"Alabama" Kind of Likes Barack Obama

Reading is Fundamental

Pulling my children away from the television and video games, I've instituted a daddy book club during which we read science fiction and fantasy novels which interested me when I was a child. (and which naturally, by extension, must interest the children, as well - though 90 minutes of reading with freewheeling discussion-Q/A may be the real attraction) In any event - it beats the hell out of passive viewing and thumb-twitching - and thus far, they both seem to greatly enjoy it.

Since the children will be beginning taiji and their first fledgling sword lessons next week - I thought we might begin with Elric of Melnibone. As any fan of Elric knows, a big part of the attraction to this anti-hero is his sentient, soul-stealing sword Stormbringer. Since I'm short two lent-out and long-ago lost books from the original series, I went by the library and to my surprise discovered there was a more recent Elric related novel called The DreamThief's Daughter - presciently published in 2001 and set in the context of pre-Nazi and Nazi germany;

Nazis... controlled the media. On the radio, in the newspapers and magazines and movies, they began to tell the people whom they should love and whom they should hate... This is by no means a new phenomenon... The American Puritans characterised everyone who disagreed with them as evil and godless and probably witches... The British and the Americans went into China to save the country from the opium they had originally sold it. The Turks had to characterise Armenians as godless monsters before they began their appalling slaughter of the Christians.

Frightened nations will accept too easily the threat of civil war and the promise of the man who says he will avert it. Hitler averted civil war because he had no need of it. His opposition was delivered into his hands by the ballot boxes of a country which, at that time, had one of the best democratic constitutions in the world, superior in many ways to the American.

It is a mark, I think, of the political scoundrel who uses the most sentimental language to blame all others but his own constituents for the problems of the world. Always a "foreign threat", fear of "the stranger". I still hear those voices in modern Germany and France and America and all the countries we once thought too civilised to allow such horror within their own borders.

Moorcock pulls no punches in his treatment of the socioeconomic context giving rise to German fascism. The literary treatment in turn provides us with a fantastical backdrop over which to discuss 20th century history and current events as these unfold with breathtaking speed all around us.

The Changing Game

quoth Submariner;

By not attacking HRC on her many and obvious personal misdeeds, Obama is already changing the game. These guys, Hannity, Dobbs, Scarborough, and others realize that they are in the process of becoming extinct.[...]

Obama's vision is not MLK's but his tactics are. These white political gangster rappers will persist but they will become minor figures speaking to a marginal and extremist audience. This is why I hope a President Obama would continue his boycott of Fox. As the promoter of this bestiality, to appear on Fox gives white political gangster rappers and their audience legitimacy. Obscured in the current campaign is the considerable courage Obama has shown by not appearing on Fox.

As much as I would enjoy agreeing with your analysis Sub, and I am currently inclined to think that you may be correct as regards Baraka's having outflanked the dominant memetic morphology du jour, methinkst you perhaps underestimate the open-ended and generative metamorphic nature of the beast(s) in question. We are, after all, talking about "conservatism" as identity politics.

Here’s my thesis: Conservatism is a form (indeed the original form) of identity politics. It is expressed through multiple forms of political ideology based on justifying elite rule and the division of the human race into dualized classes (ideal and counter-ideal) in terms of some “natural” moral order.

Conservatism appears in various forms as the rationalizations and dualized classes shift over time, and in three distinct states of realization, reflecting different levels of development of the self. The overt rationalizations commonly mistaken for conservative ideology are, in fact, derivative phenomena—tertiary at best. The primary phenomena is the creation of a conservative identity, the subject of conservative political narratives. The secondary phenomena is the supporting ideology of superior and inferior groups, casting conservative identity as something to be preserved, promoted, and defended against the forces of evil, embodied in its demonized others. The primary and secondary phenomena are relatively constant over time, while the tertiary phenomena vary considerably.

Baraka may indeed have managed to evade tertiary formations in the current, prevailing, collective convervative phenotype. This remains to be seen in the Pennsylvania and Indiana primaries. Let the record show, however, that over the past 7 years, several attempts have been made to reapportion the tertiary characteristics of the conservative narrative in America.

1. GWOT (global war on terrorism)

2. Islamo-fascism

3. Illegal immigration and the Culture War

As I've said previously, progressive/populist movements from William Jennings Bryan to John Edwards have always sought to include outright racists in their coalitions. An Obama victory finally extirpates them from political consideration. For if you tell me, like Howard Dean did during his run in 2000 and Edwards did this year, that I have to get down with a straight up cracker, I say fuck that. I don't give a damn about their economic struggles. Sailors on the slave ship endured high mortality and terror inflicted on them by the captain but they never saw the slaves as human and rebellious slaves took no pity on them.

While tempermentally, I'd be strongly inclined to agree with this assertion, morally and tactically, I am compelled to disagree. First and foremost - I believe that it is imperative that we take into consideration the economic struggles of the poor, white, and pissed - as much as we take into consideration and engage around the economic struggles of the Black underclass - as I wrote at VisionCircle;

Not only must we Work hard on increasing and enriching the level of interpersonal engagement within our own communities, the next evolutionary push will have to involve education, outreach, and socialization - interpersonal communion - with and among the masses of the poor, white, and pissed. This will not be easy. But it is most definitely necessary.

Not only will this enrich both our respective communities, it will comprise a bulwark against the genuinely evil predations that the backers of the present administration have in store for America.

If the poor in America remain divided, the impending economic collapse will subject all Americans to a political reality and danger unseen since the economic collapse of post-WWI Germany and the rise of National Socialism. The emergence of a genuinely and overtly fascist formation in America would not require significant investment or effort. In fact, it has been a vividly imagined ethnonationalist fantasy now for the past 30 years. While the wizards of minimal regret population scenarios and forecasting had other mechanisms in mind than did the physicist William Pierce - the history of the rise of the Third Reich stands as phenomenally instructive as regards the actual ways in which an advanced democratic society, when buffeted by severe economic privation, can be transformed into a genocidal fascist dictatorship via the rules of the democratic system itself.

Busting the "Rev. Wrighting" Tactic

It's been a minute since I had an opportunity to showcase the interlocutory brilliance of Rachel Maddow. In no uncertain terms, she is the most gifted debater on the media mainstream today. She handles hypocritical and propagandist blowhards like a master cavaleira.

In this case, she does a tremendous job of pointing out the contrived nature of what is transpiring in the illusory choice-making process now passing itself off as a democrat party presidential primary...,

Bottomline - "Rev. Wright"ing = "Swiftboat"ing - and it's an obvious and tired political propaganda tactic.

"We" need to begin calling it out whenever and wherever we see it in use - case in point - being the ABC presentation of Hellury and Baraka wednesday night that passed itself off as a debate.

Recall that ABC has the dubious distinction of having originated the "Rev. Wright" meme that has been seized upon by Faux News and its ideological bedfellows as a non-issue-related cornerstone of the partisan attack on candidate Baraka.

A Theory of Power

Last night I came across an earlier and far better developed version of Blackmore's Gene-Meme-Teme proposition - applied in the abstract - to the current world problematique.

The free booklet is called A Theory of Power. It appears that its author Jeff Vail (who blogs here) was well ahead of his time with the thesis of the booklet. While I've only skimmed it, I see nothing on the face of it with which I fundamentally disagree. In addition to A Theory of Power and the Rhizome blog, I also found a summary of the theory posted at Energy Bulletin a couple of years ago. (I disagree with a few things the reviewer states in his own theory of communes and social organization, but I find the summary and review itself most helpful.)

* The best representation of our world, of what 'is', is not matter, but the connections between matter.

* These connections define 'power-relationships' -- the ability of one entity to influence the action of another.

* The 'law' of evolution can therefore be restated as: if new patterns of forces can survive their impacts with one another, if they tend to hold together rather than tear apart, they then represent a stable collection of power-relationships which survive, self-replicate, and mutate into further new patterns which are in turn subject to the same law.

* This law applies to physical (matter), biological (gene) and cultural (meme) patterns; all matter and life and consciousness, and their evolution, are 'creatures' of their/our material, genetic and cultural constituents, created for the perpetuation of these patterns and sustained through their stable power-relationships.

* Because of the evolutionary success of memes (due to their ability to adapt and change much more quickly and successfully than genes), culture has come to play an increasingly dominant role in our planet's power-relationships.

* Most significantly, the advent of agriculture, which was provoked by climate change (the ice ages) brought about a necessary power shift from the individual to the group in the interest of memes' survival, to the point the individual became largely enslaved to the culture, and the survival of the civilization culture now outweighs in importance the survival of any of its members or communities.

* A consequence of that has been the advent of the codependent cultural constructs of market and state, and, as agriculture has enabled exponential growth in population and created new scarcities, egalitarian societies of abundance have given way to hierarchical societies of managed scarcity.

* This hierarchy has been further entrenched with the cultural evolution of technologies that enable even greater self-perpetuation of the memes that gave rise to it, and have led to the 'efficient' subjugation of the human individual to technology -- that's the power-relationship that most supports the survival and stasis of the culture, and under it even those at the top of the hierarchy become slave-hosts to the memes and culture.

* These memes and culture can now self-perpetuate and thrive more effectively with technology and the artificial constructs of market and globalizations than they could with inefficient and unreliable human hosts, so technology growth is now even outstripping human growth, to the point that humans are becoming commodities and could even become redundant.

* So: if we are now becoming slaves to the machine-powered perpetuation of memes that are outgrowing their need for us (to the point that although catastrophic global warming and human extinction now seem inevitable, this is not something our meme-culture 'cares' about) can we, the human slaves, thanks to the genetic and memetic evolution of self-awareness, 'liberate' ourselves and defeat the meme-culture before it destroys us? In other words, can we consciously, collectively take control for the first time over power-relationships, and establish new power-relationships that put the genetic survival of the human race (and, hopefully, the survival of all other life on Earth on which that genetic survival depends) ahead of the reckless survival of the Frankenstein 'civilization' culture we have created?

I believe that successful rhizome instances can only be established organically. In other words, you have to engage with others around project oriented efforts that give rise to a sustainable framework for interpersonal communion, cooperation and collaboration. It's a lifestyle choice after all, not simply a theory of "how then shall we live?"

Apocalypse Scale

The Psychological Import of An Attractive Black Candidate

Wherein we humbly yield the microphone to the mighty Submariner, promoted from always tasteful and classy oyster perpetual, to now honorary prince of the lost kingdom of Atlantis (that'd be Visioncircle LOL!!!).

As I've told my friend Temple3, there is a definite difference between pericarditis, angina, and a heart attack. If you or someone in authority could make a selection, then you would much rather not have a straight up heart attack. This is where we are.

I'm not one of the deluded who calls Barack a prophet. If anything he is a modern day King David. A lowly, goodhearted shepherd who uses superior guile and strategic alliances to usurp the throne.

Barack has a supple feel for power. No one can aspire to enter the political architecture without approval of the American Jewish lobby. That's a major reason why Pat Buchanan will never be down.

"Unless America figures out how to meritocratically embrace the attractions of an unimpeachable black candidate like Oprah Winfrey or Colin Powell, with all the requisite stateswoman/gangsta cred required to silence any and all detractors, AMERICA WILL FAIL!"

When Craig Nulan presciently averred this on 06 February 2005, Barack was a political neonate. Nulan captured what I've been clumsily articulating since Obama's ascendancy. If America has a minimal chance to be redeemed it will be done by black people.

As a physician I see miracles nearly everyday. Two weeks ago I witnessed a ninety-something year old have a cardiac arrest. We did CPR with her family at the bedside who decline having her intubated. We stopped resuscitation efforts after three minutes. She had a thready pulse and I told her son that that she was checking out. An hour later the lady was sitting up talking to her family saing her chest hurt, presumably from us doing CPR.

When you experience things like this nearly every week, like I do, you develop a certain optimism or faith. It is this hope, like that of the African in the bowels of a 18 Century slave ship, that sustains me.

Out of the comments and straight to the top. It just doesn't get any better than that on the Soul Conviction tip. As a matter of fact, I did, I did say something to the effect of what the good doctor brother Submariner referred to, the punchline for which was this;

Here's the rub. It's not about what an Oprah or a Colin might personally bring to the office, they're superstars without a doubt. Rather, it's about what the POTUS exemplifies about the collective American unconscious that matters here. Until and unless the American collective unconscious evolves considerably beyond its current state, it's simply not fit to imperially preside over the rest of the world in the manner Cobb describes here.

almost makes one nostalgic for the halcyon days of group political commentary....,

The Illusion of Crisis?

In this morning's Guardian commentary, a rhetorical point is raised;

How come Zimbabwe and Tibet get all the attention?

If a government wants to abuse human rights and rig elections, it needs to have the support of - or be - the western powers.

Nice serendipity given the Engdahl article on Mark Penn's abrupt defection from the Hellury campaign, his history with manipulating elections in client states, and his role in the global illusion making apparatus.

But, on the basis of the scale of violence, repression and election rigging alone, you would be hard put to explain why these conflicts have been singled out for such special attention. In the violence surrounding Zimbabwe's elections, two people are currently reported to have died; in Tibet, numbers estimated to have been killed by protesters and Chinese forces range from 22 to 140. By contrast, in Somalia, where US-backed Ethiopian and Somali troops are fighting forces loyal to the ousted government, several thousand have been killed since the beginning of the year and half the population of the capital, Mogadishu, has been forced to flee the city in what UN officials describe as Africa's worst humanitarian crisis.

When it comes to rigging elections, countries like Jordan and Egypt have been happy to oblige in recent months - in the Egyptian case, jailing hundreds of opposition activists into the bargain - and almost nobody in the west has batted an eyelid. In Saudi Arabia there are no national elections at all, let alone the opposition MPs and newspapers that exist in Zimbabwe. In Africa, Togo has been a more flagrant rigger, while in Cameroon last week the president was given the job for life. And when it comes to separatist and independence movements, the Turkish Kurds have faced far more violence and a tighter cultural clampdown than the Tibetans.

The crucial difference, of course, and the reason why these conflicts and violations don't get the deluxe media and political treatment offered to the Zimbabwean opposition or Tibetan separatists is that the governments involved are all backed by the west...,

In order to get a grip on TEP bidnis and the machinations of its hegemonic illusion apparatus, the subrealist would have to go all bidnis intel and set up a global dashboard on which we could benchmark and track where the most flagrant economic, social, cultural, civil and political rights violations are occurring inclusive of a backgrounder on the historic links between the current oppressive regime and its historic and continuing TEP sponsorship.

The Illusion of Choice?

Hillary Rodham Clinton said emphatically last night that Barack Obama can win the White House this fall, undercutting her efforts to deny him the nomination by suggesting he would lead the party to defeat. What does this mean?

Has Hellury been disavowed?

Mark Penn is exemplary of what US political insiders refer to as a person of the “permanent establishment,” the shadowy institutions and insiders behind the curtains who really determine critical policy issues and shape the choices gullible voters then are given to “democratically choose among.”

It has been referred to by strategists since the time of Edward Bernays as the “illusion of choice.” Penn is above political party, serving the interests of what some call the permanent establishment. As a case in point, he also is CEO of the influential global public relations firm, Burson-Marsteller, which includes among clients the largest US mortgage lender, Countrywide Financial and Blackwater Inc. the Republican led mercenary security firm that has been accused of repeated killings of innocent Iraqi civilians.

Penn’s firm was to make sure the “image” of such clients remained positive to the US public. Referring to Mark Penn, the influential Washington Post once referred to him as “the most powerful man in Washington you've never heard of." According to PSB’s website, Penn helped elect 15 overseas Presidents in the Far East, Latin America, and Europe. Clients include heads of state or opposition politicians in Greece, Turkey, Israel, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Bermuda and Yugoslavia.

With the abrupt departure of Hillary Clinton’s main campaign strategist, Mark Penn, have Hellury's backers decided to fold? If so, will they now shift their interests to Baraka or McCain?

Cell Shape and Polarity - "Being" and "Knowing"

The other day I asked you to "consider the possibility that nature isn't opposed to culture, that biochemistry rivals intellect as a survival tool...," I just received an article from The Scientist that provokes a little further speculation along that line;

Jacobs-Wagner's career started off with a bang when, as a graduate student at the University of Liège in the early 1990s, she discovered that some bacteria can induce the enzyme beta-lactamase when exposed to antibiotics such cephalosporin, rendering them resistant to these drugs. "It's the physiology that interested me, the physiology I really wanted to understand," she says. "How do bacteria know they are under attack, and how are they able to respond by making protein that inactivates the antibiotics?"[...]Her pioneering studies on the molecular mechanisms underlying cell shape and cell polarity in Caulobacter crescentus, says Errington, "have helped change the way people think about bacteria. Now there's a whole new field of people who are working on bacterial cell biology using the same sorts of approaches used to study eukaryotes.

Can bacteria "know" anything? Is this just an instance of bumping up against the descriptive limitations of the language, or as I suspect, does it point to something rather more fundamental about the inseparable nature of "being" and "knowing"?

Fuel, Food, and Fiber

A subrealist is first and foremost dedicated to the implementation of practical and scientific solutions to the problems of the collective that it examines. The energy required to maintain our complex society is fairly easily within our reach. It would necessitate the local reuse/recycling of bulk waste as advocated by our brilliant sister Mahndisa, and, it would involve the industrial scale cultivation of hemp as feedstock for the age-old process of pyrolysis.

Pyrolysis is the technique of applying high heat to biomass, or organic plants and tree matter, with little or no air. Reduced emissions from coal-fired power plants and automobiles can be accomplished by converting biomass to fuel utilizing pyrolysis technology. The process can produce, from cellulosic material (like the stalks of hemp), charcoal, gasoline, ethanol, non-condensable gasses, acetic acid, acetone, methane, and methanol. Process adjustments can be done to favor charcoal, pyrolytic oil, gas, or methanol, with 95.5% fuel-to-feed ratios. Around 68% of the energy of the raw biomass will be contained in the charcoal and fuel oils -- renewable energy generated here at home, instead of overpaying for foreign petroleum.

Pyrolysis facilities can run 3 shifts a day, and since pyrolysis facilities need to be within 50 miles of the energy crop to be cost effective, many new local and rural jobs will be created, not to mention the employment opportunities in trucking and transportation.

Hemp vs. Fossil Fuels

Pyrolysis facilities can use the same technology used now to process fossil fuel oil and coal. Petroleum coal and oil conversion is more efficient in terms of fuel-to-feed ratio, but there are many advantages to conversion by pyrolysis.

1) Biomass has a heating value of 5000-8000 BTU/lb, with virtually no ash or sulfur emissions.

2) Ethanol, methanol, methane gas, and gasoline can be derived from biomass at a fraction of the cost of the current cost of oil, coal, or nuclear energy, especially when environmental costs are factored in. Each acre of hemp could yield about 1000 gallons of methanol.

3) When an energy crop is growing, it takes carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air, and releases an equal amount when it is burned, creating a balanced system, unlike petroleum fuels, which only release CO2. When an energy crop like hemp is grown on a massive scale, it will initially lower the CO2 in the air, and then stabilize it at a level lower than before the planting of the energy crop.

4) Use of biomass would end acid rain, end sulfer-based smog, and reverse the greenhouse effect.

Given the simplicity and obviousness of the solution to the problems we face, can there be any question whatsoever about the precise "nature" of our man-made predicament?

Is anybody holding their breath waiting in anticipation of a presidential candidate who advocates doing the simple, doable, and obvious to get the U.S. up off the energy mat?

The Fury of the Poor

Full article at Der Spiegel online;

Hunger in America

Perched on the edge of a cliff - we're habituated to maintaining the American Way of Life, regardless of the costs (which are as yet insufficiently perceptible here on the liminal fringe of consensus reality).

It is difficult for people to accept that the world as they've always known it is ending. We've recovered from recessions before, so we'll recover from this recession. That's the argument we hear in the commons - and it is, thanks to voodoo economics and ignorance of peak oil - essentially, irrefutable.

We have recovered from recessions before, but this is no ordinary recession. We've even recovered from a great economic depression before, but this is by no means an ordinary economic depression.

The end of the American way of life will come unexpectedly......,

Sorry Out of Gas

Co-Opted Science?

The Identification and Destruction of False Ideas is a pillar of the subrealist ouevre.

The H5N1 virus may have dropped out of the news headlines just now, but it hasn't gone away. Over the past couple weeks, I've come across a veritable tidal wave of pandemic planning and preparedness documentation and emergency management and crisis communications literature addressing this topic.

While it's not as sexy as the UFO preparedness literature, the sheer volume of the stuff makes me wonder to myself, "self, what the hell is going on here? what do these people know that we don't?" Then this morning, I find this article The ultimate weapon of mass destruction, and a moment of abject lucidity begins to set in;

In Britain and the US, public health studies suggest that a full-blown pandemic of bird flu or something like the respiratory disease SARS could knock out a critical mass of the working population. Some sixty per cent of the nursing and medical services could be out of action within 10 days, according to a study at the Defence Academy of the UK Staff College. This would mean the armed services would have to be called in to help.

The threat to public order - a scenario out of the Day of the Triffids or the Quatermass Experiment - is what really alarms Downing Street. An American study has suggested that in a worst case, half the population would go down with bird flu – roughly the scale of Europe's Black Death of 1348. Half of those would have to go to hospital and millions would die in the first wave.

The government has laid in stocks of 14.6m courses of Tamiflu, one of two known medicines capable of combating H5N1. However, pharmaceutical competitors have claimed that Tamiflu would only be effective for a very short time, and the WHO says the virus appeared to be resistant to Tamiflu in at least two known cases.

It appears that the UK National Security Strategy has pegged pandemics as one of the major threats menacing the civilized world.

The threat to this country from a pandemic caused by bird flu or some such virus is greater than the threat from international terrorism in the view of Gordon Brown and his Downing Street advisors. This is why pandemics are ranked alongside terrorism and other major global ills in the National Security Strategy unveiled last month.

Now where is Gordon Brown getting his information from?

The argument is based on a hypothesis, a short-odds scientific bet. Sir David King, who's just stepped down as the UK's Chief Scientific Adviser, puts it like this: "It is more a question of when rather than if the H5N1 virus mutates into a virulent human form. So far we have noted more than 20 mutations of the virus in only a few years."
His view is supported by every public health official or doctor I have met in recent months. Only last week, three former heads of the Defence Ministry and the Joint Intelligence Committee told me without hesitation that they thought the PM was right to flag the potential menace.

Oh Lawd!!!! The sky must indeed be falling, or maybe not. Evidently Sir David King has established track record second only to our own legendary Brownie. According to the warmwell blog, hailed thus; "This website has served as a rapier, puncturing the bladder of Government obfuscation, by publishing a highly informed, topical digest of news..." Sir David King has established a track record of highly dubious provenance and has served as a pseudo-scientific authority co-opted to justify a series of disastrous political agendas, most notably the mass slaughter of British livestock to control an alleged pandemic..

Which brings me back full circle. What's up with the human pandemic preparedness push?

The Strange History of Economics

From The Strange History of Economics;

Following WWII, the United States increasingly came to determine (one might say dictate) the shape of economics worldwide, while within the United States the sources of influence became concentrated and circumscribed to an absurd degree. This state of affairs, which persists to the present day, was engineered in significant part by the US Department of Defense, especially its Navy and Air Force. Beginning in the 1950s it lavishly funded university research in mathematical economics. Military planners believed that game theory and linear programming had potential use for national defense. And although now it seems ridiculous, they held out the same hope for mathematical solutions of “general equilibrium”, the theoretical core of Neoclassical economics. In 1954 Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu achieved for this mathematical puzzle a solution of sorts that has been the central show piece of academic economics ever since. Arrow’s early research had been partly, in his words, “carried on at the RAND Corporation, a project of the United States Air Force.” In the 1960s, official publications of the Department of Defense praised the Arrow-Debreu project for its “modeling of conflict and cooperation whether if be [for] combat or procurement contracts or exchange of information among dispersed decision nodes.” In 1965, RAND created a fellowship program for economics graduate students at the Universities of California, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Chicago, Columbia and Princeton, and in addition provided postdoctoral funds for those who best fitted the mold. These seven economics departments along with MIT’s, an institution long regarded by many as a branch of the Pentagon, have come to dominate economics globally to an astonishing extent.

It's a short read. While you're there, check out the post autistic economics network and get a subscription. The price is right, enjoy....,

Vespers

The New Five Dollar Bill

Obama Meet Howard Beale...,

Here is a think for yourself moment...

Ridiculous questions are being raised about Obama's comments that voters in rural PA are frustrated and bitter because of how Washington has treated them.

Both Clinton and McCain are making the case that he is some how an elitist and out of touch with voters...or that he talks down to voters.

Take a look at all of what Obama said and then draw your own conclusions....,

Brother Baraka, stop pussyfooting around with these two crusty mediocrities, grow a pair and stuff this latest round of Faux News propaganda down their lying, treacherous pieholes!!!!

Cornification

What if Stephen King is right? What if human consciousness isn't the end-all and be-all of Darwinism? What if we are all just pawns in corn's clever strategy game, the ultimate prize of which is world domination? Author Michael Pollan asks us to see things from a plant's-eye view -- to consider the possibility that nature isn't opposed to culture, that biochemistry rivals intellect as a survival tool. By merely shifting our perspective, he argues, we can heal the Earth. Who's the more sophisticated species now?

PBS interview with Michael Pollan

2002 article in the NYTimes - When a Crop Becomes King