http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/aug/12/new-superbug-drug-resistant-mrsa

A massive dose of unintended consequences.

http://robertkennerfilms.com/films/files/detail_current.php

With a constituency limited to anyone who eats, “Food, Inc.” is a civilized horror movie for the socially conscious, the nutritionally curious and the hungry. Yes, it has a deceptively cheery palette, but helmer Robert Kenner’s doc — which does for the supermarket what “Jaws” did for the beach — marches straight into the dark side of cutthroat agri-business, corporatized meat and the greedy manipulation of both genetics and the law. Doc biz may be in the doldrums, but “Food, Inc.” is so aesthetically polished and politically urgent, theatrical play seems a no-brainer, though it won’t do much for popcorn sales.

Corn is the vegetable-as-villain in “Food, Inc.,” which builds on the work of nutritionists, journalists and activists Eric Schlosser (“Fast Food Nation”) and Michael Pollan (“The Omnivore’s Dilemma”) to show how multinationals have taken over the production of food. As the movie tells us, corn — which today assumes dozens of ubiquitous identities, notably high-fructose corn syrup — is kept at unrealistically low prices by the government, is fed to animals that haven’t evolved to eat it (such as the cow), causes those animals to develop maladies that must be treated with antibiotics (which are passed on to consumers), and has led to the mutation of new strains of the E.coli virus, which sickens tens of thousands each year.

“If you wanted to create global pandemics, you’d build as many of these factory farms as possible. That’s why the development of swine flu isn’t a surprise to those in the public health community. In 2003, the American Public Health Association–the oldest and largest in world–called for a moratorium of factory farming because they saw something like this would happen. It may take something as serious as a pandemic to make us realize the real cost of factory farming.”

-Dr. Michael Greger, Humane Society of the U.S.

Capital accumulation is a specified subset of this dynamic.

Administration-management itself inheres with tendencies, in particular the tendency toward what De and I have called dog-waggery, and the tendency to overgrow and encrust social formations with rules instead of organic norms. The germs of heirarchy, contract, and law are all there.

Interesting thesis from DeLanda is that the management systems adopted most widely by industry were adopted from the military.

At any rate, my own experience with ideology and practice (and I use the first term in my usual way) is that pragmatically (?), no, practically-bereft theory carries the tendency to overreach and elaborate into a complexity that exceeds the ability of a theory to account for emergent realities. It loses its predictive value at the same time that its generalities are picked apart at the edges by local specificity.

The folks I am talking to these days — and working with, literally, we did a labor-trade group on Sunday that made a large and beautiful garden in one couple’s front yard (in some of the most compacted soil I’ve seen) — are not inchoate but searching. That searching, however, is being done more and more intentionally as part of actual work. Theoretical musings are not work. And praxis includes mapping… some of these folks have mapped, geographically, demographically, historically, and economically, Northeast Central Durham to a point where the quality of their knowledge of the area approaches what we’d have called in the military “sound, timely, tactical intelligence.”

The subject of property in this is very, very specific, as in actual property with a geographic coordinate. And the topic of speculation is whether we can get land through land trusts and take it off the market… create some of our own facts on the ground, as it were. This is a strategic conversation, without laying out a Strategy to which all must bend the knee.

After the garden work, people had food and beer, and we passed around books we wanted to temporarily trade. Mine in curculation are The Power of the Machine and The Silent Majority. We are talking about “land reform” and the semiotic character of money; but we are also exchanging tips on soil pH, comfrey, water catchment, blueberries, mulch, and tomatoes.

Stan Moore: So what are you saying, human beings are more ethically depraved today than in the past?

http://journeytoforever.org/at_link.html