TimB

Using a combination of watercolor and ink, Zhifang Shi creates vignettes of the places he encounters in his worldwide travels. The Shanghai-based artist works en plein air, painting atop a portable palette to document storefronts, architectural features, boats, and trolley cars. Washes of color add depth and movement to Shi’s loose, gestural contour lines, and his focus on points of entry and modes of transit invites the viewer into the artist’s world. You can keep up with Shi’s wide-ranging travels and resulting urban sketches on Instagram.

davidhellman:

socialist smash part 2 of 2

davidhellman:

Asian grocers beginning to wrap produce in banana leaves rather than plastic.

Chickadees, barn swallows, and goldcrest kinglets emerge from impasto oil paintings by Angela Moulton. The artist works in the aesthetic space between realistic and stylized, using natural tones that are slightly keyed up, and following the body and beak shapes of each bird while giving them just a bit of extra plumpness. Thick brush strokes form the birds’ bodies in just a couple of deft swipes. The artist, who splits her time between Illinois and Idaho, sells her work as Pratt Creek Art, and offers both originals and prints of her small-scale paintings. Moulton also shares videos of her process on YouTube.

From the BBC:

People have been posting images of themselves using the hashtag #WePark showing themselves working in car parking spaces in San Francisco. The group pays for the space and creates makeshift offices, using Wi-Fi from free internet zones or by using their mobile phones as hotspots. The movement has since spread further afield to France...

"We live in a very expensive real estate market. It's just so crazy to think the way we use our street is not reflective of that and so those parking spaces are just dirt cheap compared to all of the other real estate in San Francisco...

She said: "It was great. Everybody had access and were sitting there working. It was lovely. Someone brought doughnuts, a vase, flowers and a table cloth. I think it's going to be even more fun and advanced next time. You have 12 people working out of a space instead of a vehicle just sitting there doing nothing all day. It's a great use of space...

"Office spaces are expensive and here in France if your company is less than one year old, no one wants to rent you anything, even with warranties. But that's not the real problem, because working remotely is a perfect alternative. The other real problem is the cities that just don't do anything to reduce the polluting cars' activity."

Just to clarify - these people are not squatting in the space.  They are feeding the meter.   My crystal ball says that confrontations are inevitable when somebody driving in a car threatens these people because he/she can't find a vacant parking space near their office or shopping destination.  Interesting.

Paco Pomet (previously) combines chilling social commentary with humorous juxtapositions of past, present, and future in his satirical paintings. All-new works from 2018 and 2019 include meditations on melting glaciers, differences of opinion in frontier settings, and the symbolism of setting suns. The Spanish artist often combines greyscale and full color within a single painting to draw the viewer’s attention to specific details, like a car driving toward a bubblegum pink slime-slide, and two settlers in neighboring buildings enveloped by different-hued auras.

Pomet’s latest solo show, “No Places”, opens April 4 at Galleri Benoni in Copenhagen, Denmark, and runs through May 10, 2019. You can see more from Pomet on Instagram, and if you enjoy his work, also check out Toni Hamel.

The next time you’re in a grocery store, pharmacy, or toy department and spot a subtly unusual item, it might an Obvious Plant. Jeff Wysaski, the man behind the meme, has been creating and depositing strange flyers, placards, and packaged products in conventional retail outlets for several years. His creations are often a send-up of a popular pop culture phenomenon like Sesame Street or The Avengers, and feature chuckle-inducing copy, alternately quippy and filled with intentional typos. From a lonely Bert to Barely Any Ketchup (made by “Hardly Foods”), Obvious Plant items have become increasingly elaborate over the years, and Wysanski makes some of his designs available for purchase in an online store.

You can follow along with Obvious Plant’s quirky interventions on Instagram. If these are up your alley, also check out Chindōgu, a concept and subsequent community of designers of useless products, first popularized in 1990’s Japan by Kenji Kawakami.

by Charles Mudede
So far, I have not been wrong. Live with that. After the Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max 8 crashed on Sunday, March 10, I suspected that the accident might have something to do with the decade-long transference of the corporation's capital to executives and share holders. This transition to the value extraction, over value creation (terms I borrow from the Britain-based economist Mariana Mazzucato), took two forms. One, wage elimination (layoffs) and wage repression (directly or indirectly); and bewilderingly massive share buybacks that, by pumping up the value of the corporation's shares, effectively redirected billions from production and product development to a class of men and women who, to use the words of the father of academic economics, Adam Smith, "love to reap where they never sowed"—we call them "investors" when in actual fact they are simply speculators.

My point in that post: If you think that this kind of activity (aggressive wage depression; rampant value extraction) has had no effect on the corporation's products, then you must come from Planet Claire. And sure enough, we on Earth are now learning from the New York Times about "shoddy production" and "safety lapses" and "manufacturing mishaps" and workers filing "whistle-blower claims" at Boeing’s North Charleston plant.

Next, I warned that Boeing's decade-long buyback binge would, one, come to an end, and, two, have a huge impact on its financial position if a solution to the 737 could not be found quickly. One thing is for sure now: there is no quick way out of this mess. And sure enough, Reuters reports that Boeing "abandoned its 2019 financial outlook" and "halted share buybacks." So far, the grounding of 737 planes has cost the company "at least $1 billion." This unexpected hemorrhaging of cash will not stop until those planes are back in the air. But Boeing has not had any good news since that crash in the Dark Continent. What all of this means is that problems within the company that were once isolated and did not correlate, are now correlating.

After 2 Boeing 737 Max jets crashed, regulators and lawmakers are scrutinizing the company. Meanwhile, Boeing has increased the pace of 787 production and is said to be pushing to shrink its quality control staff by about 100 jobs in North Charleston. https://t.co/0IN0YkcM6Z
— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 20, 2019

Recall that Boeing bought back its stock right after a 737 Max 8 owned by Indonesia's Lion Air killed ‎181 people. It could do this because the problem (the crash in the Java Sea) was isolated. The second crash was not. It almost immediately linked back to the Lion Air crash and, consequently, both began to make links with more and more of Boeing's internal problems: the shoddy production, the repression and discontent of workers, the whistle blowing. All of this is now correlated with the costly grounding of all the planes. And as the mess spreads, we can expect all of these troubles to finally correlate with the heart of the matter: Over $50 billion in buybacks. And here we have the potential explosive at the tip of this torpedo that could sink the markets and send the US plunging into what will certainly be a depression that only a world war or the New Green Deal could resolve.

Many think that Boeing will be bailed out, if its finances are in complete disorder, but that is not the issue. What instead matters is how its disorder might change the way the other huge companies in the blue chip family are perceived by speculators. How stable are they? If Boeing is in trouble, then what about the rest? This will be the moment of danger. Suddenly, effective money (financial assets) which, during the boom, was seen as almost the same as strict money, will begin to lose its appearance as any kind of money. As in ancient Japanese ghost stories, the gold will turn to straw fast, if the damage done by buybacks is exposed by one blue chip firm. That is how it will all go down, and there is now a much longer way down than in 2008.

Martin Hutchinson of MarketWatch:

...no bubble is as overblown and as unjustified as share buybacks, which have totaled $350 billion in the first 10 months of 2018 alone. These have run at far more than double the level of any previous economic upsurge, at a time when stock prices are more overvalued than they have ever been before — 1929 was a model of sound valuation and caution by comparison — with the favorite tech stock, Radio Corporation of America, trading at only 28 times trailing earnings. [Share buybacks] have de-capitalized blue-chip companies, leaving many of them with negative equity... [I]t need hardly be said that another year of frantic buyback activity has left the balance sheets of most of those companies in even worse shape.

In 2018, corporations—some even running losses, or not growing at all, or in decline—repurchased their own shares to the stunning tune of $1 trillion. That is where most of the 2017 tax cuts went. And, with the current composition of the government, there are no new tax cuts in the near future, and no way of getting at all of that public cash locked up in Social Security (Bush tried that back in the day and failed). Cuts on social spending (the GOP's delight) will not be enough to keep this buyback bubble afloat. What will? The cash transferred to shareholders is gone, and the government is presently in no fiscal position to keep the vastly overpriced markets solvent. Also, Wall Street essentially dumped its losses into the Federal Reserve balance sheet—this is called “quantitative easing” or “QE”; it cost $3.5 trillion—and so this market-inflating option is severely enervated.

Now, please, dear reader, consider this. Call me a Marxist or whatever. But, for real, cash from the public purse went directly to the inflation of values in stock markets that are, in a true business sense, insolvent. And it has been so since 2008. There is no way out of this fact: Wall Street would not be breaking records today if the government hadn't pumped it with the tax-cut cash (Trump) and $3.5 trillion in liquidity in the form of quantitative easing (Obama) and mention $700 billion in hard money (Bush). Mainstream economists and bankers actually have the nerve to call this capitalism: government rewarding all manner of bad business decisions. But, of course, it's not capitalism. It's simply privatized socialism.

And so in the US, we have weaponized Keynesianism, on one hand; and privatized socialism, on the other. And yet the masses are subjected to lecturers from bankers like Jamie Dimon, J.P. Morgan Chase's CEO, about the awfulness of socialism: "[It] inevitably produces stagnation, corruption and often worse." (I will have more to say about Dimon, the most dangerous man in the US economy—and the king of the present decade—in another post.) But if you are going to be a capitalist, then be a bloody capitalist.

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"Experts recently found that it is likely to be a long-lost royal marriage bed dating to the 15th century.  In it, the nuptial frolics of King Henry VII and Elizabeth of York celebrated the end of the Wars of the Roses... and birthed England's famed Tudor dynasty.

The bed's former identity came to light after it was retired from the hotel and discarded in a parking lot. It was rescued by an antiques dealer who [incorrectly] listed it as "a profusely carved Victorian four poster bed with armorial shields..."

When Ian Coulson, a restorer and dealer of antique beds, purchased the bed online in 2010, he discovered that the wood was far older than the seller suspected... Meanwhile, emblems such as stars, shields, lions and roses carved into the bed frame were frequently associated with Tudor royalty; together, they matched the style of surviving Tudor beds from the 15th and 16th centuries.

The faces in the Adam and Eve headboard carving resemble early portraits of Henry VII and his queen; and the figures are surrounded by fertility symbols — acorns, grapes and strawberries...

DNA analysis of the wood confirmed that it was oak from central Europe of the genetic variety known as Haplotype-7, found from southern France through Belarus, and all of it came from the same tree, according to the online news outlet Hexham-Courant. Samples of paint under the headboard varnish revealed flecks of ultramarine; this vivid blue medieval pigment was more precious than gold and likely would have been used only to decorate beds belonging to royalty...

More at Live Science, via Neatorama.

The Justice Department is not usually shy about publicizing alleged terrorism plots that it uncovers in the United States. This week, however, news broke of a violent extremist plot in the United States that court documents chillingly noted would have led to the “murder of innocent civilians on a scale rarely seen in this country.” Outside of the court filings, however, the Justice Department did not say a word.

The plot involved Christopher Hasson, 49, a self-described white nationalist. Hasson is a lieutenant in the United States Coast Guard and had amassed a terrifying arsenal of weaponry, along with a hit list of prominent liberal politicians and media figures in the country that he had allegedly been planning to kill. Hasson had been arrested on gun and drug charges but was described in court documents as a “domestic terrorist, bent on committing acts dangerous to human life that are intended to affect governmental conduct.” Among those he was planning to target included Democratic politicians Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., as well as Sens. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. He also, according to court documents, planned to target CNN host Don Lemon and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, among others.

Normally, the Justice Department  issues a press release to let the public know about their successful investigation — even in cases that at first glance appear to be much less serious.

Normally, when an alleged terrorist plot is uncovered in the U.S., the Justice Department issues a press release to let the public know about their successful investigation — even in cases that at first glance appear to be much less serious than an extremist who had already put together their own hit list and weapons cache. In this case, however, there was no such release.

Instead, the news broke to the public through the Twitter feed of Seamus Hughes, a deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, a D.C.-based counterterrorism think tank. Hughes shared the documents with the allegations against Hasson, which had apparently been posted to the court’s online docket. Without the sort of press release that tends to accompany major terrorism arrests, Hughes found Hasson’s case because he habitually checks court filings.

The administration’s silence fits a pattern. A study published last year by the Washington-based Institute for Social Policy and Understanding showed that the Justice Department was six times more likely to issue press releases in alleged plots that involved Muslims than non-Muslims. The press releases are particularly important since they tend to trigger news coverage and public awareness of cases.

The information about Hasson gleaned from the documents paints the picture of a man obsessed with far-right conspiracy theories and visions of destroying the existing social order. According to the allegations against him, Hasson was obsessed with the need for a “white homeland” and had made preparations for acts of violence intended to plunge the U.S. into political turmoil. His alleged plot appears to have drawn heavily from the manifesto of Anders Breivik, an anti-Muslim radical who killed 77 people in a deadly rampage in Norway in 2011. Breivik’s actions remain an inspiration to many on the extremist fringe today, including Hasson, whose plot allegedly corresponded with many of the instructions contained in Breivik’s manifesto.

In a draft email contained in filings against Hasson, he spoke in terms also distinctly similar to those associated with the “alt-right” movement and the network of extremist supporters of President Donald Trump. “Liberalist/globalist ideology is destroying traditional peoples esp white. No way to counteract without violence,” Hasson wrote. “It should push for more crack down bringing more people to our side. Much blood will have to be spilled to get whitey off the couch.”

Last year, an Institute for Social Policy and Understanding study found that cases of attempted violence involving Muslim suspects received 7 1/2 times more coverage from major media outlets than those involving non-Muslims. While Hasson’s case was picked up after court filings were posted on social media, it seems that in this case, the government was uninterested in publicizing information about a white nationalist terrorism plot that its own filings claim would have resulted in catastrophic violence.

While the allegations against him have yet to be tested in court, at first glance Hasson’s case seems to add to concerns about the growth of far-right violence in the United States. Gauging the true scale and scope of this phenomenon is a difficult task. In future, though — and to dispel accusations of bias — it’d be helpful if the Justice Department would at least let the public know about it.

The post The Department of Justice Loves Publicizing Arrests of Alleged Terrorists — but Not the White Nationalist Coast Guard Officer appeared first on The Intercept.

The hundreds of U.S. military bases scattered across the globe might seem like small, unimportant dots on a map, but they are the foundation of the U.S. Empire today.

Half of all humans owe their lives to small farmers, because that’s who grows most of the food in Africa and Asia. But it turns out that small farmers in poorer countries are stuck with seeds that can’t cope with a rapidly changing climate.

It’s a different story here in North America. A farmer in Illinois facing drought can plant Pioneer’s AQUAmax corn, which provides solid yields in dry years. If damp weather is covering your peas in powdery mildew, you can get mildew-resistant seeds. Most small farmers, on the other hand, can’t get their hands on new seeds bred to tolerate droughts, floods, and pests.

For the past six years, the Dutch nonprofit Access to Seeds has been researching the $50-billion seed industry — companies like Monsanto-buyer Bayer, Syngenta, and Pioneer — to see if they are making the latest innovations available to small farmers. It released a report this week showing that the vast majority of the world’s farmers can’t get their hands on the same seeds that help wealthier farmers produce bountiful harvests.

Grist spoke to Ido Verhagen, executive director of the nonprofit, about why more small farmers are seeking out improved seeds, why no one wants to breed beans, and why he thinks we need agribusinesses to help fix the food system. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Q. Why should we care if farmers are able to buy the latest seeds?

A. Seed is the key technology in agriculture. If we want Earth’s population of 10 billion by 2050 to have nutritious diets without ruining the planet we have to create a more sustainable food system, and that starts with seeds.

Q. I know some readers will think that companies selling seeds to small farmers would be a problem, not a solution.

A. I’m not claiming farmers should use seeds coming from companies, but I think they should have the choice.

There’s an Israeli NGO called Fair Planet seed that did some experiments with farmers in Ethiopia testing seeds from companies and traditional varieties. Just by using more advanced practices like using seedbeds [rather than throwing seeds across a field), they could double the yields of their traditional varieties. But by using varieties that were the result of modern plant breeding, yields were five times higher. So farming techniques matter a lot, but seeds matter even more.

Also, in times of climate change, more farmers are starting to ask for seeds. We did roundtable discussions with farmers’ organizations, and farmers from Africa said, “Yes, why can’t we get access to the technologies that are just common in Europe and the USA?” But farmers from Asia told us, “Well, actually we manage quite well ourselves.” We had these same roundtables just three years later in 2016 and everything had changed. Even the farmers in Asia were saying, “We do need better seeds because of climate change.”

The old method — farmers saving the seeds from the plants that perform best each season — was not keeping up with climate change.

Q. How many small farmers have that option?

A. The big global companies reach just 10 percent of small farmers. But there are smaller seed companies everywhere. I was impressed by the regional seed industry in Asia: They have broad breeding programs, they are highly competitive, and they are investing in a lot of local businesses. In East Africa, there is an emerging seed industry, but they only breed for a select few crops. If you include those smaller regional companies, they reach 20 percent of small farmers around the world.

Q. Are there crops that aren’t getting enough attention?

A. The seed industry hardly invests in legumes [like chickpeas, lentils, and beans]. That’s an issue.

Q. Yeah, if we want to get protein from plants rather than carbon-intensive meat, we need legumes.

A. Yes, but it’s difficult to build a business case for them. Their seeds are easy to reuse, so farmers don’t have to buy them every season. That means companies get a lower return on investment for all the breeding, so they aren’t as interested.

Q. One thing you found is that companies are starting to breed crops with better nutritional value.

A. For a long time in breeding, the focus was on yield and disease resistance, and nutrition wasn’t a priority. Now more and more seed companies tell us that nutrition is also a breeding target. But this is difficult and it can be hard to get farmers to adopt those seeds because they generally care more about yield, not nutrition.

Q. What happens next, ideally?

A. We started six years ago, more or less as a copycat initiative. There was already something called the Access to Medicine Index that wanted to encourage Big Pharma to make medicine available in developing countries. It created a race to the top, and increased the understanding between the public and private sectors, allowing, for example, the World Health Organization and pharmaceutical companies to form partnerships.

So our main goal is just to show how this industry is performing and which companies are good candidates for partnerships with NGOs and research institutes. If we want to be able to feed 10 billion people without exceeding planetary boundaries, the whole system has to move. And these benchmarks allow us to identify priorities.

Q. I know this is just your second report, but do you see any examples of companies reacting in a race-to-the-top kind of way?

A. I think you have to be modest — we can’t assume it’s because of us. But three years ago, only a few of these companies had really thought about how to contribute to global food security — at least not explicitly. Now almost all of them have explicit targets.

They are looking at their strengths and trying to use them. So a Dutch seed company that is really good in breeding is opening a breeding station in Tanzania. Syngenta has set up a foundation with projects around the world to help pre-commercial farmers adopt new technologies and start selling food. Companies are exploring how they can contribute, and not just by charity, because charity is good but it can start today and stop tomorrow. We are really interested in sustainable business models, so that the seed is there season after season for farmers.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Big farmers use climate-resistant seeds. Most small farmers can’t get them. on Feb 1, 2019.

A veteran national security journalist with NBC News and MSNBC blasted the networks in a Monday email for becoming captive and subservient to the national security state, reflexively pro-war in the name of stopping President Donald Trump, and now the prime propaganda instrument of the War Machine’s promotion of militarism and imperialism. As a result of NBC/MSNBC’s all-consuming militarism, he said, “the national security establishment not only hasn’t missed a beat but indeed has gained dangerous strength” and “is ever more autonomous and practically impervious to criticism.”

The NBC/MSNBC reporter, William Arkin, is a longtime prominent war and military reporter, perhaps best known for his groundbreaking, three-part Washington Post series in 2010, co-reported with two-time Pulitzer winner Dana Priest, on how sprawling, unaccountable, and omnipotent the national security state has become in the post-9/11 era. When that three-part investigative series, titled “Top Secret America,” was published, I hailed it as one of the most important pieces of reporting of the war on terror, because while “we chirp endlessly about the Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Democrats and Republicans, this is the Real U.S. Government:  functioning in total darkness, beyond elections and parties, so secret, vast and powerful that it evades the control or knowledge of any one person or even any organization.”

Arkin has worked with NBC and MSNBC over the years and continuously since 2016. But yesterday, he announced that he was leaving the network in a long, emphatic email denouncing the networks for their superficial and reactionary coverage of national security, for becoming fixated on trivial Trump outbursts of the day to chase profit and ratings, and — most incriminating of all — for becoming the central propaganda arm of the CIA, the Pentagon, and the FBI in the name of #Resistance, thus inculcating an entire new generation of liberals, paying attention to politics for the first time in the Trump era, to “lionize” those agencies and their policies of imperialism and militarism.

That MSNBC and NBC have become Security State Central has been obvious for quite some time. The network consists of little more than former CIA, NSA, and Pentagon officials as news “analysts”; ex-Bush-Cheney national security and communications officials as hosts and commentators; and the most extremists pro-war neocons constantly bashing Trump (and critics of Democrats generally) from the right, using the Cheney-Rove playbook on which they built their careers to accuse Democratic Party critics and enemies of being insufficiently patriotic, traitors for America’s official enemies, and abandoning America’s hegemonic role in the world.

MSNBC’s star national security reporter Ken Dilanian was widely mocked by media outlets for years for being an uncritical CIA stenographer before he became a beloved NBC/MSNBC reporter (where his mindless servitude to his CIA masters has produced some of the network’s most humiliating debacles). The cable network’s key anchor, Rachel Maddow, once wrote a book on the evils of endless wars without congressional authorization, but now routinely depicts anyone who wants to end those illegal wars as reckless weaklings and traitors.

Some of the most beloved and frequently featured MSNBC commentators are the most bloodthirsty pro-war militarists from the war on terror: David Frum, Jennifer Rubin, Ralph Peters, and Bill Kristol (who was just giddily and affectionately celebrated with a playful nickname bestowed on him: “Lil Bill”). In early 2018, NBC hired former CIA chief John Brennan to serve as a “senior national security and intelligence analyst,” where the rendition and torture advocate joined — as Politico’s Jack Shafer noted — a long litany of former security state officials at the network, including “Chuck Rosenberg, former acting DEA administrator, chief of staff for FBI Director James B. Comey, and counselor to former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III; Frank Figliuzzi, former chief of FBI counterintelligence; Juan Zarate, deputy national security adviser under Bush.”

As Shafer noted, filling your news and analyst slots with former security state officials as MSNBC and NBC have done is tantamount to becoming state TV, since “their first loyalty — and this is no slam — is to the agency from which they hail.” As he put it: “Imagine a TV network covering the auto industry through the eyes of dozens of paid former auto executives and you begin to appreciate the current peculiarities.”

All of this led Arkin to publish a remarkable denunciation of NBC and MSNBC in the form of an email he sent to various outlets, including The Intercept. Its key passages are scathing and unflinching in their depiction of those networks as pro-war propaganda outlets that exist to do little more than amplify and serve the security state agencies most devoted to opposing Trump, including their mindless opposition to Trump’s attempts (with whatever motives) to roll back some of the excesses of imperialism, aggression, and U.S. involvement in endless war, as well as to sacrifice all journalistic standards and skepticism about generals and the U.S war machine if doing so advances their monomaniacal mission of denouncing Trump. As Arkin wrote (emphasis added):

My expertise, though seeming to be all the more central to the challenges and dangers we face, also seems to be less valued at the moment. And I find myself completely out of synch with the network, being neither a day-to-day reporter nor interested in the Trump circus. …

To me there is also a larger problem: though they produce nothing that resembles actual safety and security, the national security leaders and generals we have are allowed to do their thing unmolested. Despite being at “war,” no great wartime leaders or visionaries are emerging. There is not a soul in Washington who can say that they have won or stopped any conflict. And though there might be the beloved perfumed princes in the form of the Petraeus’ and Wes Clarks’, or the so-called warrior monks like Mattis and McMaster, we’ve had more than a generation of national security leaders who sadly and fraudulently have done little of consequence. And yet we (and others) embrace them, even the highly partisan formers who masquerade as “analysts”. We do so ignoring the empirical truth of what they have wrought: There is not one county in the Middle East that is safer today than it was 18 years ago. Indeed the world becomes ever more polarized and dangerous. …

Windrem again convinced me to return to NBC to join the new investigative unit in the early days of the 2016 presidential campaign. I thought that the mission was to break through the machine of perpetual war acceptance and conventional wisdom to challenge Hillary Clinton’s hawkishness. It was also an interesting moment at NBC because everyone was looking over their shoulder at Vice and other upstarts creeping up on the mainstream. But then Trump got elected and Investigations got sucked into the tweeting vortex, increasingly lost in a directionless adrenaline rush, the national security and political version of leading the broadcast with every snow storm. And I would assert that in many ways NBC just began emulating the national security state itself – busy and profitable. No wars won but the ball is kept in play.

I’d argue that under Trump, the national security establishment not only hasn’t missed a beat but indeed has gained dangerous strength. Now it is ever more autonomous and practically impervious to criticism. I’d also argue, ever so gingerly, that NBC has become somewhat lost in its own verve, proxies of boring moderation and conventional wisdom, defender of the government against Trump, cheerleader for open and subtle threat mongering, in love with procedure and protocol over all else (including results). I accept that there’s a lot to report here, but I’m more worried about how much we are missing. Hence my desire to take a step back and think why so little changes with regard to America’s wars. …

In our day-to-day whirlwind and hostage status as prisoners of Donald Trump, I think – like everyone else does – that we miss so much. People who don’t understand the medium, or the pressures, loudly opine that it’s corporate control or even worse, that it’s partisan. Sometimes I quip in response to friends on the outside (and to government sources) that if they mean by the word partisan that it is New Yorkers and Washingtonians against the rest of the country then they are right.

For me I realized how out of step I was when I looked at Trump’s various bumbling intuitions: his desire to improve relations with Russia, to denuclearize North Korea, to get out of the Middle East, to question why we are fighting in Africa, even in his attacks on the intelligence community and the FBI.  Of course he is an ignorant and incompetent impostor. And yet I’m alarmed at how quick NBC is to mechanically argue the contrary, to be in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war. Really? We shouldn’t get out Syria? We shouldn’t go for the bold move of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula?  Even on Russia, though we should be concerned about the brittleness of our democracy that it is so vulnerable to manipulation, do we really yearn for the Cold War? And don’t even get me started with the FBI: What? We now lionize this historically destructive institution?

That an entire generation of Democrats paying attention to politics for the first time is being instilled with formerly right-wing Cold Warrior values of jingoism, über-patriotism, reverence for security state agencies and prosecutors, a reckless use of the “traitor” accusation to smear one’s enemies, and a belief that neoconservatives embody moral rectitude and foreign policy expertise has long been obvious and deeply disturbing. These toxins will endure far beyond Trump, particularly given the now full-scale unity between the Democratic establishment and neocons.

I think the way it's supposed to work is the elected president, as Commander-in-Chief, makes decisions with Congress about whether troops will be deployed (which didn't happen in Syria), & then the President decides when they come home. We have civilian, not military, rule: https://t.co/5GJ2J5jjUE

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 21, 2018

Still, that a network insider has blown the whistle on how all this works, and how MSNBC and NBC have become ground zero for these political pathologies of militarism and servitude to security state agencies, while not surprising, is nonetheless momentous given how detailed and emphatic he is in his condemnations.

The post Veteran NBC/MSNBC Journalist Blasts the Network for Being Captive to the National Security State and Reflexively Pro-War to Stop Trump appeared first on The Intercept.

Woodworker Keith Williams of Oddball Gallery in Minier, Illinois creates geodesic spheres that balance math and art. Each sculptural form is created from 170 wood triangles that are then hand-assembled into 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons. Next these shapes are glued together into an angular 180-sided ball that is placed onto a lathe and transformed into a completely smooth sphere.

As Williams removes approximately 1/4″ of wood, natural rings from the plywood are brought to the surface, covering the final piece in a dizzying array of concentric circles. You can watch a behind-the-scenes look at how these objects are made in the video above. FInd more peeks into the Oddball Studio on Williams’ website and Youtube. (via Laughing Squid)

When a Border Patrol agent is contemplating pulling someone over, they have a checklist of possible behaviors to look out for. They can determine “whether the vehicle or its load looks unusual in some way,” or “whether the passengers appeared dirty.” If those descriptions don’t apply, they can assess “whether the persons inside the vehicle avoid looking at the agent,” or conversely, “whether the persons inside the vehicle are paying undue attention to the agent’s presence.” And if those don’t apply, they can simply determine that the car is in an area nearby the border and pull it over on that basis alone.

The Border Patrol’s authority doesn’t only apply to remote stretches of the border. Agents also deploy in cities, searching for people they believe to have illegally entered the country; board buses and ask passengers to prove they are in the country legally; and conscript civilians to assist them with law enforcement activities under threat of arrest.

These details and others were revealed in more than 1,000 pages of previously unseen Customs and Border Protection training documents, which were obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union after a four-year legal battle and shared exclusively with The Intercept. The documents were finally released to the ACLU’s Border Litigation Project this past August in response to a 2014 Freedom of Information Act request that focused on the policies of Border Patrol’s “roving patrols” — units that operate outside of ports of entry and checkpoints, often venturing far into the country’s interior. These roving patrols can question, detain, and arrest individuals they suspect of having illegally crossed the border or having smuggled drugs or other contraband into the country.

The documents include a copy of the agency’s 2012 Enforcement Law Course, which CBP has described in court filings as advice “on the legal authority of CBP’s law enforcement personnel and issues they would confront in investigations and prosecutions.” (CBP declined to comment on whether the ELC has been updated since 2012 and did not respond to further requests for comment.) In addition to the Enforcement Law Course is a series of PowerPoint presentations from November 2017 aimed at helping Border Patrol trainees digest the legalistic language of the ELC.

During the course of the FOIA litigation, CBP argued that releasing the documents would be a violation of attorney-client privilege between CBP’s legal branch and its officers in the field. A federal judge dismissed that claim last year, after finding that the Enforcement Law Course did not contain confidential information flowing from client to attorney. Despite this finding, parts of the course, including the entire section related to the use of surveillance, have been redacted. A judge also allowed a chapter on instructions regarding courtroom testimony to be redacted, finding that it conveyed litigation strategy.

What’s included in the documents, however, is a portrait of an agency that acknowledges that citizens and noncitizens alike are covered by the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, while also instructing officers on expansive ways to circumvent it.

“One thing the documents that we obtained do a good job of highlighting is how arbitrary and often nonsensical the agency’s decision about whether something rises to reasonable suspicion to justify a stop is,” said Mitra Ebadolahi, an attorney with the Border Litigation Project who litigated the FOIA request.

As part of the legal advice for roving patrol officers, CBP lists 21 possible “articulable facts” that can serve as a basis for stopping a car — demonstrating a broad interpretation of what constitutes reasonable suspicion as justification for Border Patrol to pull over anyone within 100 miles of the border. Many of these articulable facts stem from cherry-picked court decisions that have granted Border Patrol wide latitude in making stops.

(1) whether the vehicle is close to the border;
(2) whether the vehicle is on a known smuggling route;
(3) whether the vehicle’s presence is inconsistent with the local traffic patterns;
(4) whether the vehicle could have been trying to avoid a checkpoint;
(5) whether the vehicle appears to be heavily laden;
(6) whether the vehicle is from out of the area;
(7) whether the vehicle or its load looks unusual in some way;
(8) whether the vehicle is of a sort often favored by smugglers;
(9) whether the vehicle appears to have been altered or modified;
(10) whether the cargo area in the vehicle is covered;
(11) the time of day or night at which the vehicle is spotted, and whether it corresponds to a shift change;
(12) whether the vehicle is being driven in an erratic or unsafe manner;
(13) whether the vehicle appears to be traveling in tandem with another vehicle;
(14) whether the vehicle looks as if it has recently been driven off road;
(15) whether the persons inside the vehicle avoid looking at the agent;
(16) whether the persons inside the vehicle are paying undue attention to the agent’s presence;
(17) whether the persons in the vehicle tried to avoid being seen or exhibited other unusual behavior;
(18) whether the driver slowed down after seeing the agent;
(19) whether the passengers appeared dirty;
(20) whether there is intelligence available that suggests that smuggling will occur in the area or by a specific vehicle; and
(21) whether the vehicle is coming from an area of a sensor alert.

Outside of the border zone, law enforcement in the United States has been held to a standard set by the Supreme Court’s 1968 ruling in Terry V. Ohio, which found that stops by police officers must be based on a reasonable suspicion that someone has just committed, is committing, or is about to commit a crime. The list of possible justifications presented by the ELC is so broad as to suggest that simply being in a car near the border is suspicious enough to warrant a stop.

While Customs and Border Protection claims that a 1953 Justice Department regulation extends its jurisdiction to within 100 air miles of the border (which covers nine of the country’s 10 largest cities and two-thirds of its population), the ELC also provides a legal framework for a 25-mile zone around the border where Border Patrol believes its agents are allowed to patrol private lands and question anyone they encounter (including within border-adjacent cities like New York, Miami, and San Diego). According to the ELC, Border Patrol agents are not allowed to enter private dwellings or infringe upon an individual’s “reasonable expectation of privacy,” when a citizen believes they’re not putting something in the public view and a law enforcement agency would be required to obtain a warrant to conduct a search.  What’s less clear is how the agency’s near-constant surveillance of the area surrounding the border serves to narrow this reasonable expectation of privacy.

The entire chapter on electronic surveillance has been redacted in the ELC, and the unredacted sections, as well as the PowerPoint presentations, paint a complicated portrait of scenarios in which surveillance technology, when used by CBP, would constitute a search. The ELC points to Supreme Court decisions on GPS devices and thermal imagers as examples of cases in which a warrant would be required. Meanwhile, when it comes to aircraft overflights, “If the aircraft is operated lawfully and in airspace where such flights are routine, no intrusion by the aircraft into a reasonable expectation of privacy occurs,” the ELC states.

According to Sarah St.Vincent, a Human Rights Watch researcher on surveillance and domestic law enforcement who reviewed the ELC, this secrecy and lack of clarity about CBP’s surveillance operations is a central feature of how the agency operates.

“This is a form the surveillance state takes in the United States,” St.Vincent told The Intercept. “It takes place under this veneer of law, such that it looks legitimate and reasoned, but actually there are serious questions to be asked, both about practices and whether the case law or the laws the government is citing in support of what it wants to do reflects what Congress or the courts actually said.”

Getting to the bottom of how CBP uses its surveillance authority has been difficult for attorneys and advocates litigating these issues, as parts of criminal cases that might rely heavily on surveillance can be hidden from view as part of a process called “parallel construction,” which creates a separate evidentiary basis for a criminal investigation in order to hide how the investigation began.

“We’ve seen, in the parallel construction context, that they will fixate on a particular Supreme Court case that might be outdated and use that as a legal justification for what they want to do and ignore that there may be some rulings that might be contradictory to what they want to do,” St.Vincent explained. “There is a broader problem with the government cherry-picking cases and justifying things to itself that, when I sit down and look at these things as an attorney, it doesn’t really hold up. Not in the categorical way they say it does.”

According to the documents, the border itself extends far beyond even the massive 100-mile zone to any city with an international airport where Border Patrol can prove that a nexus has occurred (that someone has crossed the border recently). According to the ELC, “Transportation checks conducted at key hubs complement linewatch [agents tasked with watching the border between ports of entry], roving patrol and immigration checkpoint operations by closing off another means of escape from the border area.”

Border Patrol also believes it has broad authority to check the identity of individuals on buses or trains within the 100-mile border zone, as recent headlines can attest. If Border Patrol obtains permission, as it has from bus companies like Greyhound, agents are allowed to board the bus and ask for identification. The ELC advises that agents are not required to inform travelers that they are allowed to refuse to show identification or that refusal will not be used as reasonable suspicion to undertake a search. “The Fourth Amendment does not require police officers to advise bus passengers of their right not to cooperate and to refuse consent to searches,” the ELC states.

“The judiciary has to be a line of defense for the Constitution and really make the Fourth Amendment protections meaningful by interpreting them in a way that doesn’t permit an agency such as Border Patrol to basically make up whatever it wants and have that satisfy the standard,” said the ACLU’s Ebadolahi. “That’s one of the things that these documents really throw into relief. It’s really disturbing.”

A bill introduced this past spring by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., would require Border Patrol agents to report every instance they stop and question someone about their citizenship status. Right now, agents need only document the arrests they’ve made, making patterns of racial profiling or persistent harassment of people who live along the border impossible to track.

The ELC reveals other, less-reported aspects of CBP enforcement, including the existence of a “city patrol,” whose purpose is “to locate illegal aliens within cities close to the international border.” In the section describing city patrol, there is no requirement for suspicion that a recent border crossing has taken place; this unit’s mandate is simply to “locate aliens who are subject to removal from the United States.” The ELC instructs agents only to make an arrest without a warrant if they suspect the individual has committed a federal felony, including presenting forged documents. Still, city patrol’s mandate overlaps considerably with the interior enforcement normally delegated to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In addition to the existence of city patrol, which seemingly widens the already vast jurisdiction of CBP’s roving patrols, the ELC reveals Border Patrol’s belief in its ability to demand assistance from any civilian, and, if they refuse, the option to charge them with a misdemeanor or issue a fine of up to $1,000. As recently as 2012, Border Patrol has used this ability to compel hospital doctors to assist them with cavity searches for contraband. This eventually led to a settlement in 2014 between CBP and the ACLU that included a clarification to hospitals along the border that doctors need not assist unless a warrant has been issued for the cavity search or an individual has consented to being searched.

The PowerPoint presentations also provide some do’s and don’ts for Border Patrol agents, including advice that they shouldn’t use “slang” in official reports. One example of this “slang” is an archaic slur that harkens back to one of Border Patrol’s earliest large-scale enforcement actions, Operation Wetback in 1954.

After four years of litigation to try to get a peek into what legal justification CBP is using to create a state of constant surveillance near the border, and as a mandate for ever-increasing incursions into the country’s interior, Ebadolahi still feels that the largest federal law enforcement agency is shrouded in almost complete mystery.

“I think it would be really helpful to have a sense of how CBP allocates the resources of what it does have, because it’s billions of dollars, and they’re constantly saying they don’t have resources. We’re seeing this now with the asylum-seekers at the port of entry, where the agency is saying it’s at max capacity,” Ebadolahi told The Intercept.

In December, the Supreme Court sided with a ruling by a District Court judge in California and refused to let the Trump administration enforce a new set of rules that aimed to bar people who cross between ports of entry from applying for asylum. Even without the ban in place, however, CBP has drastically reduced the amount of people it allows to cross the border at ports of entry in order to apply for asylum. Trapped in unfamiliar cities, asylum-seekers sometimes make the dangerous trek through the desert and across the border only after waiting weeks and even months for CBP to admit them at a port of entry. CBP claims that it simply does not have the capacity to process the thousands of asylum-seekers who present at ports of entry every month. This presents a contradiction to lawyers like Ebadolahi: Untold millions are being set aside for security and surveillance, and seemingly very little for addressing possibly legitimate asylum claims.

“How are they allocating the resources they have?” Ebadolahi continued. “Our taxpayers are funding this, and it’s not actually increasing anyone’s security. It’s actually a huge risk to living in a free society.”

The post Newly Released FOIA Documents Shed Light on Border Patrol’s Seemingly Limitless Authority appeared first on The Intercept.

Visual responses in the cerebral cortex are believed to rely on the geniculate input to the primary visual cortex (V1). Indeed, V1 lesions substantially reduce visual responses throughout the cortex. Visual information enters the cortex also through the superior colliculus (SC), but the function of this input on visual responses in the cortex is less clear. SC lesions affect cortical visual responses less than V1 lesions, and no visual cortical area appears to entirely rely on SC inputs. We show that visual responses in a mouse lateral visual cortical area called the postrhinal cortex are independent of V1 and are abolished upon silencing of the SC. This area outperforms V1 in discriminating moving objects. We thus identify a collicular primary visual cortex that is independent of the geniculo-cortical pathway and is capable of motion discrimination.

Veterinarians at UC Davis are using fish skin to treat wild bears burned in that state's recent wildfires.  This is not a graft, but rather a biologic bandage.  Tilapia skin has also been applied to the paws of a young mountain lion.

“You want to do everything possible to get these animals feeling better. It’s not their fault they were in this horrible fire and they’re in a strange environment and they don’t know what’s going on and they hurt.”

Giving them a long time to recover wasn’t an option. The team didn’t want to risk having the bears acclimate to people or captivity. Standard care, which would require frequent bandage changes, would also be difficult with a wild animal...

Peyton remembered reading about a group in Brazil that had used sterilized tilapia skins to successfully treat burns on humans. While the treatment had never been performed in the United States and never on animals, Peyton decided it was worth trying.

“The high collagen level in the fish skins helps with healing and acts like a matrix,” said Peyton. “It would act as protection and it was pretty inexpensive and available.”..

“In our view, there was no downside,” said Peyton. The fish skins are even edible, and no reactions to the skins were observed. The mountain lion, which received the same treatment as the bears, ended up eating his.

More details and photos.

Artist Tim Klein takes advantage of the widely used die-cut patterns for jigsaw puzzles to form hybridized montages that combine two unexpected images. By carefully selecting pieces from puzzles with complementary patterns yet surprisingly different subject matter, he creates wild new visuals. In one montage, an old-fashioned locomotive takes the place of a powerful horse torso, while in another, the cylindrical shape of an icy-cold beer fills in for the stocky body of a teddy bear toy.

Klein credits Mel Andringa with inspiring his own puzzle pursuits, and shares with Colossal, “For me, the use of ordinary, mass-produced puzzles is essential to the surreal feel of the artwork. As I visit garage sales and secondhand stores in search of vintage puzzles, I sometimes feel like an archaeologist discovering and ‘reconstructing’ strange, shattered images whose shards have been languishing in dark boxes on the shelves of suburban game room closets for decades.”

Klein, who formerly worked as a computer scientist, lives in Vancouver, Washington. If you like these mash-ups, check out Alma Haser’s custom puzzle designs which combine and interchange the facial features from identical twins. You can see more of Klein’s combined creations on his website. (via Kottke)

Simon Prades (previously) uses muted color palettes to convey feelings of introspection, inquisitiveness, and even rage in his editorial illustrations. His work often features human portraits interwoven with natural elements such as coiling snakes and growing plants which combine detailed realism with abstracted and surreal environments. The German-Spanish artist and designer currently lives and works in Saarbrücken, Germany, and is regularly commissioned by a wide variety of publications—from Rolling Stone to Outside Magazine. You can see more from the artist on his website, where he sells select artworks as prints, and on Behance.

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.

The renowned physicist Leonard Susskind has identified a possible quantum origin for the ever-growing volume of black holes.NASA

Leonard Susskind, a pioneer of string theory, the holographic principle, and other big physics ideas spanning the past half-century, has proposed a solution to an important puzzle about black holes. The problem is that even though these mysterious, invisible spheres appear to stay a constant size as viewed from the outside, their interiors keep growing in volume essentially forever. How is this possible?

In a series of recent papers and talks, the 78-year-old Stanford University professor and his collaborators conjecture that black holes grow in volume because they are steadily increasing in complexity—an idea that, while unproven, is fueling new thinking about the quantum nature of gravity inside black holes.

Black holes are spherical regions of such extreme gravity that not even light can escape. First discovered a century ago as shocking solutions to the equations of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, they’ve since been detected throughout the universe. (They typically form from the inward gravitational collapse of dead stars.) Einstein’s theory equates the force of gravity with…
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Utah-based artist Stephanie K. Clark (previously) considers herself a painter, but the works she creates are not made with a traditional painterly medium. Using embroidery techniques and strands of floss in a spectrum of colors, Clark paints little houses, landscapes, and other scenes that look as if they exist in the natural world and are being lit by the moon or sun.

“My process is much like any painter,” Stephanie tells Colossal. “I started out as a drawer/painter and I’ve just carried that same process into my embroidery work. I always use image and color references for my pieces. I lay out my pallet of thread/floss and I start laying the colors as if I’m painting. They eventually start blending themselves.”

Working at various scales (as small as 5″ x 5″, and as large as 6-foot-wide canvases), Clark says that the time invested depends on the size and detail of the piece, with small houses taking between 6 to 12 hours to complete, and larger landscapes requiring up to 20 hours. “I consider myself a fast worker for embroidery,” she explained, “which tends to be slow and tedious. Sometimes I have to remind myself to slow down and when I do, the pieces come out so much prettier.”

When not working on commissions, Clark’s thread paintings are inspired by her personal life: “My concepts typically go along with my life, my family, my home, and my heart.” To see more of her work, follow her on Instagram.

JaeCheol Park, who goes by the artist name PaperBlue, creates intricate drawings in the style of architectural drafts. But rather than imagining a buildable building, Park employs the classic illustrative aesthetic to form fantastical urban environments where structures appear and disappear, bleeding into one another in a haze of geometric patterns. His loose linework and intensive layering enliven the historical architectural styles he highlights in his drawings. The artist, who is based in Seongnam, South Korea, has a broad audience for his digital and concept art along with his more traditional drafting-inspired work. Park shares drawing tutorials on Youtube and finished work on Facebook. He has also published a book, which is available on Amazon. (via ARCHatlas)

After death, your options tend to be limited. You could go the cremation route, releasing carbon dioxide and mercury in the process. Or you could be buried in casket within a plastic-lined concrete vault, your body coated in carcinogenic embalming fluid. But must you destroy the planet, even after you’ve expended your time on earth?

Washington state might soon expand your options to include the (in my humble opinion, unfortunately named) process of “human composting.” A bill, expected to be introduced by state Senator Jamie Pedersen next month, would make the state the first to legalize “recomposition” — letting a body decompose in nutrient-dense soil. It would also legalize alkaline hydrolysis, aka water cremation, where a body dissolves in a vessel with water and lye until it’s just bone and liquid.

“People from all over the state who wrote to me are very excited about the prospect of becoming a tree or having a different alternative for themselves,” Pedersen told NBC News.

I don’t mean to get macabre here, but the reality is that everyone eventually dies. And the environmental cost of death really adds up. In the United States, 30 million board feet of wood, 1.6 million tons of concrete, 800,000 gallons of embalming fluid, and 90,000 tons of steel are used every year for conventional burials. Cremation releases 250,000 tons of CO2 each year, the equivalent of burning nearly 30 million gallons of gasoline.

Death didn’t use to be such an environmental drag. Burials were once a simple affair: a shrouded body lowered into the ground. The body would decay and leave behind minerals and nutrients in the soil. Maybe, if lucky, those remains could one day feed a flower or a tree.

Katrina Spade, the founder of Recompose, is popularizing a modern incarnation of this natural process. The company promises that over the span of a month, bodies will decompose into about a cubic yard of compost per person, saving at least a metric ton of CO2 in the process.

As Spade told the Seattle Times, “Our bodies are full of potential” — even, apparently, when dead.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What’s greener than burial or cremation? Human composting. on Dec 31, 2018.

What if we abandoned photosynthesis as the means of producing food, and released most of the world’s surface from agriculture?

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 31^st October 2018

 

It’s not about “them”, it’s about us. The horrific rate of biological annihilation reported this week – 60% of the Earth’s vertebrate wildlife gone since 1970 – is driven primarily by the food industry. Farming and fishing are the major causes of the collapse of both marine and terrestrial ecosystems. Meat – consumed in greater quantities by the rich than by the poor – is the strongest cause of all. We might shake our heads in horror at the clearance of forests, the drainage of wetlands, the slaughter of predators and the massacre of sharks and turtles by fishing fleets, but it is done at our behest.

As the Guardian’s recent report from Argentina reveals, the huge forests of the Gran Chaco are heading towards extermination, as they are replaced by deserts of soya beans, almost all of which are used to produce animal feed, particularly for Europe. With Jair Bolsonaro in power in Brazil, deforestation in the Amazon is likely to accelerate, much of it driven by the beef lobby that helped bring him to power. The great forests of Indonesia and West Papua are being felled and burnt for oil palm at devastating speed.

The most important environmental action we can take is to reduce the area of land and sea used by farming and fishing. This means, above all, switching to a plant-based diet: research published in the journal Science shows that cutting out animal products would reduce the global requirement for farmland by 76%. It would also give us a fair chance of feeding the world. Grazing is no answer to the ecocide caused by grain-fed livestock: it is an astonishingly wasteful use of vast tracts of land that would otherwise support wildlife and wild ecosystems.

The same action is essential to prevent climate breakdown. Because governments, bowing to the demands of capital, have left it so late, it is almost impossible to see how we can stop more than 1.5° of global warming without drawing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The only way of doing it that has been demonstrated at scale is to allow trees to return to deforested land.

But could we go beyond even a plant-based diet? Could we go beyond agriculture itself? What if, instead of producing food from soil, we were to produce it from air? What if, instead of basing our nutrition on photosynthesis, we were to use electricity, to fuel a process whose conversion of sunlight into food is ten times more efficient?

This sounds like science fiction, but it is already approaching commercialisation. For the past year, a group of Finnish researchers has been producing food without either animals or plants. Their only ingredients are hydrogen-oxidising bacteria, electricity from solar panels, a small amount of water, carbon dioxide drawn from the air, nitrogen and trace quantities of minerals such as calcium, sodium, potassium and zinc. The food they have produced is 50 to 60% protein, the rest is carbohydrate and fat. They have started a company (Solar Foods), which seeks to open its first factory in 2021. This week it was selected as an incubation project by the European Space Agency.

They use electricity from solar panels to electrolyse water, producing hydrogen, that feeds bacteria (which turn it back into water). Unlike other forms of microbial protein (such as Quorn), it requires no carbohydrate feedstock – in other words, no plants.

Perhaps you are horrified by this prospect. Certainly, there’s nothing beautiful about it. It would be hard to write a pastoral poem about bacteria grazing on hydrogen. But this is part of the problem. We have allowed a mythical aesthetic to blind us to the ugly realities of industrial agriculture. Instilled with an image of farming that begins in infancy, as about half the books for very small children involve a rosy-cheeked farmer with one cow, one horse, one pig and one chicken, living in bucolic harmony, we fail to see the amazing cruelty of large-scale animal farming, the blood and gore, filth and pollution. We fail to apprehend the mass clearance of land required to feed us, the Insectageddon caused by pesticides, the drying up of rivers, the loss of soil, the reduction of the magnificent diversity of life on Earth to a homogenous grey waste.

The compound the Finnish researchers have produced from air, water and electricity is most likely to be used as a bulk ingredient in processed food. But (though this goes well beyond the company’s current plans) is there any reason why, with modifications of the process, it could not start to deliver the proteins required to make cultured meat, or the oils that could render palm plantations redundant? Is there any reason why it should not eventually replace much of what we eat?

According to the researchers’ estimates, 20,000 times less land is required for their factories than to produce the same amount of food by growing soya. Cultivating all the protein the world now eats with their technique would require an area smaller than Ohio. The best places to do it are deserts, where solar energy is most abundant. When electricity can be generated at €15 per megawatt hour (a few years hence), their process becomes cost-competitive with the cheapest source of soya.

Could a similar technique also be used to produce cellulose and lignin, eventually replacing the need for commercial forestry? Is there any inherent reason why the hydrogen pathway could not create as many products as photosynthesis does today? Could it help to change our entire relationship with the natural world, reducing our footprint to a fraction of its current size?

There are plenty of questions to be answered, plenty of possible hurdles and constraints. But think of the possibilities. Agricultural commodities, currently using almost all the Earth’s fertile land area, could be shrunk into a few small pockets of infertile land. The potential for ecological restoration is astonishing. The potential for feeding the world, a question that has literally been keeping me awake at night, is just as electrifying.

None of this means we can afford to relax and wait for an infant technology to save us. In the meantime, as urgent intermediate steps, we should switch to a plant-based diet and mobilise against the destruction of the living planet. You could start by joining the Extinction Rebellion that launches today [Wednesday].

But if this works, it could help, alongside political mobilisation, to change almost everything. Places which have become agricultural deserts, trashed by giant corporations, could be reforested, drawing carbon dioxide from the air on a vast scale. The ecosystems of land and sea could recover, not just in pockets but across great tracts of the planet. A new age of global hunger becomes less likely.

Crude and destructive technologies got us into this mess. Refined technologies can help get us out of it. The struggle to save every possible species and ecosystem from the current wave of destruction is worthwhile. One day, perhaps within our lifetimes, they could repopulate a thriving world.

www.monbiot.com

Swiss photographer Pierre Pellegrini is drawn to remote landscapes dotted by tree groves, snow-topped piers, and structures that have fallen into a state of disarray. Long exposure photographs force Pellegrini to sit quietly with these scenes, meditatively taking in the high contrast landscape as his camera processes the deep blacks and brilliant whites that emerge in the dead of winter. “I simply photograph what I feel, and am always looking for moments and situations where everything is in its place,” he explains to Colossal. “I try to find a sort of harmony between what I see and what I feel.” You can see more of his square format black and white photographs on Instagram.

by Charles Mudede
First things first. I'm sorry to have abruptly ended my journey across the British Empire by way of Patrick N. Allitt 108 lectures for the Teaching Company. I'm not to blame, however. The movie I found myself suddenly making in the fall is. So, where was this journey through the British century (properly, the long 19th century) taking us? To the century we entered in 2008, with the crash of Wall Street and other markets. What makes this moment significant is made obvious in one of the best books of the year, Adam Tooze's Crashed, which is a detailed account of the world-historical episode. And what made it world-historical was not the massive amounts of money it burned and destroyed (or redistributed upwards) but how the US and China each responded to the crisis.

The US, Tooze points out, pumped trillions into its stock markets to keep share prices way above what they are actually worth (almost nothing). As for China, it pumped trillions into its infrastructure. The former took the form of numbers in servers; the latter, as David Harvey has explained in several lectures, as raw concrete. And in the way the US's New Deal (with a huge war it supported) dragged the world out of the Great Depression in the 1940s with massive real-world projects and expenditures, China, as Tooze states, dragged the world out the Great Recession (not the US) in the early years of the current decade. This is where the beginning of the end properly begins. But let's look at where things are now.

The transition to the Chinese moment, which is represented in pop culture by movies like Pacific Rim: Uprising, occurred between 2008 and 2016. We can say that Obama was the last figure of American empire, and had a practical plan (Plan B) to keep China in check. This was the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The project was accelerated after the Bush administration failed to govern Iraq (Plan A) with technological wizardry (the display and success of this plan was actually for eyes in Beijing, the emerging political capital of the post-American world). But the US failed in Iraq and had do something that even the Chinese military could do very easily: put troops on the ground (the "surge").

After the failure of Plan A, Obama, a neoliberal, turned to globalization, Plan B. After all, China's power was entangled with the international trade system. Weakening its economic position was the soft power form of the hard power of shocking and awing China's military brass. And, in the context of world trade, Obama's plan would have probably worked and kept America in play for several more decades. But the GOP had a racist base that needed to be fed, and so could not fully support Obama, a black president, on what was effectively all that was left (Plan B) for the survival of empire (a massive, pan-Pacific free-trade agreement that checked China). Its base also hates women, and so the person who would have continued Obama's globalization or a US-directed Pacific Century project, Hillary Clinton, was attacked and attacked to feed the GOP racist/sexist beast.

Trump tore Plan B apart upon entering the White House and has committed his turbulent administration to a Plan Z (zero or, if you are British, zed). His presidency (which neo-conservatives in the form of Jim Mattis attempted, and, in the form of John Bolton, are still attempting, to revert to Plan A—the military option that died in Iraq) is instead devoted to feeding the GOP base (about 30 percent of reliable the US voters) nothing more than more and more nothing (the wall). It is at this point that neocons found themselves sympathizing with neoliberal cosmopolitanists like Clinton and Obama (whose plans for maintaining US supremacy—through the State Department rather than the Pentagon—were at least credible and in line with the interests of significant sections of the elite and corporate America), and so cannot stick with the current administration's Plan Z.

Mattis was fired by Obama because of his devotion to Plan A. But Plan B, as a means of continuing US global hegemony into the 21st century, was far more plausible than Plan Z. Mattis had to exit the Trump administration. And eventually, so will Bolton. Because the GOP can do nothing about this worthless Plan Z, it has to go under with its current leader, and, in the process, take the whole of the US along with it. That is where we are now.

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Tokyo-based photographer RK explores the far reaches of Japan, as well as neighboring Asian countries, shooting images that capture both timeless and of-the-moment scenes.  RK often includes signs of life in his landscape images, whether a fisherman casting a line beneath a vibrant Japanese maple tree, or a carefree skateboarder cruising down a paved road with Hokkaido looming in the distance. The photographer also highlights the densely-packed nature of life in Japan, from masses of commuters forming a sea of umbrellas to shop owners surrounded by huge selections of neatly organized inventory.

Despite the highly composed quality of his photos, RK shares with Colossal, “There’s always new places I want to take photos, so I always try to find new compositions and ideas when arriving at the photo spot.” RK explains that he came across photography by chance: he was immersed in street culture and working as a professional DJ, when he joined an urban running crew and the founder asked him to take some photos of his teammates. From there, he dove into the field, teaching himself to shoot and edit images.

You can see more of RK’s work on his website and stay up-to-date on his most recent photographs and travels via Instagram. (via This Isn’t Happiness)

Two peculiar ‘crop circles’ have recently been spotted in Japan’s Miyazaki Prefecture. Viewable only from above, they were formed by sugi (Japanese cedar) trees.

Conspiracy theorists will be disappointed to learn that there is a very practical explanation for how these shapes emerged: science. Specifically, it was the result of a scientific experiment that spanned close to 50 years.

According to documentation (PDF) we obtained from Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, in 1973 an area of land near Nichinan City was designated as “experimental forestry” and one of the experiments was to try and measure the effect of tree spacing on growth. The experiment was carried out by planting trees in 10 degree radial increments forming 10 concentric circles of varying diameters.

Part of what makes the crop circles so alluring are their concave shape, which was an unexpected result of the experiment that would suggest tree density does indeed affect growth. The trees are due to be harvested in about 5 years but officials are now considering preserving the crop circles.

Below is an image from Google Earth, which is unfortunately a bit dark. For those who are interested, here are the exact coordinates. (Syndicated from Spoon & Tamago)

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.

Neither animal, plant, fungus nor familiar protozoan, a strange microbe that sits in its own “supra-kingdom” of life foretells incredible biodiversity yet to be discovered by new sequencing technologies.Courtesy of Yana Eglit

The tree of life just got another major branch. Researchers recently found a certain rare and mysterious microbe called a hemimastigote in a clump of Nova Scotian soil. Their subsequent analysis of its DNA revealed that it was neither animal, plant, fungus, nor any recognized type of protozoan—that it in fact fell far outside any of the known large categories for classifying complex forms of life (eukaryotes). Instead, this flagella-waving oddball stands as the first member of its own “supra-kingdom” group, which probably peeled away from the other big branches of life at least a billion years ago.

“It’s the sort of result you hope to see once in a career,” said Alastair Simpson, a microbiologist at Dalhousie University who led the study.

Impressive as this finding about hemimastigotes is on its own, what matters more is that it’s just the latest (and most profound) of a quietly and steadily growing number of major taxonomic additions. Researchers keep uncovering…
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