Earth Intelligence – Page 180 – Public Intelligence Blog

Baltimore's poorer neighborhoods have been dealing with Martin O'Malley for years and years, as I can recall from when I worked in ACORN's national office and heard all about the trouble this man was from our Maryland chapter. O'Malley, once mayor of Baltimore and now governor of Maryland, may run for president of the United States on a what's-left-of-the-left-wing-of-the-Democratic-Party kind of platform. His current and former constituents will have the usual warnings about who the newly packaged candidate has really been. Perhaps they'll be heard, although that's not usually how these things work.

One of many angles worth observing about O'Malley is his position toward the natural environment. He's been pushing for fracking and for a coal terminal on the Chesapeake Bay at Cove Point (Obama just approved it!). My friend and Baltimorean Diane Wittner says she thinks O'Malley is after campaign money “at the expense of a livable bioregion.”

One of O'Malley's destructive proposals is of particular interest because of the resistance to it organized by young people. O'Malley wants to stick a giant incinerator into a poor neighborhood in Baltimore. This monstrosity, called the Energy Answers Incinerator, would be the largest trash-burning incinerator in the nation, consuming 4,000 tons of trash a day including plastic, rubber, vinyl, metal, and household waste. In violation of state law this worse-than-a-major-coal-plant pollution machine would be situated less than a mile from Benjamin Franklin High School and Curtis Bay Elementary School. The incinerator would flood the air with mercury, nitric oxide, lead, dioxins, and particulate matter, producing cancer, heart disease, diabetes, asthma, respiratory problems, and — if all the stars align — just possibly a single uncomfortable question in a presidential “debate.”

The neighborhood to be victimized, Curtis Bay, already has the highest toxic air pollution in Maryland and among the worst in the nation. Here's a map I've just made because I think people who visit Baltimore's tourist area would appreciate knowing how close this less favored area is:

Now check out this great website where I've learned about this outrage:

Stop the Incinerator:

“For the health of our community and our children we are calling on Governor Martin O’Malley to stop the proposed trash burning incinerator from being built in Curtis Bay. If built the Energy Answers Incinerator would be the largest of its kind in the nation, producing more pollutants per hour of energy produced than the largest coal plants in Maryland. Worse still, the project is set to be built less than a mile from Benjamin Franklin High School and Curtis Bay Elementary School, in violation of Maryland state regulations. It is this kind of recklessness that has led Baltimore to be ranked number one in air pollution related deaths per capita.

“Energy Answers was required to begin construction in August. While the Maryland Department of Environment investigates if they failed to do so, we are calling on Governor O’Malley to intervene and protect our children’s health and the health of our community.

“Please contact Governor O’Malley if you want to stop the nations’ largest incinerator from being built less than a mile from schools. Let him know that our community is not a dumping ground. Let him know that the Energy Answers incinerator needs to be STOPPED.”

Governor’s office phone # 410.974.3901 / 1.800.811.8336
Governor O’Malley’s contact page: http://www.governor.maryland.gov/mail/

Watch this terrific video:

http://vimeo.com/74501368

2013/10/10

SchwartzReport: Peak Soil – The End of Natural Nutrition

Earth Intelligence

Back in the early 70s my good friends Christopher Bird and Peter Tompkins wrote a bestseller, The Secret Life of Plants. I learned many things from their research, often talking to the people they were writing about who were visiting. What really came through to me during those exchanges was the importance of microbial life in the soil. They went on to emphasize this in a second book, Secrets of the Soil.

A few years later I saw the potential of a soil based agriculture up close watching what my friend Alan Chadwick, perhaps the most famous biodynamacist of his day, accomplished in small fields. And I have come to know the benefits first hand through my wife Ronlyn's lovingly cared for biodynamic organic gardens built on a foundation of healthy soil. Her beds produce fantastic vegetables, and I feel notably healthier eating them.

I have never understood why it was not transparently obvious that the use of herbicides, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers would eventually result in a field becoming “dead” soil. Here is a report explaining what I mean.

Peak Soil: Why Nutrition Is Disappearing From Our Food
MONICA NICKELSBURG – The Week

2013/10/07

Berto Jongman: Food Security — Rotten Intelligence, Worse Ethics

01 Agriculture, 05 Energy, 11 Society, 12 Water, Collective Intelligence, Earth Intelligence

Uncertainty on figures hampering food security efforts

Mark Kinver

BBC News, 4 October 2013

More than 600 scientists gathered in the Netherlands for a global food security conference, described as the first of its kind.

Organisers said science could help end uncertainty surrounding efforts to meet the food needs of future generations.

They added that, until now, there were many policy debates on food security but there was no scientific forum for researchers to share knowledge.

The next food security conference will be held in the US in 2015.

“A really key message from the conference for us is that we have got lots of estimates about needs of population growth etc, but at the moment we are so uncertain of the exact numbers – the uncertainty is really very high,” said conference co-chairman Ken Giller, professor of plant production systems at Wageningen University.

“We talk about the current population being seven billion, moving to 9.2 billion in 2050 and the estimate is that we need to increase production 70% or more.

“But there are many different ways of addressing that. If we don't know what the problem is then we can't get started in addressing them.”

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Food Security — Rotten Intelligence, Worse Ethics”

2013/10/042013/10/04

Berto Jongman: Breaking the Cycle of Counterinsurgency

Earth Intelligence, Peace Intelligence

Breaking the Cycle of Counterinsurgency

It's time to relegate the bankrupt counterinsurgency doctrine into the “dustbin of history.”

By Hannah Gurman and Jeremy Kuzmarov, October 3, 2013

Foreign Policy in Focus, 3 October 2013

This September marked a potential turning point in America’s long and seemingly bottomless appetite for war. The Obama administration made a pitch for U.S. military intervention against Syria, and the American public didn’t buy it. Across the country, people demonstrated and wrote and prodded their congressional representatives to vote against air strikes, forcing the president to backtrack and agree to pursue a Russian plan to have Syria’s president Bashir al-Assad turn over his chemical weapons stockpiles. This turn of events came just days before the 12th anniversary of 9/11 and may mark the end of an era in which the U.S. public gives carte blanche support to foreign military intervention.

The United States could take this critical moment to learn from the mistakes of its recent past. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the two full-scale wars of the era, the course of intervention followed a similar path. First came the military strikes. These were followed by the military-backed regime changes that installed Hamid Karzai and Nouri Al-Maliki. And then came the massive counterinsurgency campaigns that were launched after these governments failed to gain the full support of their people. As George Ball, undersecretary of state in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, warned of Vietnam, “Once on the tiger’s back, we cannot be sure of picking the place to dismount.” In other words, once the path of intervention begins, it’s difficult to stop.

There is also a pattern of counterinsurgency in the larger course of history. The moment of the supposedly limited strike tends to be one of relative war fatigue, which incrementally erodes as U.S. involvement deepens and the war escalates. War fatigue then returns after the cost in dollars and American lives becomes intolerable. A generation later, the cycle begins again.

Taking COIN Out of Circulation

Read full article.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Breaking the Cycle of Counterinsurgency”

2013/10/032013/10/03

Gregory Sinaisky: HIST 3 APR 2003 Detecting Disinformation, Without Radar [Truth Specific, Lies Vague]

Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Peace Intelligence

Detecting disinformation, without radar
By Gregory Sinaisky [Pseudonym]

Asia Times, 3 April 2003

How to tell genuine reporting from an article manufactured to produce the desired propaganda effect? The war in Iraq provides us plenty of interesting samples for a study of disinformation techniques.

Take the article “Basra Shiites Stage Revolt, Attack Government Troops”, published on March 26 in The Wall Street Journal Europe. Using its example, we will try to arm readers with basic principles of disinformation analysis that hopefully will allow them in the future to detect deception.

The title of the article sounds quite definitive. The article starts, however, with the mush less certain “Military officials said the Shiite population of Basra … appeared to be rising”. “Military officials” and “appeared to be” should immediately raise a red flag for a reader, especially given a mismatch with such a definitive title. Why “officials”? Were they speaking in a chorus? Or was each one providing a complementary piece of information? A genuine report certainly would tell us this and also name the officials or at least say why they cannot be identified.

Why “appears to be”? There are always specific reasons why something “appears to be”. For example, information about the uprising may be uncertain because it was supplied by an Iraqi defector who was not considered trustworthy and has not been confirmed from other sources. Again, every professional reporter understands that his job is to provide such details and it is exactly such details that make his reporting valuable, interesting, and memorable. If such all-important details are missing, this is a sure sign to suspect intentional disinformation.

Continue reading “Gregory Sinaisky: HIST 3 APR 2003 Detecting Disinformation, Without Radar [Truth Specific, Lies Vague]”

2013/10/022013/10/02

Anthony Judge: Global Security from an Interplanetary Perspective

Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Extraterrestial Intelligence, Peace Intelligence

Global Security from an Interplanetary Perspective

Interplanetary Security Council — Resolution on Planet Earth

27 Mres'klon 4013

Following is an unofficial translation of the purported resolution of the Interplanetary Security Council regarding the Planet Earth. A corrected translation may be anticipated.

This unusual document appears to follow the pattern of earlier purported resolutions of the Interplanetary Security Council. It is made available here because of its extraordinary structural resemblance to the resolution agreed by the UN Security Council on 27 September 2013 — consequent on various calls for an exceptionally “strong resolution” (UK, US and France call for ‘strong' UN resolution on Syria, The Guardian, 16 September 2013). As with the earlier documents of the purported Planetary Security Strategy of the Nibiruan Union, and the Nibiru-drafted Resolution on Earth, it is unclear whether the UN Resolution (2013) is merely an adaptation of the following Nibiruan document — correspondingly “strong” in its wording regarding Planet Earth. As such it is unclear whether it is reflecting an implementation of the policy of the Nibiruan Union — or whether the document outlining the future intervention in Syria on behalf of the UN, engendered a Nibiruan articulation of its policy towards other planets such as Earth — in defence of its own sovereign interests. Such reciprocal articulation might then constitute a case of policy engendered by morphogenetic field resonance effects. This would also be consistent with the classical injunction displayed outside the UN Security Council: ‘Do Unto Others as You Would Wish That Others Should Do Unto You' and may be the principle underlying all interplanetary policy. It would also be consistent with a Hermetic aphorism: As Above, So Below.

EXTRACT

Continue reading “Anthony Judge: Global Security from an Interplanetary Perspective”

2013/10/012013/10/01