Sustainability

Sustainability. What a clunky word for such a fundamental concept.

If you think for a moment about anything that you want to endure -- a family, a life, a career, a species, a planet -- the key feature is that "it" must be sustainable.

At a holiday party this weekend several of us got to talking about eating too much. We'll try to eat less in the new year, and lose weight. Isn't it a shame that we crave food that makes us fat? we lamented.

Well, for several hundred thousand years, human beings have struggled to get enough to eat. Our "tastes" evolved to achieve sustainability in an environment of scarcity.

Last month, my daughter's third grade curriculum had a brief unit asking the students to compare the lives of the Pilgrim's at the first "Thanksgiving" with our lives. What I came away impressed with was that for almost all peoples in temperate climates, harvest time is not a time for gluttony. It is a time to complete the careful, prayerful storing away of food for the long winter. When the snow melts, it is not harvest time again -- it is months before there are crops to harvest. Putting food away, saving, conserving were, for all the generations of humanity but the last, the foundation of survival -- sustainability.

Contemporary society lives in the oblivion of wealth. Historically the"people" distrusted the wealthy who were wastrels. The wealthy who were rulers who did not make sustainability the hallmark of their reign destroyed their realms and are regarded by history as fools, e.g. the Bourbon kings of France.

The challenge of the 21st century will be to reorient our mores and social structures toward sustainability. Can a species as intelligent as ours continue to live in a social structure -- religion, morality, government, economics, habits, social life -- that is inimical to its survival?

What happened in the 1950s, 60s and 70s in America that the value of saving and conserving that was shaping pattern of adults shaped in the Great Depression was lost?

Families must begin saving for sustainability, eating for sustainability, using fuel for sustainability.

We have been blinded by the success of the Market. We assume that if we can afford it -- the food, the gas, the car, the energy wasting house and lifestyle --the expenditure is okay because it is "blessed" by the Market.

Is the Market ever wrong? Of course. Who triumphs in the Market? Everybody? Of course not. The Market can seduce you, can't it?

In what ways can our market-worshipping culture be re-educated about how the market values sustainability?

Tags: market, sustainability, savings, fuel, food, diet, species survival, energy, markets, Sterlingpoints, Eric Sterling,

A Scanner Darkly

On Sunday, October 8, 2006, after a screening of the motion picture, A Scanner Darkly, at the University of Maryland in College Park, I spoke to the audience about the moral and political implications of the story. I was accompanied by Micah Daigle, Field Director, Students for Sensible Drug Policy national office. This event was sponsored by the University's Student Entertainment Events office and the Students for Sensible Drug Policy University of Maryland chapter.

The plot is complex and hard to follow, but the characterizations and acting are excellent, and there are many funny scenes with Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey, Jr., and Rory Cochrane The dramatic acting by Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder is suspenseful and gripping.

The movie is set in the near future in Orange County, CA, then in grip of a terrible new drug abuse epidemic. The anti-drug police have more pervasive surveillance tools and resources than our current law enforcement agencies, with the ready ability to monitor anybody anywhere. There is such an enormous number of undercover agents who need to operate under extremely tight security that their actual identities are unknown to one another.

The new drug causes brain damage manifested by random hallucinations and paranoia, yet its users become addicted to some effect of the drug, and need to find it to use it. The drug is especially insidious in that it is believed to create a sort of split personality so that a person may be living to two parallel existences. The drug is reputedly deadly, although no deaths from its use are depicted, that I recall. The drug is also pervasive and we find that all of the central characters are addicted to it. The mental illness the drug engenders is portrayed throughout the movie. There is a uniquely effective, widely advertised treatment available that requires living in a secure facility.

As the movie progresses, the integrity of the drug enforcement agency and the treatment business come into question.

The movie is an adaptation of a 1977 novel by Philip K. Dick, one of the leading authors of our time, who is best known as a science fiction writer. His literary executors, the Philip K. Dick Trust, have this to say about the movie.

This essay by Lawrence Sutin (a professor at Hamline University, St. Paul, MN) helps explain Dick's vision and purpose.

My comments:
George Orwell's novel 1984, also a dark vision of the future, helped to define the late 20th century vision of a police state using the model of World War II, the state security surveillance systems of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and its occupied territories, and the state propaganda systems developed and used by all the major powers.

A Scanner Darkly, the movie, is influenced by the domestic police practices in the U.S. of the last two decades; by the widespread availability -- if not widespread use -- of cocaine, heroin, club drugs, prescribed psychoactive medications, and methamphetamine; and the late 20th century social concept of a drug epidemic.

In the limited time available to me, I argued that the movie's depiction of the state's failure to control drug misuse and the drug trade by means of an intense prohibition regime reflects a contemporary reality. In dialogue with the audience I argued that the continuation of the drug problem, i.e, our systematic failure to really address it, continues the growth and power of the law enforcement industry, and serves to advance political careers, and certain social agendas.

I argued that combating the prohibition system was a moral imperative that ranked with the importance of the student anti-Vietnam war movement.

I argued that students had a right to demand that the university be truthful in characterizing the health threats students face and demand that university disciplinary policies be based on facts not propaganda. I argued that it was unacceptably disrespectful to students as persons with full legal responsibility for their conduct to promulgate disciplinary policies that reflected falsehoods and prejudice, such as punishing marijuana use more harshly than alcohol use.

My conclusion is that the students had a duty and a right to get active on campus around drug policy issues.

Tags: drug enforcement, drug treatment, law enforcement, police, A Scanner Darkly, University of Maryland, SSDP, justiceanddrugs, Sterling on Justice and Drugs

Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. lays out a very damning case in Rolling Stone magazine that the Republicans conspired to swing the 2004 election from Kerry to George W. Bush.

Kennedy provides a very detailed analysis of the myriad problems. The focus is on Ohio where he explains more than 300,00 votes that were likely to be for Kerry were kept from being counted. He identifies voting machines that counted for Bush when Kerry was selected.

The range of misconduct, much of which he lays at the feet of Kenneth Blackwell, Secretary of State of Ohio and a co-chair of the Bush campaign is vast: the deliberate sabotage of the voter registration process, disregard of new voter registrations, wholesale purging of voter registration lists in selected areas, failure to send absentee ballots, failure to provide sufficient numbers of voting machines in selected precincts, efforts to intimidate votes not the vote, and numerous acts on election day to skew the outcome including discarding votes.

If you have not read this report, it is well worth the time.

Tags: presidential election, Kerry, G.W. Bush, Blackwell, Ohio,

Subverting America's Moms to sell, sell, sell

Business Week reports that Proctor and Gamble has recruited 600,000 moms for the word of mouth sales project, called Vocalpoint.

By crafting product messages mothers will want to share, along with giving them samples, coupons, and a chance to share their own opinions with P&G, the Cincinnati consumer-product giant is using personal endorsements to cut through advertising clutter. "We know that the most powerful form of marketing is an advocacy message from a trusted friend," says Steve Knox, Vocalpoint's CEO.

The program is a state-of-the-art method for reaching the most influential group of shoppers in America: moms.

Bush Administration send up by Robert Smigel on Saturday Night Live, May 20, is hysterical

If you are not a fan of the Bush Administration, you will find it impossible not to laugh at the Robert Smigel comic from the May 20 Saturday Night Live. The video is posted on Crooks and Liars. The entire audio portion is composed from speeches, press conferences, Senate testimony, or media interviews by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. Make sure your mouth is empty when you watch it.

Cheney Affirms GOP Opposition to Gun Control

The National Rifle Association has argued for years that the only legitimate form of gun control is hitting your target. Saturday, Feb. 11, 2006 Vice President Dick Cheney, working to bolster the GOP's conservative base for the 2006 elections, ostensibly aiming at a covey of quail, discharged his .28 guage shotgun into a Texas millionaire lawyer, Harry Whittington, hitting him in the cheek, neck and chest. The birds got away, and Democratic chances to take control of the Senate were seriously weakened, according to the conventional wisdom. But an anonymous NRA spokesman worried that Cheney's extreme stance in opposition to gun control might be misused by liberals for partisan political purposes. "We have always taken an unorthodox view toward political speech," he joked. "We believe in massive firepower when it comes to the Congress, but this is a new one for us."

Katharine Armstrong, who owned the ranch where the shooting took place described it as a "peppering." "This is something that happens from time to time. You know, I've been peppered pretty well myself," said Armstrong, which explains why many Republicans are so indignant with civil libertarian apoplexy when the police pepper spray demonstrators without provocation. Whittington was in stable condition in a Corpus Christi hospital on Sunday.

Whittington was immediately assisted by the medical personnel who always accompany the Vice President and was taken to the hospital in the Vice President's ambulance. Democrats attacked this as an abuse of tax payer funds. "Once again we see this Administration bend over backwards to save the life of a millionaire!" fumed an anonymous spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee. "And aren't quail some kind of endangered species?" she muttered.