. . . an examination of things of interest to jad

I tend to err on the side of believing those who claim ignorance. We live in a world chock-full of narratives. It’s possible, in some cases, to go through a large part of one’s life without hearing a particular counter-narrative to a given belief–even if the counter-narrative cleaves more closely to reality. As humanity advances, and reality wins through, claims of ignorance become less believable. At some point, we have to accept it as evident that someone is either willfully ignoring a fact, or that they do not feel compelled to act on it.

As an easy opening example, take the practice of hitting (a.k.a. spanking) children as a “teaching” tool. This was a universal practice for . . . well, ever–”spare the rod, spoil the child” is 2500+ years old. Fast forward to the enlightenment and you get the first people hypothesizing that it might not be a great idea, based on the premise that children are humans and stuff. Fast forward to the mid-late 20th century, and observational evidence begins to accumulate that the best outcomes are associated with peaceful parenting. In the current day, the evidence appears overwhelming. The only remaining advocates of hitting children “for their own good” cite the Bible as their principal authority.

Whereas the parents of the 60s and 70s could perhaps claim never to have heard the position against hitting their children, today’s parents can’t say the same. A parent who hits a child today can’t reasonably claim to be doing so in the child’s interests. He or she wants to inflict abuse^[1]

There’s a similar lesson that should have been learned, amply, in 10+ years of public access to full-spectrum information: when you send agencies whose existence depends on violence to carry out your social agenda, awful things will happen. In political and economic science, these were once called “unforeseen consequences,” but given the premise of this article, we should change that to “entirely foreseeable consequences.”

In 2008, the EU decided “to obtain 10% of all transport fuels from biofuels by 2020.” I assume in pursuit of the laudable goal of taking some heat off the environment (pun intended)–something we can all get behind. According to the Guardian, “the total land area required to grow industrial biofuels . . . has been estimated as 17.5m hectares . . . more than ½ the size of Italy.”

In a world of equals, should the EU be serious about meeting this goal, there would need to be a lot of exploration in pursuit of uninhabited regions suitable for growing biofuel crops. In light of the scarcity of such land, there would probably also be alot of “wheeling and dealing,” trying to make it worth the while for the world’s farmers to grow biofuels and/or offering them buy-out levels of wealth in exchange for their land.

Luckily for the EU and their corporate creatures, no such equality exists. The lands were simply seized from their rightful, mostly indigenous, owners by the various puppet states around the world, and handed to the corporations seeking legistlated profits susidized and protected by the western armed militaries of the 3rd world.

A parallel land grab is on to depopulate indigenous farmland to grow forests for carbon credits, which, apparently will be worth alot in the future.
master
The Guardian continues, “The latest data suggests that up to 203 million hectares of land has been acquired by companies in land deals and two-thirds of that is for biofuels.” By my math, that’s just short of 4 Italies’ worth of arable land moving out of the hands of its actual owners, those who live on and work it and into the hands of multi-national corporations.

This is the result of demanding that government, “do something,” about a problem. It is an inevitable result and it has countless parallels in the modern world as well as throughout history. This does not mean, by any stretch, that there aren’t myriad social problems that must be addressed; anybody who votes to hand them over to the corporate-state, or worse yet, collections of multi-national-corporate-states, is either wilfully blind, or evil.

1. ^[1] with the possible exception of a few religious folk who really can hit their children thinking that they’re carrying out God’s plan. ↩