Silence Is a Commons

From remarks by Ivan Illich at the "Asahi Symposium Science and Man - The Computer-Managed Society," Tokyo, Japan, March 21, 1982:

On the same boat on which I arrived in 1926, the first loudspeaker was landed on the island. Few people there had ever heard of such a thing. Up to that day, all men and women had spoken with more or less equally powerful voices. Henceforth this would change. Henceforth the access to the microphone would determine whose voice shall be magnified. Silence now ceased to be in the commons; it became a resource for which loudspeakers compete. Language itself was transformed thereby from a local commons into a national resource for communication. As enclosure by the lords increased national productivity by denying the individual peasant to keep a few sheep, so the encroachment of the loudspeaker has destroyed that silence which so far had given each man and woman his or her proper and equal voice. Unless you have access to a loudspeaker, you now are silenced.

Just as the commons of space are vulnerable, and can be destroyed by the motorization of traffic, so the commons of speech are vulnerable, and can easily be destroyed by the encroachment of modem means of communication.

The issue which I propose for discussion should therefore be clear: how to counter the encroachment of new, electronic devices and systems upon commons that are more subtle and more intimate to our being than either grassland or roads - commons that are at least as valuable as silence. Silence, according to western and eastern tradition alike, is necessary for the emergence of persons. It is taken from us by machines that ape people. We could easily be made increasingly dependent on machines for speaking and for thinking, as we are already dependent on machines for moving.

Such a transformation of the environment from a commons to a productive resource constitutes the most fundamental form of environmental degradation. This degradation has a long history, which coincides with the history of capitalism but can in no way just be reduced to it. Unfortunately the importance of this transformation has been overlooked or belittled by political ecology so far. It needs to be recognized if we are to organize defense movements of what remains of the commons. This defense constitutes the crucial public task for political action during the eighties. The task must be undertaken urgently because commons can exist without police, but resources cannot. Just as traffic does, computers call for police, and for ever more of them, and in ever more subtle forms.

By definition, resources call for defense by police. Once they are defended, their recovery as commons becomes increasingly difficult. This is a special reason for urgency.

human rights, anarchism, ecoanarchism, anarchosyndicalism

The piddling contribution of wind power in New England

ISO New England: Seasonal Claimed Capability (SCC), Jan 2012 report

Total New England Claimed Capability (MW)
Winter (March):  34407.889;  125.964 (0.366%) from WIND
Summer (August):  31766.431;  50.735 (0.160%) from WIND

The SCC of Intermittent Power Resources generator assets are determined using the median of net output from the most recently completed Summer Capability and Winter Capability Periods across the Summer (HE 14-18) and Winter (HE 18-19) Intermittent Reliability Hours, respectively.

The ISO-NE report lists 34 wind-powered generators, only 26 providing any winter and 24 summer capability (two of which because they are still under construction or not yet connected and therefore deleted from the list below).

generator	capacity (kW)	winter	summer
MA:
BARNSTABLE_DPW_ID1545	200	80 (40%)	14 (7%)
BARTLETTS OCEAN VIEW FARM WIND	250	0	0
BERKSHIRE WIND POWER PROJECT	15000	6988 (46.6%)	1704 (11.4%)
CITY OF MEDFORD WIND QF	100	0	0
HOLY NAME CC JR SR HIGH SCHOOL	600	0	0
HULL WIND TURBINE II	1800	458 (25.4%)	52 (2.3%)
HULL WIND TURBINE U5	660	180 (27.3%)	46 (7.0%)
IPSWICH WIND FARM 1	1600	342 (21.4%)	125 (7.8%)
JIMINY PEAK WIND QF	1500	0	0
MOUNT ST MARY-WRENTHAM MA WIND	100	4 (4.0%)	2 (2.0%)
NATURE'S CLASSROOM WIND QF	100	0	0
NM-STONE	600	6 (1%)	0
NOTUS WIND I	1650	500 (30.3%)	187 (11.3%)
OTIS_AF_WIND_TURBINE	1500	199 (13.3%)	125 (8.3%)
OTIS_WT_AFCEE_ID1692	1500	1200 (80%)	1200 (80%)
PRINCETON WIND FARM PROJECT	3000	582 (19.4%)	157 (52.3%)
RICHEY WOODWORKING WIND QF	600	0	0
TEMPLETON WIND TURBINE	1650	401 (24.3%)	74 (4.5%)
TOWN_OF_FALMOUTH_WIND_TURBINE	1650	133 (8.1%)	6 (0.4%)
ME:
BEAVER RIDGE WIND	4500	1240 (27.6%)	466 (10.4%)
FOX ISLAND WIND	4500	159 (3.5%)	0
KIBBY WIND POWER	132000	34590 (26.2%)	13375 (10.1%)
ROLLINS WIND PLANT	60000	20860 (34.8%)	6207 (10.3%)
SPRUCE MOUNTAIN WIND	19000	9000 (47.4%)	4500 (23.7%)
STETSON II WIND FARM	25500	6740 (26.4%)	2602 (10.2%)
STETSON WIND FARM	57000	15725 (27.6%)	7056 (12.4%)
NH:
LEMPSTER WIND	24000	8518 (35.5%)	2457 (10.2%)
RI:
NE ENGRS MIDDLETOWN RI WIND QF	100	0	0
PORTSMOUTH ABBEY WIND QF	660	0	0
TOWN OF PORTSMOUTH RI WIND QF	1500	159 (10.6%)	178 (11.9%)
VT:
SEARSBURG WIND (listed in Mass.)	6600	900 (13.6%)	202 (3.1%)
SHEFFIELD WIND PLANT	40000	17000 (42.5%)	10000 (25.0%)
TOTAL WIND	459420	125964 (27.4%)	50735 (11.0%)

Note that several of these figures are obviously bogus, with round numbers and summer values an even fraction of the winter value suggesting developer reports rather than actual data, and the 80% claimed capacity for one of the Otis Air Force Base turbines is clearly impossible.

Therefore, the ISO-NE report of 0.37% of its power in winter and 0.16% in summer is an exaggeration of the true situation. That piddling contribution includes the output from nine very large wind energy facilities, all on mountain ridges that used to provide important forested habitat.

(Note that the 42-MW Mars Hill Wind Farm in Maine is not included here, because it is outside of the ISO-NE network. And according to the New England Wind Forum of the U.S. Department of Energy, there are two other large facilities currently under construction — Record Hill Wind Project [50 MW] in Byron and Roxbury, Me. and Kingdom Community Wind [63 MW] in Lowell, Vt. — and five more that have been permitted — Cape Wind [468 MW] and Hoosac Wind Energy Project [30 MW] in Mass., Spruce Mountain [19 MW] in Me., Granite Reliable Power Windpark [99 MW] in N.H., and Georgia Mountain Community Wind [12 MW] in Vt.; the Hoosac and Granite projects are in fact under construction, and the Record Hill project is operating.)

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism

Leahy loves fascism

Not only did Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy vote to further codify the USA's march to military dictatorship in the form of the NDAA, he is also the sponsor of PIPA, the Senate version of SOPA, adding censorship of the internet to his acquiescence to fascism.

human rights, Vermont

The Washington Post shakes things up

First, on Friday Jonathan Turley wrote "10 reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the free":

Every year, the State Department issues reports on individual rights in other countries, monitoring the passage of restrictive laws and regulations around the world. Iran, for example, has been criticized for denying fair public trials and limiting privacy, while Russia has been taken to task for undermining due process. Other countries have been condemned for the use of secret evidence and torture.

Even as we pass judgment on countries we consider unfree, Americans remain confident that any definition of a free nation must include their own — the land of free. Yet, the laws and practices of the land should shake that confidence. In the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, this country has comprehensively reduced civil liberties in the name of an expanded security state. The most recent example of this was the National Defense Authorization Act, signed Dec. 31, which allows for the indefinite detention of citizens. At what point does the reduction of individual rights in our country change how we define ourselves? ...

Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of “free,” but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit.

These countries also have constitutions that purport to guarantee freedoms and rights. But their governments have broad discretion in denying those rights and few real avenues for challenges by citizens — precisely the problem with the new laws in this country.

The list of powers acquired by the U.S. government since 9/11 puts us in rather troubling company.

Assassination of U.S. citizens ... Indefinite detention ... Arbitrary justice ... Warrantless searches ... Secret evidence ... War crimes ... Secret court ... Immunity from judicial review ... Continual monitoring of citizens ... Extraordinary renditions ...

And the week before (and appearing in our local paper this past Sunday), John Tirman wrote "Why do we ignore the civilians killed in American wars?":

As the United States officially ended the war in Iraq last month, President Obama spoke eloquently at Fort Bragg, N.C., lauding troops for “your patriotism, your commitment to fulfill your mission, your abiding commitment to one another,” and offering words of grief for the nearly 4,500 members of the U.S. armed forces who died in Iraq. He did not, however, mention the sacrifices of the Iraqi people.

This inattention to civilian deaths in America’s wars isn’t unique to Iraq. There’s little evidence that the American public gives much thought to the people who live in the nations where our military interventions take place. Think about the memorials on the Mall honoring American sacrifices in Korea and Vietnam. These are powerful, sacred spots, but neither mentions the people of those countries who perished in the conflicts.

The major wars the United States has fought since the surrender of Japan in 1945 — in Korea, Indochina, Iraq and Afghanistan — have produced colossal carnage. For most of them, we do not have an accurate sense of how many people died, but a conservative estimate is at least 6 million civilians and soldiers. ...

Why the American silence on our wars’ main victims? Our self-image, based on what cultural historian Richard Slotkin calls “the frontier myth” — in which righteous violence is used to subdue or annihilate the savages of whatever land we’re trying to conquer — plays a large role. For hundreds of years, the frontier myth has been one of America’s sturdiest national narratives.

When the challenges from communism in Korea and Vietnam appeared, we called on these cultural tropes to understand the U.S. mission overseas. The same was true for Iraq and Afghanistan, with the news media and politicians frequently portraying Islamic terrorists as frontier savages. By framing each of these wars as a battle to civilize a lawless culture, we essentially typecast the local populations as theIndians of our North American conquest. As the foreign policy maven Robert D. Kaplan wrote on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page in 2004, “The red Indian metaphor is one with which a liberal policy nomenklatura may be uncomfortable, but Army and Marine field officers have embraced it because it captures perfectly the combat challenge of the early 21st century.”

Politicians tend to speak in broader terms, such as defending Western values, or simply refer to resistance fighters as terrorists, the 21st-century word for savages. Remember the military’s code name for the raid of Osama bin Laden’s compound? It was Geronimo. ...

Perhaps the most compelling explanation for indifference, though, taps into our beliefs about right and wrong. More than 30 years ago, social psychologists developed the “just world” theory, which argues that humans naturally assume that the world should be orderly and rational. When that “just world” is disrupted, we tend to explain away the event as an aberration. For example, when encountering a beggar on the street, a common reaction is indifference or even anger, in the belief that no one should go hungry in America.

This explains much of our response to the violence in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. When the wars went badly and violence escalated, Americans tended to ignore or even blame the victims. The public dismissed the civilians because their high mortality rates, displacement and demolished cities were discordant with our understandings of the missions and the U.S. role in the world.

The Faustian Bargain that Modern Economists Never Mention

Gary Peters writes at Our Finite World:

Historically people have shifted their belief systems in various ways. The Greeks and Romans believed in numerous gods and goddesses and attributed all kinds of powers to them. Then the great monotheistic religions came along and people began to believe in just one god, though they honored him under different names.

Recently, beliefs have shifted again, with people worshipping just one part of a god, the invisible hand. Thanks to Adam Smith and those who followed him, especially the current neoclassical economic theologians, we have seen such an increase in the world’s wealth and sheer numbers that it is hard to imagine life before the industrial revolution, with its shift from mostly human and animal muscle power to the energy dense fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas. It is also hard to imagine that humanity could someday slide back into another age of scarcer and more expensive energy, but that is a possibility that cannot be excluded from our thinking.

The Faustian Bargain

What about the Faustian bargain? It remains deeply hidden from view because its exposure by the high priests of modern economics would force us to rethink how we live and why we live this way, as well as what we’re planning to leave for future generations. The Faustian bargain goes something like this: Thanks to the discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels, humans (really just a small minority of them) are able to live richer lives today than even the queens and kings of yore could have dreamed of.

Furthermore, we’ve used some of those finite resources to increase food supplies and to expand the human population, which provides the economic system with both more workers and more consumers, a necessity to keep the economy growing under our current economic model. The world’s population increased from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7 billion today, and we add about 80 million more each year. Humans have quickly become the most numerous megafauna on the planet.

The other side of the bargain, the side hidden from view and never mentioned in economics texts is this: At some undetermined time in the future, one that creeps ever closer, this economic system, fed by energy and other resources at ever increasing rates at one end and spewing out waste products at rates that cannot be absorbed by Earth’s ecosystems at the other, is unsustainable. What that means is simple enough: Industrial society as we know it cannot go on as it has forever—not even close.

Our economic system must exist within Earth’s finite limits, so recent and current generations have sold their soul to the devil for temporary riches, leaving the Devil to collect his due when the system falls apart under its own weight and the four horsemen of the apocalypse ride again across the world’s landscapes. None of this will happen tomorrow or this week or this year, but our economic system is faltering at both ends.

For many, if not most, of the world’s population life may become more difficult, incomes lower, and uncertainty greater. It does not mean the end of the world, as some predict for 2012, but it will mean that future generations probably will not live like current ones. Rather than admit that the current system cannot be sustained, the affluent and powerful will do everything possible to maintain the status quo.

The Fallacy of Long-Term Economic Growth

Economic growth remains a mantra for politicians and corporate leaders, including the banksters who brought us the Great Recession. Even President Obama, like presidents before him, speaks regularly about “growing the economy.” But nothing in the real world suggests that economic growth can continue forever. Nor does much evidence support the notion that economic growth has been a good thing for either the planet or billions of its human residents. It looks more like a colossal Ponzi scheme.

One of the most optimistic supporters of modern economics and its marvels is Tim Harford, who wrote, in his book The Logic of Life, “The more of us there are in the world, living our logical lives, the better our chances of seeing out the next million years.” This may be the dumbest thing an economist has ever written and he shows not even the slightest understanding of the planet on which we live. Homo sapiens has only been around for about 200,000 years, so another 800,000 years at the rate we’re going seems absurd. If our population were to continue to grow at an annual rate of only 1.0 percent, slightly less than our current growth rate, then our numbers would increase to over 115 trillion in just the next thousand years. You can play with the growth rate if you wish, but you cannot escape the cold hard fact that human population growth must stop. Only economists seem to miss the fact that economic growth must stop.

Among the high priests of modern economic theology, Paul Krugman came closer than anyone to admitting that growth could not go on forever on our planet. In an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times (12-26-10) he wrote, “What the commodity markets are telling us is that we’re living in a finite world [my italics] ….” He went on to mention the possibility of peak oil production and even climate change, both of which threaten the modern economic system, but then, returning to the faithful fold, he wrote, “This won’t bring an end to economic growth….” He admitted that our lifestyles might have to change but gave no clue about where and how that might come about or where it might lead.

Economic reality and economic theology don’t fit together very well. In 1988 Edward Abbey wrote, in his book One Life at a Time, Please:

It should be clear to everyone by now that crude numerical growth does not solve our problems of unemployment, welfare, crime, traffic, filth, noise, squalor, the pollution of air, the corruption of our politics, the debasement of the school system (hardly worthy of the name ‘education’), and the general loss of popular control over the political process—where money, not people, is now the determining factor.

Today, 24 years later, virtually every word of Abbey’s statement is truer than ever, yet politicians and economic theologians continue to preach that if we can just grow the economy (local, state, national, and world) then all will be well again. You need not look far or deeply to see how wrong they are and what price we’ll pay when the Devil comes looking for our collective souls.

Among economists, Herman Daly is one of the few who has tried to reveal the Faustian bargain for what it really is, as is apparent in this statement from a Dec. 26 article, Rio+20 Needs to Address the Downsides of Growth:

Even though economies are still growing, and still put growth in first place, it is no longer economic growth, at least in wealthy countries, but has become uneconomic growth. In other words, the environmental and social costs of increased production are growing faster than the benefits, increasing “illth” faster than wealth, thereby making us poorer, not richer. We hide the uneconomic nature of growth from ourselves by faulty national accounting because growth is our panacea, indeed our idol, and we are very afraid of the idea of a steady-state economy. The increasing illth is evident in exploding financial debt, in biodiversity loss, and in destruction of natural services, most notably climate regulation

Click here to go to the complete essay.

The Veritas Papers: A Crash Course on the Truth

A crash course on the truth about the struggle for Palestinian human rights: The Veritas Papers

Download:

1.  Occupation from Scratch — Confused? Have no idea what this is all about? Find out here!
2.  Myths vs. Reality — Don't believe everything you’re told about the occupation of Palestine
3.  The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine — The “Nakba” of 1948 and continuous policy of ethnic cleansing
4.  Israel’s “Right” to Exist — Why don’t Palestinians accept or support this “right”?
5.  The West Bank and Settlements
6.  Apartheid — The separation and privilege of one people over another another
7.  Breaking Gaza — Collective punishment and incarceration of an entire population
8.  International Law — What does the UN & International Law have to say?
9.  Resistance — Is the Gandhi way the only way? Violent vs. non-violent resistance
10.  A Real Partner for Peace — Who is preventing peace in the Middle East?
11a.  Canada's Role in Occupation — Is Canada the “peace-maker” we think?
11b.  America: Israel’s Biggest Ally — Unconditional American support and funding of war crimes
12.  Boycotting Israel — The international boycott, divestment & sanctions campaign
Addendum 1.  Companies to Boycott — Be a responsible buyer and stop supporting apartheid
Addendum 2.  Famous People and Things Who Support Palestine

All 15 Veritas Papers

The Veritas Handbook — A guide to understanding the struggle for Palestinian human rights

human rights

Military spending: USA vs. the world

Military expeditures 2010 (in billion 2009 USD, as % of 2009 GDP, and per capita) according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute:

Worldwide total:	1,604b	2.5%	$229
Non-USA total:	917b	1.9%	$137
USA:	687b	4.7%	$2,196
China:	114b	2.2%	$85
France:	61b	2.5%	$938
UK:	57b	2.7%	$915
Russia:	53b	4.3%	$371
Japan:	51b	1.0%	$399
Germany:	47b	1.4%	$575
Saudi Arabia:	43b	11.2%	$1,587
Italy:	38b	1.8%	$626
India:	35b	2.8%	$29
Brazil:	28b	1.6%	$146
South Korea:	24b	2.9%	$494
Canada:	20b	1.5%	$578
Australia:	20b	1.9%	$877
Spain:	16b	1.1%	$346
UAE:	16b	7.3%	$1,928
Turkey:	16b	2.7%	$217
Israel:	13b	6.3%	$1,667
Netherlands:	12b	1.5%	$714
Greece:	9b	3.2%	$833
Colombia:	9b	3.7%	$194
Taiwan:	8b	2.4%	$345
Poland:	8b	1.8%	$210
Iran:	7b	1.8%	$92
Venezuela:	3b	1.3%	$112

The military expenditures of the next highest 22 countries after the USA, including the two most populous nations, China and India, all together equal those of the USA alone.

Military expenditures by the USA account for 43% of the worldwide total, are equal to 75% of the rest of the world's combined, and per capita are 16 times the average of the rest of the world.

Iran's military expenditures are one one-hundredth of the USA's, Venezuela's four-tenths of one one-hundredth. Per person, the USA spends 24 and 20 times more than Iran and Venezuela, respectively.