Forbes is lying about a study to promote AGW denialism

So there’s this Op/Ed piece titled “Peer-Reviewed Survey Finds Majority Of Scientists Skeptical Of Global Warming Crisis” in Forbes right now. It refers to this paper in Organizational Studies, a journal largely focusing on the sociology of organizations.

The Op/Ed piece is blatantly lying about the paper.

Let’s start with the title. For one, the paper is not a survey. Surveys are quantitative, and therefore strive for large and representative samples; this paper was a qualitative study, with a sample selected on the basis of usefulness to the topic, not because it’s representative. Secondly, the author of that Op/Ed piece, James Taylor, claims that a “majority of scientists” is skeptical of AGW. Except that the paper doesn’t study “scientists”; it studies “professional experts in petroleum and related industries”*, and refers to them collectively as “professionals”, not “scientists” like Taylor does. Plus, right in the introduction the paper explains that “there is a broad consensus among climate scientists” about AGW being real. Which is not a group of scientists the paper studies, because its focus is not what the scientists doing research on climate issues conclude from their research. The abstract of the paper (emphases mine):

This paper examines the framings and identity work associated with professionals’ discursive construction of climate change science, their legitimation of themselves as experts on ‘the truth’, and their attitudes towards regulatory measures. Drawing from survey responses of 1077 professional engineers and geoscientists, we reconstruct their framings of the issue and knowledge claims to position themselves within their organizational and their professional institutions. In understanding the struggle over what constitutes and legitimizes expertise, we make apparent the heterogeneity of claims, legitimation strategies, and use of emotionality and metaphor. By linking notions of the science or science fiction of climate change to the assessment of the adequacy of global and local policies and of potential organizational responses, we contribute to the understanding of ‘defensive institutional work’ by professionals within petroleum companies, related industries, government regulators, and their professional association.

In the paper the authors state the purpose of the paper as follows:

Our aim is to examine the construction and disputation of expertise in a contested issue field and the consequences this has for the mobilization for or against regulation.

and

How do professional experts frame the reality of climate change and themselves as experts, while engaging in defensive institutional work against others?

It’s a sociology paper; about social construction of “expertise” on AGW which justifies in the minds of professionals “defensive institutional work, i.e., the maintenance of institutions against disruptions” caused by demands for climate-action. It wouldn’t make sense to study research scientists in climatology for this.
Plus, studying specifically professionals working for oil companies and oil-related industries (in Alberta, no less!) is going to severely skew the proportion of professionals studied who are denialists. Which the authors of the study are quite upfront about**, but which Taylor completely ignores in favor of claims like:

the overwhelming majority of scientists fall within four other models, each of which is skeptical of alarmist global warming claims.

Taylor then quotes parts of the paper where the oil-industry professionals are classified into 5 groups of positions about AGW. Mostly the quotes are ok, but they are trimmed to look less like the “social construction of climate change” categories that they actually are in the paper.

Lastly, Taylor takes a swipe at the authors of the paper (where he once again calls it a survey. dude, no.) for being “alarmists”, because they use accurate terms (“deniers”, etc.); he then claims that because of the obvious pro-AGW-bias of the authors, “alarmists will have a hard time arguing the survey is biased or somehow connected to the ‘vast right-wing climate denial machine.’”. Which is silly, since of course the study is connected to the denial machine; it’s about the denial machine, sampling a group of people who have every reason in the world to deny that their institution (the oil industry) is fucking with the climate.

And then another blatant lie:

Another interesting aspect of this new survey is that it reports on the beliefs of scientists themselves rather than bureaucrats who often publish alarmist statements without polling their member scientists.

Again, this is neither a survey, nor does it study scientists. It confirms that among climate scientists, there is a consensus that AGW is real and a problem. But these folks are not the subject of the study; it’s a study about denialist self-rationalization, so of course it’s full of deniers. Also, it’s of course not “bureaucrats” that publish consensus reports on AGW; unlike the subjects of this study, the IPCC is actually a body of actual climate scientists doing actual research on our climate.

The Forbes article concludes thusly:

People who look behind the self-serving statements by global warming alarmists about an alleged “consensus” have always known that no such alarmist consensus exists among scientists. Now that we have access to hard surveys of scientists themselves, it is becoming clear that not only do many scientists dispute the asserted global warming crisis, but these skeptical scientists may indeed form a scientific consensus.

1)”hard surveys of scientists”, my ass. 2)1/3 of people even within the oil industry agreeing that AGW is a thing and a serious problem, plus another 17% basically answering “I don’t know, and neither do you” cannot in any way be construed as a “consensus” against AGW even among the group studied.

Lastly, and slightly OT, I’ll also note that the denialist goalposts have moved so thoroughly that even in the oil industry, “virtually all respondents (99.4%) agree that the climate is changing”. Now it’s all about whether to do anything about it.

The paper itself is quite interesting, since the concepts they’re analyzing apply to other debates about what is or isn’t scientific and who is or isn’t a legitimate authority on any given topic is relevant to many other areas***, especially where “defensive institutional work” is being done****. Really though, the most amazing thing about it is that a paper examining the ways in which denialists frame their denialism by defining experts as those who agree with them in order to justify defensive responses to attacks on the oil industry ends up being used to define experts (i.e. “scientists”) in such a way that it agrees with denialists and justifies their defensive, anti-regulatory reactions. It’s so very meta.
- – - – - – - -
* specifically, members of The Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA); no research scientists.
**they definitely don’t claim they have a representative sample of “scientists” or “experts on AGW”, since that’s not the point of the study. Quite the opposite, since this is not a quantitative study, but one using qualitative methodology. They’re not interested in how many people believe what, but in the content and diversity of these positions and the methods of justifying them.
**(examples: defining Rebecca Watson as an illegitimate authority in skepticism, because she has a communications degree rather than a science degree; shifting boundaries of what is or isn’t True Science^TM to exclude many social sciences; hyperskepticism; etc.
****any claim of “you’re harming The Movement”, and “I like this community the way it is, stop trying to change it”, ever.

Playing Cassandra

I’m feeling distinctly pessimistic today. As I’ve written in the past, the notion that “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice” may be a necessary belief to remain motivated in generations-long battles for justice, but as an “is” statement (as opposed to an “ought” statement), it is naive at best in light of the cyclical nature of civilizations. All civilizations in the history of humankind have, sooner or later, declined and fallen into a “dark age”.

And with that cheery introduction, I’ll give you the following:
1)Rachel Maddow analyzing the effects of money on US politics. Basically, Republicans and corporations now have enough money at their disposal to win even extremely unlikely electoral races. And the Democrats’ plan to survive and counter this? winning, then amending the constitution. except that, as just noted, they can’t really win anymore. So basically, unless the Repubicans actually manage to self-destruct, the US government is now wholly theirs, on all levels, for years to come.

2)A graph and summary about oil prices since the economic crisis. oil prices are currently falling because of assorted political clusterfucks, but for the last year, despite fluctuations, they are as high as they were at the beginning of 2008. and anything “good” happening economically will instantly reverse the current downward trend. so, it seems our choices right now are economic collapse somewhere important and the continuation of the Era Of Cheap Oil, or economic stabilization/recovery and the official end of oil below $100/bbl. Peak Oil, anyone?

3)In Europe, xenophobia always lurks just under the surface, threatening to erupt. The EU and its predecessor were created to end a history of conflict that includes the Hundred Year War, the 30 Year War, and that started both world wars. And they were doing a decent job of it, considering, before the global economic meltdown. But because the meltdown happened before the EU figured out how to manage itself in crisis situations, it is now in a political as well as an economic crisis. With predictable results: Fascists are getting elected wherever sufficient distrust of the other EU members has managed to break to the surface

4)And last but not least, speaking of the long arc of history: here’s a paper in Nature (I haz pdf) about possible “critical transitions” in the global ecosystem in the next century or so. I’ve kind of written about these transitions before. They’re basically what happens to an ecosystem when it stops being resilient enough to withstand a particular environmental pressure: it undergoes a drastic change until it can regain (relative, temporary) equilibrium as an entirely different ecosystem, one that usually doesn’t sustain the same species and communities as before. And this paper basically discusses the possibility that our biosphere is about to undergo a critical transition as a result of human-caused pressures on the system. Some choice quotes:

Here we summarize evidence that such planetary-scale critical transitions have occurred previously in the biosphere, albeit rarely, and that humans are now forcing another such transition, with the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience.

This Modelling suggests that for 30% of Earth, the speed at which plant species will have to migrate to keep pace with projected climate change is greater than their dispersal rate when Earth last shifted from a glacial to an interglacial climate, and that dispersal will be thwarted by highly fragmented landscapes.Climates found at present on 10–48% of the planet are projected to disappear within a century, and climates that contemporary organisms have never experienced are likely to cover 12–39% of Earth48. The mean global temperature by 2070 (or possibly a few decades earlier) will be higher than it has been since the human species evolved.

Although the ultimate effects of changing biodiversity and species compositions are still unknown, if critical thresholds of diminishing returns in ecosystem services were reached over large areas and at the same time global demands increased (as will happen if the population increases by
2,000,000,000 within about three decades), widespread social unrest, economic instability and loss of human life could result.

Climate Conference in Durban, AKA We’re Fucked

So the Climate Conference in Durban ended, and it could only be described as an Epic Fail. The Sociopathy of politicians from powerful countries is becoming more and more obvious, when you look at how many people do want something done, and have spoken loudly and clearly as to WHY something needs to be done. Here’s a small sample:

Abigain Borah from the Youth Climate Delegation

Anjali Appadurai also from the Youth Climate Delegation

Karl Hood Chair of the Alliance of Small Island States

Claudia Salerno from Venezuela

And here’s a wrapup of that clusterfuck: U.S. Delay on Climate Pact Spurs Backlash From the EU to Barbados

To sum it all up: we’re fucked unless every US politician over 30 drops dead tomorrow or China and the US get wiped off the surface of the planet in the near future

Or shorter still: we’re definitely fucked.

Link dump

there’s a few issues on my mind that don’t need a lot to have said about them (or, you know, render one completely speechless), so I’ll just collect them all here:

1)douchebag: now an insult also applicable to racists: Hey Did You Know Your Vagina’s Personality Is Based On Your Race?

2)something that’s quite old by now, but that I haven’t gotten around to respond: Walton linked to an article about a boy in London fighting the ban on cornrows in his school. The ban was being defended because it bans things associated with gang-culture. Someone else commented that it was “unprofessional”. That reminded me of how political black people’s hair is: how much racism there is in associating traditionally black hairstyles with criminality, and how much shaming there is (usually of women) for their natural hair, to the point where many of them end up damaging it to make it look like white people’s hair. Anyway, here’s a good article from the guardian about it: Cornrows? Non-traditional? What rubbish

3)News Corp trying to shut up critics, in a way that vaguely reminds me of something a certain someone recently did… News Corp’s Times Of London Cartoon Shows Starving Children Bemoaning Phone-Hacking Scandal Coverage

4)Limbaugh claims that current heatwave is a Liberal Conspiracy: Limbaugh: The Killer 116° Heat Index Is ‘Manufactured By The Government’

5)Sustainable development that’s actually sustainable: Permaculture in Cambodia (30 min documentary)

EDIT: one more, for good measure: Fox News: Are There Really Poor Americans?, from The Young Turks

Farmers in developing countries reject GMO’s. Why?

I recently found this article about Haitian farmers planning on destroying Monsanto seed. It reminded me of the stories of Indian farmers doing the same, and it stunned me that people in these extremely poor countries would be willing to destroy crops; especially Haiti, which just suffered a huge disaster, and where just a few years back people were eating mud. Now, I’m personally biased, but I wanted to really know whether these farmers were really acting in their best interest, based on experience with these crops, or whether they were like the teabaggers, talked by outsiders into acting against their own interests out of ignorance and fear.

After a little bit of digging, what I discovered was a massive discrepancy between scientific papers, which claim increased yields¹, as well as reduced need for pesticide use², and the writings of NGO’s and social workers which reported increased pesticide use and increased debts accumulated by the farmers. Usually I’d just go with the scientific studies, but I was having a hard time believing that thousands of Indian farmers would commit suicide if their financial situation weren’t as bad as reported. And eventually, I came across a somewhat comprehensive article^3(pdf!) that explained the discrepancy at least in part: all the scientific studies are usually done within 1-3 years of adopting the GM crop; but a few studies showed that over a longer period, pesticide use between bt and non-bt crops evens out after longer periods of time either because of increase of secondary pests, or because of resistance:

‘Bt Technology Adoption, Bounded Rationality and the Outbreak of Secondary Pest Infestation in China’ claims that after seven years of Bt cotton introduction in China (1996 to 2004), the expenditure on pesticides for Bt and non­Bt was identical in 2004 at $101 per ha and the earnings from Bt cotton were lower [Mishra 2006]. Narayanamoorthy and Kalamkar (2006) reported the economical viability of Bt cotton for Indian farmers (Maharashtra). Contrary to expectations, the total quantity of pesticides used in Bt cotton variety MECH 162 was higher than non­Bt cotton varieties. The average net profit from Bt cotton was Rs 31,880 per ha, about 80 per cent higher than that from non­Bt cotton. There was no significant difference in pesticide use between Bt and non­Bt cotton varieties. However, it is too early to generalise in India, where four million small and marginal farmers have taken up cultivation of Bt cotton with estimated adoption rate of 50 per cent by the end of 2007 [Mishra 2006]. Illegal and spurious seeds coupled with non­maintenance of minimum 20 per cent refugia by these farmers may result in severe pest attack on Bt cotton due to selection pressure and outbreak of secondary pests like whitefly [Chari 2006]. The bollworm is expected to develop resistance in 2007­/08, where it was introduced in 2002 [Kranthi 2006][ed.:and indeed, it apparently has].

The same article also notes the significantly higher fertilizer reqirements of bt-cotton:

Fertiliser use was the highest in the case of Bt cotton, fol­lowed by hybrid cotton and was the least in the non­hybrid cotton varieties. The nitrogenous fertiliser use in Bt cotton was higher by 23 and 31 per cent when compared to the other hybrid and non­hybrid varieties, respectively. The respective phosphatic fertiliser use was higher by 17 and 50 per cent and the potashic fertiliser use was higher by 104 and 413 per cent. The use of zinc­sulphate was also higher in Bt cotton by 25 and 10 per cent, respectively.

Note also that at least the potash is an energy-intensive fertilizer, since it’s mined and then transported; phosphate is also usually mined. This means that as oil-prices rise, so will the cost of those fertilizers.

Anyway, the term “incorrect use” shows up in that article as well as a couple others that mention less-than-expected yields of GM-plants. I’m suspicious of that term, since it seems to mean that these crops can only grow in very specific circumstances. In wealthy countries where farmers can control the environment in which their crops grow more thoroughly and consistently, this might not be too big of a problem (though, with global warming and Peak Oil looming on the horizon, even wealthy Western farmers might loose control of conditions just enough to cause problems, maybe); but in poorer countries more prone to various environmental disruptions, and where the profit margins are smaller and income and financial relief in case of drought or other possible disasters is significantly less certain, it might be too difficult to expect the maintenance of the exactly necessary conditions by a sufficiently large percentage of farmers, year after year, to prevent these problems from eventually cropping up and rendering GM-plants unprofitable.

There were other reports of GM-plants failing (or not succeeding enough to be worth implementing): GM sweet potatoes in Africa and bt-cotton in Indonesia⁴; bt-cotton on small South African farms⁵ (their conclusion is especially noteworthy, since a lot of agriculture in developed countries consists of small farms, and any shift away from that has always resulted in massive misery, starvation, homelessness, etc. for the suddenly landless). There’s suspicion that GM-plants are toxic when consumed⁶. GM-companies are prone to stealing traditionally developed/discovered traits, patenting them, and therefore potentially depriving the original developers of the free use of those traits⁷. And lastly, the development of GM-plants is just another step in the arms-race that has, over the last 50 years or so, led to an explosive growth in use of herbicides and pesticides, which has impoverished and bankrupted many farmers, disrupted many ecosystems with its poisons, and even poisoned people themselves, while only modestly improving yields for short periods of time, while at the same time destroying top-soil and demanding increased fertilizer (which I already mentioned will be more and more of a problem in the future).

So, overall, I have to come to the conclusion that GMO’s are indeed not a good thing for farmers in developed countries; alternatives such as organic farming with local, non-patented seeds seems more promising than the participation in a race that makes agriculture more expensive, more fuel-intensive, more toxic to humans and the environment, more sensitive to any and all imperfections in implementation, and robs farmers of the freedom to use their seeds as they see fit. And sometimes, it robs them of their livelihood altogether.

Hooray for slobs

I’ve finally found the perfect excuse reason for being a lazy slob. It’s environmentally friendly (and cheap)! This is why (warning: not for germophobes!)

• I clean the apartment twice a year, which means I’m using almost no cleaning supplies

• I rarely do laundry, so that saves both on soap and on electricity
• dishes only get done occasionally between uses
• I don’t ever iron anything, so less energy again
• I wear clothes even when severely damaged, i.e. i need to buy fewer of them and therefore don’t contribute to the energy and resource usage required to make them
• I have never actually washed my car, so no soaps, no water and energy wastage
• between the boyfriend and me, we’ve probably used one bar of soap in the last year
• a bunch of other things, which on second thought are maybe a bit TMI :-p

unfortunately, I bet being a nightowl completely ruins all of that, since it results in eating food from the gas station and having the lights on all night. :-p

Alternative Energy

After reading and watching the depressing BP clusterfuck, it’s things like this that manage to cheer me up. This is 21st Century North Dakota:

These were built as part of the “shovel ready” projects in the stimulus bill. And Google is planning on building another windfarm somewhere in this state, as well.

link-dump

1) “success oriented planning”, Big Oil edition: remote shut-off? we don’t need no stinkin’ remote shut-off!

2)The Arizonan immigration-law is sparking calls for boycotts on multiple fronts: baseball, businesses, other cities, foreign countries

3)random obligatory anti-corporate link: two simple statistics

Functional redundancy, “success-oriented planning”, and the global economy

I’ve been working on this post for a while, and it still doesn’t feel quite finished, but because of the Iceland volcano outbreak, I’m gonna post it anyway, since it’s relevant. Maybe there will be a part two if this version ends up needing too heavy revision/expansion.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - -

Functional redundancy is a term used in biology and ecology mostly (and in software engineering, too); it refers to different components of a system performing similar functions, so that in case of disruption, they can take over each others’ functions(in ecology, that would be the ability of another species to fill a particular, suddenly empty niche that is necessary for the functioning if the whole ecosystem). Having a lot of this functional redundancy is usually seen as a sign of the health and resilience* of a system¹, ².

A similar concept exists in engineering³, where critical systems usually have multiples as fail-safes.

In both cases, the redundancy is “expensive”, i.e. it uses more resources/energy than a system without it would. This means that in ideal and/or stable conditions, a system with redundancy functions at sub-optimal levels, because the redundancies reduce efficiency. What this generally means is that every system must balance resilience against efficiency.

And this is where “success-oriented planning” comes in. You see, in business, redundancies are almost always considered wasteful, and are cut out. Overstaffing, overequipping, overtraining etc. are all seen as flaws, as things that cut into the bottom line. And so, they are removed as much as possible. But of course this only works in ideal conditions, so doing this means you’re planning on succeeding, and are not making any contingency plans. This, on paper, generally looks significantly more efficient in both time and money. In reality though, every fuckup (and there always are fuckups) costs more time and money, because there are delays in acquiring the extra resources required to fix the problem**. Sometimes, the fuckups are so many, or so huge, that they destroy the plan altogether, when a less efficiently but more pessimistically designed plan might have survived.

And what does this have to do with Iceland’s volcano? Well, the volcano shut down Europe’s most popular, cheap, and least subsidized for of transport. Stories about people stranded on vacation were abundant; usually further down were stories about suddenly overfilled trains and ferries, even though often both have additional trains/boats in service. Similarly, even though there was squeaking about possible future food shortages in stores, there really weren’t any, partially simply because a lot of stores are replenished once a week, but partially also because not all foods have to be transported from very far away, thus risking spoilage.

Those things are all symptoms of functional redundancy, maintained almost entirely by state-funding/intervention: the rail is state-owned in most European countries, and so are many ferry services. Even road maintenance, for all those newly rented and now hard-to-come-by cars, is state funded. Similarly, the existence of spare vehicles and crew, which was mobilized to deal with the suddenly increased demand, is a sign of maintained redundancy. So is the existence of the vast majority of European agriculture.

If transportation would have been left to capitalist competition, there wouldn’t be this multiple redundancy in transportation. The buy-off and deconstruction of America’s public transport in those cities in which it was sold to private interest is pretty good evidence for this: in LA for example, there was an excellent network of trolleys within living memory of some of its senior citizens; now the only way to get around is to drive. And additionally, even if additional systems existed, they’d be just as understaffed and under-equipped as many purely for profit, non-subsidized companies are (for example, ancient undermaintained airplanes, and overworked long-distance truck-drivers), so they would hardly be equipped to shoulder such a sudden shift in demand.

Similarly, if the flight-stoppage had lasted longer and Europe had to subsist on its own food reserves, even this early in the year, it wouldn’t have been a disaster, because food is still produced in Europe. This is almost completely a question of functional redundancy, since according to free marked principles, virtually no food should be produced in Europe at all, and it all would have to be shipped/flown in from overseas,*** from cash-crop producing cheap-labor countries. This would have spelled a disaster for Europe, as well as the supplier countries, since they wouldn’t be able to sell.

Now, a volcano eruption disrupting flights is a bit of a freak-event. But it’s not like were not facing a similar, more predictable and also more permanent disruption in the near future. Peak oil is looming⁴, or might have even passed, and transportation and agriculture will be likely its most notable victims.

The Green Revolution for example is entirely fossil-fuel based, and so is its descendant, the GMO revolution****; neither will successfully continue to function in a post-cheap-oil world. Fostering small scale, local agriculture could provide some functional redundancy (Yes, small scale, local agriculture is capable of feeding the world; Victory Gardens provided as much food during WWII as large-scale agriculture did. Thanks for asking), but modern subsidies, especially in the US, do precisely the opposite, subsidizing monoculture on ginormous scales. This is entirely counterproductive. So is the continued push for agro-fuels, which will die the moment fuel-intensive agriculture does.

Transportation is in a similar and partially worse pickle. I’m not aware of oil-free kerosene-alternatives at all. Cars may well be turned into all-electrics in the next decade, but then they’ll still run on fossil fuels everywhere except in France maybe, and that would mean more CO₂ emissions, which we can’t afford for obvious reasons. The current flight-crisis is showing that trains can barely handle having to pick up the slack for a short-lived temporary flight outage. What will happen when both flying and driving suddenly become non-existent or heavily reduced? What will happen in the US, where the train map has a rather HUGE holes in the middle⁵, and most the trains run only once a day as it is (oh, and they regularly get stuck in the mountains in the winter, and no trains cross the Cascades and Rockies for days, even weeks then)?

As far as I can tell, the USA has lost the ability to create functional redundancies in the 80′s, when every politician seems to have run on the “running government like a business” platform, and the only subsidized business, agriculture, has been subsidized in entirely the wrong direction, i.e. away from diversification and towards monoculture and specialization. It’s an entire country build according to “success-oriented planning”, i.e. this idiotic, powerful American optimism and exceptionalism that keeps on fueling its economic bubbles***** and that eschews even thinking about a Plan B, and which, as a result, has pretty much only one solution for every problem, and often it’s already a pretty jury-rigged one. There isn’t much resilience in the system.

Europe is somewhat better off, especially because they already have a lot of this infrastructure in place and because new non-fossil-fuel infrastructure is being created that might make transitions easier. But for some unfathomable reason, quite a few European governments seem to want to become more American: more car-dependence, more “tax-rebates”, more “business-friendly”, and more useless agricultural subsidies that only prop up existing agriculture, rather than providing a non-fuel-intensive alternative.

And the rest of the world? Australia has never had much in the way of natural resilience; there’s a reason agriculture never developed there, and it’s on it’s way to its natural death now with more stress, and more irregular weather and less rain.

And the entire developing and undeveloped world has virtually no resilience left at all; domestic agriculture has become nonexistent, while export agriculture will become non-existent when transporting food across the world will become too expensive; and this is in the areas that aren’t being fucked over by global warming, and industrial erosion and poisoning.

On the whole, it seems the global economy is one big exercise in “success-oriented planning”. It’s time to fess up that that was probably a really dumb idea, and start building (and allowing other countries to build) some resilience into the most important bases of our systems (I mentioned agriculture and transportation, but electricity in general as well as communication are other important examples). I suspect it’s a wee bit late to prevent all disasters, but better late then never, I’d say…

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

*resilience being a measure of how much you can fuck with a system until it finally cannot compensate, collapses and becomes a completely different system

**the new “solution” to this faulty planning is the creation of the disposable human. Temp agencies for example provide insta-experts/workers/whatever to companies. This precarization of labor creates fucktons of problems for the workers, especially in places like the U.S. where temp-workers don’t get benefits and get paid less than the equivalent permanent employee would, but it works just awesomely for the companies. ugh

***incidentally, there’s already been reports of some exotic and out-of-season foodstuffs spoiling because there was no way to deliver them from the countries in which they were grown to Europe; this has serious consequences on the countries where these crops are grown, because they usually lack diversification and functional redundancy, either as a consequence of colonial history, or as a consequence of World Bank and IMF blackmail that destroyed localized, non-cash-crop agriculture and various state-subsidized industries.

****both the high-yield agriculture of the Green Revolution, and GMO crops, are fertilized and pesticide/herbicide intensive, as well as labor-intensive, and therefore only profitable when economies of scale come into play. They also both lack in genetic diversity within and between varieties which would supply the plants with some of that flexibility and resilience to change.

*****probably best exemplified by the massive pre-financial-crisis hubris of “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

You will be assimilated; resistance is futile.

Say what you will about Capitalism, but it has the probably most effective and universally applicable method of conquering its enemies: subversion, assimilation and substitution via mimicry.

pseudo-punk: one and two

pseudo-hippie: one and two

pseudo-communist: one and two

pseudo-green: one and two

point being, if it costs you that much money to be an anti-consumerist/anti-capitalist rebel, you’re doing it wrong.

It’s cool to be a rebel right now. But really living without stuff, wearing the same pair of jeans for decades until they’ve become unfixable, fighting the peer-pressure to buy-buy-buy, go to demonstrations, organize, boycott, fight, etc… well, that’s hard work. So much easier to just buy into the look and believe that that is what the whole thing is about. This dilutes the real counterculture and assimilates it into the mainstream, consumerist culture; it becomes a mere fashion statement.

And it’s really fucking tough to resist, too. I’m guilty of it, too… but I want to do better, because I hate feeling like a poser and hypocrite. I’m getting there, in baby steps, but I get the feeling that baby-steps just aren’t fast enough.

Being good is hard; and disgustingly caffeine-free *pout*