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Posted by stan as News at 10:40 AM PST

is part of the New Canon.

Here is an excerpt that resonates with Insurgent American.

I just got home from talking to a new friend, another longtime activist. She told me of a campaign she participated in a few years ago to try to stop the government and transnational timber corporations from spraying Agent Orange, a potent defoliant and teratogen, in the forests of Oregon. Whenever activists learned a hillside was going to be sprayed,they assembled there, hoping their presence would stop the poisoning. But each time, like clockwork, helicopters appeared, and each time, like clockwork, helicopters dumped loads of Agent Orange onto the hillside and onto protesting activists. The campaign did not succeed.

“But, ”she said to me, “I’ll tell you what did. A bunch of Vietnam vets lived in those hills, and they sent messages to the Bureau of Land Management and to Weyerhaeuser, Boise Cascade, and the other timber companies saying, ‘We know the names of your helicopter pilots, and we know their addresses.’”

I waited for her to finish.

“You know what happened next?” she asked.

“I think I do,” I responded.

“Exactly, ”she said. “The spraying stopped.”

Endgame (Two Volumes), Derrick Jensen, Seven Stories Press

Posted by stan as Pedagogy at 2:52 PM PST

Find the 35-Point Practical Guide for Action here.

Insurgent American is primarily an intelligence asset, a strategic resource to organize information to support and guide practical action… ergo out self-identification as a practical strategic resource. In one analytical piece here, we explained that strategy, tactics, and intelligence are interfused. One cannot develop intelligence without some point of view about the kinds of action that are required to achieve strategic objectives.

Some readers have suggested we publish a of list of practical actions that people can take. While this is a slightly different take on our original conception of supporting practical activity with intelligence development, if we acknowledge the interfusion of action and intelligence, then it makes sense for us to state those kinds of actions that we see as practical insurgency.

Action requires more than doing what everyone can already do. It requires the development of particular practical skills. An organization may be able to organize a march of half a million people on the DC Mall and still not be able to grow a cabbage, fix a flat tire on a bicycle, or start a blog. Implicit in our core convictions is that the belief that practical independence from the dependence-creating structures of the current system is a precondition of revolution. That independence is predicated on the ever more widespread development of particular skills… maybe even skills that we have to invent ourselves.

Other methods and theories of revolution have attached greater significance to having the “correct” ideas, the “correct” program, and the “correct” organization. These ideas and this practice have made inroads in places, but they inevitably run into the wall of their own dependence, in particular, their attachment to the industrial model of social organization, the orthodoxy of their ideas and the demand for ideological conformity as a membership gauntlet, and financial dependency on institutional structures like non-profits whose activities are circumscribed by government charters. We do not advocate wholesale abandonment efforts or even organizations that are already there and in motion. But we do believe that the voids, weaknesses, and blind spots of these models require remedies that reach people who cannot or will not operate within the constraints of these ideas, programs, or organizations.

New practices create new forms of consciousness; and here are a few ideas on some practices. Anyone can do one, two, or as many as are workable in present circumstances. The mental test we use in trying to determine the what’s appropriate is woman-burb-hood. Is this something that can relate to the capacities of a woman who lives in either a suburb or an urban neighborhood?

The order does not correspond to any valuation or priority. Find the 35-Point Practical Guide for Action here.

Posted by stan as Pedagogy at 3:16 PM PST

Reposted from Fire on the Mountain

I just watched the new MoveCongress.org video of John Murtha explaining his legislative strategy to end the occupation of Iraq, which seems to contain some interesting hidden booby traps for the Bush administration. There is, unfortunately, another concealed agenda item in his plan—providing cover for Democrats who are under massive pressure to vote No on the upcoming $93 billion emergency appropriation Bush needs to continue the war.

FULL ARTICLE

Posted by stan as News at 6:52 PM PST

With the Republican Party on the political ropes, so to speak, about the war, and the Democrats increasingly under siege from their left on the issue of cutting war funds, it’s been hard to keep pace with developments the last few days. In between just doing life-stuff, I think I try harder than most to make sense of what is going on these turbulent days in international relations. But things still slip past my radar; and that’s what friends are for.

A recent email from my friend, Lydia, gave me a much-needed heads-up that I feel compelled to share here.

I admit I had turned off the TV except to watch late-night whodunit CDs – my cognitive junk food. It’s a mental health break from CNN infomercials and the puffed-up posturing of politicos on C-Span.

Lydia had followed some of my musing about the chaotic bifurcations in American domestic politics, and how ripe anti-immigrant xenophobia is for whichever candidates choose to pluck this poisonous but low-hanging fruit.

The advantage, as males, of having women for friends, is we can share the complementary strengths we have from our respective socialization as a way of overcoming our weaknesses. Men are trained to compartmentalize, to set aside certain irritants from our culture when they make us uncomfortable… and anything that hits our emotional tuning forks is reflexively kept out, so to speak. It’s a great defense mechanism, but it comes at a high price… which is a real loss of sensitivity to important intangibles around us. A net weakness, in my view. We are not immune to emotional manipulation; in fact, I would argue, we are more susceptible to it, because we won’t acknowledge it. Women are socialized to be very sensitive to emotional appeals, and the strength of that is that they can more readily feel and, therefore, identify them.

Lydia had been watching C-Span, and shot me an email.

“I’m curious if you’ve been able to stomach any of the speakers in the House since yesterday,” she said. “I know folks on both sides are pissing you off.”

For the first time the more populist/xenophobic war supporters are feeling pressed to come up with more rhetorically effective (however ignoble) arguments, with a larger forum in which to do it…

For the first time, I heard Boehner, who launched the anti-resolution [the House anti-“surge” resolution] side, name this as a conflict against Islamic jihadism that began in 1979 with the Iranian hostage crisis.

Now, their Islamophobia doesn’t surprise me… but until yesterday I hadn’t heard them reframe this as a war that has been going on “since 1979,” with “30 attacks against America” in the intervening years, only one of which was 9/11.

Here’s what concerns me . . . There’s something highly psychologically enticing to anyone who was born in or before, say, 1975, I think, to have offered to them a powerful new narrative for the entirety of their lives. . . not just a narrative for a crisis of the past few years. .. but suddenly, like the disease metaphor in addiction, a large grand theory through which so many culturally and personally dislodging changes, losses, accelerations can be reinterpreted. (I’m not talking here of the small minority highly informed about the long history of American imperialism.)

Of course, the lives of any generation, whether Stone Age or Digital, are always full of individual and collective ego-generated suffering (desire and fear, from the Buddhist perspective), and the knee-jerk human response is too long for a grand, typically otherizing (and thereby ego-maintaining) theory to explain it.

I’m just concerned that this sweeping up of the past 28 years into a new grand narrative is going to register on the inner fascism-to-counter-psychic-pain meter perhaps more powerfully than the immigrants-are-stealing-our-jobs narrative.

At first glance, it seems counter-intuitive. We’ve got lots more Latina/os in our daily lives in the US to hate and round up and blame for shitty jobs and unaffordable health care than people who are or look like Muslims. On the other hand, this new narrative re-engages the imagery of what for many was a highly emotionally charged conflict about which they or their parents had unresolved anger. . . .and suddenly, oh, all these years growing up and fucking up like any living human being and seeing our society changing so goddamn fast and our hopes not pan out . . . it’s captured by Americans in blindfolds. [The photographs of the American Embassy hostages of 1979 in Iran]

“We’ve been blindflolded.”

There’s enormous demagogic potential in dramatically merging the desire to rip those blindfolds off those hostages, with the incessant human desire to re-visualize “anew” our personal and collective histories in a way that gives meaning to the unavoidable losses and absurdities of all human life that, for two generations, would have accrued since 1979.

Obviously the most aggressive apologists for the Bush administration war policy right now, represented by attack-dog Boehner, are reading from someone’s playbook. I’d missed it, partly because I turned off the TV, but also partly because dismissing these demagogic appeals – for boyz – includes wrapping those emotional tuning forks in cotton. While I would reactively dismiss this as “just more bullshit,” Lydia – like many well-socialized grrlz – felt that ping… one that was carefully calculated by the authors of the new “1979” narrative.

So I turned on C-Span, just in time to hear Republican John Duncan of East Tennessee speak out against the war in terms I could have written myself (this was a remarkable thing to behold, and Duncan should be praised to the heavens). What I also heard, however, again and again, not just from that macho shit-head Boehner, but from a whole queue of Republicans, was the 1979 narrative.

Lydia had nailed it.

“I never thought,” she wrote, “that masses of people might be psychologically tempted to trace back a reverse trajectory around the random scatterplot of their lives’ and culture’s perceived personal and cultural losses, recasting the meaning of their lives within the collective narrative of the ‘global fight against Jihadism (sic) since 1979.’”

This talking point is very consistent with the whole Straussian worldview of the neocons. They are all about reasserting control, about re-establishing order in a world where classical (Jeffersonian) liberalism has led (in their view) to dangerous levels of social disorder. Part of that control is the militarization of both foreign and domestic policy; but a very important part of that control is finding a Grand Narrative, of decisively establishing a Manichean cultural mythology (The Noble Lie) that can be mapped onto the collective imagination.

That’s what’s clever about this new play. It mobilizes the Islamophobia that was already there, but it pushes it back before 9-11, which with its sequels has now become an avalanche of embarrassments; and it does so with this meaning-making that Lydia admits resonated with her as she saw the photographs of the blindfolded hostages… the resonance that I would have “tuned out.” And, of course, it trumps the anti-Latin@ xenophobia of Dobbs and Tancredo that might threaten Republican unity… maybe…. we’ll see.

What becomes important, then, is inoculation. Constructed imagination like this works in the dark, as it were. Its instrumentality does not suffer bright light. It is like those cockroaches that one sees scurrying down the drain when we flip on the kitchen light in the middle of the night. That’s why we have to call this out. We have to talk about this, a lot. Expose it. Name it every time it rears its head, because the establishment won’t.

I would even suggest, in conjunction with these confrontations, we send around the very humanizing Lucas Gray flash video of Iran. Nothing communicates like pictures and music.

The antidote to this is not a pill; it’s a long infusion. Now. Early. Don’t let this venomous myth of the US-as-Victim-of-Islam get a purchase. Every instance of this myth must be confronted.

We are out ahead of them right now, and this is an attempt to re-capture the political initiative. It has to be dealt with quickly and without quarter.

Thanks, Lydia.

Posted by stan as Analysis at 2:22 PM PST

a Dale Allen Pfeiffer report, from Carolyn Baker’s site

The net energy value of biodiesel and ethanol is very hotly debated. There are many net energy studies of biofuels, particularly ethanol, which give a wide range of values. The main problem is that net energy studies are easily influenced by biases. The researcher must choose the energy inputs and outputs and the values to assign to these various inputs and outputs. There is no clear standard. However, in a survey of a large sampling of ethanol studies, the authors found that the average of all these studies taken together showed a net energy loss of 8%. Throwing out the three highest and three lowest outliers cut this loss to 2%.1

In this report, while we will discuss the net energy profile of various biofuels, we will also bring up several other criticisms of biofuels and the biofuel industry that are not so controversial, nor so open to debate.

FULL ARTICLE AT Speaking Truth to Power

Posted by stan as Analysis at 6:23 AM PST

Three years ago, I wrote a series for From The Wilderness entitled “Persian Peril in which I outlined my reasons for disbelieving the breathless rumors that the US was about to attack Iran. Not only have the flames of the rumor failed to abate, the escalation of Bush administration saber rattling has thrown a good deal of gasoline on them. Now the US is dispatching a third naval battle group to the Arabian Sea near the Gulf of Hormuz as part of its
campaign to ratchet up tensions with Iran and to shift blame for the Iraq debacle onto its Persian neighbor.

FULL AT Speaking Truth to Power

Posted by stan as Analysis at 8:54 PM PST

Humankind is doing more things, faster, across a greater space than ever before, producing changes of a size and speed never seen before.

Thomas Homer-Dixon compares our current situation to driving too fast along a country road in a dense fog. Some ignore the fog and keep their foot pressed on the accelerator, but most of us feel like fairly helpless passengers on this wild ride.

FULL INTERVIEW

Posted by stan as Analysis at 7:44 PM PST

There is a new piece by Kim Alphandary up called Fatima, the Virgin of Abu Ghraib: Why I Chose to Create This Painting. Check it out.

My art show consists of one painting and 12 large drawings. The most important work in the show is a painting titled “Fatima, the Virgin of Abu Ghraib”. This painting is an illustration of one woman’s story in Iraq, a story that has become a modern day myth. It is a powerful tale about how a women and her family deal with rape during times of war.

Thanks for letting us put your writing on IA Kim!

Posted by BrianR as Analysis at 5:51 PM PST

We have some new writing in the Analysis-Synthesis section by Huibin Amee Chew. The first piece up is called Why the War is Sexist (And Why We Can’t Ignore Gender Anymore; Here’s a Start for Organizing). Keep an eye out for more of her amazing work. Thanks for letting us put your writing on IA Amee!

Posted by BrianR as Analysis at 8:19 AM PST