Disabled Now Blamed for Social Security’s Woes AND Sluggish Economy…

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From FIREDOGLAKE

The mainstream media continues to blame the disabled. Will this create more public support for austerity?

Recently, Planet Money at NPR, wrote a hit-piece accusing the disabled of fraudulently obtaining benefits through SSI and SSDI. Contagion followed and other pundits compounded the NPR error by repeating the falsehoods. But now we have WSJ ‘piling on’ to blame the disabled for leaving the workforce and creating a sluggish economy. The disabled are the designated ‘bad guys.’

… unexpectedly large number of American workers who piled into the Social Security Administration’s disability program during the recession and its aftermath threatens to cost the economy tens of billions a year in lost wages and diminished tax revenues.

Signs of the problem surfaced Friday, in a dismal jobs report that showed U.S. labor force participation rates falling last month to the lowest levels since 1979, the wrong direction for an economy that instead needs new legions of working men and women to drive growth and sustain a baby boomer generation headed to retirement.

There are more people qualifying for disability because there are more people entering into the disability danger zone. This is an effect of a larger generation entering into the age when injuries and illnesses occur.

This weekend, former Social Security Commissioners, moved by conscience to respond, came out with a written statement in opposition to the falsehoods being promoted about both the disabled and about the programs which serve the severely disabled, and which are very, very difficult to qualify for.

Bill Maher on Ayn Rand: ‘It’s all stuff that seems very deep when you’re 19 years old’…

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From ARTURO GARCIA
The Raw Story

Bill Maher delivered a blistering critique of modern libertarianism on Friday’s episode of Real Time With Bill Maher, slamming adherents for developing a “creepy obsession” with author Ayn Rand.

“It’s all stuff that seems very deep when you’re 19 years old,” he said, before making a quick exemption for one of his guests, young anti-creationism advocate Zack Kopplin. “About how government is a dirty trick played by the weak on the strong, and I can see how, if you’re a privileged college kid, you read that and think, ‘Yeah, that’s right, I don’t need anything. So shut up, Dad, and pay my tuition.’”

Rand’s work has often cited been as an influence on Republican lawmakers like Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). Ryan went so far as to once say that Rand taught him “what my value systems are.”

“I believe him,” Maher said of Ryan. “Because [Rand's work] has a strange appeal to people who are kind of smart, but not really.”

Years ago, Maher conceded, he supported some libertarian ideals, saying he wanted to keep the government out of his bedroom, his medicine chest, “and especially not in the second drawer of the nightstand on the left side of my bed.”

But somewhere along the way, he said, libertarians became devotees of Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, which he called “a book that’s never been read all the way through by anyone with a girlfriend.”

But even as he said he still supported notions

The Gospel of Success: Paulo Coelho’s vapid philosophy…

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From VICTORIA BEALE
New Republic

Do you like Paulo Coelho? You’re in good company. Acolytes range from Will Smith to Madonna, and, more recently, Joe Jonas, who said of Coelho’s most famous book, The Alchemist ‘‘[The book] is a story about the endless search of finding out who you truly are … it brought some stability into our wild ride of a life.” In his ‘‘Author’s Note’’ to The Alchemist, Coelho mentions that Bill Clinton and Julia Roberts are also fans.

The celebrity endorsement is a crucial part of Coelho, Inc. But it’s not the only ingredient in his myth-making enterprise. Every paperback edition of his sixteen books has a three-page ‘‘Author Biography’’ printed at the end, a hagiographic summary that informs us that the author has always been a ‘‘seeker of the new.’’ In case you missed the point, the bio concludes that Paulo has ‘‘touched the hearts of people everywhere.’’ This is hardly PR overreach; it’s how Coelho himself talks of his life and his work. He puts his writing forward as profound meditation on the meaning of life, death, and God. One hundred and forty million people have bought his books.

If you’ve absorbed any of Coelho’s incredible commercial success, without actually reading the 65-year-old, Brazilian author, it’s genuinely shocking to realize just how shoddy and lightweight his books are, how obvious and well-trodden their revelations. It’s tough to pick the most clichéd lines when there’s such choice, but here are a few of the best. From The Alchemist (1988): ‘‘Why do we have to listen to our hearts?’ the boy asked. … ‘Because, wherever your heart is, that is where you’ll find your treasure.’” From Veronika Decides to Die (1998): ‘‘And all of us, one way or another, are insane.’’ From The Zahir (2005): ‘‘God knows that we are all artists of life.’’

In ‘Life After Life,’ Caught In The Dangerous Machinery of History…

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From MEG WOLITZER
NPR

[Available for rent $2 at Mulligan Books... DS]

Flannery O’Connor said short stories need to have a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order. But what about novels? Kate Atkinson seems to believe there can be a beginning, a middle and an end, and then another beginning, plus several more middles … and why not have a beginning again?

What she’s done in her masterful new book, Life After Life, is prove that what makes a long piece of fiction succeed might have very little to do with the progression of its story, and more to do with something hard to define and even harder to produce: a fully-realized world. Atkinson not only invites readers in but also asks them to give up their preconceptions of what a novel should be, and instead accept what a novel can be.

When I started Life After Life, I have to admit, I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep going. I was disoriented, and I thought maybe the problem was me

Sam Harris, the New Atheists, and Anti-Muslim Animus…

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From GLENN GREENWALD
The Guardian

(updated below – Update II)

A long overdue debate breaks out about whether rational atheism is being used as a cover for Islamophobia and US militarism

Two columns have been published in the past week harshly criticizing the so-called “New Atheists” such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens: this one by Nathan Lean in Salon, and this one by Murtaza Hussain in Al Jazeera. The crux of those columns is that these advocates have increasingly embraced a toxic form of anti-Muslim bigotry masquerading as rational atheism. Yesterday, I posted a tweet to Hussain’s article without comment except to highlight what I called a “very revealing quote” flagged by Hussain, one in which Harris opined that “the people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.”

Shortly after posting the tweet, I received an angry email from Harris, who claimed that Hussain’s column was “garbage”, and he eventually said the same thing about Lean’s column in Salon. That then led to a somewhat lengthy email exchange with Harris in which I did not attempt to defend every claim in those columns from his attacks because I didn’t make those claims: the authors of those columns can defend themselves perfectly well. If Harris had problems with what those columns claim, he should go take it up with them.

I do, however, absolutely agree with the general argument made in both columns that the New Atheists have flirted with and at times vigorously embraced irrational anti-Muslim animus. I repeatedly offered to post Harris’ email to me and then tweet it so that anyone inclined to do so could read his response to those columns and make up their own minds.

Expert Advice For Raising Goats and Making Chèvre…

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From COOKING UP A STORY

Naomi Montacre of Naomi’s Organic Farm Store offers detailed tips and advice for raising goats in the city.
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An Urban Goat Farm: Abita Springs Farm

Ed Arcement and his wife Nancy love cheese. Indeed, their mutual enthusiasm for this processed food is why they chose to attend a national goat show in Spokane, Washington. They found themselves suddenly bidding on a particular goat, and to their surprise, won!
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How to Make Soft Goat’s Milk Cheese: Chèvre

Cheese-making enthusiast, and member of the Going Goat Cooperative, Nori Gordon shows us how she makes soft goat milk (chèvre) cheese.
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Proposed Law Could Deliver Major Boost to Urban Agriculture in California…

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From EARTH ISLAND JOURNAL

Bill would give property tax breaks to landowners who lease their parcels to urban farmers

Small-scale farming isn’t easy. The prices farmers receive for their goods are often low, the margins are tight, the days are long, and the chores never-ending. For farmers who don’t own their own property, land insecurity compounds financial instability. It’s tough to really dig in if you don’t know how long you can stay on the piece you’re farming.

The bill would also help urban farms like Little City Garden in San Francisco (pictured above), where the farmers don’t own the three-quarter acre lot they farm and scrape by on a month-to-month lease.

The problem of insecure land tenure is especially pressing for urban farmers in many cities, who have to contend with limited space and high real estate values. Brooke Budner and Caitlyn Galloway, the co-founders of San Francisco’s Little City Gardens, understand this better than anyone. They don’t own the three-quarter acre lot they farm and scrape by on a month-to-month lease.

“Small scale farming is already a high risk proposition,” Budner told me recently. “Anything we can do to make it a little less risky is important.”

A new law proposed by California Assemblyman Phil Ting (who represents San Francisco and San Mateo) might give Little City Gardens a bit more security so the small business can thrive. The idea is simple: Property owners who commit to leasing their land

Terminal Capitalism, Part One…

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From ROGER BAKER
The Rag Blog

The doubts about the viability of capitalism as a system now extend far beyond its traditional critics.

“Karl Marx was supposed to be dead and buried… Or so we thought. With the global economy in a protracted crisis, and workers around the world burdened by joblessness, debt and stagnant incomes, Marx’s biting critique of capitalism — that the system is inherently unjust and self-destructive — cannot be so easily dismissed…” — Time Magazine, March 25, 2013

Does American capitalism have a future?

We might easily anticipate that the usual critics, including perpetually grouchy observers of the status quo like Noam Chomsky, would have doubts about the future of capitalism. Here, he asks, “Will Capitalism Destroy Civilization?“

The current political-economic system is a form of plutocracy, diverging sharply from democracy, if by that concept we mean political arrangements in which policy is significantly influenced by the public will. There have been serious debates over the years about whether capitalism is compatible with democracy. If we keep to really existing capitalist democracy — RECD for short — the question is effectively answered: They are radically incompatible.

The poor spend all the money. Isn’t it obvious?

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From MARK STEEL
The Independent

It’s a tricky argument to pull off – the poor caused the debt so they should pay it back

In a couple of weeks, the economy will be put right.

Because at last cuts such as the “bedroom tax” and universal tax credit come in, so we’ll finally get some money back off the richest people in this country – the poor. Any glance at our society makes it obvious who’s run up all the debts; the poor, that’s who, swanning around in charity shop cardigans and galavanting on shopping expeditions like the women in Sex and the City, squealing “Hey let’s go to Poundland and buy a dishcloth”, in ways the rich can barely dream of.

The rich have to pay for the poor’s avarice, with many currency speculators at Price Waterhouse having to take on extra work to make ends meet. They’ve barely finished destabilising the yen when they take two buses to a cleaning job, polishing a bedsit in Tower Hamlets. Many CEOs find their salary runs out and live on cat food until their bonus arrives, and 40 per cent of the board at the Royal Bank of Scotland are now on the game.

This is mainstream economics, that the poor are richer than the rich. Modern politicians

The Treason of the Intellectuals…

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From CHRIS HEDGES
Truthdig

The rewriting of history by the power elite was painfully evident as the nation marked the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Some claimed they had opposed the war when they had not. Others among “Bush’s useful idiots” argued that they had merely acted in good faith on the information available; if they had known then what they know now, they assured us, they would have acted differently. This, of course, is false. The war boosters, especially the “liberal hawks”—who included Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Al Franken and John Kerry, along with academics, writers and journalists such as Bill Keller, Michael Ignatieff, Nicholas Kristof, David Remnick, Fareed Zakaria, Michael Walzer, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, George Packer, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Kanan Makiya and the late Christopher Hitchens—did what they always have done: engage in acts of self-preservation. To oppose the war would have been a career killer. And they knew it.

These apologists, however, acted not only as cheerleaders for war; in most cases they ridiculed and attempted to discredit anyone who questioned the call to invade Iraq.

How to green the world’s deserts and reverse climate change…

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From TED TALKS

[Eat local meat to save the earth. Please. -DS]

• The conversion of large amounts of fertile land to desert has long been thought to be caused by livestock, such as sheep and cattle overgrazing and giving off methane. This has now been shown to be incorrect, as removing animals to protect land speeds up desertification
• Rising population, land turning into desert at a steady clip, and climate change, converge to create a “perfect storm” that threatens life on earth. According to an African ecologist, dramatically increasing the number of grazing livestock is the only thing that can reverse both desertification and climate change
• Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), play a key role in this impending disaster, as large-scale factory farms also directly contribute to environmental pollution
• According to estimates, grazing large herds of livestock on half of the world’s barren or semi-barren grasslands could take enough carbon from the atmosphere to bring us back to preindustrial levels
• A holistic management and planned grazing system has already been implemented in select areas on five continents, with dramatically positive results
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It’s time for harmony between science and spirituality…

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Helix Nebula Photo © NASA, JPL-Caltech

From PAUL FLETCHER
Positive News

The meeting of cutting-edge scientific and spiritual understandings of the world could be the foundation for us to live sustainably

In the late summer of 1983, scientists such as the physicist Fritjof Capra and biologist Francisco Varela joined spiritual leaders such as His Holiness the Dalai Lama and zen master Baker Roshi at a pioneering event in Austria.

By the end of the five-day conference, which was called Other Realities and took place in the village of Alpbach, it was hard for me to distinguish the scientists from the mystics. The conclusion of all the assembled wisdom was that spirituality without science tends to be self-obsessed and weak, and that science without spirituality was mechanistic and inhuman. There needed to be a fusion of the beauty of science and the blissful nature of spirituality.

In the decades that followed, dialogue grew between scientific researchers and those with a spiritual vision for a better world. This led into new fields of thought and understanding about the nature of reality. Central to this in the UK was the founding of the Scientific and Medical Network in 1973, which felt that science was often guilty of leaving out consciousness and purpose, and which tried to apply scientific rigour to its investigations into consciousness. The Wrekin Trust charity also ran a series of conferences similar to the Austrian event.

Spanking Babies for God: Why America Is The Most Violent First World Country…

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From ROBERT DeFILIPPIS
The Big Slice
Thanks to Herb Ruhs

I recently wrote an article about how the same-sex marriage debate arouses society’s schizoid moral responses. It got me to thinking about another piece I wrote in 2011 that illustrates the same moral schizophrenia. In this case, how child abuse and death can result from substituting knowledge of childhood development with religious beliefs. Here it is:

It is a fact that the U.S.’s Child Abuse is the worst in First World.  From BBC News by Michael Petit, “More than 20,000 American children are believed to have been killed in their own homes by family members in the last 10 years, nearly four times the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. A BBC investigation finds that the United States has the worst child-abuse record of all the industrialized nations. Every week, 66 children under 15 die from physical abuse or neglect in the First World, 27 of them in the U.S. Experts say teen pregnancy, high-school dropout rates, violent crime, imprisonment, and poverty are generally much higher in the United States.”

It is also a fact that the U.S. is the most religious country in the First World. According to several surveys on religion, 83 percent of Americans claim to belong to a religious denomination. How can these two facts simultaneously exist in the same country?

Kopimism and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance…

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From CHRISTIAN ENGSTROM 

Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance from 1974 is one of the world’s most widely read philosophical books. I think it has a strong connection to Kopimism.

The Kopimist creation myth so far identifies three Fundamental Principles that have worked together to create life on Earth: Copying, Cooperation, and Quality.

The book of Pirsig revolves around the concept of Quality, which acquires a more and more metaphysical meaning as the book progresses.

I believe that what the Kopimist creation myth calls Quality, and describes as the attraction force of the good, is very similar to Pirsig’s Quality, perhaps even identical.

The book of Pirsig is a very deep book, of the kind that you reread in whole or in part a number of times in your life, and gain new insights each time. I will give a quick summary of it below, but the important thing is not whether that summary is understandable or not.

The most important thing is that Pirsig argues the idea that Quality is a real (though not yet explored) force of nature. That idea we can copy straight into Kopimism. We can then use the book of Pirsig as a starting point for a deeper philosophical discussion about what Quality is and how it affects our thoughts and actions.

Antique Farm Tools

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From No Tech Magazine

Peter Charles Dorrington collected and restored over 750 antique farm tools between 1985 and 2001. Most of these tools were agricultural hand implements and fenland tools that were used in England, Wales and Scotland, dating from about 1600 to 1940, for example: “chaff cutters”, “flails”, scythes”, “dibbers” and “breast ploughs”. Photographs of roughly half of the tools that are still in the collection are included here. Information and notes on some of the tools are also included.

In pre-industrial societies, throughout the world, most people worked as agricultural labourers. Indeed many of the types of hand farm tools on this website might have been used by your own ancestors…
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THE “CHAFF BOX” OR “CHAFF CUTTER”

The chaff box or cutter was a simple but ingenious device for cutting straw chaff, hay, and oats into small pieces – before being mixed together with other forage and fed to horses and cattle. Apart from being more economical than previous methods of feeding, this aided the animal’s digestion and prevented animals from rejecting any part of their food. Since the chaff box was made largely of wood (usually ash) with only a small amount of ironwork, it cost relatively little to make and, as a result, few farms, town or country stables were without one by the end of the eighteenth century.

There were two sizes, one of heavy construction which normally resided in the darkened corners of barns or stables and another smaller model made of pine or similar wood which was portable.

Ecology of the Mind…

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From ADBUSTERS

For thousands of generations we humans grew up in nature. Our teachers were flora and fauna and our textbooks thunderstorms and stars in the night sky. Our minds were like the forests, oases and deltas around which our cultures germinated: chaotic, wild, fecund.

But in the last couple generations, we have largely abandoned the natural world, immersing ourselves in virtual realms. Today the synthetic environment rivals nature as a driving force in our lives, and the mental environment has become the terrain where our fate as humans will be decided. By emigrating from nature we’ve done something more than just move domiciles – we have fundamentally altered the context in which we live our lives.

Along with this transition to a new psychic realm, we have also seen the exponential rise of mental illnesses. Globally, humanity is now suffering from an epidemic of uncontrollable anxieties, mood disorders and depression. The United Nations predicts that mental disease will be bigger than heart disease by 2020.

Why is this happening? Why are we breaking down mentally?

If you ask psychologists what increases the general loading of psychopathology on the human animal, they will list a lot of things: the breakdown of community, the insecurity of social roles, the stresses of modernity and globalization and maybe even the chemicals in the air, water and food that may be affecting our brains in unknown ways. Others blame

Giving Up On My Kindle…

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From ESQUIRE

There are lots of reasons offered for the decline of sales in e-readers, but one hasn’t been sufficiently considered: They currently suck.

I’ve finally given up on e-readers. When my last Kindle broke, with its cracked screen of frozen e-ink smearing poor Agatha Christie’s face, I decided not to repurchase. I was only picking it up for books I’d already bought anyway. For at least a year, I had been reading actual print books — like some caveman, like some Medieval scribe. E-reader sales shrunk by 28 percent in 2012. There are lots of reasons offered for that decline — the rise of tablets, the saturation of the market, and others — but I think one reason has not been sufficiently considered: E-readers as they currently exist suck.

I really, really want to have an e-reader. I have loved e-readers from the beginning. They were the one technology, of all the wonders of contemporary life, for which I was an enthusiastic early adopter. In the Wall Street Journal, before the launch of the Kindle 2, I wrote that it would transform reading, and for the better. To say I was excited was an understatement.

The only other events as important to the history of the book are the birth of print and the shift from the scroll to bound pages. The e-reader, now widely available, will likely change our thinking and our being as profoundly as the two previous pre-digital manifestations of text.

Tiny Houses Make a Big Difference…

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From KELLY McCARTNEY
Shareable

The small — tiny, even — house movement serves society on multiple levels. Because the structures take up less space, they also use fewer resources. On top of that, the minimalism demanded by living in such limited square footage forces inhabitants to have considerably fewer belongings than their counterparts in homes five times their stature. The average size of a new, single-family home in the United States is around 2,500 square feet; the average tiny house comes in under 500 square feet — with some states mandating a minimum of 220 square feet to adhere to building codes.

Despite assumptions, the architecture and design of small homes varies. Some are fashioned from recycled and found materials; some come on wheels; and others utilize shipping containers. Documentary filmmaker Christopher Smith used his Tiny: A Story About Living Small project to explore his own and others’ process of going small.

Here are some examples of tiny houses from around the world.

Happy Birthday, Viktor Frankl: Timeless Wisdom on the Human Search for Meaning…

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From MARIA POPOVA
Brainpickings

“Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”

 Celebrated Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, born on March 26, 1905, remains best-known for his indispensable 1946 psychological memoir Man’s Search for Meaning (public library) — a meditation on what the gruesome experience of Auschwitz taught him about the primary purpose of life: the quest for meaning, which sustained those who survived.

For Frankl, meaning came from three possible sources: purposeful work, love, and courage in the face of difficulty.

In examining the “intensification of inner life” that helped prisoners stay alive, he considers the transcendental power of love:

Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved.

Transition: Distributed Solar Power a ‘Mortal Threat’ to Utilities…

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From CLIMATE DENIAL CROCK

Three weeks ago, I had my 5 minutes at a local “listening session” on energy, put on by the Governor of my fair state.

My main message was that a technological sea change is coming in energy production – and if regulatory and utility policy do not anticipate the further build out of wind, solar, and distributed energy, the transition is going to be ugly. Traditional energy producers who think they can hold back the tide will be like typewriter makers trying to bad-mouth word processors. They are going to go away.

Last week had coffee last week with a well-informed friend, who agreed with me that this is an oncoming freight train. He pointed me to some new survey results from Ernst & Young.

Renewable Energy World:

We conducted a telephone survey of executives involved in corporate energy strategy at 100 companies with revenues of US$1 billion or more. Questions focused on energy spend, types of energy used, energy strategy, and outlook.

Let the Waltons Go First…

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From digby
Hullaballoo

I’m watching Bill Maher and his guests last Friday calling the American people morons because they don’t want the government to cut programs they value. All the wealthy people on the panel went on and on and on about how those idiotic Americans refuse to make sacrifices for the greater good because they’re just sooooo stupid.

Ok, I’ll agree to live in penury in my old age but I think these people should be forced to join me:

Bernie Sanders says Walmart heirs own more wealth than bottom 40 percent of Americans

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, tweeted a startling statistic to his followers on July 22, 2012: “Today the Walton family of Walmart own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of America.

Sanders speaks and writes frequently about wealth distribution in the U.S., a hot-button issue among liberals and a rallying cry of the Occupy Wall Street Movement.

The Waltons, of course, are members of the proverbial 1 percent.

Bill Maher on New Pope…

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Bill Maher here

Bill Maher spent a second week ending “Real Time” by slamming Pope Francis, this time focusing on the media’s fascination with the new pope.

“I have just about had it with the press squealing in delight with everything the new pope does,” Maher said. “He’s a 76-year-old executive who just got a promotion. You act like he’s a baby who just made a boom-boom.”

“There are over a billion Catholics — just on the back of my gardener’s truck,” Maher said, to some applause and even a few boos. “So I get it that this is a legitimate news story. But can we at least stop saying that the job of pope is so hard?”

He even compared the Church to his own show.

“The Catholic Church has basically always done what we do here at ‘Real Time.’ It’s a bunch of guys sitting around making up new rules.”

Maher, who was raised Catholic and is now an outspoken voice against religion, is unlikely to stop his criticism of the pope or the Catholic Church anytime soon.
~~

The persecution of Barrett Brown – and how to fight it…

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From GLENN GREENWALD
The Guardian UK

Aaron’s Swartz’s suicide in January triggered waves of indignation, and rightly so. He faced multiple felony counts and years in prison for what were, at worst, trivial transgressions of law. But his prosecution revealed the excess of both anti-hacking criminal statutes, particularly the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), and the fixation of federal prosecutors on severely punishing all forms of activism that challenge the power of the government and related entities to control the flow of information on the internet. Part of what drove the intense reaction to Swartz’s death was how sympathetic of a figure he was, but as noted by Orin Kerr, a former federal prosecutor in the DOJ’s computer crimes unit and now a law professor at GWU, what was done to Swartz is anything but unusual, and the reaction to his death will be meaningful only if channeled to protest other similar cases of prosecutorial abuse:

“I think it’s important to realize that what happened in the Swartz case happens in lots and lots of federal criminal cases. . . . What’s unusual about the Swartz case is that it involved a highly charismatic defendant with very powerful friends in a position to object to these common practices. That’s not to excuse what happened, but rather to direct the energy that is angry about what happened. If you want to end these tactics, don’t just complain about the Swartz case. Don’t just complain when the defendant happens to be a brilliant guy who went to Stanford and hangs out with Larry Lessig. Instead, complain that this is business as usual in federal criminal cases around the country – mostly with defendants who no one has ever heard of and who get locked up for years without anyone else much caring.”

Prosecutorial abuse is a drastically under-discussed problem in general, but it poses unique political dangers when used to punish and deter online activism. But it’s becoming the preeminent weapon used by the US government to destroy such activism.

Just this week alone, a US federal judge sentenced hactivist Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer to 3 1/2 years in prison for exploiting a flaw in AT&T’s security system that allowed him entrance without any hacking, an act about which Slate’s Justin Peters wrote: “it’s not clear that Auernheimer committed any actual crime”, while Jeff Blagdon at the Verge added: “he cracked no codes, stole no passwords, or in any way ‘broke into’ AT&T’s customer database

Transition: Superheated American City Dealing with 110 Degrees for 33 Days — Phoenix Confronts Apocalyptic Climate Change…

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From WILLIAM deBUYS
TomDispatch
Thanks to Todd Walton

If cities were stocks, you’d want to short Phoenix.

Of course, it’s an easy city to pick on. The nation’s 13th largest metropolitan area (nudging out Detroit) crams 4.3 million people into a low bowl in a hot desert, where horrific heat waves and windstorms visit it regularly. It snuggles next to the nation’s largest nuclear plant and, having exhausted local sources, it depends on an improbable infrastructure to suck water from the distant (and dwindling) Colorado River.

In Phoenix, you don’t ask: What could go wrong? You ask: What couldn’t?

And that’s the point, really. Phoenix’s multiple vulnerabilities, which are plenty daunting taken one by one, have the capacity to magnify one another, like compounding illnesses. In this regard, it’s a quintessentially modern city, a pyramid of complexities requiring large energy inputs to keep the whole apparatus humming. The urban disasters of our time — New Orleans hit by Katrina, New York City swamped by Sandy — may arise from single storms, but the damage they do is the result of a chain reaction of failures

Transition: Seeds of Conflict…

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From Discover Magazine
Thanks to Rosalind Peterson

Genetically modified corn and soy dominate U.S. farms, but activist raids have kept Europe GMO-free. The fight over the next Green Revolution has just begun.

Not long after midnight on July 9, 2011, six men descended on a fenced-in field at biovativ, a research facility in the northern German town of Gross Lusewitz. It was a clear, warm Saturday night, and the 115-acre farm was lit by a half moon.

Moving quickly, the men surrounded the night watchman. Shining their flashlights in his face and threatening him with pepper spray and clubs, they frisked him, took his flashlight and keys, and smashed his cell phone. Then they headed directly for their target, a potato patch the size of a tennis court. Within minutes, the potatoes—part of a research project run by the nearby University of Rostock to see if rabbit vaccines and plastic polymers could be grown in plants—had been ripped out of the ground or trampled.

Two nights later, at a farm 100 miles to the south, the scene repeated itself almost exactly. This time, a dozen masked men overpowered two guards at the Üplingen Plant Science Garden, hopped a waist-high wire fence and trashed a plot of genetically modified potatoes, along with part of a nearby stand of transgenic wheat. As police cars sped toward the farm, the raiders melted into the night.

How the US public was defrauded by the hidden cost of the Iraq war…

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From MICHAEL BOYLE
GuardianUK

George Bush sold the war as quick and cheap; it was long and costly. Even now, the US is paying billions to private contractors

When the US invaded Iraq in March 2003, the Bush administration estimated that it would cost $50-60bn to overthrow Saddam Hussein and establish a functioning government. This estimate was catastrophically wrong: the war in Iraq has cost $823.2bn between 2003 and 2011. Some estimates suggesting that it may eventually cost as much as $3.7tn when factoring in the long-term costs of caring for the wounded and the families of those killed.

The most striking fact about the cost of the war in Iraq has been the extent to which it has been kept “off the books” of the government’s ledgers and hidden from the American people. This was done by design. A fundamental assumption of the Bush administration’s approach to the war was that it was only politically sustainable if it was portrayed as near-costless to the American public and to key constituencies in Washington. The dirty little secret of the Iraq war – one that both Bush and the war hawks in the Democratic party knew, but would never admit – was that the American people would only support

The Internet is a surveillance state…

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From BRUCE SCHNEIER
CNN Opinion

I’m going to start with three data points.

One: Some of the Chinese military hackers who were implicated in a broad set of attacks against the U.S. government and corporations were identified because they accessed Facebook from the same network infrastructure they used to carry out their attacks.

Two: Hector Monsegur, one of the leaders of the LulzSac hacker movement, was identified and arrested last year by the FBI. Although he practiced good computer security and used an anonymous relay service to protect his identity, he slipped up.

And three: Paula Broadwell,who had an affair with CIA director David Petraeus, similarly took extensive precautions to hide her identity. She never logged in to her anonymous e-mail service from her home network. Instead, she used hotel and other public networks when she e-mailed him. The FBI correlated hotel registration data from several different hotels — and hers was the common name.

The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we’re being tracked all the time.

Meet Scott Prouty, the 47 Percent Video Source…

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From DAVID CORN
Mother Jones

For months, he and I shared a big secret and repeatedly discussed whether he should go public or stay hidden.

The fellow on the other end of the phone call pronounced his name with hesitation. For nearly a fortnight, he and I had been building a long-distance rapport via private tweets, emails, and phone conversations as we discussed how best to make public the secret video he had shot of Mitt Romney talking at a private, $50,000-per-plate fundraiser in Boca Raton, Florida. Now I was almost ready to break the story at Mother Jones. I had verified the video, confirming when and where it had been shot, and my colleagues and I had selected eight clips—including Romney’s now-infamous remarks about the 47 percent of Americans he characterized as “victims” unwilling to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives”—to embed in two articles. We had blurred these clips, at the source’s request, to make it difficult to tell where Romney had uttered these revealing comments, while clearly showing that it was Romney speaking. The goal was to afford the source a modicum of protection.

The source was justifiably worried about repercussions. Once the video was posted, he might lose his job. He might face criminal prosecution or a civil lawsuit. Months earlier, he had anonymously posted a snippet from the video, in which Romney nonchalantly described the work-camp-like living conditions at a Chinese factory he had visited. The source, offended by these comments, had hoped that the short clip would catch fire in the political-media world. But it hadn’t, partly because its context and origins were unknown. The source’s desire to remain in the shadows had hindered his ability to bring the story to the public.

Then James Carter IV, a freelance researcher (and, though I didn’t know it then, the grandson of Jimmy Carter) who had been sending me

Kill Anything That Moves…

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From CHRIS HEDGES
Truthdig

Nick Turse’s “Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam” is not only one of the most important books ever written about the Vietnam conflict but provides readers with an unflinching account of the nature of modern industrial warfare. It captures, as few books on war do, the utter depravity of industrial violence—what the sociologist James William Gibson calls “technowar.” It exposes the sickness of the hyper-masculine military culture, the intoxicating rush and addiction of violence, and the massive government spin machine that lies daily to a gullible public and uses tactics of intimidation, threats and smear campaigns to silence dissenters. Turse, finally, grasps that the trauma that plagues most combat veterans is a result not only of what they witnessed or endured, but what they did. This trauma, shame, guilt and self-revulsion push many combat veterans—whether from Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan—to escape into narcotic and alcoholic fogs or commit suicide. By the end of Turse’s book, you understand why.

This is not the book Turse set out to write. He was, when his research began in June 2001, a graduate student looking at post-traumatic stress disorder among Vietnam veterans. An archivist at the U.S. National Archives asked Turse whether he thought witnessing war crimes could cause PTSD. He steered Turse to yellowing reports amassed by the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group. The group, set up in the wake of the My Lai massacre, was designed to investigate the hundreds of reports of torture, rape, kidnapping, forced displacement, beatings, arson, mutilation, executions and massacres carried out by U.S. troops. But the object of the group was not to discipline or to halt the abuses. It was, as Turse writes, “to ensure that the army would never again be caught off-guard by a major war crimes scandal.”

Time for a Copyleft for Seeds and Genes…

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From BOLLIER.ORG

Two cases involving the patenting of living organisms are now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, and the outcomes do not look good.  It appears that commoners who wish to use seeds, genes and other living things as a shared gift of nature will be cast out into the darkness once again.  The Court seems poised to privilege the private control of lifeforms, providing yet another legal subsidy for the market order.

The seed case was brought by a 75-year-old farmer from Indiana who had bought commodity soybeans from a grain elevator.  As described by the New York Times, an estimated 90 percent of all U.S. soybean crops are now grown from genetically modified Monsanto seeds resistant to the Roundup herbicide.  Not surprisingly, many of the seeds that farmer Vernon Hugh Bowman bought contained second-generation versions of Monsanto seeds.

The problem is, Bowman inadvertently grew a new batch of GMO seeds without paying Monsanto or getting its authorization.  Monsanto sued him, claiming that Bowman’s crops infringed Monsanto’s patent.  Accepting the view that Monsanto’s patent let it control even second-generation seeds, a U.S. federal district court forced Bowman to pay an $84,000 fine.

In his legal filings, Bowman argues that once a patented object is sold, the seller loses control over how it can be used.  This is a legal doctrine known as “patent exhaustion.”  It’s similar in concept to the “first sale doctrine” in copyright law, which prohibits publishers and other copyright holders from charging licenses for library books or DVDs.  If the scope of copyright or patent rights is too extensive, sellers can control too many “downstream” uses of the product, usually with harmful effects on competition, innovation and price.

Growing your own food is like printing your own money…

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From RON FINLEY

A guerilla gardener in South Central LA

Here is one of the finest TED talks I have ever seen. “Gardening is the most defiant act you can do in the city”, “Get gangsta with your shovel” and “plant some shit”. Brilliant.
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Chomsky: The Corporate Assault on Public Education…

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From NOAM CHOMSKY
Alternet

Our kids are being prepared for passive obedience, not creative, independent lives.

The following is Part II of the transcript of a speech Noam Chomsky delivered in February on “The Common Good.” Click here to read Part I.

Let’s turn to the assault on education, one element of the general elite reaction to the civilizing effect of the ‘60s. On the right side of the political spectrum, one striking illustration is an influential memorandum written by Lewis Powell, a corporate lawyer working for the tobacco industry, later appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon. At the other end of the narrow spectrum, there was an important study by the Trilateral Commission, liberal internationalists from the three major state capitalist industrial systems: the US, Europe and Japan. Both provide good insight into why the assault targets the educational system.

Let’s start with the Powell memorandum. Its title is, “The Attack on the American Free-Enterprise System.” It is interesting not only for the content, but also for the paranoid tone. For those who take for granted the right to rule, anything that gets out of control means that the world is coming to an end, like a spoiled three-year-old. So the rhetoric tends to be inflated and paranoid.

Powell identifies the leading criminals who are destroying the American free-enterprise system: one was Ralph Nader, with his consumer safety campaigns. The other was Herbert Marcuse

Fukushima Is Already Harming Our Children…

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From FIREDOGLAKE

Thyroid abnormalities have now been confirmed among tens of thousands of children downwind from Fukushima.  They are the first clear sign of an unfolding radioactive tragedy that demands this industry be buried forever.

Two years after Fukushima exploded, three still-smoldering reactors remind us that the nuclear power industry repeatedly told the world this could never happen.

And 72 years after the nuclear weapons industry began creating them,  untold quantities of deadly wastes still leak at Hanford and at commercial reactor sites around the world, with no solution in sight.

Radiation can be slow to cause cancer, taking decades to kill.

But children can suffer quickly.  Their cells grow faster than adults’.  Their smaller bodies are more vulnerable.  With the embryo and fetus, there can never be a “safe” dose of radiation.  NO dose of radiation is too small to have a human impact.

Last month the Fukushima Prefecture Health Management Survey acknowledged a horrifying plague of thyroid abnormalities, thus far afflicting more than forty percent of the children studied.

The survey sample was 94,975.  So some 38,000 children are already cursed with likely health problems…that we know of.

A thyroid abnormality can severely impact a wide range of developmental realities, including physical and mental growth.  Cancer is a likely outcome.

How Hemp Threatens the Corporatocracy…

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‘They Profit, You Pay’: Activists Slam Nuclear Industry as Fukushima Remains Too Hot to Enter…

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Fukushima Anniversary Protest in Tokyo: Greenpeace activists wearing “nuclear scream” masks demonstrate in front of the Japanese parliament (Noriko Hayashi / Greenpeace)

From GREENPEACE
Common Drems

At disaster-stricken Japanese plant and worldwide, the nuclear industry must be held accountable, says Greenpeace

Greenpeace activists protest with English, Japanese and German banners in front of the European Hitachi headquarters in Duisburg,The six reactors of the Fukushima nuclear plant are built by Hitachi, GE and Toshiba (Bernd Arnold / Greenpeace)With the two year anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster quickly approaching, environmental activists from Greenpeace launched a worldwide campaign Thursday calling for the international community to hold the nuclear industry accountable for past and present nuclear catastrophes.

Meanwhile, from the Fukushima Nuclear Plant today, Julian Ryall of the Telegraph reports that radiation levels within half of the reactor units are still far too high for people to enter, let alone efficiently “decommission” them, two years after the disaster began.

According to Ryall, scientists still do not have a grasp on the conditions of the reactor cores in three of the six units at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. They cannot enter the structures to investigate and are confined to using remote-controlled vehicles to get inside the “tangle of wires, pipes and rubble

Tariq Ali: Hugo Chávez and Me (Updated)…

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From TARIQ ALI
The Guardian

The late president of Venezuela, who I have met many times, will be remembered by his supporters as a lover of literature, a fiery speaker and a man who fought for his people and won

Once I asked whether he preferred enemies who hated him because they knew what he was doing or those who frothed and foamed out of ignorance. He laughed. The former was preferable, he explained, because they made him feel that he was on the right track. Hugo Chávez’s death did not come as a surprise, but that does not make it easier to accept. We have lost one of the political giants of the post-communist era. Venezuela, its elites mired in corruption on a huge scale, had been considered a secure outpost of Washington and, at the other extreme, the Socialist International. Few thought of the country before his victories. After 1999, every major media outlet of the west felt obliged to send a correspondent. Since they all said the same thing (the country was supposedly on the verge of a communist-style dictatorship) they would have been better advised to pool their resources.

I first met him in 2002, soon after the military coup instigated by Washington and Madrid had failed and subsequently on numerous occasions. He had asked to see me during the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. He inquired: “Why haven’t you been to Venezuela? Come soon.” I did. What appealed was his bluntness and courage. What often appeared as sheer impulsiveness had been carefully thought out and then

Another milestone on the way to the extinction of the human race…

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From DAVID ATKINS
Hullabaloo

All of these problems have the same solution…

No need to pay attention to this. I’m sure everything will be fine.

The amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the air jumped dramatically in 2012, making it very unlikely that global warming can be limited to another 2 degrees as many global leaders have hoped, new federal figures show.

Scientists say the rise in CO2 reflects the world’s economy revving up and burning more fossil fuels, especially in China.

Carbon dioxide levels jumped by 2.67 parts per million since 2011 to total just under 395 parts per million, says Pieter Tans, who leads the greenhouse gas measurement team for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

That’s the second highest rise in carbon emissions since record-keeping began in 1959. The measurements are taken from air samples captured away from civilization near a volcano in Mauna Loa, Hawaii.

The great tragedy here is that we have three gigantic problems right now, each of them with the same simple solution. We have a climate problem, first and foremost. We have a global economic and unemployment problem, second. And we have a global terrorism (or imperialism, depending on your point of view) problem focused largely on oil producing states, third.

The economy: Under new ownership…

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Employees at Equal Exchange, the oldest and largest fair-trade coffee company in the nation. It is also a worker-owned cooperative. Photo by Paul Dunn.

From MARJORIE KELLY
YES! Magazine

How cooperatives are leading the way to empowered workers and healthy communities.

Pushing my grocery cart down the aisle, I spot on the fruit counter a dozen plastic bags of bananas labeled “Organic, Equal Exchange.” My heart leaps a little. I’d been thrilled, months earlier, when I found my local grocer carrying bananas—a new product from Equal Exchange—because this employee-owned cooperativeme outside Boston is one of my favorite companies. Its main business remains the fair trade coffee and chocolate the company started with in 1986. Since then, the company has flourished, and its mission remains supporting small farmer co-ops in developing countries and giving power to employees through ownership. It’s as close to an ideal company as I’ve found. And I’m delighted to see their banana business thriving, since I know it was rocky for a time. (Hence the leaping of my heart.)

I happen to know a bit more than the average shopper about

Wealth Inequality in America Far Worse Than We Thought…

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From DailyFinance.com

For much of the past decade, policymakers and analysts have decried America’s incredibly low savings rate, noting that U.S. households save a fraction of the money of the rest of the world. Citing a myriad of causes — from cheap credit to exploitative bank practices — they’ve noted that the average family puts away less than 4 percent of its income.

“Wealth Inequality in America,” a six-minute video produced by a YouTube user named “Politizane,” casts an interesting angle on the plummeting savings rate. Set to depressing piano music and packed with crystal-clear animations, it gives a powerful snapshot of the American economic landscape. Noting that “The top 1 percent own nearly half the country’s stocks, bonds, and mutual funds,” the video goes on to contrast those impressive holdings with the rest of the country. By comparison, it points out, the bottom 50 percent of earners own only 0.5 percent of those investments.

It isn’t hard to see why there is such a yawning gap between the richest Americans and the rest of us. Since 1976, the share of national income earned by the top one percent of workers has nearly tripled, from 9 percent to 24 percent. It’s not hard to see why their share has increased: As Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich recently pointed out, the economy has roughly doubled in size over the last 30 years — and, in an ideal world, more money in the economy should mean more money in everyone’s pocket.

Where is the Occupy movement now that the depravity of the super rich is on full display?

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From ROBERT SCHEER

Whiny Billionaires in Need of Sequestration…

The suddenly increased national debt is primarily the result of a deep recession caused by the top bankers and hedge fund hustlers of Wall Street, saved from their folly by massive and costly federal intervention. The result has been a season of obscene profit for them, while the rest of the nation has floundered. But instead of making the rich pay, ordinary citizens will be visited with job furloughs and a savaging of public services that often are lifesaving.

Consider two stories this week that make Karl Marx look prescient: one, in The Wall Street Journal, concerns the payout of $1 billion in bonuses to nine private equity executives; the other, under a New York Times headline, states that the jobless recovery has been a boondoggle for corporate profits. “Recovery in U.S. Is Lifting Profits, but Not Adding Jobs,” the headline reads, by way of explaining why the stock market is nearing its unprecedented high while the unemployment picture remains so dismally bleak.

But whenever a politician dares to hold those “fat cats” accountable, as Barack Obama once did, he or she is branded by apologists for the super rich as a socialist engaging in class warfare. The outrage of the entitled as opposed to the despair of the dispossessed is the cultural norm, as evidenced by Stephen Schwarzman, one of the more egregious of those private equity billionaires.

How the coop movement can help us win together…

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From SHAREABLE

Workers at the former Republic Windows & Doors have been much celebrated in the press for their victory over Bank of America. Their story is an inspiration, and a precious victory that we will continue to cheer. True to the cooperative movement, their transition to become New Era Windows was supported by a network of allies who propelled the workers into the limelight and helped them overcome those banks that were deemed too big to fail. Theirs is a story of sharing ideas and making a joint effort at movement building, with co-op developers, unions, and the workers themselves as players.

Republic’s workers were unionized, and as members of Local 1110 of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, they had a sneaking suspicion that layoffs were coming. In late 2008, Bank of America cancelled the company’s line of credit, driving Republic into bankruptcy, the workers were set to be laid off without their dued severance pay or other benefits. Mark Meinster, one of the ambitious union organizers from Local 111, suggested that the embattled workers occupy the factory. Their suggestion was met with some skepticism—even other union organizers thought for sure they’d be arrested—but their risk paid off, and the workers won back what the bank had threatened to take away.

However, in 2012, after this momentous win, Serious Energy, the company that eventually bought out Republic, attempted to oust the workers a second time, precipitating another factory occupation. The forward-thinking organizers who won the first time around mobilized again, and after a second victory, began thinking about forming a worker cooperative. It was a hard-fought and ultimately successful showdown, but the union needed

Hack your education…

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From SFGate

Dale Stephens was an inquisitive child who found school to be more about teachers trying to discipline kids rather than inspire young minds.

At the end of fifth grade, Stephens informed his parents that school wasn’t for him and that he wanted to be a part of the “unschool” movement, which believes that learning outside of school can be “massively successful.”

Stephens, who is from the small town of Winters near Davis, now lives in San Francisco and has written a book

The Farm School…

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The Farm School is a family farm for the coming generations where people experience first hand what it means to be stewards of the earth.

We provide multi-day residential school-year and summer programs for the over 1,500 young people and their teachers, a year-long program to train adults in practical sustainable agriculture, and an on-site one-room middle school.

Young people work the land and take home the cultural history, vital experience, and personal identity that farms nurture. Teachers work alongside their students and leave with new insights into their craft and children they teach. Adults learn to farm and carry essential knowledge from one community to the next.

Careful mentoring, meaningful work, humor and kindness are at the center of all we do.
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Teach kids to farm, not code…

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From KIM BURGESS

My father taught me to code as a kid. He’s spent sections of his life as a software engineer and as a teacher and was one of the best mentors I could have asked for when starting the craft. These days he and my mother run an organic farm, are outspoken advocates of sustainable living and are both extremely involved in community activism.

On being exposed to code.org‘s recent hugely popular campaign he had an interesting comment. This is a view that I’ve seen mirrored amoung a number of people not actively engaged non-profit based software engineering or hacktivism. His entire post is below, with my comment following.

“I’ve been able to write code fluently in a couple of languages at any one time for most of the last 35 years (although pretty disinterested for the last 5 or 6)

George Carlin On Religion…

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A new story of the world…

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“Our hearts know that a more beautiful world is possible … but our minds do not know that it’s possible. … Our understanding of causality, even, doesn’t allow for a path from here to there.

“Our stories have kind of an immune system that keeps them intact as long as possible. … Things aren’t working so well anymore and it’s a lot harder to fully believe in our stories. … they are falling apart … and birthing us into a new understanding of what’s real and what’s possible and who we are. And in that new story, that logic of the heart that says that ‘Yeah, I know that this is a significant act and I know that everything I do is significant’ no longer contradicts the logic of the mind which had been the logic of separation.”
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Jackass Journalism…

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From ANA MARIE COX
Guardian UK

We’re true believers, but we’re also troublemakers, and if you look at the work we do, a lot of it has a sense of humor.

So says Michael Goldfarb, founder of the Washington Free Beacon, basking in the predictable reaction to an article by Free Beacon staff that accused the New Republic’s owner of purging Jewish writers. That’s the whole MO: be outrageous, scurrilous and completely unfair. And then, when you get a rise, just shrug and say: “What’s your problem: can’t take a joke?”

But for something to be humor, it has to be funny. And as comedy goes, the Free Beacon’s jokes have all the subtlety of Jackass. The only difference is that instead of creating dubious hilarity at the spectacle of their self-inflicted pain, they’re using equally ridiculous stunts to laugh at yours. Clinically speaking, we call people with that attitude “sociopaths”, but in the political realm, Goldfarb’s punchlines – emphasis on punch! – are just the latest iteration of a burgeoning style of discourse whose practitioners have become influential enough to deserve their own designation.

They belong to an emerging group of conservatives with technological and PR savvy who specialize in passing off mean-spirited pranks as a form of partisan journalism, and whose passionate plaints against a perceived liberal agenda are rooted in name-calling rather than philosophy.

Call them Limbaugh Mini-Mes, or Nixon’s New Media ‘Plumbers’, or maybe Breitbart’s Brat Pack (Breitbrats, Bratbarts?).

Here’s a sample of the Free Beacon’s headlines: “The Booty Bundler“, about a minor Obama fundraiser with a striptease video on her resume. “Coal Runnings“, a largely hypothetical piece about how much new national standards for power plants could cost Missouri voters. And the typically subtle “Obama Lie Machine“, about the Obama campaign’s tax calculator in which the paper’s staff appears to completely misunderstand the concept of marginal tax rates.

Zero Dark Thirty, the CIA and film critics have a very bad evening…

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From GLENN GREENWALD

The stigma attached to the pro-torture CIA propaganda vehicle, beloved by film critics, results in Oscar humiliation

Just a few months ago, the consensus of the establishment press and the nation’s (shockingly large) community of film critics was that Zero Dark Thirty was the best film of the year and the clear (and well-deserved) front-runner to win the most significant Academy Awards. “OK, folks, you can plan something else for Oscar Night 2013 . . . . Zero Dark Thirty will win Best Picture and Best Director (Kathryn Bigelow),” pronounced Time Magazine’s Richard Corliss. “‘Zero Dark Thirty’ and Kathryn Bigelow won major critics’ prizes on Sunday, confirming the Osama bin Laden manhunt thriller as an Oscar frontrunner,” said Entertainment Weekly. The film “looks like the movie to beat right now” as the critics’ awards “landscape is dominated by Kathryn Bigelow’s ‘Zero Dark Thirty,’” reported the Washington Post’s Jen Chaney.

But then political writers had begun to notice what film critics either failed to detect or just wilfully ignored. The film falsely depicted torture as instrumental in the finding of Osama bin Laden (“what is so unsettling about ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ is not that it tells this difficult history but, rather, that it distorts it”, said the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer). Beyond the torture falsehoods, it was a blatant vehicle for CIA propaganda, bolstering a worldview exclusively out of Langley (“This is not a coincidence. The CIA played a key role in shaping the film’s narrative,” reported BuzzFeed’s Michael Hastings; the CIA “couldn’t have asked for better product placement”, said the New York Times’ Timothy Egan; as a result, said The Atlantic’s Peter Maass: “Zero Dark Thirty represents a new genre of embedded filmmaking that is the problematic offspring of the worrisome endeavor known as embedded journalism”). In sum, said MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, the film “colludes with evil” (a long but very partial list of writers, filmmakers, FBI agents and even government officials who similarly denounced the film is here).

The first sign that this fallout was harming the film was when its director, Bigelow, was not even nominated for Best Director. And now, on Sunday night at the Academy Awards, Zero Dark Thirty got exactly what it deserved: basically nothing other than humiliation:

Only Love Remains…

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From GUY McPHERSON
Nature Bats Last

Most people would say I’m not religious. I’m not spiritually religious, although I exhibit some behaviors in a religious manner. I refer to myself as a free-thinker, a skeptic, and occasionally an indifferent agnostic or a militant atheist. So the apparently spiritual title of this essay would seem out of character for those who know me.

I’ll not wander down the road of knowing me. Even after five decades of study, much of it characterized by the serious introspection allowed those who pursue the life of the mind in the halls of academia, I barely know myself. And I know too little about love. But I’m pretty certain it’s all we have.

I’ve tried turning my back on my own emotions, and those of others. I’ve been a rationalist most of my life, and my entire career was spent as a scientist and teacher. My laser-like focus on reason precluded the expression of feelings, an attitude reinforced by the culture in which I came of age, a culture in which the only thing worse than having feelings was expressing them. For most of my life I’ve been mystified by public displays of affection and people who mourned the loss of individual lives.

After all, as I’ve known for a long time, birth is lethal. Nobody gets out alive, a notion that applies to cultures and species as well as individuals. My perceived lack of empathy led some to conclude I was a sociopath. Or a psychopath. My two-sizes-too-small brain can’t customarily distinguish the two.

Long familiar with his talent as a guitarist, I didn’t think the words of Jimi Hendrix applied to my world: “When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.” Recently I’ve begun to question my earlier sentiments.

Heartbroken, again and again

I keep believing I’ve worked through each of the five Kubler-Ross stages of grief. And then, just when my rational side seems to get the upper hand, I’m overwhelmed again and thrust back to the lobby of my own personal Heartbreak Hotel.

A decade ago, as I was editing a book on climate change, I realized we had triggered events likely to cause human extinction by 2030.

Seed Starting Chart…

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From ORGANIC GARDENING

Timing is everything. To start your seeds on time, you need to know when in relation to the frost-free date in spring to plant them. If you need help determining your spring frost-free date, call your county extension agent who can tell you for certain.

Creating Your Seed-Starting Plan

• Print the seed starting chart below.
• Write your frost-free date in the blank space at the top of the chart.
• Get a calendar and add or subtract the number of weeks in the “Safe to Set Out Time” column. This is the “Setting Out Date” when you can safely plant the crop to the garden. Write it in the last column.
• Take each date from Column 5 (“Setting Out Date”), subtract the number of weeks shown for that crop in column 3 (“Weeks from Sowing”) and record that date in column 2 (“When to Start Inside”).

YOUR SEED-STARTING PLAN
The Spring Frost-Free Date in My Garden is_______________
CROP	WHEN TO START INSIDE	WEEKS FROM SOWING	SAFE TO SET OUT TIME (RELATIVE TO FROST-FREE DATE)	SETTING OUT DATE
Basil		6	1 week after
Beets*		4-6	2 weeks before
Broccoli		4-6	2 weeks before
Cabbage		4-6	4 weeks before
Cauliflower		4-6	2 weeks before
Collards		4-6	4 weeks before
Corn*		2-4	0 to 2 weeks after
Cucumber		3-4	1 to 2 weeks after
Eggplant		8-10	2 to 3 weeks after
Kale		4-6	4 weeks before
Kohlrabi*		4-6	4 weeks before
Lettuce		4-5	3 to 4 weeks before
Melons		3-4	2 weeks after
Mustard*		4-6	4 weeks before
Okra*		4-6	2 to 4 weeks after
Onions		6-8	4 weeks before
Parsley		9-10	2 to 3 weeks before
Peas*		3-4	6 to 8 weeks before
Peppers		6-14	2 weeks after
Pumpkins		3-4	2 weeks after
Spinach		4-6	3 to 6 weeks before
Squash		3-4	2 weeks after
Swiss chard		4-6	2 weeks before
Tomatoes		6-8	1 to 2 weeks after
* These crops are usually direct-seeded outdoors, but they can be started inside.