Citizens of Earthalujahville!
Didn’t they levitate the Pentagon and turn it orange, some years ago?
We are planning our return to the Devil’s Laboratory, the “RoboBee Lab” at Harvard University. We want to transform the four-story tall RoboBee Lab into a gigantic bee-hive.
We have sung our “ROBOBEE DON’T POLLINATE ME” gospel number in the hallways of the lab, and the scientists stumbled out and we talked. We’ve been to the lab twice now.
Our little film about the Robobee and coverage in the New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert, the Village Voice, and Al Jazeera America have raised this scandal to the light of day. The citizens are beginning to swarm. “You mean, they are building a drone to replace the Honey Bee, even while pesticides kill off the real bees?”
We have two more shows at Joe’s Pub in New York on June 15th and June 22nd.
Around the corner from our Joe’s Pub finale on June 22nd, is a second pub, grandly called Swift’s Hibernian Lounge. There, the singers and faithful, the beekeepers and artists – shall gather from 4 to 6 o’clock. We will draw and paint and sculpt and write songs, depicting the bee-hiving of the RoboBee lab. Monsanto and the Pentagon must be opposed with magic surrealism, honey and money. Oh glory beeeee it’s a fundraiser tooooo!
Faithful who won’t be with us in New York, do not despair!
• Watch the HoneyBeeLujah Show livestream at 2:00pm EDT on Sunday June 15th.
• Send your drawings of bees attacking the Robobee Lab to me at Revbilly@revbilly.com by June 20th. We will put as many of your creations on the walls as we can. You images can be by hand or photo-shop.
• Help us finance our soul-saving mission back to the RoboBee lab – our Third HoneyBeeLujah RoboBee Exorcism.
HoneyBeeLujah!
Reverend Billy Talen
Beware of the Robobee, Monsanto and DARPA
More About the Robobee, from The Church of Stop Shopping Website
Let’s consider for a moment the honey bee and its anticipated replacement, the RoboBee. Let’s pay a visit to the frankenbee’s parents, Monsanto and DARPA.
The RoboBee is a mechanical bee in the design stage at the Microrobotics Lab, housed in a well-appointed building at Harvard University. The RoboBee project’s Intelligence Office declares that the robotic inventors are inspired by the bee. The RoboBee project’s website and press releases use the imagery of the golden bees that we remember from our love of the cuddly buzzy honey-maker.
But something is wrong with this enterprise. While the RoboBee’s press is nearly all positive, and open-faced students have posted euphoric YouTube reports of their robotic work, the whole thing looks quite different to the people of the beekeeping community, who can’t help but point out that the real life honey bees and bumble bees are plummeting toward extinction.
After one of our singing rituals at the laboratory, a public relations man named Paul followed us out proclaiming, “But we have nothing to do with colony collapse, and we’re sorry that the honey bee is dying…” And yet the RoboBee project’s top goal, as stated on their website, is to achieve mechanical pollination. So Monsanto, Bayer, Syngenta, et al – the Big Ag companies whose agricultural chemicals are driving the honey bees die-off, must be very interested in this honey bee drone. How couldn’t they be waiting in the wings? A robot bee would be invaluable as a pesticide-proof pollinator.
These corporate giants apparently expect the RoboBee to come on-line just in time for the real insect’s extinction, since there is no evidence that they are reducing sales of the main suspect in the case of the vanishing bees, the neonicotinoid pesticides. (Which must be a very profitable item, one third of the pesticides used world-wide this year will contain neonicotinoids.) Every scenario for the death spiral of the bees involves these neuropathic chemicals. The beekeepers report that pollen-laden honey bees cannot find their way to the home hive, their navigation systems short-circuited by neonicotinoids carried in their bodies.
Let’s go to the stage-mother of the fake bee: the drone-maker, DARPA. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is the well-known drone designer that projects American power as a deadly buzzing sound in the sky above the villages of the mid-east. While American air-power always used the aerodynamics of falcons, ospreys and eagles – DARPA is teaching Pentagon futurists to dream of the quick turns and sneaky camouflage of bats, insects and hummingbirds.
The RoboBee’s public relations flacks argue that the military has nothing to do with the RoboBee. However, we have tapes of the lead scientist at the RoboBee’s lab, Dr. Rob Wood, publicly thanking DARPA for early financing of the project. He is a “DARPA Young Fellow,” a million-dollar award given to researchers whose work reflects the “values of the Department of Defense.” The RoboBee proponents have made a tactical to use Harvard University and the National Science Foundation for a veneer of non-drone prestige.
But there are smoking drones everywhere. Military awards have been pinned to Rob Wood’s chest by the Navy and Air Force. This wunderkind of nano-technology has even received a citation from that the President Barack Obama, drone warfare’s most famous fan. The RoboBee is a DARPA project and needs to be a part of Harvard’s burgeong divestment movement.
The flight of the RoboBee gives us a revealing map of how this marriage of executives and generals envision our future. It shows us the interlocking techniques of the military and industrial GMO agriculture. Monsanto’s factory farms have evolved toward the Pentagon’s approach to terrorism. The chief chemist of Agent Orange wants to cover the world’s surface with mono-culture cash crops, where a single strain of, say, corn, is all you see to the horizon. Pesticides and herbicides select and eliminate living things that are not contributing to profitability.
There is collateral damage in this kind of farming. Any living thing that we would call “wild” – is at risk. Honey bees from apiaries can be killed outright by the toxins, but also may not survive the Monsanto environment of dead wild plants and low-nutrient industrial crops. People living in rural areas are exposed to these toxins. Most tragically, indigenous people are swept aside by local bribed militia who present the leaders of traditional villages with rigged evictions and transfers of land title to the giant agriculture concerns. This is going on now in Africa, the so-called “Green Revolution,” directed from the offices of Monsanto and the White House.
With its agricultural theory of overwhelming force, Monsanto has joined the Pentagon’s presence in most countries. The two are rulers in the new corporatized planet. Monsanto and the DARPA’s child, the RoboBee, fits this nightmarish Philip K. Dick future perfectly. If one-third of the food we eat is pollinated by bees, then the out of control meandering of the honey bee is unacceptably inefficient. The vast mono-cultures that these executives envision require “Smartbees,” computer-directed mechanical pollinators that go straight to designated flower targets.
But as James Brown once sang, wait a minute. Anthropologists date our partnership with bees back into antiquity. We’ve participated with the bee in its meandering brilliance for thousands of years. We’ve loved the flight of the bee as it disappears headlong into the flower. We love the taste of honey. Wait a minute, does the RoboBee make honey? Or is this robot bee in essence is a little bomber, taking off not from hives but from runways, heading out on its mission for American interests?
The Honey Bee is a lover, a honey-maker, a lyric in erotic songs, an endearment we give each other. The RoboBee, on the other hand, is a drone being financed by the government. This is weaponized nature. The RoboBee is a killer.