…we are still left with a disaster of a war in Afghanistan that cannot be won and that the country as a whole will not support.

Winning in Afghanistan & Pakistan will require that Saudia Arabia stop using our oil dollars to fund the Taliban, their Wahhbi missionaries.  It will also require that Pakistan have blackout-free electricity and adequate supplies of clean water.  The winner will have to deliver shoes, clothes, food and education to the youth of Pakistan and Afghanistan, as the Taliban now do. Further, population growth has to be accounted for in planning and the governments of the US, Pakistan and Afghanistan must be willing and able to pay more than the Taliban.  Currently, the Taliban use their Saudi funding to be the highest wage payers.  Paying dearly to fight and enemy that we are at the same time superbly funding with our mindless energy policies is the height of folly and puts us squarely on the road to disaster.  To make matters worse, our tax policies are not aligned with our military and political objectives.  In fact, our tax policies demonstrate that we are hooked on the magical thinking that we can have it all:  ”guns and butter” with victory on the cheap.  Our opponents know full well that this confirms our lack of commitment and staying power.  Much the same could be said about our drug policies and their internal contradictions.  Why is none of this being broadly discussed here in the US?  Charlie Wilson and the CIA created the Taliban but then we abandoned our friends with the bitter fruit being a Taliban that has morphed into an out of control  monster.  Lastly, we must confront and reduce the level of deeply entrenched and systemic corruption that bedevils all parties in this conflict. Until we honestly face the ground truths listed above, and eliminate the flow of our energy dollars to Saudia Arabia, we will be locked in an unsustainable and un-winnable conflict, largely of our own making.

Author: Jock Gill

In a historical context, we have yet to conceptually realize the philosophical foundations of the 2008-2009 public affirmation of the country’s [Pakistan] judiciary. I do not recall a single modern historical precedent wherein the elected government of the day was almost swept from its incumbency by popular revolt that resulted in re-establishing the country’s superior judiciary headed by the present Supreme Court and its chief justice.

In a country where praetorian, feudal and colonial norms determine social thinking and public behaviour, democracy remains susceptible to anti-democratic challenges. Playing the role of a knight in the service of democracy in Pakistan is neither easy nor follows any set practice since polemical rhetoric or the borrowed and fake robes of a martyr are always seen through by the masses who are being made the target of such an adornment. The people have become as suspicious of the calls of “democracy being in danger” as they are wary of slogans such as ‘Islam in danger’ or ‘stability at any cost’ or ‘Pakistan first’. The weaknesses in the case of those gunning for the independence of judiciary are clearly visible, but its defenders need to see that the task in front of the Supreme Court’s handling of national causes is both delicate and difficult.

Please read the full essay here.

Today, we need to reflect on the lack of meaningful change and the seemingly unchangeable ancien regime of 20th century America.

The Boston Globe ran a front page story on how Corporations invested $100 million per month for ten months, thats a B as in one billion dollars, to stymy change and preserve the legacy approaches of yesteryear. If they could not block Obama’s election, they could make sure no change you could hope for would be enacted.

DailyKos has run an item “No One Is Going To Save You Fools“.

Before I explain the generic insult, let me first make something perfectly clear: I am your enemy. That you don’t know this is understandable: after all, people like me prefer it that way. But until you understand just what you’re up against and why, you’re going to continue to lose, and look like fools in the process.

Barack Obama has indeed sold you out. He and many of his Democratic colleagues have sold you out on healthcare, and they’ve sold you out on financial reform. You were looking for a savior, and you’ve been had–not an altogether atypical result for those looking for a strong leader to “save” them.

He hasn’t done this because he’s a bad guy. In fact, he’s a great guy. I think he’s doing pretty much the best job he can. He’s sold you out because he’s not afraid of you. And really, if I may be so bold, he shouldn’t be afraid of you. You don’t know who really runs the show, and you’re far too fickle and manipulable to count on.

thereisnospoon’s diary :: ::
The first thing you need to understand about healthcare reform is what Jane Hamsher identified long ago: nothing–absolutely nothing–is going to trump the White House’s deal with PhRMA and the insurance industry. The question you need to ask yourselves is: why? If you’re intellectually mature enough to get past “personal betrayal” as your best answer, you’ll be on the right track.

While you ponder that one, you might want to also consider why nothing has been done–nor will anything serious actually be done–about financial industry reform. Standing up to the financial industry in the current political environment should be a no-brainer. So what in the heck is going on here? If you can think past shadowy conspiracy theories and possible personal enrichment for the Obama family, you’ll be doing the kind of thinking that will help actually solve the problem.

The problem is people like me, and the people I work for. I’m what they call a Qualitative Research Consultant, or QRC for short. Here’s my website. There’s even a whole association of us who meet regularly to discuss ideas and tactics. Together with the AAPC, the MRA, the AMA, ESOMAR, and a whole host of other organizations you’ve never heard of, we have more power and control than you know. We’re extremely good at what we do, and we do it all behind the scenes, appealing to and manipulating your subconscious brain in ways that your conscious brain has little to no control over.

Clearly, today, too many politicians are too beholden to corporate money. If we want real change, if we want to spend $1 billion dollars inventing the future and the next release of the Modern Era, we have to begin by getting corporate money out of politics. In a word, we must abolish the entrenched fiction that corporations are persons with constitutional rights. Only when we do this, and restore the prohibition of corporations engaging in political activity, will our elected representatives truly work once again for we the people.

“… The reality, which is that western power is in retreat nearly everywhere, is insistently denied. Yet the rise of China means more than the emergence of a new great power. Its deeper import is that the ideologies of the past century – neoliberalism just as much as communism – are obsolete. Belief systems in which the categories of western religion are reproduced in the guise of pseudo-science, they are redundant in a world where the most rapidly advancing nation state has never been monotheist. Western societies are well worth defending, but they are not a model for all of humankind. In future they will be only one of several versions of tolerable modernity.

For secular western intellectuals to accept this fact would rob their life of meaning. Huddled in the tattered blanket of historical teleology, which tells them they are the leading lights of humanity, they screen out any development that demonstrates their increasing irrelevance. …”

As Gray points out below, this bankrupt intellectual fraud hardly bodes well for our ability to deal successfully with the harsh realities of climate disruption.

The intellectual default of politicians cannot be remedied by returning to the ideologies of the past. It is shared by much of the public, and comes from a chronic inability to engage with reality. Perhaps only a more serious crisis will overturn the delusive fancies on which so many policies are based. A run on sterling in the event of a hung parliament after the next general election; the cataclysmic defeat that will follow Barack Obama’s decision to reinforce inevitable failure in Afghanistan; a spiral in oil prices after a flare-up over Iran; the collapse of the dollar as the world finally loses patience with American solipsism – any one of these eventualities, together with others that cannot be foreseen, could be a catalyst for rethinking.

But the omens are not encouraging. The make-believe that surrounds climate change – epitomized in the empty statements of intent regarding unachievable goals that will be the only outcome of the Copenhagen meeting – shows that the biggest challenge for the future is being evaded. It looks as if we may be wandering in the ruins of the Noughties for some time.

A design goal of Modern Era 2.0 should be a cure for what Gray calls “a chronic inability to engage with reality”. This is but one of many very serious ‘bugs’ in the systems software of Modern Era 1.0

Do you really think 100,000 contractors and 30,000 more troops in Afghanistan are about do for the Afghans what we will not, cannot, do for ourselves? And if we cannot, do not, what chance of success do we have there? Or Iraq? Or at home? Where is the change we can believe in? When will Obama stand up to the monied interests of Wall Street and the Military Industrial Complex?

If what people see is mainly greed and rigid ideologies run amok and contaminating the highest levels of our government, what should they believe? We talk one talk, but we walk quite another walk. In a word, our propaganda and our actions are in conflict and provide no reliable reference point. Would you trust anyone who did this?

Paul Stamets on 6 ways mushrooms can save the world

What, then, is the soil, the essential foundation, of our economy and Western culture? Perhaps it is entrepreneurial start ups, small business and enterprises on Main Street. These have historically been the largest generators of jobs. If this economic soil, like the soils of our forests and fields, has been over-mined and voraciously exploited by the industrial model, then is it any wonder we have a jobless recovery? After all, the government’s economic soil amendments have, so far, gone to the largest and most predatory businesses in America, especially to the too-big-to-fail banks and car companies. What do we call banks that will not loan Main Street and small businesses our very own tax dollars? Our money that they are now handing out as bonuses to the already rich? Is this any way to restore the soils that support our very economic well being?

Properly inoculated biochar is, in many ways, all about restoring the carbon content as well as the health and vitality of the living soils of our forests and fields — as well as many other environmental benefits. What is the biochar analog we need to apply to the economic soils that nurture and support entrepreneurial start ups, small businesses, and Main Street? If we want to have a recovery that provides plentiful jobs, we had better find that analog and start applying it as soon as possible.

Update:

“Jane D’Arista is an economist with the Financial Markets Center in Philomont, VA. She is a Research Associate with the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) and author of the masterful study of U.S. financial regulation, The Evolution of U.S. Finance. For more than thirty years, Jane D’Arista has been one of the country’s most insightful analysts of financial markets and regulation.”

D’Arista was interviewed by The RealNews Network to create “Anatomy of casino capitalism”. The interview is presented in 8 parts. Please be sure to watch all 8 parts. If you do, you will have some pretty good ideas about what needs to be done to start rebuilding our economic soils and preserving some vestige of Economic Sovereignty.

Watch all 8 episodes here.

Read her Oct. 29th testimony before the US House’s Committee on Financial Services here.

The critical question at hand is simply this: Can the carbon captured by photosynthesis and converted by pyrolysis to stable agricultural charcoal, Biochar, properly inoculated with minerals, microbes, fungi, etc, be used today to:

1. improve soil quality &  crop yields?  Are our soils at an optimum carbon content level for best yields?  Could healthier soils feed more people? It worked in the Amazon for the Amerindians.

Soil fertility is complex.  It is important to understand why carbon is essential to soil fertility. Humic substances do the same thing as biochar/Terra preta – facilitate cation exchange capacity. Biochar and humic substances have a common parent material, lignin, and form the same type of functional groups on their surfaces. If you look at a textbook rendition of their molecular structures, lignin, humic acid and char, they are similar. It’s just that biochar is much more stable, especially in tropical or semi-arid environments. Very little humus forms in tropical soils. The parent material simply rots too quickly.

2. Act to remediate water quality, esp. caused by runoffs of E. coli and Phosphorus? Phosphorus needs to be re-captured as the supply is tight and costs will be going up.  Allowing it to run off  and ‘escape’ from the fields is bad economically and environmentally.

3. Sequester carbon for 1,000s of years thus contributing to “Low Carbon Agriculture” and perhaps even carbon negative foods?  

 4. Make better use of millions of tons of agricultural residues currently simply burned in the fields?  We know this also adds carbon soot to the atmosphere which is bad for health and is a significant climate change driver.  Agricultural residues could be used in a domestic pyrolysis unit for carbon negative cooking, heating and biochar production.  The biochar could be mixed with compost, animal manures, and urines – excellent sources of minerals. This enriched mixed would then be re-cycled back to the fields.

5. Reduce the amount of fossil-fuel-based fertilizers required?

6. Be used as a forest management tool to improve forest soils etc.?

7. With Biochar’s ability to retain water, is it a useful tool for fighting desertification? Drought and general lack of rain fall is expected to be a growing problem in many areas as a consequence of climate disruption.

I refer interested parties to this paper as reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

See pages 4 & 5 esp. on Biochar.

The paper is described here:

Additionally, the International Biochar Initiative [IBI] has addressed most of the issues raised about biochar in the research summaries and FAQs that are on their web site.

The Research Summaries are here and the FAQs are here. 

It should be noted that the United Nations has just issued a report that over a billion people aren’t getting enough to eat.  We can, in all likelihood, reproduce the same proven, historical, benefits of agricultural charcoal by feeding soil biota with biochar and nutrients so that growing enough food to feed large populations becomes much easier. Then, of course, we get the added bonuses, including sequestering GHGs.

In conclusion, Biochar can be very useful today, even if it is not exactly the same as Terra preta. In fact, this is not at all about recreating Terra preta.  It is truly about learning how to use stabilized carbon today to improve soils, water, forests, the atmosphere, and make use of the renewable thermal energy produced by pyrolysis.  In short, plants capture carbon via photosynthesis.  The immediate question facing us now is how can we best use that carbon, stabilized by pyrolysis, to meet as many of our current goals as possible?

The single most important take away is that biochar is expected to be very useful IMMEDIATELY in the seven [7] areas I mentioned above.

Note: I owe thanks to Paul D. McCullough , Nando M. Breiter of the The CarbonZero Project, and Kelpie Wilson of the IBI, for materials and suggestions that made this a better post.

It is critical to understand that, starting in 1980 with Pres. Reagan, our public health infrastructure has been eviscerated. After all, if the government can do no good and is by definition “the problem”, why pay for a public health infrastructure?

The real problem is that now we are facing a sharp peak, an exponential rate of growth, in the H1N1 pandemic. This peak will range from about October 15 – November 21. A consequence of Pres. Reagan’s political philosophy, and resultant under-funding of public health, is that, now that we need all of the benefits of a public health infrastructure to inform, guide and help us weather this storm, we have to ask if we actually have what we need. Do we know what is happening in enough detail in time to make the best decisions in a timely and effective manner?

H1N1 may yet again prove the fallacy of the the notion that only the private sector can solve our problems and the public sector can never be the answer. The spike in absenteeism caused by H1N1, for example, is apt to have a measurable impact on 4th quarter GDP. Will this have political consequences in the mid-term elections? Will the fruits of the Reagan era, and all of their unintended negative consequences, be blamed on the current Administration?

A key test is whether the government, despite the Reagan/Bush heritage, will have enough information to be able to offer sufficiently accurate information and appropriate timely responses to maintain public trust. This remains to be seen. There is already evidence of institutions in Washington sending employees home when a co-worker develops H1N1 but swearing the employees to secrecy. This intellectually dishonest ‘cover up’ denies the public health services the very data they must have to maintain the public’s trust. How long will this be tolerated?

So far we have seen the disastrous results of the Reagan/Bush philosophy of the government and its regulations as always being the problem, and never right, in the current economic and housing turmoil we are suffering through. We are seeing the same terrible consequences of the view that the private sector is the only and best answer when it comes to the bloated cost of our fragmented healthcare system that still leaves 10s of millions of American uninsured or under-insured. H1N1 may show us another tragic consequence of the blighted and simplistically one sided views of the market fundamentalist.

The question everyone should be asking is: What can the private sector in the US get right at all? Not Wall Street. Not automobiles. Not healthcare for all. Not secure home ownership you can believe in. Not a stable and secure environment that gets better from generation to generation. Not soils that have increasing carbon content and biological vitality. Not a diet that does not promote diabetes and other costly health problems. Not secure employment with a retirement plan to you can trust to be there when you need it. And the list goes on. Not even a job for everyone who wants one.

The answer is simply that neither the private sector nor the public sector is sufficient. Both are limited by imperfect knowledge and constrained by the seven deadly sins, human nature. It is clearly necessary for both the private and public sectors to work together to overcome these endless limitations as best they can.

America will not regain its vitality until the private and public sectors, working together, instead of against one another, form a synergy that is greater than the sum of the parts. This will require the re-establishment of the separation of State, Church, and the Private Sector. This would truly be Change We Can Believe In.

Myth X: The market functions well enough today because it’s pricing function is accurate.

My thesis is that the pricing function we have today is actually pathological and is based on playing with crooked dice and marked cards. We want the answer to be “cheap” — so we lie to ourselves, cheat, and rig our pricing function to get the answer we want.

When I ask people if they want a healthy atmosphere, healthy soils and clean water, they all say yes. If I ask what the value of these three conditions is, they have a very hard time ‘pricing’ them. Nor can they price the cost of NOT doing anything to keep our natural world clean and safe.

On the other hand, many people understand that the price of a soda pop, for example, should include all of its end-to-end costs with no externalities allowed. Include the cost of filling up the land fill, of causing obesity & diabetes, of bad nutrition, of the carbon foot print of trucking sugar water anywhere, perhaps even include the energy ‘wasted’ making a non essential ‘food’., etc. etc. etc.

Now, if we apply end-to-end pricing to fossil fuels, a much more accurate pricing function, then what happens, for example, to the price,of coal when its price includes ALL of the environmental damage it does [air, water, soils, landscape], the health hazards it creates, etc? If we do the same with fossil fuels from insecure and vulnerable off shore sources, then we must also include the military costs of defending them. What then becomes the honest price of Oil? Natural gas? Atomic power?

In general, we profess that we do not want to dictate people’s choices. We want to be free to inflict damages on our neighbors. But should we expect to pay for the damages of our choices up front? Most states require people to take reasonable steps to reduce the burden of emergency healthcare: seat belts and bike safety helmets come to mind. What about the damages people’s energy choices can inflict? Should we impose at least a $1.00 per gallon carbon tax on fossil transportation fuels? Or would it be more honest and market oriented to require end-to-end energy pricing, with no externalities?

Now, if we had an honest and all inclusive end-to-end pricing function, could we then eliminate ALL subsidies for all energy? Which would be more honest: Removing all subsidies and tax loopholes from fossil transportation fuels or layering on a $1.00 tax? Which choice would actually do the most to improve the health of the atmosphere, the soils and our water, while also improving the health of the market economy?

How would these two policy choices change the playing field? Can we model this?

On a related topic, David Yarrow led a small team of dedicated biochar supporters and had a great day at Shelburne Farms yesterday. One thing that became very clear is that it much more powerful to give people a positive story to be for, than it is to give them a negative story to be against.

For example, I would share my vision of hundreds of homes in a local community heating with carbon negative pyrolysis systems and selling or trading their resultant biochar back to their local Community Supported Agriculture farms. This creates a virtuous cycle where their CSAs could, completing the loop, start providing them with Nutrient-Dense Carbon-Negative foods. As people heated their homes, instead of feeling guilty, they would be looking forward to more nutritious and healthier foods in the coming summer and forever afterwards for generations to come. Further, as the biochar in the fields builds up, carbon negative pyrolysis heating will also help keep the waters clean by mitigating run off contamination.

The people I shared this vision with understood and were amazed at the possibility of even thinking that we could tie our heating systems and our food systems together in a new configuration that would help improve the health of the atmosphere, our soils and our water. They were excited to BE FOR this idea that warmth, food and cleaner water could be integrated into something greater than the sum of its parts. Liberating people from silo thinking, feeling guilty, and hopeless can be very energizing.

It is simply not good enough, not effective, to only offer guilty choices of bad or less bad, high carbon vs low carbon solutions. Our challenge is to invent solutions that can be embraced, will be embraced, because they are positively good for you and your future generations. We need solutions people want to embrace and feel good about embracing. Solutions that offer an enhanced view of the future, not a diminished one. We will do best to go beyond solutions that only offer people the option of feeling less guilty. This is the most likely way to create a positive feed-back loop that may be able to take these new approaches ‘viral’.

Of course, another alternative is for things to go way wrong and create situations where the governments are reduced to imposing rationing and other controls in response to chaos induced by climate disruption.

Additional Biochar resources:

1. Biomass Magazine

2. The Economist

3. Biochar Conference at UMass Amherst, Nov. 13, 2009

4. Introduction to Biochar: Six Posters from IBI

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Is it even remotely possible that Jefferson and his co-signers had even a shred of intent that the Declaration apply also to corporations? Are corporations, in fact, the product of the same extraterrestrial “Creator” who, by creating man, ‘endowed’ him with ‘certain unalienable rights’? I find the argument that a creating God also created corporations, thus endowing them with the same unalienable rights as human beings, to be completely incomprehensible and utterly unimaginable. Ridiculous, even.

In that the Revolutionary war was fought, in part, to establish independence from the monopoly powers of The East India Company, the first multi-national corporation, it seems unlikely that it would have even crossed Jefferson’s mind that his words would apply to anyone other than human beings.

It is perhaps revealing that the notion of corporate personhood was the fiction of a railroad man, then clerk of the Supreme Court, invented to further the profits of the 19th century railroads. This fiction realized President Lincoln’s fears concerning the unintended consequences of his dealings with railroads in support of his efforts to win the Civil War.

Jefferson, the product of his education and readings, is well known as a champion of the values of The Age of Enlightenment, especially science, freedom of religion with separation of church and state, and the primacy of the human spirit. Jefferson’s Enlightenment view of the world was eloquently captured in his Declaration of Independence, as is well spelled out in the popular Ken Burns production on the life of Jefferson.

How Jefferson must be spinning in his grave as contemporary America has rejected his vision of America’s future and, instead, gone down an anti-Enlightenment path: the rejection of science, the co-mingling of church and state, with the primacy of the multi-national corporate world view.

Take science. Jefferson would have embraced the study of global warming, and would have been disappointed by the anti-science deniers. Jefferson would have been fascinated by a biographical film on the life of Charles Darwin. He would have been shocked that only in post-enlightenment, neo-religious America is such a film without distribution. But this is the sad reality of today’s post-enlightenment America.

Change We Can Believe In

It is perfectly clear today, that, if we are to re-invigorate the American experiment in self governance, we must re-assert the primacy of the core values of The Enlightenment as embodied in the Declaration of Independence. The American experiment only exists as an affirmation of these values. If we reject these “self evident truths”, as we appear to be currently doing, we also, in fact, reject Jefferson and his Declaration of Independence.

From Jefferson’s perspective, “Change We Can Believe In” can mean only one thing, the re-affirmation and restoration of the ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence, the foundation the American Experiment rests so precariously on today. Can President Obama rise to this challenge? Does he have the courage and the political will to disrupt the status quo of the last 130 years? If not, will he be content to preside over the failure of the American Experiment?