Why This Pervasive Sense of Doom?

On the train home from work last night, reading an article on the collapse of honeybee colonies (Dady Chery, The Bee’s Vanishing Act), I realized why it is there is this pervasive sense of doom that shrouds everything these days. No longer as a society do we structure in -- acknowledge the merit of -- repose.

Formerly in the United States there was a widely shared cultural vision of the importance -- the justice and fairness -- of a secure retirement. One would toil his or her heart and soul away, kissing youth goodbye, at a job(s), usually dehumanizing, with the promise that eventually one would get to relax for maybe a decade or two of dotage.

At the beginning of this year when the Boeing Machinists approved, following threats by the employer (backed by politicians elected by means of union support), an end to their defined-benefit pension, a line was crossed. The palm at the end of the American mind -- retirement with a good defined-benefit pension -- has been chopped down.

The Great Recession knocked my union's pension plan into the red. One of the moves the plan trustees made to get back into the black was to abolish "the rule of 80." The rule of 80 states that once a plan participant hits age 55, any years of credited service in the plan plus the participant's age that add up to 80 or more allows the participant to retire early with full benefits. In other words, the "gold standard."

My idea was to be done with the rat race by 59. That is what it would take me under the rule of 80. I would retire to California and spend the remainder of my days reading books I want to read -- on ancient Egypt, Big Foot, Robert Caro's LBJ opus -- and jogging beneath an orange sun.

But shortly after the Lehman meltdown, the rule of 80 was rescinded and so was the daydream of freeing myself at 59.

It is war all the time. That is what it is. And that is what I realized sitting on the train last night. The Hobbesian state of nature, the war of all against all, which supposedly motivates us to come together and form a society, is actually the basis of our culture now. And no better representative of this is the Grand Old Party, an absolutely contrived diabolical corporate machination designed solely to expand the prerogatives of the super-rich. That the Democrats have been beaten repeatedly by these soulless ghouls proves that they are no better.

Bear this in mind next week or next month when Obama announces his immigration plan. That plan was rolled out by the Gray Lady yesterday, "Obama Plan May Allow Millions of Immigrants to Stay and Work in U.S.," as part of the post-midterm debacle counterattack that the administration has skillfully put forth -- along with net neutrality and the China carbon-reduction accord -- to mobilize its broader base of support.

Republican leadership is talking tough, even going so far as to mention the possibility of a government shutdown if Obama extends protections to millions of undocumented immigrants. The Tea Party will be stirred up. No doubt there will be angry rallies of white people with rifles held aloft.

The optics favor the Democrats. It's a good political move by Obama. It empowers the knuckle-draggers in the GOP and accentuates the fissure with the Chamber of Commerce Rovian brain trust, who favor an immigration deal.

In the end, if past iterations of Potomac Armaggedon are a guide, a deal will be cut, and that deal will likely be one which sells the undocumented down the river.

But maybe the GOP's pandering to Dixiecrat nativism will finally bust the seams of the party. We can only hope. It is doubtful though.

Which leaves us only the repose offered by the mind. For me, now, it is the idea that this weekend I will watch football on television while eating an entire bag of clementine oranges.

Bees are Dying as are Palestinians and Soon it Will be Our Turn

At a certain point during the day on Thursday the realization dawns on me that I am going to make it through another week. Friday is on the horizon, and with it the promise of a bit of rest and relaxation. When I realize I am going to make it I feel relief. The repetition of the rat race becomes less demanding. It seems as if I have a little more room to move.

But yesterday, let me just say this about yesterday before moving to a brief treatment of the hollowness, the stupidity of John Kerry's ceasefire negotiations. I can't get out of my head this OpEd I read a few weeks back by Mark Winston, a Simon Fraser University professor, "Our Bees, Ourselves: Bees and Colony Collapse." I was telling a coworker about it. Honeybee colonies are collapsing because of mono-crop agriculture, overuse of pesticides, overwork due to being hauled by tractor trailer from one field to the next to perform pollination duties. And this Simon Fraser University professor thinks the same thing is going to happen to us homo sapiens because the same basic conditions apply: We are basted in chemicals, sustained by mono-crop agriculture, and we are overworked:

Honeybee collapse has been particularly vexing because there is no one cause, but rather a thousand little cuts. The main elements include the compounding impact of pesticides applied to fields, as well as pesticides applied directly into hives to control mites; fungal, bacterial and viral pests and diseases; nutritional deficiencies caused by vast acreages of single-crop fields that lack diverse flowering plants; and, in the United States, commercial beekeeping itself, which disrupts colonies by moving most bees around the country multiple times each year to pollinate crops.

The real issue, though, is not the volume of problems, but the interactions among them. Here we find a core lesson from the bees that we ignore at our peril: the concept of synergy, where one plus one equals three, or four, or more. A typical honeybee colony contains residue from more than 120 pesticides. Alone, each represents a benign dose. But together they form a toxic soup of chemicals whose interplay can substantially reduce the effectiveness of bees’ immune systems, making them more susceptible to diseases.

These findings provide the most sophisticated data set available for any species about synergies among pesticides, and between pesticides and disease. The only human equivalent is research into pharmaceutical interactions, with many prescription drugs showing harmful or fatal side effects when used together, particularly in patients who already are disease-compromised. Pesticides have medical impacts as potent as pharmaceuticals do, yet we know virtually nothing about their synergistic impacts on our health, or their interplay with human diseases.

Observing the tumultuous demise of honeybees should alert us that our own well-being might be similarly threatened. The honeybee is a remarkably resilient species that has thrived for 40 million years, and the widespread collapse of so many colonies presents a clear message: We must demand that our regulatory authorities require studies on how exposure to low dosages of combined chemicals may affect human health before approving compounds.

Honeybees are ancient and very stable. So much so that Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe hypothesize that they came fully formed from outer space. The fact that honeybees are dying now in great numbers is a very bad sign not just for them but for all life on the planet. Humans will not be spared. A great die off is coming our way.

Winston's solution is let some things return to the wild. Capitalists will actually make more money:

Bees also provide some clues to how we may build a more collaborative relationship with the services that ecosystems can provide. Beyond honeybees, there are thousands of wild bee species that could offer some of the pollination service needed for agriculture. Yet feral bees — that is, bees not kept by beekeepers — also are threatened by factors similar to those afflicting honeybees: heavy pesticide use, destruction of nesting sites by overly intensive agriculture and a lack of diverse nectar and pollen sources thanks to highly effective weed killers, which decimate the unmanaged plants that bees depend on for nutrition.

Recently, my laboratory at Simon Fraser University conducted a study on farms that produce canola oil that illustrated the profound value of wild bees. We discovered that crop yields, and thus profits, are maximized if considerable acreages of cropland are left uncultivated to support wild pollinators.

A variety of wild plants means a healthier, more diverse bee population, which will then move to the planted fields next door in larger and more active numbers. Indeed, farmers who planted their entire field would earn about $27,000 in profit per farm, whereas those who left a third unplanted for bees to nest and forage in would earn $65,000 on a farm of similar size. 

Such logic goes against conventional wisdom that fields and bees alike can be uniformly micromanaged. The current challenges faced by managed honeybees and wild bees remind us that we can manage too much. Excessive cultivation, chemical use and habitat destruction eventually destroy the very organisms that could be our partners.

And this insight goes beyond mere agricultural economics. There is a lesson in the decline of bees about how to respond to the most fundamental challenges facing contemporary human societies. We can best meet our own needs if we maintain a balance with nature — a balance that is as important to our health and prosperity as it is to the bees.

But any such common sense has difficulty gaining traction in a world dominated by greed, lies, vanity and stupidity. Case in point is the U.S. Secretary of State's shuttle diplomacy to secure a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza. As Michael Gordon and Rick Gladstone report, "Kerry Claims Progress Toward Gaza Truce, but Hamas Leader Is Defiant," he is only talking to, on the Palestinian side, the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas will be able to deliver nothing:

But even as Mr. Kerry pressed his case with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, a defiant note was struck by one figure whom the secretary of state has conspicuously not talked with: Khaled Meshal, the political leader of Hamas. 

“Everyone wanted us to accept a cease-fire and then negotiate for our rights,” Mr. Meshal said at a news conference in Qatar, his home in exile, taking aim at the very approach Mr. Kerry has sought to nurture. “We reject this, and we reject it again today.” 

Mr. Kerry has emphasized that his immediate goal is to obtain a cease-fire, after 16 days of fighting that has killed nearly 700 Palestinians, 32 Israeli soldiers and three Israeli civilians.

Kerry is trying to secure an immediate ceasefire with only a promise to address substantive issues later. We know what some of those issues are -- an end to the Israeli blockade of Gaza, open borders and ports, release of Hamas political prisoners, etc. -- and we also know that Israel has no intention of budging on any of them without some form of Gaza demilitarization backed up by intrusive inspections. Hamas will not agree to this. Furthermore, Israel has stated there will be no ceasefire until leadership is satisfied Hamas' tunnels have been identified and destroyed.

Israel got a big boost late last night when the FAA lifted its flight ban. No doubt a lot of pressure was placed on the Obama administration. But Meshal is resolute. There will be no ceasefire without a lifting of the blockade:

In Doha, Qatar’s capital, Mr. Meshal outlined his own demands. While Mr. Meshal said that Hamas would not “close the door” for a brief truce to evacuate the wounded and deliver humanitarian aid, he stressed a more lasting agreement would not come until some of the group’s demands were met. 

“We will not accept any initiative that does not lift the blockade on our people and that does not respect their sacrifices,” he said.

So the slaughter will continue. The United States' days as a leading power are over. It no longer commands any moral force. Europe is moving away. Eventually, hopefully soon, the American people will move away as well. By this I mean smash Washington. This will take a new political formation, which, given all the election and campaign finance law revisions of the last twenty years, will basically require a revolution.