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August 9, 2008 at 08:35:13
See No Hemp, Hear No Hemp, Speak No Hemp, Part I by Rand Clifford Page 1 of 2 page(s) |
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See No Hemp, Hear No Hemp, Speak No Hemp, Part I by Rand Clifford Molders of public opinion work in such insidious ways that their actual methods and means usually go unnoticed. While inculcation of propaganda, lies, and disinformation do much of the shaping, simple omission has profound effect—might even be the favorite because it is, after all, nothing. It’s hard to imagine nothing ever accomplishing so much, but consider that for most people under common awareness manipulation, whatever corporate media (CorpoMedia) omits, to a large extent doesn’t exist.
Flag-draped coffins streaming home in the dead of night from our war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan are under media blackout, and so mean as little to most Americans as the actual reasons for the invasions, or even the hideous war crimes themselves. By its nature, omission is all but limitless; its application by CorpoMedia has grown to enormous proportions as celebrities and sports overpower hard news. So this article focuses on omission of—the calculated disappearing of a single thing that for thousands of years has profoundly benefitted the health and well-being of people all over the world, and today offers so much more: Cannabis hemp.
6/26/08, the Economist newspaper published: Better Living Through Chemurgy. http://www.truthabouttrade.org/content/view/11985/54/ A decent article overall, at the end of paragraph one it points out that chemurgy is an ugly word; subtle implications being that there might actually be something ugly about chemurgy itself? Chemurgy is a branch of applied chemistry focused on preparing industrial products and consumer goods from agricultural raw materials. The term first appeared in William J. Hale’s 1934 book The Farm Chemurgic. The National Farm Chemurgic Council was formed a year later to foster greater industrial use of agricultural raw material—something ugly in ravenous petrochemical empire eyes....
The Economist article lauds American scientist George Washington Carver for developing hundreds of industrial products from peanuts...then comes disinformation: "In the 1930s, Henry Ford started using parts made from agricultural materials, and even built an ‘all-soy car’". Sorry, not "all-soy"—Ford made a car in 1941 of mostly resin-stiffened hemp fiber, with hemp plastic windows, and powered by hemp ethanol. Soy resins were used, but it has always been known as Ford’s Hemp Car. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxlj6fgQ-ZU
Ford loved American farms, which by the mid-twenties were in an economic crisis that would worsen into the great depression. Ford knew that creating new markets for farm products was essential, and with his political and financial backing, the Farm Chemurgy movement started taking off. Ford also knew that with widespread cultivation, hemp could be an economic powerhouse—and that ethanol from hemp, or any other fermentable vegetable matter, was the fuel of the future, something widely agreed upon at the time in the automotive industry.
A favorite quote of Ford’s: "There’s enough alcohol in one year’s yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for one hundred years." His first Model-T was designed to run on hemp alcohol.
Rudolf Diesel designed the diesel engine to be powered by vegetable oils, such as from hemp seed; at the 1900 world’s fair he ran his new engine on peanut oil.
To the stupendous misfortune of virtually everything but Big Oil, the chemurgy movement was stifled by Big Oil. A new National Energy Program was the subject of many bills in Congress, focused on utilizing part of Americas vast agricultural capacity for production of alcohol fuels. Big Oil responded with withering lobby power, including slogans such as the government’s proposed energy program "robbing taxpayers to make farmers rich". Then, as now, whatever Big Oil wants, Big Oil gets. Ford’s vision of cheap, clean and renewable biofuels spooked early oil barons into keeping oil prices in the range between $1 and $4 per barrel—prices so low that no other energy sources could compete. But once they were sure the competition had been killed off, the price of oil began to soar. They were not only able to eliminate competition from alcohol fuels...but were instrumental in diddling government into effectively banning hemp cultivation—an incredible robbing of the people to protect entrenched corporate profits that still endures.
Food, fuel, fiber, paper, plastics, medicines...cannabis hemp could turn sunshine, water and carbon dioxide into many thousands of pollution-free products with today’s technology. Nothing else grows so prodigiously. Hemp can be grown in all 50 states, needs no petrochemical inputs, actually improves the soil, and could be a powerful resource for mitigating global warming. However, it’s becoming obvious that the elite want catastrophic global warming to help further their population reduction plans—more on this in a moment.
Chemurgy attracting such renewed attention is certainly encouraging. Though after reading more than a dozen new articles on the subject, I saw no mention of hemp...until I hit an article written by a hero regarding modern hemp awareness, Jack Herer. His book on "Hemp and the Marijuana Conspiracy": The Emperor Wears No Clothes has seen many printings since its debut in 1985. A true modern classic, Herer’s book points out that not only has the word "hemp" been removed from all high school textbooks...he found that the Smithsonian Institution had also removed "hemp" from all exhibits, replacing it with "other fibers"—even though at the time referred to in the exhibits, hemp made up about 80% of the fibers used, while the fibers mentioned by name, such as cotton and jute, played minor roles. Herer questioned a museum curator about the absence of "hemp", and was told: "Children don’t need to know about hemp anymore, it confuses them." Well, when it comes to CorpoMedia, it seems a similar decision has been made for the entire population. The fact that the National Congress of State Legislators has passed sweeping pro-hemp legislation, and the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture also vigorously support commercial production of hemp—as well as more than 15 states, most recently Vermont, having passed pro-hemp legislation...prime omission material for CorpoMedia. Same thing as Congressman Ron Paul’s "Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2007", which has been comatose in the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security tlinetlinesince April 20, 2007.After all, what politico from the world’s leading trafficker of heroin and cocaine wants to appear "soft on drugs"? http://www.druggingamerica.com/ciadrugs/index_cia_right.html
Chemurgy without hemp is almost like fire without heat. Hemp alone could produce more products than all other touted chemurgic candidates combined! Any serious mention of chemurgy should boldly list hemp as the absolute superstar, but as usual...there’s the political stench of Big Oil and its petrochemical empire. Their latest subterfuge involves giving "biofuels" a bad name. By using their legendary clout to help ramrod ethanol from corn, they have not only contrived the "food-versus-fuel" controversy, but also greatly expanded the massive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico fed by petrochemical runoff from all the new acres of corn—all the while enhancing their profits with soaring use of petrochemical fertilizers and other petrochemical inputs http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/5924145.html It takes as much if not more fossil energy to produce a gallon of corn ethanol as the energy available from that gallon. The energy equation is helped somewhat by corn byproducts, but the bottom line in this heavily taxpayer subsidized boondoggle is: corn is one of the very worst crops we could choose for making ethanol, and hemp is probably the very best; incredible political complications muddy this reality, but under the mud things are very clear.
So why not utilize hemp for biofuels, the most perfect solution available for not only the fuel AND food crisis, but also as a premier scrubber of greenhouse gas? This monumental question has the simplest of answers: entrenched profit, and agenda. Hemp would force profits of Big Oil and its Petrochemical Empire to leak down to farmers...to the people—anathema to the elite. Wealth must flow up, they say, not down, so THEIR government (CorpoGov) keeps hemp buried with the "marijuana" contrivance, while CorpoGov (and Wall Street) reap trillions from the trafficking of heroin and cocaine, denying average people of the most valuable of crops to supposedly protect them from the "menace of marijuana". Could there be a better example of hypocrisy as a cornerstone of CorpoGov? Could there by a better example of the sense of it all than Ron Paul’s federal hemp farming legislation being mummified in the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security? In all other industrialized nations this has been an agricultural consideration, meaning they all now benefit from hemp farming. But here in the home of Big Oil....
If instead of the obscene prohibition of more than 70 years, American farmers had been "allowed" to grow hemp, we might not be facing the intentional scuttling of America to make way for the elite’s New World Order. Perhaps America’s wealth would not be concentrated in so few hands, and Big Oil with their petrochemical empire would not so dominate CorpoMedia and Corpogov. Perhaps the Industrial Military Complex would not be the domestic and global monster it has become, and might not have us at the brink of WWIII with an attack on Iran. You’ve seen the propaganda about Iran being the most evil incarnation this side of Nazi Germany...but along with Prescott Bush, who financed Hitler? http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar
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Ever try to teach congress about hemp?
The real problem is American business doesn't like competition any more and hemp is far too competitive with a number of other industries. Here's a link to The Hemp Industries Association http://www.thehia.org Trying to educate congress is worse than urinating on an electric fence while standing in a puddle of salt water on a steel deck, and Zarquon knows I've tried to educate them, but for some brain dead reason their response usually has something to do with what the DEA says. by Dave Kisor (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 310 comments [40 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Saturday, Aug 9, 2008 at 6:31:48 PM
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Reply: Rule of thumb.
Don't just follow the money. Follow the silence. by John Hanks (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 1760 comments [39 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Saturday, Aug 9, 2008 at 7:10:49 PM
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only a fraction
Rockefeller's Standard Oil near-monopoly is not the only force against hemp. If farmers could grow their own fuel, Big Oil wouldn't like that. Ford built a car from hemp, The steel industry wouldn't like that. Imagine Granma growing her own headache medicine in her backyard. Big Pharma doesn't like that. Hemp fiber remaining after the oil is extracted would replace all the logging of our national forests for paper towels, newsprint, toilet paper, all the tons of junk mail and tons of reams of paper in every office. After all, the Declaration of Independence was (ironically) written on hemp paper and that may be why it has endured two hundred years while most of the newspapers and books of that time are now dust. Mixed with resin, hemp fiber would make one of the strongest replacements for wood in construction as well as being almost impervious to moisture and varmints. The two-by-four and plywood industries would have to re-tool. Hemp fiber would replace nylon in most applications, especially climbing, because hemp rope doesn't stretch thin, too thin to grasp, under strain. There are so many potential practical applications for hemp fiber that this list is only a fraction of the environment-saving and money-saving, and the pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers we could eliminate. and all of this at a tremendous cost-saving. The prohibition on hemp is presently being violated by Mexican Drug Cartels in our own national forests. Why not take the profit generated by illegality away from these murderous gangs and put them out of business? But why on earth criminalize the most adventurous of our own youth by imprisonment for possession of hemp? George Washington grew it as a cash crop, for crissakes. If the loss of our children's youth, future potential and good name is not bad enough, then the billions we spend each year to keep them in prisons might influence the evaluation of the prohibition of hemp. All in all, a very bad deal, pushed by entrenched interests. The cure is worse than the ailment. The punishment is worse than the offense. The buggy-whip makers are running the government, and the sooner we can wrest back people's control of the people's government, the sooner that government and these people can be a force for life in the twenty-first century rather than the force for death we have seen in the twentieth. Pro-life? Legalize hemp. Don't care if the people, plants, and entire ecological bio-diversity of the planet dies? Then you're pro-death. Keep drilling for more oil. After all, petroleum, if it doesn't kill on contact, is an efficient carcinogen. You pro-petrodeath folks, while you're piling up the big bucks, you have a good chance at killing everything on Earth. But you don't breathe the same air as the rest of us, you're rich. Even though Earth will by then look like Mars does now, you'll have this whole poisoned planet to play with all by yourself. by martinweiss (41 articles, 6 quicklinks, 13 diaries, 503 comments [3 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Saturday, Aug 9, 2008 at 11:58:06 PM
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Thank you
This is an extremely well-written and researched piece of literature, Rand Clifford, and I thank you for your contribution to our mutual goal: legalizing hemp. This article energized me to post my comment on your article as a seperate article of my own. I have a feeling the Corpogov is about to be up to its ass in alligators, and hemp will be at the end of a long line of trouble. The great mass of people is not buying this arrangement. When I was driving OTR recently, everywhere I went the working people were laughing at the gullibility of the Bush cabal to think anybody would put credence in anything they were doing, or ever trust them again. But Bush still thinks he's doing fine. There are those few gung-hoes who swallow everything Bush tells them, but they're not a big problem. All they ever did was follow orders, anyway. If we could release all non-violent prisoners who are in for possession of pot, it would enable a lot of Democratic voters-- another reason for Corpogov to retain the prohibition. by martinweiss (41 articles, 6 quicklinks, 13 diaries, 503 comments [3 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Sunday, Aug 10, 2008 at 12:32:39 PM
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Timber Industry Threatened by Hemp
I didn't understand our draconian anti-marijuana laws until I moved to the Pacific Northwest. Weyerhauser, Georgia Pacific and other big timber producers don't want anyone with five acres and a sack of seeds to be able to grow hemp fibers that produce vastly superior paper products and oriented strand board (like plywood, but stronger). It's not the drug aspects that Big Timber is aftaid of, it's the stems and seeds! How's that for irony? JP by JonmarkP (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 111 comments [13 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Monday, Aug 11, 2008 at 2:06:39 AM
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Timber Industry Threatened by Hemp
I didn't understand our draconian anti-marijuana laws until I moved to the Pacific Northwest. Weyerhauser, Georgia Pacific and other big timber producers don't want anyone with five acres and a sack of seeds to be able to grow hemp fibers that produce vastly superior paper products and oriented strand board (like plywood, but stronger). It's not the drug aspects that Big Timber is aftaid of, it's the stems and seeds! How's that for irony? JP by JonmarkP (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 111 comments [13 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Monday, Aug 11, 2008 at 2:08:56 AM
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HEMP
So we are finally hearing more about hemp the only known removable that can meet the world's energy needs and cleanse the atmosphere. For millenium hemp provided 85 per cent of human needs. It also was the first plant farmed. When the tribes discovered this plant that would provide for them and their flocks, they stopped following their herds, settled down on the Mesopatamia Plateau. When U.S. was 13 states it was illegal NOT to grow hemp. In 1934, it was a $2 million export crop. However, Hearst, owned much of South America's forests. Dupont had just devised a sulpheric acid compound that would turn trees into pulp, but trees couldn't compete. It took 40 years to grow a tree, hemp matured in 3 months and it took 4.5 acres of forest to equal one of hemp. Moreover, hemp won' t burn. Obviously, Hearst's forests couldn't compete. So, although hemp has none of the necessary THCs, Hearst solved their problem by making hemp a dangerous drug and illegal! Now the Hearst Corporation forest - wealthy watches the World becoming unable to support life while they sit on the cure for Global warming, the source of a desirable, salable product creation of which would re-build our middle class and provide thousands of jobs. Do corporation moguls have kids. by emily horswill (6 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 79 comments [1 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Monday, Aug 11, 2008 at 4:24:44 AM
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How
Thanks for a very important article. The MSM should be thrown in jail for not talking about this issue. Its only been this year that I found out hemp could produce biodiesel. Somehow I had heard we could make cloths, but had never dreamed paper, and plastics too. by Michael Dewey (5 articles, 1 quicklinks, 4 diaries, 245 comments [12 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Monday, Aug 11, 2008 at 10:56:58 PM
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How
Comment from Ratings: What is it going to take to get the powers that be to get off of their blind support of the status quo? by Michael Dewey (5 articles, 1 quicklinks, 4 diaries, 245 comments [12 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Monday, Aug 18, 2008 at 11:28:58 AM
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