JHK’s Three-Act Play
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by James Howard Kunstler
Like entropy, the diminishing returns of technology never sleep. The hubristic techno-narcissism of the day, as seen in mankind’s efforts to fake-out the universe, will eventually get our one-way ticket to Palookaville punched. Perhaps there’s such a thing as being too cool after all.
The trick so far has been to create massive inflation, export the effects of it to other trading partners, and end up with a lot more money here in the USA, or the illusion of more money. Well, loans, for houses, cars, and college tuitions. In a word: debt. Let’s call it “Rainman Economics,” because it begins to resemble the behavior of a severely autistic human being who performs a small range of obsessive actions over and over and over, often centered on numbers. Rainman Economics is the policy of the Federal Reserve and, indirectly, the government under Mr. Obama.
The suave and genial Mr. Obama just doesn’t know what’s going on — despite being surrounded by minions with briefing folders, sages and vizeers, quantitative augurers neck-deep in mathematical goat entrails, and (always) the lone, silent soldier toting the dire nuclear “football.” Mr. Obama doesn’t know that the universe has launched us on a journey to a place beyond techno-industrialism — and it’s not Ray Kurzweil’s infinity of orgasms. It’s a place where no ring-tones are heard and not so much as a stretch-mark of the Kardashians remains to be found.
This is the eeriest summer. The coordinated effort to devalue gold — so as to maintain the sagging reputation of the world’s re$erve currency — has had the effect mainly of funneling it out of weak hands in the west to strong hands in the east, to countries that at one time or another we regarded as adversaries. China and Russia have been backing up their respective trucks at the gold warehouse loading dock, and before too long they will have yuan and rubles with more credibility than the US dollar.
In these games of currency war, there are too many moving parts for comfort. Paradoxically, the American position is all about maintaining undeserved comfort, that is a standard of living that is no longer earned but borrowed from the darkest pool of magic capital: the future of declining expectations. Enjoy the flat screen TVs, water-parks, RVs, and Happy Meals while you can. There is sand in the gears of the moving parts that have made all that possible. It’s quite a trick to debase your currency for strategic advantage and at the same time maintain the world’s credibility in it. The strategic advantage is that debasement allows you to dissipate existing debt by stealth. But that trick is not working too well at the moment in the USA because too many other players are trying the same thing, and doing it badly, so people in foreign lands are dumping their currencies to take refuge in the dollar. The chief product of all this motion is not “prosperity” but instability. That is the last thing that economies need, even if the gamesters in the financial markets can arbitrage it to their advantage.
Instability translates into uncertainty, especially about the relative value of currencies. For the moment, holders of weakening currencies are seeking refuge in seemingly “stronger” dollars in bubbling equity markets. Many more dollars have been stashed on the balance sheets of the Federal Reserve in the form of bonds purchased in galumphing bales since 2009 — only the catch is that many of these bonds are worthless, especially the mortgage-backed securities. The collateral exists in the form of mold-infused sheetrock, swimming pools with algae blooms, and strip malls left with a single tenant: the wig shop. The Fed will never be able to unload this hoard of garbage, even if it “tapers” its buying of new garbage. The dollars that the Fed creates out of nothing are trapped in this fetid backwater of rotting capital, destined to go nowhere — surely not into activity that produces real wealth, or the means to continue being civilized.
Something’s in the air this hot, soggy summer and it smells like the loss of faith. In another month, as the nights grow cool we’ll approach the sober season of fall, when the air seems to possess powers of magnification and suddenly things can be seen clearly. The high frequency robo trading bots are good at detecting microscopic differences in digital quant pools, but they don’t have the finer sensory antennae of human brains for forces outside the rather narrow math narrative.
For instance, I communed with my fellow citizens this Fourth of July weekend for a few hours at a little beach in a Vermont state park. It was a family kind of place. The mommies and daddies were putting on a competitive tattoo display (along with competitive eating). So many skulls, Devil heads, snakes, screaming eagles, flags, and thunderbolts. I suppose they acquire these totem images to ward off some apprehended greater harm, the metaphysically inchoate forces marshalling at the margins of what little normal life remains in this nation of rackets, swindles, and tears. All was nonetheless tranquility, there by the little lakeside, with the weenies grilling and the pop-tops popping. A three-year-old came by where I was working on my tan on a towel in the grass, supine. He asked me if I was dead. Not yet, I told him. Behind him a skull smoking a doobie loomed in blue and red ink on his daddy’s thigh. My people. My country.
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First.
Instability translates into uncertainty, especially about the relative value of currencies. For the moment, holders of weakening currencies are seeking refuge in seemingly “stronger” dollars in bubbling equity markets.
Funny how that works. Things going to hell… and the dollar gets stronger.
You say “massive inflation”? Say what? Those pesky facts regarding inflation get in the way of your thesis.
Consumer prices climbed 1.1 percent in the 12 months through April, according to a measure watched by the Fed that excludes food and fuel — matching the smallest increase since records began in 1960. That’s down from 1.9 percent in the year ended April 2012.
Pity there isn’t a Brad around here to say “Dammit Janet.” The repartee would be amusing to read. I happen to have an entry with the subject line “Science Fiction, Double Feature” but I won’t use it right now. Maybe later.
Instead, I’ll respond to your point about inflation. There are other kinds of inflation out there besides price inflation for goods and services. There are inflations of the currency supply and of assets. Right now, there is inflation of the currency supply which appears to be fueling asset inflation. Mr. Kunstler might just be referring to this phenomenon instead of the CPI.
The Fed’s inflation of the money supply could also fuel price and wage inflation, but isn’t. The economy is too depressed for that. As you’ve noted, CPI is low. It’s even true with energy. I haven’t checked the national averages, but in my little corner of metro Detroit gas prices are actually a few cents lower than they were at this time last year. That’s despite the unrest in Egypt.
http://crazyeddiethemotie.blogspot.com/2013/07/prices-rise-after-july-4th-but-still.html
There is no definition of “massive inflation” in this week’s screed.
Today’s 30-yr. fixed mortgage rate is 4%. In 1981 the 30-yr. fixed mortgage rate was 16% Even those high rates did not qualify as “massive inflation” … and did not create panic, and did not sink the economy. I don’t think CFN appreciates what hyperinflation is.
You could even argue inflation has DECREASED thanks to QE (we don’t have 16% mortgages today), thanks to the Fed printing money out of thin air, thanks to these past 40 years off the gold standard.
But it’s not just “massive inflation” (say 60% mortgage rates) that has failed to materialize in spite of the fear mongering of ultra-rightists. Their “personal debt” argument is also bogus.
Supposedly the USA is in ever increasing personal debt, mindless victims of their own financial predicament, force to borrow to stay alive. That is not true either.
Total consumer debt per household now averages $16,046. That sounds terrible until you realized that in just five short years our fellow citizens have brought DOWN their personal debt from $35,245 prior to the economic downturn in 2008. They now have paid off over one half their debt.
Cutting personal debt by half should not have happened, should not have even been possible, given the nightmare scenarios painted here each week about people being out of work (how do you pay down debt if you’re out of work?), about “massive inflation” (how do you pay down debt if you have the spend more and more inflation-ridden money on higher and higher priced essentials?), etc.
They can do it because the stories we are told here about “massive inflation” and out-of-control “personal debt” are not true.
Y’all can scream “the sky is falling” all you want… the facts just don’t support your point of view. Going from $35,245 debt to $16,046 debt in just five years is the opposite of “the sky is falling” … it is an indication people have their heads on straight and are taking personal responsibility for their financial situation.
It is just not all as black as it is painted here week after week. The facts prove it. Inconvenient facts.
I saw that factoid about personal debt declining a few days ago. As you say, it’s a pretty amazing thing considering stagnated wages, “everyone’s” house being underwater, and the astronomical unemployment rate (Forbes says the real unemployment rate is 14.3% 7/5/13). Funny thing about that unemployment rate…people don’t have to actually get jobs, just use up their benefits and “poof” they are no longer unemployed. All that unemployment and all those bad mortgages have caused an awful lot of bankruptcies. Funny thing about bankruptcy…every time the judge bangs his gavel, “poof” another $35,249 dollars in average credit card debt goes up in smoke, or down the rabbit hole, or [insert your favorite metaphor here].
So the question is did people *actually* pay off their credit cards? That’s a serious question because I don’t know. I do know a lot of no-longer-unemployed people who don’t get paychecks and several who no longer pay credit card bills.
Like yourself, I don’t know either (other than the evidence of my own eyes). With today’s access to information, why don’t we know, and why is it so difficult to find out?
As you point out, the actualities are being masked or outright hidden. Someone is trying to keep things out of the awareness of the general public. (And we get unending happy-talk propaganda from gum’mint-sponsored entities.)
Now why the marked increase in fairy tales and the veiling of some very serious predicaments? I smell tipping-points and desperation to maintain control and power as things are in an obvious state of disintegration.
Dropping by to say ‘Hi’ to ya’all. I wonder how many of the [Im] posters here are Asoka-Carol-DOD? And
Kyoostik
Jaygo
Buck
Ehero
Tripp
Turkle
Any of you still drop by here?
Theres a noteworthy clip at Solari.com
of someone who grows food for 5 or more on 20 x 200 in a city.
“Rainman economics”–I like it. I think that phrase has a future. Also, nice touch with “re$erve.” The unorthodox orthography gets your point across. As for your opening, I had a feeling you’d write about entropy again, along with the point that industrialization, with its prevailing value of efficiency, just increases the rate at which entropy occurs. I stumbled over some research that bolsters your point. It compares the metabolism of cities with that of stars. The bigger both are, the faster they burn. In the case of stars, the more efficient burning of its fuel results in bright stars that burn out young. Really big ones go supernova. If the analogy holds for cities, the comparison is not just insightful, but ominous.
http://crazyeddiethemotie.blogspot.com/2013/07/cities-stars-entropy-and-sustainability.html
You say “massive inflation”? Say what? Those pesky facts regarding inflation get in the way of your thesis.
Well, to be fair, janet, JHK did say the inflation was being exported to the U.S.’s trade partners. I think an elaboration on the specifics of that mechanism are in order. I’ve read about it before, but following the rabbit down this finance hole, you’re eventually sure to get lost and never find your way out. It’s best to keep your eye on the big picture and avoid the hole of no return.
I’m not so sure about currency wars. Increasingly, former so-called nations are joined at the hip. The days of Nation-States have passed us by, and we are now in a sort of Limbo as a new alignment comes into focus…..a deliberate alignment. It should be clear to everyone by now, that the Snowden spectacle reveals that alignment. They’re all on board, with the exception of Cuba perhaps….and even Cuba is just a matter of time. When Fidel kicks off, Cuba will ramp up tourism, and with that, the cockroaches will set up shop as they have everywhere else on the planet.
Carol, one thing you don’t get the same sense of because you live in the U.S. is how much Cuba already HAS ramped up tourism. That’s because YOU and your fellow countrymen in the Benighted States can’t go. But in the Free Country of Canada, it’s no sweat. At least, not until you get there. All sorts of average folks go on holiday to Havana, especially because Mexico, the long-time favourite hot spot for chilled Canajuns, is getting a rep as a shot zone. Hell, the woman who cleans the psychiatric ward where I work just got back from a week at an all-inclusive Cuban resort with her tattooed biker husband. You don’t get more working-class than that, mop-swingers jetting down to the communist Caribbean.
BTW, how many hospital janitresses in the U.S. would be able to afford something like a foreign holiday? Wages are good here, even for labourers. America is SO screwed, except for the top 5%. But the other 95% don’t glom it. Ah well, the average North Korean thinks he or she is living in the workers’ paradise too…
I know Cuba has a robust tourist trade, but nothing resembling it’s Pre-Castro heyday when it was the Caribbean Vegas. I have no doubt it will be that once again. When that days come, it won’t have the same appeal for Canadians.
There will be no more “firsting” on this blog.
The next “firster” will be banned.
Also unwelcomed: stupid political puns, e.g. “Repugnicans.”
I hate that stuff.
Use of the word “fucktard” gets you banned automatically. I just don’t like the tone of it.
Profane language is allowed, but must be used politely.
–JHK
A few comments on the story and the other posters.
It is perhaps true that directly measured inflation is not high in the United States. That is because debt is used as a substitute for increasing the money supply, which would cause inflation. If instead, goods and services are paid with IOU’s, then the money supply is not immediately increased.
I am absolutely certain that Obama and others in the Executive Branch have a clear picture of possible dire scenarios and the trajectory of the financial system. But they are hamstrung from doing anything about it. And as previous posters have stated, if they ran around yelling that the sky was falling, it would put the population in a panic. You can look at the whole situation as a game of musical chairs. When the music stops, those with the power and the money (usually the same people) believe that they will easily be able to snag a chair, because the game is rigged in their favor.
I, like JHK, am also sceptical of many unfounded conspiracy theories, but we should be clear. Men do collude and conspire to achieve their goals. And the financial system is the primary instrument of such mechanations. The political system is a mere side show to the central banks and their associated financial institutions. The Federal Reserve is a cartel of the largest and wealthiest of these, and it is able to set policy that favors its own industry. Even if Obama or some other political leader wanted to do something about this, they are effectively impotent.
And the whole system is far more fragile and haphazard than most people believe. A mere unwinding of certain classes of derivatives nearly brought the entire system crashing to the ground. You might liken Bernacke and his ilk to sailors in a ship, bailing out water just to keep the ship afloat.
@ Peak Everything said “The political system is a mere side show to the central banks and their associated financial institutions”
This is best expressed by the awesome Frank Zappa, who told us all that “Politics is the entertainment division of the industrial-military complex”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pbZlKja0bwI
I’m pretty happy JHK is going forward with these guidelines—its certainly about time a quality blog like this encourages a little politeness, and seriousness, among responders.
From djc, an avid reader from the very beginning of CFN.
Thank you, JHK!
You have neatly outlined the zeitgeist+reality of the 3-card-monte financing of what turned out to be the Great Crumbling. (According to our greatest of Grand Viziers [Dick “Tater” Cheney] the ‘Murkin lifestyle is non-negotiable, so we’re gonna drive this sucker like we stole it [we did], and until the wheels fall off.)
The wig shop, eh? More ‘covering over’ of things? 😉
“… Instability translates into uncertainty…”
Without fail!
Ain’t got trust? Then you ain’t got shit.
…But doesn’t Rainman Economics fix all that with new, designer algorithms? Well, mebbe not.
(Sorry for the Dick Tater Cheney groaner; it’s just kinda irresistible! Yeah, yeah, I’ll desist. 😉 )
The wig shop, eh? More ‘covering over’ of things?
Or maybe it’s a reference to the Emperor Has No Hair.
From my vantage, it’s nail salons, not wig shops. Nail salons are more ubiquitous than McDonalds. That’s fitting as well. We can all clean out the dirt from underneath each other’s finger nails resulting from digging in the earth to make our mud cakes and pies.
Interesting news came out this morning: Elliot Spitzer is going back into politics, running for comptroller of NYC:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/07/08/spitzer_s_resignation_was_a_mistake_comeback_may_be_hard_but_he_never_should.html
I dislike agreeing with the font of conventional spurious wisdom that is Matt Yglesias, but he’s right that Spitzer never should have resigned over his prostitution scandal. In American politics, two things are utterly predictable: (1) people will treat politicians’ private lives as though they’re the public’s business; and (2) the politicians who survive the resulting scandals will be not be the ones with a sense of shame or honour, but sanctimonious hypocrites like the serial cheater Newt Gingrich.
As NY governor, Spitzer was all over the banksters and treated them as the criminals they were, and are. Just think how much difference he could have made by sending even one well-groomed megalomaniacal fraud to prison. I hope he wins.
Elrond, sorry to go all Thetan on your engram, but I think Spitzer was right to resign in shame. He broke the law, and a high-level pol who does that with some irrationally risky business should not be trusted with high powers. Dickish but attempting-revival Anthony Weiner also has my OK to stay away. Too bad the same does not apply to Gingrich, David Vitter, Larry Craig and a list of other Republikkkans too long to bog down a page with. But those fcukers have no shame. That’s because they’re too busy hurling it at everyone else. And we’re only talking about the sexual scandals here. Don’t get me started on the financial crimes of the people who have the power.
Point is, politicians need to be honourable. At least a little! A person who cheats and lies in their personal life is going to do the same in their official. If the world had moral people pulling the strings, things would not be as knotty as they are. An impossible, laughable notion, for sure. Which is one of the reaons why we’re doomed.
Good morning,
No. “Kunstler refuses to die!” – He should have told the little one. That’s why he writes a blog and podcasts every week.
Publish or Perish!
There’s a lot of people who will not accept that the “leader of the free world” could be ignorant about anything having to do with how the world really works. That the president of the grand USA could be MISinformed in order to be MANipulated by the same people who groomed him for the job. They believe he allows these informers to jog with him, mine private USA telecommunications and wake him up in the wee hours when things start going down on the other side of the planet. Remember that part of the presidential debate about getting one’s circadian rhythms out of whack by the 3 AM phone call? He’s a public servant with a lot of sensitive information laid out before him which is mainly interpreted by other people. Like any executive, he has people to handle stuff when he’s sleeping and tells them not to call unless it’s for a very good reason – there’s something he can actually DO about it. What can the president do about the economy? He helped revive GM because that’s what everyone wanted and it makes sense when the car makers on t.v. say everyone’s going to need a new Ford F150 every 11 years. They’re not concerned about how people are going to pay for them or how their engines are going to run on 10$ a gallon oil. That kind of stuff is beyond the scope of a President’s term! And people are telling him they’ll figure out a way to power everything on solar cells, coal, nicotine, caffeine and natural gas in 10 years. By then he’s out of office and has an online library instead of a brick and mortar one like everyone else.
I disagree with your assertion that Preznit Hopey (is that a too-stupid political phrase?) doesn’t know what’s going on. There have been plenty of studies by the Defense Department, insurance companies and other agencies focused on long-term planning that have forecast the looming dangers from climate change, Peak Oil, etc. The people at the top are not stupid. They didn’t get to where they are by being clueless about the obvious.
Who are stupid are the self-absorbed, apathetic masses. And it’s in the interest of TPTB to keep them that way. Because if the mass hologramedia (h/t Joe Bageant for the “hologram” meme, RIP) were constantly trumpeting the notion that “Everything is running out! Your life is going to change drastically! Stop breeding like yeast and wasting so much shit!” it would be terrible for business. Think of the children! The ones who wouldn’t be born to parents who had to outfit them with sweatshop made cutie-pie clothes from Babies R Us, to cite one small example.
If people had a sense of what’s coming, they’d be lurching around like a panicked herd on the Chisholm Trail, and who knows what might happen? The Owners like predictability. Leads to profitability. They’re gonna milk this current pattern of civilization for all it’s worth. That way, they get to live in power and luxury for as long as they’re alive. What comes after the milk runs dry, they don’t care, because they’re sociopaths, and not caring about what happens to anyone else is what sociopaths DO.
Bukko,
A fine summation of The Big Picture!
The “panicked herd on the Chisholm Trail” (in a walloping thunderstorm, no doubt) is a really good one too.
Ozone, are you the same person who commented under that screen name at The Automatic Earth? I think of Ilargi and Stoneleigh’s framing a lot when I analyze the world. “Herd behaviour,” “building a lifeboat,” “the best time to dig a well is BEFORE you run out of water” etc. They, JHK, Dmitry Orlov, Michael Ruppert and a scant few others are like the First Family of Doom.
Hmmmm, certainly not recently. I wouldn’t have anything trenchant to add to the maze of mathematical analysis, like many of their guest posters and commenters. (Fascinating stuff, and I also appreciate how it’s all ‘humanized’, for the most part.)
A couple at Archie’s Place (The Archdruid Report), but that was a few weeks back.
Although the First Family of Doom are only faintly heard to be ranting on their fruitboxes at Bughouse Square [tm Bukko], more passers-by are beginning to tune in as officially sanctioned broadcasting comes to be regarded with a jaded and suspicious eye. (Reality is starting to intrude on lifestyle pursuits.)
“because they’re sociopaths”
Do you really think our leaders are that much different than everyone else? They are drawn from the public at large and share the same psychology.
Most people desire the same things: a comfortable existence, increasing prosperity of their society, financial security and wealth, a good future for their children, etc.
The real quandary is that many of our leaders also have what most people would consider good intentions, but these desires are leading to unintended outcomes, based on often unseen repercussions.
For instance, it is almost universally considered to be an unequivocally “good thing” when medical science cures diseases and increases lifespans. But the unintended side effect is that overpopulation is exacerbated, which puts further burden on the resource and energy supplies.
There are a lot of Catch-22’s like this in how our society works. I don’t blame our current situation on some kind of sinister outlook of our leaders. Our type of civilization simply has basic flaws that are overlooked in the endless march upwards.
And the remedies are not pleasant. What would solve the overpopulation problem? There could be restrictions on having children or at least removal of subsidies for them or (and I’m not advocating this) forced sterilization. But having children is considered almost a universally positive behavior.
So that’s the issue as I see it. It is not necessarily the fault of our leaders. They merely reflect our hopes and desires.
“The Owners like predictability. Leads to profitability.”
See here’s the thing. Most everyone likes predictability and stability. Instability and chaos are not desirable characteristics for a society for the vast majority of people.
“They’re gonna milk this current pattern of civilization for all it’s worth. That way, they get to live in power and luxury for as long as they’re alive.”
We are all milking it. The average person today in America, even most of those living in poverty, has a better standard of living and quality of life than royalty of only a few hundred years ago. We all like what technology and progress has brought us, but we want to discard the unintended consequences.
Just think how much difference he could have made by sending even one well-groomed megalomaniacal fraud to prison.
Really? Madoff was sent to jail and look what kind of difference that made. Exactly zero difference. And don’t get me started about Martha Stewart.
They know how to pick their token prosecution cases, you have to give them that. Madoff was the perfect scapegoat. The name is perfect. It quite literally reads as Made Off. Sorry you had to be the fall guy, Bernie. Them’s the breaks when you play in the big leagues.
What about Snowden?
Snowed In in Russia?
Also, too, Carol, Madoff screwed over a lot of rich people. The unprosecuted financial criminals merely bilked millions of little people and Norwegian teachers’ retirement funds. A million of us don’t count for as much as one millionaire, in the halls of power.
Plus, Madoff’s fraud was a simple Ponzi. Exposing IT did not show the fraud that is at the heart of the cheque-kiting scheme that is “interbank lending” and all the other fractional reserve phoniness. You bust some bankmaggots for that and more people might start waking up the the way things really work in the moneysphere. And they’d say “Holy shit — this is so bogus that it can’t go on!” I say that all the time. But it’s just me, and other econobsessed Doomers. As long as it’s just a fringe ranting on our fruitboxes at Bughouse Square, we can safely be ignored.
Really? Madoff was sent to jail and look what kind of difference that made. Exactly zero difference. And don’t get me started about Martha Stewart.
Exactly my point: The ones who did go to prison are just the ones who weren’t the real problem. I feel for anyone who invested with Bernie Madoff in good faith, but his operation did not endanger the entire world economy as far as I know, and his victims at least got their pound of flesh in the end. Whereas people like Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein, AIG’s Joe Cassano, and Lehman Brothers’ Dick Fuld effectively ruined the lives of millions of people while wrapping dynamite around the foundations of the financial system, all for a percentage, and not one of them has come within a mile of wearing an orange jumpsuit.
Spitzer would have been one of the few people in a position to make it happen, if he’d only been able to keep it in his pants. Personally I’ll spot my elected officials a little adultery if they’ll just execute their offices faithfully. But that’s just me.
The thing I like most about these stories, are the little, overlooked details. Like Spitzer fucking with his socks on. That’s great. Why couldn’t the prick take his socks off? Is he that much of a control freak? Is he that insecure? Does it give him an enhanced orgasm? Or with Clinton and Lewinsky, Clinton’s crooked cock. What a great detail, and the press didn’t put it front and center, the prudes. Clinton’s dick is so crooked, he can fuck around corners. The rest of the crap surrounding these stories is just that….crap….and boring crap, at that.
” Like Spitzer fucking with his socks on.”
Is it possible he didn’t want to get athletes foot??
That’s a distinct possibility, or perhaps he’s embarrassed by his ugly toes. He had good taste in women, though. That service provided some real beauties.
“…the American position is all about maintaining undeserved comfort, that is a standard of living that is no longer earned but borrowed from the darkest pool of magic capital”. I’ve never heard anybody say it better. Thanks.
In my neck of the nation, Redwood City California, the City leaders blocked off a bunch of downtown streets and rolled in bright and shiny American automobiles manufactured in the 1950s and 1960s. “Happy Motoring Land” though no vehicles were moving. To give the affair a bit of Vietnam War angst a equally bright and shinny Bell UH-1 Iroquois helicpoter, a.k.a. Huey, circled overhead a short distance turning tight loops as if closing the entire retro affair with a giant invisible ribbon and bow.
A sobering view James. A few years back, when I was still capable of caring about these sorts of things, I set out a book. I’m not sure I believe in much of what I wrote anymore but I’m posting it, a chapter a week so you all can decide (chapters appear in reverse order because the most recently posted takes the top position). http://www.thesisa.org
Vermont? Now a very backward state, run by the likes of Bernie and Pat.
Chances that all at the beach were low info voters, except you. You
need focus on unions. JFK created them with an Executive Order 50 years ago this summer. They now contol America. Look at the locals,
fire, police, teachers. Check out the state workers unions, noting Bernies and Pats connections. Check out the IRS union, paired with NRC union, to understand why nuclear power is dead and dying.
Coolidge said no, FDR said no, but JFK cut a deal and created the municpal union controlled USA in 50 years. The unions profess to run the country but only serve themselves. Hence you get 4 more years of Obama ineptitude and they get get more of a death grip on America.
The implication that nuclear power is dying leads to burning fossil fuels burning, a real trajedy. We will need all the fossil fuels for the future, for plastics and medicine.
Keep up your good blog. Thanks.
JD Candon
Unions control America? That’s patently absurd, and there’s zero evidence to support the assertion.
Sure, there’s small and waning blocs of vestigial power within certain blue state cities. But that represents the last outpost of union power, and is under heavy assault right now.
Is John Corzine in jail yet?
Last I heard, he’s vacationing in Cuba.
Why is he doing that? Is there political bagman money to be raised in Cuba for the next puppet to succeed Obama in the Punch-and-Judy show that is the American “two-party, one-Syndicate” state? I presume you’re jesting about Cuborzine, of course. Of all the reasons I despise Obama (and keep in mind that I’m someone who emigrated from the U.S. in 2005 because I detested George Bush THAT much) his failure to do a single goddamned thing about the financial criminals is the biggest.
Remember what ‘they’ did to Paula Deen, Martha S, Leona H? They throw a little meat to the dogs sometime.
Wages are good here, even for labourers. America is SO screwed, except for the top 5%.
I hear ya. Canada rocks. Where else can you, as a member of the 95%, get away with murder, except in Canada? Zachary knows, but he can’t answer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVAzioPSKm4
Of all the reasons I despise Obama (and keep in mind that I’m someone who emigrated from the U.S. in 2005 because I detested George Bush THAT much) his failure to do a single goddamned thing about the financial criminals is the biggest.
I don’t despise Obama because what has transpired is exactly what I expected and actually predicted. He’s just a face, a spokesman….a figurehead. Contrary to what Bush proclaimed, the Prez. is not the decider, it only appears as though he is. The office he resides in is a rubber stamp with a face attached to it that changes every four or eight years.
Five minutes spent reviewing Obama’s main campaign contributors back in early fall 2008 disabused me of any illusions about who Obama represented, long before he was elected it was clear that Wall Street had a lock on both candidates.
You might want to go a little easier on the tattooed masses. Although I am not personally into inking myself, it strikes me as an attempt (albeit largely unconscious perhaps) by people to reconnect with a tribe, to express their individuality, and to declare their commitment to ideas and values. In other words, to reclaim some humanity in a commoditized corporatized world.
Seriously.
Tattoos are as much a commodity as anything else these days. The tattooed crowd is as fake as any other. I see them as no different than the tart who cakes on her make-up every morning, or the hillbilly who can’t go anywhere without a ballcap on his head.
There’s no accounting for taste. You should be happy that you can stand out from the crowd simply by NOT caking on make up.
As for tattoos, they have indeed been co-opted by commercial forces and become just one more thing to market to the masses. That’s what commercial forces do.
However, this does not change the underlying motivations of the consumers, although it does dilute it, and tends to send the commoditized item into the cycle of simulacra.
No way. Intelligent, sensitive people do not get tattoos for the purpose of making some kind of public statement or shock. He is describing human bumperstickers of rebellion and mutillation. Pop singer Rianna is a very good example of commercial tattoos; wikipedias profile lists all her tattoos like they’ve become as important to her character as her talent and ambition. Tattoos have no value no matter how ornate and expensive, they donot make you exotic creatures, just ignorant of their origins and original purpose. There is no tribe! Tattos are as empty as a used pez depenasor!
We have bread a generation now at least 2 or 3 in a row which is shiftless with a major goal in life to avoid pain and game the system. I am no right winger and loath weak thinking but when you see scores of people quitting gainful employment to entertain themselves or qualify for public assistant. Including my fellow baby boomers living off of students loans going back for the 3rd degree of a life time. When do they thing they will have the time in their short remaining lives to pay back the loan? Then when or if the benefits end circle back to documented work. Add in the millions working ‘under’ the tax mans table. All the while undocumented workers toil in the shadows keeping our food and service economy running. Massive theft at the top of the economic chain. Then if that is not bad enough the sense of entitlement of all to enjoy the fruits of once in a 100 million year old energy and near or neo slaves here and around the world.
James, can someone be banned for displaying awful grammar? Case in point above.
Coupla interesting snippets from the news over the weekend:
1) ‘A 2012 report by aircraft manufacturer Boeing said the industry would need 460,000 new commercial airline pilots in the next two decades – with 185,000 of them needed in Asia alone.’ OK, I get the fact that Boeing has a vested interest in trumpeting the need for their product. But what are these tens of thousands of anticipated planes going to be using for fuel? Pixie dust? Bakken play shale gas? Ultra-efficient furnaces kept piping hot with the inexhaustible supply of paperwork generated from failed mortgage backed securities and collateralized debt obligations? It’s a pity you can’t harness hubris.
2) Yahoo featured an analyst named Ron Baron who confidently predicted that within 20 years the Dow will be at 60,000. At the rate we’re going, he may well be right. But by that time, quantitative easing and all the other financial sleight-of-hand will have so debased the currency that we’ll be carrying around wheelbarrows full of $10 million notes to buy bread at the local Piggly-Wiggly.
Sigh………..just another day in the United States of Moronica……
I said this upthread:
I’m not so sure about currency wars. Increasingly, former so-called nations are joined at the hip. The days of Nation-States have passed us by, and we are now in a sort of Limbo as a new alignment comes into focus…..a deliberate alignment.
The following link expresses it nicely. The author’s analysis validates my thinking on this issue and his break-down of the issues resonates with me.
http://thebreakthrough.org/journal/debates/against-cosmopolitanism-a-breakthrough-debate/the-arbitrage-of-the-nation-state
The real threat to national sovereignty is not cosmopolitan aggregation of power into a higher form by supranational state actors, but rather the increasing impotence and fragmentation of nation-states in the face of threats from subnational non-state actors. Specifically, nation-states are being undermined simultaneously (1) from below, by transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), and (2) from above, by transnational financiers who have innovated means to capture or to evade national regulatory apparatuses. Unlike the cosmopolitans, these actors do not have as a goal the usurping of the nation-state either individually or as some form of conspiratorial group. Rather, degrading the capacity and legitimacy of their “host” nation-states is simply an emergent, unintended, and indeed unwanted byproduct of their activities.
What both these classes of actors are doing is exactly what legitimate international businesses have always done, namely engaging in arbitrage. Their businesses are built on taking advantage of differences in regulatory arrangements and prices for land, labor, capital, and technology in different locations: buy cheap in one place, sell dear in another. The technologies that underpin the ability to engage in this arbitrage — synchronized logistics and transportation, telecommunications and the Internet, instant electronic payment systems — are the underlying drivers of what we today refer to as globalization.
Not that you will be tempted to ever get a tattoo, we know you hate them even more than you hate cheese puffs but here’s another good reason for you.
I was informed recently by a young tattoo artist that old skin is much harder to work on than young skin. So if you are tempted to go under the needle you can remind yourself that any pretty young thing inking you up will be constantly reminded that you are an old fart while she buzzes away.
Despite your charm.
K-Dog
Please come visit. I will sit and roll over if you do.
You were looking pretty hard at that tattoo. Maybe you did need to know this.
re: “the metaphysically inchoate forces marshalling at the margins of what little normal life remains..” — Cool..
Totally Cool,
INCHOATE:
being only partly in existence or operation : incipient; especially : imperfectly formed or formulated : formless, incoherent
Storm clouds gather.
Yes, and remember, there is no choate, only inchoate.
…I happen to be very gruntled about that!
There is no definition of “massive inflation” in this week’s screed.
Today’s 30-yr. fixed mortgage rate is 4%. In 1981 the 30-yr. fixed mortgage rate was 16% Even those high rates did not qualify as “massive inflation” … and did not create panic, and did not sink the economy. I don’t think CFN appreciates what hyperinflation is.
You could even argue inflation has DECREASED thanks to QE (we don’t have 16% mortgages today), thanks to the Fed printing money out of thin air, thanks to these past 40 years off the gold standard.
But it’s not just “massive inflation” (say 60% mortgage rates) that has failed to materialize in spite of the fear mongering of ultra-rightists. Their “personal debt” argument is also bogus.
Supposedly the USA is in ever increasing personal debt, mindless victims of their own financial predicament, force to borrow to stay alive. That is not true either.
Total consumer debt per household now averages $16,046. That sounds terrible until you realized that in just five short years our fellow citizens have brought DOWN their personal debt from $35,245 prior to the economic downturn in 2008. They now have paid off almost one half their debt.
Cutting personal debt by half should not have happened, should not have even been possible, given the nightmare scenarios painted here each week about people being out of work (how do you pay down debt if you’re out of work?), about “massive inflation” (how do you pay down debt if you have the spend more and more inflation-ridden money on higher and higher priced essentials?), etc.
They can do it because the stories we are told here about “massive inflation” and out-of-control “personal debt” are not true.
Y’all can scream “the sky is falling” all you want… the facts just don’t support your point of view. Going from $35,245 debt to $16,046 debt in just five years is the opposite of “the sky is falling” … it is an indication people have their heads on straight and are taking personal responsibility for their financial situation.
Clusterfuck Nation is just not all as black and gloom and doom as it is painted here week after week. The facts prove it. Inconvenient facts.
And savings? Why don’t you tell us about all the money average Americans have tucked away? The record number of people on foodstamp EBT’s ?
Janet,
You cannot be that stupid. Did you not bother to look at why the consumer debt is down? It can be down for TWO reasons and you saw only one and it is the least. People defaulted, you idiot. What kind of cheap shit troll are you?
http://business.time.com/2012/10/19/household-debt-has-fallen-to-2006-levels-but-not-because-were-more-frugal/
In fact, says Mustafa Akcay, an economist at Moody’s, “nearly 80% of deleveraging is caused by defaults.” Only 20% of the decrease comes as a result of what he calls “voluntary deleveraging,” i.e. the hard work of paying down our debts faster than we borrow.
How does look you pinche pendeja hija de puta.
Wha’s’amatta?
Propaganda outburst didn’t take the first time around?
Tell a lie often and loudly enough, it takes on a sheen of truth?
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave…”
janet, unless wages/incomes rise, and rise significantly, the debt allergy households in the U.S. have acquired will kill the economy as this analysis clearly shows. The right-wingers want people to work for nothing and they don’t want them to carry debt. That will equal misery all the way around. They like misery, apparently. Yes, I know the article is from 2009, but I believe it is still relevant.
http://www.international-economy.com/TIE_Su09_BailyLund.pdf
Unless income rises, the ongoing consumer debt reduction could cripple the recovery.
The right-wingers want people to work for nothing and they don’t want them to carry debt.
The right wingers want people to spend. Primordial is profit-making and growth. Going into debt is OK as long as the economy continues to grow and the store owners continue to profit. As W famously said: “Get on board. Do your business around the country!” — speech at O’Hare Airport, late Sept. 2001.
The 1% wants people in debt, a docile workforce so desperate to keep their jobs they cannot risk demanding higher pay, people who have to work because they have debts. They want a work force in desperate need of money to pay off the fruits of shopping. They don’t want independent, debt-free citizens who can take risks, organize unions, and demand higher pay.
In the threat-filled months after 9/11, traveling on airplanes, visiting tourist destinations, and, yes, going shopping, were acts of defiance and patriotism.
SOURCE: Bush, George W. Decision Points. New York: Crown Publishers, 2010. p. 443-4.
For the moment, holders of weakening currencies are seeking refuge in seemingly “stronger” dollars in bubbling equity markets.
If you compare the strength of the dollar against currencies of six U.S. trading partners, you will find that the dollar has increased 1.7 percent from the start of the year through June 11 (81.11 on the Dollar Index). The dollar was 84.35 at its May 22 close on the Dollar Index, the highest level since July 2010.
It is not just “for the moment” … the dollar has held its strength over the last few decades. Collapse of the dollar (and a 4,000 DOW) has been a regular prediction here at CFN, one that has not come true and will not come true. Only true believers hang on in the face of so much data that contradicts their belief.
SINGAPORE, May 27 (Xinhua) — As the U.S. dollar strengthened further after U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke indicated the possibility of scaling back quantitative easing and after discussions among Fed officials of exiting from monetary stimulus during the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting last week were revealed, financial analysts here have predicted that majority of the Asian currencies may decline for quite some time to come. The strength of the U.S. dollar had been bolstered by the minutes of last FOMC meeting and Bernanke’s testimony before the U.S. Congress.
True in May, true in June, true in July, true in August, etc.
Using a phrase like “for the moment” is just bald-faced fear mongering.
1) I love when JHK uses cool words – like deracinated, detritus, and yes, inchoate.
2) JHK, Greer, Ruppert – these men are giants and should be rewarded with whole counties or even states to rule. It takes a special person to see the long collapse – some of the ‘prepper’ movement sees these quick collapse theories almost as porn – but the type of slow collapse that these guys are talking about take a special kind of mind to be able to handle. To paraphrase Greer – never underestimate the ability of the machine to perpetuate its existence. Negative feedback is a powerful thing. Also never underestimate the people’s desire to keep the machine running.
3) I would like to think that Ruppert is now semi retired because he found a young Hippie chick who blows him 3 times a day and helps him till his garden and brew his own beer. Hopefully JHK is working on the same kind of setup.
“these men are giants and should be rewarded with whole counties or even states to rule”
I don’t think so. These people, while thoughtful and intelligent, are primarily dissenters and critics. These types do not necessarily make good leaders. People want to be comforted, and they want to believe in fantasies. And they want leaders who will reinforce those fantasies.
“It takes a special person to see the long collapse…”
It takes a special kind of person to look back over the last 100 years and proclaim there has been no progress.
A hundred years ago the average life expectancy was 47.
A hundred years ago only 14% of homes had a bathtub. Only 8% of homes had a telephone. (A three-minute call from Denver to New York City cost $11 — severe deflation!)
Collapse? What a laugh.
Janet, the advance of technology aside (see my post below), I suggest you start reading Zero Hedge, as it’s the best compendium out there on what’s really going on and why you should NOT be laughing:
http://www.zerohedge.com
A hundred years ago we weren’t as dependent on the machine as we are now. We have become soft and weak, and while you are right about the exponential improvement of technology, you’re missing the fact that powering that technology is going to get more and more expensive, as we run low on fossil fuels and the world population continues to increase. And while I would love to believe that humanity will collectively wake up one day soon and decide to allocate the remainder of the planet’s resources to reducing the environmental damage we have already done and stewarding the human race to a more sustainably sized population and way of living, I doubt that will happen. Rather, I expect the next 100 years to be a series of wars, famines, environmental disasters, and general human stupidity.
So, yes – a long collapse. But I like that you are keeping your sense of humor about it!
What I don’t get, Jim, is your abject Luddism. Yes, I can see near-term collapse back to something “Medieval,” but what I DON’T see is anything stopping the exponential growth in technology, which continues to prove Kurzweil and others right.
Forget “Future Shock.” We all EXPECT computers and electronics to not only get better at less cost; we expect TO MERGE WITH THEM, JUST LIKE WE’RE ALREADY DOING. Sure, it’s right to worry about Big Brother and his endless spying on us, but how long can this thug keep on doing so when we’re going to be able to do the same to him — each and every one of us — until HE’S the one with no place to hide.
Moreover, when I recently asked my software engineer nephew whether he thinks we’ll achieve superhuman intelligence within the next few decades, he just shrugged and said, “Sure.”
It’s a foregone conclusion among the tech-savvy young, in other words, that we’re only just getting warmed up technology-wise. And yet, WITHOUT EVER EXPLAINING WHY, you endlessly belittle “the hubristic techno-narcisisism of the day.”
WTF?
One word. Energy.
It is impossible to go back to medieval, anymore than it is possible for you to go back to when you didn’t know addition and subtraction. As Rube-i-Con used to say: there is no going back, only forward… and we’ll take our knowledge with us into the future. Even the Luddites will. Ipso facto, it is impossible to “go back”
Dick Butkiss, I checked out the ZeroHedge site. I was only prepared to giggle, not laugh… but then I saw this ZeroHedge headline:
Booming Tear Gas Industry Continues To Lead Global Economic Recovery 07/08/2013 17:12
Then I couldn’t help it. I laughed.
Tear gas? More than the financial industry? More than aerospace? More than telecommunications or informatics?
Do you take ZeroHedge seriously?
Have you heard of The Onion? Do you take it seriously, too?
Do you know that the ZeroHedge headline was taken from an Onion headline? Both seem to have a lot in common in provoking laughter.
Onion Week In Review, Global Economy up as Tear Gas Sales rise!
Fuck gold and silver, tear? gas is going to be the new standard of currency. LOL!
My dear girl, if you had any idea what Zero Hedge is, you’d realize that it posted the Onion piece in the same spirit that it was written.
Let’s start over.
Seriously.
I’m with you on JHK’s Luddism, after all, just not buying your belief that we’re actually in a recovery, rather than a money-printing coverup.
janet, that certainly is the case with SOME right-wingers, but not by any means all of them. In fact, it underscores how inadequate these terms are; right-winger, left-winger, conservative, liberal. For example, many who post to this site don’t condone spending….well, at least not spending on things like Disney or Medicare, but when it comes to guns and Spam, well, the sky’s the limit. However, to be fair, most everyone listened to Bush and spent, and when Obama was inaugurated he made it clear that our way of life was not negotiable….meaning the spending/consumption must go on at all costs.
At the Earth Summit in 1992, George H.W. Bush forcefully declared, “The American way of life is not negotiable.”
It’s the End of the World as We Know It, Baltimore Chronicle, Aug. 3, 2004
—
My principle focus as vice president has been to protect the American people in our way of life
Transcript: Vice President Cheney on ‘FOX News Sunday’, Dec. 222, 2008
—
We will not apologize for our way of life nor will we waver in its defense.
Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 2008
Also, I hear ya about zerohedge. Like TOD, it’s another site created and run by former hedge fund folks……and the rubes keep falling for this shit. They sure do get a kick out of stirring these boys up, don’t they? It’s so easy.
But, back to spending. The current economy depends on spending/consumption for growth, so until it’s replaced with another paradigm, without the consumption, things get creatively peculiar when trying to perpetuate a growth economy with diminishing spending. You must admit, the rich are getting richer under Obama just as they have under every president before him. Well, most every president, but that’s the plan….to concentrate the wealth…and it is concentrating at break-neck speed. There is so much wealth accumulating so quickly, the reinvestment strategies can’t keep pace with it.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/les-leopold/the-rich-have-gained-56-t_b_3237528.html
Oh, are we getting ripped off. And now we’ve got the data to prove it. From 2009 to 2011, the richest 8 million families (the top 7 percent) on average saw their wealth rise from $1.7 million to $2.5 million each. Meanwhile the rest of us — the bottom 93 percent (that’s 111 million families) — suffered on average a decline of $6,000 each.
Do the math and you’ll discover that the top 7 percent gained a whopping $5.6 trillion in net worth (assets minus liabilities) while the rest of lost $669 billion. Their wealth went up by 28 percent while ours went down by 4 percent.
It’s as if the entire economic recovery is going into the pockets of the rich. And that’s no accident. Here’s why.
Sorry, Carol, but your comment about Zero Hedge makes it clear that you do not want to hear what it has to say, which is that the status (statist) quo is unsustainable and therefore doomed to collapse.
JHK and I may disagree about technology, but we don’t disagree about that. And Zero Hedge is a daily wakeup call with regard to the how and why of it.
Are you REAL new here? Carol is the ‘resident impediment’ to honest sharing of facts. AKA ‘THE ENTITY’. Possibly paid by the
Dept O Defense.
I read JHK every week but don’t usually read the comments and had not made any until yesterday. So in that respect I’m new here and therefore am not familiar with the “resident impediment.”
Give me time.
“In another month, as the nights grow cool we’ll approach the sober season of fall”
You sure don’t live in Dixie. Try 60 days. Sigh…
Looking forward to your take on Egypt next week.
Carol, believe it or not things were worse under Bush junior and are getting better under Obama. According to the latest data from economist Emmanuel Saez, when the last economic expansion ended in 2007, the fraction of income going to the top 1 percent was the highest since 1928 and the fraction of income going to the top 0.1 percent was the highest ever recorded (and, Carol, the data go back to 1913). The share of income going to the very top remains high, but has come down and was lower in both 2009 and 2010 than in any year from 2005 through 2008.
http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/TabFig2010.xls
There is no basis in the data for claiming that inequality under President Obama is greater than the historic levels reached under President Bush.
Bush focused on tax cuts tilted towards the wealthiest Americans, policies to which the Republicans would like to return. In contrast, since his first day in office, President Obama has been focused on policies that promote shared growth and help the middle-class and those struggling to get into it. Below are just a few notable examples:
Income for families.
** Obama secured tax cuts for the middle-class; expanded the refundability of key tax credits for working families, making them available to more households;
** Obama pushed for temporary expansions in critical safety net programs, first in the Recovery Act and extended in subsequent legislation.
Thanks to Obama’s policies, 7 million Americans were lifted out of poverty in 2010 according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and middle-class families got $1,000 tax cuts.
Education.
** Obama has more than doubled the amount of funding available for Pell Grants, and the maximum award has increased from $4,730 in 2008 to $5,550 in the 2011-12 school year; and 3 million more students received Pell grants in 2012 than in 2008.
** Obama created the American Opportunity Tax Credit to reduce college costs, which benefited 9.4 million students and their families in 2010.
**Obama championed bold and comprehensive student loan reform that will save taxpayers $68 billion over the next decade, and is helping student loan borrowers better manage their debt through flexible repayment options. Together, these efforts represent the largest investment in higher education since the G.I. Bill.
Health reform.
Obamacare will help provide security for American families, something that a New York Times column described as the “federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago.”
Fair pay for working women.
The first piece of legislation President Obama signed into law was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which empowers women to recover wages lost to discrimination by extending the time period in which an employee can file a claim.
**Obama also continues to push for the Paycheck Fairness Act, commonsense legislation that gives women additional tools to fight pay discrimination.
** Obama also supported the Buffett Rule to ensure that no millionaire pays less in taxes than the middle class.
GEEEZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ…via Drudge:
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/101m-get-food-aid-federal-gov-t-outnumber-full-time-private-sector-workers
Mr. K., we need to get you together with Moira Gunn of TechNation podcasts.
Her recent guest was Brian Fagan, author of “The Attacking Ocean: The Past, Present, and Future of Rising Sea Levels.”
He basically echoed you calls to get our fiscal house into as orderly a shape as possible in order to have the capital necessary to build and maintain the infrastructure necessary to meet the challenges of warming and rising oceans. Apparently Miami/Beach/Florida is in for baptism–immersion, not sprinkling. Other parts of the coasts, of course, are in for trouble too.
Even living in Memphis, I hadn’t really stopped to consider the implications for the Mississippi River Valley. If we have the money to throw at Old Man River, where are we going to get the manpower to buttress the current shoreline, keep the channels dredged, maintain the levies and keep the old boy from returning to his old philanderin’, meanderin’ ways without that extra little kick from oil?
Happy days.
GEEEZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ…via Drudge
anti dod, you are probably getting government benefits, too. Maybe not supplemental nutritional assistance (SNAP), but other benefits like veterans’ benefits or tax breaks or a student Pell grant.
The definition of “government benefit” includes tax breaks like the mortgage-interest deduction for homeowners or the employer health deduction — those count as a government “benefit” and are no different from actual spending.
These tax expenditures added up to about $1.2 trillion in 2011. And they tend to flow disproportionately toward wealthier households.
Let’s see:
For the wealthier households $1.2 Trillion in tax expenditures
For poorer households $1.40 per person per meal
(not that you can survive on $1.40 per meal, but SNAP is only SUPPLEMENTAL)
Something the Drudge report neglected to mention.
My comforts are few but one of those comforts is reading you. Thank you for sharing your thoughts every Monday.
I like to think that I welcome a return to normality. High gas prices will push us there. I think this bump on the chart for the past hundred or so years of cheap energy and therefore The Greatest Country ever is about to end.
The pain of the Carter years will be easy compared to what tomorrow may bring.
AND By the way, today is the anniversary of their last show 18 years ago…
http://archive.org/details/gd95-07-09.sbd.7233.sbeok.shnf
McMike said: Five minutes spent reviewing Obama’s main campaign contributors back in early fall 2008 disabused me of any illusions about who Obama represented, long before he was elected it was clear that Wall Street had a lock on both candidates.
Oh, really? And 2012?
Wall Street gave $61 mlllion to Romney and $19 million to Obama.
That would be like you or I spending a quarter … which does not constitute a “lock”
Kunstler’s errors:
1) “Enjoy the flat screen TVs, water-parks, RVs, and Happy Meals while you can. ”
This stuff today is a dime a dozen, takes nothing to produce, can be available to 7 billion people worldwide for free, is not available to all only because people want to grab a bigger piece of the pie to have more power upon other people. This stuff is virtually free today (along with houses, cars and all other consumer items) because the Technological Economy has reached a point where it costs very little to produce, with little labor and little energy (which is infinite, like solar) so the old fashion “resource scarcity existence” is no longer operating. Kunslter, get over it, this is the reality.
2) “The dollars that the Fed creates out of nothing are trapped in this fetid backwater of rotting capital, destined to go nowhere — surely not into activity that produces real wealth, or the means to continue being civilized.”
The houses and swimming pools and stores, the Real Estate is actually the only Real Wealth a civilization needs: the real wealth has been created by the boatloads, in fact, the real estate bubble came about because too much real wealth was created, too much goods were created, too many homes: homes are real wealth, people really need only a few real things and goods to live well, cars, homes, food etc. The problem is once again that a Technological Economy can produce loads of this stuff very cheaply with very little labor and so forth.
The real problems are all Cultural, Psychological, Political and boil down too: what rules of engagements between people must be used in order to Distribute the Wealth and goods between all people ? How can we distribute a huge amount of goods and real wealth to all in such a way as to keep the economy moving and everyone satisfied ? The problems are all about distribution, not production.
And especially the biggest contradiction of all is that once you build so many homes, you got your job done once and for all, now you don’t need to work for years since the job has been done, but economies and societies are based on work in order to distribute money, but the work is no longer needed, the product of the work has been created, now you can simply live without working, but an old fashion, moralistic, 18th century view of the world thinks that the equation “work creates wealth” is still operating when this is no longer operating.
Now the same problem happened in Spain and will happen in China: too much production, too many homes built but no way to distribute them. Now Spain and China are very different culturally from the USA and between themselves but they all have the same common denominator: the ease with which a technological economy makes you build real estate and they all fall in the same trap: they built and build too many homes using them as an imaginary store of value: but that is the mistake: the problems are simply how to distribute the huge amount of free wealth a Technological Economy can generate.
Now Spain has a million empty homes it can’t distribute to anyone and China is building millions of homes destined to remain empty for the same reasons (the prices of the homes are too high compared to their going salaries, like a home in China costs 100,000 dollars or rents at 500 dollars a month and the avergae slob makes 300 or 400 dollars a month, go figure).
The problems are all about distribution, how to distribute the wealth to any old slob, since work is no longer necessary to create wealth, real wealth is created very easily, it is all a problem of how to give it out to all without being conditioned by the moralistic, fairy tale, comic book model of “having to work for a living”.
“What sort of work will succeeding generations find that allows them to be consumers?”
Simply no work, the idea of full employment in a society is relatively recent, only a few decades, most of the world and people, study anthropology, has lived dirt poor, most people who have ever lived would have been considered “unemployed” for all of their lives by todays’ arbitrary standards and so forth.
The chinese have millions of empty homes in skyscrapers, they just keep on building like drones, so where is the “too few producers ” ? All companies and factories and home builders would love to make and build like crazy, as they have done in the past but saturating markets in the end. all of the instability of capitalism is due exactly to this, easily saturated markets with goods, homes cars and all kinds of things by too few workers given the huge efficiency and productivity gains a technological economy provides and so forth.
Of course economy is just a cycle of booms and busts and instabilities, economy is not a science, just an arbitrary beahavior set a civilization gives itself, and the economy will always change and surprise you: just when housing goes bust and prices go down, there will be another boom and priceds going up again and so forth.
The stupid moralistic “work makes you richer” no longer operates for the most part, hard work for the most part is senseless and so forth. Of course some will get rich by working hard, but the system has nothing to do with hard work and merit and all to due with politics, power struggles, arbitrary decisions, networks, energy and so forth.
What I find amazing is how much of all the economic rules are truly pure inventions, man made fluke – quirk – totally arbitrary inventions masking themselves as somehow being necessary or a necessity or grounded on some fundament, some objective reasons and so forth.
Economy is a purely cultural affair, a purely tribal affair, the laws with which a tribe engages itself with are 100 % invented, a comic book, a flight of fantasy that somehow becomes encoded as a necessity, as a reference system (along with all law and legal systems, all political systems, all of the “rules of laws” governing how people interact between each other and so forth).
So where is the problem with having millions of “free loaders” who don’t want to work, or make believe they work and live anyways ? who cares ? where is it written that humans must engage equality between themselves ? who is the boss and slave ? why are there even bosses and slaves ? (because someone arbitrary decided to force himself to be a boss and slave weaker people ? or a rigged system of relationships make a class of people the bosses and so forth).
We live in an economic system that is totally arbitrary at its heart, totally a random fluke of laws, rules, engagements, behaviors, values and so forth. So we must buy loads of things, new things (a never ending array of new gadgets, complex and time consuming as much as possible, crazy complex smartphones with thousands of new apps as that is what all the chant of “Innovation and Research and Startups” (are these tags even valuable ? who decides what has value and what doesn’t ?) are all about and so forth) from loads of peoples or robots or machines building them to justify a mechanism to distribute money to other people and so forth. There is no solution to the economy, the economy is not even a problem, anything goes really, anything can go and will go, anything will happen, the economy can and will evolve in anyways whatsoever according to any crazy rules that become the new rules and behaviors that capture a large enough arbitrary consensus amongst the people in a tribe.
Look at anthropology, how many different tribes lived in history, each with their own rules and laws and engagements according to anything at all, a religion, a god, a book, a master boss, an enlarged family, wars and fights (between each other or against other tribes, or anything in between) all kinds of strange and absurd relationships between all of the elements of a tribe, all of the social structures being totally arbitrary, the infinitely programmable machine, a tribe of people that can be programmed into any set of rules at all (man having many wives, woman having many husbands, incest relationships ok or not, or people killing themselves all together in the name of an imaginary god or rock in the sky and so forth, the examples and possiblities are never ending, study sociology also to see how the social stuctures are all inventions, minds progammed to act and behave in any odd way, just because, for no reason at all).
So the worldwide economy is doing fine, is excellent, it will always be in crisis mode, it thrives on creating problems for itself and imaginary solutions, on instabilities and so forth. Growth will always be too low until the economies start growing too much and then must be “cooled off” and then the interest rates must go up again and the cycles repeat.
And to think that thousands of economy professors actually study this stuff thinking they are studying something that is more worthy than astrology or a comic book…
“Too many consumers and not enough producers.”
From:
www ilovephilosophy com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=183176
“Too many consumers and not enough producers.”
Totally wrong ! we have way more producers than consmuers by a long shot, we have huge excess capacity, all EU car factories (except germany) are running at less than 80 % production and you think we don’t have enough producers ?!?!
The USA was used to building 2 million homes a year, now it can’t even reacvh a million and so on, the Chinese have huge factiroes, we could produce thousands of times more goods without even increasing the number of workers, or just increasing them by very little.
No way, jose’, you have it all wrong and upisde down. We have we too few consumers for what can be produced, hence no jobs, no economy moving and so forth. We need huge amount of increased consumption more than anything else!
From:
http://money.msn.com/investing/who-kill … ican-dream
“In his paper, Mankiw explains why the top 1% are doing so well while the rest of us sprint hopelessly to catch up: The rich are simply better than us. They make more money because they contribute more to society than we do. They are smarter, have the skills that are in high demand, have better entrepreneurial instincts, and work harder. What’s more, their kids inherit these traits genetically.
Not only are the rich better than us, the world is also increasingly becoming their kind of place. Technological changes over the past 30 years have made their advantages even more rewarding than before.”
Invent any arbitrary property or personality or “skill set” or attribute a person must have to deserver more money and you got it licked: like all tall people will be paid more just because, because I say so, ok ? or all those who can learn chess and beat the best players in a week will get more money or all the girls who are the best looking will get more money and so forth: anything goes, any property that is supposed to be “objectively valuable” will make people get more money.
The real deception is in what is considered “objectively valuable”: this is culturally defined, arbitrarily defined, is a rigged game, nothing makes anyone objectively more valuable than another in the end, these are arbitrary choices of a system of society where an entire heirarchy of values, activities, personality types, relationships, etc. create an entire array of inequalities just because, for no reason at all (or sometimes and maybe for some reasons that they work in part, but anyways) and so forth.
But then again all human relationships are just power struggles, confrontations, friends and enemies always changing, masters and slaves and so forth.
But then again this is all envy, the losers don’t accept that the winners win, just lose and shut up welfare queens and lazy slobs and let the strong get what they “deserve”.
spark plugs
In fact, says Mustafa Akcay, an economist at Moody’s, “nearly 80% of deleveraging is caused by defaults.” Only 20% of the decrease comes as a result of what he calls “voluntary deleveraging,” i.e. the hard work of paying down our debts faster than we borrow.
This is exactly as I suspected, janet. What is your rebuttal to this, and if you provide stats, please provide a link to the sources of those stats. In your most recent comment to me, you appeared to be flaunting that tired trope that “at least Obama is not as bad as Bush.” It’s not a matter of that, janet. They both play for the same team. Yes, I agree with you that some who post here and like to trot out the tired tropes of the right that Obama is some sort of communist are obnoxious, but to tout Obama as some kind of savior or a lesser evil is equally obnoxious. Any president these days is an automatic rubber stamp for everything the PTB want. Obama is no different.
Now that that’s out of the way, one of the reasons I enjoy your presence is because you help keep this Near-Term Hysteria (NTH) real. I believe you are on to something when you assert that hedge fund swindlers are behind much of this Doomer movement. They’re gaming these folks in the worst kind of way; it is such lowly exploitation, and yes, there are degrees of exploitation. And yet, I will not feel sorry for the rubes who buy into the sky-is-falling bullshit. I listed on the last thread the things that must be visible and observable before I’ll agree that things are getting bad….REAL BAD. Not surprisingly, the usual suspects around here ignored that list and continued to parry their tired tropes lifted from right-wing propaganda outlets to include those hedge fund sites like zerohedge and TOD.
Oh, really? And 2012?
Wall Street gave $61 mlllion to Romney and $19 million to Obama.
That would be like you or I spending a quarter … which does not constitute a “lock”
Source of stats, please, and no, I don’t mean a White House Circular. Keep in mind, the person who made the comment you have attempted to rebut is not making a typical right-wing propaganda point. Rule number one in right-wing propaganda is to never, and I mean NEVER, criticize corporations in anyway. This is why Eleuthero is such a dead giveaway.
istantsingularity1
istantsingularity3
on blogspot
I like to think that I welcome a return to normality. High gas prices will push us there.
I have to laugh when I here bullshit like this. Return to normalcy? What? Have you read objective and impartial history, especially the history of New England? There is no way in hell I would want to return to that “normalcy” and in fact, I agree with janet on this one, there is no way we will return to that “normalcy”, for many reasons, not just, or even, the reason janet states. For a brush up on New England’s history, you can start with the following:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0195069056
Also, there’s this from the Detroit Free Press that emphasizes the brutal intolerance of Puritanical life.
Americans who worry about Muslim countries adopting Sharia law forget that our country was first settled by Christian fundamentalists who codified their own version of religious absolutism — and had no qualms about killing anyone who objected.
And as you doze in front of the football game after Thanksgiving dinner, give a thought to the enduring myth this holiday perpetuates, that the Puritans who came to Massachusetts some 400 years ago believed in freedom of religion.
The truth is that the Puritans had no problem with religious persecution. They just wanted to be the ones doing the persecuting.
The “Body of Liberties,” written in 1641 to govern the Massachusetts Bay Colony, incorporated many of the legal protections that would appear in the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights 150 years later. But it also said that anyone convicted of worshiping “any other God but the Lord God, he shall be put to death.”
It threatened the same penalty for witchcraft and denying that the Bible was the inspired word of God, and a law passed by the Plymouth Colony in 1671 prescribed death as the penalty for those who rejected Christianity.
Let us observe the continuum of the lengthy Ol’ Spidey posts, shall we?
7:15 am
7:16 am
7:20 am
7:21 am
Don’t those seem like pre-selected buckshot blasts of bullshit to you? Either that or we have the world’s fastest keyboard clacker.
An irritating flood of nonsense and non sequiturs, signifying nothing.
Instant Crappification
Instant Crappification
Here’s some taxpayer monies well-spent, and a quiet pronouncement from the AO of the US Courts I could almost believe:
The average cost of a wiretap order last year was $50,452
This would be the cost of “legitimate” ones that I would assume included a nice trail of paperwork indicating a warrant. (Remember those pesky inconveniences?) Nothing to do with snooping that’s ‘off-budget’.
Here’s the link to the lying article on the lying site, Zero Hedge (collated and edited by a lying pack of lying liars). 😉
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-07-08/average-cost-official-wiretap-us-50452
We should be grateful our tax monies are being spent to keep our chir’rens safe from drugs!!! (Ask your doctor about taking some colorful handfuls today!)
Hello James Kunstler.
Thanks for updating your BLOG space. I know you have been busy.
I’m sensing some of the exasperation among you “visionary” folk. Many pundits can’t come to terms with how or why the financial world continues on in the face of unreal activities.
You know it. I know it – experts you consult with know it – but the big wheels and the “big markets” keep going.
Please excuse me – if you have covered this topic in another arena. But what I really would like to hear about from you – or anyone you know that studies economics – is when will we really see western nations give up [ discretionary energy consumption ] ??
We both know its a long way to a world “made by hand.” What I want to know is —
HOW FAR IS IT UNTIL A WORLD WITHOUT PRO-SPORTS, NASCAR – AND SUVS THAT IDLE FOR HOURS IN DRIVE-THRU FAST FOOD WINDOWS?
Good question. I’d like to know too.
My best guess? Not until the wheels fall right the hell off.
Continuation of the car culture has become the indicator of “everything’s normal; return to your [underwater] homes and shelter in place”.
A peek behind the curtain of ‘how it’s done’ from the purveyors of intriguing and thought-provoking lies.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-07-09/japan-government-change-inflation-calculation-ushering-even-more-boj-liquidity
Simply change the metrics and hunky-dory is instantly created; Abracadabra! It’s alchemy and magicks I tells ya.
Thanks, ozone, for that ZeroHedge article in which no mention is made of Japan deciding to go back to pre-industrial times. There is also no mention of magic or alchemy in the ZeroHedge article. The article is right to say: “one can’t print one’s way to prosperity.” Of course not. Printing presses are so 18th century.
Here is the truth: there are an endless number of electrons. Infinite in number. Without limit. Completely sustainable on central bank computers. Japan is just imitating how the USA and China pulled themselves up by the bootstraps into the economic utopia just around the corner.
The best part of the article is at the end:
May as well enjoy the here and now.
Finally ZeroHedge says something I completely agree with. Living well is the best revenge… and has nothing to do with money.
“Living well is the best revenge… and has nothing to do with money.”
You can try to live well without any money. Good luck with that in our society!
BBC reported this morning that Shell is changing heads early next year. Their business correspondent interviewed an expert (sorry; didn’t catch name or area) about the implications.
The correspondent surprised me by pushing the expert pretty hard on the difficulty of findig new oil, the expense and environmental dangers. The expert finally admitted that, yeah, things are getting a little tough but we’re not at the peak yet.
I’ll be danged. Awareness of reality is like water under pressure, prodding for crevices, cracks. No flood yet, just a few dribbles from the ceiling.
And we want the flood of truth!!
But what do we get? Government paid agents running around sticking fingers in holes in dikes like little Dutch boys.
Hopefully it will be a case of all the kings men not being able to put humpty together again before the blood on the floor gets too deep.
That is a dark pool we don’t want. – K-Dog
Dark Doings
What will they think of next?
I was late with my comment yesterday. I thought it was published late since all that came up was last weeks article in Firefox. But when I looked at this blog in Chromium voila there she be. This weeks article.
I took it in stride but today I look and see the same result. If I actually select ‘The Darkest Pool’ and then cut and paste the URL into Firefox I go straight to the article just fine.
It’s like someone made a custom page for me to make sure I don’t get close to being a ‘firster’ on monday mornings.
It is strange, very strange.
And a high quality comment should have attracted more than a dozen visitors to K-Dog on a Monday morning and it didn’t.
What gives?
I dunno, Dawg.
I tried to leave a response but was denied authentication.
I’ll give it another go today just for suspicions’ sake.
Software glitch, or…?
or…?
I just discovered Dr. Barber…
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1992/03/jihad-vs-mcworld/303882/
“An efficient free market after all requires that consumers be free to vote their dollars on competing goods, not that citizens be free to vote their values and beliefs on competing political candidates and programs. ”
He’s echoing a lot of what’s been written by JHK and what I’ve been thinking for years.
Working today. I must have missed the posting yesterday.
or…? Shenanigans from the agents of the Ministry of Fear and Control.
Ministry of Fear and Control
Yes methinks the natives may be getting restless.
Dripping into the armpits of their dress shirts and more than heat is making them sweat. The neck-tie may seem a bit tight. Yesterdays release from the theGuardian may have caused some acid stomach.
Suppression in the U.S. is successful but I have the interview posted at my web site. It’s a link and if your on a military base you won’t be able to follow it (theGuardian is blocked)but then you probably can’t see K-Dog anyway so no difference.
I’m going to see if the link to Snowden is still at K-Dog. Strange things electronic have been a’happening. A solar storm perhaps, hurricane force solar winds.
or
Shenanigans from the agents of The Ministry of Fear and Control.“
…?
AGAIN
“I was late with my comment yesterday. I thought it was published late since all that came up was last weeks article in Firefox. But when I looked at this blog in Chromium voila there she be. This weeks article.
I took it in stride but today I look and see the same result.”
So it’s not just me, then. It’s a problem that Firefox is having with the site. FWIW, this week’s entry also displays on the front page when viewed with Internet Explorer. Too bad IE and Chrome aren’t the top browsers, Firefox is, although I’ve read reports that Chrome is passing Firefox in the U.S.
“And a high quality comment should have attracted more than a dozen visitors to K-Dog on a Monday morning and it didn’t.”
If all the Firefox users are having the same problem, then some of them may not be reading this week’s entry. I have a feeling at least a few of them may not be bothering to use the drop-down menu to get to the blog. I hope that issue is corrected soon. After all, JHK wants readers, too.
“What gives?”
I have my own unscientific explanation–Mercury Retrograde. The planet Mercury is currently being observed as moving in reverse. When that happens, astrologers claim that communication and transportation go awry. This includes electronic communication and devices that support it. Based on this woo-woo story, glitches like this are more likely.
Of course, this is all BS. My official position on astrology is that it’s bunk, but it’s harmless, fun bunk that tells great stories. It even tells an interesting story about me.
http://crazyeddiethemotie.blogspot.com/2013/04/earth-signs.html
I took to dabbling in the Tarot(!) for some new insight into the mess, Kunstler. I think Card #12, the most mysterious card in the set, expresses the national reality perfectly. It is a man, and allegorically a nation, that is hanging upside down… (Cheers on the new look.)
4 Actions/possibilities for the Hanged Man:
1. Letting go
ending the struggle
2. Reversing
upending the old order/doing an about-face
3. Suspending action
pausing to reflect / giving up urgency
3. Sacrificing
giving up for a higher cause
These are all characteristic of a slave mentality. Not for me. Thanks, but no thanks.
Capitulation is not a higher cause. I’ll go with putting the urgency in proper perspective but that’s it.
Letting go, reversing, sacrificing. Come on, what kind of pussy are you? We haven’t even been water-boarded yet and your going all Benedict Arnold on us. Get some spine. Growl a little.
IMHO
🙂
Dear McMike,
Municipal unions control America. Check your police contracts, check your fireman contracts check your teachers contracts.
Check out the IRS union. The NRC union. McMike, it is beyond discussion. The government unions control at the municipal, state and Federal levels.
JFK created them with an E.O. in 1963.
Yours truly,
JDCandon
Thanks, ozone, for that ZeroHedge article in which no mention is made of Japan deciding to go back to pre-industrial times. There is also no mention of magic or alchemy in the ZeroHedge article. The article is right to say: “one can’t print one’s way to prosperity.” Of course not. Printing presses are so 18th century.
Here is the truth: there are an endless number of electrons. Infinite in number. Without limit. Completely sustainable on central bank computers. Japan is just imitating how the USA and China pulled themselves up by the bootstraps into the economic utopia just around the corner.
The best part of the article is at the end:
May as well enjoy the here and now.
Finally ZeroHedge says something I completely agree with. Living well is the best revenge… and has nothing to do with money.
Nice double posting from the Ministry of Propaganda, Jasoka.
Thanks; the more we hear, the less we know! How cool izzat?
You think Eddington knows? You think the physicists know?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_number
Thank you for your friendly comment. JHK’s new ground rules have improved the forum. What with budiswizer, spidey, etc. back it’s almost like what they tell me the old times were like.
“May as well enjoy the here and now.”
The ministry pushes the mime of just sit back and enjoy the show all the time. It’s highly offensive to those ‘in the know’ but the insidiousness of it is missed on those new and naive. Naïveté softens the sting and makes it sound like an opinion; not the command it is.
The ministry pushes the mime of just sit back and enjoy the show…
Howdy, K-Dog.
If you are not following ministry commands, what are you doing?
The ministry must know what’s best… as individuals we cannot change the macro-economy, can we?
That leaves us to follow the ministry’s command to enjoy the show. The ministry knows best, doesn’t it?
I would say, that it’s our considered opinion that the Ministry know the best [and also the shortest] way over the edge of the cliff into irreversible civilizational collapse and howling chaos.
Sorry, Jasoka, that will be a spectator sport for a miniscule few, and a [literal] world of hurt for the rest of us.
janet, I gather you have a sense of humor since you mentioned you lol at zerohedge. How about K-Dog’s photo? Does that make you laugh? It makes me laugh. I think K-Dog is Martha Stewart. Look at this photo of Martha and her prized dog dining together and tell me that’s not K-Dog’s photo. Hi Martha. Glad to have you. You’re a freak, but we love you all the same.
http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/intel/2012/02/13/13_marthastewartgenghiskhan.o.jpg/a_560x375.jpg
I don’t condone banning people, but for adopting silly dog photos, they deserve a group wedgie. Same goes for anyone who writes “chur ‘ren” or some such nonsense. The progenitor of that one deserves their undies, if they wear any, pulled up past past their ears. If they don’t wear underoos, a pair will be provided for the occasion.
Carol, I just assumed that K-Dog and ozone have been assigned the task of keeping us laughing. Their posts are most entertaining. I laugh at all of their fact-free, fear-full, paranoia. I thought laughter was what they were trying to bring about. The Ministry must be well pleased with their ludicrous performance.
According to Guy MacPherson, we may be facing near term extinction in the next 20 – 30 years due to a variety of different causes and/or combination thereof. Basically, the climate heats up and then all the plants fry, or we die from lack of oxygen or ionizing radiation from all the nuclear power plants that go tits.
I wonder when the shit finally hits if I’ll still be getting invites in my email box to join “Hot Hookups”?
It doesn’t appear to me that humanity basically gives-a-shit about anything? Like the sociopathic teenager who torches the school library.
Pucker, it is really very simple. We have not engaged in overshoot. We have not exceeded the system’s carrying capacity. Therefore, there is no massive die off. We are still here. That is the proof.
Even if there was a die off (and I don’t believe there will be for at least the next 150 to 250 years), the Earth has already had several mass extinction events and some humans always seem to come out alive to continue creating and procreating. Chances are there will never be a complete die off of humans (if the last several billion years can be believed).
Janet, the latest illogician to come to the CFN cesspit of nonsense. Duh, right, Janet. There’s no die-off ’til there’s a die-off. Wow, I’ve never seen this kind of rhetorical alchemy where a person “proves” that something cannot happen because it hasn’t happened yet.
That’s precisely how dense you are. And then you speculate that earth’s carrying capacity won’t be exceeded until “at least the next 150 to 250 years” and, golly gee whiz, since your “event X won’t happen because it hasn’t happened yet” tour de force of illogic is the pedestal upon which you stand to muse like a mandarin, we must seriously contemplate your awesome wisdom.
It’ll happen when it happens. Yes, that’s a tautology but it has a virtue that your “reasoning” doesn’t have … it CANNOT be false. Die-offs don’t just come out of nowhere like a Gamma Ray Burst. There’s a build-up. If you can’t see that the death of the American middle class in 15 years isn’t a damned good start to a ramping up of suffering and chaos well then there’s no convincing you.
Signs are there and building. Oil is now more than 10X more expensive than under Clinton. Virtually all Western countries have absolutely unrepayable debts. Most of these debts, when graphed, form a HYPERBOLA. If it were linear, that would be scary enough but it’s not.
When Being There returns, this Power-Femme fest is extremely unimpressive. Oh, not to worry … the middle class has only lost 50% of its net assets and their new jobs are either part-time or at a rate of pay far below just five years ago. Nothing to look at … move along, move along.
Gawd. People like Janet are like weathermen “predicting” sunshine for today but it’s already raining. It’s hard to predict the future but Janet can’t even predict the past.
E.
All you have to know about “janet”, is that it’s our dear old friend “Ja’soka”. (The syntax is unmistakable, and if you need examples they’re all over this weeks’ trainload of postings.)
We should understand that it’s ‘her’ ‘job’ to get us to forget about all the pesky predicaments that are about to take the floor out from beneath us and sit back in the LazeeBoey, tear open a bag of Cheez Doodles, crack open a Bud and switch the teevee on to Waltzing with Willie. Let the gum’mint handle everything; it’s under CONTROL; QUIT WORRYING!
(BTW, don’t forget to pay your taxes, they’ll be wisely spent… believe us; would we lie to you?)
I have just encapsulated the entire gig. Heckuva ‘job’ isn’t it?
(I would guess they think the “janet” tag to be more accessible/forgivable by nature of pretending to be “a girrrrrl”. Bernays would be proud of all this effort on behalf of this propagandistic, mind-bending utopia.)
Meh
“We have not engaged in overshoot. We have not exceeded the system’s carrying capacity. Therefore, there is no massive die off. We are still here. That is the proof.”
The whole basis of industrial society is predicated upon extracting non-renewable energy from the earth in the form of fossil fuels and burning it. Similarly, much of our water supply comes from aquifers that renew on the order of millions of years, and we are depleting them in scant decades. The top soil of our farmlands is also depleting at an alarming rate and that which remains is becoming more saline over time. How long do you think this particular type of game can be played?
The time scale during which our type of civilization has existed is quite short. Oil was only first pumped out of the ground in industrial operations around 1860. American car culture really only took off after WWII during the 1950’s.
“Chances are there will never be a complete die off of humans”
Of course, every species goes extinct eventually, even if it evolves into something else. So your statement is purely fatuous.
Your viewpoint in all your posts seems to be, “I’m okay right now. Therefore everyone is okay and will be for the forseeable future.” Do I even need to explain why this is a completely erroneous way to look at the world?
Take a look at Peak Everything’s post, folks … especially “Janet” and “Carol”. This is what we call REASONING. I heartily recommend it. Peak Water? What he says about draining of aquifers in decades but millions of years to replenish? Absolutely true and scientifically backed out the ying yang. Same with oil.
Poor Malthus? He literally IS “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”. Unfortunately, he’s dead and when this whole manic industrialized, oil-driven gig starts to hit against a wall of Titanium, there won’t be anyone left to cry wolf because we’ll still be riding the high of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
E.
Both Asoka, sorry, I meant “Janet”, and “Carol” are humourous and remind me of the old joke about a woman saying to the bank teller, “But I can’t possibly be overdrawn on my checking account, I still have CHECKS!” We really need to see these two as the lightweights they truly are. When “Carol” suggested that Eric Snowden was some imaginary, made up figure, I smiled to myself at what a troll “she” really is.
“We are still here. That is the proof.”
This is so unbelievably dumb as to almost defy description.
I’m still here. Therefore, I’ll never die.
M-o-r-o-n-i-c!
You may note, P.E., that I said the exact same thing to “Janet”. Yes, the proof that you’re immortal is that you’re still here. These Power Femmes provide a comical but sad proof-by-example that most of ’em just don’t have the mental horsepower so they “implode” in a post of staggering stupidity.
E.
The U.S. is turning into a St,,asi-style surveillance state, trashing the 1st, 4th, and 5th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. Humanity is on the verge of near term extinction. But don’t worry! We’ve now got Gay Marriage!
Fucking Lunatics!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
LOL! Re-read your hyperbole. Count the exclamation marks. Lunatics because rights are expanding? Not. Humanity is not on the “verge” of near term extinction. You sound like those fundamentalist preachers who carry signs saying “The End is Near!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” You sound like a lunatic.
Gay Marriage is a “Wedge Issue”—-A Wedgie….
Used to distract us from more important issues, like liberty…survival….
Gay Marriage is a “Wedge Issue”—-A Wedgie….
Used to distract us from more important issues, like liberty…survival….
Not for me, it’s not. I haven’t paid attention to it whatsoever. It’s only a wedge issue if morons let it be a wedge issue and a distraction.
It’s McPherson, not MacPherson (the redneck version where all Mc’s are Mac’s). Ask him and the folks over there what happened to Jennifer Hartley. Someone asked that a month or two ago, and didn’t get an answer. She was once a prolific poster at NBL, and then poof, she disappeared in the blink of an eye. Suicide? Committed? If so, it’s precisely the point and purpose of that site……an ARG (Alternative Reality Game) to get people to off themselves. I wonder how many have so far because of NBL ? And then, of course, there’s the despicable and onerous creep, ulvfugl. You want to talk about a rabbit hole. The story that is ulvfugl is the story of the internet; psychopaths developing their own institution in cyberspace with designer padded walls and tie-dye straight-jackets.
We have not engaged in overshoot.
If you follow NBL very closely, you can’t help but come to the conclusion that its basis is eco-fascism and eugenics. They hate children and love animals and pets. They consistently, without fail, trumpet that over-population is the PROBLEM. They’ have been corrected about this numerous times, but they all still insist it’s not only a problem, but THEE problem. Ironically, MacPherson wrote an essay talking about the root of problems. It was an excellent essay, and yet he doesn’t abide by it, much to Orlov’s chagrin since Dmitry likes things and people that abide, especially women who will bend over gleefully and take what they’ve got coming to them.
Of course, you and I know over-population, to the extent it’s even so, is not the problem, it’s a symptom. The root of the problem is a way of life; that way all the presidents uphold in the form of an oath to protect and defend. So, over-population is only a symptom so long as the root of the problem remains rooted, i.e. industrial civilization and the culture that created it and perpetuates it.
They’re a bunch of dishonest, childless, PETA bread-eating, eco-fascist eugenicists over at NBL, and each day brings a new level of NTH (Near-Term Hysteria). If Macpherson and NBL isn’t CIA or NSA or DHS or FBI, it should be. Why not get paid for such valuable services? Maybe they are, or some are, whilst others join in cluelessly, as they’ve done their entire lives.
Your argument, “Carol”, is essentially that if some set of facts was once associated with Sanger’s eugenics, then that association dooms it to be false for all time. As Peak Everything and I have pilloried Janet’s posts for their sublimely horrid illogic, your assertions follow the same pattern.
You don’t want to examine publicly verifiable FACTS about water problems, energy problems, or do a true dispassionate analysis about the world with seven billion people (a direct product of the oil age). You just want to associate anybody who’s not blowing blue sky bubbles with every heinous ideology you can think of.
That’s not reasoning. It’s “guilt by association” which is known to be a lynch mob mentality. Congratulations … you’re the KKK!!!
E.
Sweet Mother of Osho!! Here’s a prime example of what I’m talking about with NBL. I swear, it must be a satire, like Little Murders.
http://guymcpherson.com/2013/07/collapse-awareness-and-the-tragic-consciousness/#comment-82160
pat wrote, “I personally believe that TPTB will unleash a pandemic to severly reduce the population.”
In the whacked-out world of today, the above is, in my opinion, a very positive thought. I would much rather sit by the bedside of my loved ones, comforting them and easing their passing than to see them hog-tied and carried off by a band of cannibals. I’m a big believer in the whole “death with dignity” movement and if tomorrow I learned about a flu-like disease, 100% fatal and highly contageous cropping up around the world I would be glad. I’d rather it held off for a couple of more years so my grandson could get some more skateboarding in. But if it had to be now, so be it.
Let the gum’mint handle everything
It’s time to deliver that Group Wedgie.
Oze, K-Dawgy dogg, Eleuthero, BT.
Hello, all. I see Janet and company are keeping us all entertained/informed/distracted and doubting the doubtless right on cue but with a new found sense of subtle, (less?) accusatory and gentler dissent that us “true believers” and acolytes should appreciate, right? We’ll, at least he/she isn’t still writing soft porn and then complaining that the racist rapists have attacked her.
Anyhow, here’s a very interesting interview with Dr. PCR this week from the misdirected but still fairly reasonable paranoiac Greg Hunter. PCR demonstrates why he thinks the the two major pending international trade agreements TAP and TPP (thanks to BT for informing me about 1 of these) and why they might stave off a dollar collapse. Of course, PCR wisely doesn’t speak with religious certainty but his point of view, as far as my feeble mind can ascertain, at least explains the latest economic collapse reach around the puppet masters are orchestrating. Folding all the western countries interests into one giant Clusterfuck World order.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyO-xR6ZW20&feature=c4-overview&list=UUG-G8LLr38fQUNZU8K0t-EA
Now I don’t necessarily doubt that a collapse of globalism is in fact pending, but my intuitive hunch is that such predictions are sound if only the “market fundamentals” that all the free market libertarian ideologues ascribe to hold true, which they aren’t and don’t seem to even exist if they ever did. It seems we’re simply transitioning from one concocted social economic structure to another, making many of us quite grumpy in the meantime.
In other words, if in fact the world is ordered as these professors proclaim, then their fears do seem justified, yet one thing I’ve learned from reading all of you is that we’re not dealing with reality,nor are the TPTB constructing the system based upon natural measures. I guess my anology would be that all the social engineers are using different types of calculus to build shared bridges, making shit up (math) as they go. I also think the Jenga fortress can remain erect for some time to come. But what an uneasy fortress to live in. What to do?
All in all, I personally believe the collapse of ecology (natural law) will condense humans into the enclaves of “wealth” worldwide, as JHK has described might happen nationally, but the shenanigans of globalism will continue. Still, as E says, it goes from “fine” one day to chaos the next. Please excuse the poor paraphrasing.
As always, thanks for the links.
-UFIA
Thanks for including this. I enjoy reading Dr. Robert’s blog and his insight. I would probably respect him more if he just came right out and said that he was one of many Reagan whores. Instead, he sometimes whines about how great “Uncle Ronny” was for America and implies what a shame it was that he galloped away from Washington on a big, white horse.
Those enclaves of which you speak are a done deal. The USA isn’t alone in extreme wealth concentration. Brazil and all those “People’s Republic” types of places are experiencing the same thing. Find any recent article about Sao Paolo for example.
It’s true, UFIA, that the middle class world doesn’t have to end with a bang but rather with a billion whispers. In the USA … it already has.
E.
It is interesting and informative to hear the average American’s viewpoint on the oil supply.
I often hear statements like the following:
“If all this new oil is being discovered, then why isn’t the price of gas going down? It must be that the oil companies are gouging us to make a profit.”
What most people don’t realize is that the important part of Peak Oil, or at the part that is immediately relevant to us, isn’t the prospect of running out of oil. This will not happen anytime soon. No, as JHK gas alluded in the past, the price is the key metric that will sink economies when it is too high. Any why is the price still fairly high even with new supply?
The new oil is expensive to produce. When oil was first extracted, from Pennsylvania actually, it basically seeped right out of the ground. The cost of production was low. But now, using all these new extraction techniques, the cost of getting oil is much higher.
Canadian tar sands for instance requires strip mining operations and enormous quantities of water, rather than just a pump in the ground. This means that even if there are trillions of gallons of available oil, the price is still going to be high due to the cost of production.
Now comments on the article itself:
“the diminishing returns of technology never sleep”
Everything is subject to diminishing returns, so technology is not unique in this. The main confusion I see is that people do not understand how much energy and resources it takes to provide more and more technology to an ever growing number of people on the planet. They confuse technology with energy, and they are definitely not the same.
“The suave and genial Mr. Obama just doesn’t know what’s going on”
I’m not sure that this is the case. Obama is an intelligent person and a thoughtful one. The question would be what can he do about it? If there are severe structural problems in the US financial and economic system, but there is very little that could actually be done about it without causing great distress to millions of people, he is unlikely to address those issues. They will simply go unmentioned.
“Mr. Obama doesn’t know that the universe has launched us on a journey to a place beyond techno-industrialism”
I’m not sure this is the case. Technological progress is not going to stop. The real driver going forward will be the rising living standards of the rest of the world and the associated increasing demand for energy and resources, along with the severe externalities such as pollution and Global Warming. But I don’t see a return to ox-drawn carts anytime soon.
“Paradoxically, the American position is all about maintaining undeserved comfort, that is a standard of living that is no longer earned but borrowed from the darkest pool of magic capital: the future of declining expectations.”
I like this sentence quite a bit. I have often felt the requirements to sustain our current standard of living has a lot to do with robbing from the future. It is a common theme in ecological literature such as “Overshoot” by Catton.
RE: tattoos
This seems to me a basic case of “monkey see, monkey do.” People see those whom they respect with them, either their peers or music and sports stars, and they simply copy the look. It is like a permanent fashion statement. The messages being sent are often as simple and simian as, “Look at how tough I am.” Or perhaps “Don’t mess with me.”
The members of every civilization seem to assume that their particular model of life will continue into the future ad infinitum. They essentially must “buy into” it or risk despair, confusion, and disillusionment.
Thus you have people like “janet” who are wholly convinced that human population will continue its upward trajectory for hundreds of more years, that our society is not in massive resource imbalance, and that because things are okay for them right now, that it must be great for everyone else.
An excellent source book decoding a lot of this is William Catton’s “Overshoot” book, which I have mentioned many times on this blog. I have found it an excellent reference for understanding this type of psychology and the true long-term trajectory of our civilization.
Thus you have people like “janet” who are wholly convinced that human population will continue its upward trajectory for hundreds of more years
No, sir. Never said that. What I have cited are professional demographers (the ones who study population growth), who say population will level off at around 9 Billion.
Scientists at the Autonomous University of Madrid and CEU-San Pablo University say their estimates, developed by using techniques from high-level physics to analyze UN population data between 1950 and the present … shows global population peaking in 2050 slightly above eight billion, and then falling back to 6.2 billion by the end of the century, the same as the total world population back in 2000.
Catton and all the other neo-Malthusians are all wet. You can’t argue with physics.
I wonder if keeping Snowden off the news and keeping attention on the manhunt for him instead of the substance of his disclosures is generating overtime at the Ministry of Fear and Control.
Since we have some DoD employees right here on this blog I’ll just ask.
Are DoD stooges getting overtime keeping the lid on the ‘pressure cooker these days?
Don’t be shy. Maybe you are planning on using the extra money for a sea cruise? Perhaps a new car with the windfall? You must be getting something for all the extra work.
Don’t be shy, do please share. We’d all like to know.
K-Dog
Thus you have people like “janet” who are wholly convinced that human population will continue its upward trajectory for hundreds of more years
No, sir. Never said that. What I have cited are professional demographers (the ones who study population growth), who say population will level off at around 8 to 9 Billion.
Scientists at the Autonomous University of Madrid and CEU-San Pablo University say their estimates, developed by using techniques from high-level physics to analyze UN population data between 1950 and the present … shows global population peaking in 2050 slightly above eight billion, and then falling back to 6.2 billion by the end of the century, the same as the total world population back in 2000.
Catton and all the other neo-Malthusians are all wet. You can’t argue with physics.
To be honest, I’m not sure how I feel about the Near Term Extinction of humanity controversy. On the one hand, I’m not convinced that it’s true if only because one can never accurately predict the future. Also, having lived in China, I know that people can still “survive” living in toxic waste. Perhaps there is a “die off” taking place, but it’s a silent die off and “life goes on” in a twisted sort of way. This is the future of mankind that I envision—an expanding Global Cancer Village. Life seems to be like life before, except that people lose their jobs, become progressively poorer, and disappear from a variety of causes.
On the other hand, it seems a bit odd, to say the least, that seemingly intelligent, sane, level-headed blokes like Guy MacPherson, Dmitry Orlov and others with PhDs who have no vested financial conflicted interest in the matter and who support their positions with often main-stream data, are simply ignored by government and the MSM.
What’s got me rather worried is Fukashima. While we can’t always predict the future, we have the lesson of Fukashima which teaches us that when confronted with a disaster with dire implications for the human population, the government and the MSM will simply keep silent and will attempt to distract the people’s attention. When I watch the U.S. MSM at the present time, this appears to be exactly what is happening. This could, in effect, be an admission that humanity is about to drive off the cliff.
Apparently, the G,,er man people at the time were leisurely celebrating Christmas in G erm,,any completely unaware that the 6th Army was freezing to death at Stalingrad.
This is ultimately what happens in a mass media-controlled, su rvei llan.ce state.
What we’re seeing in the United States today is what Jim so eloquently describes in his books and on this blog. I’m constantly amazed at how he sees through the mirage that the MSM puts forth and accurately describes a world that must come to terms with its very finite resources.
[Humanity’s current predicament]
“Some of your neighbors called and said they heard some screaming and a loud crash.”
“I don’t know nuth’n about no loud crash.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Omua-KqqO2w
Pucker said of Dmitry:
“seemingly intelligent, sane, level-headed blokes … who have no vested financial conflicted interest …”
LOL! That was a good joke. Tell us another one.
Guy McPherson does list this on his web page:
There is no point to intellectual and political work if one were a pessimist. Intellectual and political work require, nay, demand optimism. (Edward Said)
That puts McPherson at odds with a lot of doomers on CFN who seem allergic to optimism. They make fun of optimists and call them Pollyanna.
I have gone back and read Asoka’s comments from years ago. In replies to Asoka on CFN, the doomers were saying the “house of cards economy” was going to collapse “soon” … (a question of months, before Obama’s inauguration in 2008) and Asoka said no. Asoka was right.
About Y2K: JHK wrong. Asoka was right.
About 4000 Dow: JHK wrong. Asoka was right.
About collapse of Euro: E. wrong. Asoka was right.
About QE and hyperinflation: Asoka right was again.
About sky falling. Chicken Little wrong. Asoka right again.
But it seems people here never learned anything from Asoka.
I’m a Qualified-Optimist.
I’m optimistic if Leadership is good. If the quality of leadership is bad, I cannot rationally be optimistic.
I recall reading somewhere recently that according to certain scientific polls, a vast majority of Americans have less regard for members of the U.S. Congress than used car salesmen and even cockroaches.
It’s hard to be optimistic when most legislation is written by corporations and very few Congressmen even read the legislation that they pass.
Get rid of your top-down mindset. Change comes from the bottom up.
Legislators do not install themselves. They are voted into office by popular vote. If they are writing corporate legislation and telling you, like Romney did, “corporations are people, my friend” … then the people don’t vote for corporate legislators, like they did not vote in Romney.
And money does not buy elected office. Romney (and Karl Rove) spent millions more than Obama and they lost.
Obama’s SuperPAC, Priorities USA, spent $74.7 million.
Romney’s SuperPAC, Restore Our Future, spent $153 million.
Romney spent twice as much and lost … because millions of popular votes win elections, not corporate millions of dollars.
Why is it that many Feminists now seem to “have-it-in” for Dmitry Orlov?
I think that some Feminists reacted badly to Orlov’s off-hand remark at a presentation recently about some Russian punk rock band called “Pussy Riot”.
What is “Pussy Riot”?
A “Pussy” is either a cat, or a vagina. A “Pussy Riot” would, therefore, presumably be either a cat, or a vagina, that is engaged in an act of violent civil disobedience.
I don’t intellectually even know where to begin with that one? Being a heterosexual male I must confess that I’m rather “partial to” vaginas. (I dislike cats, as I’m a “dog person”.) But I don’t think that I’d want a violent vagina that could potentially hurt or snap off my penis. Strange…..
Orlov has some very retrograde and negative attitudes towards women, and believes that post-collapse women will return to “baseline”, which means subordinated and valued only for having babies. We feminists are right about Orlov.
Thanks for the week’s work, JHK.
I just wanted to see if I could get a post, to post.
And I wanted to make an observation that the resident know-it-all/troll/asoka.. has reincarnated – this time as “janet” and perhaps as “carol newquist,” also.
Hello to all the old timers, even spidey/8m.
Asoka.. – try posting less, and not being an expert on everything.
Maybe this blog can now rebuild. I’m out ’till next week.
Welcome, P4W!
Try not to be so controlling of how often others post or of who crosses our imaginary line national boundaries.
OBAMA AND BUSH PROMOTE BENEFITS OF IMMIGRATION
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/obama-and-bush-promote-benefits-of-immigration/
Yeah, OK, whatever, asoka..janet.
First mention of immigration for the week, btw. jackass.
And why don’t you – not be an unmitigated troll on JHK’s website.
Soon, we will have asoka/janet/carol – all trolling the NEW CFN.
JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER – Why do you put up with this?
Now – I’m out ’till next week.
Gotta’ burn some fossil fuel and produce some CO2.
It’s part of the “non-negotiable” American way of life.
(TM Bush/Obama)
We need more consumers to fuel GROWTH in America.
(TM asoka..janet..carol)
What a mess. (TM – progress4what)
Thanks to both you and Being There.
Did ya all know the USA population has increased by 36? MILLION since year 2000?
I think it’s more of a feeling that your favorite appendage will be snapped off, not that it actually will snap.
The rebel girl band from Russia is similarly just a very excitable FEELING that doesn’t represent reality.
Orlov is making an observation that it is possible for women to be HAPPY and CONTENT in a subjective role because they choose it. Subsequently, if a woman doesn’t choose to be subservient to a dominant male society now or in the future (when it’s supposed to mean their survival) life will be difficult for them but not impossible.
There are lots of single non-lesbian women who work within a team of men to accomplish any given task, especially that of leading a project, because they bring a skill (usually that of being extremely observant to detail and having intuition or insight into how things should be done). Kunstler has a project in his fictional novels that has to do with a dominantly FEMALE driven activity. Sure the men will have the brute strength and skill to build the laundry, but it will be the women actually using it, and the men need to be sensitive to their needs and recommendations. Men such as Orlov and others have a tendency to piss people off because…frankly…they just talk to damn much. If they would introduce the women in the roles they admire and want to promote, things would go better for them with women liberationists because a woman would be speaking and showing their perceived to be contrary ideas.
It’s close to verdict time in the Zimmerman trial. Will he be acquitted? If so, will there be riots? If there are riots, will it be like the L.A. riots after the Rodney King verdict? If it is similar to the L.A. riots after the Rodney King verdict, will white folks lay down and take it once again? During those riots, wild animals fled into the streets and attacked everyone and everything. The violence was perpetrated by thugs who couldn’t care less about Rodney King; they were just looking for any excuse to vandalize, maim and murder. The naive and unwitting who ventured into the prone areas when the L.A. riots broke out were mercilessly attacked. Reginald Denny? A working class stiff driving a truck gets his head bashed in with a brick because some thugs like to do that sort of thing and will find any pretext to do it. The police let it happen. The police will let it happen again in Florida should the verdict not go the way the lynch mob demands. Will white folks allow their heads to be bashed in with bricks again, or will they stand their ground this time? We’ll see. I think they’ll let their heads be bashed in with bricks. Tough guys are no where to be seen at times like these. They only pick on easy targets. Thugs don’t fight each other, they fight easy, vulnerable targets, because thugs are ultimately cowards.
Tough guys are no where to be seen at times like these. They only pick on easy targets. Thugs don’t fight each other, they fight easy, vulnerable targets, because thugs are ultimately cowards.
Case in point. Look at what the cowards with the guns and the “Rule of Law” are doing instead? That’s right, picking on easy targets. The law protects them, not “us”. They get away with their cowardice precisely because of the law. If you confront their thuggery head-on, you go to jail, not them. They are the epitome of cowardice. Scumbags. There’s one in my neighborhood. He’s a cowardly pussy who would never take a real fight. NEVER. Like Chris Kyle, they prefer to take on unprepared and vulnerable targets, and even then, from a quarter mile away behind a scope. Yeah, you, I know you’re watching and listening. In fact, I’m waving at you right now. You’re a coward.
http://resistkxl.tumblr.com/post/54937045247/lukexvx-freedomsson-northwoods-wimiine
Oh, look, a Resist the Keystone XL Pipeline Tumblr! Oh, shiny!
Thanks for the link to a blog I should be following. In return, I’ll give you a link to my coverage of the local anti-tar-sands activists in Michigan, who are protesting the Enbridge pipeline through the state. They’re willing to stick their necks out for their cause.
http://crazyeddiethemotie.blogspot.com/2013/06/civil-disobedience-against-tar-sands-in.html
I only linked to that site for the pics of the security thugs ready to do battle with some flower children. I had never heard of or seen this site previously, but the pics say a thousand, or more, words.
Alright, here’s my prediction. There will be no riots, because Zimmerman will wrongfully be convicted of either third degree murder or manslaughter. Ordinarily, Florida uses the binary approach in self-defense cases where you’re either guilty or not guilty of the charge on record, end of story, but apparently, as with all law, there are work-arounds and the prosecution is requesting that the judge instruct the jury they can convict of third degree murder or manslaughter. if lieu of second degree murder. Considering the tension that exists between the defense team and this judge, I predict she will allow the prosecution’s request and the jury will moronically take this instruction as a cue to convict Zimmerman of the lesser charge. We’ll see. Either way, it’s all good. Thugs will remain thugs. The injustice system will remain the injustice system, and the World Made By Hand will be here any day now. Next spectacle, please.
I heard the news today, oh boy….
Back to Snowden
I just heard that the Kremlin is looking for typewriters! They want keep their most important secrets off-line. Very interesting reaction to Snowden’s revelations.
That idea of the Limited Hangout Operation sounds more intriguing, now.
WASHINGTON — The federal government on Thursday reported a SURPLUS of $116.5 billion in June, the largest for a single month in five years. The gain kept the nation on track for its lowest annual deficit in five years.
Isn’t this Zimmerman trial just another MSM “Wedgie” to divide the the poor people along racial lines?
I read in Paul Craig Roberts new book, “The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism” that there are now “insourcing” contractor companies in the U.S. that bring in low-wage foreign workers on temporary visas to work in U.S. fast food restaurants. You can’t even make this shit up.
Pucker,
If you really want to know the full extent of the global agenda, listen to this: It explains this new hybrid they innovated called public/private partnerships. Oh, indeed you will hear more about it in the future. From education to building infrastructure. And guess what comes out on the bottom, the people…as if I needed to spell that out.
[“The Commons, Banking In the Ivory Tower & Public-Private Partnerships” with Jim Hogue, Charlie Eaton and Darwin Bond Graham. Ethan Allen on The Commons; Wall Street profits vs public capital at the University of California; conflicts of interest on the Board of Regents; interest rate swaps; privatization of the public finance system; Transportation Infrastructure Finance & Innovation Act; securitization; Port of Oakland; Doyle Drive, Presidio Parkway.]
http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/93274
Isn’t this Zimmerman trial just another MSM “Wedgie” to divide the the poor people along racial lines?
Everything’s a Wedgie, including your comments, my comments, PCR’s misinformation….EVERYTHING. Wedgies R Us. Learn to love the Wedgie.
The judge has allowed for manslaughter. The dopes on the jury will convict him of manslaughter now. He acted in self-defense and is guilty of nothing per the law. But then, when does the law matter? Yet another case of Affirmative Justice.
In his new book, “The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism”, Paul Craig Roberts compliments Dmitry Orlov and Orlov’s classic, “Reinventing Collapse”.
I still don’t understand why the Feminists are now going after Orlov, or as George W. Bush, Jr. would say: “Smoke him out of his hole.”
I think that it’s terrible that some people are intimating that Orlov is fond of vodka, as this smacks of some kind of negative cultural stereotype of Russian people, which has absolutely no relevance to the conclusions or methodology of Orlov’s research.
Hell, I like Russian people. O.K., I’ll grant you that Russian humor and the Stalin jokes from the Soviet era seem a bit strange, but I guess that in a bizarre sort of way that it is somewhat funny that the audience kept clapping for 2 hours after Stalin’s speech because each member of the audience was afraid to be the first person to stop clapping?
It has always struck me as rather strange that the U.S. government keeps attacking a group of people who seem to be doing the dirty work of killing the people who are really trying to harm the U.S. Very strange….
I guess that the way it works is that if they run out of enemies that in order to keep the game going they’ll just start attacking their friends, and the people won’t notice?
It’s like sport, basketball, football, nascar, etc.. It never ends because it it did end then all of coaches, the players, the half-naked, breast-implanted cheerleaders, the obnoxious drunken fans, the merchandisers, fast food commercials, etc. would just disappear and the people would no longer be distracted and could then focus on more important things like gardening, paying attention to family and friends, exercise, hunting, fishing, reading, etc.
According to Paul Craig Roberts’ book “The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism”, the GMO plants that they’re now feeding everyone inherently block the uptake of important vitamins, minerals, etc. from the soil and, therefore, do not contain important nutrients essential to sustaining the human body—Virtual Reality Food!
The people could literally become obese while starving to death.
Totally insane!
As I’ve said before, Monsanto may take out a patent on us all and claim that they own our DNA. We may have to pay them a tax to sytay alive….Who knows where this Brave New World will take us?
In the Zimmerman trial, at the time of the shooting, wasn’t the deceased sitting atop the defendant literally knocking the defendant’s bloody head against the ground?
If so, the defendant would seem to have a defense since it is foreseeable to a reasonable person what might have resulted to the defendant if the deceased had continued to knock the defendant’s head against the ground, right?
In Florida, you have a legal right to protect yourself from attacks. You may be justified in using deadly force if someone is attempting to murder you. Additionally, in Florida, if a perpetrator is committing a felony upon you in your home, the use of deadly force is justified.
The statute was intentionally written broadly.
1st degree Murder: A homicide committed intentionally with premeditation or malice aforethought.
Voluntary Manslaughter: The intentional killing of a human being, when the defendant had no prior intent to kill.
Involuntary Manslaughter: The unintentional killing of a human being.
Vehicular Manslaughter: A death that is unintentional and is the result of reckless driving, such as DUI.
To prove the crime of Manslaughter, the State must prove the following two elements beyond a reasonable doubt:
(Victim) is dead.
Give 2a, 2b, or 2c depending upon allegations and proof.
2. a. (Defendant) intentionally caused the death of (victim).
2. b. (Defendant) intentionally procured the death of (victim).
2. c. The death of (victim) was caused by the culpable negligence of (defendant).
However, the defendant cannot be guilty of manslaughter if the killing was either justifiable or excusable homicide as I have previously explained those terms.
The trick so far has been to create massive inflation, export the effects of it to other trading partners, and end up with a lot more money here in the USA, or the illusion of more money. Well, loans, for houses, cars, and college tuitions. In a word: debt.
Massive inflation does not exist.
Money in the USA exists because Obama is not spending the money the government receives. We are running monthly budget SURPLUSES.
Debt is going down, both national debt and personal debt.
JHK offers his opinion but does not give numbers to back it up.
This week I have given the numbers to prove inflation, deficits, and debt are all going down.
The USA is a nation with leadership. Obama is the leader who is reducing the deficit, reducing debt, and reducing inflation. Hell, they are even talking about eliminating QE. And GM is profitable. The government nursed it back to health. Obamacare will further reduce the deficit. It’s all good.
However, the defendant cannot be guilty of manslaughter if the killing was either justifiable or excusable homicide as I have previously explained those terms.
If you mean guilty as in convicted, yes he can be. It’s trial by jury, and that jury will decide his fate, right or wrong. I don’t think this should have ever come to trial. What you just mentioned could have been settled during an appropriate grand jury process, and following the sentiment and procedure of the law, that grand jury would have decided to not send this case to trial.
In his new book, “The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism”, Paul Craig Roberts compliments Dmitry Orlov and Orlov’s classic, “Reinventing Collapse”.
Maybe PCR and DO could merge and amongst other things, develop a designer vodka. They can call their boutique spirit Collapse Vodka and it can made from potatoes cultivated and harvested by obedient and subservient Russian female immigrants who abide. Their special potato can cleverly be named Crop-D.
Their special potato can cleverly be named Crop-D.
In the case of Dmitry I think he would prefer his double D.
According to Paul Craig Roberts’ book “The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism”, the entire academic discipline of Economics is predicated on the notion that natural resources are unlimited, and, therefore, that economic growth can continue indefinitely.
I don’t know about you, but I think that even your average 5 year old might find a problem with that one.
Even your average, “garden-variety” head case locked up in the mental hospital might be able to see that there might be a problem here.
The people running everything are obviously terribly disconnected from Reality.
Pucker, you are painting with an awfully big brush.
“the entire academic discipline of Economics” … NOT.
Interesting that you believe PCR, instead of doing five minutes of research to prove what he is saying about academic economists does not apply universally. I could provide you with a long list of academic economists (contemporary and historical) who do not believe what you say they believe, but you would probably continue to believe PCR.
<b<“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world, is either a madman or an economist.”
~Kenneth Boulding, Economics professor
Pucker,
The majority of economists have gone in the direction of the Milton Friedman Chicago School of business.
The big think tanks also walk in lock-step, but there are alternatives. What PCR is saying is that the dialog that we hear is completely in this camp and the alternatives are not heard. TINA refers to Margaret Thatcher’s famous dictum “There is no alternative.” They try to discredit any thinking that goes in a different direction, so PCR is right in terms of who gets heard.
I like the post Keynsians who recognize some of the problems with Keynes. People like Michael Hudson and William K. Black. Both teach at the Missouri School of Business the alternative to Chicago.
UMKC is the main alternative to Chicago School anti-government economics, along with the Berlin School of Economics.
Also JHK interviewed on his pod-cast Brian Czech, founder of The Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.
Check it out!
Just because they make that claim–doesn’t make it true, as we all know.
They lie about how much oil we have to get the Europeans aligned with us instead of Russia, a country rich in nat resources.
You gotta appreciate those Orwellians.
“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world, is either a madman or an economist.”
~Kenneth Boulding, Economics professor
Economist from academia … does not believe in necessity of growth
Boulding believed that in the absence of a committed effort to the right kind of social science research and understanding, the human species might well be doomed to extinction. But he died optimistic, believing our evolutionary journey had just begun.
NOTE TO CFN:
JHK is undergoing one more surgery today to remove bone spurs from his neck. He now has the reputation of best patient of the year for the surgery industry!
Do wish him well, everyone!
Also JHK interviewed on his pod-cast Brian Czech, founder of The Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.
Check it out!
I don’t have time to check out everything you people here say to check out. Who does? Considering that, why don’t you summarize it for us. For example, does this pollyanish approach address the very basic fact that power doesn’t relinquish itself readily….meaning those in positions of power have created a system that maintains and perpetuates the hierarchy and their positions therein? Amongst other things, this is the problem with what the Zeitgeist Movement proposes. How do you get from Point A to Point B, C, D, E and so on and so forth?
Also, how do you know JHK is having surgery, or better yet, why do you know? Your answer is important to me. It will help me gain greater clarity on the mystery that is this comments section.
Hey wise guy CN, If you in fact checked it out you might have heard JHK announcement of his surgery—So my advice to you is to ignore anything I say on this blog and leave me out of your female impersonator mosh-pit BS.
I promise to ignore you! That will be easy
If so, why are you bothering to announce it to a bunch of anti-semitic freaks who in another place and time would put him in a gas chamber and then cremate him? The very same people you have enabled and coddled over the years. I’ve watched your posts like a hawk. You are a foil, not the real deal, and your assessment is not JHK’s assessment. JHK has stated on numerous occasions he is not a right-winger, and in fact, voted for Obama. You are a right-winger by virtue of your complicity with the racists who have usurped this blog and continue to do so despite the changes.
NOTE TO CFN:
Very interesting…..this use of the colon. Note to pattern recognition file.
Pucker, you are painting with an awfully big brush.
Imagine what Pucker says about the Jews? Mindsets like this view life through their Big Brush. You have your Feminists, your Liberals, your “Niggers”, your Jews, your “faggots”, your Yankees, your Japs….and on and on it goes. That BIg Brush makes it all so easy. There’s no need to think. All you need to do is tune into PCR, DO and DD and they’ll tell you how to use that Big Brush to paint by the numbers they’ve provided so as you can go jump in the sack with your sisters and daughters who abide.
Na Zdorovie!!
They lie about how much oil we have to get the Europeans aligned with us instead of Russia, a country rich in nat resources.
You really believe this? You think the “Europeans” are a bunch of morons who don’t see through this rather simple and transparent ruse, and yet you in your infinite wisdom do? Come on, get a grip.
I don’t think you’re a woman as you say you are. If you are, you’re a disgrace for allowing janet and me to be treated as we have been in this den of iniquity. Albright would be ashamed of you, and in fact, she would claim you are no woman at all, regardless of a vagina. I don’t even think you have a vagina. I think it’s time to come clean. All those who claim to be women, prove it, and I don’t mean show us your vagina, at least not in the literal sense.
You’re an abusive presence on this blog and a liar–Carol Newquist is a man and you know it.
Hey, I’ve got a brilliant idea. Why don’t you start your own blog, let’s see how many people are interested. Lets give it a whirl, girl. You and your alter-ego Janet…now that’s rich.
And if you think in your twisted way that you’re being attacked it could be that your testosterone rage started the bad vibe around here. But alas, you want to take the blog over, so you”ll never leave. We are all stuck with you and your vulgarity—-It’s over between me and you.
Don’t insinuate yourself into my conversations with others. I won’t be responding no matter how outrageous you choose to be.
For the first year I was on this blog I wouldn’t reveal my gender because it’s totally irrelevant. I don’t care about personalities, I care about info.
I would say that pointing out alternatives to MSM at least makes people think about why things are done. I let people know what my true opinion is when I actually formulate something and I throw out other ideas that are circulating around for people to explore theselves.
“Carol” is good at yanking chains. As a long time reader of this blog, I’ve noticed that “she” does “her ” level best to derail any intelligent discussion here with “her” irrational thinking. I got a huge whiff of this when “she” started writing all of that soft porn crap. Let’s not feet these trolls any longer.
I like that. Had to read it twice to ‘get’ feet meant ‘feed’.
‘ you”ll never leave’…via Death? Or JHK banning ‘the entity’ that works or worked for Dept of Defense [hence my ‘handle’].
Notice somewhere upthread ‘it’ [carol?] quotes Asoka!
For the first year I was on this blog I wouldn’t reveal my gender because it’s totally irrelevant. I don’t care about personalities, I care about info.
This is so priceless, I’m speechless….but not wordless. Yes, it is irrelevant. What someone is or isn’t IRL is irrelevant to the discussion and yet your sockpuppet sidekick E. adamantly disagrees. I’m not impersonating anyone or anything. What you believe me to be or what anyone else here has said that I am is merely what you and they have wanted to ascribe to me for various reasons. I am nothing. I am nobody. It’s you and yours that make me in the image you prefer. I’m your reflection……but reflections can be tricky.
Now, start answering some of the issues I’ve addressed rather than focusing on these Wedgie distractions. Address what I said about Brian Czech and the Steady State Economy rather than deflecting with this personality bullshit.
New K-Dog, and only a click away !!
🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂
so much for kunstler’s diminishing technology returns…
Even more striking are the policies enacted in Germany, which boasts more than a million solar systems, four times as many as the United States despite the fact that it has about one-fourth of the population. Last May 26, these mostly rooftop arrays produced 22 gigawatts—enough to meet half the country’s electricity demand. It’s worth noting that the “insolation,” or sunniness factor, of Germany is worse than that of everywhere in the contiguous United States except rainy Seattle.
peace peaceniks
E says:
Those enclaves of which you speak are a done deal. The USA isn’t alone in extreme wealth concentration. Brazil and all those “People’s Republic” types of places are experiencing the same thing. Find any recent article about Sao Paolo for example.
It’s true, UFIA, that the middle class world doesn’t have to end with a bang but rather with a billion whispers. In the USA … it already has.
E.
***************************************************
Thanks for weighing in, E. Death by a thousand cuts, agreed.
Regarding those enclaves: it seems the only thing left to be built are the walls; however, a sudden stampede of hopeful captives pouring into those protected and military enforced enclaves needs to be avoided and/or managed as best as possible. Despite what the Alex Jonesians of the web believe, I think the last thing the gubbaments and the corporates want to deal with are disaster/climate refugees en mass and all at once, if at all avoidable.
That’s what I think we’re witnessing today, an attempt to reduce the inevitable chaos over time. All the rules have been thrown out the window and the consequences of industrialism have been fully realized, but we’ve all collectively agreed to ride in the automobile til the wheels fall off or until we can’t build anymore roads, because the Elite want what’s theirs and the middle class want what’s been promised.
My question is how are the middle class members who aren’t able to transition and compete in the new supposed “wealth” generating paradigm to be re-apportioned or re-assigned to a manageable sector of the economy and social structure that’s emerging?
In other words, why do we continue to believe the false promise of a sacred middle class livelihood? The Elite don’t believe in this promise and have positioned themselves accordingly. It’s because they don’t believe in this promise that they scramble to shape the laws as they have. We not only have a problem in allowing the upper classes to dominate and control all the productive resources, but we also have a problem with the middle classes willfully believing that they’re entitled to the very class structure that oppresses them. Upon whom are we to place the most blame for the problems the clusterfucked global civilizations now face, the narcissists who seek to dominate or the enablers who allow the parasites to bleed them dry? I’m getting tired of all the victim-hood.
The sort of Hunger Games dystopian fear-mongering I constantly come across and even mostly identify with does periodically strike me as bit far-fetched and dismissive of some rather obvious self-selected, self-fulfilling prophecies to which the middle class mentality simply acquiesces. Although, here I’m simply expressing a bit of frustration and confusion about the whole inescapable set of ordeals. I’m not without empathy, I just somtimes have a hard time sympathizing with the people of the middle class who watched their dreams disappear for 30 or more years and just kept on keepin’ on the whole time.
Anyhow, this interview from CR with Bill Moyers was quite good but conjured a lot of mixed feelings for me about the noble mythology of the middle class mindset. I’m still sort of processing it all, but if any here have opinions either way, feel free to shout.
http://www.charlierose.com/watch/60238315
-UFIA
The Elite don’t believe in this promise and have positioned themselves accordingly.
The Elite are not invulnerable. Money cannot protect them. Guns cannot protect them. Even in their gated communities they will not be safe when TSHTF … just around the corner. There is no where to hide.
I hope that JHK recovers soon from his surgery.
Is surgery for bone spurs serious?
I don’t know anything about this.
I don’t trust doctors. They seem to just order lots of expensive tests, particularly if they find out that you’ve got insurance coverage.
I read somewhere that on average that there’s a 50% chance of getting cancer, and that the chance of dying of it is another 50%. In other words, basically you get 2 flips of the coin.
It’s like in the movie “No Country for Old Men” when the psychopath, Anton Shagure, flips the coin before his kills his victims: “Call it. Just call it.”
They’re all f..cking crazy.
For much of my “up-bringing” I always thought that since Americans had “rule-of-law” and a government presumably based upon reason that America was somehow “exceptional”.
NOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now, I found out that the entire premise of Western Capitalist Economics is that unlimited economic growth is possible because resources are presumed to be unlimited. (I understand that there’s a branch of Economics called “ecological economics”, which accepts that resources are finite; however, this branch is a relatively recent development in Economics.)
If you think about it, this is not that much different from the Eastern Islanders cutting down all the trees.
“It’s o.k. to keep cutting down all the trees. There’s nothing to worry about. The Stone Heads will protect us. The Stone Heads have always protected us. The Stone Heads won’t let us down. We need to keep cutting down the trees to build more Stone Heads!”
The crowd cheers: “More Stone Heads! More Stone Heads! Down with the Hippie Tree Huggers! More Stone Heads!”
Some steady-state (no-growth) economic theorists:
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1971)
K. William Kapp (1950)
Karl Polanyi (1944)
E.F. Schumacher (1973)
Herman Daly’s (1977)
Pucker, your choice of Easter Island deforestation is not an example of finite resource consumption. Forests are not finite resources. Globally in the last decade the area of forest covered by a management plan – an important tool for achieving sustainable forest management – is steadily increasing. It’s not like it’s inevitable we are going to use up all the forests like on Easter Island. We are smarter than that.
How are we smarter? If you look at the last 20 years, significant positive trends have been reported in the area of forest designated for the conservation of biological diversity and the area of forest in protected areas (particularly in the last decade), the area of planted forest and the number of students graduating in forestry. Human beings are rational animals. We educate when education is necessary. We conserve when conservation is necessary.
We’re on it, Pucker. It’s all good.
If you want evidence, check out the FAO reports on global forest resources assessment. Humanity is awake and acting positively.
Dmitry Orlov is a modern-day Alexis de Tocqueville.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_de_Tocqueville
Once when I was a kid I came across a tract of land in Alabama that had been “strip mined”. It was completely barren of vegetation and badly eroded from the rain. The soil was just a chalky rough gravel and dust as if it can been bleached with chlorine or acid. Dead…. Like the end of the world.
Mountaintop removal mining (MTR), also known as mountaintop mining (MTM), is a form of surface mining that involves the mining of the summit or summit ridge of a mountain. Coal seams are extracted from a mountain by removing the land, or overburden, above the seams. The land may be dumped back on the ridge and compacted to reflect the approximate original contour of the mountain.[1] It is the predominant method of coal mining in the Appalachian Mountains in the eastern United States. Explosives are used to remove up to 400 vertical feet (120 m) of mountain to expose underlying coal seams. Excess rock and soil laden with toxic mining byproducts are often dumped into nearby valleys, in what are called “holler fills” or “valley fills.”[2][3][4] Less expensive to execute and requiring fewer employees, mountaintop removal mining began in Appalachia in the 1970s as an extension of conventional strip mining techniques. It is primarily occurring in Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, and Tennessee
Peer-reviewed studies show that mountaintop mining has serious environmental impacts, including loss of biodiversity and toxification of watersheds, that mitigation practices cannot successfully address.[5] There are also adverse human health impacts which result from contact with affected streams or exposure to airborne toxins and dust.[5] According to 21 scientific studies there has been major effects on the population in the Appalachia where MTM takes place including over 50% higher cancer rates, 42% higher birth defect rates, and $75 billion a year in public health costs from pollution. [6]
Yeah, coal is nasty stuff … which is why Rube-i-Con’s post on Germany is so important, showing where there is a will there is a way.
Germany boasts more than a million solar systems, four times as many as the United States despite the fact that it has about one-fourth of the population. Last May 26, these mostly rooftop arrays produced 22 gigawatts—enough to meet half the country’s electricity demand. It’s worth noting that the “insolation,” or sunniness factor, of Germany is worse than that of everywhere in the contiguous United States except rainy Seattle.
No mining necessary. No environmental degradation necessary. No higher cancer and birth defect rates necessary. No pollution necessary. Solar is clean, emission-free, sustainable energy.
Janet, In 1970 my high school had an energy symposium and the speaker for solar energy said that they could not get US govt funding and that the govt liked big utilities.
The economic political system of monopolistic trans nationals gets government preference and presently it’s crony capitalism where govt chooses winners and losers.
In Germany theoil companies aren’t entrenched as they are here so they can move ahead.
Here it won’t happen unless individuals decide to do it themselves. It amazes me that the Tea party types don’t embrace it more, since they want freedom from govt. and one would think freedom from giant monopolies.
Janet, what’s going on with South American rain forests and Asian rain forests. Are they also being replanted?
__________
Pucker, our economic model changed from Keynesian economics, which was a demand-side more balanced mixed economy with wage and price control and more protections for the citizenry.
Unfortunately for us we moved into more of the Austrian School through the Chicago School of business influenced by Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman. Soon after that we adopted supply side economics, developed by Paul Craig Roberts. He still stands by the theory but admits that the global free market system doesn’t work. The supply side is the real problem for nat. resources.
I consider PCR a conundrum. He is flawed in his economic theory yet he is somehow a man of conscience. One of the few who spoke his mind and lost his big position.
What’s the deal with solar energy?
I read somewhere that solar energy doesn’t really solve the energy problem since it isn’t relatively energy positive, i.e., as much energy goes into creating the solar panels as comes out.
I understand that the key for continued economic expansion is finding a rich energy positive energy source, like oil in the early days, when the equivalent of one barrel of oil could literally produce 100 barrels of oil. Now, the ratio is one-to-three barrels, which puts us in the current “Energy Pickle”, right?
I think that it’d be funny to invite Dmitry Orlov to give a “half-time” presentation on the topic of Collapse and societal delusion in the face of Collapse during a televised U.S. professional football game.
Orlov reminds me of the character, Zarathustra, in Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”.
At American college football games, do some drunken fans still wave those giant foam rubber hands with the index finger extended and shout: “We’re Number One!”?
Yeah, Pucker, what is going on? Europe can make solar work and we can’t? And they don’t have any more sun than we have. Yet their cost benefit analysis shows solar is competitive with oil. An assessment was made as to whether renewable energy use for electricity generation in the EU was beneficial throughout the cycle of high and low oil prices. Costs and benefits are calculated with the EU statistics for the period of low oil prices 1998–2002 and high oil prices 2003–2009. The share of renewable energy in electricity production was 21% of all energy resources in 2008, growing on average 5% a year during 2003–2008 compared to nil growth of the fossil fuels mix.
Correlations show significant impacts of growing renewable energy use on changes in consumers’ electricity prices during the high and rapidly increasing fossil fuel prices in the period 2005–2008. The growing use has contributed to price decrease in most countries that use more renewable energy and price increase in many countries that use little renewable energy. Costs and benefits are assessed through comparison between the observed consumers’ electricity prices and simulated prices had they followed the costs of fossil fuel mix.
A net benefit of 47 billion euro throughout the oil price cycle is attributable to the growing use of renewable energy, which is on average 8 billion euro a year. This net benefit is larger than the total public support for renewable energy. The net benefit would be larger had the EU anticipated high oil prices through more public support during low oil prices, as this would create productive capacity, but countries’ interests increasingly differed.
Wind power is the largest source of “alternative energy”. However, it stands on the huge shoulders of fossil fuel energy to be built and maintained. A windmill has an expected operating life of only 25 years. In fact, wind is another mirage. Read this:
********************************************************************************
Violent Environmental Problems With Wind Turbine Operation: From Avian Mortality to Catastrophic Failure
by James Rust
April 3, 2013
27 15 53
Renewable energy wind turbines as electricity sources possess extreme environmental problems not found in their renewable energy rival–solar photovoltaic. These problems are due to rotation of 130-foot or more long, thirteen-ton turbine blades with tip speeds of 200 miles per hour.
“An unavoidable problem of wind turbines is killing flying creatures. The Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) produced a video “Eagle lawsuit ruffles wind industry feathers”. The video records a bird apparently being killed by a wind turbine. It appears the bird went back for a second look at the turbine and a blade struck the fatal blow. Possibly the bird thought the turbine was a bigger bird.”
A companion article published March 19, 2013, by CFACT is “Wind turbines kill up to 39 million birds a year” by wildlife expert Jim Wiegand. Details of studies on bird fatalities caused by wind turbines are cited in this article.
The source of Jim Wiegand’s statement wind turbines kills up to 39 million birds a year is found in the December 15, 2012, Townhall article by Paul Driessen “Stop Subsidizing the Slaughter”. Mr. Driessen’s estimates are based on bird fatality studies done in the United States and Europe that are referenced in the article. He used 39,000 wind turbines operating in the United States at the end of 2011 for making estimates.
It has been long known wind turbines are devastating to bat populations. A U. S. Geological Survey report “Bat Fatalities at Wind Turbines: Investigating the Causes and Consequences” mentions thousands of bats are killed annually at wind turbine sites around the world.
Besides being minced by turbine blade rotations, bats are subject to deaths by other means as explained by the August 26, 2008 Scientific American article “On a Wing and Low Air: The Surprising Way Wind Turbines Kill Bats.” Bats are killed by pressure pulses causing burst blood vessels in their lungs. Due to these deaths being caused by remote features of wind turbine operations and bats very small body mass, bat carcasses may be located large distances from offending wind turbines and never found. As nocturnal creatures, bats are particularly vulnerable to wind turbines because their operations are frequently at night when demand for electricity is at its lowest.
These four references provide links to other references of bird kill studies that make convincing arguments wind turbines present unacceptable threats to flying creatures.
According to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), the United States had at the end of 2012 more than 60,000 Megawatts of wind turbine output supplied by 45,000 turbines. The majority of wind turbines are located in vast agriculture areas of central United States stretching from Texas to Canada.
The 39 million annual bird fatalities estimates by Jim Wiegand and Paul Driessen may be gross underestimates due to thousands of wind turbines starting operation in 2012. Bats devour huge amounts of insects and their loss in agriculture areas may have devastating impacts on future agriculture production. These assessments are not considered or studied. Agriculture Departments of Midwest Universities, like Purdue University, should study effects of bat loss, and maybe extinction, and subsequent larger insect populations on crop production. Wind farms in corn fields are close by.
Other problems with wind turbines are they catch on fire and explode. In 2011, an upper New York state wind turbine exploded and spread debris for one-fourth mile. Pictures of wind turbine fires in Texas and other locations are further displayed.
Winter times present other problems for wind turbines. Spinning turbine blades have thrown refrigerator-sized pieces of ice hundreds of yards.
Wind turbines should be subjected to the same Maximum Credible Accident (MCA) criteria imposed on nuclear power plants. The MCA for nuclear plants is a Loss-of-Coolant-Accident (LOCA) in which reactor coolants stop flowing and reactor cores are subject to melting due overheating.
The MCA for wind turbines is 13-ton turbine blades snap-off during operation and blades hurtled possibly one-half mile. This accident could be labeled Loss-of-Blade-Accident (LOBA). A possible LOBA is a severed blade lands in a local high school football stadium during Homecoming–thousands could be killed before the 13-ton blade comes to rest. Exclusion zones surrounding wind turbines need established to protect the public from injury. Smaller scale injuries are individuals being struck by decapitated eagles or similar flying creatures.
Wind turbines also affect humans. Exposure to low-amplitude pressure pulses unnoticed by humans may lead to future problems. In addition, sound pulses at about 20 cycles per minute match turbine’s speed of rotation. Long-term health effects from these disturbances can’t be known.
These are a few violent environmental problems with wind turbines unknown to solar photovoltaic. Like solar energy, additional environmental assessments are wind turbines energy requirements to build and install them in comparison to energy outputs during operating lifetimes. Wind turbines require external power supplies to heat them in the winter and provide initial blade rotations.
Environmental effects of acquiring rare earth metals for generator magnets, large quantities of fiberglass and other metals, and vast amounts of concrete for turbine bases need evaluated. Like solar energy, intermittent operation of wind turbines require fast responding fossil-fuel electricity sources to maintain continuity of electricity supply. Poor performance of backup electricity supply may reduce or even eliminate wind turbine’s savings of fossil fuel use.
In the exuberant pursuit of wind and solar energy sources, matters of intermittent supply are ignored. Wind power is substantial in Texas and supply problems are documented in my February 11, 2011, article, “Wind Power Emergencies in Texas“ posted on The Heartland Institute website.
Like solar photovoltaic, wind turbines are expected to have a practical operating lifetime of around 25 years. What happens to wind turbines no longer usable?
Will the countryside be strewn by unsightly landscapes of tall towers with dangling turbine blades? This is a view of thousands of still wind turbines shown years ago on I-10 west of Palm Springs, California. Whether this situation exists today the author is unaware.
________________________________________________________
James H. Rust, Professor of nuclear engineering and policy adviser to The Heartland Institute. Prof. Rust currently funds three annual engineering scholarships of $2500, $6000, and $6500.
– See more at: http://www.masterresource.org/2013/04/violent-environmental-problems-with-wind-turbine-operation-from-avian-mortality-to-operational-failure/#sthash.fjyrlFvJ.dpuf
Thanks for that.
Now that’s sad.
That’s what I call unintended consequences! Another example of not looking at the whole picture.
Mornin’, E.
Thanks for the post and data as usual. What are the chances that the country by way of the government agrees/ passes legislation mandating a massive solar panel retro-fitting campaign, something that Jeremy Grantham suggested on CR a few months back?
I wonder why it is that as a country we can’t even produce a coherent narrative and consensus on how to implement the most basic “fixes” to our energy management needs.
Is this simply a case where the energy industry itself lobbies against such competing implementations, as these initiatives would certainly diminish their market share in a given sector? Is it also a problem where the average voter simply doesn’t require enough of the alternative energies agenda from their considered candidates platform? Or is it just ordinary NIMBYism as it relates to technologies beside solar arrays?
-UFIA
I think solar should have a “Manhattan Project” level of importance attached to it. Thus far, it simply does not scale well at the city/state level. However, Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTRs or “lifters”) promise as much or more than solar. Thorium reactors CANNOT have a meltdown because the coolant instantly becomes solid at less than core temperatures. Thorium is much more abundant than uranium (about 4X) and there’s enough there for about 1,000 years and civilizations need to buy much than just a couple of decades of time.
However you slice it, though, wind is the dominant current source of alternative energy and even countries like Germany are questioning it as I write. The avian deaths are a bad side effect but the materials it takes to make thousands of windmills are daunting and, once again, stands on the back of existing fossil fuel technologies to build and maintain.
Wind only keeps the lights on if built on massive scales (many “kilo-mills” per unit area are necessary to generate meaningful power). They use up lots of rare earth metals. ONE windmill uses an incredible amount of resources. It’s not the answer.
E.
Yes, I understand the points, E. It seems too that the window for transition and implementation of these technologies and the requisite fine tuning of the viability of each of the programs has come and gone, to risk sounding defeatist. Maybe that window of opportunity was open 30 years ago? But now such development, if I understand your position, is nearly impossible due to the lack of cheap oil to bridge the gap?
What about a conservation (dare I use the word confiscation?) of requisite materials which are typically squandered in consumer enterprise? Of course, that’s probably a pipe dream considering the political mine field proponents of such an idea would face. That to me seems the only alternative: to say enough of this wasteful consumer paradigm and to finally mandate an end to the landfill supply chain economy, if that makes sense. I know, I’m treading a thin line offensive to the free market mythology.
Anyhow, I know I often hear of Carter’s solar panels on the White House and Reagan’s removal of the same thanks to some sort of new found oil abundance and vindication via free market solution(s) that never arrived, but I’ve never understood the symbolism behind the two acts or presidencies, and I don’t think the gestures of each ever rose beyond the level of symbolism. For how long have we accepted the promise of ’round the corner energy independence, alternative infrastructure capacity, and free market utopia?
Interesting that the technology to truly solve these problems will probably rust and rot or stifle in infancy as we let the social engineers continue to do all the thinking.
Meanwhile, this Summer in my region of Colorado instead of actually receiving worthwhile amounts of rain when the gray clouds roll in and the wind picks up only giant dust storms ensue and visibility drops to near zero for the duration. My little town was always known for the periodic little dust devil cyclones but it wasn’t considered a dust bowl until recently.
-UFIA
Very few people will buy Dmitry Orlov’s books, but everyone will run out an buy Von Daniken’s books about alien astronauts.
Erich Anton Paul von Däniken (/??r?k f?n ?d?n?k?n/; German: [?e???ç f?n ?d??n?k?n]; born 14 April 1935) is a Swiss author who has made controversial claims about extraterrestrial influences on early human culture, in books such as Chariots of the Gods?, published in 1968. Von Däniken is one of the main figures responsible for popularizing the “paleo-contact” and ancient astronauts hypotheses.
Von Däniken’s first book, Chariots of the Gods?, was an immediate best seller in the United States and Europe. The ideas put forth in these books are largely rejected by scientists and academics, who categorize his work as pseudohistory and pseudoarchaeology.[1][2][3]
Von Däniken wrote his first book while working as manager of the Hotel Rosenhügel in Davos, Switzerland. He was convicted of several financial crimes, including fraud, shortly after publication of his first book.[4] The revenue from the sales of his book allowed him to repay his debts and leave the hotel business. Von Däniken wrote his second book, Gods from Outer Space, while in prison.
Von Däniken later became a co-founder of the Archaeology, Astronautics and SETI Research Association (AAS RA). He designed Mystery Park (now known as Jungfrau Park), a theme park located in Interlaken, Switzerland, that opened on 23 May 2003.[5]
…and they’ll run out and buy Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope.”
The people will buy books about aliens from outer space…and Hope.
James H. Rust, Professor of nuclear engineering and policy adviser to The Heartland Institute. Prof. Rust currently funds three annual engineering scholarships of $2500, $6000, and $6500.
This is too funny!! Really, it is. The Heartland Institute? Just the name itself conjures Back To The Future visions of nuclear-powered gas chambers and crematoriums. Gee, you don’t think there’s a conflict of interest considering the good professor’s occupation, do you? Let me guess, the only option is the nuclear option, right? This guy is named appropriately; rust…..like the disintegrating hull of the Titanic sitting at the bottom of the northern Atlantic.
Is surgery for bone spurs serious?
I don’t know anything about this.
PCR, in his book, Ketchup Is A Vegetable adulated Dmitry Orlov for his coverage of Cervical Osteophytes in his book, Vodka That Abides. DO claims the following about Cervical Osteophytes in that renowned work:
More than half of the people over the age of 60 have osteophytes, or bone spurs, somewhere in their bodies. Osteophytes in the spine are a normal sign of aging and are not a cause for concern unless they result in pain or neurological symptoms. Cervical osteophytes are bone spurs that grow on any of the seven vertebrae in the cervical spine (neck), involving the spine from the base of the skull to the base of the neck (C1 – C7 vertebrae).
Cervical osteophyte formation typically occurs when ligaments and tendons around the bones and joints in the cervical spine are damaged or inflamed. The inflamed or damaged tissue abnormally influences surrounding bone growth (though hard, bones are constantly renewing, like fingernails and hair). As a result, new bone cells are deposited where they would not normally grow.
The inflamed or damaged tissue that stimulates cervical osteophyte growth is often caused by cervical osteoarthritis, a degradation in the neck joints that occurs in many older people. These joints include the disc spaces themselves (a modified joint) and the facet joints, and this condition of cervical osteophyte formation is referred to as cervical spondylosis. Other types of arthritis, traumatic injury, and poor posture can also lead to osteophyte formation.
So, you see, it’s not too serious….but it is a pain in the neck (not ass). Thanks to DO for his coverage of this common condition, and thanks to him for suggesting therapeutic vodka baths for what ails ya. Screw the epsom salts, bring on the vodka; it’s the most effective technique for nonpathologic desquamation….and, you get a healthy buzz in the process; you’ll quite literally feel compelled to sing in Russian, and if you’re male, to beat your wife.
Nice stab in total darkness from one who knows nothing of the attendant symptoms that this condition is burdening JHK with. Self-involvement (whether for remuneration or lifestyle laughs) is its’ own reward/curse.
For the first year I was on this blog I wouldn’t reveal my gender because it’s totally irrelevant. I don’t care about personalities, I care about info.
This is the great fallacy of liberalism — that gender, or for that matter, ANYTHING in the universe, is irrelevant. To the contrary, EVERTHING is relevant and infinitely so. Everything “matters.” NOTHING is irrelevant.
The androgynous personalities of Janet and Carol would have you believe otherwise.
“This is the great fallacy of liberalism — that gender, or for that matter, ANYTHING in the universe, is irrelevant. To the contrary, EVERTHING is relevant and infinitely so. Everything “matters.” NOTHING is irrelevant.”
This is the great fallacy (one of many, actually) of dichotomous political thought; that relatively innocent statements such as this made by BT to which you refer in the above scold can be skewered, distorted and categorized as a derivative argument from liberals that wasn’t being made at all, as if she were flying the flag of liberalism itself rather than simply defending herself from one of yet another of Carol/Janet’s erroneous attacks. And here you stroll in and simply add to the bullshit.
However, the argument you may have in fact been trying to make sounded like an argument against Post Modernism, which I might have been inclined to receive, had you not fucked it up entirely. Post Modernists essentially hold that everyone is entitled to their own (t)ruths; the counter to Post Modernist tale spinning that I’ve heard and agree with is that post modernism merely seeks to spin a Grand Narrative that there are no Grand Narratives, no (T)ruths; that everyone is entitled to their own worldview, which is utter nonsense. And your snarky remark to BT signifies that you’re thoroughly trapped in that bogus Conservative VS Liberal dichotomy and thus a categorical thinker at most – a Post Modernist at best. Or have I attributed qualities to you that are way off base?
You seem to also want to confuse the terms relevant and relative. Perhaps everything is relative but you bury your boot in your mouth as you make the claim that everything is relevant to everything else, as if there are no boundaries, no distinctions at all. You’d make a horrible scientist or diagnostician of any sort. I suppose soon you’ll return to the tiresome minutiae of spotting minor grammatical foibles and correcting nominal spelling errors while lacking any genuine, extensive diagnostic capacity beyond simple proof reading. You’ve made yourself Carol’s unpaid, autonomous sock puppet by default. Original.
In your post above you come across as not more than a fairly comfortable old fool with a boring superiority/inferiority hang up. Fascinating.
Although I am not personally into inking myself, it strikes me as an attempt ………………….. to express their individuality …………
Something on the order of 97% of NBA players have tattoos. Something on the order of 100% of that 97% would tell you they have tattoos “to express their individuality.”
Sheep rush around the fields in close proximity to their fellow sheep and lemmings plunge off the cliffs with their fellow lemmings “to express their individuality.”
Does anyone here get the connection?
Followers are individuals!!!
On to a more important matter. Didya know the USA population has increased by 35,000,000 since 1.1.2000?
And with am nasty may quickly increase by another 35M?
So will blacks riot if Zimmerman is aquitted? Having watched the trial, I can pretty much say that Judge Nelson did everything in her power to persuade the jury that they should convict him. I had to smile when she said to them, “You know, you could find him guilty of a lesser charge, like deadly assault? You did know you could do that, right?” I’m surprised she didn’t mention child abuse, or the fact that Zimmerman’s car might have been double parked. After all, he was just a little boy, lost at night, carrying a package of Skittles and an iced tea. Who knows where Zimmerman got all of those bruises and lacerations on his head. Could have been a careless job shaving?
The broad that has all the t’s crossed and the i’s dotted is the mom, Sabrina Fulton. Apparently she has put in not only one but TWO trademarks for Trayvon’s name. According to rumours, she’s got a deal with Nike and some other sporting gear place to sell hoodies, baseball caps, sneakers, boxers, and other such apparel with slogans like “I am Trayvon” and “We are all Trayvon Martin”. Smart bitch who knows a good opportunity like this shouldn’t be wasted.
Do you know what the judges maiden name is?
Do you know what the judges maiden name is ?
Good Lord ! Where in the hell is the apostle ? It should read judge’s , not judges . Get with it , Christopher .
I don’t follow the details of the Zimmerman trial, except for the headlines. I’m not that interested because I consider the whole saga another circus for the population at large. Pay attention, discuss Zimmerman’s guilt or innocence with everyone, and don’t think about real issues. The media love a great story. It’s got great themes for everyone (pick and choose):
Racial tensions
Racial inequality
Fear of social unrest if Z gets off
Blacks on welfare
Gun control
Redneck prejudice
Vigilantes
And more..
In the meantime, the middle class is going down the tubes, our government is venal and corrupt, our environment is being destroyed, wars are ubiquitous and cheap energy is becoming a memory.
Bill, the middle class has been going “down the tubes” since the Arab.Oil embargo in 1973. What we’re seeing is a continuing downward spiral which is augmented by recessions and the various bubbles which burst (out of necessity). The government is definitely corrupt and will continue to be so because it has the ability to print all of the money it wants. And if the situation with Eric Snowden showed us nothing else, it’s that all of the Western countries are just fine being America’s bitch as long as they get some gravy. There is no rule of law and our congress critters have their pockets well lined by Israel. The slaughter of Muslims will continue as long as the money spigot flows.
I’ve never been a fan of windmill energy (pun intended). Now its unintended consequences are coming into play. It seems to me that the only long-terms solutions to the energy issue are solar power of various sorts (e.g. current solar technology, plus future apps like efficient fuel cells and solar power satellites), and the ever hopeful development of nuclear fusion.
But we gotta realize that all energy production affects the environment, thermodynamically there’s no way around that.
That’s where overpopulation comes into play: more people, more energy needed, more affect on the environment. That’s why keeping the number of people down is so important at our current level of technology.
This is the great fallacy of liberalism — that gender, or for that matter, ANYTHING in the universe, is irrelevant. To the contrary, EVERTHING is relevant and infinitely so. Everything “matters.” NOTHING is irrelevant.
The androgynous personalities of Janet and Carol would have you believe otherwise.
Hey Q Schmuck, you’re misrepresenting. Not the universe, just cyberspace. In cyberspace, you can’t touch and/or lick someone’s penis or vagina, so why the hell define yourself by it when all the senses are not in play ? In your twisted world, you believe women should be flashing neon signs that say “FUCK ME” and men should carry around a bullhorn like Alex Jones constantly shouting “LOOK, I HAVE A PENIS.” Grow the hell up, you freak. Like so many of your generation, psychically you never matured beyond adolescence.
Embrace the liberation of cyberspace, Q Schmuck. It’s not too late for you to move beyond adolescence even though you only have a few years left. Cyberspace can help you get in touch with your feminine side that has been unfortunately forced into dormancy. Think of how much more you could have accomplished, how high you could have soared, if you hadn’t culturally been indoctrinated to spay your femininity? It’s a sad thought.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ixqbc7X2NQY
That’s why keeping the number of people down is so important at our current level of technology.
Hitler couldn’t have said it better himself. Per his suggestion, do you agree with him that “we” should start with the Jews? You have admitted you are Jewish. You really want to travel down that road again? Really? It never turns out the way you think it will. Never again can easily become again and again.
Of course, I know you’re not serious and just a ruse and foil, but I feel compelled to address this ruse/foil that is you, nonetheless.
I’ve been mostly away from this blog, rarely posting lately. I need to shake off the rust in my writing, so I’m going to ignore my own rule not replying to you, just this once.
I never said to eliminate living people. Natural ways exist to ultimately lower population without doing bad things to people.
Your on-line personality is very nasty, acerbic and paranoid, quite unlikable. Your ceaseless put-downs are unpleasant. JHK having neck surgery now is good luck for you because he otherwise probably would ban you. It doesn’t matter to me whether or not you are male or female or some 3rd hybrid option. I don’t care whether or not you are a sock puppet or are really Asoka, When enough time has elapsed and I know JHK is feeling better, I will e-mail him samples of your recent posts and request you be banned. You impede the discussion here.
Oh, by the way, comparing my comment about population to Hitler’s methodology is way over the top, considering my religion.
“I’ve been mostly away from this blog, rarely posting lately.”
______________________
That’s not what our records show.
Hey, Frosty! Are you, or rather your namesake, going to say yes to Anna Chapman?
http://crazyeddiethemotie.blogspot.com/2013/07/snowden-asks-for-asylum-chapman-asks.html
Carol,
As Bean said “Your on-line personality is very nasty, acerbic and paranoid, quite unlikable.” Very few people enjoy being unlikable but you are obviously one of them.
Tell us about someone who likes you……a spouse, a child, a co-worker, an acquaintance? In all honesty it is hard to imagine. What kind of relationship do (or did) you have with your mother? I will speculate you long ago parted ways with your mother. This is very common among effed up people. I offer Paulette as Exhibit A.
You said to Bean “You have admitted you are Jewish.” See definition:
admit
Verb
1.Confess to be true or to be the case, typically with reluctance.
2.Confess to (a crime or fault, or one’s responsibility for it).
Don’t you think stated is a more accurate and better word choice?
Don’t you think stated is a more accurate and better word choice?
No, context means everything, and since it’s been established for some time now that this comments section’s been hijacked by racist freaks, for someone to declare they are Jewish would be, appropriately, an admission to a crowd such as this one. Not to me, but to ninety percent, or more, of those posting here…..all five of them and their various sockpuppets including you.
I used to work for a leveraged finance partner in a US law firm. One day it dawned on me that they were pretending and they didn’t know what they were doing. They were just “doing deals” in order to get the fees; the higher the turnover of fictitious asset transactions, the higher the fees. They basically ran out of assets to sell so they invented fictitious paper assets “derived” from real assets (i.e., derivatives) and sold those backed by fictitious insurance schemes. Tits-on-Tits….. In one transaction, they did the deal with the underlying asset left blank in square brackets to be filled in later. Tits-on-Tits…..
The entire discipline of Capitalist Economics is based upon the Mother-of-All-Fictions—that the resources of the planet are infinite, and, therefore, potential economic growth is unlimited.
Blind faith in Technology—Fukashima….Building nuclear power plants without even considering how to dispose of the nuclear waste.
It seems clear to me now that the ruling class does not really know what it is doing and that it is just being driven along by economic forces. They’ve lost control but they are pretending that they’ve got it under control.
Pucker, I agree with you about the economy. Unlike stock options and commodity futures, derivatives on not traded in an open market, and thus the derivative creators have no daily accountability. It also doesn’t hurt these people that government and quasi-governmental agencies are staffed with the very people that made their fortunes in derivatives.
Greed probably will be our undoing, if a day of reckoning does occur.
What was the name of the incoherent female witness in the Zimmerman trial who said that she “…heard the grass”?
What would have happened if on cross examination the lawyer started talk’n dirty with her?
Ms Jeantel? Theres a rumor that the voice on the cellphone is NOT
Jeantels, that Jeantel is a fraud.
[Ms. Jeantel takes the stand.]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIqeeK6sntk
{Unknown Unknowns….Shooby Shooby Doo…..We’re gonna have a really great shoo tonight….]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiPe1OiKQuk
Pucker said: Building nuclear power plants without even considering how to dispose of the nuclear waste.
To quote Ronald Reagan, there you go again.
This time you are painting with a broad nuclear power brush, as if all nuclear power plants are the same, as if all nuclear fuels are the same, as if all have “nuclear waste” issues. But you are capable of discovering that on your own.
Dmitry Orlov is in the wrong business. There’s no money in the Collapse business. The big money is in new age religion and HOPE.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmebpZaGjz8
Pucker, you want to go from working derivatives as a leveraged finance partner in a US law firm to new age religion? To make money?
Bad timing. A recent Gallup poll shows about 77 percent of Americans said religion is “losing its influence” on American life. There is no more future market for new age religion than there is for derivatives.
By the way, life is so much more than just making and spending money. Stick around, Pucker. You have a lot to learn from CFN.
In a recent interview, Dmitry Orlov said that talking to the average American about Collapse is like “…trying to get through to the average person in a mental hospital.”
The interviewer chuckled in response.
Unfortunately, that’s no joke!
That’s exactly what it is!
They’re all MAD!!!!!!
Once you realize this, then the gravity of the situation and the downward spiral of delusion in response to Collapse becomes apparent.
Ozone, how goes it, man? You must be cheating on CFN and posting more frequently on other blogs; maybe this means that you’ve finally had your fill of Carol? Don’t let chicks with dicks pin ya down, signorino!
Anyhow, sat down to a fresh saute of al dente cooked colorful beets and and wilted red kale sprinkled with feta cheese plated next to a sinful 16 oz T-bone steak this evenin’ – the veggies fresh picked from my garden; well, the kale was store bought, but we’re just now starting to early harvest some of the vegetables we’re producing. What a blast the project has been – this being our third-year try at raised bed gardening.
But on an entirely befitting CFN Doomer note, I came across this article from a lead you turned me on to and thought I’d share it, case you haven’t caught it. It’s from the Guardian and speaks to the recurrent meme of a climate tipping point soon to come?. Here’s a snippet:
“The new paper by James Hansen is just the latest confirming that we are on the verge of crossing a tipping point into catastrophic climate change. Other recent scientific studies show that the current global emissions trajectory could within three years guarantee a 2C rise in global temperatures, in turn triggering irreversible and dangerous amplifying feedbacks.
According to a scientific paper given at the Geological Society of London last month, climate records from Siberian caves show that temperatures of just 1.5C generate “a tipping point for continuous permafrost to start thawing”, according to lead author Prof Anton Vaks from Oxford University’s Department of Earth Sciences. Conventional climate models suggest that 1.5C is just 10-30 years away.” – see link below
And that last bit is what Mcpherson also emphasizes: that CONVENTIONAL models project threshold breach up to 30 years out, whereas according to Hansen’s latest digestion and interpretation of data where he calls for 2C rises in a mere 36 months. Mcpherson, too, has recently upped the ante on his non-linear feedback loops to total now 16 irreversible driving factors, up from, what, 10 originally? And still apparently none of the current accepted peer-reviewed climate models account for non-linear feedbacks? That’s hard to reconcile for some reason.
I’ve been reading other climate scholars who are less certain of the end of the Northern Hemisphere in fewer than 5 years claim, but hey, these NTE characters sure do capture the imagination easily. And there’s some pretty decent writers over at NBL too. Oddly, one is almost tempted to root for GM’s end of empire prediction, but his dose of redemption comes at the expense of my opportunity to squander the most productive years of my life as a cog in the wheel of empire. How is that fair? Just kiddin’. Life is tragic, says JHK.
Funny thing that me and E were talking about energy solutions earlier and I just remembered something I heard from C. Martensen awhile back:
Problems have solutions; predicaments have outcomes.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/earth-insight/2013/jul/10/james-hansen-fossil-fuels-runaway-global-warming
-UFIA
UFIA,
Thanks for the yell. I just been running in place and can’t even ketchup HERE (where it’s 50% scroll territory)!
Thanks for your thoughtful links and comments.
“Problems have solutions; predicaments have outcomes.”
Both JHK and D.O. have echoed this as a strict warning, but (as usual) it’s never taken in the tightest, proper interpretation. Too bad fer the chir’rens…
“Sorry us perpetrators and servants of predicaments are now so very dead; I guess you could shout at the grave sites?”
A hat tip in order for the fine ladies in Sanford, Florida, who had the good sense to render Zimmerman a free man. It was simply amazing to me to see an upstanding citizen being railroaded into being same racist killer by the liberal, lying, mainsteam media. And I’m not saying that it’s a good thing that a young 17 year old was murdered, because clearly it’s not.
Had a gun-toting Trayvon Martin stalked an unarmed George Zimmerman, and then shot him to death… DO I EVEN NEED TO COMPLETE THIS SENTENCE?
“Janet” doing that “hate” thing again…at least your bud, “Carol” admitted to being wrong aout this case. Maybe you should take out a notebook and jot down some facts about the case before you go off and scatter your judicial judgements about things which clearly you have no abiltiy to make. What are you, twelve? Or is that just your reasoning ability? At least “Carol” has some degree of intelligence in her discourse. You??? I’d measure you about one step BELOW…Miss Rachel Jeantele.
Ummmmmm, yeah, ……i did JUST SAY THAT!!!!!
Agreed. The jurors did the proper thing and proved me wrong. I’m glad to be proven wrong in this case. They applied the evidence to the law and decided correctly, imo. As I mentioned earlier, this case never should have gone to trial.
Meanwhile in Tampa, Florida Marissa Alexander, who had never been arrested in her life, fired a warning shot in self-defense. Nobody got hurt, but this month a northeast Florida judge was bound by state law to sentence her to 20 years in prison.
Oh, she was Black, a Black woman.
So she gets 20 years for firing a warning shot?
In Florida.
In self-defense.
This month.
“I’m glad to be proven wrong in this case.” “carol” ….yeah, right!!!
This tune goes out to Dmitry Orlov….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCHtsiNho5o
They’ve confirmed the names of the pilots on the Korean Asiana airlines flight that crashed.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/12/asiana-pilots-fake-names-racist_n_3588569.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular
This is the mentality of the person bill decides to respond to so diplomatically; someone who engages in adolescent jokes about race. You’re a fraud, bill. I don’t believe you for one second. Never did.
Carol, getting all defensive and such! Nice one, Q! Thanks for keeping it real, bud!
Some bored, poorly-paid, student loan-indebted college intern probably couldn’t take it anymore so he makes a joke in poor taste about the names of the pilots of the Asiana plane that crashed. It gets into the information processing pipeline at the news bureau, but none of the zombified employees catch it including the news person who just mindlessly reads the teleprompter. Incredible!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/12/asiana-pilots-fake-names-racist_n_3588569.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular
One day, we will arrive at the top of the mountain realizing that every young person, regardless of race, class, color or creed, has the right to walk safely home with a nothing but a bag of skittles and a can of ice tea in their hands. Until then, our work is not done.
Read more: http://globalgrind.com/news/rest-peace-trayvon-benjamin-martin-michael-skolnik
Anyone who has ever served as a juror knows that cases and their outcomes are based on the way a case is framed.
As a juror, you must follow suit with the parameters you’ve been given by the judge. The rest is the game played between prosecutors and defenders.
The jury is put in a position to work with what they are given. If the witnesses aren’t reliable –even when they aren’t wrong, the prosecution and/or the defence are stuck with the material they have to work with.
It’s a wonder any justice is done at all in this country and in many cases as we know, it’s not and innocent people go to jail and the guilty do get off.
The problem with this case, is that a basic fact was not part of what Zimmerman was tried for.
Mr. Zimmerman was driven by his own predilection to pursue a young black man in a hoodie that he determined didn’t belong in a given community and was up to no good. This time he was going to stop this kid from acting.
The reality is that Travon’s father lived there and he was going out to get a snack and that he had no weapon and had no plan of breaking the law.
When Zimmerman contacted the police he was told to stand down and didn’t follow that order. He took it upon himself to act as vigilante and created a scenario that put his own life in jeopardy and resulted in the death of a scared teen who had no idea what Zimmerman was doing.
There was no discussion here. There was no attempt at identifying himself. Travon’s friend said on the phone to him that this strange man could be a rapist. Imagine how Travon felt when this guy was on his trail and what his frame of mind might have been.
I believe that had the prosecutors come up with a few other counts against the actions Zimmerman took, he would have been found guilty of a lesser crime than murder. He was surly out of line.
As I’ve pointed out before, this blog is like a Rorschach test when it comes to perception. Those who think this is about whites standing up to racial pressures are happy at the verdict and others who feel something very wrong happened and Zimmerman should not go scot free that this is a travesty of justice.
Whatever your Rorschach test results are is how you look at this image. I believe something went horribly wrong and hopefully we’ll see some changes in how stand your ground laws are fashioned.
Oh, BT, if O.J. Simpson was innocent then so was Hitler. Actually, Simpson’s guilt was a LOT clearer than Zimmerman’s going strictly from the evidence. That’s why Simpson lost the civil trial and then proved what a vindictive, pompous ass he was by holding up guys at gunpoint in Vegas for which he’s still in the can.
Then how about the Duke Lacrosse Scandal. A couple of black girls pretended to be Snow White and accused the lacrosse team of raping them. Turns out that not only were these girls HOOKERS but the prosecuting attorney was DISBARRED for prosecutorial abuse of power. They just HAD to put those preppies in prison by God … whatever it took!! Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton were on the steps of the University convicting the lacrosse team but neither of these assholes apologized when the embarrassing facts rolled in.
Here’s what I mean by reverse racism: Black people like Simpson are “innocent” and black hookers are Snow White. Finally, we know FUCK ALL about the precise circumstances of Zimmerman’s approach to Martin or what Martin’s attitude and behavior consisted of and the jury found it sufficiently murky to acquit Zimmerman unanimously!!
For you to write your piece about this is a “Rorschach Test” is very disappointing. You just watch. The black indignation will be far, far greater about Martin than the white indignation after the Duke Lacrosse team was tried in the court of public opinion by every black leader from NYC to Oakland, CA. I’m disappointed in your insistence that this is a test of our humanity. Most white people I know, a couple months after the Lacrosse scandal were like “What Duke lacrosse scandal?”.
Minorities have proven to be FABULOUS at public indignation and when proven wrong they NEVER recant like Jackson and Sharpton did not recant when proven grossly wrong. You’re implying that whitey is constantly indignant. Do you get to say that because it’s true or because you just like the sound of it?
E.
E.
This is more a case of vigilantism and should not have been tried simply as a murder. In that case it does come down to self-defense.
When Zimmerman called the police he was told to back down and he didn’t.
This is not about every other black and white case ever tried in this country and it will never right the wrongs of the racial and cultural divide. We have a deep schism and no one case will cure us of that.
In court cases as in our analysis this is a matter of perception and how a case is presented. The poison tree is the dynamic set in motion by a man who was not trained to handle a would-be criminal.
He failed to state what he was doing and failed to find out what TM was doing there. That’s because he had no training and was in over his head before he disobeyed the order the police gave him.
He called it in and should have waited for the police to confront this kid. It really ends up being that simple.
The rest of what happened never would have happened if Zimmerman let the police follow up. Too bad he gets to walk scot free without taking responsibility for his actions that led to an unnecessary murder. If the prosecution framed this case differently there would be some accountability.
Sorry, E., but I’m not blaming whitey and I’m not siding with the showcasing by Sharpton, only pointing out that we are all seeing the same story with different perceptions and coming out with different takes on it.
Everyone always thinks they’re right and few can look upon these cases objectively.
I sure hope I’m never at the wrong place at the wrong time with an armed individual guessing at what I’m doing.
“As a juror, you must follow suit with the parameters you’ve been given by the judge. The rest is the game played between prosecutors and defenders.”
BT, so very true; you’ve succinctly summed up the whole issue in 2 sentences.
I’ve been a juror in several trials over the years, some of them criminal. It seems that jurors in my neck of the woods are pretty scarce because the system always calls me as soon as the minimum time period calling for jury duty elapses.
In my last trial I had to decide an assault case. Both sides called their witnesses, and their testimonies each defended their own side. The decision ultimately rested on a security camera tape that was supposed to show the incident. Unfortunately, the picture was so grainy that none of the jurors could say whether or not the defendant was the perpetrator.
When the trial began, the judge instructed us that the standard for conviction had to be guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. This was not the case. I believed the defendant was guilty, but I couldn’t vote for a conviction because of the doubt. The point of my comment here is that although it killed me to do so, I voted innocent because I felt I had to follow the principles set forth centuries ago by men much wiser than me..
Until someone has had the experience of helping decide a person’s fate, that they ought not comment on whether justice was served.
American jurisprudence states that citizens must decide a person’s fate if a jury trial is requested. For any thinking person, this requirement can be a great burden forever. I wish the public didn’t have this responsibility, but like most everything in life, nothing is perfect.
Crystal Magnum, arrested for murda. It was one gal, not 2. Sharpton and Jesse, da good reverunds rushed to the po gals defense.
Actually it went WAY F–KIN beyond the elected officials. There was a group of 80? leftist profs at Duke that did a ‘lynching’ of those innocent men. There may have been civil lawsuits against the feminazis. There is info. online.
“When the trial began, the judge instructed us that the standard for conviction had to be guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. This was not the case. I believed the defendant was guilty, but I couldn’t vote for a conviction because of the doubt. The point of my comment here is that although it killed me to do so, I voted innocent because I felt I had to follow the principles set forth centuries ago by men much wiser than me.” -BTB
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BTB, you shouldn’t be so quick to kowtow to the intellects of mere men from centuries past. Humans have never been as smart as they’ve believed themselves to be.
The reasonable doubt standard is part and parcel to criminal trials whereas the preponderance of evidence standard is the rubric in civil proceedings. Neither of these are particularly rigorous evidential standards, and in both cases the wrong verdict can be delivered despite the merit (and lack thereof) of the evidence, as you suggested. Case decisions in criminal trials often only boil down to which way the wind blows through a particular jury’s collective mind.
Nonetheless, I didn’t quite understand E’s mention of the O.J. Simpson trial, as it has zero similarity to the Zimmerman spectacle; anyhow, here’s how the evidence stacked against O.J. in the Criminal trial: the defense team counted up and presented as many pieces of evidence suggesting O.J.’s guilt as they could, yet O.J.’s slick defense team was able to project reasonable doubt onto the evidence and into the weak minds of jurors. He went free but was later convicted of wrongful death in the Civil trial using the preponderance of evidence standard and the exact same counted up pieces of evidence from the criminal trial. The jury’s intellect in the civil case played less a role, for all they had to do was some simple addition to deliver the verdict in the civil case.
Now if there is a similarity to be found among the Simpson and Zimmerman cases it is likely to be seen in whether there is next a civil suit for wrongful death filed against Zimmerman. The only similarity to be mentioned would be if Zimmerman gets off criminally but loses civilly. Even if he is found guilty he’s now only looking at a monetary penalty. But all the race debating is completely silly and shows that the msm’s ability to captivate simple minds has been perfected to the level of high art.
In every case, Justice will be swerved…
-UFIA
Touche
Very well stated.
Jurors are almost never informed of their nullification rights. Thanks to the Quaker, William Penn, jurors do have that right. Juries have the right to judge both the law and the facts and to nullify the law if they so chose. No need to kowtow to the “principles set forth centuries ago.” Jurisprudence is a dynamic process. Jurors have rights.
UFIA,
The reasonable doubt standard has been in effect for centuries. Even if – and I’m not admitting this – those men were not as bright as we’d like, extremely wise legal theorists have upheld this standard for at least 800 years, yet to my knowledge, the reason doubt principle has never been overthrown in the English court system (I think).
So, my young friend, at the risk of sounding like those old men who say in their quivering, elderly voices (not my intention), “You young whippersnappers haven’t been around enough to know what’s really going on – why, when I was your age, things were different…”, I say unless you’ve shouldered the responsibility of holding a man’s future in your hands – and I’ll make the assumption you haven’t – you might not want to so easily disregard the weight of history. And if you have, then maybe the whippersnapper description is apt.
One thing the judge tries to impress on the jury is to view the facts as presented, objectively. Unfortunately, many people can’t seem to do that. Is anyone 100% objective, anyway? Hence the imperfection of the system.
I do mostly admire your comments. Keep them coming, I look forward to them.
Live long and prosper,
BTB
BTB,
I wasn’t disputing the historical relevance or weightiness of the judicial protocols per se but rather pointing out that RD and PofE are equally weak evidential standards, at least as compared to the rigorous standards for evidence required in the practice of the scientific method, and we use these weaker measures of evidence to decide the fate of many truly profound legal questions in our culture. And you can see the result all around you.
The reasonable doubt and preponderance of evidence standards have in fact been in place for some time, and I loosely but adequately explained how they’re used in the different types of legal proceedings to (miss?)handle and process the exact same samples of evidence in a given scenario. Moreover, examples do abound in the history books of ridiculous legal decisions arrived at using these oddly contrived evidential rules, but we’ve come to elevate legal practice and the framers of such as Gospel from Gods because we can also point to other seemingly favorable productive outcomes. They’re indeed tried and true legal methodologies which by no means are perfect, but they’re the best the non-scientific thinkers could think of, hundreds and thousands of years ago. And hey, ya win some ya lose some, right?
In that sense, these msm hyped criminal trials that in no way deserve national attention do serve a purpose – they turn the ordinary idiot at home with a half-cocked hunch about a case and a closet full of painful grudges into the latest Johny Cochrane, Ken Starr, or fuckin’ Nancy Grace. They’ve also become sporting events, not serious life and death discussions of genuine concern for affected parties, and you get to pick your team and place your bets and then bitch, piss and moan if the ref doesn’t throw the flag or call the foul when you think he should. It’s like a Springer show but the freakshow is the audience, not the trailer trash and ghetto fabulousness seated on stage. People with deep opinions on these stupid media diversions want a ticket to the freak-show? Well look in the mirror to find it.
Separately, the evidential standards for legal proceedings also demonstrate exactly how “evidence” can be stacked or twisted to define money as speech, but I’m beginning to drag the conversation into a separate realm entirely, so I’ll just let it go.
It wasn’t a personal jab, Bill. Look forward to your posts also.
-UFIA
CFNers like to think they have “critical thinking” abilities. Jury duty is a good example of an opportunity to put critical thinking to work. Nothing in the U.S. Constitution or in any Supreme Court decision requires jurors to take an oath to follow the law as the judge explains it or, for that matter, authorizes the judge to “instruct” the jury at all. Judges provide their interpretation of the law, but you may also do your own thinking. Keep in mind that no juror’s oath is enforceable, and that you may regard all “instructions” as advice.
When they believe justice requires it, jurors can refuse to apply the law. Jurors have the power to consider whether the law itself is wrong (including whether it is “unconstitutional”), or is being applied for political reasons. Is the defendant being singled out as “an example” in order to demonstrate government muscle? Were the defendant’s constitutional rights violated during the arrest? Much of today’s “crime wave” consists of victimless crimes–crimes against the state, or “political crimes”, so if you feel that a verdict of guilty would give the government too much power, or help keep a bad law alive, just remember that you can refuse to apply any law that violates your conscience.
UFIA,
I think the discussion about Bernard Goetz and George Zimmerman might be a more apt comparison than O.J.Simpson.
Goetz was prosecuted for vigilantism even though he was approached by 4 muggers. He too was waiting for a fight to even the score from a former run-in.
It goes to frame of mind and I think Zimmerman was looking to even a score from bad actors from the past.
btw I did say at the time that OJ was found not guillty that he would be put away for something else….something in the air.
Let’s also remember that Zimmerman may not be off the hook just yet. Federal prosecutors can still file criminal civil rights charges now that Zimmerman has been acquitted in the Florida state case.
The Feds opened an investigation into Martin’s death last year but stepped aside to allow the state prosecution to proceed. The Feds have additional evidence, evidence generated during the federal probe, in addition to the evidence and testimony from the state trial, and they can still determine that the evidence reveals a prosecutable violation.
Janet,
i can just hear the response to that. The racists will scream that the communist-fascist tyrant Obama is re-trying the case—
You just can’t win…..
It was obvious from the testimony in the Goetz case, that Bernie had a chip on his shoulder from a previous mugging, in which he was made to feel powerless and humiliated. He then went looking for trouble by riding the subways. The 4 muggers were probably going to, at the minimum, push him around, if not physically assault him.
There was no convincing testimony that showed Zimmerman was actively looking for trouble. But I do believe he was angry about burglaries in the neighborhood, supposedly committed by Blacks, and profiled TM.
He should not have confronted TM in the first place, but TM shouldn’t have fought Zimmerman. At the point Treyvon was on top of Z, Z did not have an option to get away, and probably was justified in shooting him. That’s just my opinion. Who knows what really happened?
Nullification applies when the juror(s) believe the specific law behind a trial is unconstitutional or unfair, or generally, wrong, and votes to acquit for that reason. In the case in which I served, I believed the reasonable doubt principle was correct, and I stood by it.
Many times jury nullification is taken out of the equation before the trial even starts. The judge interviews the jurors individually, beforehand, and asks the juror if they have any problem with the law or anything that pertains to the case. For example, in a first degree murder trial in a death penalty state, the judge will ask if the juror has any objections in principle to the death penalty. If the juror says yes, there’s a good chance that juror will not be empaneled. Then the juror would have to lie about his beliefs in order to be chosen.
This is why both prosecutors and defense attorneys spend so much time and effort in choosing jurors.
“How does it feel to be a problem? To have your very body and the bodies of your children to be assumed to be criminal, violent, malignant.” — W.E.B. Du Bois
It’s a horrible thing for DECENT black and Hispanic people to be profiled, followed, and suspected for everything for they comprise the majority of their ethnic groups.
However, anybody with any respect for data must acknowledge that on a per capita basis these ethnicities are responsible for anywhere from 3X to 10X more crime than the Caucasian culture that surrounds them. Equally tragic is the fact that these ethnicities are also small minorities at universities and colleges largely because succeeding in this way is looked at as “giving in to the man” or doing it the white man’s way.
Finally, another horrible tragedy consists of things like the reelection of politicos like Marion Barry like it’s a thumb in the eyes of whitey. Indeed, it’s like a robber holding up someone while pointing the gun at his feet saying: “Hands up or I’ll shoot!!”.
We can philosophize until we are blue in the face but the reason people are afraid of black people in neighborhoods is entirely due to their enormous increment of crime above white people. Palo Alto where I live is a very white town. There have been two armed robberies on side streets this year, both by black men. Steve Jobs house where he lived was robbed by black guys from Oakland who were among the dumbest criminals in recent memory.
In nearby East Palo Alto, essentially a ghetto/barrio, there was a recent spate of six murders in little more than two weeks. Neighboring Palo Alto hasn’t had a TOTAL of six murders in the last combined THIRTY YEARS. The decent people in towns like East Palo Alto have to appoint stronger leadership to DEMAND that their young people act like civilized beings and put mentors and leaders in place who will enforce this.
E.
UFIA,
Thanks for the yell. I just been running in place and can’t even ketchup HERE (where it’s 50% scroll territory)!
Thanks for your thoughtful links and comments.
“Problems have solutions; predicaments have outcomes.”
Both JHK and D.O. have echoed this as a strict warning, but (as usual) it’s never taken in the tightest, proper interpretation. Too bad fer the chir’rens…
“Sorry us perpetrators and servants of predicaments are now so very dead; I guess you could shout at the grave sites?”
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Haha, probably better than 50%, my man.
But if you happen by any follow up affirmative or rebuttal responses to the latest Hansen piece, please throw a dog a bone. I have my doubts about this 2C change in as few as 3 years thing but it all comes down to the quality of the peer reviewed data, right?
The debate aside, however, I have to confess that it just plain feels like the climate is shifting. I have a hard time discounting what I sense as I stand in my own damn front yard these days as anything else but bad news.
-UFIA
Is global warming a fact? Well, of course it is!! Is it predominantly manmade? Well, even politically correct climatologists will show graphs that only go back a few thousand years. Earth’s climate cycles can be on the order of a MILLION years. Greenland was once green and being farmed long before man had the ability to create so much CO2.
Whether manmade or totally cyclical, nature has a way of telling humans that “shit happens”. CO2, however, has a small fraction of METHANE’s ability to warm the globe. Humans don’t release much methane into the atmosphere.
Climate change is simply a geological fact. The New York Snow Belt no longer reaches Ithaca which only gets about 30% of the snow it got just 30 years ago. New Mexico’s “exceptional drought” might actually be far more representative of its very long term average climate than what happened in the 20th century.
My wish is that the climate debate made SOME attempt to untangle the web of complexity by figuring out just how much of the change is manmade and how much is cyclical. I am unaware of any such research.
E.
UFIA,
Anecdotally speaking, the temperate climate of of NYC and the metropolitan area is getting more like my experience in Bangkok and Mexico in the summer.
It looks more like the a tropical rain forest profile. Often hot humid breaking into downpours in the afternoon, marked by unstable air masses with lots of localized rain.
My sister lives in the burbs and she gets caught in downpours while it’s sunny here and her yard and garden is growing out of control. She can barely keep up with the growth. We remember when we had to water our lawns every day.
Dry grass is no longer an issue.
Jim –
Not sure what the point of changing your website was about. Change I see but no improvement and in fact, like much so-called technological improvement around us it is a diminishment instead.
Debt
By the way, life is so much more than just making and spending money. – janet
Typical Asoka…tells the well-off “money won’t make you happy” while supporting every government scheme of wealth transfer to the poor. Why doesn’t s(he) tell the poor “money won’t make you happy?” Rhetorical question, no answer required.
Q.
You don’t have to be Asoka to read studies that show that money doesn’t fulfill emotional needs. After you’ve made a certain amount, it doesn’t translate to happiness.
I for one would much rather have surplus money and feel secure, but after that, it matters more that I have strong relationships and can participate in things I value.
I believe that having a sense of control of your life and choices is what makes people happy, although money does make those options easier to achieve.
As far as redistribution of wealth? Well what’s happened in the last few years is that it has been redistributed from the bottom to the top with no balance. This is not the economy of your youth, Q.–Wake up!
It’s entirely possible that Zimmerman, like security guards everywhere, are “wannabe cops”. However, lost in the description of the event was the fact that Zimmerman’s neighborhood had a large number of home invasions, PRIMARILY BY YOUNG BLACK MEN.
Also, Martin is described as TEMPORARILY STAYING in the neighborhood but not a full-time resident. Therefore, with these facts in mind, if you’re a neighborhood watchman you’d be a little negligent NOT to approach Martin to see what he was doing.
Finally, when I was Martin’s age, teenagers generally reacted with deference and fear when questioned by an older person. They don’t punch them, knock them down, or anything else. Therefore, to all the protestors and their goddamned righteous indignation today I say … DON’T LET THE FACTS STAND IN THE WAY OF YOUR MINDSET.
Think about it … if you lived somewhere where vandalism was getting tiresome AND about 80% of the perps were black and you saw a young black kid on the street wearing a black hoodie with no obvious destination AND he didn’t live in the neighborhood, what would YOU do in Zimmerman’s position? Fuck reverse racism. Fuck the protestors. Congratulations to the jurors who saw that reasonable doubt permeated this case from top to bottom.
Whites have NEVER gone public like Sharpton and Jackson to express indignation en masse even in horrific cases like the Simpson case. Blacks don’t ever apologize either when they have wronged people like the Duke Lacrosse team. Or how about the old Tawana Brawley case of false rape accusation? I could go on and on and on.
Our society is “racist” all right but when blacks or Hispanics are racists it’s “The Just Indignation of the Oppressed”. Whites apparently have no right to indignation.
E.
Indignation is one thing and taking the law into your hands instead of waiting for the police as GZ was told to do would have averted the misunderstanding.
TM shouldn’t have died because of others and becuse GZ thought he fit into a catagory.
Facts are facts, E. and I think the Rorshach test I refer to is what facts you focus on.
As for the hoodie, it was raining and I gotta tell you I wear the hood on my sweat shirts when it rains—I just don’t scare anyone—maybe when I’m more wrinkled I will.
Eleuthero, regarding manmade versus cyclical, don’t fall into the assumption that manmade is or recent origin. Our tampering with Earth’s climate didn’t begin just a few decades or centuries ago, but 8000 years before, with the birth of agriculture.
William Ruddiman, a climate scientist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, started to suspect that ancient human activities have affected the climate when he noticed a telltale discrepancy in levels of greenhouse gases revealed by ice cores.
During the previous three periods between ice ages, levels of carbon dioxide and methane in the air fell in lockstep with decreases in summer sunshine caused by cyclical changes in Earth’s orbit. But after the most recent ice age, which peaked about 12,000 years ago, the two gases broke the pattern.
Levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide began to increase 8000 years ago, followed by methane 5000 years ago, even though summer sunshine has been decreasing. “Both gases followed the expected trend for a while but then went up instead of down,” says Ruddiman. “It didn’t quite fit.”
After ruling out possible natural causes for the greenhouse gas increases, Ruddiman now thinks that early farmers clearing forests in Europe, India and China account for the surge of carbon dioxide, while rice paddies and burgeoning herds of livestock produced the extra methane. He estimates that over time this activity laced the atmosphere with about 40 parts per million of carbon dioxide and 250 parts per billion of methane, enough to produce nearly 0.8°C of warming before 1700, around the dawn of industrialisation. If he is right, that just about equals the warming humans are thought to have caused since then.
Intriguingly, Ruddiman thinks the anomalous cooling of the “little ice age” that gripped the world for several centuries from around 1300 was caused by a specific setback to agriculture — plague. He notes that pandemics of bubonic plague depopulated Eurasia during those same centuries. Fields and villages were abandoned and reclaimed by fast-growing forests that sucked carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, resulting in the cooler temperatures felt worldwide. This completely reverses the widely held idea that it was the little ice age that caused the famine, depopulation and disease.
Another surprising implication of Ruddiman’s theory is that the warming before 1700 0.8°C globally, but nearly 2°C in far northern latitudes — may have saved Canada from renewed glaciation. If levels of greenhouse gases had continued to fall after the most recent ice age, as they did after the three preceding ice ages, glaciers would once again have spread across north-eastern Canada about 4000 years ago.
Just sayin’
I actually agree that agriculture is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, I aver that that point is incontestable. However, a possible influence of much greater magnitude is the effect of climate on the Gulf Conveyor Current. Even the Pentagon, since Daddy Bush’s administration, has been very concerned with this phenomenon.
The paradox is that global warming has slowed the current so much that Europe is having its most brutal winters in decades. However, it’s the trend that matters and if this current slows to a crawl, Europe will soon be a most inhospitable place to live since Rome is one degree farther NORTH than New York City!! Thus, global warming may still occur as a global AVERAGE but some places, especially Europe may experience the opposite: Brutal cold.
E.
The correlation between income and happiness is considerably weaker than people expect and recent research supports that contention.
Cone, J., & Gilovich, T. (2010). Understanding money’s limits: People’s beliefs about the income – happiness correlation. Journal Of Positive Psychology, 5(4), 294-301. doi:10.1080/17439760.2010.498620
Gleibs, I. H., Morton, T. A., Rabinovich, A., Haslam, S., & Helliwell, J. F. (2013). Unpacking the hedonic paradox: A dynamic analysis of the relationships between financial capital, social capital and life satisfaction. British Journal Of Social Psychology, 52(1), 25-43. doi:10.1111/j.2044-Aknin, L. B., Norton, M. I., & Dunn, E. W. (2009). From wealth to well-being? Money matters, but less than people think. Journal Of Positive Psychology, 4(6), 523-527. doi:10.1080/17439760903271421
Becchetti, L., Corrado, L., & Rossetti, F. (2011). The Heterogeneous Effects of Income Changes on Happiness. Social Indicators Research, 104(3), 387-406. doi:10.1007/s11205-010-9750-0
Those are just a few studies out of many that show a person’s day-to-day emotional wellbeing is only influenced by money up to a certain point.
Comparing people’s happiness against income, researchers have found day-to-day emotional state rose with average annual income only until about $75,000. After that more money made no difference (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1011492107).
People’s emotional state may stabilise above $75,000 because they no longer worry about meeting basic needs This allows them to settle into whatever level of moment-to-moment happiness their personality permits. I don’t know if that is what Asoka said when he posted here, but this is what current scientific research studies have found.
There have actually been studies showing that if you make only a few kilodollars more than average, you’re as happy as a billionaire. Money buys happiness up to a very small point. I won’t quibble about any dollar figure under $100K but your point has actually been studied and verified.
E.
I am anxious. I am really anxious to see the huge pile of dung we have created finally collapse and then to see what humans that are left will be like. How they adapt to it. that is if I make it.