Truth is clearly overrated among our kind (4)

In the end, our society will be defined not only by what we create but by what we refuse to destroy.

(John Sawhill, former president of The Nature Conservancy)

A reflection of ourselves

Our national parks and preserves are located in all regions of the country (Our NationalParks), but they are in need of help. From budget cuts, discussed previously, to climate change this remarkable American creation, which goes back more than 100 years, is under threat in the 21^st century.

Shrinking available water supplies affects ecosystems and species survival. Non-native plants, insects, snakes and reptiles encroach on native plants and animal ecosystems and ultimately can result in extinction. It's estimated that approximately 6,500 non-native species are now intruding on native plants and animals.

Air pollution has no boundaries. Such things as coal plants and automobiles affect both air quality and visibility, which over time poisons plants, fouls water resources and threatens vulnerable species. A warming planet is affecting glaciers in our national parks, fire season is becoming longer and more severe, food production could decrease and eco-patterns may change more quickly and threaten numerous species … including humans.

Because of budget cuts deferred maintenance is increasing rapidly, estimated to be well over $7 billion at the present time. Roads are in disrepair, trails closed, restrooms shut and “out of order” signs appearing everywhere. At the same time, more visitors are arriving at our national parks, an estimated 45 million annually. The difficulty is that more visitors mean more problems requiring better service and upkeep.

Beware of the big bad wolf

You can take your tree hugging, granola eating politically correct, earth worshiping, subaru driving, pony tailed sandals in the winter, wolf loving butt somewhere else!

(A sign near Salmon, Idaho, home of the annual Coyote and Wolf Derby)

In old European superstitions it is believed to be unlucky to say the word “wolf” in the month of December, for you run the risk of being attacked by one. On the other hand, wolves are prominent in Native American mythology and many Indians oppose the hunting of wolves. It is believed by some tribes that wolves are family members and the human spirit comes from wolves.

In general, European-Americans from the very beginning have had a total disregard for wildlife. We have slaughtered and butchered animals with abandon from the moment we set foot on the North American continent. We pretty much have belonged to the school of “dominion over” rather than “stewardship of.”

Even in the late 19^th century there were reports of the day time sky darkening because of the migration of millions of passenger pigeons flying overhead. The bird tasted good and was easy to kill. On September 1, 1914 Martha, the last captive passenger pigeon, died at the Cincinnati Zoo. We rarely know the specific date that a species goes extinct, an extinction we humans caused.

Kill 'em all and then some

Salmon, Idaho holds a four day Coyote and Wolf Derby every year. Salmon is a rural ranching community and in its own way reflects a dark part of an American past that should be in the Museum of Natural History but still exists today in small pockets throughout the country. Keep in mind that the livestock industry “hates” predators of every kind and always has. Science and objective observation have little to do with it.

The object of the hunt is to kill coyotes and wolves as fast as possible. It is killing for the sake of killing. Prizes of $1,000 are awarded for the most animals killed. Special awards are also given to children who demonstrate prowess in this slaughter.

Of particular interest is that part of the hunt takes place on federal lands—meaning public. Supposedly, oversight responsibility rests with the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, who seemingly vanish shortly before and during this cultural celebration of human blood-lust.

The steak tastes bad

Climatologists are telling us with a “high level” of certainty that our warming planet, since 1950 at least, is caused primarily because of what we humans have been doing to the Earth. Yes, it's us.

In terms of global warming, meat production is especially harmful and beef production may be the most damaging form of meat. Cows produce methane emissions, a powerful greenhouse gas. Many methods of cattle production demand large tracts of land, contribute to the destruction of forests and trees are burned releasing CO2. Cattle production more often than not requires huge amounts of water and fertilizer.

If the whole world ate beef at the rate of Americans and produced by methods that are usual in the U.S., we'd likely have little chance of staying below internationally agreed limits on global warming.

So what, why it matters for every one of us, and what can really be done about it?

TO BE CONTINUED

The Ethos of Death

These two articles in particular tell us something about the political reality in America, the cult of death and the on-going land swindle that continues currently. The disease can be cured if we choose.

Wyoming, Montana and Idahoand Killing Grizzly Bears

House Republicans Seek toOpen National Forests to Mining and Logging

THE RIGHTS of NATURE

Truth is clearly overrated among our kind (3)

The lesson should be constantly enforced that, though the people support the government, the government should not support the people.

(President Grover Cleveland, while vetoing a bill offering financial aid to the poor, 1887)

Collyfoxing

By coincidence I happened to see a YouTube video put up by Jon Ritzheimer a few weeks back, one of the gang leaders that occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and who is now in jail. He stood in front of a table piled high with dozens of dildos that his detractors had sent. What struck me, however, was the seeming bewilderment on his face as he swept them off the table and onto the floor.

“Let us do something, while we have the chance!”

(Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot)

But, if you live in a world of paranoia, United Nations' black helicopters invading the U.S., FEMA concentration camps, a dash of apocalyptic Christianity and a distorted understanding of American history, rational thinking is likely to be difficult. You can, nevertheless, serve as a very useful tool for others. (The word collyfoxing is old English and means 'misleading and making a fool of one.')

If you know how it's easy

No, it's not a collection of sociopaths, crazed zealots and the merely pathetic that are the true problem. The real threat to our national parks, sanctuaries, recreation programs, enforcement and sound land management throughout the U.S. comes first and foremost from a loud and powerful segment of the the U.S. Congress, who know quite well who they work for.

The “grand strategy” is to starve all these programs until they collapse. It is not just public lands in the West that are threatened but community parks in both rural and urban areas, historic sites like Civil War battlefields, upkeep on popular hiking trails, dealing with invasive species and maintaining, for example, redwood forests in California to conserve water. Appropriations have been cut in important programs like the Land and Water Conservation Fund, popular programs allowed to expire and funds diverted back to the oil and gas industry.

In my state of Missouri, hardly a bastion of enlightenment at the present time, the state legislature wants to prevent the Department of Natural Resources from creating a new State Park that would benefit all the residents of the state, keeping in mind that our parks in Missouri attract millions of visitors annually, bring in an estimated billion dollars and support some 15,000 jobs. Most important, it would protect natural resources and be a legacy for future generations. This is an issue that is common throughout the country.

In the West the livestock industry, oil and gas, mining and land developers have always known how to conjure up the cowboy fairy tales about freedom, liberty and the “sacredness” of private property. They certainly know how to purchase politicians at the national, state and local level. When needed they can, of course, always find a bunch of terrorist thugs to break windows, wave guns and yell about government overreach. It's nothing new; they've been doing it for a long time.

To put names and faces to some of the worst elected officials in the U.S. Congress in terms of our national sanctuaries, wildlife and the determination to privatize all public lands, you can probably begin with five in particular. Collectively they have received millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry and agribusiness. They are in the House of Representatives Ken Calvert of California, Don Young of Alaska and Rob Bishop of Utah. In the Senate they are Mike Lee of Utah and John Cornyn of Texas. They all happen to be Republicans—at the moment.

So what does it all mean, what can be done about it and who cares?

TO BE CONTINUED

Truth is clearly overrated among our kind (2)

They're making people everyday, but they ain't makin' any more dirt.

(Will Rogers)

Trespassers will be shot or worse

In July 2015 the United Nations estimated a global population of 7.349 billion people. Right now (2016) we are currently at 7.4 billion and increasing.

In 1700, only 316 years ago, the human population of the entire planet was approximately 600 million. In what we now call the United States the population (Europeans) was approximately 250,000 people. The industrial revolution in Europe wouldn't begin for another 80 years or so. The human footprint across the globe was still relatively benign in 1700.

A momentous change in agriculture had begun in Europe, starting in England in the late 17^th century. It had a profound effect on the lives of people and one of the key factor in the global demographic explosion that would take place in the next 300 years.

The first change was the enclosure movement. Hedges began encircling more and more farmland. Before, land had been largely communal; everyone could graze their animals and raise crops on community land. But as new crops, new methods of breeding, and new cultivation techniques developed pressure grew to enclose the land, in order to improve both the yield and the quality and insure better management. While the farming system was undoubtedly revolutionized, many people lost their land, became dispossessed and had to find work in the cities.

With the spreading enclosure of land and the rising power of the landowners, the Norfolk Four-Course System was established. Throughout the Middle Ages and up to the late seventeenth century, field lay fallow every three years; farmers slaughtered their farm animals in the fall because they had no forage crops to feed them in the winter. The Norfolk system changed all this.

The fallow year disappeared and fodder crops, such as cornstalks, hay, and straw were fed to animals. This produced a lot of manure and urine, enriching the soil and ultimately increasing the harvests.

These new methods and techniques spread to the rest of Europe and ultimately moved in one form or another to the United States, where Europeans found some of the most fertile and productive land on the planet with few human obstacle to stop them from claiming it. For landless Europeans who could only dream of possessing property of their own, the world to the west seemed like a Garden of Eden with infinite abundance.

A book was published in England in 1776, arguably one of the most influential books ever written. The author was Adam Smith and the title of his work was An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. He defined the free-market, what it was and its value in creating wealth.

Politicians in America, in particular, have always loved to talk about the free-market, its central role in America's greatness and “exceptionalism” and, not surprisingly, government must not be allowed to impose regulations on that “invisible hand” that knows best.

Well, not often stated, even the venerable Adam Smith in the 18^th century told us to beware of capitalists because they could manipulate the “sanctity” of the market. In fact, he said, “The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from [capitalists] ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined...” America, however, was going to demonstrate how the big swindle ought to be played on a continental scale.

You cannot solve the problem with the same kind of thinking that has created the problem.

( Albert Einstein )

The idea that human beings are better off acting selfishly would have been laughable to Shakespeare, anathema to Jesus, absurd to Darwin and insane to Freud. Even Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, would have recoiled from the crass self-interest philosophy promoted by Ayn Rand....

(Lynn Parramore, Institute for New Economic Thinking and founding editor of New Deal 2.0)

TO BE CONTINUED

Truth is clearly overrated among our kind (1)

Orcs hate Elves with a passion.

(from Lord of the Rings by J. R.R. Tolkien)

“Home home on the range, where the deer and the antelope play”

According to the Center for Biological Diversity, Wildlife Services, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has killed, through gassing, poisoning and strangulation by snare, 27 million native animals since 1996, including more than 1 million in 2014. The animals have included prairie dogs, gray wolves, mountain lions, black bears, foxes, coyotes and even bald eagles, and possibly a few domestic cats.

The mission of the USDA APHIS (Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service) Wildlife Services “is to provide Federal leadership and expertise to resolve wildlife conflicts to allow people and wildlife to coexist.” The WS is a government agency, its programs paid for by the taxpayers and supposedly answerable to all the citizens.

Yet most people, including the politicians responsible for oversight, have little understanding of the seemingly secret activities of this agency. What are the causes for each killing? Why is there a large variation from one year to the next? Is it merely a perception of a threat offered up by a farmer or rancher that causes the WS to kill wildlife? What role does corporate agriculture in general have in setting the “killing” priorities ... or, is it merely part of something much more corrupt and ultimately harmful to all of us?

Piling up the cow manure

In 1885 William A.J. Sparks, commissioner of the General Land Office, in his report to Congress, said

that “unscrupulous speculation resulted in the worst forms of land monopoly … throughout regions dominated by cattle-raising interests.” It has been said often enough that it's more than likely that land in the western states was acquired originally by assorted types of fraud.

The swindle, updated for the 21^st century and more efficient, is still a swindle, with the possible consequences far worse today and affecting those that have never seen a real cow.

When a character like Cliven Bundy and his fellow travelers, the very essence of “welfare parasites,” state they will not pay a grazing fee for their cattle, keep in mind that the taxpayers of the United States are providing millions of dollars in indirect subsidies for private land ranchers. The actual federal grazing fee is approximately $1.35 a month per cow-calf pair in 2015, but the market rate on private land averages around $12.00.

One of the more colorful quotations comes from Brian Ertz, chairperson of Sierra Club's National Grazing Team, who said in 2014 in reference to an area on the Idaho-Nevada border: “One of the most cattle-fucked landscapes you'll ever see.”

Actual climate science tells us that one of the main contributors of greenhouse gases comes from meat production. It's also in the realm of possibility that the butchering of wildlife brought to you by the Wildlife Services has been decided by the livestock industry.

Today, desertification, pollution of water, destruction of cover for birds and mammals, mono-culturing of grasslands, deforestation and the destruction of native plants comes to us through poorly regulated grazing. In 1934 in congressional testimony the Forest Service referred to “ cancer-like growth” because of unregulated grazing. More than 70 years later we're still dealing with cancer-like growth and it's not because we don't understand the science today.

In 1946 The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) was created, a merger between Grazing Service and the General Land Office. Today it administers more than 247 million acres of public lands, mostly located in the western states. The BLM has sometimes been referred to, with a touch of bitterness, as the Bureau of Livestock and Mines. The question of course is who exactly does the BLM really work for. TO BE CONTINUED

10,000 biological generations

It is not that nature lacks intelligence but our own concepts do

(Jeremy Narby, anthropologist )

I saw the movie The Revenant this past week and it was good, not because of the acting and cinematography, which was excellent, but because of how the story was told. It's loosely based on the life of an actual fur trader Hugh Glass, who was supposedly almost killed by a grizzly bear in 1823. It is ostensibly a tale of human survival, but to the credit of the director, it reveals more than a man-vs-nature adventure film.

Seeing ourselves

Depredation, race, class, predatory capitalism are certainly revealed in the film but we also see human relationships with what can be called the natural world, as well as respect and understanding of the “other,” both human and non-human But I did find myself at times during the movie thinking about the criminal occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by our modern day white terrorists grifters.

For those who have not seen the 2013 talk by Jeremy Narby, Intelligence in Nature, the following video is outstanding. He poses the question: How can we [humans] transform ourselves into intelligent predators?

The title of this article, “10,000 biological generations” refers to the fact that Homo-sapien-sapiens—us-- have only been around some 200,000 years, a drop in the evolutionary bucket. Whether or not we humans in our present form will be around 200 years from now is, in my opinion, questionable at best. But we have survived by the “skin of our teeth” in the past....

Our last common ancestor with the chimpanzee (See “Remembering uncle Sah” ) likely lived in what is now the country of Chad in Africa. Approximately 7 million years ago we went our separate ways. Now, the more than 7 billion(!) of us in the 21^st century need to somehow radically change just who and what we are.

Malheur Refuge once again

Land use policy in the United States is worthy of serious discussion and debate at the local, state and national level, but the feverish, narcissistic fantasy of a segment of America to hand over all our national sanctuaries to the “private property” crowd because they think it's some sort of right they have acquired is on par with the old, nonsensical “divine right of kings.”

What is at stake, as humans, is changing the “concepts” about the world we live in and our place in it. In the meantime, in one small corner of Oregon, all of us collectively need to confront the idiocy of white entitlement accompanied by the usual threats of violence. Get out. Yeah, it's non-negotiable. We need to get on with solving genuine problems in the 21^st century.

The problem with America is....

Once again it's “Deja vu all over again.” Never ending white entitlement, delusional history and the usual threats of violence are now playing out at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Eastern Oregon, one of the more important bird and wildlife sanctuaries in the country and located in an isolated corner of Oregon.

Malheur is being occupied by a handful of white (Christian?) terrorists with the apparent and enthusiastic support of ISIS no less. The Refuge, however, happens to belong to all the people of the United States.

But like a shopworn morality play our wild-wild-West has a familiar ring to it, going back to when the Europeans claimed ownership of those “empty” spaces following the American Civil War. The through-line or theme, nevertheless, has remained the same right up to the present time.

As early as 1805 two different creation stories appeared in an attempt to explain the founding of the United States. One was, later to be called the “Jeffersonian interpretation,” and the other known as the “natural” outcome of the Revolution of 1776. These versions of America's creation have been swirling around, re-imagined, and debated and argued about for more than 200 years.

It's all ours

At the end of the Civil War European-American turned their gaze toward our western frontier. It was now time for our pent up ambitions to be fulfilled—our (white) Manifest Destiny.

Coincidentally, the philosophy of Social Darwinism first appeared in Great Britain in the 1870s, which had little to do with evolution or Darwin, but did provide a justification and underpinning for white supremacy across the globe. It was adopted enthusiastically by America's elite, but for the average white American it merely confirmed what had been felt, culturally and socially, from the very start of the Republic.

The final piece in the “occupation” of the West was the railroad, the cutting edge technology of the 19^th century. By the end of the century the railroad had helped make America a global trading partner, and by the end of World War I in 1918 the United States had become the premier economic power in the world. The start, however, was quite different from the fairy tales found in the average history book or the backs of cereal boxes.

“....the triumph of the unfit...”

For a fascinating and detailed history of the transcontinental railroad it's worth reading Richard White's book Railroaded. You'd recognize the Bernie Madoffs of the 19^th century, the assorted speculators and those that created the 19^th century equivalent of sub-prime loans and credit default swaps.

But the making of the West had little to do with the fanciful rugged individual or some 19^th century libertarian John Gault wearing chaps and armed to the teeth. It had much more to do with large corporation colluding with the government, for private gains at public expense. It is a remarkable story of greed, incompetence and welfare capitalism at its supreme worst. Abraham Lincoln in 1864 said that, “Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow.” He was most certainly right.

Unfortunately, along with the laughable business “tycoon” and corrupt government official and politician, there was a very dark side. It is a dismal story of genocide, racism, environmental destruction and overall depravity, which even by 19^th century standards was simply barbaric.

Last but certainly not least is the iconic oil painting of cattle and cowboys adorning the boardroom walls of cattlemen associations, offices of western politicians—and the pages of comic strips.

Like the railroads, large cattle corporations were created, frequently by people that knew absolutely nothing about cows, cowboys and ranching. It was a kind of learning by doing, the ends of course justifying any means. Cattle corporations just like the railroads were often accused of violating anti-monopoly laws. There were numerous examples of unlawful enclosure of public lands, fraudulent attempts at controlling water resources, overgrazing and the cruelty of mass starvation of cattle.

Very much like the railroad corporations the cattle industry lived by financial illusion, where the numbers had virtually nothing to do with reality. As Richard White has said, in reference to the cattle business, “These land grabs were attempts by a classic nineteenth-century monopoly to claim a public resource for a privileged few.”

The cowboy himself was largely a myth even after the short-lived cattle drives ended. More often than not the average cowboy was underpaid, exploited, illiterate and old or dead by the time he was thirty-five.

Land belongs to (some of) us because we're the people

The short version is that the land around the current Malheur National Wildlife Refuge had originally belonged to the Northern Paiute Indian tribe, who had probably lived in the area for hundreds of years. They of course were eventually “removed” from the land by European-Americans in the 1870s.

President Theodore Roosevelt ( himself part of white American mythology) in 1908 created the Malheur refuge, one of the first sanctuaries in the United States, which was at that time unclaimed government lands, which consists today of more than 187,700 acres, including 120,000 acres of wetlands. The reason Roosevelt created this national wildlife refuge is because photographers in the 1880s discovered that plume hunters had decimated many North American birds. Feathers for ladies hats were popular at the time. Just your average American entrepreneur meeting a demand.

Not to worry, plenty of everything

B.J. Soper, a resident of the county where the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is located, while not a supporter of the illegal occupation of the refuge, nevertheless probably expressed the view of many westerners when he said to a journalist that, “What people in Western States are dealing with is the destruction of their way of life.” Fair enough, but whose way of life? Should we go back to the 1950s, the 1890s or possibly before any white person had set foot on what is now called the United States?

It must have seemed bountiful beyond belief when the first white people started moving west, All this “free” stuff as far as the eye could see and all for the taking. Capitalism globally since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the past 220 years or so, never really took into account what actual costs were. Such things as grass, water, the degradation of grasslands, pollution of the air, the overuse of toxic chemicals, the slaughter of wildlife never entered any balance sheet. It's still resisted today, even though the rhetoric has been updated.

The Bundy crowd and their camp followers are nothing new. Some 30 years ago a conservative land-use doctrine called Wise Use emerged, a successor if you will to the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s, which goes back even farther to to the anti-national park movement, which goes back ultimately to Plymouth Rock and the European understanding of what was “developed land” in the early 17^th century.

The Wise Use doctrine claims that moral primacy in the West belongs to ranching families, logging and all natural resource companies. The goal is to eliminate such things as most of our environmental regulations, get rid of the Endangered Species Act, promise unrestricted use of off-road vehicles and privatize virtually everything. What a grand vision!

Above all else the true believers will tell anyone that listens that they are far better stewards of the land than any government entity. Needless to say the timber industry, the mining and oil industry, among others, while not necessarily in support of armed bandits with automatic weapons, tell us that these poor souls are victims of government overreach. Of course they are.

Death eaters, dead-enders and the profitable business of victimhood

In a perfect world Cliven Bundy, the family patriarch, would willingly pay the extremely modest grazing fee ( now up to some $1 million ) as a functioning citizen of the United States, in order to keep his cattle on my property—or--he would be living out his days in a federal prison and his cows sold on the open market.

Ammon Bundy, the oldest son of Cliven and the self-proclaimed leader of the white terrorist militia at Malheur, is a recipient of a small business government loan, courtesy of my tax dollars. He is not even a rancher but an owner of a trucking business in Arizona.

It is not that we can not find any ranchers in the West today who understand modern land ecology, different ways of raising cattle, the importance of large natural sanctuaries, the value of predators in a healthy ecosystem, climate change, as well as ultimately preserving a future legacy for all Americans; it's that we still have, hovering over everything, a thuggish history of human plundering, a disrespect for nature and above all the decaying ideology of white entitlement and self-serving victimhood.

Most likely the majority of people that are sympathetic to these various white militia groups do not want to go to prison or get shot, but it's pretty clear there is a core group of deadenders that long for a cowbilly Valhalla. We as a society must get on with the 21^st century if we want to preserve anything worthwhile.

We took away their country and their means of support, broke up their mode of living, their habits of life, introduced disease and decay among them, and it was for this and against this they made war. Could any one expec t less. Then, why wonder at Indian difficulties.

(General Philip Henry Sheridan, Commanding Army General in Army Report of 1878)

I can't find my bootstraps to pull up

Clinton's welfare reform was the logical conclusion of Ronald Reagan's pernicious use of the 'welfare queen' myth in the 1980s.

(Amy B. Dean, fellow, Century Foundation)

The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind—it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.

(Joseph Goebbels, Propaganda Minister, Nazi Germany)

Nature and nurture

“Good wombs have born bad sons,” as Shakespeare says in The Tempest. The nature versus nurture debate goes back to at least the time of Plato. But perhaps over the past fifteen or twenty years we have acquired a remarkable pool of knowledge regarding human behavior in general, be it the mapping of the human genome, neuroscience discoveries, behavioral psychology or even the controversial field of genopolitics. As individuals we are a complex mixture of genetic and environmental factors. But who are we in assorted groups or various interests or particular markets?

Behavioral economics it seems to me has a great deal to offer, for example, the 2016 presidential election in the United States, which promises to be once again less than enlightening, informative and honest.

Behavioral economics may also have a lot to say about how we look at poverty in the U.S. and throughout the world. Poverty in America has come out of the shadows, for the moment at least, in part because of the issue of racism, a central piece in understanding this country.

Where once behavioral economics was an outlier in the field, it has now become an influential element in understanding economic decision making. Even the World Bank in its 2015 annual report devoted most of the document to behavioral decision making. Ultimately, to be truly successful, it has to influence policymakers to think in a different way. This, however, is hardly ever easy; we humans are reluctant to let facts get in the way of our strongly held beliefs. Call it nature vs nurture.

My cortisol hormone just doesn't feel right

Researchers are familiar with what's called a hormone-receptor complex. There are steroid hormones, which include cortisol, estrogen and testosterone. Cortisol, for example, is released under stress, the proverbial threat, but it can also occur by merely thinking about unpleasant things. High levels of cortisol over long periods may cause such illnesses as depression, heart disease and overall suppression of the immune system.

Stress and prolonged complex tasks can cause glucose levels in the region of the brain associated with attention and planning to drop. Physical capabilities can decrease but mental acuity can be affected as well.

Neurotransmitters, serotonin and dopamine being two, are related to stress and motivation. Levels of serotonin in an individual can affect the sense of well being and confidence. These individual variations might cause different reactions and possibly have a bearing on how we think about and react to real world issues, such as violence, gay marriage and poverty.

The point of all this is that we know a good deal more about genetic and environmental factors when it comes to human behavior. This connects to behavioral economists and how they have looked at the field of psychology and the discoveries in neuroscience and have adapted and applied many of the ideas to economics. Some have referred to behavioral economics as the “hybrid offspring” of economics and psychology.

You've been framed

Frank Luntz, a political operative in the early George W. Bush presidency, told the administration that it was important to always refer to global warming as “climate change.” This phrase, it was believed, was less unsettling and more controllable, thus more easily ignored. The fossil fuel industry could rest easily.

More than 30 years ago two psychologists published a paper questioning the standard assumptions regarding decision making, which ultimately had a significant impact on traditional economic theory. See Prospect Theory: An Analysis ofDecision Under Risk.

The long standing belief had been that the “Economic Man” was rational and by in large made self-interested decisions. Intentionally or otherwise, this idea benefited the status quo and provided a justification for what has been thought to be the “inherent” wisdom of what is universally referred to as the free-market, which is hardly “free” in any sense of the word.

What was being suggested is that the reality was actually more about how alternatives were framed and not about their “relative value.” It became all too often a zero-sum game. The framing was what strongly influenced the decisions that people made.

Now, some thirty years later, the word “framing” is familiar to a great many people, and certainly it's part of the strategy for both marketeers and political operatives among others. Of course, who would want to pay a “death” tax. Outrageous! But what about a small percentage of the rich paying a very moderate estate tax upon their departure from the living, considering how they benefited from America's political and economic system? Andrew Carnegie, one of the founding fathers of the Gilded Age, did not believe that the children of the rich ought to be handed a pot of gold. This was the United States and we of course did not want to create a parasitic aristocracy. You've been framed.

Now, behavioral economists are looking at how people actually act in making economic decisions, which could influence the kinds of programs that might be developed, not only in dealing with poverty but improving upon the choices we all make—unlike what the traditional economic model claims we have been doing all along. It has been to a large degree a lovely fairy tale. Go ahead, treat yourself and pull out that credit card. You deserve it.

The problem with those people

It seems that so many of the tired, moth-eaten cliches have never gone away and have a life of their own: character flaw, lazy, lack of self-discipline and so forth have been the constant refrain. In my part of the country you only have to follow the state legislatures in Missouri and Kansas to know that obliviousness and general obtuseness have been raised to the level of sacred text.

It's not that an individual might be deemed unambitious, but that an entire class of people or group of individuals have been summarily dismissed as, well, “flawed.”

What makes behavioral economics so compelling is the many studies that have been undertaken and the quantifiable data gathered. It refutes so many of the standard, mythical economic beliefs beloved by the status quo—most obviously the comfortable and the privileged.

In the now well studied Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944, as the allies advanced across Europe, the Nazis let the people of Holland starve. This affected the fetuses of pregnant women, especially those fetuses in the 2^nd and 3^rd trimesters. The fetuses took the cue from their mother's low nutrient intake, but even when the war ended and there was plenty of food, in many cases the “thrifty” metabolism couldn't stop storing calories away. In a number of instances health problems like diabetes developed later on for these children.

We learned that physical deterioration was clearly obvious, but we also observed the mental effects of starvation. Food became the central thought, above anything else. Fast forward more than 60 years later and behavioral economists want to know how mental states along with social and physical environments affect economic activity on a very specific level … realizing that one size (program) does not fit all.

While behavioral economists, like any group of people, can have varied points of view, some basic ideas seem to stand out, oftentimes contrary to the prevailing views. Sendhil Mullainathan, a behavioral economist at Harvard has said that, “To put it crudely, poverty—no matter who you are—can make you dumber.”--anywhere in the world, among any economic class of people.

The gnawing away of cognitive competence, counter-productive decisions, the inability to consider the long-term best interest are all related to what economists refer to as scarcity. While the standard belief is generally that those poor people are poor because they make bad decisions, the behavioral economists believe that people make bad decisions because they are poor, perhaps obvious to some people, but observing (in the U.S.) the Congress, many state legislatures and numerous politicians pontificating on poverty and the poor, you would be hard pressed to locate cognitive competence among these “decision makers.”

This is a complex subject, and while behavioral economics is a central part of economic theory today, for many, it goes against deeply ingrained beliefs and vested interests. Framing is going to matter a lot.

For those who want additional information on the subject the following may be of interest:

Foundation

Herbert A. Simon

The Framing of Decisions andthe Psychology of Choices

The Noise Trader Approach toFinance

$100 Dollar Bills on theSidewalk

History

Brief History of FarmerAlliance, 1880s (How white racism worked against economicself-interest)

Other

Rise in suicide by Black Children Surprises Researchers 

Scarcity: Why Having TooLittle Means So Much

Behavioral Economics andSocial Good

GOP's Vile Anti-Poor Crusade

Improving Decisions AboutHealth, Wealth and Happiness

The New Dictatorships RuleThrough the Velvet Fist

Debate Central (framing):American Combat Troops to Fight ISIL

By by ice shelf

Larsen B, Antarctic

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/video/2015/may/15/antarctic-larsen-b-ice-shelf-nasa-video  

Nature is always changing. You environmentalists and your scare tactics. Don't worry, be happy. We'll study it when we have time.

Save the sacred

Yes, it is our responsibility now.

Climate change once again, and again--and again

When the facts change, I change my mind—what do you do, sir?

(John Maynard Keynes)

A perpetual motion machine for sale

Snake oil salesmen

A number of years ago I was at a global climate change conference in Washington, D.C. One day was devoted to visiting the offices of various senators and representatives. I ran into a cigarette lobbyist, a former congressman from North Carolina, who was visiting the representative from his old district who was a personal friend. We had a pleasant chat before he was ushered into the office of his friend. While we chatted, I wondered what he might have said if I'd told him he was working for a criminal enterprise. Needless to say, back then, I didn't. Probably today I would have.

The fossil fuel industry has run a similar campaign to what the cigarette manufacturers once did. It has worked for a very long time. It's about denial, deception and a belief that the public in general is easily manipulated and by in large not well informed.

How the good guys win

The  fossil fuel industry is condemning us to climate disaster

Responding to climate denial from Australia

Don't worry, fracking is good

Let's take a cruise

Obama's piecemeal policy

Want to make a movie

Global warming not slowing

Believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right 

(George Orwell)

Los Afectados 2015

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.

(Hannah Arendt)

Five years ago this month the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster began in the Gulf sixty miles off the coast of Louisiana. Five years later the region is still suffering the consequences of the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

In the late 1960s the Texaco Petroleum Company got the concession to search for oil in a remote region of Ecuador. Eventually some 16 billion gallons of toxic waste were dumped in one of the most fragile ecosystems in the world, covering approximately 1,500 square miles, about the size of the state of Delaware.

I first wrote about the Ecuadorian oil field called Ispingo-Tiputino-Tamboccocha back in 2007 and again in 2012, see Los Afectados. As well, I had lived in Ecuador in the early 1970s. It is now an old story but still a new story and one that is ongoing.

A major difference, however, is that some forty years later the size of Los Afectados (The Affected Ones) has grown well beyond Ispingo-Tiputino-Tamboccocha, the country of Ecuador and the continent of Latin America.

2015

On March 4, 2014 the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York said that the $9.5 billion Ecuadorian judgment was—regardless of its merit--the product of fraud, racketeering, false testimony and bribery instigated by the plaintiff and its lead attorney, Steven Donziger, with the defendant being Chevron Corp. The judge stated that Chevron did not have to pay anything. It was “unenforceable.”

Some people have referred to this case, which has been going on for some twenty years, as “never-ending litigation,” even though Chevron has some very deep pockets with considerable political influence. According to an analyst with OilPrice.com, Chevron in 2013 in the fourth quarter alone made $4.9 billion.

As of April 2015 the plaintiff expects the case to come before the Canadian Supreme Court. A Chevron subsidiary is developing the Alberta tar sands. Chevron also has assets in Argentina and Brazil, which Donziger has indicated he will go after.

The way the world is

Lost in this endless litigation, political maneuvering and money exchanging hands, the fact is that no one is disputing that a large portion of the Amazon region in Ecuador has suffered serious environmental damage along with crops, soil and water having been contaminated and people getting sick.

Above all else it is the indigenous community voices in the region that may have been drowned out. Will many of them die before there is any conclusion to this case? Will their children have to contend with the same environmental damage?

A brief story

From the plaintiff—LosAfectados

From the defendant—Chevron

From Rolling Stone: SludgeMatch: Inside Chevron's $9 Billion Legal Battle with EcuadorianVillagers

…......

About BP Deepwater Horizon: “The endless horrors of the BP oil spill”

A smoking gun: “ChelseaManning and the Deepwater Horizon Deaths”

I got mine

Was “evil” committed in Ecuador forty years ago? I suppose it depends on your point of view. Did the executives at Texaco know the difference between right and wrong back then? Did the military junta who ran the country care about what happened in the jungle?

Texaco was well aware of “best” practices. They chose to ignore them. I doubt the generals cared at all about indigenous people in the Amazon. They wanted the money. Can Chevron be held responsible for what Texaco did? The government of Ecuador “oversaw and certified” the successful completion of remediation by Texaco. Texaco became a subsidiary of Chevron in 2001. Chevron never drilled for oil in Ecuador. The case of course will play out.

The only real option is confrontation. Unless we afflict the comfortable everywhere, our actual future at the very least will be a dreary 21^st century serfdom. We are Los Afectados across the globe and ultimately we have only ourselves to blame.

So-called science: Climate change

A bit of levity regarding the minds of climate change deniers, but the ultimate consequences are likely to be anything but amusing. The question is as always how do we go about changing those minds or ignoring them completely?

You don't need to know that

Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among the people.

(John Adams, second president of the United States)

This video came out two or three years ago, but it's telling on so many levels that it is worth looking at more than once. The reality is that it may be even more pertinent three years later. The mere “tweaking” of the system will not change anything.

Wealth Inequality in America

The U.S. is now the most unequal of all Western nations and has a lot less social mobility than Canada and Europe. In the 2014 mid-term elections the voter turnout was as low as the 1830 elections, where only white male property owners could vote. It is in the short-term interest of the plutocracy (read globally) to keep it this way.

Source: Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook

Who loves you

Trans-Pacific Partnership

Trust us--it's far too complicated to explain to you. International trade benefits everyone. We understand, you don't have to. We're bringing the world together.... Do what you're told.

The authentic invasive species

Several days ago I received some material from the Sierra Club reminding me to renew my membership, which I had let lapse for a couple of years. What caught my attention however was a short letter that was included in the membership material. The letter read as follows:

“Dear Human:

Imagine that, little by little, your home was taken away from you. The forests and mountains where you once roamed freely disappeared, replaced by roads and concrete buildings.

What if politicians in suits, someplace far away, decided your fate … decided that you, your family, your friends, and neighbors had become a nuisance—a menace—to those who had invaded your home?

And so now, you must die.

Imagine these politicians rallying for your slaughter … ignoring what science has told them, encouraging citizens to hunt you down and kill you.

Imagine your family under attack. Defenseless, with nowhere left to hide, you must dodge bullets from the ground and sky, just to find food for yourself and your young children.

Imagine that, in one of these public hunts, you watched your offspring die.

Then you will know the terror that wolves face every day … and why we so desperately need your help.

After all, you and your fellow humans are the only ones who can save us. Our fate is in your hands.

So I hope you will answer this cry for help. You are our only hope. And time is running out ….”

Murder for fun, profit and prestige

The late, great comedian George Carlin once remarked that we humans can't destroy the Earth. The planet will deal with us without difficulty. I remain optimistic that after humankind vanishes (at least the current variety of Homo sapiens), the remaining life on Earth, as science writer Michael Tennesen says, “ will survive, adapt, diversify, and proliferate.”

I don't want to think that the combination of our technology, slow evolutionary development and general ignorance could actually turn our planet into an uncompromising nightmare like that offered up by the novelist Cormac McCarthy in his novel The Road.

Yet, regardless of whether or not we humans do ourselves in sometime in the future, the mind numbing misery we're inflicting on other species right now is appalling. It is conceivable that up to 50 percent of plant and animal species could have gone extinct by the end of the century. Unlike other mass extinctions, the principal cause this time will most likely be humankind. There's a reason that most scientists refer to our current geologic age as Anthropocene.

Wide areas of Asia currently, because of official corruption, greed, ignorance and even what is casually called “cultural” cuisine, are destroying plant and animal life across the planet at an astonishing rate. We humans have become like the invasive plant kudzu on steroids.

While we collectively—with some notable exceptions—have been killing and destroying most everything around us for thousands of years, it was far less noticeable before the industrial age and a global population under two billion. But now, with a population of more than 7 billion humans and increasing, we are destroying life on Earth on an industrial scale, seemingly unaware of its consequences for us.

So what ought we to do? One possibility certainly is that we may not be able to do anything in time. Fields like neuroscience and behavioral genetics have provided considerable insight in how humans think and process information and why we often do what we do ... but, the “so what” question however can't be tossed aside.

How do we confront, educate and find the resources fast enough to turn the human death cult into a manageable problem at the very least. Cowboy yahoos in the American West, clueless Chinese bourgeoisie desperate for the “bling” of ivory and other human predators are not going away anytime soon.

Maybe it does begins with trying to understand what the wolf could be thinking as he stares at his dead cub bleeding to death from the gunshot wound. Maybe we have to find better ways to talk to narcissistic Homo sapiens. Anyway, I renewed my membership in the Sierra Club. Giving up can't be an option.

For an unvarnished assessment of wildlife destruction read The Politics of Extinction. Getting angry is good but then come up with a plan. We need one right away.

Welfare queens in America

You know, they're just lazy, drug addicts, poorly educated, naturally inclined parasites.... The taker class.

The Best of American Capitalism

White America's secret, part 4

The United States of America is awesome, we are awesome.

(Andrea Tantaros, Fox News TV co-host, responding to U.S. Senate report on torture)

The loneliest moment in someone's life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.

(The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald)

Accepting

It's the unsettling truth that may be the hardest part right now for a large portion of white America; after all, the U.S. has the oldest functioning Constitution in the world, and that might be the problem on any number of levels.

It was the brilliant James Madison, author of the United States Bill of Rights and one of the authors of The Federalist Papers who, in 1787, said, “They ought to be constituted [the nation] as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” Ah, always the dangerous mob, the rabble, a consistent yet unspoken “through-line” of the United States.

Is an 18^th century document going to serve our needs in the 21^st century? Most likely not. Our social and political myths—created most certainly by white America and in particular the “minority of the opulent”--have largely remained intact for more than 200 years. The last occupying foreign army in the United States was the British during the war of 1812.

The many reasons given for not voting in the recent mid-term election represent at the very least intellectual laziness, be they offered by the “millennials,” those that just find the Republican party repugnant and of course the “disenchanted” liberals. But we've reached the point where we can probably say “so what” with some qualifications. The rot has advanced too far.

The Democratic party is a feckless relic, a hollow shell; yet, it possibly could morph into some sort of sane conservative movement, at some point in the future. The handful of genuine Democratic political progressives in the party, and they are only a handful, ought to be spending their time building a new progressive movement elsewhere.

The Republican party, the party of Lincoln, at least outside the benighted Confederacy, is really about the intentional development of an authentic, nativist, totalitarian movement, what the Europeans were familiar with in the 20^th century and that may be once again rearing its head in Europe in the 21^st century.

Black America, more than anyone else, clearly has a compelling reason to develop an organized and disciplined movement, one capable of acquiring greater political power at the national and most definitely at the local level.

The Occupy movement demonstrated that people could come together for political change with a serious moral purpose, but Occupy ultimately floundered and became a minor irritant to the kleptocracy and the political hacks that do its bidding.

We seem to have difficulty accepting the fact at the present time, but radical change is never a brief “get together” without any clear, definable objectives. To succeed, a movement has to ultimately bring in large, diverse groups of people of all ages, who aren't going away under any circumstances.

Of course it's about power, gathering it in and confronting those who refuse to give it up. Above all, it has to be unremitting and offer an understandable alternative to the status quo. This is not something done overnight nor is it a fervent wish for some messianic vision to make it happen.

An excellent time to begin is in January 2015. There will be more than enough motivation to go around. Once again from The Great Gatsby, a novel about illusion: “Americans while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.” Well, we'll find out.

For an interesting documentary on the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the use of police repression and the connections between what happened more than a 100 years ago and today, watch the video below.

The Wobblies: An Actual History of American Labor

IWW

Some Additional Reading and Considering Other Possibilities:

Slavery and Capitalism

The Power of Bad Ideas

America's Ownership Society

The Road to Turkdom

When History Knocks

Let's all screw the 1 percent: Thesimple move Obama could make to strengthen the rest of us

Why Poor People Stay Poor

Why so many wealthy Americans thinkthey're middle class

Big money keeping minoritypoliticians out of office, report says

Why Democrats Can't Win Over WhiteWorking-Class Voters

A scary culture change: What new lawenforcement rhetoric reveals about America

Revealed how the FBI coordinated thecrackdown on Occupy

Nine terrifying facts about America'sbiggest police force

Class warfare from above, 1865-1920

The Radical Paradox of Martin LutherKing's Devotion to Nonviolence

A Grifter For All Seasons in America:Ayn Rand

The GOP's Bad Habit

How to go California

Hens, unbound

We need to pressure the rest of the United States and across the planet. Change can happen. Non-humans--everywhere--deserve more than unremitting human cruelty.

So long 2014

Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot

(Eugene O'Neil, playwright)

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.

(Alan Turing, mathematician)

We live in capitalism. It's power seems inescapable. So did the divine rights of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

(Ursula K. Guin, writer)

“With a little help from my friends”

A small Christmas present for non-humans

Considering how we humans in general treat each other, it's not surprising how we deal with non-humans. But now perhaps one small step in human behavior, but much more to be done.

Argentina: Court grants orangutan basic rights

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/90400fa7a85a4802be8fbb36fededab4/argentina-court-grants-orangutan-basic-rights