Thursday, September 28, 2017

We will survive however with growing climatic destruction and a growing permanent hungry nomadic world population remember the Movie Soylent Green?



We will survive however with growing climatic destruction and a growing permanent hungry nomadic world population remember Soylent Green?

As I look at this mornings sobering news and how it will in fact directly Impact ours and the worlds future I remember past stories as to what we in fact are facing and sadly I am 100% a realist who looks at the big picture. this morning I am haunted by a picture of the two chief warmongers of the world Cheney and Bush as Cheney with his snide, hateful, kill, cur is demanding immunity for companies that have been spying against us so our future can continue to be controlled! Congress is Complicit and again will give in. Our leaders will wimp out again

Please read that because I want to focus on the future! I saw this story about the situation between Israel, Gaza, and Egypt, and it reinforced my portend for the future!

Palestinians, running out of fuel, food and other supplies after Israel closed Gaza border crossings, poured into Egypt through blown-out and torn-down breaches in the border wall. Egyptian guards stood by without intervening, and Egypt's Foreign Ministry spokesman announced that the nation would remain open to the needy "as long as this is a humanitarian crisis." "We are not opening the Rafah crossing just for everybody to cross -- we're opening it because it's a very dire humanitarian situation," said spokesman Hassam Zaki. Growing chaos as 50,000 break through the border

Alert! This reminded me of two recurrent themes as we head into the future. First we see what is happening in Africa and around the world as the climate changes becoming more caustic to human life and increasing wars creating a growing hungry, nomadic, world population that we are not going to be able to sustain as we would like.


We discussed four months ago that We are creating a permanent nomadic immigration population of the entire middle east if not the world with a couple countries as islands! I ask you to please check this out as I got this compliment from our friend Chuck for looking at and alerting as to the big Picture: That's something I hadn't even considered Jim. I mean I read about people fleeing for their lives and have seen some of the pictures, but I hadn't thought of the creation of a nomadic lifestyle (culture?) by war. Thanks for expanding things again for all of us as you look at "the big picture". More people should. What we are creating in the middle east and around the world

With that said I want to remind you of our discussion three months ago that our climate will be our biggest threat as we attempt to survive into the future! There was a report released raising the threat of dramatic population migrations, wars over water and resources, and a realignment of power among nations. During the last two decades, climate scientists have underestimated how quickly the Earth is changing — perhaps to avoid being branded as "alarmists," the study said. But policy planners should count on climate-induced instability in critical parts of the world within 30 years.

The report was compiled by a panel of security and climate specialists, sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for a New American Security. The Associated Press received an advance copy. Climate change is likely to breed new conflicts, but it already is magnifying existing problems, from the desertification of Darfur and competition for water in the Middle East to the disruptive monsoons in Asia, which increase the pressure for land, the report said.

At the very least, the report said, the U.S. can expect more population migrations, both internally and from across its borders; a proliferation of diseases; greater conflict in weak states, especially in Africa where climates will change most drastically; and a restructuring in global power in line with the accessibility of natural resources. Left unchecked, "the collapse and chaos associated with extreme climate change futures would destabilize virtually every aspect of modern life," said the report, comparing the potential outcome with the Cold War doomsday scenarios of a nuclear holocaust. There is quite a backlash scenario. Please read it
Anyway, as we watch the threat in America and never see the situation remedied but rather allowed to worsen as Bush follows his nightmare scenario, Everything else aside here I am reminded of Katrina and how those poor people were hung out to dry and still Bush is refusing to fund much needed projects as we and the world are purposely allowed to fall into disrepair and another dire scenario we are facing as we try to move successfully into the future we also discussed four months ago.

 Noting the world is racing to another world war and knowing our weapons are too powerful for man or the planet to survive it and the fact that the environment is turning on us and much of the world is running out of fresh water I first wondered why Areas such as Georgia and many of the areas around the ocean and world do not turn to desalinization as this problem did not crop up over night.

I then decided to Google water wars as I know there are many problems developing daily around the world as countries harness water sources running through their land and was horrified at what I was finding. There were 136,000 stories encompassing water wars around the world. Let alone within ones own boundaries. What the hell is wrong with the world? We are already at war! We are already in the fight of our lives, why are we racing to end them? The Washington Post had a good article.

Global warming will intensify drought, and it will intensify floods: As the air gets warmer, there will be more water in the atmosphere. That’s settled science. Where the atmosphere is configured to have high pressure and droughts, global warming will mean long, dry periods. Where the atmosphere is configured to be wet, you will get more rain, more gully washers.”

The droughts will be especially bad. How bad? Richard Seager, a senior researcher at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, looked at 19 computer models of the future under current global warming trends. He found remarkable consistency: Sometime before 2050, the models predicted, the Southwest will be gripped in a dry spell akin to the Great Dust Bowl drought that lasted through most of the 1930s.

 Droughts and water shortages already been driving conflict around the globe: The potential for conflict is more than theoretical. Turkey, Syria and Iraq bristle over the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Sudan, Ethiopia and Egypt trade threats over the Nile. The United Nations has said water scarcity is behind the bloody wars in Sudan’s Darfur region. In Somalia, drought has spawned warlords and armies. Already, the World Health Organization says, 1 billion people lack access to potable water. In northern China, retreating glaciers and shrinking wetlands that feed the Yangtze River prompted researchers to warn that water supplies for hundreds of millions of people may be at risk. Water wars will worsen

Water has emerged as a key issue that could determine if Asia is headed toward cooperation or competition. No country would influence that direction more than China, which controls the Tibetan plateau, the source of most major rivers of Asia. Tibet's vast glaciers and high altitude have endowed it with the world's greatest river systems. Its rivers are a lifeline to the world's two most-populous states - China and India - as well as to Bangladesh, Burma, Bhutan, Nepal, Cambodia, Pakistan, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. These countries make up 47 percent of the global population.

Yet Asia is a water-deficient continent. Although home to more than half of the human population, Asia has less fresh water - 3,920 cubic meters per person - than any continent other than the Antarctica and China is taking it. The looming struggle over water resources in Asia has been underscored by the spread of irrigated farming, water-intensive industries and a growing middle class that wants high water-consuming comforts like washing machines and dishwashers. Household water consumption in Asia is rising rapidly, although several major economies there are acutely water-stressed.

The specter of water wars in Asia is also being highlighted by climate change and environmental degradation in the form of shrinking forests and swamps that foster a cycle of chronic flooding and droughts. The Himalayan snow melt that feeds Asia's great rivers could be accelerated by global warming. Man am I naive! Yesterday I couldn't understand China's wanting to control Tibet, the Himalaya's, and the Dali Lama, today I know. Asia's water wars
 
This is a crisis that will only worsen every day around the world . Tens of millions of Americans have or are migrating to the southern and western states where there are many areas of chronic water shortages (duh). Now Governor Bill Richardson has fired the first shot, suggesting a national water policy, which is shorthand for stealing water from the Great Lakes. Rust belters are outraged, some suggesting we sell Richardson water at $80.00 a barrel. Vegas, probably the fastest growing area in the country, is sucking as much from the Colorado as it can, and will still have major shortages, perhaps within months. The Great Lakes are in a low cycle and any diversion would probably be an ecological disaster. I was looking at the links that follow and the Great lakes are being fought over as we speak and America is already experiencing water wars as well as much of the world. Please look at the overwhelming amount of stories on The worlds water wars

** The world is already at war with our shrinking changing environment a war we are bound to lose. I cannot comprehend the world racing to another world war that will only serve to seal all of their demise even sooner. What is wrong with us? looking at all the unfolding terrible scenarios unfolding before us as we attempt to move into the future I am reminded of the moves depicting our horrific future we all grew up with. As I watch the world breakdown, the climate becoming increasingly hostile, and our world population exploding with us already unable to feed them, a movie that was once thought unfathomable now begins to look closer to reality. You remember the 1973 sci-fi movie Solyent Green Solyent Green was made out of people

I do not see quite a horrible scenario but I have to wonder what we will be driven to in our desire to survive?

James Joiner
Gardner, Ma
http://anaverageamericanpatiot.blogspot.com

14 comments:

billie said...

that's the thing- folks all over are discussing the debates and whatnot- but no one is taking global climate change seriously. we can grow our own food- but you can't make water. not having water is my single biggest fear. you can layer and wrap in blanket against the cold- you can unlayer and strip against hot- but without water- in a short time frame- you die. how many people are going to die when they get around to privatizing water?

jmsjoin said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
jmsjoin said...

betmo this should work! Guarani Aquifer

jmsjoin said...

betmo you are entirely right and as you can see it is one of my biggest concerns. Sadly like everything else I am afraid the fresh water situation is even worse than most realize. Remember acid rain too and the inumerable ponds and lakes they are killing on top of everything else. What kills me is we are threatening to worsen it exponentially like the entire planet by heading towards a nuclear war making the planet inhabitable by no one.
It also kills me that as we prepare to make the majority of the planet uninhabitable Bush has 2,000 acres in Paraguay to escape to. It just happens to be over one of the oldest, deepest, largest, supplies os fresh water in the world.

Larry said...

Can't deny this Jim:

Today, National Public Radio reporter Guy Raz reported that the Bush Administration is in negotiations with the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki to create an “enduring relationship that will ensure that the United States occupies and guarantees the government’s safety against threats both foreign and domestic for at least the next 10 years. One Representative, Bill Delahunt of Massachusetts, has been trying to get both Administration and Pentagon officials to testify as to the nature of the negotiations, thus far with no success. Rep. Delahunt’s guess as to why? Because the agreement may qualify as a “treaty” instead of an “agreement,” and thus require Senate ratification, something that President Bush doesn’t want and doesn’t believe that he, as President, needs.

This represents yet another example of this administration’s expansive view of Presidential power, and it needs to be the one that breaks Congress’, and the public’s, back.

President Bush is a True Believer™ in the imperial presidency, a perspective that the Constitution of the United States grants the President almost unchecked power with regard to pretty much everything. First popularized by historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, the imperial presidency dates back to FDR, if not further, and supposedly reached its zenith under Richard Nixon. In the post-Watergate days and months, Congress forced new restrictions on the Presidency that presidents have been pushing back on ever since - the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA), limitations on information sharing between the FBI, IRS, CIA, et al, and restrictions on the CIA’s ability to operate on U.S. soil.

But in many ways it wasn’t until President Bush that supporters of the imperial presidency, aka expansive Presidential powers, made significant headway. And most of that so-called progress has been made as a direct result of the September 11 attacks.

On September 18, 2001, Congress approved the “Authorization for Use of Military Force”, Public Law 107-40 [S. J. RES. 23], and in so doing granted President Bush the Congressional authority he needed to prosecute the so-called “war on terror.” Specifically, the President was:

…authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

Based on the authority of this not-quite-a-declaration-of-war, President Bush invaded Afghanistan and overthrew the Taliban who were, then, harboring the organization responsible for 9/11 - Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

But this authorization of force has been used to justify extraordinary rendition, the process of sending accused terrorists to foreign nations where they can be tortured for information in direct contravention of U.S. law. President Bush and former Attorney General John Ashcroft have acted directly against FISA by ordering warrantless NSA wiretaps, claiming that the Authorization for Use of Military Force, combined with his Constitutional authority as President, granted him all the authority he required to ignore prior federal laws and spy on U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. Similarly, President Bush and his various underlings have claimed that waterboarding is not torture and that only by threatening death or causing severe organ damage may an “interrogation technique” be called torture. Similarly, President Bush authorized secret CIA prisons abroad specifically to bypass U.S. law and developed the entire concept of illegal or unlawful combatants in order to avoid granting international POW status to suspected Al Qaeda members.

In the name of the “War on Terror,” our very own President implemented policies that amount to human right abuses that the U.S. doesn’t tolerate in other nations - like Russia and China.

But it hasn’t stopped there. Following the successful invasion of Afghanistan (and thus far unsuccessful reconstruction), President Bush sought to make a case for invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein, something that his father and former President, George H. W. Bush had wisely refused to do in 1991 (or possibly, in President Bush’s mind, failed to accomplish). In the process, he, Vice President Dick Cheney, and many of his highest advisors chose to lie repeatedly to Congress, the American people, and our international allies. The result was the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 (aka the Iraq War Resolution) and, ultimately, the invasion and subsequent ongoing occupation of Iraq.

President Bush wasn’t happy with everything that the Iraq War Resolution had in it, and as a True Believer™ in “expansive” Presidential power, he issued a signing statement that said, in part:

[M]y signing this resolution does not, constitute any change in the long-standing positions of the executive branch on either the President’s constitutional authority to use force to deter, prevent, or respond to aggression or other threats to U.S. interests or on the constitutionality of the War Powers Resolution.

Which basically meant that President Bush refused to acknowledge that Congress had any authority to limit his military activities as Commander in Chief.

Since then, President Bush has ignored repeated calls by Congress to limit the scope and duration of the ongoing occupation of Iraq. For example, he’s rejected, again through the use of a signing statement, restrictions on his ability to move money around within the Executive Branch, especially between the Department of Defense and the CIA, and even within the DoD itself. His argument is essentially that the President gets to run the Executive as he sees fit, but if this is true, then Congress’ only recourse (as defined by their Constitutional authority to control government funding) is to defund the entire Executive branch. And President Bush’ wide use of signing statements has thrown the entire Executive branch into a legal limbo regarding which laws, and which parts of laws, they have to follow. If you believe President Bush, though, neither he nor his underlings face any restrictions on their activities as imposed by federal law. In essence, the entire Administration is an extralegal and unaccountable entity. In other words, President Bush isn’t a President accountable to Congress and the judiciary - he’s a dictator.

And now President Bush is trying to do an end-run around Congress’ treaty ratification authority while at the same time trying to bypass three separate federal laws that limit his ability to construct permanent military bases in Iraq. All in the name of the very “status of forces” agreement that Guy Raz reported on. According to Mr. Raz, there are legal (if unethical) ways around those annoying federal laws, like using “adjectives like ‘enduring’ or ‘continuing’ instead of the word ‘permanent’”. Kenneth Katzman, a Middle East analyst for the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, goes so far as to wonder whether “keeping the elected Iraqi government in power against internal threats” qualifies legally as a treaty or not. I wonder if the agreement will go so far as to define the Iraqi Parliament, of which nearly half have voted to have the U.S. end their occupation within two years, as an organization that could qualify as an “internal threat.”

Ultimately I agree with Mr. Raz’s conclusion - if the imperial presidency of George W. Bush ignores all these laws, as well as a new one that the Senate is considering, this issue will rapidly come before the Supreme Court. And then we’ll see if the President is allowed to ignore the very Constitution he’s sworn, and utterly failed, to serve and protect.

Larry said...

This is happening under our noses Jim:

Repress U

Michael Gould-Wartofsky


Free-speech zones. Taser guns. Hidden cameras. Data mining. A new security curriculum. Private security contractors. Welcome to the homeland security campus.

From Harvard to UCLA, the ivory tower is fast becoming the latest watchtower in Fortress America. The terror warriors, having turned their attention to "violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism prevention"--as it was recently dubbed in a House of Representatives bill of the same name--have set out to reconquer that traditional hotbed of radicalization, the university.

Building a homeland security campus and bringing the university to heel is a seven-step mission:

1. Target dissidents. As the warfare state has triggered dissent, the campus has attracted increasing scrutiny--with student protesters in the cross hairs. The government's number-one target? Peace and justice organizations.

From 2003 to 2007 an unknown number of them made it into the Pentagon's Threat and Local Observation Notice system (TALON), a secretive domestic spying program ostensibly designed to track direct "potential terrorist threats" to the Defense Department itself. In 2006 the ACLU uncovered, via Freedom of Information Act requests, at least 186 specific TALON reports on "anti-military protests" in the United States--some listed as "credible threats"--from student groups at the University of California, Santa Cruz; State University of New York, Albany; Georgia State University; and New Mexico State University, among other campuses.

At more than a dozen universities and colleges, police officers now double as full-time FBI agents, and according to the Campus Law Enforcement Journal, they serve on many of the nation's 100 Joint Terrorism Task Forces. These dual-purpose officer-agents have knocked on student activists' doors from North Carolina State to the University of Colorado and, in one case, interrogated an Iraqi-born professor at the University of Massachusetts about his antiwar views.

FBI agents, or their campus stand-ins, don't have to do all the work. Administrators often do it for them, setting up "free-speech zones," which actually constrain speech, and punishing those who step outside them. Protests were typically forced into "free-assembly areas" at the University of Central Florida and Clemson University, while students at Hampton and Pace universities faced expulsion for handing out antiwar fliers, aka "unauthorized materials."

2. Lock and load. Many campus police departments are morphing into heavily armed garrisons, equipped with a wide array of weaponry, from Taser stun guns and pepper guns to shotguns and semiautomatic rifles. Lock-and-load policies that began in the 1990s under the rubric of the "war on crime" only escalated with the President's "war on terror." Each school shooting--most recently the massacre at Virginia Tech--adds fuel to the armament flames.

Two-thirds of universities arm their police, according to the Justice Department. Many of the guns being purchased were previously in the province of military units and SWAT teams: for instance, AR-15 rifles (similar to M-16s) are in the arsenals of the University of Texas campus police. Last April City University of New York bought dozens of semiautomatic handguns. Some states, like Nevada, are even considering plans to allow university staff to pack heat in a "special reserve officer corps."

Most of the force used on campuses these days, though, comes in less lethal form, such as the rubber bullets and pepper pellets increasingly used to contain student demonstrations. Then there is the ubiquitous Taser, the electroshock weapon recently ruled a "form of torture" by the United Nations. A Taser was used by UCLA police in November 2006 to deliver shock after shock to an Iranian-American student for failing to produce his ID at the Powell Library. A University of Florida student was Tased last September after asking pointed questions of Senator John Kerry at a public forum, his plea "Don't Tase me, bro!" becoming the stuff of pop folklore.

3. Keep an eye (or hundreds of them) focused on campus. Surveillance has become a boom industry nationally--one that now reaches deep into the heart of campuses. In fact, universities have witnessed explosive growth since 2001 in the electronic surveillance of students, faculty and campus workers. On ever more campuses, closed-circuit security cameras can track people's every move, often from hidden or undisclosed locations, sometimes even into classrooms.

The International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators reports that surveillance cameras have found their way onto at least half of all colleges, their numbers on any given campus doubling, tripling or, in a few cases, rising tenfold since September 11, 2001. Such cameras have proliferated by the hundreds on private campuses, in particular. The University of Pennsylvania, for instance, has more than 400 watching over it, while Harvard and Brown have about 200 each.

Often it can be tricky to find out where the cameras are and just what they're meant to be viewing. The University of Texas battled student journalists over disclosure and ultimately kept its cameras hidden. Sometimes, though, the cameras' purpose seems obvious. Take the case of Hussein Hussein, a professor in the department of animal biotechnology at the University of Nevada, Reno. In January 2005 the widely respected professor found a hidden camera redirected to monitor his office.

4. Mine student records. Student records have in recent years been opened up to all manner of data mining for purposes of investigation, recruitment or just all-purpose tracking. From 2001 to 2006, in an operation code-named Project Strike Back, the Education Department teamed up with the FBI to scour the records of the 14 million students who applied for federal financial aid each year. The objective? "To identify potential people of interest," explained an FBI spokesperson cryptically, especially those linked to "potential terrorist activity."

Strike Back was quietly discontinued in June 2006, days after students at Northwestern University blew its cover. But just one month later, the Education Department's Commission on the Future of Higher Education, in a much-criticized preliminary report, recommended the creation of a federal "unit records" database that would track the activities and studies of college students nationwide. The department's Institute of Education Sciences has developed a prototype for such a national database.

It's not a secret that the Pentagon, for its part, hopes to turn campuses into recruitment centers for its overstretched, overstressed forces. The Defense Department has built its own database for just this purpose. Known as Joint Advertising Market Research and Studies, this program tracks 30 million young people, ages 16 to 25. According to a Pentagon spokesperson, the department has partnered with private marketing and data-mining firms, which in turn sell the government reams of information on students and other potential recruits.

5. Track foreign-born students; keep the undocumented out. Under the auspices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been keeping close tabs on foreign students and their dependents through the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). As of October 2007, ICE reported that it was actively following 713,000 internationals on campuses, while keeping more than 4.7 million names in the database.

The database aims to amass and record information on foreign students throughout their stay inside the United States. SEVIS requires thick files on the students from the sponsoring schools, constantly updated with all academic, biographical and employment records--all of which will be shared with other government agencies. If students fall out of "status" at school--or if the database thinks they have--the Compliance Enforcement Unit of ICE goes into action.

ICE, of course, has done its part to keep the homeland security campus purified of those not born in the homeland. The American Immigration Law Foundation estimates that only one in twenty undocumented immigrants who graduate high school goes on to enroll in a college--many don't go because they cannot afford the tuition but also because they have good reason to be afraid: ICE has deported a number of those who did make it to college, some before they could graduate.

6. Take over the curriculum, the classroom and the laboratory. Needless to say, not every student is considered a homeland security threat. Quite the opposite. Many students and faculty members are seen as potential assets. To exploit these assets, DHS has launched its own curriculum under its Office of University Programs (OUP), intended, it says, to "foster a homeland security culture within the academic community."

The record so far is impressive: DHS has doled out 439 federal fellowships and scholarships since 2003, providing full tuition to students who fit "within the homeland security research enterprise." Two hundred twenty-seven schools now offer degree or certificate programs in "homeland security," a curriculum that encompasses more than 1,800 courses. Along with OUP, some of the key players in creating the homeland security classroom are the US Northern Command and the Aerospace Defense Command, co-founders of the Homeland Security and Defense Education Consortium.

OUP has also partnered with researchers and laboratories to "align scientific results with homeland security priorities." In fiscal year 2008 alone, $4.9 billion in federal funding will go to homeland-security-related research. Grants correspond to sixteen research topics selected by DHS, based on presidential directives, legislation and a smattering of scientific advice.

But wait, there's more: DHS has founded and funded six of its very own "Centers of Excellence," research facilities that span dozens of universities from coast to coast. The latest is a Center of Excellence for the Study of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism, the funding for which cleared the House in October. The center is mandated to assist a national commission in combating those "adopting or promoting an extremist belief system...to advance political, religious or social change."

7. Privatize, privatize, privatize. Of course, homeland security is not just a department, nor is it simply a new network of surveillance and data mining--it's big business. (According to USA Today, global homeland-security-style spending had already reached $59 billion a year in 2006, a sixfold increase over 2000.) Not surprisingly, then, universities have in recent years established unprecedented private-sector partnerships with the corporations that have the most to gain from their research. DHS's on-campus National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terror (START), for instance, features Lockheed Martin on its advisory board. The Center for Food Protection and Defense relies on an industry working group that includes Wal-Mart and McDonald's offering "guidance and direction," according to its chair.

While vast sums of money are flowing in from corporate sponsors, huge payments are also flowing out to "strategic contracts" with private contractors, as universities permanently outsource security operations to big corporations like Securitas and AlliedBarton. Little of this money actually goes to those guarding the properties, who are often among the most underpaid workers in the universities. Instead, it fills the corporate coffers of those with little accountability for conditions on campus.

Meanwhile, some universities have developed intimate relationships with private-security outfits like the notorious Blackwater. Last May, for example, the University of Illinois and its police training institute cut a deal with the firm to share its facilities and training programs with Blackwater operatives. Local journalists later revealed that the director of the campus program at the time was on the Blackwater payroll. In the age of hired education, such collaboration is apparently par for the course.

Following these seven steps over the past six years, the homeland security state and its constituents have come a long way in their drive to remake the American campus in the image of a compound on lockdown. Somewhere inside the growing homeland security state that is our country, the next seven steps in the process are undoubtedly already being planned.

Still, the rise of Repress U is not inevitable. The new homeland security campus has proven itself unable to shut out public scrutiny or stamp out resistance to its latest Orwellian advances. Sometimes such opposition even yields a free-speech zone dismantled, or the Pentagon's TALON declawed, or a Project Strike Back struck down. A rising tide of student protest, led by groups like the new Students for a Democratic Society, has won free-speech victories and reined in repression from Pace and Hampton, where the university dropped its threat of expulsion, to UCLA, where Tasers will no longer be wielded against passive resisters.

Yet if the tightening grip of the homeland security complex isn't loosened, the latest towers of higher education will be built not of ivory but of Kevlar for the over-armored, over-armed campuses of America.

Unknown said...

Larry--
This was birthed at Kent State in 1970.

amphibious said...

I could never understand what the problem was with that fine new food source, Soylent Green. It was, by definition, an unlimited resource.
Except for one small problem, known even before 1973, that carnivores don't eat other carnivores because being already at the top of the food chain the toxin build-up just goes through the roof. And that was just simple biologically produced toxins (kidney/liver).
In 1989 we learned (or should have) what happens when vegetarians are fed meat bovine spongiform encepholopathy - Mad Cow but that is still being done.
If you want to see want happens to a modern western economy when the water starts to dry up, have a look at Oz. And that is an entire continent with no immediate, even more desparate neighbours.

jmsjoin said...

Larry
I hope you get this! You know what my question is? First you know Bush gets pissed when some questions his usurped stupidity! However that said, if the idiot signs an agreement that we will be there for a thousand years what is it worth? Does the next President if we are that lucky have to be bound by it? Can't he or she sign their own agreement to get the hell out and refortify America?

jmsjoin said...

Larry
Yes right under our very noses or should I say in regard to those of us that know it, right in our faces. As we discuss often, we are the enemy and terrorism is merely the tool to be used against us to implement Bush's new (dis)order.

jmsjoin said...

Brother
That came from Kent State, really? Do you have any personal incite into Kent State? I would be interested in hearing it.

jmsjoin said...

amphibious
I am afraid I see it coming to that and we will Doctor it as we have to in order to make it life sustaining. Instead of adapting our ways to help our environment we will expound on these damaging ways and adapt ourselves to the failing environment our own human lust has created.
Amphibious straighten out my little mind. Are you and Allan one and the same? I hope all is well in the land of Oz!

Unknown said...

Jim--
I was speaking of the dissent idea suppression that was birthed at Kent State.

But I do have some connection. At the time, I had a road band named Luzianne, we had played 3 venues in the Akron area, one on the campus at Kent State, that ended the day before the massacre. We heard about it the next day, while playing in Indianapolis. I'm still shocked 38 years later.

jmsjoin said...

Brother!
You've come a long way baby! I knew there was more to you. I can agree with the thought of dissent being born at Kent State. Certainly the payment for it! That shaped most of us who were active in the trenches of society at the time and we will never forget it.
Just thinking about the time opens up a flood of memories, Hmm! Take care!