u.s. exempted bp's gulf of mexico drilling from environmental impact study

WaPo | The Interior Department exempted BP's calamitous Gulf of Mexico drilling operation from a detailed environmental impact analysis last year, according to government documents, after three reviews of the area concluded that a massive oil spill was unlikely.

The decision by the department's Minerals Management Service (MMS) to give BP's lease at Deepwater Horizon a "categorical exclusion" from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on April 6, 2009 -- and BP's lobbying efforts just 11 days before the explosion to expand those exemptions -- show that neither federal regulators nor the company anticipated an accident of the scale of the one unfolding in the gulf.

Rethinking the rules

Now, environmentalists and some key senators are calling for a reassessment of safety requirements for offshore drilling.

Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), who has supported offshore oil drilling in the past, said, "I suspect you're going to see an entirely different regime once people have a chance to sit back and take a look at how do we anticipate and clean up these potential environmental consequences" from drilling.

BP spokesman Toby Odone said the company's appeal for NEPA waivers in the past "was based on the spill and incident-response history in the Gulf of Mexico." Once the various investigations of the new spill have been completed, he added, "the causes of this incident can be applied to determine any changes in the regulatory regime that are required to protect the environment."

"I'm of the opinion that boosterism breeds complacency and complacency breeds disaster," said Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) on Tuesday. "That, in my opinion, is what happened."

Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, said it is important to learn the cause of the accident before pursuing a major policy change. "While the conversation has shifted, the energy reality has not," Gerard said. "The American economy still relies on oil and gas."

recollections from rig survivors

Mark Levin full audio interview with Trans-Ocean Horizon survivor.

PeakOilPetroleumandPreciousMetals | Minutes before the Deepwater Horizon exploded in fire, workers on the deck heard a thump, then a hissing sound. Gas alarms sounded and the rig shook.

Seawater and mud containing gas from the well spewed up through the crown of the derrick and rained down on the drilling floor; fumes reportedly moved into the "safe zones" where the electric generators are located. The generators raced out of control as they sucked gas into the air intakes.

When the electric power surged, light bulbs exploded, computers and other electric systems were destroyed, leaving the rig in darkness except for the light from fires and explosions that ripped apart walls, according to accounts derived from interviews with attorneys representing survivors, missing rig workers and their families, as well as experts in the field of offshore drilling operations.

Before the blowout, the rig's crew had been replacing heavy and valuable drilling mud with lighter salt sea­water in the top section of the pipe, known as the riser -- the purpose being to extract the mud so they could remove the riser, several sources said. While doing so, they had to secure the wellhead to keep oil and gas from blowing out.

But blow out it did.

Kevin Eugene, a steward on the rig, said he was in his bunk watching TV at about 10 p.m. when a "big old loud boom" and an alarm went off "almost simultaneously.

The lights went out. The platform began shaking.

I thought the place was falling in the ocean, that the whole rig was collapsing," said the father of four from Slidell, La.

Ceiling tiles, dust and debris rained down from overhead. Clad only in his pajama pants and undershirt, he scrambled down a hallway toward an exit to a stairwell that would lead to a lifeboat up on deck. He heard more explosions, but can't remember how many.

When he got onto the deck, he felt a blast of heat and saw flames about 200 yards away.

I mean it was the hugest, biggest fire I've ever seen," Eugene said. "It was just a big ol' ball of fire up there on the derrick. The whole derrick was on fire. The fire was shooting from out the well over there that the derrick was connected to and you could hear the gas gushing out."

The deck was covered with oily mud.

farmers in the fields of stars

Video - 2001 a Space Odyssey sync'd to Echoes.

3001 | Call them the Firstborn. Though they were not remotely human, they were flesh and blood, and when they looked out across the depths of space, they felt awe, and wonder - and loneliness. As soon as they possessed the power, they began to seek for fellowship among the stars.

In their explorations, they encountered life in may forms, and watched the workings of evolution on a thousand worlds. They saw how often the first faint sparks of intelligence flickered and died in the cosmic night.

And because in all the Galaxy, they'd found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of the stars; they sowed and sometimes they reaped.

And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.

The great dinosaurs hd long since passed away, their morning promise annihilated by a random hammer-blow from space, when the survey ship entered the Solar System after a voyage that had already lasted a thousand years. It swept past the frozen outer planets, paused briefly above the deserts of dying Mars, and presently looked down on Earth. Spread out beneath them, the explorers saw a world swarming with life. For years they studied, collected, catalogued. When they had learned all that they could, they began to modify. They tinkered with the destiny of many species, on land and in the seas. But which of their experiments would bear fruit, they could not know for at least a million years.

They were patient, but they were not yet immortal. There was so much to do in this universe of a hundred billion suns, and other worlds were calling. So they set out once more into the abyss, knowing that they would never come this way again. Nor was there any need; the servants they had left behind would do the rest

On Earth, the glaciers came and went, while above them the changeless Moon still carried its secret from the stars. With a yet slower rhythm than the polar ice, the tides of civilization ebbed and flowed across the Galaxy. Strange and beautiful and terrible empires rose and fell, and passed on their knowledge to their successors.

And now, out among the stars, evolution was driving toward new goals. The first explorers of Earth had long since come to the limits of flesh and blood; as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and gemstone. In these, they roamed the Galaxy. They no longer built spaceships, They were spaceships.

But the age of the Machine-entities swiftly passed. in their ceaseless experimenting, thy had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light. Into pure energy, therefore, they presently transformed themselves; and on a thousand worlds, the empty shells they had discarded twitched for a while in a mindless dance of death, then crumbled into dust.

Now they were the Lords of the Galaxy, and could rove at will among the stars, or sink like a subtle mist through the very interstices of space. Thought they were freed at last from the tyranny of matter, they had not wholly forgotten their origin, in the warm slime of a vanished sea. And their marvelous instruments still continued to function, watching over the experiments started so many ages ago.

But no longer were they always obedient to the mandates of their creators; like all material things, they were not immune to the corruptions of Time and its patient, unsleeping servant Entropy. And sometimes, they discovered and sought goals of their own.

some people have god, I have hubble...,

Video - Hubble Astronomy Domine.

Guardian | for those of us without faith, I propose the Hubble Deep Field Image as an excellent alternative way to get some perspective. In 1995, the Hubble telescope was pointed for 10 days at a patch of sky which appears completely blank to the naked eye from the Earth. It's a tiny piece – much smaller than the area of sky you'd cover with your little fingernail if you held your arm outstretched. And in that apparently blank area of sky the Hubble Deep Field Image discerned with amazing clarity more than 10,000 galaxies. Each galaxy is made up, on average, of about 100bn stars. Every star could, like our sun, be orbited by planets. That is the size of the universe we live in.

This may not be a thought that makes you feel calm. Although many people find that this sense of scale helps make their own problems seem less enormous, it doesn't work for everyone. For some the sense of how incredibly small we actually are seems to instil terror instead. But perhaps even terrifying perspective is important. In 1968, during the Apollo 8 mission, a photograph known as Earthrise was taken. It shows the Earth, from the moon, rising across the lunar landscape. This photograph has been called "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken". The sense it gave of the Earth as small, beautiful and fragile – the understanding that, whatever our differences, we're all together on one small planet – has been credited with kick-starting the environmental movement of the 1970s.

The Apollo space missions may have come partly out of the paranoia of the cold war, but the legacy they've left has been one that can move us out of tribalism. Hubble's contribution to scientific understanding has been impressive, including information about the speed at which the universe is expanding, investigating black holes and improving our estimates of its age. But the benefits of appreciating the size and scale of our universe aren't limited to science.

If I were in charge of such things, I'd mandate that before every climate change conference, before peace talks and trade negotiations, leaders and policians should spend some minutes contemplating the Hubble Deep Field. This is the size of the universe we may as a species, if we're industrious, resourceful and fortunate, get to explore. This can be our goal: surely one worth pursuing. With so many pressing problems on Earth, how can we afford not to try to focus on the things that unite us? Human beings used to cast their eyes heavenwards in search of divine inspiration, but it turns out that the stars themselves can be inspirational enough.

sex and death

Video - The Outer Limits The Second Soul.

Sexual processes, he merger of attracted beings, probably originated as did the early symbioses. In both sexual and symbiotic fusions, hunger was a likely primordial factor urging the desperate to merge. Cells that join in sex, however, by definition represent genes and cytoplasm from gendered individuals who are members of the same species.

In our book, The Origins of Sex, Dorion Sagan and I argued that meiotic sex began long after bacterial sex as abortive cannibalism in certain protists. To understand the convoluted history of sex, we declared, one needs to know protoctist biology.

We explained how both sexual and symbiotic mergers bring distant genes together within the recombined organism. Sex differs from symbiosis in that the cyclical fusion and later separation tend to be far more predictable, far less creative and casual than those in temporary symbiosis. In sex, offspring greatly resemble their parents, and gender differences are ritualized and predictable.

The bodies formed by symbiogenetic fusion, such as modulated bean roots, green hydras, cud-chewing cows, luminous fish, and red algae, differ profoundly from each of the parent partners that fuse. Symbiogenesis is far more splenid than sex as a generator of evolutionary novelty. When the parents are extremely closely related to one another, for example, nonphotosynthetic red algae who live on (or rather "off") their relatives, other photosynthetic red algae, sex and symbiosis re barely even operationally distinguishable. But when the symbiotic parents of the mergers are distantly related - for example, bean plants and rhizobia bacteria or cows and their entodiniomorphid rumen ciliates - the products of these mergers are stunningly different from either parent.

Programmed death is a nonnegotiable consequence of the sexual mode of life. The great cycle in which males and females make sperm and ova with one set of chromosomes, only to have them come together again to make an offspring with two sets of chromosomes is linked intimately with the imperative of individual plants and animals to die. All organisms, including bacteria and many protoctists, can of course be killed. Starvation, dessication, and poisons are great killers. But death by destruction lacks a natural built in timetable. Evolution of the protoctist ancestors to plant and animal bodies required sacrifice and loss; multicellularity and complexification ushered n the aging and death of individual bodies. Death, the literal disintegration of the husk of the body was the grim price exacted for meiotic sexuality. Complex development in protoctists and their animal and plant descendants led to the evolution of death as a kind of sexually transmitted disease. More than one billion years ago, when protoctists evolved by integration of bacterial symbionts into permanent and stable communities that became protoctist individuals, the kind of scheduled death that disturbs us today first appeared.

Excerpted from Animal Sex - Symbiotic Planet Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan

sacred sexuality in ancient egypt

Gurdjieff Journal | Out of the cosmic soup, an egg produced by ancetral gods and four primordial couples is called into being by Thoth, the keeper of Science. This egg blasts forth in the first cosmic Big Bang and the Sun is born. Atum-Ra. A divine entity. A demiurge—one who creates material out of chaos. Atum-Ra, surrounded by the feminine element Hathor, becomes excited, masturbates, and either spits or breathes out his two children, Shu and Tefnut, the Two Lions of the solar horizon. Shu and Tefnut, being brother/sister and husband/wife produce two more children, Nut (Heaven) and Geb (Earth). Nut and Geb's union annoys their grandfather Atum-Ra since he can't continue circulating and energizing the world he is creating. He commands their father Shu to separate his "overly amorous" children, creating space between heaven and earth and thus infuriating Geb, who in his fury twists and turns in great gyrations and the mountains and volcanoes are created. Before the separation, Nut (sister/wife) has conceived five more children—Osiris, Isis, Nephthys, Seth, Horus—but Atum-Ra curses them and they are born against his will.

Creation, a Sexual Act
Thus begins the ancient Egyptian creation myth that is minutely detailed in this beautifully illustrated text, Sacred Sexuality in Ancient Egypt. The Ancient Sages, in the eternal wish to regulate man's most powerful urge, the sexual instinct, decided to make Creation a sexual act. The culture, as reflected in the book, is permeated with laws, ritual, literature and art that reflect this divine model. The authors state that their ambition is "a general glimpse behind the shutter of the private life of the ancient dwellers along the Nile."

Now that Thoth had brought Atum-Ra into being, the gods could no longer live outside of space and time and were thus subject to the same cycles as their mortal underlings. The nine emanations of Atum-Ra—Shu, Tefnut, Geb and the five children, Osiris, Isis, Nephthys, Seth and Horus—complete the Ennead, the divine Supreme Court who rule the Universe. Couples are formed—Osiris and Iris, who rule the world peacefully, and Seth and Nephthys. Seth, the Lord of Materiality, however, is less than majestic in his manifestation. A turbulent, frustrated deity, Seth embodies upheaval and sexual chaos. His sister/wife Nephthys is no comfort as she unfortunately is more attracted to Isis and Osiris than to her brother/husband. From her union with Osiris she produces a child, the dark dog Anubis. To complicate matters further, Isis and Osiris, having no child of their own, decide to appoint Horus (he's their little brother, too), as their heir. This infuriates the jealous Seth (uncle/brother), who kills Osiris and cuts him up in little pieces and tosses his body into the Nile.

Isis, a magician as well as a wife, gathers up the pieces (except for the phallus which was swallowed by a fish) and, with the help of Anubis, reconstitutes Osiris; in many illustrations she is depicted as a bird who flutters her wings and brings Osiris back from the dead. Osiris then returns to the center of the earth to once again recharge his energies. He is depicted as a god of nature, literally "germinating" small grains of wheat popping up on his mummified body, and, with a fully erect penis, recharging life force to the earth.

release the kraken!!!

Video - Release the kraken.

Kunstler | Senator Levin pretty much had Goldman Sach's Lloyd Blankfein dead in a casket with that now-notorious email from GS's head of sales and trading, Tom Montag, describing one of their billion-dollar investment "products" as "one shitty deal." Levin seemed to delight in crossing the boundary into the realm of the unspeakable, knowing that even the so-called "family" newspapers and cable TV networks would have to report it. And just to make sure nobody missed the point, the senator repeated that phrase at least twenty times before the day was over. It was like the climactic scene in that old Hammer Films classic, The Horror of Dracula, where Professor Van Helsing moves from coffin to coffin pounding stakes through the hearts of Drac and all his fellow bloodsuckers.

It's hardly the climax of our story, though. Ours has barely started. It seems to me lately that the crack-up we've entered is liable to play out more gruesomely for our privileged elites than the orgy of bloodletting that attended the French Revolution. That historical moment was a sharp transition between old, settled social relations and the new political realities of imminent industrialization and a rising middle class. The elites in charge of things to that moment, an ossified aristocracy, responded to rising discontent with utter feckless stupidity. To make matters worse, a great many of them were hunkered down in the fantasy-land Royal Palace of Versailles, enjoying what was for practical purposes a non-stop mega house party. They must have thought they were safe twelve miles outside Paris.

The French Revolution actually got off to a better start than it is remembered for. A progressive opposition put together a new legislature, the National Assembly. They undertook the writing of a constitution. But it all fell apart rather quickly since the dim-witted King and his cohorts didn't really get into that old changing times spirit and their lack of cooperation -- not to mention their decadence -- provoked the more violent factions of the common people to form that kraken of politics, the mob. What a goddamned mess it turned into -- a revolving cast of mob masters, each worse than the last, whipping up the crowds to ever more horrible enormities of human vivisection -- a political process that had gone hopelessly out of control. Despite the agile precedent of their friend, the new USA, quickly resolving its own rebellion into a functioning government of law, France opted for a bloody clusterfuck -- which went on for eight more years.

trickledown economics...,

Video - unregulated drilling practices at the heart of gulf oil spill.


Video - Gulf oil spill's effects in Indianapolis.

HuffPo | GULFPORT, Miss. — Scientists say the Gulf oil spill could get into the what's called the Loop Current within a day, eventually carrying oil south along the Florida coast and into the Florida Keys.

Nick Shay, a physical oceanographer at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, said Monday once the oil enters the Loop Current, it likely will end up in the Keys and continue east into the Gulf Stream.

Shay says the oil could affect Florida's beaches, coral reefs, fisheries and ecosystem within a week.

He described the Loop Current as similar to a "conveyor belt," sweeping around the Gulf, through the Keys and right up the East Coast.

Shay says he cannot think of any scenario where the oil doesn't eventually reach the Florida Keys.

flooding reaches heart of nashville...,

Video - Party in the face of death.

WaPo | Muddy water poured over the banks of Nashville's swollen Cumberland River on Monday, flooding neighborhoods and parts of the historic heart of Music City after a destructive line of weekend storms killed 28 people in Tennessee, Mississippi and Kentucky.

The flash floods caught the city off guard, and thousands of residents and tourists were forced to flee. Authorities used motorboats and personal watercraft to rescue residents who had been trapped in their homes. The rapidly rising waters led to the deaths of 17 people in Tennessee, including 10 in Nashville, and officials feared that the death toll could increase.

Country music's landmark, the Grand Ole Opry House, was flooded with several feet of water, and at least 10 feet of water flooded the nearby Gaylord Opryland Hotel complex, indefinitely shutting down one of the nation's largest hotel and convention centers. The historic Ryman Auditorium -- the former home of the Grand Ole Opry -- and the recording studios of Music Row were not in immediate danger.

Downtown was nearly deserted after authorities evacuated the area. Floodwater spilled into some streets near the riverfront, and restaurants and bars were closed. Water filled the basement of the Schermerhorn Symphony Center where pianos were stored and seeped into a mechanical room in the Country Music Hall of Fame.

"It's shocking to see it this way, but it was an incredible storm," Mayor Karl Dean said as he surveyed the flooding on Monday.

Gov. Phil Bredesen declared 52 of Tennessee's 95 counties as disaster areas after finishing an aerial tour.

if only arizona were the real problem

NYTimes | It’s harder and harder to cling to the conventional wisdom that the Tea Party is merely an element in the G.O.P., not the party’s controlling force — the tail that’s wagging the snarling dog. It’s also hard to maintain that the Tea Party’s nuttier elements are merely a fringe of a fringe. The first national Tea Party convention, in Nashville in February, chose as its kickoff speaker the former presidential candidate Tom Tancredo, a notorious nativist who surely was enlisted precisely because he runs around saying things like he has “no idea where Obama was born.” The Times/CBS poll of the Tea Party movement found that only 41 percent of its supporters believe that the president was born in the United States.

The angry right and its apologists also keep insisting that race has nothing to do with their political passions. Thus Sarah Palin explained that it’s Obama and the “lamestream media” that are responsible for “perpetuating this myth that racial profiling is a part” of Arizona’s law. So how does that profiling work without race or ethnicity, exactly? Brian Bilbray, a Republican Congressman from California and another supporter of the law, rode to the rescue by suggesting “they will look at the kind of dress you wear.” Wise Latinas better start shopping at Talbots!

In this Alice in Wonderland inversion of reality, it’s politically incorrect to entertain a reasonable suspicion that race may be at least a factor in what drives an action like the Arizona immigration law. Any racism in America, it turns out, is directed at whites. Beck called Obama a “racist.” Newt Gingrich called Sonia Sotomayor a “Latina woman racist.” When Obama put up a routine YouTube video calling for the Democratic base to mobilize last week — which he defined as “young people, African-Americans, Latinos and women” — the Republican National Committee attacked him for playing the race card. Presumably the best defense is a good offense when you’re a party boasting an all-white membership in both the House and the Senate and represented by governors who omit slavery from their proclamations of Confederate History Month.

In a development that can only be described as startling, the G.O.P.’s one visible black leader, the party chairman Michael Steele, went off message when appearing at DePaul University on April 20. He conceded that African-Americans “really don’t have a reason” to vote Republican, citing his party’s pursuit of a race-baiting “Southern strategy” since the Nixon-Agnew era. For this he was attacked by conservatives who denied there had ever been such a strategy. That bit of historical revisionism would require erasing, for starters, Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, not to mention the Willie Horton campaign that helped to propel Bush 41 into the White House in 1988.

The rage of 2010 is far more incendiary than anything that went down in 1988, and it will soon leap from illegal immigration to other issues in other states. Boycott the Diamondbacks and Phoenix’s convention hotels if you want to punish Arizona, but don’t for a second believe that it will stop the fire next time.

after peak oil we are headed toward social collapse

Video - Dmitry Orlov Social Collapse Best Practices.

TruthOut | Clearly, our choices in terms of the future that we want to create will in time be largely determined by limitations in oil and other resources. It stands to follow that we can either have a last-man-standing orientation in which only the most affluent and powerful people have lavish supplies of expensive energy and material goods or we can foster deglobalization, which leads into equitable sharing of resources, job creation, strengthening of community ties, assurance that local resource bases are not exceeded and creation of a social foundation that does not increasingly divide the world between the rich and the poor members of society.

The second option, also, protects against the sort of widespread financial collapse that occurs in the buoy model. In such an arrangement, a descending buoy, when additional buoys are hooked by a line to a sinking one, drags the others to some degree downward based on proximity wherein the ones having the closest connections are pulled down the most. Alternately put, guess what happens next when one's own economy, assets, social well-being and so forth are precariously linked to declining partners. Is it a structurally safe arrangement?

All considered, it is easy to notice that some individuals and countries faring relatively well throughout the ongoing recession are ones whose economic foundations have been largely isolated from worldwide influences. Moreover, the nations mostly immune to the downturn tend to be oriented toward serving the needs of their own populations, have been largely regionalized in focus and generally have smaller, comparatively simple, manageable economies, as the US and other countries, in my opinion, should aim to duplicate as much as possible.

In the end, "Our country's leaders have three main choices: Taking over someone else's oil fields until they are depleted; carrying on until the lights go out and Americans are freezing in the dark; or changing our life style by energy conservation while heavily investing in alternative energy sources at higher costs," according to Charles T. Maxwell. I would add to his perspective that our leaders and the rest of us must, in fairly short order, start creating self-reliant, ecologically healthy communities, ones that are durable and flexible so as to reasonably withstand difficult outside forces, such as lack of sufficient oil or, in the least, the crippling, post-peak oil prices that will come to pass. Only if we successfully do so can we avoid the most dire consequences from the severe deficits to come.

With the current peak-oil interval, we have a grace period when oil is still fairly inexpensive and abundant. At the same time, we cannot expect our government leaders to help society transition off of heavy oil dependence on account of their being controlled by "big business" interests. Therefore, it is up to average citizens to create the reforms that lead into localized economic and social development. If the enterprise is not actively taken in a timely fashion, the resultant chaos, as pointed out by Dmitry Orlov in "The Five Stages of Collapse," will be unavoidable.

america's chief weaknesses

Gurdjieff Journal | He saw our existence as "feverish" and that we had developed a strange and destructive love. He reported through the redeemed Beelzebub, his fictional persona in the First Series, that our predominant urge, or chief weakness, was our "love of 'dollar business' and of dollars themselves."(2) In the chapter "Beelzebub in America," he speaks of our Americanisms, two in particular being especially detrimental: the media, whose "conscience," he says, "is completely atrophied"(3); and advertising, which he calls a "maleficent invention." He goes to the heart of the matter with a saying of Mullah Nassr Eddin's—"that man will become a friend of the cloven-hoofed who perfects himself to such Reason and such being that he can make an elephant out of a fly."(4)

But it is our passion for food and sex that Gurdjieff warned will be our undoing. Our strange and destructive eating habits—the canned and processed foods of his day (to say nothing of the frozen and genetically altered foods and microwaved meals of ours). Our abnormality with food will be the cause of digestive disorders that will weaken our constitution; while sex—in objective reality "the most sacred of all sacred Divine sacraments"—which we use for titillation and worse, will lead to impotence. He illustrated this with his tale of Beelzebub visiting Chicago and being taken to a "story party" by a man whom Gurdjieff refers to as "the amiable and obliging Mr. Bellybutton." All the guests he found "exceedingly gay and very 'merry.'" They were telling "funny stories" which Beelzebub would have found amusing "if it had not been for one 'feature'...their 'ambiguity' and 'obscenity.'" The next evening Mr. Bellybutton escorted him to a "petting party" where a young woman he had never met stroked his neck. For the following evening Mr. Bellybutton proposed a "'swimming party' where young people bathe together but of course all dressed in special costumes." Seeing Beelzebub's disinterest in such 'tame affairs,' Mr. Bellybutton—who is now spoken of "as the obliging and exceedingly 'amiable' Mr. Bellybutton,"(5)— offered to take him to something "more substantial."

If these digestive and sexual disorders were allowed to proliferate throughout society, Gurdjieff foresaw America being destroyed as czarist Russia had been. "The process of the destruction of the large community 'monarchic Russia,'" he wrote, "proceeded in consequence of the abnormalities of, so to say, the Reason of the power-possessing beings there,(6) whereas the process of the destruction of this community America will proceed in consequence of organic abnormalities. In other words, the 'death' of the first community came from, as they say, the 'mind' whereas the death of the second community will come from the 'stomach and sex' of its beings....it is precisely these two functionings necessary to their common presence, which are now both going in the direction of complete atrophy; and moreover, at a highly accelerated tempo."

Not judging, allowing everyone "to do their thing," came out of the Timothy Leary-Alan Ginsburg 1960s drug culture. Taking drugs to increase vibration, users entered what Gurdjieff calls the higher emotional or higher mental center. The problem was—never having worked on themselves and thus purified their vibration by their own conscious labors and intentional sufferings—their egos subtly skewered and distorted the experience. They unconsciously projected their own ego-laden values and assorted psychic maladies onto the higher reality. In a word: they personalized the impersonal. As Gurdjieff would say, imagination was created in higher centers.(9)

As the drug wore off, the drug takers "came down," returned to their original heavier vibration, and scorned the denser, more causal level of everyday existence as being "phony," "hypocritical," and the like. Taking the world to be one (which it is, and isn't) they didn't see they were applying the knowledge and ideas of a higher level to a lower. What were once direct impressions of the higher level were deflected into the argot and acting out of half-remembered ideas. Hence, the flowering of the idea that it wasn't cool to judge anyone. This, along with the equally delusive idea of 'equality,' and assorted other utopian ideas put America on the fast track to societal insanity. The Mr. Bellybuttons of the day did their free love dance and society passively followed.

However, the impetus for the foregoing having been given long before, Beelzebub could warn that the sex center and the power center—"the two chief motors of their existence thus deviated retrogressively"—were both moving in a "direction of complete atrophy; and moreover, at a highly accelerated tempo." (And this, remember, was in the context of 1924–1949) He pointed out the Mr. Bellybuttons already among us, those exceedingly amiable and obliging bastard-guides to the animal realm, who make everything so easy, so nice, so respectable, so fun. And he spoke of a law "according to which one must always and in everything guard just against the initial impetus, because on acquiring momentum, it becomes a force...." This initial impetus was given and accepted long ago and now the question, as it is for virtually every area of American life, is how to get off Mr. Bellybutton's stairway to hell. The answer, individual and societal, can only begin to be understood by working to be present to the state of things that, unfortunately, is. Only by the fearless facing of that can we come to a courage of presence that is in life but certainly not of it.

what are they trying to signal?

Video - Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking Aliens

Guardian | "Extremophiles" are species that can survive in places that would quickly kill humans and other "normal" life-forms. These single-celled creatures have been found in boiling hot vents of water thrusting through the ocean floor, or at temperatures well below the freezing point of water. The front ends of some creatures that live near deep-sea vents are 200C warmer than their back ends.

"In our naive and parochial way, we have named these things extremophiles, which shows prejudice – we're normal, everything else is extreme," says Ian Stewart, a mathematician at Warwick University and author of What Does A Martian Look Like? "From the point of view of a creature that lives in boiling water, we're extreme because we live in much milder temperatures. We're at least as extreme compared to them as they are compared to us."

On Earth, life exists in water and on land but, on a giant gas planet, for example, it might exist high in the atmosphere, trapping nutrients from the air swirling around it. And given that aliens may be so out of our experience, guessing motives and intentions if they ever got in touch seems beyond the realm's even of Hawking's mind.

Paul Davies, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University and chair of Seti's post-detection taskforce, argues that alien brains, with their different architecture, would interpret information very differently from ours. What we think of as beautiful or friendly might come across as violent to them, or vice versa. "Lots of people think that because they would be so wise and knowledgeable, they would be peaceful," adds Stewart. "I don't think you can assume that. I don't think you can put human views on to them; that's a dangerous way of thinking. Aliens are alien. If they exist at all, we cannot assume they're like us."

Answers to some of these conundrums will begin to emerge in the next few decades. The researchers at the forefront of the work are astrobiologists, working in an area that has steadily marched in from the fringes of science thanks to the improvements in technology available to explore space.

sarmoun stigmergy

Video - Bee Colony Collapse Disorder.

Guardian | Fears for crops as shock figures from America show scale of bee catastrophe. The world may be on the brink of biological disaster after news that a third of US bee colonies did not survive the winter. Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter.

The decline of the country's estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.

The number of managed honeybee colonies in the US fell by 33.8% last winter, according to the annual survey by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the US government's Agricultural Research Service (ARS).

The collapse in the global honeybee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon honeybee pollination, which means that bees contribute some £26bn to the global economy.

Potential causes range from parasites, such as the bloodsucking varroa mite, to viral and bacterial infections, pesticides and poor nutrition stemming from intensive farming methods. The disappearance of so many colonies has also been dubbed "Mary Celeste syndrome" due to the absence of dead bees in many of the empty hives.

US scientists have found 121 different pesticides in samples of bees, wax and pollen, lending credence to the notion that pesticides are a key problem. "We believe that some subtle interactions between nutrition, pesticide exposure and other stressors are converging to kill colonies," said Jeffery Pettis, of the ARS's bee research laboratory.

A global review of honeybee deaths by the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) reported last week that there was no one single cause, but pointed the finger at the "irresponsible use" of pesticides that may damage bee health and make them more susceptible to diseases. Bernard Vallat, the OIE's director-general, warned: "Bees contribute to global food security, and their extinction would represent a terrible biological disaster."

the fertility-opportunity hypothesis

Wikipedia | Abernethy's research has focused on the issues of population and culture. Her most famous work discounts the demographic transition theory, which holds that fertility drops as women become more educated and contraceptives become more available. In its place she has developed a fertility-opportunity hypothesis which states that fertility follows perceived economic opportunity. A corollary to this hypothesis is that food aid to developing nations will only exacerbate overpopulation. She has advocated in favor of microloans to women in the place of international aid, because she believes microloans allow improvement in the lives of families without leading to higher fertility.

She has opposed programs that would spur economic development in less developed countries on the grounds that they are self-defeating. In the December 1994 issue of The Atlantic Monthly she authored an article entitled "Optimism and Overpopulation" in which she argued that "efforts to alleviate poverty often spur population growth, as does leaving open the door to immigration. Subsidies, windfalls, and the prospect of economic opportunity remove the immediacy of needing to conserve. The mantras of democracy, redistribution, and economic development raise expectations and fertility rates, fostering population growth and thereby steepening a downward environmental and economic spiral."

Vanderbilt | As world reserves of oil and natural gas dwindle over the coming decades a prospect predicted by many energy experts the rate at which the people in most societies around the world have babies is likely to drop precipitously as well.

That is the prediction of anthropologist Virginia Abernethy, professor emerita of psychiatry at Vanderbilt University , speaking on Feb. 13 in the symposium From the Ground Up: The Importance of Soil in Sustaining Civilization at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held in Seattle.

The availability of energy has been a major factor in population growth, says Abernethy. In the modern context, energy use per capita affects economic activity. So a prolonged decline in energy use per capita will tend to depress the economy which, in turn, will cause a decline in the fertility rate.

Abernethy's argument has two parts: the link between the availability of petroleum and the economy, and the link between changes in economic conditions and fertility rates.

Regarding the first link, she points out that oil and gas are unparalleled sources of energy. Not only does petroleum provide the fuel that powers modern vehicles and the natural gas that people use for home heating and cooking, but petroleum products are the source for hundreds of industrial and agricultural products, including fertilizer, pesticides and plastics. This means that petroleum cannot be easily replaced by other fuels and feed stocks.

Despite the fact that continuing low prices are encouraging Americans and the inhabitants of other industrialized countries to consume oil and gas at profligate rates, numerous geologists, physicists and computer scientists have calculated that petroleum and liquid natural gas production will begin to plateau and then decline within five to 10 years, she says.

courage of the sisters

Video - Overview of the Sisters of St. Joseph.

NYTimes | In the fierce closing debate over health care reform, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops charged that the legislation didn’t do enough to restrict insurance coverage of abortions. Many Catholic nuns and the Catholic Health Association of the United States, which represents hundreds of Catholic hospitals, looked at the same bill and concluded that it would have no effect on abortion financing. They signed a letter urging its passage, saying the reform was “life-affirming” and consistent with Catholic values.

Now one bishop is punishing the nuns who supported reform. Bishop Lawrence E. Brandt of Greensburg, Pa., has decreed that “any religious community” that signed the letter would be forbidden to use the diocese’s offices, parishes or newspaper to promote programs that encourage young people to consider the religious life.

That was precisely what the Sisters of St. Joseph of Baden, Pa., whose leadership team signed the letter, were asking Bishop Brandt’s parishes to help promote. Many of the sisters — who specialize in health care, social services and education — work in hospitals, hospices and nursing homes as administrators, nurses and therapists. In an age of declining vocations, they are trying to encourage young women to join their ranks.

Bishop Brandt accuses the nuns of taking “a public stance in opposition to the church’s teaching on human life.” The nuns did not challenge the church’s doctrine of life from conception to natural death. They saw the bill as a powerfully positive step, because it provided health insurance to millions of people without it, and hundreds of millions of dollars for the care of pregnant women.

The Sisters of St. Joseph of Baden showed courage and compassion when they spoke out for reform. It makes no sense at all to try to punish them or thwart their efforts to find new sisters who would care for the sick and dying and lead exemplary Catholic lives.

stand down if you don't have ovaries

NYTimes | While we’ve been distracted by Tea Party antics, the government’s efforts to sack Goldman Sachs and the tawdry drama of John Edwards and his baby’s mama, a rash of states has rushed to restrict access to abortion.

Two weeks ago, the governor of Nebraska signed a law that banned most abortions after 20 weeks on the theory that that’s when the fetus can feel pain. But as Caitlin Borgmann, a City University of New York law professor, wrote in The Los Angeles Times, “There is nothing approaching a scientific consensus on fetal pain at 20 weeks’ gestation.”

On Wednesday, Mississippi’s Legislature sent a bill to the governor that forbids public financing of abortions. The prohibition stands even in cases of severe birth defects.

Tuesday, the Oklahoma Legislature overrode a gubernatorial veto to pass two abortion laws. One requires women, even those seeking to end a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest, to have an ultrasound and have the fetus described to them. The other prevents mothers from suing doctors who withhold information about fetal birth defects.

And on Friday, the Florida Legislature passed a bill also requiring all women seeking an abortion to undergo an ultrasound. Even if the women don’t want to see the image, the doctor must still describe it to them.

It is a striking series of laws, enacted mostly by men, that seek legal control over women’s bodies. I happen to agree with Representative Janet Long of Florida, who said on Friday that you should “stand down if you don’t have ovaries.”

Proponents hope that some of these measures will force the Supreme Court to reconsider Roe v. Wade. Unfortunately, public opinion is inching in their direction. A Washington Post/ABC News poll released on Friday found that the percentage of people who think that the Supreme Court is too liberal is at its highest since they began asking the question, as is the percentage of people who say that if Roe v. Wade were to come before the court again, the next justice should vote to overturn it. They’re not the majority, but it’s still not good.

It might be tempting to think of this as a temporary blip — a conservative swing during tough times, but that would be shortsighted. There is a long-range trend of public opposition coming from unexpected quarters.

According to a Gallup report released on Wednesday, the percentage of college-educated people who favor legal abortion under any circumstances has been dropping since the early 1990s and has now reached a new low. And while the largest overall drop was among men over 65, it was closely followed by a drop among women under 30.

This shifting landscape is ripe for a row over Roe. It’s coming. With luck, President Obama will nominate a warrior to the court. Preferably one who also agrees with Representative Long.

rachel maddow interviews dan stein

Video - Rachel Maddow sets the stage for FAIR president interview.


Video - Rachel all up in that..., just watch it.

rachel maddow fact checks dan stein

Video - Rachel Maddow fact checks Dan Stein.

cultural hegemony

Video - explaining Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony.

The View From Brittainy | The problem of Peak Oil is that the narrative which underlies it runs contrary to everything Enlightenment and the ideology of progress stand for. Where progress is about conquest and mastery of nature, peak oil tells us of the absolute, unmovable limits this very nature assigns to our development and prosperity. There is no way to reconcile them, and those who attempt to do it – such as the “bright green” - choose a more convenient problem to solve, global warming for instance, or end up defending such oxymoronic cause as “green growth”.

To get out of our global predicament we must recognize that an unsustainable society simply cannot be sustained and reshape it for resilience and sobriety. This massive powerdown effort cannot be even begun, except at the local level, without first undermining, then overthrowing the culture of progress which rules our civilization since the end of the XVIIIth century.

Similar ideological warfare have been won in the past, and against adversaries every bit as hegemonic as the ideology of progress. Christianity, initially, a small Jewish cult, progressively spread in the Roman underground during the heyday of the Empire before becoming its official faith and utterly replacing the once hegemonic pagan civic religions. The Reformation imposed itself in the northern half of Europe – and goaded the once all-powerful into extensive reforms – after more than a century of confused intellectual (or not so intellectuals in the case of the Hussites, for instance) struggles. As for the Enlightenment itself, its victory was a slow and difficult one. The late Christopher Lasch pointed out that the ideology of progress met with considerable resistance in America, from the Knights of Labor to the Southern Agrarian. As late as the early twentieth century, the Roman Catholic Church condemned popular sovereignty and religious pluralism and until 1967 all priests and teachers had to take an anti-modernist oath.

It was not until after World War Two that those ideas fell into growing irrelevancy. The ultimate fate of the ideology of progress will ultimately mirror theirs, even if we still don't know which paradigm will replace it. History is full of aborted world religions and hegemonic cultures. The rise of Christianity and the Reformation witnessed the birth, and death, of not a few “heretic” sects which could have become the new norm, had things turned out otherwise – who remembers the Marcionites, for instance, or Arianism, at a time the official religion of most of Western Europe, or the original Anabaptists cults which raised such an alarm in Renaissance Germany before being stomped out by both Catholics and Protestants. Others, which could also have become hegemonic have survived by insulating themselves and becoming closed, self-sufficient, communities. The Jews or the Parsi come to mind, but the Waldenses or the Mennonites are also good examples.