It is all 4IR, though two items merge into Biomedical.
An eyewitness report from Eric Francis Coppolino about a pro-Palestine encampment being busted by overwhelming state armed power. This time it was at the State University of New York - New Paltz campus, on the Hudson Riven some 75 miles north of New York. It is15 miles south of where Coppolino lives, It is where he attended graduate school and became embroiled in a well—known (covered by the NY Times) legal battle with the administration to force it to perform a real cleanup after transformers explosions left dorms contaminated with dioxin. He won!
NY State Troopers, Sheriff's Emergency Response Team, called onto the SUNY New Paltz campus by Pres. Wheeler; peaceful pro-Palestine encampment of 150 students and community members arrested. Eric Francis Coppolino, 5/3/24. Photos by Eric Francis and Joachin Broughtin
Oh, the time will come up
When the winds will stop
And the breeze will cease to be breathin'
Like the stillness in the wind
Before the hurricane begins
The hour that the ship comes in
—Dylan
Text by Eric Francis. For prior article, see AMERICAN SPRING.
THERE ARE TWO THEORIES of what a protest is for. One is to make a point about an issue, to bring attention it, and maybe to score a victory. The other is that a protest serves to bring out the nature of the beast. Faced with a peaceful, antiwar sit-in protesting Isreal’s continued bombing and occupation of Gaza, Darrell Wheeler, president of the State University of New York at New Paltz, invited New York State Troopers and Ulster Counter Sheriff’s Emergency Response Team, onto the campus.
The encampment, one of many that has sprung up around the United States since one was busted at Columbia University in mid-April, was established Wednesday, and students had just spent one night there. It barely seemed like a protest; it was a little cluster of tents on the lawn, with the students taking care of food, security and other basic needs. The military response you’ll see in the following photos was directed against what you see above. I covered this Thursday night in American Spring.
The protest was set on a grass-covered residential quadrangle where there is no foot traffic; there are a few picnic tables, trees and wide sidewalks all around it. The students were not breaking any law, and were only in violation of a campus rule — till they took down their tents. Thursday afternoon, the Pres. Wheeler spoke with students, and offered a deal if they would remove the tents and go into closed negotiations. Students countered with an offer for open negotiations and then removing the tents.
Thursday at 7 pm, Michael Patterson, an assistant vice president for student affairs, descended from the administration building, and informed the students that they had moved the deadline to 9 pm. When I tried to question him, he strode across the campus with an assistant repeating “no comment, no comment.”
Meanwhile, I left the campus briefly to drive around the perimeter. I discovered that New York State Troopers and Sheriff’s deputies where mustering in the parking lot of Campus Police headquarters. I still could not believe they would be organized to pull this off. “The whole time cops were so incompetent, they didn't even have scissors to cut the zip ties off us on hand,” one student wrote to he this morning. “Some of them have never even been to New Paltz before last night and were trying to be buddy-buddy with us only moments after body slamming us on the floor.”
Then they moved out and set up three staging areas, essentially surrounding the quadrangle where the students had their tents pitched. My car was parked in what became one of those staging area. I spoke with the cops for a while, who seemed to be in good spirit and were not wearing riot gear. When they moved out just after 9 pm, I picked up my camera and went back to the quad, unsure where they went. Then I heard a rumor that they were donning riot gear. On the quad, about 150 students had formed a circle with their arms linked, facing outward, around a large tree — a maneuver they had practiced earlier in the evening.
Overhead, a State Police helicopter shined a bright spotlight on the crowd, while three drones sent video of the scene through a closed-circuit police television system. The action seemed to be justified by the notion that a large portion of the protesters were not students — and that this was some kind of unnatural, off-campus operation. While the organizers had it together and were well-informed, I did not notice any unusual presence of people who seemed like ‘outsiders’. Among those in the protest with the students were several faculty members and community members.
The skills the organizers used required some natural leadership ability and maybe about one afternoon of civil disobedience training. This was not a complicated direct action. But it was unprecedented for SUNY New Paltz (which my editors used to jokingly call SUNY No Pulse). Anywhere within the 64-campus SUNY system, nothing resembling this had happened for two generations.
.
Police formed a line in front of Gage Residence Hall, and marched incrementally across the quadrangle, approaching the approximately 150 protesters, who sat with their arms linked. Then the arrests began, starting at about 8 pm and continuing into the early hours of the morning. The disproportionality of the police response was astounding. In my knowledge of the State University system, nothing even close to this has happened since the spring of 1970, at the peak of student protests against American wars in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
In last night’s article, American Spring, I proposed that Pres. Wheeler would be taking the fall for this, if peaceful student protesters were arrested. We shall see. Hundreds of students were streaming recording video of the incident. There was very little professional media presence there — that I could see, only myself and Hudson Valley One, a local newspaper and website (which provided a measure of live coverage that I followed remotely through an associate editor).
Students were highly organized and had many drivers ready to pick up protesters at various courts across the local region, including in Highland, Ellenville and New Paltz. They were arraigned and charged with simple trespassing, which is a violation, not a misdemeanor.
Here are additional photos. [These follow!] More coverage Friday on Planet Waves FM. [A bunch of photos and a map of campus follow]
My comment at the page.
Jeffrey Strahl, Lockdown Times, 11AM, 5/3/24, US Pacific Time.
Thanks so much for being there and risking yourself to bring us the eyewitness report, just like you did with the same campus's dioxin-contaminated dorms 30 years ago.
I believe this is part of a nation-wide crackdown (NYU today!) coordinated by the Biden admin, which is trying to degrade and eliminate the entire movement so as to make way for an Israel attack on Rafah which it will sanction after all, no matter the weeks of saying such a move is "unacceptable," including possibly the driving of many of the inhabitants into Egypt.
Posted at Al Jazeera yesterday. regarding Biden.
"President Joe Biden says “order must prevail” on university campuses in the United States, just hours after police raided and dismantled another protest encampment [UCLA]in support of Palestinians.
In a brief news conference on Thursday, Biden said both the right to free speech and the rule of law “must be upheld” but stressed that “violent protest is not protected” “Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduation — none of this is a peaceful protest. Threatening people, intimidating people, instilling fear in people is not a peaceful protest,” he said.
“Dissent is essential to democracy, but dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish the semester and their college education,” Biden continued. “There’s a right to protest but not the right to cause chaos.”"
Trump meanwhile called the protesters "a bunch of left wing lunatics." RFK Jr way back in October twitted his total support of billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman who called upon Harvard to repress those speaking out against the genocide in Gaza.
And, yet even more photos of the event.
Tap the headline for the newest edition of any Substack. Eric Francis Coppolino, 5/3/24.
I’ve updated this a few times since sending at 4 am. Check the new PlanetWaves.FM at about 8 pm ET for full coverage, set in the context of the Kent State shootings — the 54th anniversary is Saturday. [It includes an interview of Laurel Krause, whose sister Alison was one of the four who were shot dead in Ohio on that day]
And, if you are for some reason STILL trusting of Dr Robert Malone, here is him speaking out about what’s going on in Palestine, posting graphics which are all out attacks against those opposing the genocide.
And, here is a report about what’s been going on at a bunch of campuses.
"Student Intifada" livestream: Stanford, University of Michigan, Indiana University, & more, The Real News Network, 5/2/24. An hour and 15 minutes.
"Seven months into Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, a student-led grassroots movement is spreading across the US and beyond, hearkening back to the student protests of the ‘60s that played a pivotal role in ending the US war in Vietnam. In what is being called the “student intifada,” with over 100 encampments going up at different college and university campuses, students, faculty, grad students, and other campus community members are exercising civil disobedience, occupying space on campuses, defying brutal repression from administrators and police, combatting skewed and wildly lopsided narratives in corporate media, and pressuring their universities to “disclose and divest” their investments in companies and financial institutions connected to Israel.
In this TRNN livestream, which will take place on Thurs, May 2, at noon ET, we will be speaking directly with encampment organizers/participants from the University of Michigan, the Indiana University, and Stanford University, and we will be getting updates from encampments from New York to California.[Links]”
My comments. Good interview with a student at Columbia, pre police assault. Excellent summary with a member of the Network team, particularly reporting on what she was an eyewitness to the last several days at UCLA. [The attack by armed pro-Israel goons on Tuesday night, which the police did nothing about, was followed by a police assault on Wednesday night, followed by mass arrests and the dismantlement of the encampment. ]And a panel with 2 students from Indiana University, Bloomington, and two from Stanford. The IU students have had to deal with 2 Bearcat SWAT vehicles (which are used by both police agencies as well as the military, and with snipers. And the Stanford crackdown so far is low-key. There are political differences i have with the general analysis, but great to have the eyewitness reports.
Ending this edition, lab-grown beef’s huge energy demand and huge negative environmental impacts.
Lab-grown meat is energy intensive – and up to 25 times worse for the climate than beef, Alice Friedemann, 5/3/24.
Preface. Meat production from animals uses a great deal of energy to produce, distribute, and refrigerate. Crops must be grown that erode soil and drain aquifers. Unfortunately, lab grown meat uses even more energy and also requires crops to extract nutrients to grow the meat as well as fossil fuel process heat, fossil produced electricity, fossil-based petrochemicals, buildings, lighting and more.
It is hard to actually know the full energy, environmental, and material impact of lab-grown meat because it is so new, and privately owned that the full life cycle is a mystery. In 1961 production was 70.6 million tons, in 2020 337.2 million tons, nearly five times higher. Poultry was 39%, pork 32%, beef 22%. And demand is expected to double by 2050 so clearly lab grown meat would help feed all the new comers.
But cell-based meat is expected to consume more energy and produce more carbon dioxide than potent methane from livestock (Roy 2021).
A great deal more research is required to optimize cell culture and reproduce the wide variety of meats from different animals, the health benefits and drawbacks, nutritional composition, whether they can compete with much cheaper plant-based alternatives and more (Chriki 2020).
Risner (2023) take a crack at it by just looking at what the lab culture process would likely be, but it isn’t a conclusive, or peer-reviewed paper because so much of the process is secret. Meat replacement with land-based and fermentation-based proteins has been commercial for several decades. Animal cell-based meat (ACBM) or “cultured meat” is so recent that commercial amounts are not available yet. Hype about it has raised over $2 billion in investment money so far, with happy talk of 60 to 70% replacement of animal meat by 2030-2040 but lately predictions have been more modest, perhaps half a percent with ACBM by 2030. ACBM is tricky because endotoxins must be removed as well as dozens of other issues, clearly this is a technology that may not be ready by 2030, if ever, read the paper and see for yourself. It is complicated and they only look at a small fraction of the overall process.
Another paper that looks at the issues and complexities is Escobar (2021).
Surely this is a far too complex and energy-intense technology to survive energy decline. It is dependent on fossil fuels and the electric grid (which is also dependent on fossil fuels with only a small fraction of electricity from wind and solar), as are the microchips, diesel transportation and manufacturing lab-grown meat require as well as part of their life cycle.
Alice Friedemann [Links]
***
Klein A (2023) Lab-grown meat could be 25 times worse for the climate than beef. Analysis finds the carbon footprint of cultivated meat is likely to be higher than beef if current production methods are scaled up because they are still highly energy-intensive. NewScientist dot com [Link]Meat produced from cultured cells could be 25 times worse for the climate than regular beef unless scientists find ways to overhaul energy-intensive steps in its production.
Lab-grown or “cultivated” meat is made by growing animal stem cells around a scaffold in a nutrient-rich broth. It has been proposed as a kinder and greener alternative to traditional meat because it uses less land, feed, water and antibiotics than animal farming and removes the need to farm and slaughter livestock, which are a major source of greenhouse gases.
However, Derrick Risner at the University of California, Davis, and his colleagues found that the global warming potential of cultivated meat, defined as the carbon dioxide equivalents emitted for each kilogram of meat produced, is 4 to 25 times higher than for regular beef. The researchers conducted a life-cycle assessment of cultivated meat that estimated the energy used in each step in current production methods. They predict that this will be similar regardless of which animal’s cells are being cultivated.
They found that the nutrient broth used to culture the animal cells has a large carbon footprint because it contains components like sugars, growth factors, salts, amino acids and vitamins that each come with energy costs. Energy is required to grow crops for sugars and to run laboratories that extract growth factors from cells. Each component must also be carefully purified using energy-intensive techniques like ultrafiltration and chromatography before they can be mixed into the broth.
This “pharmaceutical-grade” level of purification is required so that there are no contaminants such as bacteria or their associated toxins in the broth, says Risner. “Otherwise the animal cells won’t grow, because the bacteria will multiply much faster,” he says. At the moment, all cultivated meat is grown in pharmaceutical-grade nutrient broths, but the Good Food Institute told New Scientist that “cultivated meat companies are moving towards an input supply chain that is suitable for use in food production, rather than built for pharmaceuticals”, which will reduce the cost and energy required.
Risner says he is dubious about whether this will be possible because even trace levels of contamination can destroy animal cell cultures. Nevertheless, it may be possible in the future to engineer animal cells that are more resilient to contaminants, he says. These are issues that urgently need to be addressed before lab-grown meat is scaled up to industrial production, says Risner. “$2 billion has already been invested in this technology, but we don’t actually know if it’s going to be better for the environment,” he says.
Malone’s stance on the Israeli led Gaza slaughter lends new meaning to “gain of fiction”.
Lab grown human meat on the menu?