The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis & The Fate of Humanity
By James Lovelock
Basic Books, 2007
208 pages

Piggy was right: we must have rules and that is not just to be applied to the English. This morning I buzzed my cell door and it didn’t open as the man at the desk had decided that too many people were taking advantage of his good nature and breaking the rules, so he was letting those out who belonged out: one by one.
And the big rules are not created by us but in some way we must try to formulate what they are and map out our behaviour, so as to conform to these rules.
This non conformity to the rules became painfully obvious to those of us who built on the response of Rachell Carsons’ Silent Spring and created the environmental movement from whole cloth curing the late 60s.
The 1st Earth Day in the spring of 1970 and the subsequent enactment into law of the EPA was the culmination of this first wave of serious environmental work.
From that period, environmentalism became an integral part of my life, but I soon realized that Capitalism would not yield to anything but revolution or collapse and that revolution was a pipedream and collapse, which we are now facing, and what the Revenge of Gaia deals with, would be recognized after it was too late to do anything about, which is the primary message of James Lovelock’s concise book about his conception: Gaia.
Having been fortunate enough to live down the road from this very wise man, for 3 1/2 years, I can deeply feel his sense of loss as the country is desecrated for the sake of ‘filthy lucre’.
I could not visit Lovelock – we have mutual friends – as I was living underground.
The part of Devon – South Hampshire – that I inhabited was a snapshot of the past preserved into the present.
I followed those 3 ½ years with 9 ½ years in a relatively untouched area of South West France, the Charente. Those years in the surroundings wherein nature had not become an aspect of manufacturing food or a theme park became even more poignant in retrospect as I read Lovelock’s elegy for a planet that he feels is headed for a future relatively free of human beings, with a sharply reduced populating living around the poles under the aegis of brutal war.
Steven Mithen, one of our great experts in human prehistory expressed similar sentiments in a recent NYROB review. “The human story is so far without an end, but is probably heading for inevitable global catastrophe.” (October 23, 2009, p. 44)
It is based on a deeper understanding of the ecological context in which we live and a long view, based on scientific data, that is deeply aware of what we are doing to our protective surround. It is a view I share.
It is the main reason I began to move beyond ecology as a primary focus, though I kept my hand in enough to lecture on the environment throughout the 70s and served as the director of the Philadelphia Sun Day Celebration in 1977.
But the crash course in concentrated reading and interacting with ecologists that I did from 1967-1971 made me aware that we could not sustain the energy expenditure that capitalism was slowly making de rigueur, through advertising and deeper study, 1974-6, of development theory only reinforced.
Systems theory made it obvious that the entire biosphere was interconnected and essentially a singly system, thus the concept of Gaia gave me no problem and global warming as human created had been a concern, if expressed in a different way, before the bells began ringing.
The systemic destruction of Gaia that Lovelock is bemoaning has been obvious to me for a long while and when large systems break, the results are not linear.
What that means are many events that we can’t even begin to imagine, most if not all of them negative.
Destruction that will dwarf New Orleans and render our best efforts null and void.
Lovelock’s short book is full of sadness and anger for what we have done to Gaia.
He does not harp upon the massive die off he sees coming, but he is evidently heartbroken about what he sees and the envisioned result of what he sees. So ami, yet I can’t mourn for the going of the shallowness I see everyplace I look and the abject triviality that popular TV culture reflects.
We deserve better.
Perhaps life at the poles will open our eyes to the beauty of this blue earth and trach us to preserve it.
Let the remnant do so.

Hormonal chaos: The Scientific and Social Origins of the Environmental Endocrine Hypothesis
By Sheldon Krimsky
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002
256 pages

To come to any understanding of the time we lie in the study of stress is essential. It is one of the key factors that must be included in any deep analysis of our increasing hectic and uncertain modern world now everywhere due to cell phones, Twitter and the other great interrupters which now define our life.
There is no escape as many wedding or funeral attendees have found out when U.S. bombs have turned a solemn ceremony into a bloody mess.
As the now deceased Norman Mailer said about fifty years ago: “we live in a time that interrupts the mood of everything alive.”
He thought that interruption was cancerous – an intuitive leap that has turned out to be true, but perhaps ultimately more important are those regulators of mood: our hormones, and the endocrine system that our evolutionary history has created to regulate them.
They help create the internal context in which we live, breathe and act out our daily ritual of living that is now under threat from a global climate change that is partially of our own creation, due to the profligacy of our energy rich life style; a change that some say has gone beyond the point of our ability to stop the catastrophe that massive climate change implies, for the food that sustains us is deeply constrained by the need for the climate it has evolved with.
Bottom line: the provisions that maintain our existence are deeply threatened by the uncertainty introduced into their growing seasons by the climate change now underway.
We have also introduced into our environment endocrine disrupters whose action upon us in the foetal state – a time when millions of biochemical reactions must occur with clocklike precision if a healthy organism, which can reproduce, is to be born and live out an adequate life.
These disrupters, in minute amounts that cause no apparent harm to the adult organism can produce an entire range of problems in the foetus which manifest years later in ADHD, lowered sperm count, breast cancer and a whole host of other problems that “could change the character of human societies.”
The scientific and social process that leads to the awareness of the dangers to our very survival is the theme of Sheldon Krimsky’s book.
In 5 crystal clear chapters he describes the process that lead to public recognition of the threat posed by the unthinking use of chemicals. Chemicals which have been integral to our body and threatening to both our moods and our future.
It would be interesting to know about the body states, with reference to chemical impact discussed in this book, of those who participated in and watched a long gang rape in Oakland during the last week.
Such impulsive, unthinking, uncaring behaviour is indicative of the changes that are “changing the character of human societies” wherein people kill women and children, through the use of suicide bombs or drone propelled missiles as if they were in a computer game.
Our freedom is progressively abused in the name of national security in spite of electing a constitutional lawyer as president.
The dreams of many for a just humane society are bowing in the wind.

Mothers and others: the evolutionary origins of mutual understanding
By Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
Belknap Press, 2009
432 pages

Science proceeds by minute particulars. Every statement must be backed up by a citation. If one is to earn the right to make a radical statement, as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy does at the end of her excellent book on the reproductive success of the human ape, it is necessary to base it on hundreds of pages of cited material/
The research is thorough and up to date as far as a general amateur can tell.
The tonus is that of a caring wise old soul who sees something precious slipping away, just as its value is being recognized.
The focus of scholar is contextual – the function of most early anthropology was to reinforce the patriarchal forces that now are seen to be a product of a particular historical shift away from an economy of hunter/gathering that was use directed and egalitarian in nature with plenty of leisure, to a hierarchical society of acquisition and protection of those acquisitions that generated social forms to protect those acquisitions. That required certainty regarding conception – that son is really my son – heirs and a form of generational transfer that protected the acquisitions.
The patriarchal remnants of these patterns were reinforced by those early anthropologists and later shifted towards historical explanation that reinforced such patterns of control. Hunters were predominant as was the idea of a killer ape.
Most of this is now history as the entrance of women into the academic professions that collect archaeological, anthropological, neurological and bio-chemical data, just to mention a few of the disciplines, that are consulted to write a book such as “Mothers and Others”, that are now replete with new eyes: those of women who as Justice Sotomayor said correctly will see things in a different way.
“But the data”, another voice may say.
Data depends upon categories which are both arbitrary and limited by the context and perceptual history of the collector.
Do not collect information on post-menopausal apes (humans fit into this category) and they can’t figure in the theory based upon facts. Thus a great deal of what Blaffer Hrdy is trying to tell us just didn’t exist until researcher reviewed past data with new eyes and began to include grandmothers and other older women in their thinking.
A new category can often be a strange attractor around which all the old data suddenly coalesce into a new theory.
I must repeat this: perception is transactional and contextual. We perceive and consequently categorise what our history and context conditions us to see. Anyone who spends a bit of time studying the 20th century can immediately see the failure of patriarchal forms and our recent economic mess would add capitalism to the junk heap.
Thus, whether the actual theory and temporal framework that Blaffer Hrdy puts forth is totally correct is not that important.
What is important is the tendency that her work represents: a shift towards a deeper understanding of empathy, altruism and other generous emotions, not as supreme, but as a balance, a dialectical opposition to the selfishness that has guided our theories and actions.
Those who can do this have something missing: a father is led into a torture chamber. A naked adolescent girl is hanging from a hook in the ceiling. She had been brutally flogged. Her face was distorted by swelling and bleeding. She had been slashed again and again by a razor. She is revived by a bucket of water. She is whipped savagely for several minutes. Then raped in front of her father. She was raped again and again in the next cell throughout the night as her father listened to her cries and moans.

They have not been fully inducted into the human family by adequate nurturing and the attachment that flows from such nurturing.
Something has not taken and Blaffer Hrdy is now suggesting that we are creating a world in which the majority will be nurtured this way.
It is another catastrophe to add to the list of indicators that what is upon us is a great transition, perhaps one that will erase us from the earth or perhaps one that will produce a new species by turning on genes that are now inactive and putting our extreme plasticity to good use.

The Age of Entanglement: when quantum physics was reborn
By Louisa Gilder
Knopf, 2008
464 pages

The elevation of physics during the course of the 20th century to a position of great eminence – as evidenced by the billions spent on devices that allow us to both peer back in time and deep within the atomic nucleus – is due to the creation of two theories: relativity and quantum mechanics brought to birth by mainly German thinkers.
The creator of relativity, Albert Einstein, was deeply involved in the discussion that evolved in connection with the problems related to the creation and interpretation of quantum mechanics (Q.M.) as Einstein was never convinced that Q.M. produced an adequate or complete picture of the atomic world.
His decades long debate with Neils Bohr the father of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Q.M. is the most fascinating argument in modern physics. It is one that is well documented, forming the core of Louisa Gilder’s sparkling book on the problem of entanglement – the apparent influence of one particle on another, during an act of measurement that appears to transcend all material limitation, thus producing an instantaneous effect, irrespective of distance.
She traces this ‘spooky action at a distance’ – from a small barely heard leitmotiv to full-blown center stage focus in an aria whose end and un-standing is nowhere in sight.
She does it in a manner of great empathy by using primary and secondary documents to take you inside the lives of those who were involved in the over 80 years long debate that is key to our physical understanding of the world that surrounds us.
The Age of Entanglement is a delicious read for anyone who enjoys intellectual challenge and can savor just how strange the world is now seen to be by those struggling to understand the edge of physical thinking in the 21st century.

Eifelheim
By Michael Flynn
Tor Books, 2006
320 pages

Eifelheim by Michael Flynn was an unusual science fiction book as it created a depth of character that is rare in science fiction which is often long on ideas but deeply lacking in depth of character, depending on stick figures to convey its ideas.
The novel is set in medieval Germany in a small hill village not far from the Black Forest.
For over 300 pages I was transported back and forth between a medieval German world that felt as real as an created by more conventional historical novels and a rather pedestrian present that felt disemplaced in contrast to the richness of Dasein communicated by a parish priest on the run, the lord of the castle, the folk who lived in the village and the aliens who crash-landed onto the wrong planet.
The gradual integration of the aliens into a medieval village, the conveyance of Christianity as a lived presence and the ability to depict alien personalities without destroying their diffence (they were in essence large grasshoppers with advanced technology) was a continual pleasure to read, irrespective of the feeling that the plot machinery, that took us from time to time back to some now wherein what we were reading was being researched and a new physics was being developed, just didn’t work well.
In spite of those interruptions, and a new physics that can be thrown on a pile with all the rest that can’t quite produce a new cosmos, I read every page with great avidity.
Eifelheim is a book that is suffused with humanity and a spirit of rare openness.
It is a delight to read.
I will read more of Michael Flynn and respond when the response is apt.
Days after I closed the book, I could still feel the village and its inhabitants under total siege from the plague.
I also felt strongly that the author is a fine novelist and should perhaps have a go at a conventional novel as his gift for conveyance of character and place is rare.

The Shock Doctrine
By Naomi Klein
Picador, 2008
720 pages

“An armed conflict between nations horrifies us. But the economic war is no better than an armed conflict. This is like a surgical operation. An economic war is prolonged torture. And its ravages are no less terrible than those depicted in the literature on war properly so called. We think nothing of the other because we are used to deadly effects… the movement against war is sound. I pray for its success. But I cannot help the gnawing fear that the movement will fail if it does not touch the root of all evil – human greed.” M. K. Gandhi (p. 141)

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein is the book so far published in the 21st century that it is most vital to read if you have any activist concern or a real desire for chance in your blood.
Obama must deal in a sharply circumscribed arena practising the art of the possible with a new grace and politesse that can change the tone, but it would take 4 Obamas in succession to bring about the downfall of greed and hypocrisy that clogs the American air.
Klein has created a Weberian ideal type – a tool for explaining the planetary political situation since the late 60s. That tool, puts Chomsky, Zinn and many others into a common context that can be grasped by anyone who is willing read her 600 pages and do some thinking. The form she has created (the ideal type) maps the reality close enough to be extremely useful.
If read honestly, it makes one thing obvious: the economic constraints that the U.S. have foisted on the planet under the aegis of CIA money (thus using proxies), the U.S. Marines, and the IMF and the World Bank has produced as much death and destruction as Mao, Stalin or Pol Pot. A destruction that is more insidious for being done under cover of an economic theory that has little basis in fact and an abysmal track record, and runs counter to the economic history of the United States.

“Today I resigned from the staff of the International Monetary Fund after twelve years, and after 1000 days of official fund work in the field, hawking your medicine and your bag of tricks to governments and to peoples in Latin American and the Caribbean and Africa. To me resignation is a price less liberation, for with it I have taken the first big step to that place where I may hope to wash my hands of what in my mind’s eye is the blood of millions of poor and starving peoples… the blood is so much, you know, it runs in rivers. It dries up, too; it cakes all over me; sometimes I feel that there is not enough soap in the whole world to cleanse me from the things I did in your name.” Davison Budhoo (p. 329)

The doctrine itself, derived from mind control experiments of Ewen Cameron performed at McGill universities Allen Memorial Institute during the 1950s when the CIA was desperate to find ways to break prisoners suspected of being communists and double agents.
These programs were part of the Cold War hysteria – Google: Project Bluebird, Project Artichoke and MK-ULTRA or read Walter Bowart’s Operation Mind Control wherein my overt part in the mind control situation is discussed – that became part of the background “knowledge” in the intelligence community, used as training methods in CIA torture schools, employed during the economic breakdowns during the last 45 years, as demonstrated again and again in this book to a chilling degree and now featured in the torture reports emanating from Gitmo, rendition sites and Bagham, now all over the media. The discussion is now everywhere.
The disregard for human life that this book documents, particularly in the context of recent disclosures, makes any attempt by American political leaders to claim the moral high ground ludicrous.
We are complicit in the death of tens of millions; deaths that go back to initial experiments in sensory overload and sensory deprivation that I have been studying for over 50 years under the general rubric: STRESS.
Stress reduces the individual’s necessary relationship to the physical and emotional environment that maintains the basis sense of meaning, order and value which constitute our sense of self or identity.
Solitary confinement reduces sensory intake, a great part of which is the continual interaction with others. Without that interaction, regression and diseases begin to fill the vacated space. Recent research on many of our young who relate electronically, not physically, are showing physical and psychic disease patterns that are a warning signal that we must heed.
What Klein has demonstrated in case study after case study, in The Shock Doctrine, is the utter immoral nature of capitalism for it recognizes no boundaries and will destroy whatever attempts to impede it.
It is perhaps the most dangerous creation that humans have created, for the behaviour described in chapter after chapter in this book can only be called legal insanity. We have been torturing a good deal of the planet under the cover of economic medicine. Klein’s book can be considered as a footnote to that simple statement.
It is now poised to destroy the entire planet in its suboptimizing quest for profit at any cost.

Greenland is melting, the Antarctic is disintegrating, yet those who brought you subprimes, infinite leverage and billion dollar yearly pay checks are basically unrepentant, wishing as Goldman-Sachs to escape from government regulations, so that profit may rule and the people be damned.
It goes beyond Obama and his desire to restore equilibrium, to a deep survival instinct, to an unmitigatable anger, to the knowledge that those in charge of our daily bread and the environment that produces it care only about dollars and will destroy us in their greed driven quest for it.
The data is laid out clearly in The Shock Doctrine. The daily headlines scream it. Where is the anger that such behaviour should produce?
And deeper where are the actions that will return the planet to people who care for people and will rip the controls out of the hands of the crazies in charge.

The Swarm: a novel
By Frank Schätzing
William Morrow, 2006
896 pages

The Swarm is a massive (896 large size pages) attempt to awaken us to the ecological danger that looms. It is packed with scientific fact that will send the curious general reader upon many a surfing expedition. It is a readable translation from a German original. It will keep you turning pages and give your emotions a workout; it will also introduce you to a spectrum of technology – clearly described – that will broaden your perspective.
The anti-Americanism is a reflection of just how low W., Cheney and company have brought us and probably justified. It is the pivot upon which the book turns.
The best I read, and I read a lot, say we have gone over the edge and that the ecosystem of which we are an integral part is broken. Schätzing gives us a happy ending that will or has increased sales, but there are a few things that the book underlines that are much more significant than “they lived happily ever after”.
1. We seem totally unable to sustain a long view – this is well dramatized by the total memory of the ocean species Schätzing creates.
2. “People are losing their significance. Everyone’s replaceable. There are no ideals any more, and without ideals, there’s nothing to make us more important than we are.” (p. 299)
3. “The problem… is that our first simulation was based on largely linear assumptions. But real life isn’t linear. We’re dealing with developments that are chaotic, and, in some cases exponential.” (p. 333)

Our present crisis – human created – has introduced us to chaotic and exponential effects. 9/11 and Mumbai are bookends to such effects. Having written seven books in the last four years about what Schätzing has conveyed so well – our sleep in relation what is coming – I got the chills, of ten, as I read The Swarm.
The oligarchy in control has lost control. The chaotic and exponential changes that we are facing due to our environmental insouciance – an environment we don’t control and don’t understand – will overwhelm us and guarantee the contempt of those fated to live in our wake.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Michael Pollan
Penguin Press, 2006
464 pages

The decline of America is obvious to anyone who examines disease statistics, a great deal of which must go back to what America puts in its mouth as fuel for maintaining a life style that is more akin to a robot than anything human.
Michael Pollan tells a good part of the recent history of that story in his Omnivorse’s Dilemma – those who have some knowledge of P.T. Barnum will understand how it happened.
Vanada Shiva’s statement: “we’re still eating the leftovers of World War II” has lead to Todd Dawson’s statement: “when you look at the isotope ratios, we North Americans look like little corn chips with legs.”
Those two statement are put into historical perspective and explained in detail in Pollan’s fascinating and very important book.

The entire horror is epitomized by another quote whish is descriptive of the DEATH in life that I’ve experienced since my return t the USA in 2001 after a twenty year absence.
“For though the farm might feed 129, it can no longer support the 4 who live on it.” “Nor can it feed the family.” (p. 34)
The sadness of that statement is the story of the USA at present, perhaps a question of product differentiation re: Gertrude Stein: “There is no there, there.” She was talking about Oakland. I would extend her metaphor to the entire country.

All sense of proportion has been lost whether it has to do with our overworked and depleted soil and work force, our dying bee population that is trucked from place to place, without a period of rest/hibernation, until the bees literally die from exhaustion, or our Indian Ocean bomber crews who fly over six hours daily to shoot and bomb a handful of bad guys at a cost that dwarfs the subprime fiasco.

When I came across a few diggers – Peter Coyote among them – taking machines apart in a San Francisco apartment in 1965, I took deep note of the activity and filed it away. Today I would train a child in basic insurgency activities and exactly what Peter and Kent were doing over 40 years ago.
The financial meltdown, though unexpected to most – a black swan – was not a surprise to me. But much worse is coming, as our entire civilization is built on sand dunes and a tsunami lurks just off shore.
Pollan knows this, but as with so many right thinking liberal Americans, he is repressing the full implications of what he knows and he knows a lot about the basis of the disaster and provides the reader of Omnivorse’s Dilemma with a raft of clear and concise facts about the nature and extent of our growing crisis.
To deal directly with the crisis he would have to mention Marx who is still our best guide to the system, Capitalism, which has replaced the Christian God with a god of its own, the market and elevated profits, a suboptimizing linear variable, which has lead to a family farm feeding 129 others, but can no loner support the four who live on it or most important: feed them!
Our economic system works soil and bees to death, not to mention people. It has lead to an unimaginable greed that has produced this latest destructive act: the ruination of the lives of tens and tens of millions of people. It is a system without heart that treats people as mechanical disposable parts.
How this applies to the most basic of our needs, Food, is the subtext of this book, for what has happened to our food is due to capitalism and the profit motive. It has nothing to do with our health or the most basic enjoyment of life: sharing a meal with family and friends.

We are supping petroleum (page 45) and from the standpoint of industrial efficiency it’s too bad we can’t simply drink the petroleum directly (page 46).
Think on the implications of this statement: “There’s money to be made in food, unless you’re trying to grow it.” (page 95)
The entire system reflects our growing madness and the exponentiating destruction of the planet that the American way of life is creating for an increasingly sick polity.
Obesity, a national problem, that is quickly becoming a planetary problem, takes years off the life of the person carrying the extra weight.
A good percentage of that added unnecessary weight is due to the annual corn harvest: a large part of that harvest is turned into 17.5 billion pounds of high fructose corn syrup whose use in thousands of processed food products is killing US, no matter what the defensive ads are saying.

If you are living off processed food, you are killing yourself. Whether that food comes from a supermarket or a fast food outlet is irrelevant.
Sir Alfred Howard expressed the entire idea very succinctly many years ago: “Artificial manures lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals and finally to artificial men and women.”
Pollan, a journalist, clarifies the statement by Howard again and again on page after page. If we take his facts seriously, we would quickly realize that the life we are living is not sustainable and that the heritage we are leaving to our children is sand and ashes.
Those involved in producing processed food are as criminal in their behaviour as those AIG executives who put over $400 billion of unsecured risk on their books.
A man I talk to daily: a calm middle American corrections officer feels that those executives should be executed for destroying our economic system. I don’t disagree though I am not a proponent of capital punishment. I would do the same to those who have turned agriculture into a processed food’s industry.
If you read Michael Pollan’s Omnivorse’s Dilemma you might be willing to volunteer for such humanitarian service.

The late Tom Anderson, the family doctor in this little farm town in northwestern Indiana, at first was puzzled, then frightened.
He began seeing strange rashes on his patients, starting more than a year ago. They began as innocuous bumps – “pimples from hell,” he called them – and quickly became lesions as big as saucers, fiery red and agonizing to touch.
They could be anywhere, but were most common the face, armpits, knees and buttocks. Anderson took cultures and sent them off to a lab, which reported that they were MRSA, or staph infections that are resistant to antibiotics.
MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) sometimes arouses terrifying headlines as a “superbug” or “flesh-eating bacteria.” The best-known strain is found in hospitals, where it has been seen regularly since the 1990s, but more recently different strains also have been passed among high school and college athletes. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that by 2005, MRSA was killing more than 18,000 Americans a year, more than AIDS.
Anderson at first couldn’t figure out why he was seeing patient after patient with MRSA in a small Indiana town. And then he began to wonder about all the hog farms outside of town. Could the pigs be incubating and spreading the disease?
“Tom was very concerned with what he was seeing,” recalls his widow, Cindi Anderson. “Tom said he felt the MRSA was at phenomenal levels.”
By last fall, Anderson was ready to be a whistle-blower, and he agreed to welcome me on a reporting visit and go on the record with his suspicions. That was a bold move, for any insinuation that the hog industry harms public health was sure to outrage many neighbors. So I made plans to come here and visit Anderson in his practice. And then, very abruptly, Anderson died at the age of 54.
There was no autopsy, but a blood test suggested a heart attack or aneurysm. Anderson had himself suffered at least three bouts of MRSA, and a Dutch journal has linked swine-carried MRSA to dangerous human heart inflammation.
The larger question is whether we Americans as a nation have moved to a model of agriculture that produces cheap bacon bur risks the health of all of us. And the evidence, while far form conclusive, is growing that the answer is yes.
A few caveats: The uncertainties are huge, partly because our surveillance system is wretched (the cases here in Camden were never reported to the health authorities). The vast majority of port is safe, and there is no proven case of transmission of MRSA from eating pork. I’ll still offer my kids BLTs – but I’ll scrub my hands carefully after handling raw pork.
Let me also be very clear that I’m not against hog farmers. I grew up on a farm outside Yamhill, Oregon, and was a state officer of the Future Farmers of America: we raised pigs for a time, including a sow named Brunhilda with such a strong personality that I remember her better than some of my high school dates.
One of the first clues that pigs could infect people with MRSA came in the Netherlands in 2004, when a young woman tested positive for a new strain of MRSA, called ST398. The family lived on a farm, so public health authorities swept in – and found that three family members, three co-workers and 8 of 10 pigs tested all carried MRSA.
Since then, that strain of MRSA has spread rapidly through the Netherlands – especially in swine-producing areas. A small Dutch study found pig farmers there were 760 times more likely than the general population to carry MRSA (without necessarily showing symptoms), and Scientific American reports that this strain of MRSA has turned up in 12 percent of Dutch retail pork samples.
Now this same strain of MRSA has also been found in the United States. A new study by Tara Smith, a University of Iowa epidemiologist, found that 45 percent of pig farmers she sampled carried MRSA, as did 49 percent of the hogs tested.
The study was small, and much more investigation is necessary. Yet it might shed light on the surge in rashes in the now vacant doctor’s office here in Camden. Linda Barnard, Anderson’s assistant, thinks that perhaps 10 percent of the town’s population of a bit more than 500 came in to be treated for MRSA. Indeed, during my visit, Anderson’s 13-year-old daughter, Lily, showed me a MRSA rash inflaming her knee.
“I’ve had it many times,” she said.
So what’s going on here, and where do these antibiotic-resistant infections come from? Probably form the routine use – make that insane overuse – of antibiotics in livestock feed. This is a system that may help breed virulent “superbugs” that pose a public health threat to us all.

American agriculture is dangerous to the health of anyone who consumes it. Animals are tortured by being fed food that is alien to their history. Their resulting sickness is then treated by antibiotics which will eventually result in organisms that are resistant to treatment.
The peanut scandal and now the pig/MRSA incident are the tip of the iceberg.
American food is manufactured, not grown.
PROFIT is the only consideration. People do not matter. They are slaves to finance. The soil and health is at risk. Do not buy American food. Boycott it. Consume locally. Know what you are eating. American capitalism has destroyed the world financial system. Rebuild that system in a new way, without the unsustainable American mode of doing things. Choose life, not death.

Apocalypse 2012: an investigation into civilization’s end
by Lawrence E. Joseph
Broadway Books, 2008
272 pages

Only an idiot can deny the possibility of a conscious force larger than ourselves. The problem is not the force or forces, but how our historical tradition has treated the alleged direct interactions with this force and the implications we have drawn from such alleged interactions.
We, the medium, are the problem. And, only those disciplines, call them religions, if you wish, that require a re-experiencing of the light (a very common metaphor associated with the descriptions of such experiences) are even worth consideration.
The books whether Bible, Koran or Veda keep a possibility alive that most human action denies. But it is only the realization of that possibility, in the achieving states hinted at, that is worth the candle.
The silliness of atheism matches the silliness of those who clutch a book and pontificate whether priest, imam or rabbi.
Such people are usually part of an organized hierarchical structure that have brought about death untold and have maintained, for the most part, social structures that enslave the masses and support the elite control of such masses.
The succour they offer to the downtrodden hardly balances such historical crimes, but I don’t think myself wise enough to criticize except in particular instances that impinge upon me and maintain a distance from such organizations, though I have often maintained close personal relationships with those integral to the hierarchy.

Anyone who reads as widely as I do and mixed in the circles I did for almost two decades before going underground would know about both the Mayan’s uncanny cosmological accuracy and their obviously related calendar systems and predictions. It is one of the mysteries that is always on the back burner of those who actively pursue a deeper understanding of the world that Dawkins and his ilk are now trashing in an overt and sometimes offensive fashion.
I met Jose Argüelles a few times in my 60s-70s travels, so I read The Mayan Factor when I encountered it in the late 90s. It strongly reinforced a viewpoint that I was developing and had been developing form the late 60s due to more mundane factors: the creation, mainly in the West, of a way of life that was not sustainable and that would eventually lead to the kind of collapse that Jared Diamond’s book has made into a commonplace.
By Earth Day of 1970 (the first one), when I structured and organized and then emceed two massive ecological demonstrations in Philadelphia in conjunction with the Philadelphia Earth Week Committee of which I was not a member as I resolutely joined no organizations and rarely if ever attended meetings with more than two others, through almost two decades of activism, a few simple ideas were obvious. One of those ideas was: the technology that we were creating was on course to bewilder the mind and to destroy human coherence.
I formulated this idea in a simple apothegm: “nanoseconds now, can the emotions follow.” The answer in 2009 is obvious: no.
And the data overwhelms regarding the alphabet growing of perceptual disorders that are leading to an increasing inability of a larger and larger percentage of the population to understand the complexity that surrounds; a growing disappearance of real depth of analysis, seemingly aided by too much viewing of information on mediums that do not lend to it being comprehended and utilized; and perhaps worse a comic book view of history that this book illustrates. In his discussion of Soviet use of telepathy to garner atomic secrets (p. 144) – spies were quite sufficient and well documented; and his discussion concerning the punishment of the Germans for World War II (p. 184-7) wherein he seems totally unaware of the decisions to rebuild Germany as a bulwark against the red menace. (A reading of Kai Bird’s Chairman of the Board, his fascinating biography of America’s most well-connected and perhaps powerful post World War II individual is a good place to start one’s historical education about this complex and on-going matter.)

That said his middle eastern viewpoint is a necessary corrective to the American establishments’ view of Israel, that less and less people share, and Obama’s State Department will further if it does not break the mould and appoint an Arab-native speaker among our top diplomatic negotiators and I can’t totally disagree with the Vatican’s intemperate statement about the current crisis, as since Hamas took over, the Gaza strip feels and now looks increasing like the Warsaw Ghetto. (Disclaimer: I was born of a Jewish mother.)

Very soon after Earth Day, it became obvious to me that we were heading for ecological disaster on the basis of the future studies I had begun to do. These studies plunged me deep into energy use and the history of Capitalistic development. I applied my knowledge to China and India and soon realized that the developmental path being pushed by the economists and investors I was reading and eating with would require four to six earths to sustain. My long seminar on Roegen’s book on economics and entropy with a soon again to be top Wall Street player was just icing on the cake.
We were heading for a brick wall. In addition two other apothegms that I developed for my Earth Day statement about stress and pollution were also rapidly becoming reality.
After years of studying and lecturing about stress, it became obvious that stress was information the body could not handle in the timeframe allotted. The time deficit was expressed as a symptom (low blood sugar) or a full blown condition: hypoglycaemia. My bed was hosting many women with such conditions. My awareness came from much reading, intensive dialogue with Marc Lappé and others, plus a lot of women with identical symptoms. The conditions I first began to talk about in the mid 60s are now endemic and drugs as metabolic regulators (self medication) are now a plague.

I saw pollution in the same way as an outgrowth of a process – mainly industrial – that could not be reintegrated into the biosphere on a timescale conducive to human health and well-being.
The general awareness expressed in shorthand in these few pages made me fully aware that our present course at the time was leading to a destructive collapse and that the ecological work I was doing was a stop gap – it might buy time – but it would not solve our long range problems.
Then a combination of factors lead me in the direction of what one edge of physics is now attempting to actualize: a device that would provide energy without increasing the entropy (which we experience as pollution).
That involved forays into a realm of human endeavour that is littered with casualties. The pursuit is genuine as many are attempting to formulate a science that is not limited to our present framework: the Einstein four-dimensional space-time framework.
And that is how science works in both the formulations of Popper and Kuhn: it is tentative and provisional and can be changed by a new experiment of data sufficient to demonstrate that old formulations are inadequate. It is a method, but due to its reductive nature it tends to act as if this method – very limited – is a metaphysic, excluding – often from existence – what it can’t fit upon its procrustean bed. But… to be blessed for the agreement it has produced and the world-wide conversations, in certain areas of human endeavour, that is has created and continues to support.
I only that it survives the storm that is coming. When even the best of scientists are faced with phenomena that radically deny/defy their methods and their previous understanding, they act like frightened children, repress the experience and run for cover.
I watched this process first hand for most of the 70s and ran a free data distribution network for a select group less frightened by such anomalous events.

The confluence in my life of three close friends: Moses Hallett, an A. V-P at Bell of PA, Bill Whitehead, a New York editor of large intellect and courage and Andrija Puharich, an investigator extraordinary, lead to my helping to birth the study of Consciousness, before anyone was ready and my almost bringing the device mentioned previously in this article (a story I can’t tell yet) to public notice.
What I experienced in Arthur Young’s Philadelphia town house one day in the mid 70s – the disappearance and reappearance of a heavy solid object without an explosion – just confirmed, but strongly, what I already seemed to know through many unusual experiences and deep intuition and study. An entire series of events transpired that day in front of a number of people, all of whom testified to seeing the same thing.
I have written those events up in dramatic form. I will post that write up as soon as I can cut through the malice connected to my personal situation, for much of my writing is now being held maliciously or illegally. Further posting will clarify the above statements.
I have also written a series of novels that attempt to dramatize the energy that gathers around a device that is necessary, if we are going to survive what Mr. Joseph suggest is coming in 2012. They will slowly emerge if conditions feel right, as they cast some light on the difficulties we face as a species in attempting to transcend our present economic limitations, something that our green pundits have been slow to grasp, but the present public suicide of Capitalism should make easier.
While people have been arguing about global warming, the planetary eco-system has been moving into a period of abrupt climate change. After reading scores of books in the areas of scientific interest that Mr. Joseph focuses on, I came to the sad conclusion that we are at the edge of a period of planetary and climate change that will probably bring civilization as we know it to an end and result in a reduction of our numbers that few want to contemplate.

I have read everything by and about Kozyrev (p. 143-6) I could find since I first discussed him in 1973 at lunch with my Bell executive co-worker. His ideas about time streams and the energy associated with it should be investigated with great energy as my experience with physics of great accuracy and entities of great control over the physical world could be explained by what he suggests about time, our great unknown.
Data mining techniques would certainly enable the data generated by Dmitriev, Mukherjee and others mentioned in this book to be correlated in novel ways, so that we could perhaps see patterns that link sunspot activity, cosmic rays, meteor and comet activity, planetary relations and volcanic activity in new ways.
If FEMA could not handle Katrina, I do not, particularly in the midst of an economic planetary downturn that should spell depression in any language, see the United States gearing up as a nation to prepare for what is too often presented as a g Mayan prophecy. If it happens, city dwellers are doomed, but those who live in the country can prepare by storing long lasting food, candles, extra warm clothes and a stand alone energy source in addition to a wood stove.
Apocalypse 2012 is apt to confuse those who come to it without much preparation. That is partly due to the mode of presentation whose intention I would imagine is directed at a mass audience. Mr. Joseph at time indicates that he is not certain that he is doing the right thing by producing and correlating evidence that points to massive destruction in a few short years, yet he expresses impatience at scientists who refuse to comment on a series of events until the data is available, though that is how scientists are constrained, through training and peer pressure, to act.
We have seen the same general problem in action with the global financial crisis: those most qualified to know and to act, hesitating to do anything that would create panic and by hesitating producing the very mess that quick action might have avoided.
It is not a simple problem. It is faced by anyone in a decision making position involving uncertainty. Anyone who has ever read a classified intelligence report will know what I mean instantly. Donald Rumsfeld tried to spell out the complications – very real – but the insight has been lost in the lies he propagated. George Soros has written an entire book as it applies to the stock market and Joseph could have added greatly to the value of his book by reflecting at length on the process he went through. His failure to do so is our loss.
A lot of the scientific work mentioned in this book deserves extended consideration in a book directed at a more serious audience.

A few observations before I close this review: one of the houses I called “home” during the 70s had a Kozyrev mirror in its living room, but we called it a Faraday cage and produced the same results that are described in the book: increased telepathic and distance viewing results (they are probably related). I was adamantly against one of the uses to which we put such technology: monitoring both the White House and the Kremlin. After years of reflection, I now feel that the destruction of the group, a death and my specific problems are connected to this infringement. Alexey Dmitriev’s short statement adequately conveys the problem that such work educes in the minds of the thoughtful: “Physicists cannot solve the problem of why living organisms have pre-information about catastrophic events. This forces us to change our picture of the world. The world is not simply matter and energy, but also information.”
I have mused upon this problem since 1970. I have a shorthand for expressing it: the problem of relating E=MC2 to H= -S. Consciousness – whatever it may be – and time are part of the problem.
I have also come to the conclusion that a part of the answer may be buried in the Tibetan texts now being translated, but more of that anon.
I wince whenever Joseph or scores of other like him refer to divine intervention either directly or by implication. This is not due to atheism, but rather my desire to make distinctions. When the mind enters states that indicate a loosening of space-time constraints, the experiences that result are not necessarily “divine”. That label tends to cancel observation or an attempt at accurate description. That cancellation is a loss to us all as we need to chart that territory as best we can.
Mr. Joseph does this well when he talks about the ocean and the extra-planetary space around us wherein in the past the map said : “There be dragons.” The divine label often destroys that possibility.
The use of “apocalypse” in the title is also disturbing as an apocalypse refers to a cataclysm in which evil forces are destroyed. That is not what is going to happen if 2012 occurs in terms that the book discusses. Comets, volcanoes and the like kill indiscriminately.
I thank him for his reference to the Bible Code and Drosnin references which I scanned and quickly erased from consideration, probably due to spending years listening to a close brilliant friend who was a Baconian. But, no excuses, Joseph’s discussion indicates a need for closer consideration.
It is only fair to end this review with an observation of Alexey Dmitriev that I share with full consciousness: “We have reached the point of deadly synergy, at which climatic processes communicate with and amplify each other in severe and catastrophic ways…”

Reborn: Journals and Notebooks: 1947-1963
By Susan Sontag
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008
336 pages

The reading of Susan Sontag’s diaries (the first volume, there will be three), let me with a feeling of deep sadness, not only for her individual wretchedness, but also for most of the secular world that so much of modern thought has produced.
I have been reading the last works of her one time husband who was a brilliant pretentious mess as a person, a great teacher and a deep questioner about the nature of the civilization that the modern quest, to make it new, has lead so many to embrace.
There is a deep awareness in his reiterative last four books, that share the same dryness and lack of joy that fills each page of Sontag.
Jouissance is absent and I continually mused upon Wilhelm Reich as I read Sontag and thought back upon my reading of Rieff.
On Sontag’s part: an intellectual focus on art and thought that feels totally disembodied as do so many of the joyless Protestant/Jewish moments that make up so much of modern culture, no matter how thrilled I’ve been to immerse in them.
Rieff has done something lasting. Defined a cultural moment and a new personality type – the therapeutic mentality – and perhaps in doing so not given Susan, his ex-wife, enough credit for the work her precocious intellect contributed to the major that helped gain him a preferment – a chair – at my alma mater.
She will fade quickly, a minor figure in a minor cultural movement. An emblem, perhaps of the sterility that intellect breeds when a culture has died and its civilized moment is proclaiming its brittle end.
Occasionally an orgasmic squeak arises from these dry, sterile pages, but the lack of real release, the inability to transcend screamed at me as I reviewed my reading lists transcribed from her diaries and recalled my trips to New York to see ten movies in three days and though of my often reading of days with just short breaks to eat and sleep, but in my “Bohemian” world there was also joy and delight in food, nature and the body of the other: an immersion in the physical that was often for days with breaks to eat and sleep, but I liked my partners and we got off.

Jouissance, joy, pleasure, happiness.
Gone missing and certainly not to be found in Reborn.
Sad, sad, sad, alas!