On The New Meaning of "Human"

Once upon a time we would chuckle or giggle at the question: "Is a 'gut feeling' a signal from your microbes?"

But more and more a "yes" answer to that question is looking neither fully impossible nor fully improbable, according to experts in this field of human-microbe symbiosis:

Scientists originally expected that the communication between animals and their symbiotic bacteria would form its own molecular language. But McFall-Ngai, an expert on animal-microbe symbiosis, says that she and other scientists have instead found beneficial relationships involving some of the same chemical messages that had been discovered previously in pathogens. Many bacterial products that had been termed “virulence factors” or “toxins” turn out to not be inherently offensive signals; they are just part of the conversation between microbe and host. The difference between our interaction with harmful and helpful bacteria, she says, is not so much like separate languages as it is a change in tone: “It’s the difference between an argument and a civil conversation.” We are in constant communication with our microbes, and the messages are broadcast throughout the human body.

(The Body Politic, Seed Magazine, emphasis added). The Dredd Blog System has been looking into the human-microbe symbiosis for a while, for example, see The Undiscovered Side of Science and Life and Hypothesis: Microbes Generate Toxins of Power.

It is even beginning to look more and more like we are simply not "human" in the sense we have always thought we are:

After all, our cells carry an ancient stamp of symbiosis in the form of mitochondria. These energy-producing organelles are the vestiges of
symbiotic bacteria that migrated into cells long ago. Even those parts of us we consider human are part bacterial. “In some ways, we’re an amalgam and a continuously evolving collective,” Relman says.

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life as we know it is built upon microbes, whether we look in the deepest oceans or our own intestines. We once had the luxury of ignoring the diminutive members of our bodies and other ecosystems. Now the blinders are off.

(ibid). Yes, "Our bodies harbor 100 trillion bacterial cells, outnumbering our human cells 10 to one", so we need to rethink "environment", "mother nature", and "ecosystem" in terms of being separate from it.

We defined sanity more in accord with recent science in On The Definition of Sanity, and pointed out that we reached The Peak of Sanity when we abandoned the reality of our nature to become our own worst enemy by going in the direction of Ecocide.

The Damage Has Been Done - 4

Two years ago on this date Dredd Blog focused on the issue of drought, worldwide drought.

Since then the Texas drought began, and wildfires around the world have worsened.

Here is that post of two years ago:

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The meaning of "the damage has been done" in the context of earth's biosphere does not always mean we can see the effects of the damage at this moment.

It is like when the engines on an aircraft cease to function, the damage has been done but the full effects which cannot be avoided do not appear until contact with the ground takes place.

The U.N. reports that the damage has been done when it comes to worldwide drought and great catastrophe:

"If we cannot find a solution to this problem ... in 2025, close to 70 percent [of the earth] could be affected [with drought]," Luc Gnacadja, executive secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, said Friday.

Drought currently affects at least 41 percent of the planet and environmental degradation has caused it to spike by 15 to 25 percent since 1990, according to a global climate report.

"There will not be global security without food security" in dry regions, Gnacadja said at the start of the ninth UN conference on the convention in the Argentine capital.

"A green deal is necessary" for developing countries working to combat drought, he stressed.

The next meeting on the convention is scheduled to take place in South Korea in 2010.

(Independent). About half of the planet is suffering, at this moment, from drought. This is not a case where substantial damage can be avoided by congress all of a sudden becoming sane, because there really is such a thing as being too late.

Perhaps that is why it appears more and more that all that world governments can do is prepare for the damage.

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The US is fairing better today than the world at large was fairing at that time (41%) two years ago:

Based on the Palmer Drought Index, severe to extreme drought affected about 26 percent of the contiguous United States as of the end of August 2011, an increase of about 1 percent from last month.

(NOAA). Some climatologists are expecting the drought in the USA to continue for some time.

Innocent Tortured To Cover Up What? - 2

Two years ago, on this date, Dredd Blog posted the following:

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A humanitarian went to Afghanistan near 9/11/01 to help those in need.

After the U.S. invasion there, he met soldiers there who were "fighting to preserve freedom" for Dick Cheney.

Either those soldiers or some lying bounty hunters accused the humanitarian of being a bad guy and took him to and fro to torture him, and he eventually ended up at GITMO.

A federal court has found that there is no evidence to support the military theory, but that his testimony of being a humanitarian is the true story:

The unclassified version issued Friday of U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly's opinion directing the U.S. government to release Kuwaiti detainee and Pillsbury client Fouad Al Rabiah from Guantanamo Bay recounts the grueling eight-year-long ordeal the 50-year old aviation engineer and father of four has experienced, including being subjected to abusive and coercive interrogation methods to extract a false confession.

In the opinion, the Court denounces the government's case from the very opening lines. "The evidentiary record on which the Government seeks to justify [Fouad's] indefinite detention is surprisingly bare," Judge Kollar-Kotelly wrote on page one. "If there exists a basis for Al Rabiah's indefinite detention, it most certainly has not been presented to this Court."

Moreover, Judge Kollar-Kotelly notes on page 44 that Al Rabiah was subjected, among other abuses, to the "frequent flier program" which "violated the Army Field Manual and the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War" by deliberately disrupting and withholding sleep from detainees by perpetually moving them from cell to cell every few hours.

(Pillsbury Law). This is not the first person to use habeus corpus to show innocent people are being tortured for years in the name of the people of the United States against our will.

In the final analysis the torturing of America is being done by criminal elements within our own government.

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Any change you can believe in?

Is 'Insanity' A Valid Defense To Ecocide?

Do you remember the science fiction movie The Minority Report?

In that scenario people were prosecuted for crimes they were going to commit in the future!

Those future crimes were "envisioned" by several future predicting mutant "precogs", who could detect what people would do during their lifetimes, and if a crime was detected, those people living in the here and now were prosecuted in the here and now, the present.

Currently there is abundant ecological, climate disaster misinformation or myth, which posits that all the ecological, climate change induced death or destruction is going to happen in the future, that it will happen to "our children", not to this generation.

To be sure, there is a reality close to that, in the sense that the results of ecological crimes happen in very slow motion as it were, or in the sense that climate change as a result of human activity in the here and now, seems to us to be very, very slow to take place.

The result is that when some types of ecological wrong are done, when pollution actually takes place at a specific time in the here and now, there can be a long span of time before the results are readily visible.

Add to that the fact that the Earth's ecosystem tends to spread the damage in an attempt to allow dilution of the damage, to spread it among the many so to speak, it can appear to be even more of a slow motion process, in terms of human capacity to detect those effects.

All these difficulties come into play when one considers ecocide to be a future event, because the question arises: "Is ecocide a future crime or a crime in the here and now?"

Because these activities of pollution are conducted in the here and now, but the resulting ecocide is going to happen in the future, we sometimes have a difficult nexus to prove.

The lesson comes home when we realize that many deaths, along with incredible destruction, is happening now, has happened for a generation or so, and therefore our grandfathers and grandmothers did us much wrong.

If ultimate Ecocide happens it may well be in the future generation where billions of people perish as a result of acts that began to be done before they were born, acts that continued for decade upon decade, and in many cases acts still taking place in the world they will be born into.

This issue is more than science fiction in some experts' minds, because not only do they see the damage being done now, as a result of crimes committed decades ago, they also see that the deadly results will only get worse.

One Dredd Blog post deals with an actual case in a civil court, not a criminal court, in the here and now, titled "A Case of Big Oil vs. Climate Change", where polluting companies were held to be a potential cause of climate change damage.

The Dredd Blog System has also considered some aspects of this legal issue over the years, in posts such as The Criminally Insane Epoch Arises, Ecocide: Evidence Of Toxins of Power, Dumb & Dumber & Bleak & Bleeker, and The Peak of Sanity.

Now, a mock trial, of the type law schools hold every year, is taking place in England's Supreme Court:

Top lawyers put fossil fuel bosses on trial in the UK's supreme court in a mock case to explore the crime of ecocide - environmental destruction - which is being considered by the UN ... It's a grim list: genocide, crimes against humanity, crimes of aggression (such as unprovoked invasions) and war crimes. All are recognised by the UN as crimes against peace and prosecuted through the international criminal court.

But should the bosses of polluting companies and the leaders of environmentally-unfriendly states join those responsible for mass murder in the dock. They could if a fifth crime against peace - ecocide - joined that list of human evils? The United Nations is now considering the proposal and the first test of how a prosecution for ecocide would work takes place on Friday, with fossil fuel bosses in the dock at the UK supreme court in London. It is a mock trial of course, but with real top-flight lawyers and judges and a jury made up of members of the public. The corporate CEOs will be played by actors briefed by their legal teams.

(Ecocide ... Global Crime?). The issue considers what is literally the largest life and death case on the planet.

The stakes could not be greater, so stay tuned.

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