Andrew Leonard writes in Salon that global stockpiles of grain are plunging. A fascinating article that dovetails quite nicely with the documentary “The End of Suburbia.” Here’s a link to an article about sugar cane-derived biofuel.

The below was received from someone who wishes to remain anonymous.  As I understand it, this essay was part of an ongoing dialog with someone else.

A response that I typed up to a certain miscreant using the handle “qrsi” got a mention by one of the WaPo bloggers!  And to top it off, said miscreant’s offensive posting was removed from the discussion page!

Senior Diplomats Retaking Foreign Policy

Senior career diplomats are retaking control of key elements of U.S. foreign policy and have begun to assert significant influence as the Bush administration enters its waning months eager to salvage a legacy marred by the Iraq war.Since assuming the helm at the State Department in 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has installed veteran foreign service officers with more than 200 years of collective diplomatic experience in seven critical posts from the Middle East to South Asia and the Far East.

By contrast, their immediate predecessors had just 72 years of combined experience and five of them were Republican political operatives with limited or no background in diplomacy, according to an Associated Press survey of senior agency appointees.

What is curious about this article is its implicit criticism of Colin Powell and his top aide, Lawrence Wilkerson. This criticism is implicit because it refers to appointees of Powell’s as having quite limited foreign policy experience as compared to Condoleeza Rice’s appointees. Furthermore, the article implies that Powell’s appointees were more sympathetic to the neocons than Rice’s appointees are. This is damned strange, because Wilkerson has long articulated his opposition to the neocon agenda, while Rice as National Security Advisor implemented the neocons’s agenda. The State Department under Powell has been (for the most part, at least) widely considered to have been recalcitrant towards the neocons’s agenda. Rice, meanwhile, has (again, for the most part) has been seen as Bush II’s agent dispatched to wrest more control over a bureaucracy that is (again, for the most part) seen as hostile (or, at the very least, dubious) to the neocons’s agenda.

Rice, Gates to Discuss Arms Sale Plans with Gulf States, Egypt and Israel

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice formally announced today that the United States intends to provide billions of dollars in arms sales and assistance to six Gulf states, Egypt and Israel to boost security against Iran.

Rice made the announcement hours before she and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates left the United States to travel to the Middle East, where they will meet Arab and Israeli leaders to discuss the arms packages, as well as efforts to stabilize Iraq and possibilities for generating new movement in the Arab-Israeli peace process.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/30/AR2007073000623.html?hpid=moreheadlines

Well, there you have it folks:  Shrub plans to promote peace…by rearming everyone to the teeth!  Is the Man a hypocrite?  Or is he merely delusional?  I do know that he is a first class S.O.B.

Okla. Senator Vows Block, Saying Author Stigmatized Insecticides

Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn has effectively blocked a resolution to honor environmental author Rachel Carson on the 100th anniversary of her birth, saying that her warnings about environmental damage have put a stigma on potentially lifesaving pesticides, congressional staffers said yesterday.

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In a statement on his Web site yesterday, Coburn (R) confirmed that he is holding up the bill. In the statement, he blames Carson for using “junk science” to turn public opinion against chemicals, including DDT, that could prevent the spread of insect-borne diseases such as malaria, which is spread by mosquitoes.

The male bovine fecal material that this S.O.B. is spouting reminds me of the right wing revisionist claims of the Vietnam War. Here he is negatively spinning the work of Carson. (Click here to see his claims debunked.) Tom Coburn is truly an S.O.B. to denigrate a woman who gave so much even as she was dying from breast cancer; a woman who hid her desperate plight because she knew in her bones that if the chemical lobby found out about her cancer, then they would distort that fact to claim that her work was biased. Coburn is an absolute slimeball.

Click here to see a very short retrospective of Carson’s life.

Happy birthday, Ms. Carson.

This just goes to show yet again that you cannot trust the mainstream media to tell the full story if it conflicts or undermines the U.S. elite’s policy goals.

I received the following from Steven L. Robinson via Green Alliance’s Green All Views Listserve.

by Joshua Holland & Raed Jarrar

AlterNet

http://www.alternet.org/story/52135/

May 21, 2007.

Iraq’s resistance groups have offered a series of peace plans that might put an end to the country’s sectarian violence, but they’ve been ignored by the U.S.-led coalition because [the resistance groups are] opposed to foreign occupation and privatization of oil.

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An online search shows that the peace plan was largely ignored by the Western commercial media.

That’s par for the course. While every nuance of every spending bill that passes the U.S. Congress is analyzed in minute detail, the Iraqis — remember them? — have proposed a series of comprehensive peace deals that might unite the country’s ethnic and sectarian groups and result in an outcome American officials of all stripes say they want to achieve: a stable, self-governing Iraq that is strong enough to keep groups like al Qaeda from establishing training camps and other infrastructure within its borders.

Al Fadhila’s peace plan was not the first one offered by Iraqi actors, nor the first to be ignored by the Anglo-American Coalition.

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But these plans are unacceptable to the Coalition because they A) affirm the legitimacy of Iraq’s armed resistance groups and acknowledge that the U.S.-led coalition is, in fact, an occupying army, and B) return Iraq to the Iraqis, which means no permanent bases, no oil law that gives foreign firms super-sweet deals and no radical restructuring of the Iraqi economy. U.S. lawmakers have been and continue to be faced with a choice between Iraqi stability and American Empire, and continue to choose the latter, even as the results of those choices are splashed in bloody Technicolor across our TV screens every evening.

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As early as 2005, the University of Michigan’s Juan Cole reported that the Sadrist movement — named after the father of the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr — had gathered a million signatures on a petition demanding a timetable for occupation forces to withdraw. More recently, the Arabic press reported that as many as a million Iraqis — a million Shia and Sunni working together — had protested the continuing occupation in Najaf on the fourth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad last month.

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One of the few laws left on the books from the Saddam Hussein era is one that severely limits the rights of Iraqi workers to organize. As journalist
David Bacon reported in the winter of 2003, coalition forces “escalated their efforts to paralyze Iraq’s new labor unions with a series of arrests”
that left one of the few surviving segments of Iraq’s once-vibrant secular civil society toothless.

Paramilitary Ties to Elite In Colombia Are Detailed

Commanders Cite State Complicity in Violent Movement

Top paramilitary commanders have in recent days confirmed what human rights groups and others have long alleged: Some of Colombia’s most influential political, military and business figures helped build a powerful anti-guerrilla movement that operated with impunity, killed civilians and shipped cocaine to U.S. cities.The commanders have named army generals, entrepreneurs, foreign companies and politicians who not only bankrolled paramilitary operations but also worked hand in hand with fighters to carry them out. In accounts that are at odds with those of the government, the commanders have said their organization, rather than simply sprouting up to fill a void in lawless regions of the country, had been systematically built with the help of bigger forces.

Is it any wonder that Columbia is a poor country?  (click here for article)  These elites find it second nature to rape the country’s natural resources and to ignore the plight of the poor.

Yet more disturbing news on the ecological front…

Antartica’s Southern Ocean, a crucial “carbon sink” into which 15 percent of the world’s excess carbon dioxide flows, is reaching saturation and soon may be unable to absorb more — a deeply troubling development, the journal Science reported Thursday.”This is serious,” said lead author Corinne Le Quere of the University of East Anglia and British Antarctic Survey.

“This is the first time that we’ve been able to say that climate change itself is responsible for the saturation of the Southern Ocean sink,” Le Quere said, adding that the trend was likely to intensify over time.

The four-year study, which the Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry also took part in, shows that an increase in winds over the Southern Ocean caused by greenhouse gases and ozone depletion has led to a release of stored CO2 into the atmosphere — preventing further absorption of the greenhouse gas.

The Southern Ocean, the world’s fourth largest, also is known as the Antarctic Ocean or South Polar Ocean, is completely in Earth’s southern hemisphere.

“With the Southern Ocean reaching its saturation point, more CO2 will stay in our atmosphere,” Le Quere said.

All told, Earth’s carbon sinks absorb about half of all human carbon emissions. Researchers said that since 1981, the Southern Ocean sink has ceased to increase, while CO2 emissions have increased by 40 percent.

“Since the beginning of the industrial revolution the world’s oceans have absorbed about a quarter of the 500 gigatons of carbon emitted into the atmosphere by humans,” said Professor Chris Rapley, director of British Antarctic Survey.

“The possibility that in a warmer world the Southern Ocean — the strongest ocean sink — is weakening is a cause for concern,” Rapley said.

 http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2007/05/17/southernocean_pla.html?category=earth&guid=20070517150030&dcitc=w19-502-ak-0000

What can be said about Rachel Carson that hasn’t already been said? All I can do is post this article; anything else would be superfluous.  Here’s an article listing commemorative events in the area.

Rachel Carson’s Persistence and Pain In Focus 100 Years After Her Birth

Here, in a study that faces the garden, is where Rachel Carson would sit and write on days when she felt well. Here, in a bedroom with a dogwood outside the window, is where she would lie down and write on days when she felt worse.

On her sickest days, as Carson struggled with cancer and radiation therapy, she came back to her brick house on Berwick Road in Silver Spring and couldn’t write at all. Instead, an assistant read her words back to her, allowing her to edit even when she couldn’t sit up.

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In 1935, with a master’s degree in zoology from Johns Hopkins University, the Pennsylvania native was hired as a government contractor to write scripts for a radio nature show, “Romance Under the Waters.” She made $6.50 a day. In 1936, Carson became a full-time science writer, and she stayed with the government for 16 more years. Carson also raised a grand-nephew, Roger Christie, whom she adopted as a son.These were less cautious times in wildlife management: Government officials were still handing out recipes for eating the animals they studied. Still, in 1945, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was conducting research on a widely used pesticide.

“DDT may have undesirable and even dangerous effects unless its use is properly controlled,” [my emphasis] said a news release, which Carson helped write.

“It stuck in the back of her mind, apparently,” said Mark Madison, a historian for the Fish and Wildlife Service, Carson’s employer for much of her career.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/17/AR2007051702627.html?hpid=artslot