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I’d like to take this opportunity to talk about [...] the darker legacy of the WTO protests, the second major change they set in motion. I’d like to talk about what people in power, not social justice activists, learned from the WTO protests. And how and why the WTO became a turning point for the increased militarization of public space during the last ten years.

To the degree that people even use the word Seattle to evoke anything other than grunge rock, Microsoft, or Starbucks, it is as shorthand for the WTO protests. Around the world, among the left and those interested in international politics, “Seattle” is often referred to as the official birth of the global justice movement (or fair trade movement—or, as its opponents call it, the anti-globalization movement).

Certainly, the protests ignited spirited debates over neoliberal globalization that had been long overdue. But those debates also set off a reaction by those in power. There’s a reason not one single global trade meeting or major political event has been seriously disrupted since the WTO was blocked from meeting in Seattle: People in power—the world’s governments, and in particular their police forces—decided that they would change the law to ensure that it would never happen again.

[...]

The War on Terror also deepened collaboration between local police forces, homeland security, and the military. It transformed discussions about peaceful protest into a language of social war, and increased the weapons at the police’s disposal to wage that war. Now, instead of protesters facing mere local or regional police forces, the full power of an increasingly integrated surveillance and police system is being brought against the First amendment rights of everyone in civil society.

ON WAR #323: Milestone - LIND

From the perspective of 4GW theory, this is an important development. The Naval Postgraduate School is a DOD institution, part of the U.S. government. Its involvement in Salinas marks the federal government’s formal recognition of Fourth Generation war on American soil, and the need for a “national model” to counteract it. If we must involve the U.S. military to lead counterinsurgency efforts in American cities, then it is difficult to deny that we face something like insurgencies in those same cities.

Ruminations from the Distant Hills: Decoding the Heavens

Have we also lost something? At the very least, we’re missing out on the best light show on the planet. Living in today’s permanently illuminated towns and cities, most of us have little sense of the rhythms of the sky; the intricate dance of the Earth, Moon and Sun, the wandering of the planets or the circles of the stars. Finding out who made the Antikythera mechanism and why also turns upside down any notion we might have had about ancient technology being “primitive” and our own being so “advanced”.

State to 'spy' on every phone call, email and web search - Telegraph

All telecoms companies and internet service providers will be required by law to keep a record of every customer’s personal communications, showing who they have contacted, when and where, as well as the websites they have visited.

Despite widespread opposition to the increasing amount of surveillance in Britain, 653 public bodies will be given access to the information, including police, local councils, the Financial Services Authority, the ambulance service, fire authorities and even prison governors.

How to Save the World

Derrick Jensen suggests (in A Language Older Than Words) that we listen to the land, and in time it will tell us just what we need to do.

I am trying to believe this, but I'm not sure I do. As Quinn says, you need to be ready to listen, to reconnect. Although I don't much like the analogy, it's a lot like being ready for a religious conversion. I understand that most people are indoctrinated into their religious beliefs from a very early age, but many still need some event to trigger a true realization of that belief. And others who come to religion later in their lives do so because they're ready -- some combination of events and support from other believers is sufficient to take them past a tipping point, and bring about a major worldview change. A heavy dose of propaganda needs to be applied at just the right time, by more than one person, in the context of the convert's own community and situation. This is not easy stuff.

Organized religions do this very effectively. They provide the tools for evangelism, and the infrastructure to keep the flock in the fold. Whereas some of them are con-men and criminals, others are generous and sincere. Gladwell has described the "cellular" organization that enables many evangelical churches to convert and retain members, using a bottom-up outreach and support process coordinated by a top-down hierarchy that supplies the tools of conversion and retention.

Perhaps the Transition movement and the Permaculture movement, both community-based networks, are the analogue of the local cells of religious groups. Perhaps these are the networks that we can use, instead of debates, conferences and books, to do the same thing to organize those who are, as Quinn and Jensen say, ready to listen, to reconnect, and to start to do the much more radical work that will be needed to:

* learn a better way to live and make a living,
* disrupt and bring down our industrial growth economy and the civilization that depends on it, and
* create new models to replace them that are healthy and sustainable.

Yet I'm troubled by this. If we create cellular networks to organize the work of reconnection, learning, action and creation needed to enable a better world, could these not easily become, as so many religious networks are, vehicles for indoctrination and exploitation? Will we end up with sects who think that better world can and should be built now, in the shadow of our teetering civilization, and others who think we should focus on undermining existing civilization and that nothing very useful can be accomplished until that work is done? I can see myself agreeing with both viewpoints.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911/brownlee-h1n1/3
Does the Vaccine Matter?

"Whether this season’s swine flu turns out to be deadly or mild, most experts agree that it’s only a matter of time before we’re hit by a truly devastating flu pandemic—one that might kill more people worldwide than have died of the plague and aids combined. In the U.S., the main lines of defense are pharmaceutical—vaccines and antiviral drugs to limit the spread of flu and prevent people from dying from it. Yet now some flu experts are challenging the medical orthodoxy and arguing that for those most in need of protection, flu shots and antiviral drugs may provide little to none. So where does that leave us if a bad pandemic strikes?"

http://sharonastyk.com/2009/10/14/thinking-hard-about-the-flu-vaccine/
A response to the Atlantic article

"But what’s really important about the article is the end – which points out that we eschew the methods that we *know* would reduce flu mortality – ie, staying away from one another during an outbreak. We have tools to keep the elderly and ill safer than they are – but we don’t use them because the industrial economy is so adamant that it cannot afford us time to be sick, or to be safe. This, I think is the most important part of all of this – I’ve written before about the ways that the industrial economy tries to subsume us all, and our time. Women who want to nurse babies can’t be freed – they must work. Sick people can’t stay home. Parents can’t care for sick children. The industrial economy must go on – it does not serve our needs, we only serve its. And this is the true purpose of the flu vaccine – not to prevent deaths, but to continue on our merry ways *without disrupting the economy.* And this alone makes me suspicious of the process."

"Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them."

http://www.cognexus.org/wpf/wickedproblems.pdf

http://www.scribd.com/doc/20774939/Cycles-New-Yorker10-12-09

"Armstrong, in his essay “Understanding the Real Economy,” said, “I have spent a lot of time trying to comprehend how such a model can even work on a specific level to a precise day, years and decades in advance. The only explanation is the subject matter is so intensely complex that there is indeed a hidden order within what would appear to be random chaos.”"

EDIT: The topic of the latter sounds scarily like the real-life roots of the movie "PI," which was disturbingly haunting to me and just disturbing to nearly everyone else I know. Are there geek shamans?

SO, as those who follow Facebook will have noted, I am in intellectual-lust over this latest find: Dancecult:Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture

It is very very difficult to explain to most people why I still periodically expend great effort, time, and money to go "hang out in the woods with a bunch of hippies" and listen to that "techno stuff." Certainly, finding actual academic discourse on tranceculture has been nearly impossible - an article here in a marginalized journal, a website discussion there, but rarely anything of substance. Why bother? you might ask. Well, I see it like this: as long as the dominant culture marginalizes this community so far as to be even outside academia, it remains vulnerable to suppression. Not that academic awareness is some kind of magic survival card, but well-written papers that take tranceculture seriously for its relationship to spirituality and positive cultural forces can be presented to skeptical powers that might otherwise see such events as mere "drug parties."

It seems to me that psytrance is now where rave was in about 1994: starting to break bigger, but also in danger of becoming co-opted. At least one article in this journal describes a 20,000+ person festival, which seems overwhelming to me. Does this not encourage commodification, cliquishness, a feeling of separation? Much like the early rave scene, smaller seems best to me; like food, doofing local keeps the community healthy.

Geez, I need to move to Asheville, or somewhere like it.

Growing Up in the West | Orion Magazine

After I gutted him and packed him on my back up the ridge and loaded him into the bed of the pickup, I stood in the clear, cold light of the morning, marveling at my blood-crusted jeans, my still blood-wet hands. All winter, I knew, we’d eat breakfasts of antelope steak and fried eggs, earthy-tasting antelope sausage mixed into cream gravy and poured over toast come dinner. My father was years dead by then, and my mother came home from work each day tired in the dark. This blood, I thought, will get us through.

My grandfather broke my reverie. He took me by the shoulders, told me I had done a good, hard thing and done it well. He told me to be careful that it always remained a hard thing to do. “Easy isn’t any good,” he said. “If it ever gets easy—quit.”

If you don't already read this blog, you should. Oh, perhaps not all of it - the entries are long, and mostly consist of "footnotes" for the discussion at the top - but certainly these folks are more in touch with the REAL financial system than most anybody I've found. And periodically, they come out with gems like this one, where they step out beyond the money and lay it all down.

The Automatic Earth

What this will lead to, and indeed already has, is levels of poverty, both in scope and in depth, which we haven't seen in a long, long time. And which, unless we act to halt their advance, will blow our communities and societies to smithereens from the inside.

When I say that you can judge the quality of a society by the way it takes care of its weakest, many if not most Americans will immediately think of the word "socialism", even as they don't know what it means. But it's not about partisan political choices, about freedom, or the pursuit of happiness, or about big government. It's very simply about minimum requirements for a functional society, period. You can't have tens of millions of people being unemployed and/or living below the poverty line for extended lengths of time without resorting to oppressive measures of physical force aimed at keeping down those who have landed in your gutters.