Australian eyewitness expert Donald Thomson appeared on a live TV discussion about the unreliability of eyewitness memory. He was later arrested, placed in a lineup and identified by a victim as the man who had raped her. The police charged Thomson although the rape had occurred at the time he was on TV. They dismissed [...]

The question was asked at the Barbastro Peak Oil Conference. If we are justified in poisoning people in order to produce combustible liquids and gas, why don’t we jump to the ultimate consequence and turn human corpses into oil? Swift’s Modest Proposal returns, with increased poignancy.

I felt a little frisson of interest and anticipation when I saw an article at Energy Bulletin entitled “Gender Issues”. I thought it might be a long-overdue discussion of gender and technocracy, gender and industrial technology, gender and power and recklessness, risk discounting, and other interesting issues. I thought it might address the dysfunctionality of [...]

Members of Orlando Food Not Bombs were arrested Wednesday when police said they violated a city ordinance by feeding the homeless in Lake Eola Park. Jessica Cross, 24, Benjamin Markeson, 49, and Jonathan “Keith” McHenry, 54, were arrested at 6:10 p.m. on a charge of violating the ordinance restricting group feedings in public parks. McHenry [...]

Been thinking lately about industrialism and the erosion of the particular, the enthronement of the generic. The train of thought is a familiar one but it took on new definition when I was working on the battens for the new sails for my junk-rigged boat (also my home). The boat is steel but the battens [...]

As I watch the corporate/financial/political elite in the US rediscover more and more of the advantages and habits of aristocracy — from Enclosure to divine right — and build their tacky monuments to ego and accumulation (what a pity none of said monuments are as pretty as Neuschwannstein say, or the Taj Mahal), I keep [...]

De’s post on the new peasant revolt got me thinking. Let’s talk about this. In some depth. Raj Patel on Food Sovereignty The latest enclosure scheme: On 18-20 April 2011, a gathering of some 200 farmland investors, government officials and international civil servants will meet at the World Bank headquarters in Washington DC to discuss [...]

I just did an article for my employing content mill on the ecological effects of the European starling. Pretty interesting. At any rate, they are among the USDA’s top 100 invasive species, numbering well over 200 million in the US. I guess they compete pretty hard for food with others, snatch cavity nests from other [...]

Hat tip to Henry for alerting us to Ellen LaConte’s piece on producing your own food. linked below. This is catching on here in our new little town of around 20,000 souls. Hereabouts it’s a church thing. The Adrian Ecumenical Forum has just begun making donation community gardens, one 500 square footer that will be [...]

Out of sight, out of mind- right? Well that’s what Big Ag companies in Florida are hoping for. SB 1246 introduced on the 8th by Sen. Jim Norman, R-Tampa would make it a first-degree felony to photograph a farm without consent. This is the sort of legislation that will turn down the exposure on factory [...]