Our future: mercenary olympics on ESPN, and no bees

On a gorgeous spring day where I sweated and swore through the learning curve of installing a drip irrigation system in the garden, my evening Web browsing has been anything but the relaxing winding down I'd hoped it would be. In fact, it turned up a couple of pieces of truly scary glimpses of our future.

The first comes courtesy of a summary/review on Daily Kos on Jeremy Scahill's extremely alarming Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

Writes the reviewers, SusanG "... Blackwater would be a masterpiece of the genre of futuristic sci fi were it not so regrettably real. It’s got all the twists and turns and secret corners of a Hollywood thriller: records and contracts that can’t be traced, shady characters recruiting other shady characters in violent Third World nations, extremist religious figures lurking in the background of a mysterious unregulated company that uses PR tactics worthy of Orwell. Unfortunately for America, we’re living the plot in real time."

The review is excellent, as is this brief video excerpt:



And the second scary bit, a report from Der Spiegel on the decimation of bee populations both in Germany and in the United States.

Walter Haefeker is a man who is used to painting grim scenarios. He sits on the board of directors of the German Beekeepers Association (DBIB) and is vice president of the European Professional Beekeepers Association. And because griping is part of a lobbyist's trade, it is practically his professional duty to warn that "the very existence of beekeeping is at stake."

The problem, says Haefeker, has a number of causes, one being the varroa mite, introduced from Asia, and another is the widespread practice in agriculture of spraying wildflowers with herbicides and practicing monoculture. Another possible cause, according to Haefeker, is the controversial and growing use of genetic engineering in agriculture.

As far back as 2005, Haefeker ended an article he contributed to the journal Der Kritischer Agrarbericht (Critical Agricultural Report) with an Albert Einstein quote: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."

Mysterious events in recent months have suddenly made Einstein's apocalyptic vision seem all the more topical. For unknown reasons, bee populations throughout Germany are disappearing -- something that is so far only harming beekeepers. But the situation is different in the United States, where bees are dying in such dramatic numbers that the economic consequences could soon be dire. No one knows what is causing the bees to perish, but some experts believe that the large-scale use of genetically modified plants in the US could be a factor.

I am pretty virulently hostile to GMO crops, but from what the article reports, there doesn't seem to be conclusive proof that GMO crops are what's behind the disappearing bees--certainly nowhere near the proof that would be needed to spur any kind of action on the part of politicians or industry, anywhere, if the disinclination in Washington to take action on global warming is any indication....

But hey, it's only life itself that's at stake: bees, pollination, plants, animals ... man. No biggie....