unleash more mayhem and wind back those pesky environmental protections.

He will attack the media, mobilise extremists and unleash all the autocratic and nationalistic tendencies that the system has – but normally suppresses. His solution to inequality will be to give tax breaks to the rich (you can’t make this stuff up!) when we know only government intervention – or catastrophe–  prevents inequality being the inevitable result of unfettered markets.

The critical result of all this? No change to the fundamental direction we are on. The rich will get richer, the middle class will stagnate, racism and conflict will worsen and we will be less secure – all while climate change destabilises civilisation.  How is this good?
Because three big things will change.

First, there will no-one left to blame. Extreme capitalism will be unleashed and it will not deliver. The fraud of trickle-down economics will be exposed.

Secondly – US climate policy will no longer matter – fossil fuels will die on the same schedule they were dying on. As I argued in my 2015 article “Fossil fuels are finished, the rest is detail”, these are fundamental trends driven by technology and markets – and no government can stop them.

Thirdly – and most importantly – is “the resistance”. We are seeing a huge mobilisation of activism and social engagement among people who have long been passive – as this humorous post describes. This is like the 60’s – without the drugs but with a political strategy!

Climate change will be our Vietnam, the fossil fuel industry our military industrial complex. It could trigger, as this Atlantic article explored, a Tea Party of the left – maybe even a Green Tea Party.

Chaotic, aggressive and not always rational, but very impactful. And the liberal wealthy elites will get right behind it – because they too have a lot to lose from extreme capitalism and climate chaos.

Isn’t this all a bit scary? Don’t we now face a period of extreme upheaval and risk? Yes, but in case you hadn’t noticed, we already are. Ask a Syrian climate refugee trying to get into Europe. Observe the terrifying trends at our melting ice caps.  Talk to a disaffected, scared, unemployed factory worker in middle America who sees no prospects for themselves and their kids.  The system is breaking down.

We’re racing towards the cliff. Despite our desperate denial, we are going to face a global crisis, regardless of what we do. This will not be gentle.

So we need to face reality on how really dramatic change could actually occur.  System change doesn’t happen incrementally and is not triggered by traditional political processes – it takes a crisis. With Clinton, we would have blundered our way closer to the cliff, deluded by small progress. With Trump, we may just wake up in time.

The Great Disruption is now in full swing. We face the most important choice in human history – economic decline and the descent into chaos – possibly collapse – or transformation into a very different economy and society. Having the walking dead in Washington may be just what we need.

.

Standing Rock will not go away

SUBHEAD: Water Protectors hope supporters on March 10th will demonstrate in Washington D.C.

By Mark Trahant on 24 February 2017 for Yes Magazine -
(http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/water-is-life-the-story-of-standing-rock-wont-go-away-20170224)


Image above: Veterans, water protectors and the independent media facing riot police. Photo by Rob Wilson. From original article.

The Dakota Access pipeline is set and oil will flow. But this is not the only fight about water, and Standing Rock is only one chapter somewhere in the middle of a long story. 

Every day I write rhymes on Twitter. I get a kick out of reducing complicated ideas and events down to 140 characters. So yesterday I wrote:

Powers That Be think it’s the endDAPL will now have much money to spendBut Standing Rock is a rally cryRebalance our world before we die

And that is the story I want to tell. Standing Rock is only one chapter somewhere in the middle of a long story.

It’s true that North Dakota used the power of the state this week to march into the camps along the Missouri River and round up the remaining water protectors.

But think about that story: A few dozen people were arrested at camps where more than 10,000 people once said no to the Dakota Access pipeline. That people power did not evaporate. Even today more people, tens of thousands, perhaps millions, are still a part of that effort via social media and through direct action.

The Standing Rock Sioux tribe and its allies have been repeating the same story for more than a year: Mni wiconi (water is life). This is a narrative that the state of North Dakota, the pipeline company, and the oil industry could not counter, despite spending millions of dollars and advancing into Great Sioux treaty lands with a law enforcement army.

The chief executive of the company behind the Dakota Access pipeline told investors on Thursday that he “underestimated the power of social media,” where stories spread so rapidly. According to Bloomberg News, Kelcy Warren complained:

 “There was no way we can defend ourselves.” 

Actually, there was a way: Many energy companies have figured out that it’s far better to work with communities than to roll over them.

The point is that the company and the state lost the narrative. But then, “lost” might not be the right word. The company was in a rush to build and North Dakota made the story more compelling by acting against its own interest.

Think about what story we’d be telling now if the North Dakota governor spent the first few weeks listening to the community and exploring alternatives. No one would have turned the page to see what happened next. No drama.

Instead, the county sheriff took center stage playing a villain. In August, Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier arrested Standing Rock Chairman David Archambault II and the plot raced ahead to a military occupation, a company line to defend, and a global audience via social media. Lots of drama.

But this is not the only fight about water. There are now hundreds of scenes spread across North America.

The protection of water, the rebalancing of the world, now has a symbol and a memory to carry that story forward. Every pipeline project that’s planned across North America will have to defend itself in every community, on social media, and with investors.

The Standing Rock Sioux tribe hopes supporters on March 10th 2017 will march and pray in Washington, D.C. The tribe asks people to “rise in solidarity with the Indigenous peoples of the world whose rights protect Unci Maka (Grandmother Earth) for the future generations of all.” I think people will go. And by the thousands. Standing Rock is the call to action.

The White House tried to rewrite the story Thursday. Press Secretary Sean Spicer told reporters at the daily briefing that the White House is “constantly in touch with” the Standing Rock Sioux. The idea here, which has been brewing for a while, is to cast the tribe as a partner of the state.

The tribe immediately called out that statement as false. Archambault said in a news release: “We repeatedly asked for meetings with the Trump administration, but never received one until the day they notified Congress that they were issuing the easement.

I was on a plane to Washington, D.C., when the easement was issued. It was an insult to me and to the Tribe. I cancelled the meeting upon hearing this news. We have since filed a lawsuit for the immoral and illegal issuance of the easement and suspension of the environmental impact study.”

This lie from the White House is revealing: The Trump administration (and its allies in the oil industry and North Dakota) understands that this story is not over. They want their narrative back.

And that’s not going to happen. How could it? We all know water is life.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Tribes divest DAPL bankers 2/13/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Army Corps okays DAPL easement 2/8/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Trump orders go on DAPL EIS 2/3/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Trump orders shale oil pipelines 1/24/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Missile launcher at Standing Rock 1/19/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Lockdown at Trans-Pecos Pipeline 1/10/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Standing Rock has changed us 12/9/16
Ea O Ka Aina: As Standing Rock celebrates... 12/5/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Army Corps denies DAPL easement 12/4/16
Ea O Ka Aina: My Whole Heart is With You 12/2/16
Ea O Ka Aina: The Loving Containment of Courage 12/1/16
Ea O Ka Aina: The Beginning is Near 12/1/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Obama hints at DAPL rerouting 11/3/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Obama hints at DAPL rerouting 11/3/16
Ea O Ka Aina: New military attack on NODAPL 11/3/16
Ea O Ka Aina: How to Support NoDAPL 11/3/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Standing Rock has changed us 12/9/16
Ea O Ka Aina: As Standing Rock celebrates... 12/5/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Army Corps denies easement 12/4/16
Ea O Ka Aina: My Whole Heart is With You 12/2/16
Ea O Ka Aina: The Loving Containment of Courage 12/1/16
Ea O Ka Aina: The Beginning is Near 12/1/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Feds to shutdown NoDAPL Camp 11/25/16
Ea O Ka Aina: NoDAPL people are going to die 11/23/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Hundreds of vets to join NoDAPL 11/22/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Obama must support Standing Rock 11/21/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Trump's pro oil stance vs NoDaPL 11/15/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Kauai NoDAPL Demonstration 11/12/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Obama to Betray Standing Rock 11/12/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Trump impact on Standing Rock 11/12/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Ann Wright on Standing Rock 11/8/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Turning Point at Standing Rock 11/6/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Jackson Browne vs DAPL owner 11/5/16
Democracy Now: Boycott of DAPL Owner's Music Festival
Ea O Ka Aina: World responds to NoDAPL protests 11/5/16
Ea O Ka Aina: NoDAPL victory that was missed 11/5/16
Ea O Ka Aina: DAPL hid discovery of Sioux artifacts 11/5/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Dakota Access Pipeline will leak 11/5/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Route of the Dakota Access Pipeline 11/4/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Sanders calls for stopping DAPL 11/4/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Obama hints at DAPL rerouting 11/3/16
Ea O Ka Aina: New military attack on NODAPL 11/3/16
Ea O Ka Aina: How to Support NoDAPL 11/3/16
Unicorn Riot: Tweets from NoDAPL 11/2/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Standing Rock & the Ballot Box 10/31/16
Ea O Ka Aina: NoDAPL reclaim new frontline 10/24/16
Ea O Ka Aina: How far will North Dakota go? 10/23/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Amy Goodman "riot" charge dropped 10/17/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Amy Goodwin to face "Riot Charge" 10/16/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Shutdown of all tar sand pipelines 10/11/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Why Standing Rock is test for Oabama 10/8/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Why we are Singing for Water 10/8/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Labor's Dakota Access Pipeline Crisis 10/3/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Standing Firm for Standing Rock 10/3/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Contact bankers behind DAPL 9/29/16
Ea O Ka Aina: NoDAPL demo at Enbridge Inc 9/29/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Militarized Police raid NoDAPL 9/28/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Stop funding of Dakota Access Pipeline 9/27/16
Ea O Ka Aina: UN experts to US, "Stop DAPL Now!" 9/27/16
Ea O Ka Aina: No DAPL solidarity grows 9/21/16
Ea O Ka Aina: This is how we should be living 9/16/16
Ea O Ka Aina: 'Natural Capital' replacing 'Nature' 9/14/16
Ea O Ka Aina: The Big Difference at Standing Rock 9/13/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Jill Stein joins Standing Rock Sioux 9/10/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Pipeline temporarily halted 9/6/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Native Americans attacked with dogs 9/5/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Mni Wiconi! Water is Life! 9/3/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Sioux can stop the Pipeline 8/28/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Officials cut water to Sioux 8/23/16 

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Regrow from kitchen scraps

SUBHEAD: Seven food plants that can be regrown from cutoffs from commonly used vegetables.

By Tricia Devets on 15 February 2017 for Off the Grid News -
(http://www.offthegridnews.com/survival-gardening-2/magic-food-7-vegetables-you-can-regrow-from-kitchen-scraps/)


Image above: Celery stump set on windowsill prepared to regrow itself. From original article.

There is a great form of recycling that is easy, fun and nutritious: re-growing vegetables from leftover scraps. You don’t need much to get started — just containers, soil, water and a sunny windowsill. Sometimes you don’t even need the soil.

Many vegetables have the ability to regenerate, and you can regrow quite a few common veggies with as little as a glass of water. It’s a great project for any time of the year, but especially during colder months when you likely don’t have access to your garden.

To help you begin, here is a list of vegetables that are easy to regrow.

1. Lettuce and cabbage
After you prepare a salad or a stew, do you toss the lettuce or cabbage heart in the trash or on the compost pile? Next time, place it in a shallow dish with about a half-inch of water and then put the dish on a sunny windowsill. The water will get cloudy and a bit smelly, so you will want to replace it every day or two.

After three days or so, you will notice new leaves sprouting. When they are large enough for eating, you can harvest them. Leave the head in some clean water, and you can repeat the process.

2. Scallions, green onions, leeks and fennel
Set the white root base in enough water to completely cover the bulb and then place the container on your windowsill.

Replace the water every few days. After a week or so, you will notice new growth. You can keep regenerating these bulbs and even can transfer them outdoors in the spring.

3. Onions – Onions need a bit more room, but they are still easy to grow. Place the onion’s root section in a cup of water on a sunny windowsill and watch for sign of regrowth. When the bulb has grown back, transfer the plant to a large pot of soil. You can replant it in your outdoor garden during the warmer weather.

4. Garlic
Did you know that you could regenerate a garlic plant from just one clove? Here’s how: Plant the clove root-end down in a pot of soil and then place the pot where it can get direct sunlight.

5. Ginger – To regenerate the root of the ginger plant, which is the part you use in cooking, take a fresh piece and submerge it partially in soil with the nubbins pointing upward.
Place the pot in indirect sunlight and keep the soil moist, and the root will begin growing within about two weeks. To obtain fresh ginger, pull up the plant, harvest some of its root and then repeat the process.

6. Celery
Celery takes a while to regrow, but the results are worth it. Place the base (about an inch or two) in a jar of water on a sunny window ledge. As with some of the other veggies, you will need to replace the cloudy water regularly. Tiny sprouts begin to appear in about a week. After a few more weeks, you will see enough growth to harvest.

7. Bean Sprouts
Soak your leftover dry beans overnight before spreading them out evenly on towels to dry. Repeat this process three or more times until you begin to notice sprouts appearing. You may use the sprouts on sandwiches and in salads. Store any leftover sprouts in the refrigerator.

Like many gardening projects, regrowing vegetables takes some time and some patience. Usually, the fresher the scraps, the better the results will be.

Keep in mind that many plants are sensitive to chlorine or fluoride. If you are on a municipal water system, consider using distilled water for your kitchen scrap garden. Also, if your windowsills do not get much sunlight, grow lights will work well.

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United States of Permanent War

SOURCE: Ray Songtree (rayupdates@hushmail.com)
SUBHEAD: Although they regularly promise to support peace, Washington is committed to perpetual war.

By Edward Hunt on 25 February 2017 for Lobe Log  -
(http://lobelog.com/the-united-states-of-permanent-war/)


Image above: Defense Secretary "Mad Dog" James Mattis and President Donald Trump in the the Hall of Heroes in the Pentagon. From original article.

As the foreign policy establishment continues to grapple with the consequences of Trump’s election, U.S. officials can still agree on one thing. The United States is a nation that is waging a permanent war.

In December 2016, President Obama reflected on the development in a speech that he delivered to U.S. soldiers at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida.

“By the time I took office, the United States had been at war for seven years,” Obama said. By continuing that war, “I will become the first president of the United States to serve two full terms during a time of war.”

Notably, Obama did not issue his remarks to criticize the United States. He only made his point to note that Congress had never provided him with authority to perpetuate the wars of the Bush administration. “Right now, we are waging war under authorities provided by Congress over 15 years ago—15 years ago,” Obama said.

Consequently, he wanted Congress to craft new legislation that made it appear as if it had not permitted the United States to remain at war forever. “Democracies should not operate in a state of permanently authorized war,” Obama said.

The Bush Plan
Regardless of what Obama really felt about the matter, the Bush administration had always intended for the United States to wage a permanent war. In the days after 9/11, President Bush provided the guiding vision when he announced in a speech to the nation that the United States would be fighting an indefinite global war on terror. “

Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes,” Bush explained. “Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen.”

The following year, Director of Policy Planning Richard Haass provided additional confirmation of the administration’s intentions. “There can be no exit strategy in the war against terrorism,” Haass declared. “It is a war that will persist.”

In other words, Haass announced that the United States would remain at war against terrorism forever. “There is unlikely to be an Antietam, a decisive battle in this war,” Haass stated. “An exit strategy, therefore, will do us no good. What we need is an endurance strategy.”

As U.S. officials developed their endurance strategy, they also settled on a few guiding principles. For starters, U.S. officials determined that they would have to maintain some kind of permanent presence in Afghanistan.

“We’re not leaving Afghanistan prematurely,” Secretary of Defense Robert Gates remarked during the early years of the Obama administration. “In fact, we’re not ever leaving at all.”

More recently, a number of officials in the Obama administration articulated a similar principle for the Middle East. In October 2016, for example, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper noted that the United States would remain in the region well into the future.

 Even if the Islamic State is defeated, “it is probably not going to go away, and it’ll morph into something else or other similar extremist groups will be spawned,” Clapper said. “And I believe we’re going to be in the business of suppressing these extremist movements for a long time to come.”

This past December, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter made a similar point, arguing that coalition forces “must be ready for anything” and “must remain engaged militarily even after the inevitable expulsion of ISIL from Mosul and Raqqa.

In essence, U.S. officials agree that the war against terrorism must remain permanent.

The Trump Turn
Officials in the Trump administration, who are now taking over the endurance strategy, have also remained determined to keep the nation at war. Although Trump promised during his campaign that “war and aggression will not be my first instinct,” both he and his cabinet members have displayed a clear preference for war.

Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who is perhaps most well known for once commenting that it was “a hell of a hoot” and “a hell of a lot of fun” to shoot enemy forces in Afghanistan, argued during his confirmation hearing that the United States should take advantage of its “power of intimidation.” In fact, Mattis pledged to increase the lethality of U.S. military forces. “Our armed forces in this world must remain the best led, the best equipped, and the most lethal in the world,” Mattis insisted.
 
Furthermore, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has positioned himself as an even stronger advocate of war. For example, Tillerson insisted during his confirmation hearing that the Obama administration should have helped Ukrainian military forces fight Russia after Putin had seized Crimea in early 2014. “My opinion is there should have been a show of force, a military response, in defensive posture,” Tillerson said.

In addition, Tillerson insisted that the Trump administration will not permit China to continue building islands in the South China Sea.

“We’re going to have to send China a clear signal that first, the island-building stops, and second, your access to those islands also not going to be allowed,” Tillerson said.

Altogether, Tillerson argued that the United States must display a greater willingness to go to war. In the years ahead, the United States will follow “the old tenet of Teddy Roosevelt, walk softly and carry a big stick,” he promised.

Finally, Trump has displayed an even stronger preference for war. In his many public statements, Trump has essentially branded himself as the new face of the permanent war against terrorism. “Radical Islamic terrorism” is something that “we will eradicate completely from the face of the Earth,” Trump promised during his inaugural address.

In short, officials in Washington are committed to perpetual war. Although they regularly promise to end war and support peace, they have spent the past 16 years transforming the United States into a nation that is permanently at war.

In fact, “the fighting is wonderful,” Trump has said.

• Edward Hunt writes about war and empire. He has a PhD in American Studies from the College of William & Mary.

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US Nuclear power dream is dying

SUBHEAD: In the last 20 years, the U.S. has seen only one new functional nuclear reactor constructed.

By Michael McDonald on 23 February 2017 for OilPrice.com -
(http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-US-Nuclear-Energy-Dream-Is-Dying.html)


Image above: Operator in the Control Room of the Watts Bar II Nuclear Plant. The Watts Bar plant named 8th biggest U.S. boondoggle ever. From (http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/business/aroundregion/story/2015/nov/25/watts-bar-plant-named-8th-biggest-us-boondoggle/337599/).

The United States was once a projected leader in the nuclear energy race. In the 20th century, the world dreamed of finding a way to provide safe, cheap, and renewable energy, and nuclear power seemed to be the manifestation of those dreams. All of this, however, seems to be coming to an end.

This past week, Toshiba decided to sell its American nuclear power subsidiary at a $6 billion loss.

Westinghouse Electric Company, an American company that Toshiba acquired 10 years ago, is in the business of building and constructing nuclear power facilities. This isn’t the first time that Toshiba attempted to offload controlling interest in Westinghouse – all previous efforts, however, have failed.

Many reasons have been cited for this sell-off. Firstly, demand for electricity has been slowing down as of late. Secondly, natural-gas prices have been declining, making it harder to justify the measures necessary to make nuclear power work – one of the primary motivators for these projects was the increasingly high cost of natural-gas.

Finally, integration of renewable energy sources (such as wind and solar) have been becoming more prevalent. Again, this makes it harder to justify nuclear energy projects.

However, the biggest barrier to entry for nuclear energy providers is the trade-off between safety and cost. The production of this type of energy can be fast and cheap, but not if companies comply fully with the U.S. nuclear regulatory body. Nuclear energy in America is simply becoming an uneconomic option.

This is problematic on the global scene for a variety of reasons, chief of which is safety standards. The U.S. remains the exemplary model to follow when it comes to regulation of new technologies.

If nuclear power in America slows down substantially, the influence the U.S. has over global safety standards wanes, and the world becomes less willing to comply with basic guidelines. Without that scale of market presence from the U.S., the industry can suffer.

This slowdown from the U.S. may be advantageous for state-owned nuclear facilities. Without America as an example, Russia, parts of Asia, and the Middle East become the example to follow – their lack of standards and regulation would be to the benefit of nuclear facilities owned by governments.

However, many privately owned nuclear facilities simply do not have the capital to sustain these plants, even when the government helps subsidize their operations. This is evidenced by Toshiba’s termination of their Westinghouse project. Projects on the private side take much longer to complete, so that safety concerns change along the way, locking them into a cycle of never ending regulation updates.

In the last 20 years, the U.S. has seen only one new nuclear reactor that is functional, constructed by a government entity – the Tennessee Valley Authority. Further, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission shows that there are only four reactors currently under construction in the entire country.

Two would be at the Alvin W. Vogtle station in Georgia, and two at the Virgil C. Summer plant in South Carolina.
These projects are implementing reactors manufactured by Westinghouse.

Construction on all four are currently delayed over three years and are billions over-budget. Westinghouse itself was one of the last private companies to be commissioned for the manufacture of nuclear reactors – before over-budget, inefficient projects such as these pushed them into ruin.

Westinghouse has said that these four projects, as well as two more in China, will be completed. But it remains doubtful that the dozens of other projects it has been commissioned to complete – and yet to begin – will ever reach fruition.


Video above: Scene from 1979 movie "China Syndrome" when operators, played by Jack Lemon and Wilfred Brimley realize that the core of the nuclear plant they are running is about to meltdown. Note this review was done before the March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi triple nuclear meltdown in Japan. From (https://youtu.be/fmdSBQGqfJw).

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Designing a DeGrowth Economy

SUBHEAD: The religion of "Growth" is a narratives used to justify the expansion of global finance.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 24 February 2017 for Of Two Minds -
(http://oftwominds.bmobilized.com/?task=get&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.oftwominds.com%2Fblog.html)


Image above: Illustration of a brain divided. A mental transformation will be necessary to adjust to a DeGrowth economy. From (https://co-munity.net/growl/events/mental-infrastructures-and-degrowth-transformation).

The conventional objections to DeGrowth boil down to: "It isn't the status quo, so it can't work."

Actually, it's the status quo that isn't working.

I've written about DeGrowth for many years, including  Degrowth, Anti-Consumerism and Peak Consumption (May 9, 2013), Degrowth Solutions: Half-Farmer, Half-X (July 19, 2014) and And the Next Big Thing Is ... Degrowth? (April 7, 2014)

These are the basic concepts of Degrowth:
  1.  Consumerism is psychological/ spiritual junk food (French: malbouffe ) that actively reduces well-being ( bien-etre ) rather than increases it.

  2. Better rather than more: well-being is increased by everything that cannot be commoditized by a market economy or financialized by a cartel-state financial machine-- friendship, family, community, self-cultivation. The goal of economic and social growth should be better, not more. On a national scale, the cancerous-growth measured by gross domestic product (GDP) should be replaced with gross domestic happiness/ gross national happiness (GNH).

  3. A recognition that resources are not infinite, despite claims to the contrary. For one example of many: China Is Plundering the Planet's Seas ( The Atlantic ). Indeed, all the evidence suggests that access to cheap energy only speeds up the depletion and despoliation of every other resource.

  4. The unsustainability of consumerist "growth" that's dependent on resource depletion funded by financialization (i.e. the endless expansion of credit and phantom collateral). This is covered in greater depth in my short book Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform).
  5. The diminishing returns on private consumption and "bridges to nowhere" (crony-capitalist public consumption).

  6. The failure of neoliberal capitalism and communism alike in their pursuit of growth at any cost.
Degrowth is heresy in what John Michael Greer calls the religion of progress (i.e. growth). The faith that growth equals progress is akin to the Cargo Cult of Keynesianism, the notion that expanding debt exponentially to drive diminishing returns of growth is not only necessary but a moral imperative.

Both the religion of growth and its Cargo Cult are narratives used to justify the expansion of global finance via financialization.

Expanding capital, profits and power is the key driver, and the religion of growth is merely the public-relations narrative that mesmerizes the debt-serfs, political toadies and media sycophants.

This leads to a fundamental question: how do we design a system that enables us to do more with less of everything ? How do we design a system that incentivizes doing more with less rather than squandering resources via optimizing human greed?

A DeGrowth economy must fulfill two requirements:

  1. The DeGrowth economy must provide paid-work livelihoods and opportunities for everyone who wants them.
  2. The DeGrowth economy must institutionalize a decentralized, democratic, self-organizing process to allocate human, social, resource and financial capital as an alternative to centralized states/banks and profit-maximizing corporations.
These arise from three key insights:

1. If we don't change the way we create and distribute money, we change nothing .

2. Not everything that is valuable is profitable , and so maximizing profit is not the sole arbiter of "value," nor is it a sound process for allocating labor and capital for everything that has value but isn't profitable.

3. Centralization undermines democracy and generates privilege, inequality, insecurity, conflict and waste by its very nature. (I discuss this further in my short book Inequality and the Collapse of Privilege .)



Image above: A boy in the Far East plays in industrial ditritus at the edge of the sea. Does this look like a world with plenty of room for everything to expand? From original article.

DeGrowth requires two intertwined systems: a decentralized, localized, globally connected network of self-organizing productive "tribes" whose labor generates a global labor-backed crypto-currency .

I describe such a system in my book A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology & Creating Jobs for All .

DeGrowth is coming whether we like it or not or plan for it or not. Our choice is to blind ourselves to the implosion of the "growth" status quo and squander the opportunity to create an economic system that thrives in DeGrowth, or accept the end-game of financialized "growth" and embrace the technological tools that enable decentralized, localized, globally connected networks funded by a labor-backed crypto-currency .

The conventional objections to DeGrowth boil down to: it isn't the status quo, so it can't possibly work. Actually, it's the status quo that isn't working , and DeGrowth is the result of that simple yet profound reality.

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Brace for Impact

SUBHEAD: It is time to focus on building a movement for adaptation to climate change.

By Daniel M. Voskoboynik on 22 February 2017 for New Internationalist -
(https://newint.org/features/web-exclusive/2017/02/22/brace-for-impact-time-to-build-fight-for-climate-adaptation/)


Image above: Turkana women carry canisters to get water from a borehole near Baragoy, Kenya. Photo by Goran Tomasevic. From original article.

Responding to climate change is not just about curbing emissions, but also adapting to what has already changed.

The fight to tackle climate change has two core branches: mitigation (curbing excessive greenhouse gas emissions) and adaptation (addressing the effects of climate change that are already unfolding). But although both areas are needed, the public tends to focus on the former in discussions on climate change.

The pressing priority is always to pull down emissions. Climate change is portrayed a future threat and our responsibility to act is framed in reference to our children and grandchildren. If environmental ruin is already here, it is deemed marginal compared to the tempests amassing on the horizon.

But this uneven focus on the future understates the gravity of present impacts. Today, climate change accounts for 87 per cent of disasters worldwide. Some of the worst droughts in decades are continuing to unravel across southeastern Africa and Latin America. Cyclonic storms, floods, wildfires, and landslides are bearing on the world’s most vulnerable populations.

The sudden violence of disasters is paralleled by the brutality of gradual change. Coastlines are being shaved and eroded by rising tides. The encroachment of sea water is increasing the salinity of littoral lands, leaving them withered and infertile. Rain patterns are shifting, shattering the millions who rely on the sky for sustenance. Every second, one person is forced to flee their home due to extreme climactic conditions.

This context of daily displacement and desolation means that the fight to tackle climate change today is fundamentally a fight to determine the fatality of the future. Yet adaptation, the crucial tool in that fight, has been side-lined and neglected.

So what is adaptation?

Adaptation means preparing our society for the climatic threats it faces and will face, insofar as we can.

It means weaving safety nets for the world’s most vulnerable populations.

It means bolstering river embankments, introducing measures to prevent diseases, building water-resistant infrastructure, expanding storm sewers and water storage, extending insurance, implementing disaster early-warning systems, and introducing a range of measures to palliate damage.

Some adaptation initiatives are already underway. From the Cook Islands to Morocco, farmers are adjusting practices and diversifying crops, to create a more climate-resilient agriculture. Current agricultural models, where monocultures breed vulnerability, are being transformed into biodiverse agrosystems.

In flood-prone areas, like Delaware, urban planners and citizens are re-engineering and re-designing neighborhoods to reduce the risk of inundation and future sea level rise.

In urban areas prone to intense heat, like the Indian city of Ahmedabad (which lost 1,300 citizens to a 2010 extreme heat wave), municipal officials are implementing heat action plans which train health workers, distribute cooling supplies, open public areas for shade, and raise public awareness.

In some areas, the only plausible form of adaptation is abandonment. In Fiji, villages such as Vunidogola are already being relocated after Cyclone Winston and other disasters devastated a number of settlements – while rising sea levels provide an additional layer of risk. The Fijian state has listed relocation as a top priority for the government.

A decade ago, the Maldivian government also organized a ‘staged retreat’, concentrating populations away from secluded islands threatened by rising sea levels.

In Alaska, the citizens of Newtok have applied for federal disaster relief to finance their own relocation, as thawing permafrost erodes the land under their feet, pulling the village towards the Ninglick River.

In China, the government has relocated over a million people away from areas governed by environmental hazards.

But adaptation is not just a technical exercise; it is also a struggle to shape what kind of world will greet the intensifying weather patterns of tomorrow. Whose lives will matter when the storms arrive?

Will the seawalls we build to hold back the swelling tides be accompanied by walls to hold out those fleeing?

The challenge of adaptation directly exposes the climate crisis as a crisis of social justice. All disasters break open the wounds of unequal societies. Storms do not discriminate, but they do make landfall on landscapes riven by disparities of wealth, power and safety.

The labels of ‘natural disaster’ and ‘extreme weather’ can mislead us into thinking that the principal dangers we face stem from the atmosphere’s furies.

But as geographer Jesse Ribot writes, ‘vulnerability does not fall from the sky.’ The wreckage of climate change is the product of collision: between environmental conditions and human realities.

This collision explains why women are far more likely than men to die in natural disasters and endure the slow violence of environmental degradation. It lies at the root of why ethnic minorities, the disabled, the silenced, and the neglected, are all disproportionately susceptible to the rigours of a changing climate.

Deep adaptation means challenging these inequities, reclaiming rights and cementing the best possible conditions for survival.

In Nairobi’s informal settlements, such as Mukuru, increasingly torrential rain spells misery for inhabitants. To build their community’s resilience, local activists are working to obtain land tenure that would enable them to defend their rights to water, health and sanitation.

What such initiatives illustrate is the agency we do have. While climate change will cause irreparable ‘loss and damage’ (impacts that just cannot be eased or adapted to), our human societies are usually the juries of fate, deciding whether cyclones will meet buttressed foundations or breaking beams.

We are still drastically unprepared across the board; the deadly European heatwaves of 2003 and 2010 revealed the stark inability even of the wealthiest economies of the world to adequately handle climatic shocks.

Finding the funding

But all transformations in politics come with costs and obstacles. The cost of adapting to climate change in ‘developing’ countries could reach $300 billion a year by 2030 and $500 billion by 2050. Funding is in short supply, with the richest states committing only meager contributions.

Rudimentary justice holds that those most responsible for a vulnerability bear the greater responsibility for redressing it, but climate change’s chief culprits remain reluctant to pay their fair share of adaptation finance to the world’s most vulnerable countries.

Neither will private finance emerge as a magical solution to the tasks of adaptation. Markets tend to follow active demand: needs backed by money. But what money can you make from displaced farmers or dispossessed communities?

As the impacts of climate change bite and politicians feel the heat of public discontent, governments are paying more lip service to ideals such as climate resilience.

But with environmental movements mostly focused on taming the drivers of climate change, this agenda of adaptation is largely being shaped by states and multilateral institutions, in ways which lay the burden of bearing at the feet of those most vulnerable.

Environmental scientist Stan Cox and anthropologist Paul Cox explain in How the World Breaks, that these models of adaptation envision a ‘resilience [which] is catastrophic by design, morally unhinged, because it counts on the vulnerable to absorb what the market sheds so that the market’s irreparable fragility can be conserved.

The vulnerable and the marginalized must have power, but not just the power to adapt; they must recapture the terms of adaptation.’

It is up to us to recapture those terms and ignite a discussion on transformative adaptation, where efforts to adjust to climate change can also serve as opportunities to decarbonize the economy, confront poverty, erode gender inequity, deliver racial justice and remediation to victims of environmental violence, suture community rifts, improve public health, and cement local resilience.

The future is here

The future is arriving sooner than expected.

Too often, our responses out of touch with the scale of the challenges they seek to address. In 2003, philosopher Seyla Benhabib wrote about grappling with new patterns of migration and globalization;
‘We are like travellers navigating an unknown terrain with the help of old maps, drawn at a different time and in response to different needs.’
It’s time to think big and retrace our maps along the lines of the new magnitude. Every gradient of warming we fail to slow needs to be compensated by an equal reduction in deprivation.

The task may seem daunting. With so many challenges facing our world, where do our limited energies go? How do you fight fires and prevent them at the same time?

There are few easy consolations, but one is clear: the solutions to our multiple problems can and should be found in the same places.

The struggle for climate adaptation is precisely the struggle for migrant rights, for decent work, for better infrastructure, for democracy, against gender violence. It is merely the struggle for a safer world, hastened by the alarms of shattering temperature records.

But by explicitly referencing adaptation, we can help humanize the realities of climate change, clarify our alternatives, and help ensure we can meet the incoming watershed with buffers of hope.

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Advantages of decay in food system

SOURCE:  Andy Kass (a_kass@yahoo.com)
SUBHEAD: Vietnam's low-tech food delivery takes advantage of decay and fermentation.

By Aaron Vansintjan on 20 February 2017 for Low Tech Magazine -
(http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2017/02/vietnams-low-tech-fermentation-food-system-takes-advantage-of-decay.html)


Image above: A stall selling homemade dÆ°a chua in a Hanoi market. Photo by Aaron Vansintjan From original article.

The food system in the industrialized world is based on mass-production, global distribution, and constant refrigeration. It requires many resources and produces a lot of food waste.

In a tropical climate, everything decays faster. Bread gets soft and mushy, milk spoils, the walls get moldy just months after a layer of fresh paint. Food poisoning is a constant concern. The heat and moisture make for an ideal breeding ground for bacteria and fungi.

In this environment, you’d think people would be wary of any food product that smells funny. But in tropical Vietnam, food can get pretty pungent.

Take mắm tôm, a purplish paste made of fermented pureed shrimp. Cracking open a jar will result in a distinct smell of ‘there’s something wrong here’ with hints of marmite to whelm through the whole room. You have chao, a stinky fermented tofu, which was so rank that the smallest bite shot up my nose and incinerated my taste buds for an hour (‘Clears the palate!’ said the waiter encouragingly).

Consider rưÆ¡̣u nếp, which is sticky rice mixed with yeast and left to ferment for several days ‘in a warm place’ — i.e. the counter.

The result is a funky-smelling desert—literally rice left to rot until it turns in to a sweet wine pudding. On the 5th of May of the lunar calendar, Vietnamese people will eat rưÆ¡̣u nếp in the morning to celebrate ‘inner parasite killing day’. Bonus: day-drunk by the time you arrive at work.

We shouldn’t forget Vietnam’s world-famous fish sauce — nưÆ¡́c mắm — made from diluted fermented fish, a flavour that many people around the world continue to find totally intolerable.

In Vietnam, putrefaction is accepted as a part of life, even encouraged. But fermentation in Vietnam isn’t just an odd quirk in a tropical diet.

To understand why fermentation is so integral to Vietnamese culture, you have to consider how it is embedded within people’s livelihoods, local agricultural systems, food safety practices, and a culture obsessed with gastronomy; where food is seen as a social glue.

And when you bring together all these different puzzle pieces, an enchanting picture emerges: one in which fermentation can be a fundamental component of a sustainable food system.

Unlike many high-tech proposals like ‘smart’ food recycling apps, highly efficient logistics systems, and food packaging innovations, fermentation is both low-tech and democratic—anyone can do it. What’s more, it has low energy inputs, brings people together, is hygienic and healthy, and can reduce food waste.

Rotting Food can be Safe and Healthy

At the entrance of a market in Hanoi, a woman with a dÆ°a chua stand tells us that making ‘sour vegetables’ is easy: you just add salt to some cabbage and let it sit for a couple of days. As we talk, several customers come by, eager to scoop some brine and cabbage into a plastic bag. Worried that we’re discouraging her customers, she shoos us away. She isn’t lacking business.

Is fermentation really so effortless? The short answer is yes. Many recipes will call for two things: water and salt. At just a 1:50 ratio (2%) of salt to food, you can create an environment undesireable for all the bad bacteria and encourage all the good ones. Sauerkraut, kimchi, fish sauce, sriracha, and kosher dill pickles—are all made according to this principle.

Yet other types of fermentation are a bit more complicated. They call for sugar (e.g. wild fermented alcohol like ethiopian honey wine), yeast starters (rưÆ¡̣u nếp, most wines and beers), special fungi (tempeh, miso), or some kind of combination of fungi, bacteria, salt, or sugar (kombucha).

Yet others are simpler: to make cooking vinegar, just let that bottle of bad wine sit for a couple of days, and to make sourdough, just mix water and flour and leave it on your counter.

All in all, fermentation is just controlled decay: your most important ingredient is time. This can sound like a bit too much, too fast. Take the woman I met at the entrance of the market. Her dÆ°a chua, while in great demand, looks like wilted cabbage, soppy, floating in murky brine.

Some bubbles are forming on the edges of the plastic container—for the trained eye a sign of an active fermentation process, but for the uninitiated, an alarm bell.

There’s no use beating about the bush. That dÆ°a chua is in fact rotting in a very similar way that a peat swamp is constantly rotting, belching large doses of methane into the world. What’s happening is an anaerobic fermentation—that is, without significant amounts of oxygen.

This absence of oxygen and the high levels of salt creates an environment supportive to several bacteria that also find their home in our own digestive systems.

Those bubbles forming in the container are by-products of these bacteria: CO2 and methane. The bacteria also lower the pH and start breaking down raw food—essentially pre-digesting it for you.

And, once the pH goes down even lower, you’ve created a monster so voracious that no other fungus, bacteria, or parasite with bad intentions will dare to enter its domain. So yes, it’s rotting just like a stinky swamp, and that’s a good thing.


Image above: A woman sells nem chua — raw fermented pork—outside her house. Photo by Aaron Vansintjan From original article.

It’s a good thing especially in a climate like that of Vietnam. Every fermentation is a small victory against the constant war against heat and humidity, which destroys all edibles in its path.

Instead of eating raw cabbage and risking death by a thousand E. Coli, you can eat fermented cabbage and know, for a fact, that it won’t have you hunkering by the toilet bowl any time soon.

Not only that, but eating fermented food has significant health benefits. You might’ve noticed the new fad of ‘pro-biotic’—well all that really means is that the product contains some kind of active bacterial culture that looks like the flora in your own stomach.

That would include, not just Go-gurt, Yoplait, Chobani, and Danone, but also several kinds of cheese, pickles, beer, and just about any other fermented product.

Eat about a tablespoon of any of these at the end of every meal, and you inoculate your stomach with a fresh batch of microbes that help you digest—all the more necessary when we eat antibiotics in our meat and bland diets of white bread and peanut butter, and drink chlorine in most municipal water systems.

Further, products like fish sauce and shrimp paste provide many impoverished Vietnamese with micro-nutrients, B-12 vitamin, proteins, and omega 3 fatty acids—comprising a significant part of people’s nutritional requirements. For a country that still remembers hunger and starvation, this is no small fry.

After several months of studying Hanoi’s food system and the people who make their living off of it, Vân (my Vietnamese collaborator) and I are starting to see some patterns.

A Diverse Food System

In the same market we talk to a vegetable vendor. Real estate in the neighborhood is getting more expensive, rents are going up. She’s having a hard time making ends meet.

On her street many elderly have sold their farmland—which they used to grow vegetables and decorative flowers—and now, unemployed, they spend their time selling home-made fermented vegetables out of their front door.

In the same neighborhood, we meet Tuan, an elderly woman growing vegetables in the banks of a drained pond. She rarely goes to the market—she can grow much of her own food in this little patch. We ask her if she ever ferments her vegetables.

Of course, but she doesn’t sell them—they’re just for herself and her family.

After several months of studying Hanoi’s food system and the people who make their living off of it, Vân (my Vietnamese collaborator) and I are starting to see some patterns.

In Western countries, the food system is shaped a bit like an hourglass: industrial farmers send their food to a supplier, who then engages with a handful of supermarket companies, who then sell to consumers.

In Vietnam, on the other hand, it looks more like an intricate web: wholesale night markets, mobile street vendors, covered markets, food baskets organized by office workers with family connections to farmers, guerilla gardening on vacant land.

Food is grown, sold, and bought all over the place, and supermarkets are just a small (albeit growing) node in the complex latticework. Most people still get food at the market, but many also source their food from family connections.


Image above: From jugs a restaurant offers home brewed rượu men, Vietnamese rice wine. Photo by Aaron Vansintjan From original article.

In Vietnam, many people might have one ‘profession’, but when you ask a bit more questions it’ll turn out that they have half a dozen other jobs for ‘extra income’. There’s a generalized ‘hustle’: everyone is a bit of an entrepreneur.

After talking with Tuan for several hours, we learned that she has, throughout her long life, fished, grown vegetables, corn, and fruit trees, sold rice noodles, bread, ice cream, roses, and silk worms. Now, aged 68, she grows decorative peach trees and grows vegetables when she can.

With an economy just decades shy of a highly regulated communist regime where the only food you could get was through rations, and the memory of famine still fresh in people’s mind, this is entirely understandable: with a finger in every pot, you can just about manage to survive. These two factors, a highly distributed food system and diversified livelihoods, make for a fertile environment for fermentation practices. 

With easy access to wholesale produce, many can turn to small-scale fermentation to compliment their income—or, in the case of Tuan, to spend less on food at the market.

Preserving the Harvest, Bringing People Together

Vietnam hosts both the Red River delta and the Mekong delta—two of the most productive agricultural regions in the world. The heat and the vast water supply allow some areas of Vietnam to have three full growing seasons.

That means three harvests, and that means lots of food at peak times, and sometimes so much that you can’t eat it all. That’s another bonus of fermentation: if your food system is local, you’re bound to stick to seasonal consumption.

But by fermenting your harvest you can eat it slowly, over a long time period. It’s this principle that underlies much of fermentation culture in East Asia.

Take kim chi, a spicy fermented cabbage from Korea. Traditionally, the whole village would come together to chop, soak, salt, and spice the cabbage harvest every year. Then, these mass quantities of salted spicy cabbage were stored in large earthenware pots underground—where cooler temperatures lead to a more stable fermentation process.

As a result, you can have your cabbage all year. If you want a localized food system, you need to be able to store your food for long periods. Fermentation makes that possible.

Fermentation is also social. Fermenting large batches of summer’s bounty typically requires hours of chopping—the more the merrier. And chopping is the perfect time for sharing cooking tips, family news, and the latest gossip. In South Korea, now that kim chi production has been largely industrialized, people try to relive the social aspect of making it through massive kim chi parties in public spaces.

In a country like Vietnam, where a traditional food system still exists for a large part, fermentation remains embedded in social relations. Relatives and neighbors constantly gift each other fermented vegetables, and many dinners end with a batch of someone’s home brewed rice wine—rượu men. Fermentation lends itself well to a gift economy: there is pride in your own creation, but there is also no shame in re-gifting. And because of its low costs, anyone can take part in it.

Gastronomy, Tested with Time

It is a bit disingenuous to caricature Vietnam’s food culture as obsessed with rotting, and suggest that this is largely the result of a tropical climate. Rather, what we’re dealing here is difference in taste: what may seem strange and pungent to one culture is highly appreciated in another.

In fact, one of the greatest impressions I have of Vietnamese culture is its deep appreciation for gastronomy: subtle, complex flavors, considered textures, modest spicing and well-balanced contrasts define Vietnamese cuisine.

Fermentation is a crucial part of this culture: the art of fermentation requires paying attention to how flavours change as food transforms, understanding these chemical shifts and using them to achieve a desired affect.

It’s also clear that Vietnamese gastronomy is popular: it takes place in street food stalls, run by enterprising matriarchs, constantly experimenting with modern products and traditional flavors. It is cheap and, to ensure customer loyalty, it is surprisingly hygienic.

Street vendors rarely have fridges, nor do they have large cooking surfaces, dishwashing machines, or ovens. By and large, they make do with some knives, two bowls to wash fresh vegetables in, a large pot, a frying pan, coals or gas burners and — for products that may go bad during the day — fermentation. Having limited access to capital and consumer electronics, these vendors — most often women — ply their trade in a way that has stood the test of time.

They know the rules of hygiene and food safety, and, because they have to be careful with their money, they know exactly what kinds of food will go bad, and what kinds of food can be preserved.

In doing so, they practice a food culture that has been passed down through generations—to a time before fridges, a global food system powered by container shipping, factory trawlers, and produce delivered to far-off markets by airplane.

While modern technology has provided many benefits for our diets, there are many innovations from the past that have been abandoned as the global food system was transformed by the availability of cheap fuel. One such innovation was the fish sauce industry that flourished during Ancient Roman times.

For Romans, fermenting fish was a crucial aspect of a low-tech and seasonally-bound food system. In fact, it so happens that research now suggests Vietnamese fish sauce may actually have its origins in the Roman variant produced over 2,000 years ago.

Today, however, fermentation doesn’t fit so easily within the global food system. Harold McGee at Lucky Peach tells the story of how canned products were notoriously difficult to transport in the newly industrialized food system of the 19th century.

Apparently, until the 20th century, metal cans would regularly explode, sending shrapnel and preserved tuna flying through the decks of transport ships. This was due to heat-resistant bacteria, which continued fermenting the product long after it was heat-treated.

The solution was to subject the canned product to high temperatures over a long period of time, killing all remaining cultures, in turn changing their flavor. But in the case of fermented food, the problem has not gone away: if you want it to be actively fermenting, transporting it will risk explosions on the high seas. But heating stops the fermentation process, and kills its unique flavor.

It’s for this reason that products like kim chi, kombucha, and sauerkraut often have to be produced locally, despite increasing global demand. In some way, fermentation belies the industrial food system: the fact that it is alive means that it doesn’t quite fit in. You either have to kill it, thereby change it, or it will keep bubbling through the cracks.

A Low-tech Food System is Possible

Fermentation cultures in Vietnam give us a glimpse of what an alternative food system might look like, one that is both decentralized and doesn’t depend on high inputs of fossil fuel energy to preserve food, high waste, and high-tech. Why does this matter? Well, in a world facing climate change, we need a low-impact food system, and fast.

But there are other reasons: with increasing concern over the health side effects of common chemicals such as BPA, found in almost all cans and pasta sauce jars, people are looking to safer kinds of preservation, which aren’t killing them and their families slowly.

And with the rise of the local food and food sovereignty movements, many are realising that we need food systems that support everyone: from small farmers to low-income families.

Because of its low investment costs, fermentation lends itself well to supporting small businesses, allowing them to take advantage of seasonality while practicing a time-tested low-tech method of food preparation. Today, in response to increasing food insecurity, we are hearing increasing calls for a smarter, more efficient food system.

Proposals such as intensive hydroponic and vertical farming, big data-powered logistics systems, smart agriculture technologies, and food waste recycling apps clog the news.

But we already have a low-tech innovation that works very well. Fermentation, because it is accessible to everyone, because of its low energy requirements, and because it fits right in to a more sustainable food system, should not be abandoned in the search for global food security.


Image above: A fish sauce factory in Vietnam. Photo by Mui Ne info & events. From original article.

It’s easy to get the impression that we live in a world of scarcity, where there just isn’t enough food to go around, and food production all around the world is limited by technological backwardness. On the other hand, many of us are more and more concerned with the increasing problem of food waste in Western food systems.

We seem to live in a world of both scarcity and abundance at the same time.

Food fermentation is a strange thing: it inverts what many regard as waste and turns it into a social, living, edible object. As a friend of mine once said, if you have too many grapes, you make wine. If you have too much wine, you throw a party. If you still have too much wine, you make vinegar.

Fermentation turns scarcity and abundance on its head, belying easy categories of what is waste and what is too much.

Sustainability advocates worry a lot about making the ‘supply chain’ more ‘efficient’ — that is, increasing profits margins while making sure all food reaching consumers in a perfectly fresh state.

Instead, we could consider taking advantage of decay. This isn’t hard: you just have to add some salt and water. We’ve done it for thousands of years, and, if we follow the example of food cultures like those in Vietnam, we can do it again.
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