Sunday, December 26, 2021

The Great Pause Week 93: Critical Justice Theory

"History rhymes"

 

Back in the early 80s we were going through a pretty rough patch at The Farm community, then some 1200 strong — lots of set-backs, and fielding heavy debt from cascading failures from undercapitalized or bad business ideas had us questioning leadership, mission, planning, and governance. Going on a “wing and a prayer” just wasn’t cutting it.

As director of The Natural Rights Center I could not go out en masse with the hero brigades tree-planting, or welding on an oil rig off Houma Louisiana, or to any of the other gigs that were being offered to help us get out of debt because I had so many court cases and was our only full-time staff attorney. Atomic workers and veterans, the Honicker case at the Supreme Court, efforts on behalf of Native peoples for religious freedom and land access, the MX missile EIS, Mount Pleasant’s toxic waste ponds and wells, amicus briefs, appellate briefs of various kinds, all keeping me tied to the small office cabin in the woods with my law library and a dorm for volunteer summer student interns. I had moved my office to that cabin to be next to home while the kids were young.

I was busy every day, filing papers and researching and writing and so it was impossible for me to imagine going off and doing tree planting for a couple weeks. Nonetheless I looked around to see where it might be possible that I could integrate an income stream into my work to help do my part to pay off the Farm’s bills. And that was tricky because my work was entirely supported by charitable donations to Plenty that were allocated and restricted to the Natural Rights Center and could not be diverted to the inurement of The Farm. 

My law license also required diligence in separating the work I did for free from anything for money. If took a paid lawyer job I would have a conflict because as a member of The Foundation I was on a vow of poverty and all earnings went to the communal religious order, not to me personally, and the Tennessee Bar Association might have an issue with that vis a vis who is licensed to practice. I sought an Ethics opinion that clarified the matter, instructing me not give my legal earnings to The Farm. I formed a professional corporation and kept it all tidy.

But going off and doing tree planting for a couple weeks was simply not in the cards. Then I was sitting in court one day and the judge asked, “Mr. Bates, can you handle a case?”

Whenever they had criminal cases come to arraignment and there was no representation, since they didn’t have a public defender, they would appoint someone right there. They would assign it to a local member of the Bar, usually someone who was present in court. And all members of the five-county bar felt an obligation to step up and volunteer if called upon this way, unless they were in trial or otherwise fully loaded down with other appointed cases.

Since I was a newbie there — I didn’t do retail trial work in the county generally, but practiced in the federal courts — I had no experience in the criminal court or had ever studied more than I had needed of that process to pass the Tennessee Bar Exam. But the Farm needed cash so I said okay.

I was appointed to represent a one Mr. Charles Wesley. The pay was something like $600 for the entire assignment, including if it went to trial. For most assigned counsel these were quickies. You cut a deal, pled the client out at arraignment, he was remanded back into custody and led off in shackles, and you went to the cashier’s counter for your check.

No matter how much I might spend or whatever it cost me to bring in witnesses or use an investigator, $600 was the flat fee for representing someone on a felony charge in Hohenwald, Tennessee in the early 1980s. And arguably that was a better system, and less rigged, than an overworked, salaried, 9-to-5 sole public defender with thousands of cases, a 5-year backlog, and perhaps hundreds of clients jailed all over the state, shuttling between available shift-shared beds, awaiting trial unless they pled to something they may not have been guilty of. Thousands just like Charles Wesley, wrong place, wrong time. Driving While Black.

I went down to the basement below the courtroom and met my client in holding and interviewed him. He was a good looking young man, lean, well groomed, athletic, in school, no priors. His face was all puffy and I asked him why. He said the food. It was too salty. He was having a reaction. He had asked to have it salt-free but had been refused. I later spoke with the Sheriff about cutting out his salt.

Some striking passages from this week’s piece in New York Magazine by Kerry Howley: “Gina. Rosanne. Guy. What do you do the day after you storm the Capitol?,” remind me of how little the American gulag has changed since Norman Mailer penned similar descriptions of conditions suffered by the Pentagon protesters in his non-fiction 1968 novel, Armies of the Night that won a Pulitzer and the National Book Award but apparently didn’t change anything. Howley writes

In Grady County, Gina was placed, alone, in a room the size of a basketball court. In the corners lurked something foul and brown, and she didn’t know if it was human filth or the brown towels inmates had and were shedding. She was very cold. She was desperate for a Diet Coke. She had only one pair of underwear, which she washed in the sink, shivering as her hands touched the cold water. The blue mat she was given to sleep on, split in several places with stuffing coming out of it, was so rancid she could not bring herself to use it, so she slept on a hard plastic cot, huddled into a ball to try to keep warm. When she asked for a blanket, a guard said he would have to ask the captain. In a lawsuit filed in 2009, a Grady County inmate said he was so cold he used the Saran Wrap in which his lunch came to wrap up his feet, at which point the guards started dropping sandwiches in his cell unwrapped.
***
Regardless of how we may receive this assessment… a country that protects the right to spin fantasy necessarily risks the well-being of those who easily lose themselves to it. Freedom isn’t free is a true thing the right used to say, and the costs of freedom of speech are real costs, borne, in part, by those unskilled at sifting fact from fantasy: the people who join MLMs, who become Scientologists, who lie awake in bed at night worrying over small children drained of adrenochrome. To spear the fact in the sea of grift is not an act of intelligence, exactly, but a kind of sensibility, a certain instinct for grasping the structure of the social world. We like to think of conspiracy theories as outside the realm of intelligent consideration, but the idea of children trafficked via a discount-furniture retailer is not more strange than a network of cages, built to maintain a centuries-old racial hierarchy and kept so cold that Saran Wrap socks register as an act of resistance, in which white rioters who deny the existence of systemic racism now find themselves.

Returning to 1980, from the police reports and the interview I learned that Charles Wesley was a getaway driver at a QuikStop hold-up. His story was that some friends had asked him to take them for a drive out to the country to see the scenery outside Nashville. They had pulled into a QuikStop off the highway and he waited in the car while they used the restrooms and bought some snacks. Then they came running out, jumped in the car and told him to hit it. He realized they had just heisted the place and so he floored the car and cut a gravel slalom track out of the parking lot. That was witnessed, incriminating him. They were stopped by police a few miles down the road.

His friends had pled and posted bail but he asked for a lawyer so he got me. I confirmed the details of his story as best I could and then went to the D.A. The prosecutor wanted felony accessory, one year, less time served. It was a fair deal and I advised my client to take it, which he did. He did his time and got out early for good behavior, but with a catch.

And his catch caught me.

He was now a felon, and in those days, the Republican voter suppression squads were ramping up a new strategy to keep blacks from voting: felony disenfranchisement. State after state, beginning in the usual bastions of the Confederacy like Florida and moving to places of more subtle elite control like Delaware, were lining up laws permanently revoking the franchise from anyone convicted of a felony, meaning a crime carrying a sentence of one year or more.

I had just pled my young client to lose his right to vote. Forever.

So much for making money for The Farm on indigent arraignments. Now I had a damn constitutional case.

Wesley versus Collins

Under the US Constitution, the several states retain the right to regulate voting and set standards, even for federal elections. Nonetheless, my choice of familiar terrain on which to fight this battle would be the federal courts and to do that I needed to establish jurisdiction. 

I argued that the Tennessee statute disenfranchising felons resulted in the unlawful dilution of the black vote in violation of the U.S. Constitution and the 1973 Voting Rights Act as amended in 1982. Prior to ’82, striking a voting regulation required proof of discriminatory intent. After ’82 a plaintiff needed only to show that a challenged statute had the result of denying minorities “an equal chance to participate in the political process.” 

Section 2(b) of the Voting Rights Act Amendments provides that vote dilution in violation of the Act is established if, 

based on the totality of circumstances, it is shown that the political processes leading to nomination or election in the State or political subdivision are not equally open to participation by members of a class of citizens protected by [the Act] in that its members have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.

This jurisdictional point was taken up by the courts in 1985 for the first time in my case of Wesley v. Collins. 605 F. Supp. 802 (M.D. Tenn. 1985), aff’d, 791 F.2d 1255 (6th Cir. 1986). The lower court simply ignored the new Voting Rights Act dilution test and concluded:

“Felons are … disenfranchised based on … their conscious decision to
commit an act for which they assume the risks of… punishment.”

The District Judge got lost in a “misdirected search for a causal nexus between the ‘indicia of historically-rooted discrimination and the Tennessee statute disenfranchising felons,’ according to one later law review. He instead should have, under the 1982 law, examined the statistical data showing impact, and weighed “totality of circumstances.” 

Following extension of the felony disenfranchisement laws to a third of the States, the 1990 census reported that blacks accounted for roughly 12.1% of the total U.S. population in comparison to a 80.3% white population. Thanks to the war on drugs, profiling, DwB and similar scams, blacks represented 47% of a total convicted felons and 48% of those convicted of violent crimes. Ninety percent of felons were of voting age. The black voting age population had shrunk to 4 percent. It was a Republican wet dream.

At trial I presented expert evidence demonstrating that:

“the ratio of white felons to the general population of Tennessee whites [was] approximately 1 to 1000, while the corresponding black ratio [was] 1 to 100.” 

Wesley, 605 F.Supp. at 804.

On appeal, standing before the three-judge panel in Cincinnati, I cited the statistics of the time for felony convictions of blacks versus whites and also cited violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments but was cut off that line because if I could not prevail on the dilution point it would be unlikely the other points would succeed. Ultimately the Appeals court endorsed the flawed logic of the lower court:

“[i]t is well-settled … that a showing of disproportionate racial impact alone does not establish a per se violation of the Voting Rights Act”

Wesley v. Collins, 791 F.2d 1255, 1260–61.

So that was it. The federal courts essentially thumbed their nose at the 1982 Voting Rights Act amendment and summarily ended Charles Wesley’s franchise, using the wrong standard of proof.

__________

This is the first of two parts that I will use to close out this, the second year of The Great Pause gifted to us by the covid pandemic. This memoir is part of a book I am developing with a Russian co-author, Тюрин Глеб, to recall for large literary audience of Russian-speaking youth the story of the hippies, and in particular the relevance of the The Farm to today’s ecovillage and ecosystem regeneration movement, now growing strong across the white frosts of that vast, beautiful, and ever-changing landscape.

Next Time: The Great Pause Week 94: Restoring the Felon Vote in Tennessee in 1981: Taking no as the first step to yes, and the big win at the Tennessee Supreme Court.

 ___________

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #Regenerosity|

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

 — Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

 ___________

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:
1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features 
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity 
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

Sunday, December 19, 2021

The Great Pause Week 92: Christmas in the Metaverse

"If you had the money would you pop the pill?"

 


A friend writes from Bali:

Imagine, in ten years, being able to take a pill at a certain age, say 60 or 70, that would allow you to stay the same age for ten or more years.

It may be possible!

Now imagine that it would cost $15,000 USD. And realize that for most people, paying for the pill would not be economically viable. Assuming that such a pill would be unsanctioned by any government—due, let's say, to unforeseen risks—the technology would remain in private hands.

If you had the money would you pop the pill?

Russian-born billionaire investor (Facebook, mail.ru) Yuri Milner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have launched a venture seeking to use biological reprogramming to rejuvenate cells. Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte from the Salk Institute, UCLA professor and pioneer in epigenetic clocks Steve Horvath, and Nobel laureate Shinya Yamanaka have joined their advisory board; Richard Klausner, the one-time chief of the National Cancer Institute, is CEO.

Milner and Bezos’ Altos Labs hopes to go to the head of the class in Rejuvenation Biotechnology. It is trying to catch Google founder Larry Page’s Calico Labs, launched in 2013. Calico also hired elite scientific figures and gave them generous budgets, although it took until May 2021, for Calico to publish its first preprint , reporting:

… that a transient reprogramming approach inspired by amphibian regeneration restored youthful gene expression in aged myogenic cells. Our results suggest that transient pluripotent reprogramming poses a neoplastic risk, but that restoration of youthful gene expression can be achieved with alternative strategies.

“Neoplastic risk” is biologese for novel tumors, cancers, or mutant cells that could damage either local organ function or compromise life function.

Page and Bezos are not the only Silicon alley actors in this space. Larry Ellison (founder of Oracle), Peter Thiel (former PayPal CEO), Elon Musk (Tesla), and Peter Diamandis (SpaceX, XPrize) are all advocates. Once you have more money than you could spend in a thousand lifetimes (Bezos and Musk are worth half a trillion in the latest Forbes rankings), the tendency is to go for the thousand-year-life pill rather than leave it all on the table. The genetic imperative, to quote transhumanist philosopher, Zoltan Istvan, is to “safeguard one's own existence above all else.”

Agerasia

My friend in Bali next asks:

If we can take pills and live 150 years what will we experience?

And if a 40 year old today could conceivably live to 150 what about the babies being born now? [Would it be] 250 years for those who can afford it?

Even if governments were to get on board with life extension, how will we define terms such as retirement, senior citizens, etc.?

There is no doubt in my mind that entrepreneurs will rush into these potential gold mines faster than they can type telomere.

Noticing the ethical dimensions of extreme longevity is not a new thing in science, philosophy, or literature. Indeed, as Ajit Varki and Danny Brower observed in Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind (2013), magical thinking of life everlasting is the singular common theme found in all religions. See the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh or the pyramid papyri. Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and Benjamin Franklin all toyed with the idea of scientific life extension. Robert Boyle (1627–1691), proposed "to replace the blood of the old with the blood of the young.” Defying death was at the heart of Shelley and Stoker’s success in Frankenstein and Dracula, both of whose title characters, one should note, viewed indefinite lifespans (agerasia) as a hellish curse.

It may be helpful to recall that the original subtitle that 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley used when putting Frankenstein to paper that rainy afternoon in 1816 in Geneva, in order to take up a dare from Lord Byron, was The Modern Prometheus. In Greek mythology, Prometheus (Προμηθεύς, meaning “forethought”) was the god of fire, credited with the creation of humanity and civilization. For his unauthorized bequest of sacred knowledge to the unworthy, Prometheus was sentenced by Zeus to be bound to a rock while an eagle came to eat his liver every day, which would then grow back overnight, only to be eaten again the next day. In modern Western culture. “Promethean” is associated with overreaching or unintended consequences. And let’s face it, giving fire to those chattering apes really was a bonehead move.

A Spring 2013 Pew Research poll in the United States found 41% believed that radical life extension (RLE) would be good for society, while 51% said they believed it would be bad. Never ones to be swayed by public opinion, and flush with Silicon Valley unicorn droppings, billionaire agerasiastas are now exploring anti-aging drugs, nanotechnology, cloning and body part replacement, cyborgs, cryonics, strategies for engineered negligible senescence, genetic editing, fooling genes, mind uploading, young blood injection, microbiome alterations and epigenetic reprogramming. So one needs to ask, suppose they succeed?

A global population of nearly 8 billion is unsustainable without additional resources, like four more Planet Earths. I could say we are on a collision course with biodiversity, extractable minerals, climate, and each other but we have already collided. It is like watching grey mold grow on an orange. For the longest time, there was none. Then all of a sudden….

Murphy’s Law

USC Professor T.W. Murphy reminds us that the earliest economic theorists—Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill—saw population growth as a temporary phase, ultimately limited by the prime physical resource: land.

Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet:

In that time, land held the key to outputs from farming, timber, mining, and game—thereby dictating economic development. What these pioneering economic thinkers did not foresee was the arrival of fossil fuels, and the technological developments that accompanied this energy explosion.

Now, we have fallen into something of a lulled complacency: having rescued ourselves so far from the end-of-growth predictions of the early economists, the temptation is to conclude that they were just wrong and we have outsmarted natural limits. This is dangerous thinking. In the end, nature is indifferent to how smart we imagined ourselves to be. If we were truly clever, we would start thinking about a world that does not depend on growth, and how to live compatibly within planetary limits.

***

Just because we can point to some completely legitimate examples of decoupled activities and many impressive substitution stories does not mean that an entire economy can be based on indefinite continuance of such things. We are physical beings in a physical world and have non-negotiable minimum requirements for life. The activities and commodities that support critical functions cannot continue to expand indefinitely, and will not become arbitrarily cheap once their expansion hits physical limits. The finite nature of our world guarantees that such limits will be asserted, committing economic growth to stall in turn. Nothing, in the end, escapes physics.

So, while acknowledging that growth in the past has brought uncountable benefits to the human endeavor, we have to ask ourselves: If the end of growth is inevitable, why does it remain our prevailing plan?

To which I would answer, “because that kind of magical thinking is hard-wired, just like denying our own death.”

Orbiting Tech Billionaires

Future tech advancements could erase the energy shortfall being created as we descend back into the safety of renewables after lingering too long in the rare air of the fossil fuel summit death zone, but those advancements could be long in the future, if at all. USAnians’ per-capita use of energy is roughly five times the global average. It is difficult to imagine how much greater might be the energy consumption of our orbiting biotech billionaires. Thanks to oil and gas, today’s humans live the equivalent of 25 billion people on the planet at the living standard of nineteenth century per capita energy use—functionally a quadrillion horses and oxen. Can the planet support an additional demographic category of 250-year-old megaconsumers at 21st century living standards?

Murphy asks a more troubling question.

Let’s say that a given forest can support an ultimate number of deer, labeled Q, in steady state, while the current population is labeled P. The difference, Q - P, is the “room” available for growth, which we might think of as being tied to available resources. Once P = Q, no more resources are available to support growth.

For the megaconsuming, long-living billionaires, a simple solution would then present itself. Is it time to cull the herd? By reducing the draw on resources from billions of short-lived Plebians, the longer-lived, superior Patricians could continue to expand their numbers, and consumption, retaining just enough numbers of their rivals to clean their pools, service their helicopters, and fetch food for their tables.

It seems I have wandered off into a popular meme of recent Sci-Fi dystopias. For the privileged elite, those never end well. Murphy’s textbook provides a better denouement:

Salvaging a decent future requires keen awareness, quantitative assessment, deliberate preventive action, and—above all—recognition that prevailing assumptions about human identity and destiny have been cruelly misshapen by the profoundly unsustainable trajectory of the last 150 years.  The goal is to shake off unfounded and unexamined expectations, while elucidating the relevant physics and encouraging greater facility in quantitative reasoning.

Whether genetic predispositions are as easily purged from our lizard brains as Murphy seems to think they can be is another question.

Another Way

There is fortunately a third alternative, whose real estate and boundaries are currently experiencing a bidding race amongst the tech titans—Facebook’s Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google, Netflix, Forte, Xaya, Roblox and all of their Chinese counterparts. Zuck has already branded it—Meta®. The metaverse of science fiction is now science fact—with wearables coming off the Foxcon assembly lines in Guangzhou like Model T Fords in 1908.


Picture Christmas in the Metaverse. Papa and Mama hear the patter of little feet on the stairs and rouse themselves, donning robes and slippers, and oh, yes, their Oculus soft lenses, as they follow the sounds of mirth to the living room. There, dappled by dawn sunbeams through frosted windows and the twinkling of Christmas tree lights, the children jump around, agog at all the splendid presents in front of the tree. Jonny is playing with his electric hovertrain monorail. Junebug is skipping her musical rope. Even Fido has gotten into the act, finding a beef-flavored bone-treat in his bowl by the fireplace. Then a gloved-hand reaches down from the chimney and the upside-down head of the Jolly Old Elf himself appears laughing a hearty Ho! Ho! Ho! And just as quickly, by laying his finger aside of his nose, and giving a nod, he is up the chimney and gone. The family rushes to the windows and out there, across the breast of the new-fallen snow, Santa gives a whistle, and away his sleigh flies.

Then papa looks at mama and they both turn to look at their googly-eyed children, and it matters not a whit that these babes are entirely artificial, as are the tree, the toys, the fireplace, the whole set. So, later, will be the Christmas dinner with lab-cultured turkey and all the trimmings, or the trip down to the opera house to see The Nutcracker, and finally, the cocktails on the deck overlooking the Bay of Bengal feeling a warm summer breeze before they retire that night.

If world population could be reduced in this way, while resources are still available to support the energy-intensive meta-infrastructure, and, oh, climate catastrophe could still be averted, then why not?

Maybe that would be a better use of those billions.


 

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #Regenerosity

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.


Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works: 

1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 

2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features 

3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity 

4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

Sunday, December 12, 2021

The Great Pause Week 91: The Diaper Index

"In Japan they have a new indicator for the population demographic — adult diapers."


“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” 

― Robert A. Heinlein 

Scientists and engineers like to use charts and indicators to aid in the visual representation of complex data. We all think more clearly when we can visualize something. In Japan they have a new graphical indicator for the population demographic — diapers.

Unfortunately these are not the kind that typically wrap the bare bottoms of babies. These are the kind keeping geriatric genitals sanitary. In rapidly aging Japan, more diapers are used by older, incontinent people than by babies. Were it not for immigration, mainly from Asia and Latin America, the same might be true in the United States. 

In Japan population change is becoming a waste problem more than an immigration issue. Waste from adult diapers is growing by tens of thousands of tons per year and most municipalities just incinerate the contaminated plastics. A few draw the heat off for buildings and hot water systems. In Houki, a town of just over 10,500 people in Tottori Prefecture, adult diapers represent about a tenth of the town’s trash. Houki makes its dirty diapers into fuel to reduce natural gas heating costs of the municipal-owned swimming pool. 

The amount of adult diapers entering the waste stream in Japan has increased by nearly 13 percent, to almost 1.5 million tons annually, in the last five years, according to data from the environment ministry. It is projected to grow a further 23 percent by 2030, when those 65 and older will represent close to a third of the population.

 — The New York Times, December 3, 2021

The larger issue that diapers wrap is human scale in a finite space. As the Japanese population both ages and shrinks at the same time, incontinence products for seniors grow, just as do the needs for senior health care, retirement homes, and morticians. 

At the recycling plant, he and his co-worker, dressed in Tyvek body suits, rubber boots and helmets, dump the diapers into a vat the size of a small trailer. They are sterilized and fermented for 24 hours in 350-degree heat, which cuts their volume to a third of their soiled weight. The process converts the diapers into a fluff that is processed through another machine and turned into two-inch-long gray pellets.
The operations slightly evoke the factory scenes from “Soylent Green,” the 1973 dystopian thriller in which nutrition wafers are made from human remains. Despite ceramic and charcoal filters designed to remove foul odors, the machinery emitted a faint yeasty, toasted smell as pellets rained down from a bright orange chute into a large plastic box.

One smart company is seizing the opportunity to bring diapers into the new carbon economy that will reverse climate change. Iwamoto Inc. developed its line of Super Stone Clean. The evolving generations of its patented Z series pyrolyzers advertise high-volume on-site diaper processing, municipal solid waste reduction, energy and secondary product creation. By pyrolyzing (carbonizing in the absence of oxygen) rather than incinerating (burning or oxidizing), Iwamoto makes biochar rather than ash. Although it likely contains plastic residues unsuited for agricultural uses, this kind of biochar can be applied in applications like biocrete or wallboard for buildings. It can also be made into plastics. Unicharm, one of Japan’s largest diaper manufacturers, has built a pilot plant in Kagoshima, in southern Japan, where it is recycling diapers back into more diapers.

In 2021, after a summer of small-scale testing, the enterprising Norwegian company Snøhetta teamed up with experienced contractors, researchers, producers and suppliers within the concrete and biochar industries to erect Norway’s first carbon negative precast concrete wall. A Snøhetta press release said: 

The construction industry is an industry with significant greenhouse gas emissions, and concrete alone makes up about 8% of CO2 emissions globally. However, it is challenging to imagine that we will build less in the years to come, and even more so to imagine that we will find a material as versatile as concrete. Therefore, we must find more environmentally friendly solutions that allow us to build for the future without contributing to making it less liveable for future generations, and the construction industry must be a part of this green change. Hence concrete seemed like an obvious place to start, and wood waste from the construction industry a sensible resource to utilize. This is the idea that grew to become our Biocrete project.

Now imagine the cities of the future cast from your grandfather’s soiled diapers and energized by your own toilet wastes. To paraphrase Heinlein, “a human being should be able to change a diaper and plan a building at the same time.”

_____________________

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity I have been involved with since its inception in 1974. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #Regenerosity

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

_____________

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:
1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features 
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Sunday, December 5, 2021

The Great Pause Week 90: Sympathy for the Detail

"Sixty million people are involved in some way in separatist movements within China today."

Image after photo by Thomas Peter/Reuters, Vocational Skills Education Center in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, 2018


When mentioning my trips to China to teach permaculture and ecovillage design, I often encounter a knee-jerk response, wherein my friends feel it necessary for them to bring up the punishment of Uyghurs to even have a conversation of any kind about China. And of course it is impossible to say anything kind about ethnic cleansing and mass detention so I just tend to agree and continue the conversation. Occasionally, I feel a loss of nuance that erodes our shared understanding of things and I will wade in with a deeper analysis. That seldom goes well. There is a purple fog that descends when hypnotic triggers implanted by popular culture are squeezed.

Given the way digital media has been accelerating and amplifying civil discord, and how that has been profitably weaponized by various governments and non-state actors, I don’t think losing nuance is a good idea. Illiberality is dangerous. Indulge me for a moment in my digression.

In China, tensions had been growing — driven in part by the universality of smart phones and apps like WeChat — between the Confucian majority and the Muslim minority in Xinjiang province, formerly East Turkestan, a stone’s throw from all the other ’Stans. There is nothing remarkable in that, and ethnic predjudices go back to the Great Golden Horde. This is just your usual tribal allegiances, with their racism and religious bigotry, topped off with a cherry bomb of violent fundamentalism. It spilled over into bloodshed in July 2009, in riots led by Sunni Muslim Uyghurs in Ürümqi, capital of Xinjiang, when 197 ethnic Han Chinese died, with 1,721 others injured, and again on March 1, 2015, when Uyghurs took their frustrations out by murdering 31 Han and wounding more than 140 with knives and machetes in a bloody rampage in the southwestern city of Kunming, capital of Yunnan, far from the Uyghur homeland. 

The mention of machetes brings to mind the Tutsi and Hutu reciprocal genocides in Rwanda 1994, deaths estimated: 491,000–1,006,354, or Bosnia ’92-’95 with 104,732 casualties, spread among Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs. I also remember the deaths of over 331 people, including 186 children, in the 2004 school siege by Sunni Muslim Chechen separatists in North Ossetia and the 2002 Moscow theater attack that ended with 117 hostages and 50 Chechens killed by Russian special forces.

In the United States, tensions had been growing — driven in part by the universality of smart phones and apps like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram — between a poorly educated Christian white majority and black, latino and Asian minorities, together with a wealthier corporate elite that institutionally keeps disadvantaged, poorly educated factions down for its own benefit, without even thinking about it. Control primarily resided in coastal cities while discontent grew and festered in heartland flyover states, exploited to political advantage by unscrupulous blowhards and the algorithm manipulation businesses of third parties, foreign and domestic. 

This is, again, your usual tribal allegiances and religious fundamentalism, but in 2021, doused with the accelerant of data-directed, eyeball-harvesting, trillionized social media, it spilled over into violence. On January 6, an aggrieved group of white MAGAdiots took revenge for a foregone election loss by storming the Capitol and murdering and wounding police with bats, lances and tasers in a bloody uprising in the District of Columbia.

The two countries reacted very differently. In China, the president called for “all-out efforts” to “prevent Xinjiang’s violent terrorist activities from spreading to the rest of China.” China would not become Rwanda, or India-Pakistan. He said that violent acts had already spread to other regions of China and could grow like a virus unless checked. He called for “a crushing blow to buy us time.”

Across the Xinjiang border in Pakistan, in otherwise school-less regions, 40,000 Sunni madrasas funded by Saudi Arabia train physicians, administrative officials, judges and teachers with Deobandi and Wahhabist versions of sectarian Islam, including a militant view of jihad. Expansion of madrasas into Afghanistan during the 1980s contributed to the rise of the Taliban, where the Afghan fighting season coincided with Pakistan madrasas’ Spring Break. This has to concern Beijing. Kandahar was not Cancún. Beer bongs and wet t-shirt contests never really caught on.

President Xi Jinping was not keen on reviving the re-education and detention camps of the Cultural Revolution. Many of his closest advisors were camp survivors from that era and strongly opposed such measures. Xi called for reform through education, but left open to interpretation by local authorities how to go about that. Hardliners, led by Party Secretary Chen Quanguo, started rounding up Uyghurs and building “education centers” that resembled massive prisons. Xi could try to distance himself, but as supreme leader, it was on him.

Xi also fell back on the policy used by his predecessors in Tibet to deal with “imbalances in the distribution of the ethnic population.” It was the same policy employed after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 in the conquest of Scotland and Ireland and by Josef Stalin in the resettlement of populations from the Baltics — separate families from their connection to their lands and pack them off to the Chinese equivalent of Siberia or Saskatchewan — the sweatshops of Shenzhen — and then resettle the Western region with 300,000 Han from Eastern China. It was a cultural blender approach to break apart the tribes, just as the Dukes of Argyll broke apart the highland clans. If Sharks started marrying Jets, Xi hopes, West Side Story could have a happy ending. 

One could contrast China’s approach with that of Gandhi’s India or post-war Transjordan, where ethnic divisions led to national partition. At present the Balkanization of the West Bank and Gaza is a transition step towards eventual assimilation of all Palestine into a Jewish Caliphate, with apartheid just a growing pain— a low-budget version of re-education centers. Resettlement of populations is done voluntarily, by enticing wannabe Israelis, recruited from orthodox sects, to make Aliyah.

In the United States a few small fish were netted by the FBI and given short jail sentences for the attack on the Capitol. Congressional investigations were begun, but were emasculated by the minority party and will likely be disbanded after the midterm elections. Polls suggest the country is even more divided now than it was in January, with a majority of Republicans saying they would vote for Donald Trump and think the normal primary election season should just be suspended so he can be proclaimed their candidate. There is a substantial minority who feel those arrested for the Capitol attack are patriots who do not belong in jail at all. In contrast to the Chinese policy of “de-extremification,” social media in the United States, including cable news, continue to polarize the population. The right is portrayed by the rightward media as beleaguered, oppressed and endangered and needing to stand up and fight. It is 1859 in America, pre-John Brown’s raid.


Polarization extends along the same political and demographic lines into vaccination mandates — giving new life to the Covid pandemic through the 60 million adamantly unvaccinated USAnians (not coincidentally the same number of vaccine doses the US has promised to release for use in the undervaccinated 2/3 world). Equally polarized are opinions about critical race theory, gun control, abortion, religious instruction in public school, active shooter drills, the prison industrial complex, access to health care, or the rewriting of history. Tribal polarization gnaws away at the bare bones of civil discourse, even in the halls of Congress, until it regurgitates spontaneous outbursts of random violence like school and workplace shootings or cars driving through crowds of innocent people.

Separatist regions of China

 

Sixty million, coincidentally, is also the number of people involved in some way in separatist movements within China today, in 2021. If you are a hawkish hegemon in Foggy Bottom, you might want to clandestinely encourage the independence campaigns in East Turkestan, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Hong Kong and Macau. If you are their counterpart in Russia or China, you might feel a need to counter that by unloosing a few hackers to sow discord in the “United” States. Cyberwars are not limited to the big three, however. Anyone can join.

So I ask, which policy makes more sense? Forced homogenization or unlimited polarization? To tribe or to untribe? China and the US are taking very different approaches. It is a vast social experiment on a grand scale. Unless you like sleeping with a machete under your pillow, you might want to rethink the Vocational Skills Education Centers in Xinjiang.


The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

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“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”
 — Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.


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