Sculptured by Weights and a Strict Vegan Diet

from The New York Times

By MARY PILON

Jimi Sitko gets up at 4 most mornings, works out two to four hours a day and can bench-press nearly twice his weight. He has a shaved head and a brightly colored tattoo on his left arm, and he can easily be mistaken for a Marine separated from his platoon.

His apartment is filled with medals and trophies from bodybuilding competitions, snapshots of his tanned, rippled physique in full flex. His uniform is an assortment of sweat pants and hoodies, which he occasionally lifts when his abs look particularly fierce.

But most surprising is what is inside Sitko’s stomach: tofu, fresh greens and plant-based protein powder.

Sitko is among a niche community of vegan bodybuilders.

As the popularity of veganism has spread in recent years — fueled in part by a flurry of food-focused documentaries like “Super Size Me,” “Food, Inc.” and “Forks Over Knives” — its imprint can be seen in industries like publishing (VegNews) and fashion (hemp tote bags).

It has even entered bodybuilding, perceived by many as a population of vein-popping men and women thriving off meat and artificial enhancements. Competitors like Sitko are forging a distinctive subculture of antibeef beefcakes who hope to change more of their competitors’ eating habits.

As a vegan, Sitko, 29, does not eat meat, dairy or, he said, “anything else that comes from an animal.” As a bodybuilder, he spends hours at the gym lifting barbells, running on a treadmill and sculpturing his 5-foot-11, 180-pound body. Then he spray-tans and parades before a panel of judges in a posing suit, known in the sport as a mankini. He is preparing for a competition in March.

There is little official data on competitive bodybuilders who are vegan, though the Web site veganbodybuilding.com has more than 5,000 registered users.

Denny Kakos, the president of the International Natural Bodybuilding Association, said he had no vegan bodybuilders entering his competitions in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Today, vegans make up a sliver of the approximately 6,000 people who compete through the group each year, but they have been a steady, small presence since the 2000s, Kakos said.

“I think it’s great that there are people who are vegan and compete,” he said. “But it’s hard for bodybuilding.”

For some vegan bodybuilders, like Sitko, veganism was an attempt to improve diet and health. Others said that a vegan lifestyle reflected their personal beliefs about animal or environmental preservation. Still others regarded it as a form of rebellion against steroid culture.

“I laugh at the drug tests,” said Billy Simmonds, a vegan bodybuilder in Las Vegas. “I don’t even eat meat.”

Bodybuilders have long been known for maintaining highly restrictive diets, often low in carbohydrates and high in protein and calories, meticulously timed with arduous workout schedules. They aim to have big muscles and little fat, which may require cycles of adding weight, then chiseling away fat to make muscles pop like He-Man’s.

Nutritionists remain divided on the implications of adding vegan requirements to the already arduous bodybuilder diet, and caution that any extreme diet be undertaken with heavy research.

“Is it possible to be a good bodybuilder and be a vegan? Yes,” said Jose Antonio, the chief executive of the International Society of Sports Nutrition. “But is it ideal? No.”

Vegan bodybuilders may face challenges getting sufficient amino acids, found in meats, Antonio said, adding that although protein can be found in vegetables and nuts, they must be consumed in greater quantities to get the same amount as their counterparts in meat. “The amount of rice and beans you need to eat would fill up a Mexican restaurant,” he said.

Other nutritionists and bodybuilders have argued that a disciplined vegan diet, consisting of things like hemp-based protein supplements, peanut butter, nuts, vegetables and legumes, can yield similar, if not better, results than a meat- or dairy-filled diet. Carefully monitored, vegans can get the same amount of protein with less fat or toxins, they argue. (For a midafternoon snack, Sitko sometimes eats 10 bananas.)

The need for specific, vegan-friendly bodybuilding advice helped create the career of 31-year-old Robert Cheeke of Corvallis, Ore. He gives motivational lectures, sells vegan-themed T-shirts and gym bags and wrote a book about vegan bodybuilding that discusses how he went from 120 pounds as a teenage vegan to 195 pounds today.

“In those days, that meant a dozen tofu dogs a day, six Clif Bars, refried beans, whatever I could eat was calories,” he said. “It worked, but it was tough on my stomach. It wasn’t healthy.”

Cheeke said he was now focused on plant-based eating, including kale, avocados, beans and spinach, much of it organically grown in his garden.

In 2003, Cheeke founded veganbodybuilding.com. The site hosts forums for vegan recipes (“Hemp-fu pudding”), strength training (“Barbell vs. Dumbbell? Pain?”) and vegan dating (closed to nonmembers).

Giacomo Marchese met Dani Taylor, a bodybuilder living near him in Massachusetts, through a “Vegan Vacation” organized through the site in July 2008. Marchese proposed last August and the two, both still vegan and still bodybuilding, are planning their wedding.

“The Web site and community of vegan bodybuilders changed my life,” Marchese said.

The site is also a place for getting advice. Before strutting before judges, some bodybuilders recommend quickly chugging an alcoholic drink or eating something sugary to make their veins — and therefore their muscles — pop.

Kenneth G. Williams, a 44-year-old bodybuilder in Oakland, Calif., is a vegan who has taken on traditional bodybuilders and won. But first, there was the stigma.

“I had buddies at the gym, they just thought I was crazy,” Williams said. “I had a great physique and they said, ‘You’re going to get skinny, sick and frail, and die.’ I wasn’t encouraged.”

In 2003, Williams became vegan. In 2004, he won his first competition.

“When they announced me as the winner, people were very happy,” Williams said. “But once the announcer mentioned I was a vegan, the claps stopped and it got so quiet in that auditorium. Right on stage, it hit me: nobody knows about this.”

Williams is now a raw vegan; he said he never heated his food above 112 degrees Fahrenheit.

“I’m no longer an athlete,” he said. “I’m a warrior now. There’s a big difference. The athletes are just out to get paid. Warriors stand for something.”

Huxley's fan-letter to Orwell for Nineteen Eighty-Four

Alduous Huxley sent George Orwell a fan-letter in Oct 1949, after receiving a review copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four from Orwell's publisher. Huxley (who, according to Letters of Note, was once Orwell's French teacher) is effusive in his praise, and goes on to directly compare Orwell's masterpiece with his own Brave New World.

Partly because of the prevailing materialism and partly because of prevailing respectability, nineteenth-century philosophers and men of science were not willing to investigate the odder facts of psychology for practical men, such as politicians, soldiers and policemen, to apply in the field of government. Thanks to the voluntary ignorance of our fathers, the advent of the ultimate revolution was delayed for five or six generations. Another lucky accident was Freud's inability to hypnotize successfully and his consequent disparagement of hypnotism. This delayed the general application of hypnotism to psychiatry for at least forty years. But now psycho-analysis is being combined with hypnosis; and hypnosis has been made easy and indefinitely extensible through the use of barbiturates, which induce a hypnoid and suggestible state in even the most recalcitrant subjects.

Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large scale biological and atomic war — in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.

1984 v. Brave New World

Thanks, BoingBoing

Women Killing It On Long Boards

Anna and a friend undertake a breathtaking longboard freeride down a winding mountain road (possibly in Maryhill, Washington, home to a full-size Stonehenge replica). It's really something to watch, though my inner worrywart kept wanting to stop the proceedings and equip the riders with protective clothing for their bare skin. I was a little disappointed that we didn't see the dismount, because the whole way down, I kept wondering, how the hell do you stop?

thanks, BoingBoing

The Fucking Internet, how does it work? Sunday Sermon

from Maggie Koerth-Baker at BoingBoing

For the next 60 years or so—basically, until everyone roughly my age has died off—former Alaskan senator Ted Stevens will be widely remembered (and mocked) for once describing the Internet as "a series of tubes".

But here's the thing. It's easy to make fun of Ted Stevens. It's harder (much harder) to explain quickly and at a relatively simple level—for lay people with no tech background—what actually happens when they call up a web page.

That's why Greg Boustead and the nice folks at the World Science Festival put together this short video, explaining the basics of the Internet, specifically the basics of packet switching. The video should help the average person understand the Internet just a little better and it has been run by several experts for accuracy, Boustead says.

I have to admit that when I had to screen it for "father of the Internet" Vint Cerf, who invented this process, I was more than a little nervous, certain he would pick it apart. When he replied with "This is so good - can I please use it to explain the concept of packets at public lectures," needless to say, I was over the moon.

So, the Internet. It's not a big truck. It's not a series of tubes. It's more like a bus full of tourists.

TimeScapes: Rapture 4K

Astronomy Photographer of the Year Tom Lowe shares a new breathtaking episode of the upcoming Timescape movie.

This is real life. Not Tron.

from Maggie Koerth-Baker at DangerousMinds



This amazing photo was taken by astronaut Don Pettit on board the International Space Stations—of which you can see a chunk at the top of the frame. It's part of a whole series of absolutely stunning photos that you need to go check out as soon as you have a free 20 minutes to spend staring at your monitor and going, "Woah," to yourself over and over.

Here's what Pettit had to say about the process.

“My star trail images are made by taking a time exposure of about 10 to 15 minutes. However, with modern digital cameras, 30 seconds is about the longest exposure possible, due to electronic detector noise effectively snowing out the image. To achieve the longer exposures I do what many amateur astronomers do. I take multiple 30-second exposures, the ‘stack’ them using imaging software, thus producing the longer exposure.”

Via Smithsonian, which is where you can find the rest of Don Pettit's photos.

The rot of Citizen's United and the grim future of American democracy

from Richard Metzger at DangerousMinds

I realize that I keep saying this, but it’s true and the best context I can offer: Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce is one of the—I think—top two political writers in America today, the other being Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, who is far better known. Everyone with even a passing interest about what happened with the Walker recall in Wisconsin needs to read Pierce’s spot-on post-mortem on the vote, “The Wisconsin Recall Aftermath: Scott Walker Steps Right Up into the Pocket of Those Who Got Him There.” Seriously, it’s a must-read if ever there was one and so is his blog, which I encourage you to bookmark.

I’ve been noticing with satisfaction in the past few days how some of Pierce’s posts at Esquire’s Politics blog have been zooming up the charts at reddit—and I’m trying to encourage more DM readers to discover Pierce’s writing, too—like this on-target statement about how big money/big corruption is destroying America. Apologies to Charles Pierce for snagging his entire post, but it’s too short—and the sentiments therein far too important—not to pass it on in full here:

The Rot of Citizens United Is Universal. Get Used to It.

It is a capital mistake to study the corrosive effect of the utterly corrupt Citizens United decision only in the context of the presidential contest, or in the context of other highly visible individual races, like the one for a U.S. Senate seat or last night’s Wisconsin recall. The rot in the system is poisonous, general, and spreading.

(And have I mentioned really how utterly stupid it is to have an elected judiciary, especially in the current cash-soaked political atmosphere? It is the second-worst idea ever behind the Balanced Budget Amendment, aka The Stupidest Fking Idea Of All Time.)

Very soon, there is not going to be a single political campaign, no matter how small, that directly affects anything having to do with America’s corporate power, which is practically everything, that will not be swamped by anonymous cash laundered through bagmen organized under the banner of some nobly monickered political whorehouse. (While considering the names of the front groups, it is always important to remember the blog’s favorite quote from Sam Spade, of the firm of Spade And Archer: “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.”) As the NYT says:

“...Justice John Paul Stevens predicted that such spending would overwhelm state court races, which would be especially harmful since judges must not only be independent but be seen to be independent as well. North Carolina is proving him right.”

Of course, I’m sure that, sometime later this week, an earnest young scribe from Politico will tell me that everything’s okay because Democrats spend money, too, and, anyway… unions! So, coming soon to your town: the $40 million race for Register of Probate, and won’t that be fun?

You can follow Charles P. Pierce on Twitter. He’ll be an essential voice during this election cycle. If you are on Twitter, you should definately follow him, and bookmark the Esquire Politics blog.

Why did our species survive?

from By Maggie Koerth-Baker at BoingBoing:

Today, we're the only living member of the genus Homo and the only living member of the subtribe Hominina. Along with chimpanzees and bonobos, we're all that remains of the tribe Hominini.

But the fossil record tells us that wasn't always the case. There were, for instance, at least eight other species of Homo running around this planet at one time. So what happened to them? What makes us so special that we're still here? And isn't it just a little weird and meta to be fretting about this? I mean, do lions and tigers spend a lot of time pondering the fate of the Smilodon?

The Human Eye As You've Never Seen It Before

from Tara McGinley at DangerousMinds:

I've seen some pretty spectacular close-up shots of the human eye before, but nothing compares to these digital images by photographer Suren Manvelyan, where the iris areas almost resemble alien landscapes. Totally cool.







Via Neatorama

Meet the Corporate Front Groups Fighting to Make Sure You Can't Know What's in Your Food

from AlterNet: By Alexis Baden-Mayer and Ronnie Cummins
Here's a partial lineup of hired guns and organizations behind the anti-labeling advertising blitz soon to hit the California airwaves.

What do a former mouthpiece for tobacco and big oil, a corporate-interest PR flack, and the regional director of a Monsanto-funded tort reform group have in common?

They’re all part of the anti-labeling PR team that will soon unleash a massive advertising and PR campaign in California, designed to scare voters into rejecting the California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act.

In November, California voters will vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on a law to require mandatory labeling of all GMO ingredients in processed foods, and ban the routine industry practice of mislabeling foods containing GMO ingredients as ‘natural.’

Polls show that nearly 90% of the state’s voters plan to vote ‘yes.’ But when November rolls around, will voter support still be strong? Not if the biotech, agribusiness, and food manufacturers industries can help it.

It’s estimated that the opposition will spend $60 million - $100 million to convince voters that GMOs are perfectly safe. They’ll try to scare voters into believing that labeling will make food more expensive, that it will spark hundreds of lawsuits against small farmers and small businesses, and that it will contribute to world hunger. None of this is true. On the contrary, studies suggest just the opposite.

Here’s what is true: The opposition has lined up some heavy-hitters and industry-funded front groups -- masquerading as “grassroots” organizations -- to help spin their anti-labeling propaganda machine.

You have the right to know what’s in your food. You also have the right to know who is working tirelessly to prevent you from ever having that right – and who is signing their paychecks. Here’s a partial lineup of hired guns and organizations behind the anti-labeling advertising blitz soon to hit the California airwaves:

Tom Hiltachk: Monsanto’s Man in California

Tom Hiltachk is the PR gunslinger behind the Coalition Against the Costly Food Labeling Proposition (CACFLP), an anti-labeling front group. A partner at the Sacramento-based lobbying firm Bell, McAndrews & Hiltachk, Hiltachk is no stranger to front groups. With a little help from his friends at Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds, he helped organize the Californians for Smokers’ Rights group to fight anti-smoking initiatives in the 1980s and 1990s. He also helped form the Californians for Fair Business Policy – a so-called “grassroots” organization, but actually a front group to mobilize business opposition to anti-smoking initiatives. That organization was funded by an “academic” front group – the Claremont Institute – which was in turn funded by tobacco companies.

Hitachk also has ties to Big Oil, including a colorful history with California’s Proposition 23, a conservative-backed ballot initiative launched – and defeated – in 2010. The initiative, supported by Big Oil, would have repealed California’s clean energy and climate laws. Hiltachk was initially an ally of Ted Costa, a veteran right-wing activist behind many conservative initiatives, including Prop 23, and head of the group People’s Advocate. But that relationship soured, according to ThinkProgress.org, when Costa realized that Hiltachk’s main motivation was to funnel the $50 million that he hoped would be raised from oil companies and the Chamber of Commerce to himself and his friends.

Coalition Against Costly Food Labeling Proposition: Looking out for consumers’ financial well being?

The Coalition Against Costly Food Labeling Proposition (CACFLP) runs a website called stopcostlyfoodlabeling.com, giving the impression that this is a group concerned about protecting consumers’ wallets. But the website lists only one consumer group in its coalition – Consumers Coalition of California. A search of the IRS.gov site turns up nothing on this group. According to the coalitions’ 2009 990-Form published on Guidestar.org, this Torrance, Calif.-based coalition describes itself as “Research and oriented community education studies and info for residential and small businesses advocating on issues affecting major legislation.” The group has no website. No other national or California-based consumer groups are listed on the CACFLP site.

CACFLP’s website does list some powerhouse coalition members, however, including the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), whose members also include Monsanto, BASF, Bayer, Dow and Syngenta as well as many large food processors and supermarket chains, and the Council for Biotechnology Information (CBI) , whose members include Monsanto, BASF, Bayer, Dow and Syngenta. Both groups are based in Washington DC. As of March, the GMA and the CBI had contributed a combined $625,000 to the CACFLP – presumably to “protect” consumers from GMO labeling. Both groups have publicly opposed this initiative.

Monsanto recently made the following statement in support of CACFLP:

Monsanto is part of a growing coalition of California farmers, food producers, grocers, retailers, and others which has been formed to oppose the California measure. As a member of both GMA (Grocery Manufacturers Association) and BIO (Biotechnology Industry Organization), we support the organizations' involvement in the California campaign to oppose the costly and extreme measure.

Kathy Fairbanks: Voice of the people?

Kathy Fairbanks wants consumers to believe she’s on their side when she warns them that requiring labels on GMO foods will raise their grocery bills. Yet since when has she fought for the little guy? A glance at her resume reveals a long list of pro-corporate gigs, including some involving illegal donations and questionable practices.

In 2010, Fairbanks worked for the Californians for Fair Auto Insurance Rates - C-FAIR - an insurance industry front group set up by billionaire Mercury Insurance executive George Joseph. C-FAIR launched a California ballot initiative, Prop 17, to raise rates on consumers who had been without coverage - despite a voter-approved law banning the practice. Fairbanks' work on the 2010 ballot initiative was investigated in a San Francisco Bay Guardian piece called "Buying Power: How PG&E and Mercury Insurance Are Spending Millions to Try to Trick Californians into Voting for Corporate Interests," and a San Diego Union Tribune article, "Insurer Veils Its Funding of Measure: Literature for Prop. 17 Omits Mercury's Millions."

During the initiative battle, the state Department of Insurance accused Mercury of illegal practices, including unfairly denying coverage and charging discriminatory rates to motorists who were not at fault in accidents, were members of the armed forces or worked in certain professions. It found Mercury had a "lengthy history of serious misconduct" and an attitude of "contempt toward and/or abuse of its customers, the [insurance] commissioner, its competition and the Superior Court." Mercury paid $300,000 to settle the allegations.

Fairbanks also worked on the wrong side of consumers on the following pro-big business campaigns:

In 2008: spokesperson for the opposition to Prop 7, a California ballot measure to require half the state's electricity to come from renewable sources by 2025.

In 2006: helped defeat Proposition 82 which would have provided credentialed teachers to 150,000 4-year-olds living in the city, funded through tax increases on individuals earning more than $400,000 a year, and on couples making more than $800,000 a year.

In 2005: spokesperson for Steve Poizner's Campaign for State Insurance Commissioner , whose funding was controlled by Poizner, a wealthy Silicon Valley Republican. The fund was required to return $1.75 million in illegal donations made by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his campaign committee.

Fairbanks also worked for the California Chamber of Commerce, in 1999, when the Chamber was spending $2.4 million per legislative session on lobbying. The list of bills she urged Gov. Davis to veto included a bill that would have increased workers compensation benefits, and one that would have allowed employees to use up to half of their annual sick leave to stay home and care for sick family members. She also opposed limiting the expansion of Big Box stores and barring businesses from using revenues from state contracts for anti-union activities.

Maryann Marino and the California Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse (CALA): Defending small farmers?

Maryann Marino is the Southern California regional director of California Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse (CALA), which according to Public Citizen is one of many so-called "lawsuit abuse" groups throughout the country that are part of a national, corporate-backed network of front groups that receive substantial financial and strategic assistance from the tobacco industry and some of America's biggest corporations.

According to Public Citizen, “These groups masquerade as grassroots citizens groups spontaneously manifesting citizen anger against so-called ‘lawsuit abuse.’ The groups aim to incite public scorn for the civil justice system, juries and judges, and to pave the way for enactment of laws immunizing corporations from liability for actions that harm consumers.”

Sure enough, Marino recently told KABC-TV, Los Angeles, the GMO labeling initiative is “not really about the right to know, but rather the right to sue.”

In 2000, the Center for Justice and Democracy issued a report on CALA which unmasked "funding by self-serving mega-corporations that secretly spawned a national network of fake citizens’ organizations," said Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook. "These so-called citizens groups are doing the bidding of the corporate funders and are pushing at all levels to deny Americans access to the courtroom and to create a legal environment that shields corporate wrongdoers from accountability."

American Tort Reform Association (ATRA): Champion of food safety?

Maryann Marino’s organization, CALA, is a state chapter of the American Tort Reform Association (ATRA) – which receives substantial financial and strategic assistance from the tobacco industry and America's biggest corporations, including Philip Morris, Dow Chemical (currently seeking approval for Agent Orange Corn), Exxon, General Electric, Aetna, Geico and Nationwide.

ATRA now keeps its membership secret, but according to a 1993 American University Law Review article by P.R. Sugarman, Monsanto Chemical Company, RJR/Nabisco, E.I. DuPont de Nemours & Company were among just a few of the companies and industry trade association members. According to "Justice For Sale: Shortchanging the Public Interest for Private Gain," a 1993 report by the Alliance for Justice, "The ATRA is made up of corporation trade groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chemical Manufacturers Association, the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association -- thus giving corporations a decoy and accomplice group two full steps removed from their board rooms."

In 2008, the last time they made the names of any of their members public, a list of "sample members" included Kraft Foods Inc., the 3rd largest packaged food company in the U.S. Kraft opposes GMO labels, but defends its use of GMOs.

In return for Monsanto's support, ATRA has been a relentless cheerleader for the company's lawlessness.

ATRA applauded Monsanto for skirting plaintiffs' claims for medical monitoring after Monsanto was found to have been knowingly polluting the small town of Anniston, Alabama, with dangerous levels of Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs). (The residents surrounding the Monsanto plant were predominantly minorities. The first lawsuit, brought in state court, went to trial and the jury found Monsanto guilty of a variety of torts, including negligence, nuisance and trespass. This case was eventually folded into a similar federal case, concluding in a global settlement fining Monsanto $700 million for its egregious behavior toward the Anniston residents.)

ATRA's publication, Judicial Hellholes, in a post titled, "Food Eaters 1, Uncompetitive Organics Industry 0," calls atrazine, the infamous endocrine-disrupting pesticide, "a safe and widely used weed killer."

Neither CALA nor ATRA have voiced concern about Monsanto suing farmers in 143 different patent infringement lawsuits when their crops were unintentionally contaminated with Monsanto's GMOs. Marino does, however, have a problem with farmers getting together to bring one lawsuit against Monsanto to stop the harassment.

Find our Common Ground: Advocating for moms and regular folks?

The newly launched website, Find Our Common Ground, may not fit in the heavy-hitter category, but it’s another example of a thinly veiled attempt by a group to look as if it’s working for small farmers, gardeners, and health-conscious folks. The group also has a facebook page, to help spread its folksy message.

The message? Direct from the group’s website:

Consumers aren’t getting the real story about American agriculture and all that goes into growing and raising their food. We’re a group of volunteer farm women and we plan to change that by doing something extraordinary. Our program is called CommonGround and it’s all about starting a conversation between women who grow food, and the women who buy it. It’s a conversation based on our personal experience as farmers, but also on science and research. Our first goal is to help consumers understand that their food is not grown by a factory. It’s grown by people and it’s important to us that you understand and trust the process. We hope you’ll join in the conversation.

The message maker? A quick search on Wois.com reveals that Osborn Barr Communications, a PR company with ties to - who else? - Monsanto – owns the domain name. Osborn Barr specializes in agriculture and rural communities and is used to create front groups for their clients. In 2006, Monsanto hired Osborn Barr to work on the controversial recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone issue, so Osborn Barr set up American Farmers for Advancement and Conservation of Technology (AFACT), a pro-rbGH farmer front group.

There will be no lack of creativity and certainly no lack of money spent to defeat the California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act. There should also be no lack of scrutiny when it comes to who is spreading the anti-GMO labeling message.

Alexis Baden-Mayer is Political Director of the Organic Consumers Association.

Ronnie Cummins is founder and director of the Organic Consumers Association. Cummins is author of numerous articles and books, including "Genetically Engineered Food: A Self-Defense Guide for Consumers" (Second Revised Edition Marlowe & Company 2004).

The Most Astounding Fact- Sunday Sermon

Astrophysicist Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson was asked in an interview with TIME magazine, "What is the most astounding fact you can share with us about the Universe?" This is his answer.

Special thanks to:

Reid Gower saganseries.com/

Michael Marantz vimeo.com/2822787

Carl Sagan hulu.com/cosmos

Neil deGrasse Tyson facebook.com/neiltyson

NASA nasa.gov/

...for their inspiration.

CREDITS

Narration: TIME Magazine's "10 Questions for Neil Degrasse Tyson"

youtube.com/watch?v=wiOwqDmacJo

Music: "To Build a Home" by the Cinematic Orchestra feat. Patrick Watson

cinematicorchestra.com

Video (in order of appearance):

IMAX: Hubble 3D (Orion)

imax.com/hubble/

Animal Planet: Safari

movies.netflix.com/Movie/Animal_Planet_Safari_The_Last_Lion_of_Liuwa/70153174?trkid=438403

Yellowstone: Battle for Life (Waterfall)

bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00jcdml

Supernova to Crab Nebula

spacetelescope.org/videos/heic0515a/

BBC: Wonders of the Solar System (formation of the solar system)

bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qyxfb

Accretion and First Eukaryotes from the 2011 film "Tree of Life" directed by Terrence Malick

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accretion_(astrophysics)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_life

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_evolutionary_history_of_life

wired.com/wiredscience/2009/05/ribonucleotides/

twowaysthroughlife.com/

BBC: Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life

wellcometreeoflife.org/

"Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia" by Ayrton Orio (Model: Xharon Kendelker)

vimeo.com/9505354

BBC: Wonders of the Solar System (Brian Cox w/ telescope)

"Afghanistan - touch down in flight" by Augustin Pictures

vimeo.com/31426899

lukasugustin.de

"mongolia!" by wiissa

vimeo.com/27876709

wiissa.com

Excerpt from "Outside In", Copyright Stephen van Vuuren/SV2 Studios

outsideinthemovie.com

IMAX: Hubble 3D (Inside Orion Nebula)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_Nebula

Shuttle Launch from 1985 IMAX film "The Dream is Alive"

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream_Is_Alive

"Earth -- Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over -- NASA, ISS" by Michael Konig

youtube.com/watch?v=ls9yJTphLxg

koenigm.com

Excerpt from "The Island" - La Palma Time Lapse Video by Christoph Malin

vimeo.com/27539860

christophmalin.com

Galaxy Map and Galaxy Formation by NCSA's Advanced Visualization Lab

avl.ncsa.illinois.edu/

"Mars sunset" captured by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit (from BBC: Wonders of the Solar System)

nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_347.html

Edited by Max Schlickenmeyer

Neil goes on to say "For me, that is the most profound revelation of 20th century astrophysics and I look forward to what the 21st century will bring us, given the frontiers that are now unfolding."

Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use. All copyrighted materials contained herein belong to their respective copyright holders, I do not claim ownership over any of these materials. I realize no profit, monetary or otherwise, from the exhibition of these videos.

Weekend Skateboarding clipSuper Slo-Mo Modern Tricks

Uncommon skateboarding tricks in super slow motion. Filmed at 1,000 frames per second with a Redlake N3 high speed camera. Since skateboarding trick names are defined by common usage and these tricks are not very common, some of them don't have well-established names. So here are my best guesses as to what they should be called:
Kyle McPherson -- nollie dolphin flip (AKA nollie forward flip)
Cameron Carmichael -- backside 180 casper flip (?) (or bs 180 hospital flip)
Jerrod Skorupski -- nollie heelflip bs body varial
David Case - nollie 360 shuv underflip (AKA nerd flip)
David Case - frontside shuv underflip (AKA kiwi flip)
Dustin Blauvelt - hardflip pretzel
Dustin Blauvelt - Merlin twist (switch front foot impossible fs 180)
Dustin Blauvelt - nollie heelflip indy grab
Shane Anderson - early grab frontside 180 fingerflip (?)
Jovan Pierson - pressure hardflip (?)
Jovan Pierson - ?? I don't know what this is, I just call it a Jovan flip
Erick Schaefer - backside pop shuv underflip
Tim Hamp - Nollie pressure hardflip (?)

via DangerousMinds

Lightning Rainbow

A rainbow during storms in Haikou, the capital of China's Hainan province. Photo: China Daily/Reuters (click on the image to see it larger)

Thanks, BoingBoing

Craig Venter’s Bugs Might Save the World

from The NewYorkTimes

By WIL S. HYLTON

In the menagerie of Craig Venter’s imagination, tiny bugs will save the world. They will be custom bugs, designer bugs — bugs that only Venter can create. He will mix them up in his private laboratory from bits and pieces of DNA, and then he will release them into the air and the water, into smokestacks and oil spills, hospitals and factories and your house.

Each of the bugs will have a mission. Some will be designed to devour things, like pollution. Others will generate food and fuel. There will be bugs to fight global warming, bugs to clean up toxic waste, bugs to manufacture medicine and diagnose disease, and they will all be driven to complete these tasks by the very fibers of their synthetic DNA.

Right now, Venter is thinking of a bug. He is thinking of a bug that could swim in a pond and soak up sunlight and urinate automotive fuel. He is thinking of a bug that could live in a factory and gobble exhaust and fart fresh air. He may not appear to be thinking about these things. He may not appear to be thinking at all. He may appear to be riding his German motorcycle through the California mountains, cutting the inside corners so close that his kneepads skim the pavement. This is how Venter thinks. He also enjoys thinking on the deck of his 95-foot sailboat, halfway across the Pacific Ocean in a gale, and while snorkeling naked in the Sargasso Sea surrounded by Portuguese men-of-war. When Venter was growing up in San Francisco, he would ride his bicycle to the airport and race passenger jets down the runway. As a Navy corpsman in Vietnam, he spent leisurely afternoons tootling up the coast in a dinghy, under a hail of enemy fire.

What’s strange about Venter is that this works — that the clarity he finds when he is hurtling through the sea and the sky, the dreams he summons, the fantasies he concocts in his most unhinged moments of excess actually have a way of coming true. He dreamed of mapping the human genome, and he did it. He dreamed of creating a synthetic organism, and he made it. In 2003, he scrawled a line across a map of the world, hopped on his boat with a small team and sailed around the planet in search of new forms of life. By the time they returned, two years later, they had discovered more species than anyone in history.

And last fall, Venter was back in motion at the end of another journey. He was crouched atop his touring bike in the final stretch of a weeklong sprint through the American Southwest, with a handful of friends trailing behind as he whipped through the mountain foothills in a blur. In the days to come, he would return to his office to piece together a design for the first of his custom bugs. But as he streaked back toward the lab, he made a final detour, swerving into the parking lot of a bakery to grab a slice of fresh pie. Venter hopped off his motorcycle, lifted his helmet and grinned into the California sun. “We hit 110!” he said. “Now I feel like I can go back to work.”

A Sci-Fi Fantasy Made Possible?

The prospect of artificial life is so outlandish that we rarely even mean the words. Most of the time we mean clever androids or computers that talk. Even the pages of science fiction typically stop short: in the popular dystopian narrative, robots are always taking over, erecting armies, firing death rays and sometimes even learning to love, but underneath their replicant skin, they tend to be made of iron ore. From the Terminator to the Matrix to the awakening of HAL, what preoccupies the modern imagination is the sentient evolution of machines, not artificial life itself.

But inside the laboratories of biotechnology, a more literal possibility is taking hold: What if machines really were alive? To some extent, this is already happening. Brewers and bakers have long relied on the diligence of yeast to make beer and bread, and in medical manufacturing, it has become routine to harness organisms like Penicillium to generate drugs. At DuPont, engineers are using modified E. coli to produce polyester for carpet, and the pharmaceutical giant Sanofi is using yeast injected with strips of synthetic DNA to manufacture medicine. But the possibility of designing a new organism, entirely from synthetic DNA, to produce whatever compounds we want, would mark a radical leap forward in biotechnology and a paradigm shift in manufacturing.

The appeal of biological machinery is manifold. For one thing, because organisms reproduce, they can generate not only their target product but also more factories to do the same. Then too, microbes use novel fuel. Chances are, unless you’ve slipped off the grid, virtually every machine you own, from your iPhone to your toaster oven, depends on burning fossil fuels to work. Even if you have slipped off the grid, manufacturing those devices required massive carbon emissions. This is not necessarily the case for biomachinery. A custom organism could produce the same plastic or metal as an industrial plant while feeding on the compounds in pollution or the energy of the sun.

Then there is the matter of yield. Over the last 60 years, agricultural production has boomed in large part through plant modification, chemical additives and irrigation. But as the world population continues to soar, adding nearly a billion people over the past decade, major aquifers are giving out, and agriculture may not be able to keep pace with the world’s needs. If a strain of algae could secrete high yields of protein, using less land and water than traditional crops, it may represent the best hope to feed a booming planet.

Finally, the rise of biomachinery could usher in an era of spot production. “Biology is the ultimate distributed manufacturing platform,” Drew Endy, an assistant professor at Stanford University, told me recently. Endy is trained as an engineer but has become a leading proponent of synthetic biology. He sketched a picture of what “distributed manufacturing” by microbes might look like: say a perfume company could design a bacterium to produce an appealing aroma; “rather than running this in a large-scale fermenter, they would upload the DNA sequences onto the future equivalent of iTunes,” he said. “People all over the world could then pay a fee to download the information.” Then, Endy explained, customers could simply synthesize the bugs at home and grow them on their skin. “They could transform epidermal ecosystems to have living production of scents and fragrances,” he said. “Living perfume!”

Whether all this could really happen — or should — depends on whom you ask. The challenge of building a synthetic bacterium from raw DNA is as byzantine as it probably sounds. It means taking four bottles of chemicals — the adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine that make up DNA — and linking them into a daisy chain at least half a million units long, then inserting that molecule into a host cell and hoping it will spring to life as an organism that not only grows and reproduces but also manufactures exactly what its designer intended. (A line about hubris, Icarus and Frankenstein typically follows here.) Since the late 1990s, laboratories around the world have been experimenting with synthetic biology, but many scientists believe that it will take decades to see major change. “We’re still really early,” Endy said. “Or to say it differently, we’re still really bad.”

Venter disagrees. The future, he says, may be sooner than we think. Much of the groundwork is already done. In 2003, Venter’s lab used a new method to piece together a strip of DNA that was identical to a natural virus, then watched it spring to action and attack a cell. In 2008, they built a longer genome, replicating the DNA of a whole bacterium, and in 2010 they announced that they brought a bacterium with synthetic DNA to life. That organism was still mostly a copy of one in nature, but as a flourish, Venter and his team wrote their names into its DNA, along with quotes from James Joyce and J. Robert Oppenheimer and even secret messages. As the bacteria reproduced, the quotes and messages and names remained in the colony’s DNA.

In theory, this leaves just one step between Venter and a custom species. If he can write something more useful than his name into the synthetic DNA of an organism, changing its genetic function in some deliberate way, he will have crossed the threshold to designer life.

Unless he already has.


To Seek Out New Life

In person, Venter is a sturdy 65-year-old with a ring of gray hair, a deep tan, perpetual stubble and crow’s feet that dance around his eyes. When he caught the world’s attention, in 1998, he was leading a private company, Celera Genomics, in a race against the government’s Human Genome Project to complete the first map of human DNA. That race ended in June 2000, when Venter and the director of the government program, Francis S. Collins, shared a lectern at the White House to declare a tie. Neither man particularly wanted to be there, and each believed his own map was superior, but in the interest of science and at the urging of President Bill Clinton, both grudgingly relented.

In the decade since, Collins has gone on to lead the National Institutes of Health, while Venter has mostly drifted away from the capital, where his challenge to the N.I.H. did not particularly kindle friendships. Though his nonprofit organization, the J. Craig Venter Institute, maintains a base in Rockville, Md., Venter spends most of his time in California, where he grew up and is currently building a $35 million laboratory on the campus of his alma mater, the University of California, San Diego. The building is designed to be carbon-neutral, with solar power and rainwater catchment, nestled on 1.75 acres overlooking the Pacific Ocean; less than two miles away, Venter has renovated a $6 million home with sweeping curvilinear architecture, which is perched on a hilltop of breathtaking views.

In contrast to his lavish home and office, Venter’s commercial enterprise makes a rather humdrum sight. Tucked into a suburban office park, a few miles north of his home, the headquarters of Synthetic Genomics Inc. is a leased two-story box plopped beside a highway. Yet in some ways, the building is the more exciting locus of Venter’s work. Though its grounds and mission are less expansive than the institute, S.G.I. is where Venter’s breakthroughs will be refined and marketed whenever they have real-world potential.

One day recently, I visited the S.G.I. building to have a look around. I found Venter in his office on the second floor, watching a video on his iPad of a race car he nearly crashed last fall at 120 miles per hour. We watched that footage for a while, then another video from a motorcycle trip, and Venter said he had recently flown a helicopter for the first time.

For a scientist, Venter spends little time in the lab, but it would be a mistake to confuse this with a lack of focus. All critical decisions at his company and his institute ultimately ascend to Venter, who monitors the work of about 500 scientists every day, imparting various kinds of guidance and direction, even if he has to be patched in by satellite. After a few minutes in his office, we were joined by Gerardo Toledo, the company’s senior director of microbial discovery. Toledo is lean and angular with hazel skin and amused eyes. In his spare time, he competes in Ironman triathlons and chases Venter on dirt bikes through the California hills. He suggested we visit the labs on the first floor, and as we descended a flight of stairs, he explained that part of the company’s mission is to find, usually in nature, the genetic components that might be useful in synthetic life. For Toledo, this meant scouring the planet for intriguing microbes with uncommon genes. “The idea is to try to understand the extent of microbe diversity,” he said.

Earth is a microbial planet. Micro-organisms make up about half the planet’s biomass, and without them, large animals could not survive. Because they are so small, so abundant and so differentiated, they also contain most of the earth’s genetic diversity. One of the most important discoveries to emerge from the human-genome projects, both at the N.I.H. and at Celera, was the revelation that humans have relatively few genes. Before the human-genome map, most scientists assumed that there were about 100,000 genes in our DNA. In fact, there are about 20,000, or fewer than those of a typical grape. That discovery was one reason that Venter began trolling the oceans in search of new forms of microbial life. Over the past nine years, he and his crew at the institute have collected water samples from thousands of locations, sending them to his lab to be screened and genetically mapped. In total, they have discovered hundreds of thousands of new species (the number is imprecise because the term “species” can be muddy) and about 60 million new genes. There were genes to help organisms survive in chemically noxious water, genes that led to the production of hydrogen and genes that trigger the manufacture of antibiotics, to name just a few. How Venter might incorporate those genes into a designer species one day remains to be seen. But as we walked down the hallways of S.G.I., Toledo explained that the company’s quest to discover microbes is not limited to the oceans.

He stopped by a framed photograph of a hand filled with oily dirt. “That picture is in Malaysia,” he said. “Oil palm is one of the highest oil-producing crops, but we’re trying to see how that can be enhanced. First by understanding its genome and how it can be better. And second to understand what is the ecosystem of all the microbes that fit with it and help it, for example, to assimilate nutrients and prevent diseases.”

We continued past a series of glassed-in labs, where scientists hunched over flasks filled with green fluid, and Toledo explained that some of the earliest organisms that S.G.I. plans to modify will be strains of algae. That’s because algae, even in a natural state, offer an enticing combination of features: they photosynthesize, capturing energy from the sun; they can absorb carbon dioxide, removing a greenhouse gas from the environment; and they produce oil to store energy, which could be cultivated into food or fuel. For decades, scientists have been tinkering with algae to make them more productive and efficient, but success has been elusive. Venter is convinced that the problem will never be solved by tinkering alone. “Algae didn’t evolve to produce tens of thousands of gallons of oil per acre,” he said. “So we have to force the evolution.” For now, S.G.I. is studying natural strains, but the goal is not to select any one of them; it’s to combine the best qualities from each. “We’re collecting all this knowledge,” Venter said, “and then we have to put it all together and design something that hasn’t existed before.”


Yellow Algae Is Just the Beginning

If the promise of synthetic biology is expansive, the potential for catastrophe is plain. The greater the reach of biomachinery, the more urgent the need to understand its risks. As every hobby gardener knows, the introduction of an outside species can quickly devastate an ecosystem. From the kudzu vine to the gypsy moth to the Burmese python surge in the Everglades, we often discover the impact of a species only when it’s too late. Looking to the dawn of a biomachine age, many environmental groups worry that synthetic bugs could become the ultimate invasive species. “It’s almost inevitable that there will be some level of escape,” Helen Wallace, the executive director of the watchdog group GeneWatch, told me. “The question is: Will those organisms survive and reproduce? I don’t think anyone knows.”

The reassurance offered by Venter and other proponents may not be convincing to everyone. A synthetic bug, they say, has little chance of surviving in the competitive natural ecosystem, and anyway, it could be designed to die without chemical support. In 2010, President Obama ordered his bioethics commission to examine the implications of Venter’s work, and the commission found “limited risks.” Still, a person can be forgiven for recalling the moment in “Jurassic Park” when Dr. Ian Malcolm smirks at a team of genetic engineers and warns them, “Life finds a way.”

At the S.G.I. office, Venter suggested we step outside to visit the greenhouse, where the most promising strains of algae were already growing in open air. We met up with Jim Flatt, the chief technology officer, and followed a narrow path through woods until we emerged at a massive glass facility. We stepped into a staging area filled with hoses and flasks, beside a laboratory stacked with computers and machines. Through a wall of windows, we could see into the main room, where algae was growing in vats under bright sunlight. Each was affixed with a small plastic tube that piped in shots of carbon dioxide. “We use bottled CO2,” Flatt said, “but in an industrial facility, we would use an industrial source. That could be captured from a power plant. It could be captured from a geothermal resource. It could be captured from a cement plant. Or it could be captured from a refinery.”

As Flatt and I poked around, Venter wandered over to chat with a scientist monitoring the algae on a computer, then he stooped by a benchtop shaker with four conical flasks of algae. Three of the samples were deep green; the fourth was brilliant yellow. Venter explained that the yellow algae was the first strain engineered by S.G.I. to include a portion of synthetic DNA. In fact, the color of the algae was the synthetic modification. Changing the pigment of algae may seem trivial, but it represents a critical factor for commercial success. One challenge to growing algae at scale is that a successful strain, by definition, tends to reproduce quickly and turn dark green. This blocks sunlight to the algae below, and requires more-frequent care and harvest. A strain engineered to a lighter color could allow the organisms to grow more densely without obstructing essential light. The yellow algae in Venter’s greenhouse was just the first to include a synthetic adjustment, but it would be followed by a series of similar changes. Even as the company modified pigment, it could also experiment with synthetic alterations to boost the production of oil and even force the algae to secrete that oil into surrounding water. “Their objective is to grow and survive,” Flatt said, “not necessarily to produce things for us. So that’s where the engineering comes into place. We say, ‘We’re going to force you to give it up.’ ”

We stepped into the main room of the greenhouse and walked between huge tubs filled with algae. The next step, Venter said, was to move the algae outside into large ponds. “None of this can be done at the lab scale and have any meaning,” he said. “People take stuff in a little test tube and multiply it by several million or something, and claim they have these yields. But nothing works the same in a giant facility. Most things fail when you take them outside.” To that end, S.G.I. had recently purchased an 81-acre parcel of land about 150 miles away, right beside the Salton Sea, where it can begin to cultivate its most successful strains. The site, he added, also sits near a geothermal power plant, which doesn’t burn fossil fuels but does release carbon dioxide from underground. Venter was already in discussion with the plant’s owner to divert its carbon emissions into the algae. It was possible that, within months, his algae would be turning pollution into food and oil.

We came to the last tub in the room, filled with the telltale yellow: a culture of synthetically modified organisms growing in the open air. They were the color of lemon-lime sports drink and, in the bright sunlight, had a radiant glow. It was like peering into a bathtub filled with the juice of 1,000 light sticks.

Venter gazed happily at the algae. “The photosynthetic process has been working for about three and a half billion years,” he said. “This is the first major change.”


The Art of Creating Life

Venter’s house above La Jolla is a swirl of clean, modern lines, with a sprawling kitchen at one end and hideaway nooks all around. There is a wine room that doubles as a walk-in humidor, an outdoor pool that seems to reach into the ocean and, in the garage below, an electric Tesla Roadster that pops from 0-60 in less than four seconds.

Two weeks ago, Venter met me at the door in jeans and a sweatshirt, and we sat down to chat on a brown leather sofa overlooking the Pacific. Nearby, a six-foot sculpture of a humpback whale leapt from a knotty burl of hardwood. Venter took a sip of a drink and leaned back with a sigh. “It’s too bad we have to do an interview,” he said.

Over the last decade, I have followed Venter’s work closely, which often meant following Venter himself on strange and harrowing journeys. Through the years, I’ve sailed with him, flown with him, dived with him and raced across the desert on motorcycles with him, often against my better judgment and at speeds I prefer not to recall. Many of Venter’s peers in science find his reckless hobbies and temperament obnoxious. No story about his work fails to mention the legion of biologists who despise him or the legendary berth of his ego. This hostility comes partly from his entrepreneurial approach to science. After he challenged the Human Genome Project in the 1990s, he was accused by the eminent James D. Watson, who was a co-discoverer of the structure of DNA in 1953, of trying to “own the human genome the way Hitler wanted to own the world.” But to the colleagues who have worked with Venter for decades, his reputation as an egotist can be puzzling. At a dinner table or a cocktail party, Venter is far more likely to brag about his skill at dominoes than any professional accomplishment, and he quickly becomes awkward and irritable when a crowd of admirers surrounds him at a reception.

This is not to say that Venter is modest. He is not. But what defines him is less the show of ego than its immovable mass. When Venter tackles a scientific problem, he tends to ignore just about everyone else working on it and to dismiss whatever approach they are taking — and shoot for the fastest way to beat them to the finish line. Speed is Venter’s muse and siren. The same manic energy that propels him into race cars and speedboats animates his professional life, leaving behind as many enemies as breakthroughs.

When Venter announced, in 2010, that he brought to life the first bacteria with entirely synthetic DNA, he was met with equal parts ceremony and dismissal. Many scientists hailed the achievement as a watershed moment in human history. “The ability to design and create new forms of life,” the prominent physicist Freeman Dyson proclaimed, “marks a turning point in the history of our species and our planet.” Yet others insisted that, because the DNA was modeled on a natural organism and was inserted into a natural cell, the claims of “synthetic life” were overblown. “He has not created life, only mimicked it,” the Nobel laureate David Baltimore insisted.

When I asked the bioethicist Arthur Caplan about these extremes of adulation and indifference, Caplan did not hesitate. Though he has criticized the Obama ethics commission for underestimating the risk of synthetic biology, he praised Venter himself as revolutionary. “He’s about three major innovations back from the Nobel Prize he should have gotten already,” Caplan said. “When you have the kinds of breakthroughs and insights that he’s had, it’s inexcusable that you wouldn’t reward that kind of work with the Nobel — and it has to be battles over personality and character, more about him than anything else.”

When I asked Venter about his reception among scientists, he was uncharacteristically nonchalant. “Some senior biologists, who in theory should know better than anybody else, keep talking about the importance of the cell,” he shrugged. “They argue: ‘Well, the cell contributed something. It can’t just be the DNA.’ That’s like saying God contributed something. The trouble for these people, it is just the DNA. You have to have the cell there to read it, but we’re 100 percent DNA software systems.” He pointed out that when his lab inserted the DNA of one organism into the cell body of another, the cell became a different organism.

Venter was quick to acknowledge that he still hadn’t created a microbe that serves an innovative purpose. “Sorry we didn’t design some new creature that never existed before as our opening gambit,” he said with a laugh. “What we published was the proof of concept. It’s like: ‘Gee, it would be really nice if the Wright brothers made a supersonic jet! Because that would have been much more useful!’ ”

This seemed like a good opportunity to ask Venter whether he had come any closer to that goal — whether, in addition to the algae modification at S.G.I., his team at the institute was working on another whole-genome assembly. Since the May 2010 announcement, Venter has been comparatively quiet, but it would be unlike him not to silence his critics. I asked him how far he had come over the last two years.

Venter was quiet for a long time. He nodded his head, as if making some calculation, then he said: “We’re doing a grand experiment. We’re trying to design the first cell from scratch.” He suggested we head into town for dinner with his two closest partners in synthetic biology, to discuss the leap they were about to take.

“It’s a little bit of a black art,” he said.


Starting From Scratch

Venter’s closest collaborators in the lab are Hamilton O. Smith and Clyde A. Hutchison III, each vaunted in his own right. Smith shared a Nobel Prize in 1978 for his work on restriction enzymes, and Hutchison’s long pedigree in genetic mapping began in 1975, when he helped the pioneer Frederick Sanger sequence the first genome of a virus, for which Sanger shared his second Nobel in 1980. At 80, Smith is tall and genial, with hearing aides and a slight stoop; Hutchison is 10 years younger, with a boyish flop of hair in his eyes and an air of perpetual worry. Together they enjoy a crotchety rapport that delights Venter endlessly. “They’re like the two old guys in the balcony on the Muppets,” he said. “But they’ve both reached a point in their careers where they can afford to take risks they never would’ve taken 20 years ago — it’s like having the oldest, smartest postdocs in the world.”

As we settled around a dinner table in downtown La Jolla, a waitress delivered foie gras from the chef, setting a plate between Smith and Hutchison, who immediately lurched forward to examine it.

“What’s that?” Hutchison asked.

“Goose liver,” Venter said.

“Oh,” Hutchison said. “I like liver.”

Smith frowned. “It’s glycogen,” he observed.

“Yeah, glycogen,” Hutchison said. “Glycogen is almost like carbohydrate.”

“It is carbohydrate,” Smith said.

Hutchison nodded. “You shouldn’t eat a lot of liver if you’re on a low-carbohydrate diet,” he said.

Then they both attacked it with their forks.

Venter and Smith first met at a conference in Spain in 1993, when Smith approached Venter after a lecture. Venter was just 46, but he was already preceded by controversy. He had recently left the N.I.H. to map gene fragments in his own lab and was licensing the results to a private company, which raised alarms about privatizing life. After his lecture, Venter recalled over dinner: “Ham came up, and his first statement was, ‘Where are your horns?’ And I said, ‘What?’ He goes: ‘You’re supposed to be the devil. Where are your horns?”’

Smith let out a guffaw. “Well,” he said, “he had inflamed a lot of the academics!”

Within months, Smith had joined Venter’s nonprofit, and in 1995, they completed the first genetic sequence of a bacterium, expanding on the work at Sanger’s lab two decades earlier. As a follow-up, they reached out to Hutchison, who was studying another bacterium at the University of North Carolina, and offered to map its genome for him. Two days later, Hutchison mailed a vial of DNA to Venter and Smith. “If that was to happen now,” Smith said, “it would have been three months and a bunch of lawyers.” Hutchison shrugged. “They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” he said.

Venter and Smith worked quickly. Using the method they developed for the first bacterium, they completed a genetic map for Hutchison in three months. But as all three men studied the second genome, which was only a third the size of the first, they began to wonder how much smaller a genome could get. What was the fewest number of genes that could sustain a free-living organism?

“I think any good inquisitive scientists in our position would have asked those same questions,” Venter said. “But how do you get there? The limits of molecular biology don’t give you enough tools.” Working together, they began to winnow down the genome by inserting snippets of DNA that interrupt gene function, on the theory that any gene that could be disrupted without killing the cell must not be essential. In 1999, they published a paper in the journal Science describing “1,354 distinct sites of insertion that were not lethal,” and speculating that more than a quarter of the bacterium’s DNA might be superfluous. But there was still no way to be sure — no way to knock out all the nonessential genes at once and see if the organism survived. In the final sentence of their 1999 paper, they proposed a novel solution: “One way to identify a minimal gene set for self-replicating life would be to create and test a cassette-based artificial chromosome.”

Create a chromosome. This was still far beyond the reach of science, and in hindsight, marks one of the earliest references to synthetic biology as we know it today. But by the time the paper appeared, in December 1999, Venter and Smith had turned their attention to the human genome project at Celera, which would consume their attention for three years. Looking back, Venter says, “the human genome was a detour.” As soon as the Celera map was complete, they returned to the synthetic project. In 2003, they developed a new method to assemble fragments of DNA and built their first virus; when that worked, they scaled up to bacteria, ultimately writing their names and quotes in its code, but the real prize was, and remains, to build the stripped-down organism they first proposed in 1999 — a free-living bacterium with less DNA than any in nature. It would not only test their theories about essential genes but would also provide an ideal framework for future organisms. Once they had the minimal genome, they could use it as a chassis to attach other genes: maybe a component to feed on sulfur or a module to generate hydrogen or both.

“That’s why it’s so valuable,” Venter said. “If we’re going to design really complex biological machinery, it has to have these fundamentals.”

But the minimal genome may raise an even more fundamental question, one that touches on the nature of innovation itself. When we think about technological change, most of us view progress through a narrow lens: we imagine new gadgets and devices that will streamline our modern lives, bringing the most technically advanced civilization in history to new heights of technical advancement. Yet the innovations that really matter in the long term may not have much to do with advancement at all. They may have less to do with improving our own standards of living than with extending those standards around the world. As the global population continues to rise, the greatest technological challenge we face may be to avoid leaving large tracts of the earth behind. The synthetic biology that Venter proposes, using a minimal genome as a platform to make advances in food, fuel, medicine and environmental health, could backfire into a biological calamity, but it could also offer the most transformative approach to a medley of problems with no apparent solution.

“Agriculture as we know it needs to disappear,” Venter said. “We can design better and healthier proteins than we get from nature.” By this, he didn’t mean growing apples in a Petri dish. He meant producing bulk commodities like corn, soy and wheat, that we use in processed products like tofu and cereal. “If you can produce the key ingredients with 10 or 100 times the efficiency,” he said, “that’s a better use of land and resources.”

As we enjoyed a decidedly real dinner of lobster and fresh vegetables, Venter explained that he was just days away from trying the first synthesis of a minimal genome. For two years, even as the team at S.G.I. has been working to cultivate algae, the institute has been poring over research to design a new genome. Eventually, the process grew tedious. “Up to three weeks ago,” Smith said, “we were on a very gradual course, and we were looking at a long time to get the thing completed. So Craig says, ‘Damn it, let’s make a guess, and synthesize the darn thing based on what we know, and maybe it’ll work!’ ”

Venter laughed. “I call it the Hail Mary Genome.”

Just days earlier, he said, they completed two designs — one led by the office in Maryland, the other by Hutchison’s team in California. In the days ahead, they would begin assembling both. If either worked, it would represent the smallest genetic code of any free-living creature on earth, one that would be impossible to dismiss as a copy. Even as we sat at the dinner table, it was possible that Venter, Smith and Hutchison already had it; that somewhere in their lab, they held the design for the first custom organism made from synthetic DNA.

Hutchison said he was encouraged that the two drafts overlapped. “There are about 30 genes different between the two,” he said.

Smith grinned. “I’m gonna go with Clyde’s draft,” he said.

“Well, mine is smaller,” Hutchison said. “I think maybe we’re going to pick some of the pieces from one design and some from the other.”

“We’re also trying to re-engineer the genome in a much more logical fashion,” Venter said. “We’re doing it in the form that, if there was a God, this is how he would have done it.”

“Evolution is very messy,” Smith added.

“We’re trying to clean it up,” Venter said.

“What’s the time horizon?” I asked.

“I have some ideas that, within the year — ” Hutchison began.

Venter shook his head. “Before the end of summer,” he insisted.

Hutchison chuckled.

“It might be the end of summer,” Smith said.

“It’s going to be the first rationally designed genome,” Venter said.

“Actually, my preference would be not to do the fine needlework,” Smith said. “I would just take the very largest 30 or 40 clusters and remove those.”

“We can do that,” Hutchison said.

“Let’s do it,” Smith said. “The hell with the rest of them.”


Wil S. Hylton is a contributing writer for the magazine. He last wrote about the state of U.S. biodefense preparations.

Editor: Joel Lovell

Has the FBI Launched a War of Entrapment Against the Occupy Movement?

from AlterNet:

By Arun Gupta

With the high-profile arrest of activists on terrorism charges in Cleveland on May Day and in Chicago during the NATO summit there, evidence is mounting that the FBI is unleashing the same methods of entrapment against the Occupy Wall Street movement that it has used against left movements and Muslim-Americans for the last decade.

In Cleveland the FBI announced on May 1 that “five self-proclaimed anarchists conspired to develop multiple terror plots designed to negatively impact the greater Cleveland metropolitan area.” The FBI claimed the five were nabbed as they attempted to blow up a bridge the night before using “inoperable” explosives supplied to them by an undercover FBI employee.

Then on May 19, the day before thousands marched peacefully in Chicago to protest NATO-led wars, the Illinois State Attorney hit three men with charges of terrorism for allegedly plotting to use “destructive devices” against targets ranging from Chicago police stations to the home of Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Defense attorneys for the Chicago activists claim their clients, like the Cleveland activists, were provided with supplies for making Molotov cocktails by undercover agents in an operation that included the participation of the FBI and Secret Service. This was followed up on May 20 by the arrest of two other men on terrorism charges in Chicago for statements they made, which critics say amount to thought crimes. The Chicago cases are also reportedly the first time the state of Illinois is charging individuals under its post-September 11 terrorism law.

To hear FBI officials describe it, “Law enforcement took swift, collaborative action…to eliminate the risk of violence and protect the public.” To many observers, however, the government itself is the overarching threat, systematically repressing peaceful dissent.

Will Potter, who analyzes FBI entrapment plots in his book Green is the New Red, says the two incidents are “a reflection of an ongoing pattern of behavior from the FBI of singling out political activists and having a direct influence in creating so-called terrorist plots for the purpose of proclaiming a victory in the war on terrorism.” Potter claims, “There have been many other cases like these in which the FBI had a role in manufacturing the plot itself. We’ve seen this time and again with animal rights activists, environmental activists and the anarchist movement.”

Simply put, the Cleveland and Chicago cases appear to be instances of the federal government foiling its own terror plots. Two days before the Cleveland plot was supposedly thwarted, David Shipler, author of Rights at Risk: The Limits of Liberty in Modern America, presciently described in the New York Times the mechanics of the FBI trap about to be sprung. Shipler wrote that FBI terror stings typically begin by targeting “suspects for pure speech” such as comments, emails and “angry postings” on the Internet. The suspects are then “woo[ed] into relationships with informers, who are often convicted felons working in exchange for leniency, or with FBI agents” working undercover. Some suspects are “incompetent and adrift, like hapless wannabes looking for a cause that the informer or undercover agent skillfully helps them find.” Noting that the FBI is “cultivating potential terrorists,” Shipler asked, “would the culprits commit violence on their own?”

That’s what the FBI claims – that it thwarted the deadly plans of Brandon Baxter, 20; Anthony Hayne, 35; Joshua Stafford, 23; Connor Stevens, 20; and Douglas Wright, 26. The plot allegedly began last fall after Doug Wright discussed deploying smoke bombs as a decoy while individuals toppled bank signs from skyscrapers in downtown Cleveland, and evolved with FBI planning into using “C4 plastic explosive devices” to demolish a bridge connecting the Ohio communities of Brecksville and Sagamore Hills.

Stephen Anthony, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's Cleveland office, claimed during the May 1 press conference “that at no time during the course of the investigation was the public ever in danger.” So if the public was never in danger, was there ever a threat?

To get to the bottom of the story I traveled to Cleveland shortly after the arrests and interviewed about 20 friends and family members of the "Cleveland 5," as supporters are calling them. They describe a group of naïve, vulnerable and even desperate individuals that the FBI preyed on. A government informant provided the five with jobs, money, a place to live, a friendly ear, beer, pot, the prescription stimulant Adderall, and most significant, the ideas and means to carry out a plot conceived by the Bureau itself.

The Lost Boys

Friends describe the five – everyone calls them boys or kids – as “quasi-hobos” and on the losing end of society. Lea Tolls, a 46-year-old mother and self-described “Occu-mom,” says, “Except for Connor [Stevens] they were destitute. They are angry, some have mental illnesses, and there is alcoholism and abuse in their families.”

Kaiser, a Cleveland occupier, told me that Doug Wright, the alleged ringleader, was “like a big brother to me. He ran away from his parents when he was 12.” Everyone invariably mentioned Wright was a train hopper, an explanation that accounts for his mangled nose, missing teeth and abrasive manner. Ben Shapiro, 26, an environmental organizer who was active with Occupy Cleveland last fall, said, “Doug was poor. He was angry, had a hard time dealing with people and was short-tempered.” Nonetheless, numerous youth said Wright was protective of and cared about them and was a hard worker. Zachy, a lanky 21-year-old who hung out with the five, says, “Doug actually did shit. He was running logistics at the Occupy camp. He was the one that knew how to tie knots and put tarps on the tents.”

The story is the same for the others: lost souls wanting to help others. Most Cleveland Occupiers were wary of Anthony Hayne, the oldest of the accused, labeling him a “con man,” “swindler” and “schemer.” Lea Tolls defended him, stating, “Tony was an addict, and we treated him accordingly.” Others added that Hayne's mother died a week before Occupy Cleveland began. Jonnie Peskar, 22, a member of Occupy Cleveland, says one night another defendant, Brandon Baxter, told him his life story, “He grew up in violence. He and his dad would fist fight. Brandon talked about how he was traumatized growing up.”

Gloria, a friend of Brandon Baxter's, called him “an absolute joy to be around. He wants to help everyone he comes in contact with.” But he also suffered from “horrible depression” and tried to kill himself in February by jumping off a bridge before being talked down by cops, she claimed. “He spent weeks in the hospital from the suicide attempt.” As for Joshua Stafford, who is known as Skelly, his mother anonymously told the media of a troubled life, saying he had been “in and out of hospitals, prisons, jails. He's just been a troubled soul since he's been born.”

Joshua Stafford and Brandon Baxter are also described as highly impressionable. Tolls says Stafford, “would have done anything anyone told him to, just to have friends.” Peskar says Brandon Baxter admitted to him, “‘I’m easily brainwashed because I was pulled into being a Neo-Nazi.’ Brandon was in a very confused state. He always contradicted himself. He didn’t know what he wanted.”

Of the five, only Brandon Baxter and Connor Stevens appear to be in contact with their families. Curious as to how Stevens was caught up in the trap, I sat down with his family in their modest ranch house in the suburbs of Cleveland to hear of a thoughtful and passionate young man trying to surmount life’s obstacles on the path to adulthood. Stevens' mother Gail describes her son as “extremely intelligent" although "school didn’t engage him.” Connor Stevens dropped out his junior year. In his sophomore year, Stevens and some friends founded a social justice group called “Fighters for Freedom” that was quickly shut down by the school administration. He was also elected class president, but was not allowed to serve because of a low grade point average. When he was 16 he told his family he was gay, which his siblings said neither surprised nor fazed them.

Gail also spoke of family troubles that affected Connor and her other children deeply – her mother and sister passing away in quick succession, followed less than a year later by her husband James running afoul of the law in 2001, which resulted in more than two years in prison for him and the dissolution of their marriage. Gail went from a stay-at-home mom to the sole breadwinner and had to handle the stress of moving her family into her father’s house.

Occupy gave Connor Stevens a sense of belonging. Gail says, “I was excited for him. There was something he could actually be part of in Cleveland.” In early 2012 he began to say “he wanted to be a pastor. He felt he was being called.” She read a letter Stevens sent her from the Corrections Corporation of America facility near Youngstown, Ohio, where he is being held. He wrote:

“I am in good spirits and feel at the top of my game physically, mentally, spiritually. … I have great faith and do not underestimate the power of prayers. The bible I’m reading, the New American, in which I’ve been focusing on the Old Testament, speaks constantly of the Lord’s uplifting the oppressed, siding with the poor, the downtrodden, the widows and the orphans. I believe God is on our side. The scripture you quoted from Jeremiah is very fitting. And just before I came down to our last visitation … I read Psalms 27:1. This is my rock, this passage. It conveys everything.”

The Plot Begins

Cleveland 5 supporters claim that Connor Stevens and possibly others were threatened to participate in the plot. Others interpret as a threat a comment in the FBI affidavit in which the informant tells the group they are “on the hook” for the explosives. Interviews with more than a dozen Cleveland activists also provide evidence that a possible FBI asset by the name of Ryan is still floating around Cleveland and is cryptically mentioned just once as “Ryan LNU” (Last Name Unknown) in the criminal complaint against the five.

The FBI plot begins on October 21. On that day the city of Cleveland announced it was shutting down the two-week-old occupation in the downtown Public Square. Organizers say Occupy Cleveland held a rally on Oct. 21 more than 500 strong, including nonviolent civil disobedience, while choosing to roll up dozens of tents in the camp so as to save its equipment from imminent confiscation by the police.

Also on Oct. 21, the FBI’s “Confidential Human Source” (CHS), subsequently identified as Shaquille Azir, made contact with Douglas Wright. The affidavit states: “Based on an initial report of potential criminal activity and threats involving anarchists who would be attending an event held by a protest group, the Cleveland FBI directed the CHS to attend that event.” That night, the FBI report continues, while most occupiers were engaged in protest, a group of seven men “was constantly moving throughout the crowd expressing displeasure at the crowd's unwillingness to act violently.”

Numerous friends of the five dispute this account, saying violence was never raised. Because there is no audio recording of the encounter, as there are for many others, the FBI claims could easily be fabricated, which would mean the basis for the investigation was spurious. People present say there was a tactical dispute between “do-it-yourself” punk kids, which the five identified with, who wanted to keep the camp going, and more mainstream, college-educated occupiers who agreed to take down dozens of tents while staging a nonviolent civil disobedience action to demonstrate support for free speech rights. Zachy and Natalie, friends of the five, say the punk kids were disillusioned with both the decision to end the occupation and what they saw as an ineffectual protest, but no one discussed violence.

'Silly Kid Things'

Zachy says, “About a week after the collapse of tent city on Oct. 21, we created a group called the Revolutionary People’s Army. We were being romantic. We were drunk and high … Doug, Connor, Brandon, Joshua and Tony were all involved in the RPA. There were a couple of serious meetings and it turned into spray painting Guy Fawkes masks, 'Rise Up' and 'RPA' and 'circle A' anarchist symbols around town. We also plastered 'Wake Up' with circle A and Occupy stickers. RPA was real tongue-in-cheek. It was silly kid things.”

Tolls calls them “boys playing cowboys and Indians with fireworks and spray paint," adding, "They were trying to empower themselves and passionately wanted to change their world. Occupy gave them hope. They were targeted by the FBI and culled from a peaceful group. They were guided toward this by individuals who provided the means and motivation. They didn’t have these violent actions in them.”

It was from these childish antics that the FBI claims that Doug Wright conjured up the initial plot – deploying smoke bombs as cover as while toppling bank signs from buildings such as the Key Bank tower. Friends of Doug Wright laugh at the allegations. They mention that with Wright’s smashed-up face and punk attire he would not even be allowed into the building, much less be able to scale the 947-foot-tall skyscraper and blast off the enormous red key affixed to the outside.

Ben Shapiro, who is highly regarded in the activist community, says he noticed suspicious activities he interprets as police disruption. “Certain people were actively trying to isolate the Cleveland 5 from other organizers last fall by spreading rumors they were FBI agents.” Additionally, says Shapiro, during the first few weeks of the occupation at the centrally located Public Square, “We saw people in strange white vans circling around the square, conducting surveillance. They were parked in an area downtown where anyone else would have been towed or ticketed within minutes.”

After the encampment ended, Shapiro says he was concerned about the punk kids and cautioned them against engaging in unsafe behavior. “They had every reason to be frustrated – there were poor group dynamics and an inability to reoccupy the square.” At the same time, he adds, “They were good kids and were coming up with elaborate plans on how to hide their tents in backpacks.” Shapiro says the activity wasn’t a strategic answer to the loss of space, but “it was very spirited.”

In hindsight, says Shapiro, there was “evidence of narcs … People spreading rumors, isolating members of the community, providing money, transportation and space.” He emphasizes he is referring not only to Shaquille Azir, but to the shadowy Ryan as well. When he heard news of the arrests, Shapiro says, “I saw the list of names. I saw this group of kids that had been targeted was now entrapped. It seems so fabricated.”

Zachy says during the next few months the five except for Anthony Hayne (whom he said was serving a jail sentence) would regularly stop by the one remaining tent downtown to pull night shifts. Zachy adds that in early November Ryan tried to recruit him to meet Shaquille Azir, telling him, “This guy is buying us breakfast and will give us a house with no strings attached.” Zachy says he was suspicious and declined the offer. Despite multiple claims that Ryan is in contact with Azir and even recruiting people to meet him in the fall, Ryan is only mentioned once in the affidavit in February 2012.

Over the winter, according to the FBI affidavit, the contact between Shaquille Azir and Doug Wright is sporadic. Azir and Wright reconnect in mid-February at the same time Occupy Cleveland rents a warehouse as a crash pad for occupiers who were maintaining a presence at the tent.

Anarchist Romper Room

In mid-May, I ventured to the red-brick warehouse dubbed the "fortress.” Entering the decrepit building was like walking into an anarchist Romper Room: tents pitched indoors, graffiti, belongings strewn about, people dozing mid-day, dirty dishes and pungent toilet odors. It was here that Brandon Baxter, Connor Stevens, Tony Hayne and Joshua Stafford reassembled. I joined half a dozen people around a table as they puffed hand-rolled cigarettes incessantly. They were clearing out as the lease was up the next day. Right off the bat, Zachy said, “A lot of us had never lived in a communal situation. This was the first time living away from our parents. Dishes were always a fight. We’re a bunch of uneducated kids.”

When the topic of cleaning came up, Rachel jumped in, “I got the name ‘mother hen’ for always complaining. ‘Come on guys, clean this trash up.’”

The discussion repeatedly circled around to Ryan. The warehouse crew expressed suspicion because Ryan appeared in mid-October, saying he drove up from Florida, but soon had connections to Azir, whom virtually no one ever met outside the five. They also mentioned Ryan would take regular road trips in his car and claim his steady source of income was via his parents wiring money to him.

In April everything comes to a head. Jonnie Peskar said Doug Wright seemed excited one day in early April. He says Wright told him, “Today is going to be a really good day. My boss has some joints waiting.” Peskar continues, “Shortly thereafter Doug asked Connor if he wanted work. They told me multiple times, ‘It’s a really cool job. He gives us beer. He smokes us out.’”

Gail said this is the first job her son ever had in his life, the first time he made money – five bucks an hour. She showed me text messages Connor Stevens sent her at the time:

“A long day of labor for me. Made $60, long day 9:30 am to 9:30 pm … If I wanna do it again, I gotta get up at 9 tomorrow. Lifes rough.”

“I kinda feel like an ant”

“My friend doug got me the job. The $ goes fast. Turned out not to have work today. Still needa get footwear.”

As the alleged plot to blow up the bridge takes shape, the warehouse members say Shaquille Azir would swing by the warehouse in the morning to pick up the boys to do home repairs, but he would sit in the car and never interact with anyone else. Rachel says she asked Doug Wright for work with Azir, but was rebuffed, as were others who offered their services. Friends of Baxter's say Wright hooked him up with work with Shaquille April.

Peskar says jobs weren’t the only thing Azir was hooking them up with. Baxter admitted to him that he was taking Adderall, a widely abused prescription stimulant. Peskar says, “Connor was also taking it, and mentioned, ‘I have a connect for Adderall.’ Both Wright and Baxter said the connection for the Adderall was Azir. I asked Baxter where he got it from, and he said ‘Doug’s boss.’”

The warehouse was also buzzing with rumors that something was afoot. One individual told me that someone asked him, “Did you hear that Doug is trying to blow up a bridge?” The individual said, “I literally laughed it off. I said Doug is a moron. He doesn’t know how to do anything like that.” Another person fingered Ryan as the source of the rumors. Ryan allegedly told them in early April, “The warehouse is going to get raided. There are people who are going to do something dangerous with explosives. It’s sitting at a house.”

I pointed out to the warehouse group that after such a dramatic incident like the arrest of the five on terrorism charges, there is a tendency to see everything that happened over the previous months in a paranoid light. Julia Boyd, who is active with Occupy Cleveland, says, “A lot of the detrimental effects of this is everyone is suspicious of everyone else.”

I suggested maybe Ryan is just crazy, not an FBI operative. One person got Ryan on the line and put him on speaker phone. After a minute of small talk, Ryan claimed someone they all knew had been arrested. Everyone was concerned this signaled a wider sweep of activists on terrorism charges. Except hours later I met up with the person in question who was never arrested and was adamant that Ryan is an FBI operative. I was able to find Ryan’s number and called him. A male answered who claimed he wasn’t Ryan and hung up after a minute. Subsequent attempts to contact Ryan by phone were unsuccessful.

It remains to be seen if Ryan is on the FBI payroll or just mentally unhinged, but lawyers told me that at minimum Ryan would be of interest for the defense lawyers for the five and it might be possible to determine if he is a paid agent. Another lawyer, who has been handling high-profile political cases like the Cleveland 5 for nearly 40 years, mentioned that in addition to the use of undercover agents and informants, the FBI employs "agent provocateurs" to infiltrate and discredit political movements, changing the name of programs to make it appear as if it has reformed its underhanded ways.

In the case of the five Chicago activists who have been swept up on terrorism charges, defense attorneys charge that two police informants nicknamed “Mo” and “Gloves” were the masterminds. In the post-9/11 era the FBI has up to 60,000 informants and spies around the United States, according to an expose by Mother Jones. The FBI cut its teeth as a repressive police force during the Red Scare after World War 1, raiding homes and deporting thousands of legal foreign-born radicals in the labor, anarchist and socialist movements. After World War II, the FBI destroyed thousands of lives and decimated the left during the McCarthy Era. The FBI famously spied on Martin Luther King, Jr., during the 1960s and at one point thousands of agents were devoted to disrupting and sabotaging the anti-Vietnam War, student and black liberation movements.

During the 1980s the FBI spied on Central American solidarity activists. Since Sept. 11 the FBI has snared hundreds of Muslim Americans in cases involving informants who supplied the ideas, motivation and means for a terrorist plot. In recent years the FBI has termed “animal rights and environmental extremists,” as well as anarchists as some of the main domestic terrorist threats. It has used infiltrators, most infamously one code-named Anna, to entrap environmental activists. In 2008, the FBI sent a snitch by the name of Brandon Darby on a fishing expedition, and he managed to cajole and push two Austin, Texas youth into agreeing to make Molotov cocktails at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn. These were all political cases as are the two against the Cleveland 5 and the Chicago group.

The fact that the FBI sprang cases during the biggest Occupy events this year – May Day and NATO – indicates it has the Occupy movement in its sights. They are hardly the only ones. Reams of federal government documents secured by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund reveal widespread government surveillance and information gathering on the movement ranging from the Department of Homeland Security to the Pentagon. The public interest legal organization asserts that the documents regarding Occupy Wall Street “scratch the surface of a mass intelligence network including Fusion Centers, saturated with 'anti-terrorism' funding, that mobilizes thousands of local and federal officers and agents to investigate and monitor the social justice movement."

For now the Cleveland 5 are languishing in jail. Connor Stevens and Doug Wright have been on suicide watch according to those who visited them. Brandon Baxter wrote in a letter dated May 19, “So Skelly was just dragged out of his cell a bit ago, He wrote ‘They all want me to DIE’ all over his walls, They said they'll bring him back, but he may be a suicide watch for awhile.”

Their trial has been set for September 17, 2012, the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, after the defense objected to Sept. 11, which was originally scheduled as the trial start date.

Summing up the feeling of many supporters, Lea Tolls says, despite their hard backgrounds the five “all have good hearts and souls. I tried to give them comfort, guidance and stability. I used to call them my lost boys, and now they’re very lost. The richest country in the world can’t support them, give them healthcare, a proper education and they end up falling through the cracks. Instead of helping them, the FBI targets them for something nefarious and violent. It’s just disgusting that the government uses them towards this end.”


Arun Gupta is a founding editor of The Indypendent newspaper. He is writing a book on the decline of American Empire for Haymarket Books.

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