JHK’s Three-Act Play
I f there is a Pulitzer Booby Prize for stupidity, waste no time in awarding it to The New York Times’ Monday feature, The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion. The former “newspaper of record” wants us to assume now that the sky’s the limit for human activity on the planet earth. Problemo cancelled. The article and accompanying video was actually prepared by a staff of 23 journalists. Give the Times another award for rounding up so many credentialed idiots for one job.
Apart from just dumping on Stanford U. biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb (1968), this foolish “crisis report” strenuously overlooks virtually every blossoming fiasco around the world. This must be what comes of viewing the world through your cell phone.
One main contention in the story is that the problem of feeding an exponentially growing population was already solved by the plant scientist Norman Borlaug’s “Green Revolution,” which gave the world hybridized high-yielding grain crops. Wrong. The “Green Revolution” was much more about converting fossil fuels into food. What happens to the hypothetically even larger world population when that’s not possible anymore? And did any of the 23 journalists notice that the world now has enormous additional problems with water depletion and soil degradation? Or that reckless genetic modification is now required to keep the grain production stats up?
No, they didn’t notice because the Times is firmly in the camp of techno-narcissism, the belief that the diminishing returns, unanticipated consequences, and over-investments in technology can be “solved” by layering on more technology — an idea whose first cousin is the wish to solve global over-indebtedness by generating more debt. Anyone seeking to understand why the public conversation about our pressing problems is so dumb, seek no further than this article, which explains it all.
Climate change, for instance, is only mentioned once in passing, as though it was just another trashy celebrity sighted at a “hot” new restaurant in the Meatpacking District. Also left out of the picture are the particulars of peak oil (laughed at regularly by the Times, which proclaimed the US “Saudi America” some time back), degradation of the ocean and the stock of creatures that live there, loss of forests, the political instability of whole regions that can’t support exploded populations, and the desperate migrations of people fleeing these desolate zones.
As averred to above, the Times also has no idea about the relation of finance to resources. The banking problems we see all over the world are a direct expression of the limits to growth, specifically the limits to debt creation. We can’t continue to borrow from the future to pay for our comforts and conveniences today because we have no real conviction that these debts can ever be repaid. We certainly wish we could, and the central bankers running the money system would like to pretend that we could by making negligible the cost of borrowing money and engaging in pervasive accounting fraud. But that has only served to cripple the operation of markets and pervert the meaning of interest rates — and, really, as a final result, to destroy any sense of consequence among the people running things everywhere.
The crackup of that financial system will be the signal failure of the collapse of the current economic regime. The financial system is the most fragile of all the systems we depend on (though the others do not lack fragility). This is the reason, by the way, that oil prices are so low, despite the fact that the cost of producing oil has never been higher. The oil customers are going broke even faster than the oil producers. Does anybody doubt that the standard of living in the USA is falling, despite all our cell phone apps?
The basic fact of the matter is that the energy bonanza of the past 200-odd years produced a matrix of complex systems, as well as a hypertrophy in human population. These complex systems — banking, agri-biz, hop-scotching industrialization, global commerce, Eds & Meds, Happy Motoring, commercial aviation, suburbia — have all reached their limits to growth, and those limits are expressing themselves in growing global disorder and universal bankruptcy. Do the authors of The New York Times report think that the oil distribution situation is stable?
There were two terror bombings in Saudi Arabia the past two weeks. Did anyone notice the significance of that? Or that the May 29th incident was against a Shiite mosque, or that the Shia population of Saudi Arabia is concentrated in the eastern province of the kingdom where nearly all of the oil production is concentrated? (Or that the newly failed state of neighboring Yemen is about 40 percent Shiite?) Have any of the 23 genius-level reporters at The New York Times tried to calculate what it would mean to the humming global economy if Arabian oil came off the market for only a few weeks?
Paul Ehrlich was right, just a little off in his timing and in explicating with precision the unanticipated consequences of limitless growth. But isn’t it in the nature of things unanticipated that they generally are not?
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The monumental ignorance/stupidity of the Times article is beyond astounding.
It looks like my students are smarter than the 23 correspondents from the New York Times. They understand what is going on, as demonstrated by one of them finding a video about overpopulation to illustrate their presentation. As for the rest of the issues, the most high profile recent attempt to do something has been President Obama’s plan to save the bees. This latest environmental initiative from the White House to preserve pollinators has nothing to do with dealing with overpopulation and resource depletion. Instead, it’s an attempt to prevent an environmental catastrophe from ruining business as usual.
Your students are smarter because they are not being paid to be stupid.
YET
Bam! (….I mean: “Woof!”)
Good point, K-dog.
Although I believe a lot of this dissemination of ignorance and foolishness is due to a terminal case of wishful thinking (Dizz-knees wishing-upon-a-star or the clicking of Dorothy’s heels), paid shilling and remaining employed on condition of groupthink should never be discounted… because these particulars just seem to keep on growing (in stridency and number). Purveyors of the status quo are obviously growing nervous that certain veils are being torn asunder and light is seeping into carefully darkened corners.
I think you nailed it right there. Was it Galbraith who said, “It’s hard to make a man understand something when his pay check depends on his not understanding it”?
Phutatorious,
That would be Upton Sinclair.
Here’s some more “Sinclair Declares”. Enjoy!:
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/23510.Upton_Sinclair
Good. But I think there is more to it than that: it helps to be ignorant, and so journalists are selected for their credentials, not for their education.
“business as usual,” says it all. The very word business has taken on a meaning that the Nazis wish they had used. In German I do not know what the words would be but it comes down to pretend everything is OK and take everything you can. Business is bad for business. I am glad I do not read the New York Times. Why should I. I live in the Southwest where everything is really fucked up.
To Mr. Kunstler and readers:
Chris Hedges claims here that “Karl Marx Was Right”:
http://m.truthdig.com/report/item/karl_marx_was_right_20150531
Hedges’ article seems to be the exclamation mark at the end of today’s rant.
Set me straight if I am mistaken.
Thank you for this link. A few, such as this article and the one you linked, are saying what everyone knows in their heart. The 1% will use up the last drop of fresh water in CA to fill their pool, keep their grass green or to wash their Bentley. The show is over. The credits for who did what are running. No one pays attention to credits. They are checking their texts and tweeting that they had a good bowel movement.
And yet, I can’t see socialism, as Marx envisioned it, ever working in the US mega-Empire, built as it is on a foundation of greed. Socialism may work some in small, more homogenous countries like Switzerland (although all the migration from Africa and the ME is threatening that ideal). But the US, where no one has much in common, would need to break up into several smaller countries first. As E.F. Schumacher said “Small is Beautiful.”
WHY THIS LARGE EFFORT TO EXPLAIN WHAT IS HAPPENING?
I become easily convinced of where we are heading, by reading the Obituaries. Each Obit has in its text, children, grandchildren , great grandchildren, and more coming. The number are expanding exponentially. That is a real increase in enthalpy.
Thanks for the new word, Max.
Stupid? No! It’s called propaganda, albeit still at this early stage, shamefully amateurish. Don’t worry, with time a cadre of ever-loyal Boy Scouts will rise to the occasion to perfect a seamless form of propaganda that will soon have us lulled into a collective stupor from which few will ever awake!
Population pressures are enormous. The whole ecosystem is cracking around us, this is plain to see. People are suffering and dying as sea levels rise, droughts increase, fresh water disappears and dam near everything is in short supply (except possibly cellphone apps). The newspapers and MSM in general are businesses and will publish what is best for business, not necessarily the truth…
I believe you meant “damn”, unless that was a pun.
Paul Ehrlich, whom JHK referenced, has been discounted by some because he took a dumb bet with Dr. Pangloss (Julian Simon) on what the prices of certain metals would be at a date in time and lost. The late Mr. Simon was all for open borders and thought overpopulation was a fantasy. While Ehrlich is no doubt right in the long run, he was off a few decades in the short run This is the same situation that Mr. Kunstler finds himself in. He’s no doubt right about Peak Oil, but maybe just a little off on the dates, so those Limbaugh/Hannity ditto heads with their collective asses up their butts feel free to ridicule. These are the same people who discount global warming because today is a cold day in June (which it is).
Should be “heads up their butts.”
What a tragedy the green revolution has proven to be in the countless petroleum related inflammatory health problems… and when fossil fuel availability plummets, the injury will be added to the insult. I don’t know how it’s going to all go down, but I would certainly argue it’s not by global revolution against capitalism, an eerily similar techno narcissistic wet dream employed by many so called leftists. We often speak of too much human meddling in things of human construct (the markets), but much more focus should be put on our meddling in the natural world, to both its and our detriment.
Thinking locally and growing sustainably (through permaculture), without loans and indebtedness, are how humanity will sustain itself as all fancifulness is lost –
https://subversesjournal.wordpress.com/
You got it Charles, it’s good to see another Permie on this forum. Every time I check out James’ garden pages, I wish he would take a PDC. It would make his garden and other systems so much more efficient and close the loops in them, leading to less input costs and greater abundance. (You listening JHK ol buddy?)
I’m excited about the whole Regenerist movement which embraces Permaculture, Holistic Management, Soil Foodweb ideas, ZERI, Keyline planning, Transition Towns, Myco-remediation, Carbon Farming, Open Source Ecology, Wet Systems, Agroecology, Silvopasture, etc as tools in an ever expanding toolkit of ways to regenerate the Earth, human supply lines and social organization at the same time. Search You Tube for some of Darren Doherty’s talks to find out more if you’re interested. He’s all about broad acre application of these techniques & systems, not just backyard gardening. Joel Salatin and Mark Shepard are doing the same thing and are definitely worth checking out.
Regenerative farming/Permaculture is the only game in town worth playing at this point in history. (If any of us want to survive the coming collapses, that is.) The other so called remedies are just so much Technograndiosity. “Sustainability” is staying where you are, we need Regeneration to repair the damage done and bring Earth back into balance and function, including bringing down the CO2 levels by putting the carbon back into the soil where most of it came from by partnering with biology.
We also need to get an grip on the basics of overpopulation. The best treatise I’ve read on the topic so far is in “The Story of B” by Daniel Quinn. The bottom line is that humans are made of food, so unless the “starving millions” are made of pixie dust, broken bottles or something else, guess what? They’re not starving. Their existence is proof of that. They are malnourished to be sure, as are obese westerners, and that is what our new mode of food production needs to focus on – Nutrition, not calories grown. You only get true nutrition from food grown on soil that contains ALL of the nutrients we need, not just N,P&K. 2015 is the International Year of Soil, a telling and fitting gesture pointing the way forward. Shit soil = shit food. Check out Elaine Ingham of soilfoodweb.com. She’s the world’s leading soil scientist and has the recipe for turning dirt into soil down to a, um, science.
Cheers!
Perhaps the “Grey Lady” of American journalism has turned into a bit of a whore in her old age, and is not above promoting the notions of stability and prosperity, in the hopes of better appeal to its readers and advertisers. Money talks at every level of society.
Agreed. Good points. It’s perhaps not just the population question itself – it may also be the issue that goes along with it of ‘shall we have endless, limitless growth forever and ever?’
If some segment of the population ever thought ‘maybe we could ease off a bit on the growth accelerator, couldn’t we?’, one way of “reassuring” them would be to show that we have plenty of food for however many billions you want to name. So no worries.
In the 12-13 minute movie that lead into the article, one speaker said words to the effect that we are not mindless creatures like butterflies, that we have a consciousness – therefore some rules that apply to insects do not apply to us.
Yes and no. We have a greater consciousness, and yet as William Catton’s work shows (“Overshoot” and “Bottleneck”) we are wrong if we think we are immune from limitations Nature imposes on other creatures.
Easing off on population might cause an easing off on creation of consumers, and lack of consumers’ demand might cause an easing off on the whole ‘limitless growth forever and ever’ doctrine which gives so much power to our current crop of “leaders”. They can’t imagine any curtailment of their power – therefore any concern over some limit to population growth must be wrong and must be attacked.
I dunno about us having a greater consciousness than butterflies–it’s just different, and we can’t know their kind of consciousness. I sure couldn’t migrate down the road, let alone to Mexico, without getting lost.
Agreed – Supposedly squirrels remember where they put their various food stashes from recalling patterns of light and shadow around the stash.
I would make a lousy squirrel – keep missing the jumps from limb to limb, keep forgetting my stash, etc.
We have the dead-end consciousness variety. Man is forced to adapt a linear interpretation of time because it knows when it began and knows it will end. Other animals do not have this curse. In the middle of man’s timeline is constant suffering placated and mitigated through consumption and aquisition programming. Consumption as the coping mechanism, keeping man grounded in pursuit of that future day when it meets the success of target aquisition… keeping him moving forward with some goal, some reason to keep on persisting. It’s worked thus far. Most people haven’t realized the awful futility of it all. But we plug on, mistaking happiness for a brief cessation or lessening of suffering. And life is suffering, as Freud said, we do not go through life being happily watered only to be momentarily thirsty. Instead, we are cursed to be thirsty and we can only lessen its pain… as with all things in life.
Wow. Great post. I learned the Green Revolution staved off mass starvation in the 60’s. Now, what has replaced soil in the last 30 years is going out the door. Yep. phosphorous. This as put forth by William Kotke, misspelled in a previous comment. Bears correcting, this guy’s a deal. Faught with the Navajo. Some may be familiar with his work, The Final Empire, Seeds for the Future.
Serious shit as John Jeavons says, the earth can be dessertified in 70 years, 30 more years of farmable soil, and what has substituted for top soil, phosphorous, going, going, gone. Add to that, 2/3 of earths’ population can be water insecure by 2025. Just go Rving, idiots.
So humans should:
a) go bowling
b) care that Kardashian’s pregnant
c) fuggetabout it and go to Vegas
d) approach our problems intelligently.
She is??!
Kim K’s ass is actually surgically implanted bowling balls.
Do you suppose they keep score? You know – Strike. Spare. And the occasional dreaded Gutter Ball?
That’s the gutter of all gutter balls.
Great post today, JHK
I was reading Charles Hugh Smith who was making parallels between the GMO monoculture to all other aspects of our global financial markets etc.
I wrote him a note:
The Monoculture model
I’ve been railing since I saw VICE with a discussion about Monsanto a few weeks ago that monoculturism is a complete denial of the physical world and that the world has supported life by redundancy instead of efficiency and local bio-diveristy instead of giant global systems too big to fail!
Note how everything the leadership is obsessed with leads to TBTF and will just because it can’t possible work over the long-haul.
Those who claim to be scientists seem completely unaware of how things actually work and instead of emulating nature—again, its all about a war against nature. That is how I see Western man and his history. Trying to live outside nature and thinking he can win. So our elite live outside the law, thanks to the illusion of free markets with no regulation for themselves. They are no longer part of the fabric of humanity, but are a superstructure that thinks it is totally risk immune!
Everything’s a war. Globalism is a war against labor turning the modern nation state into a glorified trade zone of transnational monopolies, religion is a war against science, religion becomes a war platform…..it goes on and on, because at the end of the day our Shock Doctrineers have discovered that money can be moved from the people to privatized interests through war…..so there went our sovereign and personal wealth.
I can go on and on with examples that cover politics, culture, banking basically everything we’re doing and it will go down in flames.
You just can’t fight physics forever.
“You just can’t fight physics forever.”
Punchy, and meta…. and sums up just about everything. I like it.
Why thank you, Fan of Entropy.
I agree. What we call “Civilization” is built on the Monoculture Paradigm. See my reply to Charlesbasak above, I think you’ll find some things to like in it. There is an alternative paradigm rising.
Just more fallout from the ongoing dumbing down of America.
Just the ominous and dire goings on in California alone is reason enough to take off the rose colored glasses.
Our only hope is we have some great leaders hoping to shoulder their way to the front of the pack in the GOP. If the right one gets the prize this whole human race experiment things could be over in no time.
“…If the right one gets the prize this whole human race experiment things could be over in no time…”
Agreed, Ms. V. My ‘sarcasm detect’ meter also moved a couple of clicks.
Hmm, I was thinking something else entirely. Perhaps the panda should get its time with the big brain… the apes have made an awful go of it.
I think it should be the cats to be next in evolutionary history to have the big brain. They should develop opposable thumbs and the ability to use speech and mathematics.
Our domestic shorthair cat kills prey, but has never conducted a war, nor has he nearly destroyed a planet, unlike us higher primates. Nor have any of his larger cousins, the great cats.
Our cat is so close to being able to talk, it’s really amazing!
I love the irony in the fact that the “green revolution” is so very un-green by every modern measure. Modern agriculture is the process of using land as a growth medium to convert petroleum into food. I woke up when I read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
Did any of these boobs at the Times account for the fact that, even among the most cornucopians, it is acknowledged that we have 53 years of oil left at current consumption rates? When we stop being able to convert oil to food and all the farmland that has been monocropped for decades turns out to be the least fertile soil on the planet, some folks are going to starve, plain and simple.
“If you want a first-rate example of the standard nonresponse of the era of pretense, you’ll find one in the sunny streets of Miami, Florida right now. As a result of global climate change, sea level has gone up and the Gulf Stream has slowed down. One consequence is that these days, whenever Miami gets a high tide combined with a stiff onshore wind, salt water comes boiling up through the storm sewers of the city all over the low-lying parts of town. The response of the Florida state government has been to issue an order to all state employees that they’re not allowed to utter the phrase “climate change.” – The Archdruid Report
So the population bomb gets redefined as a nonissue by the newspaper of record. As they say right in the article “The phrase “zero population growth,” once a movement battle cry, is not frequently heard these days; it has, for instance, appeared in only three articles in this newspaper over the last seven years.”
The role of the newspaper of record is to promote techno-narcissism (the normal human state) and downplay any problem the cure for which which would require social change. The newspaper of record exists to promote the status-quo and supress uncomfortable truths all the while bathing its readers in a comfortable glow of being ‘informed’.
Why is this so surprising?
Part of the game plan is to promote elitism and get people comfortable with is so they will know their place when the belt tightens. Of course this is anathema to someone who claims an allergy to conspiracy theories.
I only wanted this in bold:
a first-rate example of the standard nonresponse of the era of pretense
Sorry for so much loud barking. Hope it does not obscure the point that:
The role of the newspaper of record is to promote techno-narcissism and every other nonresponse that can be imagined. Because the people living the high-life want to keep living it and everything else is irrelevant.
The first concern of power is to maintain power. It is the power principle. It is not 23 geniuses. It is 23 ass-kissing lackeys who want a bonus at the end of the year. They want to imagine they have enough power to keep and defend. Considering how many journalists are unemployed who have zero power their weakness is explainable even if not understandable.
Arrrrrhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!
No more messing around with HTML tags for me today. I’m out of here. Have a nice day everybody.
Or as Cheney says, “We create the reality”.
mhmm until reality bites back.
I believe the issue is a bit more complex than this…
First to address climate change the per capital energy consumption has to decrease drastically… think USSR implosion… .. Our financial/military will not be sustainable.. our global food production is not sustainable… Our global society will NOT deal with this “well”.. there will be war, violence, revolt and chaos.
TPTB understand the science and know what is going on.. don’t underestimate their intelligence.. or their capabilities… educating the masses is counter productive in maintaining power…
TPTB attitude is “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”. TPTB are going to “live” to fight another day… aka kick the can…. hold your power for as long as you can, so you can use it when you “need” to. And without a stretch of the imagination the argument could be made that this route is for the “greater good”.. (snark…)
The plan is to either use geoengineering to fix this problem or ride it down until it crashes and burns… because reducing the per capital energy consumption is NOT a realistic option….
He who remains standing wins.. and they will use the US military against anyone who interferes with their goals… and before this is all said and done the military will be aggressively used. It already is…..
Chris Hedges has some interesting insights into this… Wages of Rebellion is food for thought.
Prof Philip Mirowski, has interesting lectures on Neoliberism and climate change…
And of course Sheldon Wolin, Inverted Totalitarianism….
Clive Hamilton – Geo Engineering Ethics…… (this will make you think….)
Excellent lectures recorded from the Weather and Climate Summit of 2015….
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhRxxCqlepFI3hfQYr8eemY-GmU1FHFuk
I would also like to draw your attention to Rear Admiral David W. Titley, United States Navy (Retired)…. his lectures are worth listening to… keep in mind the “language and words” he uses and the “culture” (military/pentagon) he comes from…. (he is not going to come right out and say it, but he will lead you there….).
http://climateandsecurity.org/advisory-board/rear-admiral-david-w-titley-usn-ret/
And then for little Cognitive Dissonance….
Call Of Life – Facing The Mass Extinction (2011)
https://vimeo.com/76503362
Thanks, dog. That’s hilarious, how they turn around and use their own studied lack of reporting as “evidence”!!
Yes, and it shows they think rather highly of themselves too. To them thinking it makes it so.
High times at the New York Times.
Journalists get on the elevator in the morning and go up. The elevator stops, their bodies get off, but the hubris of their minds continues on an upward trajectory and rides to the stratosphere. There thin air makes real life a joke and for a paycheck something to be mocked with merry and giddy mirth.
New York Time wannabe journalists can do the same thing at home without an elevator ride by breathing the helium from a helium balloon. Lack of oxygen is key.
Harold Wanless, Chair of Geological Sciences at the University of Miami, has been speaking about this issue for some time.. but the LSM (lame stream media) will not cover the issue…
Several of his lectures are on you tube… however this interview is the most poignant…. Florida is well and truly F&^%ed… aired on CBC… our friends in Canada..
He talks about his meeting with Voldemort discussing that which must not be named….. (Florida governor and climate change…)
http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/The+Sunday+Edition/ID/2634500294/
C’mon Jim; don’t you know that Haiti could support somewhere around 20 million humans; Greenland perhaps 50 million and California itself can sustain 100 million people? Sure. And Jerry Brown will fill Mono Lake with white wine from Sonoma.
It appears, if one believes demographic statistics from advanced countries i.e. Europe, Japan, U.S., that particular populations are slowing in growth and in many cases, declining due to the non-replacement birthrate. Any growth in these places is due to immigration alone. But we all know this.
Facts are a bitch and between the destruction of the environment viz. chemicals, nuclear and just plain using up available resources – rainforests and fisheries jump to the front of the line – we are going to meet crunch time in a petroleum-leak coated, Fukushima irradiated, dioxin dosed Black Swan moment that is going to astonish even the most Twinkie super-saturated Kardashian cow.
On the other hand those Daesh/ISIS monsters could get a party favor and start WWIII which will bring the Madhi to a town near you.
Oh, and the Grey Lady is the reified conciousness of the Bubbleland known as Manhattan. That occurred to me when I saw a front page feature the Arts section on the Insane Clown Posse.
Most people I talk to do not understand or comprehend that the fossil fuels that made this unprecedented bubble of techno-luxury (by historical standards) possible are a one-time “gift of nature” and when they are gone they are gone for good. The laws of physics and especially of Thermodynamics inconveniently places hard limits on how energy can be obtained and throws in friction, resistance, radiated losses, leakage and other pesky encumbrances to energy throughout the generation, distribution and consumption processes.
When the “gift” is expended, which is quite soon, there will not be a techno fix to replacing a totally free gift of such proportions. Every scrap of energy from that point on will cost hugely. The allocation of energy nature provides from the sun, essentially the energy budget of all life on earth, will surely be humbling for a humanity that has been addicted to dirt cheap oil, gas, coal, etc. What a spoiler to the party that will be…
With the final expenditure of the gift, standards will almost certainly have to return to historical values. The food supply is just one of the many features of modern society that will be trimmed (voluntarily or otherwise, doesn’t matter). Most of the population of Earth will have to go packing as these fantastic numbers will not fit into the energy budget of the future. The Club of Rome was spot on, the evidence is stronger now than then (unless you listen to the MSM).
Understanding the dilemma of the environment, fossil fuels, overpopulation, etc. is the easy part. Understanding why the MSM including NYT has not shown more concern for this upcoming and fast approaching civilization-crashing train wreck, that is what is HARD TO UNDERSTAND!!!
Goat, I should have posted my comment in response to you. Mea culpa.
What Right Do You Have To Be Here On Planet Earth? by William Kotke
01 February, 2011
(part of one of Kotke’s articles) Population explosion is quite a problem
At some point in our lives, most of us realized that there is no place that we could stand on the side of mother earth and not be asked, “by what right are you here?” Do we have a rent receipt, a park pass, a ticket, a passport? Even the rare humans in the Amazonian interior cannot get out of Brazil without a passport.
And when I do have a rent receipt, who is it that “benevolently” and tentatively extend those rights to me? An armed gang of thugs who call themselves “civilization” own mother earth. This loosely organized gang of thugs are composed, usually, into a male hierarchy, generally referred to as the planetary, military patriarchy. This gender imbalanced, group of fat bankers in business suits, with Generals at their side, owns the earth. These are the descendants of the original patriarchs who began the warfare – looting -death oriented, empire culture, who apparently believed that because males are larger and stronger, they should kill the opposition and loot the earth of material goods, which they call “wealth” and conflate with “power.”
Now, they have done it. They have looted the earth almost to its death. Babylon ecologically destroyed Iraq, the Indus Empire ecologically destroyed the Indus Valley, the Han Chinese ecologically destroyed China and the Greek and Roman empires ecologically destroyed North Africa and Italy and now the patriarchs are sucking the life force out of the whole earth. The patriarchs are not standing on the living earth, they exist in a mentally conditioned bubble that tells them that the more the earth dies, the better things get. They call it the sacred growth. They babble incessantly about economics, politics, and fast cars. At the universities they have answers to all questions, but the reality here on the earth is simple.
The Giant Vacuum Cleaner They Call Economics
They have set up a giant vacuum machine that can identify any valuable biological activity on the earth. Down here on the earth, the soil community of millions of members slowly builds up surpluses. In optimum ecologies, this community can produce one inch of topsoil in three hundred to nine hundred years. The giant machine identifies the biologically rich areas of soils, fish stocks, forests, grasslands and so forth in which to plug its tentacles. The sucking sound is the life force leaving our planet. Of course, they babble on about their theories of economics and politics as they try to justify their methods of sharing the loot, which they have sucked out of the planet’s life force. In this culturally conditioned reality bubble, we have more regard for the house made of dead trees than we have for the living forest itself.
The industrialists prattle on about value. What is it that makes our loot valuable? The industrial Marxist, in his bubble, says that it is human labor that makes things valuable, the voice from the industrial capitalist bubble says it is whatever people will pay.
Back on the earth, the life force maintains a web of energy flows. The sunlight is consumed, photosynthesis increases biomass, the leaf falls from the tree, it becomes food for the soil community, which creates fertility for the tree. This exemplifies the vastly more manifold and complex web of life of the earth. No life form attempts to take over the whole. Each lives according to its nature in dynamic balance with the web of life.
Therefore, each life form that exists in dynamic balance within the web of life has a right to be here on earth because it’s part of the function. In addition, because the local conditions in the cosmos have created the environment for life to exist on earth, we can say that the life form has even cosmic rights. Therefore, if you are existing in dynamic balance with the web of life of the planet earth, YOU HAVE A RIGHT TO BE HERE ON THIS PLANET EARTH, otherwise you and I are biologically illegitimate criminals intent on murdering our mother.
When we examine, say, our own liver, we see a cell community happily cooperating with the body’s design in doing liver things. In some extreme case we might see a small group of cells cancerously declare that they don’t like the cosmic design and they commit to creating a (tumor) body of their own design. They then begin sucking the life force out of the larger body and growing their own tumor body until the larger body dies.
We are now at the crime scene. There are individual life forms loose on the planet that are cancerously sucking the life out of larger benign bodies. We call ourselves, “the civilized.” And how did this criminal enterprise begin?
For several million years our species lived very successfully on the earth, embedded in the ecological energy flows as forager/hunters. With our encyclopedic knowledge of the living earth, we knew plants come from seeds and also where the seeds should be planted. Many forager/hunters planted seeds along the foraging routes, to return later. But, at some point, some humans decided that they didn’t like the design of the larger body and began the practice of agriculture as a way of life. This was the fateful decision that has almost sealed the fate of our planet.
Well said!
I’m clapping. That’s right.
Wait – you actually endorse killing animals just to support your own body? Or eating the seeds meant to create new life? What kind of person does that? The only moral diet is fruit – the tree offers it to us. And be sure not to crunch on the seeds – either swallow them whole so they can pass through or throw them aside onto the Earth. And of course no firewood. Man will have to return to the tropics and compete with the apes and monkeys, perhaps breeding with them to produce a new “man” more adapted for natural living.
Are we not Men? No, we are Devo. You are far too timid mein Frau. Devolution is Evolution.
Very thoughtful – well done.
Because, as most falsehoods that humanity has conjured for itself from religion to space colonization, the idea of human life being sacrosanct above all else at any price is its most foolish.
Great post!
As for The New York Times – It’s now all the news that’s not fit to print.
Journalism has long since left the world of media. At the national level, it’s infotainment. ET being the model for the national newscasts. At the local level, it’s that old adage, “If it bleeds it leads.”
Here in Atlanta, the local paper, the AJC has spent the last few years wandering in the wilderness. Here’s their website: http://www.ajc.com.
It has been deservedly blasted by readers of all stripes for everything including its headache inducing UI design, poor editing, intrusive ads and the fact there is not much news or real reporting on the site.
Ralph McGill is spinning in his grave.
Journalism has lost its purpose like most things in America. We’ve let the 1% and their minions take over the country. Everything is run from the top down for their benefit. But even they don’t want to recognize we’re running on the last fumes of the oil era.
You have also described the St. Louis Post Dispatch to T (and many, many others, I assume — and fear).
Many newpapers are migrating to that format. Short articles that don’t make one think too much.
“We have more regard for a house made of dead trees than we do a living forest. ” Zing. Gotta love it.
The house provides shelter from the elements that would kill you. That’s why they were invented. You go out in the forest and try to live. Blog as you starve, freeze, get sick, etc.
They used to make them out of stone.
And before that, it was wood again.
Barb wants us to live in trees like the apes. Perhaps we could make little nests like they do.
Barb wants us to live in trees like the apes.–Janos
Your argument is a reductio ad absurdum–taking the necessary partial unraveling of overgrown institutions, like suburban sprawl and agribiz, to the extreme to argue that there is no future other than swinging from the trees.
I think you know that’s just not so. You are disputing just to be contrary.
It’s called a false dichotomy. Idiots are very fond of them because it simplifies complex situations into an either/or and they can state forcefully “It’s a simple question. Why can’t you answer the question?” Yawn.
I don’t know this to be fact, but the only explanation that I have been able to come up with for articles like this NY Times report is that the “journalists” that write them must be extremely separated and insulated from the physical and economic realities that the world’s poor and hungry must endure daily. I think that the only reason that they (and to a lesser extent, the rest of the MSM) aren’t called out on their bullshit is that the folks who know to do so are too busy trying to keep their family fed and a roof over their heads, while laying awake at night trying to formulate a way to cover the interest on the payday loan.
As more and more of the “middle class” drop off the cliff into the “working poor” category, one wonders whether the point will come where a critical mass of people will realize that the MSM is not just out of touch, but actively deceiving them. Not likely to start a revolution on its own, but add it to the list of grievances that keep turning up the already-bubbling pot.
Well our system is totally based on payola, so the project such as this article is rewarded greatly.
When you say the magic words that keep the agenda going you get a big name and go to the parties. Maybe you are assured that when the Good Ship Lollypop goes down there will be a special reserved seat on the lifeboat for you.
I posted something several weeks ago on FB showing a German journalist apolgizing for lying for the CIA.
He went on to explain in detail that if you follow the directives you get all the perks, when you don’t you get punished and sidelined and fired.
ok—so the system by which we get the global corporatism ok’d by all the vassal states is reward and punishment and most likely spied upon.
BT,
When we speak of such things in the context of ignorance and stupidity, we’re solidly in the area of, “There’s your trouble”. 😉
I’m just hoping that when the Good Ship Lollipop goes down, David Brooks and the clan of true-believing, narcissistic bloviators goes down with it. Do they really believe, or is it just a road to exceptional wealth, perqs and ego-massage? Will they abandon ship and try to tell us they “knew all along” and “tried to warn us” but their editors would not allow it? (While they’re whacking those trying to scramble into the lifeboat with an oar.) I’d love to see them try that particular dodge.
Yes, Ozone… What was the refrain when 9/11 happened and then 2008 happened?
Nobody could have imagined…..
Not only did they expect it, there was fair warning about Bin Laden “determined to attack within the US”, I believe a paper with that title was offered to W. a few weeks before it happened.
as to 2008, I was reading articles all over the Guardian and many other papers through a site called “Life After the Oil Crash” for 1 1/2 years before the crash. BTW I got my money out of some funds 4 months before the crash and told my (bankster) that it was going down…..he said he didn’t think so…..his bad.
Plus, the job of those seeking their payday and glory is made infinitely easier by those like Stewart Brand. I used to have a lot of respect for his work, back when I first encountered it in my college days. I even listened to a great many of the seminar podcasts of his Long Now organization… until one day he quite randomly decided to attack JHK’s writings and viewpoint. I continued to pick up the odd podcast, but gave it up when I realized that more and more of the seminar speakers were chosen from those who’d drunk the Kool-Aid of techno-grandiosity, to quote our host.
Brand uses his past credibility and ‘in’ status with techies to gloss over our present predicament. I don’t have much respect for the man anymore.
I guess the moral of the story is you have to recognize what’s hot and who is paying big $$$ to hear something nice about their cause. So, if you are Brand, you start writing nice things about the ‘it can all go on forever’ meme.
Works for a while. Even on the Titanic, even after it hit the berg, for about an hour you could still write a story about ‘it’s not even listing – look how we’re superbly handling all that incoming water. Technology rules.’
But then after about an hour and a half, you really do have to move on to your next gig. Hence, the hot story changes to ‘Spare the Oar? Why Should We, When These Miserable Late Comers Will Just Sink the Lifeboat?’
That will be the kind of story Brand writes next.
Russ,
I think you’ve got the picture of that transition exactly right!
The less-than-imaginative, Thom-ass Friedman would be a shining example of a panderer in search of an audience (“source of income”) wishing to be pandered to.
Let’s not even get started about Pulitzers and who hands ’em out and why…
The Times article is just one more example of the efforts of denial. And not just simple denial, rather king-sized, multifaceted denial. Those who have been supremely advantaged by the last 100 or so years just can’t bear to recognize that the current “system” will end. And that’s not just our economic “system”. In other words, a gigantic paradigm shift will be coming. As a student of history I would opine we’ve been here before, maybe not at such a scale, but civilizations have experienced such shifts in the past. The question is not if, but when, and further, what will the operative dynamics be as that shift plays itself out to reach stasis. This question has been addressed at length by Janos, much to the chagrin of many readers of this blog. Interestingly, as the months have gone by, I have sensed an increasing acceptance, mostly tacit, of Janos’ Weltanschauung. Alas, it seems Mother Nature abhors a Never-never land.
Denial? Denial of what?
They’ve been pushing this Vatican/CIA racist UN agenda crap for decades, along with their propaganda agents, your very own Mr Kunstler. And now that you’re all thoroughly propagandized with their irrelevant nonsense and misdirections they come out with this propaganda stunt for you to get all indignant over their “straying” from the party line.
Instead of tuning off the propaganda, you people let yourself be played and participate in these holographic lies as though you somehow matter. You don’t. You’re just another dumbass virtual mirror in their holographic hall of mirrors.
Mika just got himself banned for referring to me as a “propaganda agent,” which is just plain scurrilous.
hmm.. you don’t look like a Vatican Assassin 🙂
lol
Thank you Al. White Men will be heard, one way or another. The more our voice is silenced, the louder we become. Did not the Church grow through the blood of the martyrs?
Ehrlich might have gotten timing wrong, and he didn’t see how fossil fuels and technology would be used in such quantities to stave off a collapse, but in the end, his concept that ‘this will end badly’ is still true.
The real tough thing is living through what we are in now; the parallel to the financial world that Being There noted by CHS is spot on.
No, you just can’t fight physics forever, but a majority of humanity is certainly trying to do it as long as it can (reminds me of the dictum “The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”).
“No, you just can’t fight physics forever…” or mathematics either. I agree with you about Ehrlich: the “fruits” of Borlaug’s green revolution were just taking roots.
Thomas Malthus, likewise, will be proven correct eventually (i.e., that population increases exponentially while food production is linear). Malthus was slightly ahead of the fossil fuel revolution and did not see that train a’coming.
Prof. Al Bartlett has been banging the table about this for a long time and has given over a thousand presentations of his excellent lecture.
http://www.albartlett.org/presentationsarithmetic_population_energy.html
Is he still alive? If so, I bet he’s for mass immigration. All the Greenies (Green is the new Red) are.
google is yr friend.
Population Biologist
Paul Ralph Ehrlich is an American biologist and educator who is the Bing Professor of Population Studies in the department of Biological Sciences at Stanford University and president of Stanford’s Center for Conservation Biology. Wikipedia
Born: May 29, 1932 (age 83), Philadelphia, PA
Spouse: Anne H. Ehrlich (m. 1954)
Children: Lisa Marie Ehrlich
Well Said AKlein as usual. Your comment should have been first again.
The human species hasn’t gotten itself into the messes overnite. It has been over the last “how man thousands?” of years. I think we’ve forgotten somewhere, we are nature, and as such, if you mess with nature too much, eventually, you’re going to get slammed.
We don’t inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. I don’t think they’re going to have much reason to rejoice at an overheated, depleted world. Yep, unfortunately nature and entropy bat last.
Not to be outdone, in the other big NY paper, The Wall Street Journal, today’s lead opinion piece titled ‘The Shale boom shifts into higher gear’ by Donald Luskin and Michael Warren. The authors claim mining oil by fracking has reached a state of scientific efficiency, and so much fracked oil is available not only in the US but worldwide, that in no time at all petroleum will be so plentiful as to be virtually free. Right now there apparently are thousands of wells just waiting to be tapped, ready to go. This is going to lead to unprecedented prosperity far out into the future, maybe forever.
Along the way the authors take a few jabs at Hubbert and his peak oil theory, and everybody who espouses this theory currently.
brh
They’ll make Swiss cheese outta the planet yet…..
In order to “solve” a current energy availability “problem” certain our financial “leadership” has given the green light to fracking. This, even though the financial rationale for this is very, very dubious, as JHK has repeatedly asserted. But let’s just day for the moment that fracking does make financial sense. What about its making environmental sense? Big question, there. How about ruining our fresh water supply? If there is any question of that happening, we should absolutely, positively err on the side of conservatism and not allow fracking. Last I checked, non-toxic water is essential to life, at least on this planet. But unfortunately, many of us are damned fools. We’ll allow this to happen so we can extend Happy Motoring for a couple more years – maybe. Will this be the outcome? Let’s look at a reasonable analogy. Americans go to DisneyWorld with their kiddies in tow and marvel at the simplicity and allure of Main Street, with its walkable streets and human scale. Then they go back to their real existence; mind-numbing tract housing with no sidewalks and big box retail with its utter dependency on cars. One should ask, why is their reality so different from what really satisfies their souls? Especially since that reality was actually attainable? So now, regarding fracking, will we wistfully talk about taking our children to places where you can actually drink the water from the ground?
Jim, what’s your take on Bernie Sanders relative to the post-fossil energy prospect? More of the same or a sign that the body politic is waking up (vs. continuing to sleep walk or jerk hypnagogically)? I look forward to a piece on the Bernie Revolution.
Ralph
PS – Inter States Book 1, “Fossil Nation,” is approaching publication: see http://interstates2040.wikispaces.com/home
Jim,
I wont link to the You Tube clip. It is a four minute doozy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Briefcase
“The Biggest Loser creator pits poor families against one another for briefcase full of cash”.
DOES ANYONE REMEMBER ‘QUEEN FOR A DAY’?
Sounds pretty low, as low as it gets, even for TV.
brh
Yup. Its the most pathetic thing I ever saw on TV. In the age of wealth transfer from the middle to the top, this is sure to be a new old theme.
‘new old theme’. I could not say it better.
As a youth I remember ‘Supermarket Races’ [may not be the title but thats what it was].
And ‘Worlds Toughest Bouncers’.
Those were beginnings of Reality TV.
As for the NYT itself, what they might have meant is everything is going super right now for its super rich readers in the upper west side, with the raging stock markets and all, and a really bitchin summer is coming up in the Hamptons, where one of the main worries is will there be enough helicopters available friday afternoons in Manhattan to ferry Wall Streeters off rooftops out to the mansions 100 miles east in Long Island. It would be a real tragedy if they had to drive that far in a car, fighting traffic and mixing it up with the proles.
brh
The one thing you can count on in this world, is for people to ignore the consequences of their activities until it rears up & bites ’em in the ass. Then they have to scramble. This is the same behavior that resulted in the financial meltdown in 2008.
I do not think the financial calamities of 2008 were an “oops” moment at all.
When Clinton gutted Glass-Steagall which basically turned the banks into casinos, take note that when their party got out of hand the schmuck taxpayers were FORCED to bail them out and no one went to jail.
The “fines” that appear huge to the average Joe and Jane were simply “the price of doing business”.
I hate to be cynical, but to me 2008 looked like a well laid plan.
Which is why Dodd-Frank merely tap danced around the problem and already every Republican candidate for president wants to gut that legislation and re-open the newly remodeled casinos.
“Never give a sucker an even break.”
Where is Brooksley Borne when we need her?!
Oh, you say resource depletion and over population killed the Easter Islanders?!??! (V-8 slap in the head here). Who’d a thunk it?!? Many don’t think this is all going to end well. But, yes, most want to continue on as usual. Unfortunately homo sapiens are physiologically programmed to think in the short term. That’s part of the problem.
Maybe the Mayans were on to something when they predicted Dec. 2012 as the end, but maybe the beginning of it. Couple in my town building a 24,000 sq. foot house complete with bowling alley, faux chilled trout stream ( no I’m serious. Wow, wouldn’t native americans be impressed, all when there’s real native brown trout right around the corner) Yah great!! You know, seems to me the Mayans did the same thing as JHK points out in his 2015 forecast. Cheers JHK.
Kudos for a fine assessment. I read the NYT article and wondered what planet the authors have lived on for the 60 years before present.
A most lucid description of the ever-magnifying “consensus trance”, which is by now a pervasive default setting of cognitive and behavioral anomalies that have become tragically normalized. One little thing to add to your Green Revolution point – the 100th anniversary of the Haber-Bosch process recently passed. There’s something to contemplate! Bravo Jim! http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_efficient_planet/2013/03/nitrogen_fixation_anniversary_modern_agriculture_needs_to_use_fertilizer.html
Note that the source of hydrogen for the Haber-Bosch process is natural gas, a finite resource. Another H2 source could be the electrolysis of water, which requires electrical energy. Would there be enough renewable energy for this? If not, there would be 3.5 billion of us going hungry.
I’m presently reading a new science fiction novel called “Seveneves ” by brilliant author Neal Stephenson, which is very relevant to today’s CFN discussion.
Briefly, the plot is that in the near future the Moon shatters and some of its pieces are about to rain down on Earth, destroying its surface and all life. A small band of about 1500 people escape to the International Space Station just ahead of the impending disaster. These people are the only survivors of the human race.
The story is about the issues that arise in the totally artificial environment the survivors find themselves. The author illustrates how difficult it is to live in such an environment: Solving one problem leads to the creation of another. Ultimately, the biggest problem is the nature of humans themselves.
I mention this novel because it is a perfect metaphor for what Man is trying to accomplish here on Earth. The timing of Jim’s article – at least for me – is scarily perfect.
Like it, Bean. I’ll check it out.
1500 people? This must be in a slightly different future! The concept of getting that many people up there would be pretty daunting. I’m pretty convinced spaceflight as our savior isn’t going to href=”https://peakfuture.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/why-we-should-not-go-to-space/”>happen, as does href=”http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/why-not-space/”>Tom Murphy.
I’ll definitely take a look at the book, though. I’m sure there will be some interesting ideas in there.
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/why-not-space/
https://peakfuture.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/why-we-should-not-go-to-space
In the novel, the world has 2 years before destruction and all the nations drop everything to band together to get as many people as possible to survive. Also, the space station has been reconfigured to provide for many more people.
Hmmm… interesting concept. There’s still the issue of minimum viable population; I don’t know if 1500 people gets you there. But it’s fiction, I can roll with a well told tale.
Also check out “Hold Back the Day” by Ward Kendall. The White Race is almost driven to extinction by a vengeful World State controlled by dark skinned mixed race people. Ditto the East Asians. Yet the World State is in crisis of over-population and most of their technological innovation depends of the remaining Whites. A colony of Whites still exist on Mars. This is too much to bear and they World State launches an expedition to exterminate them.
Movie, ‘Children of Men’.
Beantownbill said:
“I’m presently reading a new science fiction novel called “Seveneves ” by brilliant author Neal Stephenson, which is very relevant to today’s CFN discussion.”
********************
My question to you is are you reading a version with paper pages and print or are yo reading an ebook that appears on your screen as so many pixels?
I ask because brain research suggests that ebooks use a different part of the frontal cortex than those written on paper. Those parts of the brain not used regularly begin to degrade in their efficiency, The good news is that those atrophied parts of the brain can be :retrained: through increased usage. (Writing in cursive (or manuscript) instead of typing from a key board works the same way,)
The link to the article is here:
http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/10/16/reading-e-books-and-the-brain/
I read both from e-books and from the printed page. I know about brain effects due to reading from a screen. I am reading “Seveneves” on my iPad.
I also am in favor of writing the old-fashioned way. I’m old enough to have used a slide rule, and resisted the use of a calculator for many years. I felt we were losing knowledge of the rhythm, flow and beauty of numbers. When I finally started to use a calculator, I found myself not as mentally adept, so I began doing multiplication and addition in my head to keep sharp when I had to use arithmetic.
When I started to use a keyboard for writing, I found I was not being as intimately connected to what I was writing as compared to when I used cursive. I think I lose something between the time a thought appears in my mind and I type it on a screen.
Two responses:
1. I too had to learn to figure out logarithms, quadratic equations, and how to differentiate and integrate calculus functions by had on paper according to the rules for doing so. A slide rule, pencil, and paper was allowed but everything else had to come from inside my head. I have forgotten since then how to do these problems (because if one does not use it they lose it) but not how to use my head to think through the issues involved.
My granddaughter is in 6th grade and taking all advanced classes including math (which she loves).
I have watched her do her homework both on line and on paper. Alas! She isn’t learning math, she is learning how to push buttons on a calculator or a computer keypad.
2. No one can write cursive as quickly as they can write by keyboard. When typewriters were manual and editing consisted of triple spacing something so one could go back to correct spelling or punctuation or reword a statement manually before making a final copy for submission, it slowed things down and as a result caused more thought to be put into what was written.
Modern word processing allows one the capacity to rapidly revise, or edit, or correct text. The result is that we are able to have a thought go from our brain to our finger tips and appear on screen instantly. Then we push the enter button and send our “thoughts” on their way. It’s all very efficient! And it is also thought destroying. I have taken to reading aloud my blog posts prior to sending them in order to determine whether they reflect what I want to say or not (or whether whatever I want to say is worth the effort). The net effect is to give my mind the chance to contemplate what my brain has produced.
Writing longhand letters now – it’s definitely a different feel than writing emails. Plus, people love getting real mail.
Businessmen, they drink my wine
Plowmen dig my earth
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth
I think the movie “San Andreas,” may prove to be prescient. If the Hoover Dam fails for any reason, much of the Southwest becomes uninhabitable. Period. That means maybe 20% of the country becomes desolate, 20 % of real estate becomes worthless, and 20% of the population will have to move. Not to mention an immediate food crisis the likes of which no one has ever seen.
Ehrlich was right about the population bomb, but Zero Population Growth, which allows two offspring as replacements, was never a solution. Negative Population Growth, which means one or zero offspring, is a solution. If you went for NPG, you are part of the solution.
One good thing about the end of petroleum: vehicles will be grounded, useless, and not emitting CO2. But I believe it is fantasy that one day there will be no more petroleum for fighter jets, tanks, humvees, etc.
It is fantasy that the entire military machine is fragile, being oil dependent, grinds to a halt, though that is implied by the peak oil scenario.
I suspect that journalists tend to have degrees in Journalism. Not biology. Not chemistry. Not statistics. Journalism. Having university degrees, they imagine themselves to be educated, without knowing the first thing about how the modern world is constructed or maintained, or even how to think about it.
Thus we are wont to hear, “No-one saw it coming! No-one at all!”
I read that it takes a gallon of water to grow one stinkin’ almond. I drove for mile upon mile in CA through groves of almonds. I love almonds! The price is gonna go bthrough the roof when the water wars come to Ariz, Vegas, and CA. Golf courses in the Desert? Yea that makes sense. When the price of a case of Cab from CA goes through the roof the higher ups will be bitchin’ at cocktail hour. Meanwhile there is a cat 4 hurricane in the eastern Pacific, earliest on record, here in the Northeast it is 48 degrees in June, Go figure. On a lighter note the water storage tanks are already full and the fruit trees are absolutly going gang busters this year. I will probably be giving apples away again on Craigslist for horse treats. Cherries, pears,peaches, and blackberries etc.etc.Tomatoes and peppers won’t budge!
Hey Rip, those water storage tanks of yours, don’t you have plenty of water up there without capturing rainwater? (if that’s what you’re doing?) That massive Quabbin Reservoir is right down the street, plenty of water for everybody.
brh
One of these days I’d like to take a ride north and check out your spread. It sounds pretty good.
brh
You “drove” … so … without the fossil fuel, you wouldn’t have seen?
Yes stillfarmin, I drove 30,000 miles in ’77-’78 in a ’68 ford Econoline I converted to a camper. Straight six with three on the tree. I barely made it over Rockies. I had my girl and rescue dog “Scruffy” from the pound in Rapid City, SD. Gasoline was maybe $.40 cents a gallon. Worked pipelines in Texas, Ate rattlers which we killed every morning after they fell into the trench every night.Was a worm on the oil rigs in Wy. Worked ski areas in CO. and CA. I never gave a thought to oil depletion. I was a kid of 18 YO. No college for me but I certainly got an education.
The Times puts one industry shill after another on their op-ed pages, all in the name of “balance.”
This sense of unreality is partly because so many people who work there live in NYC. Don’t get me wrong. I love the city. Despite the gentrification and loss of its bohemians, NYC has great restaurants, museums, and theater.
What it lacks is perception of anything beyond the City. In my experience, New Yorkers have zero knowledge of how food is grown, how soil can be depleted, and how fragile the entire web of food production is. As a transplanted New Yorker (well, Yonkers!) told me not long ago, “I don’t want to know where my food comes from. Just give me a steak shrink-wrapped on Styrofoam, please.”
Borlaug’s well-intentioned Green Revolution, based on abundant fossil fuels to make fertilizers, is news to them. But it won’t be forever. Three days without food deliveries would dive NYC into Mad-Max anarchy.
I saw this video this morning. It seems pretty obvious to me that at some point the population is going to be too big for the planet to sustain. It seems pretty obvious to me that we’re already at this point. A finite planet with finite resources will eventually run out of said resources if there are too many people using them. All of this seems obvious with just a moment’s thought.
I must say that I find it annoying that we’re continually asked to dismiss what can be worked out with common sense. Paul Ehrlich got his time frame wrong but not his basic premise. The one guy said something to the effect of “How many times do we have to be wrong about population before we admit that it isn’t a problem?” (I’m paraphrasing) The answer is “you have to wait longer.” the answer is NOT “Phew, see? It hasn’t happened yet so clearly there’s no problem.” No, it’s all still there, we’re just finding ways to manage.
My takeaway is that the people who make the predictions should never include a time frame. As tempting as it may be to do so, RESIST THE URGE! Because at some point in time some dummy is going to say “Well it didn’t happen WHEN you predicted so it must not be true.” Even when all of the evidence is showing that it is, in fact, happening it’s just happening more slowly and less dramatically than the apocalyptic version we were waiting for.
Never underestimate the length of time something fundamentally broken can limp along. Our economy is demonstrating that very nicely.
Thanks Jim!
(it’s Heather of the First Lady chickens 😉 )
Yes, we have to stop feeding Africa. Their population growth is beyond belief. And we have to stop them from coming here. We’ll never have zpg is we allow Black Africans and Muslims to overwhelm us.
“It is generally assumed that having too many people crammed into a small territory is a recipe for poverty and other social ills. Yet according to the United Nations, the three places with the highest density are Monaco, Macao and Singapore. Not one of them remotely qualifies as a desperate case.”
Oh good grief. In a article packed with thermodynamic idiocies and cornucopian delusions this statement takes the cake. Do Monaco, Macao or Singapore grow all of their own food within their borders? Extract all of their own fossil fuels? How about their own raw materials (lumber, iron, cement, aluminum, etc)? Or, do they import massive amounts of that food, energy and mineral resources from their much larger surrounding neighbors? How long would any of these postage-stamp sized principalities last without that constant influx of goods and mineral riches? In the same way, the world’s big cities are not self-sustaining. They require enormous inputs from the surrounding countryside –and also require those rural hinterlands and waterways to become pollution and waste sinks, absorbing the trash and waste generated by their millions of inhabitants.
The authors really ought to attend a few lectures on physics, geology and agriculture before spouting such techno-triumphalist nonsense.
The NYT under Judith Miller lost all credibility and respect from me when it trumpeted the march to our totally unnecessary war in Iraq. This is just the icing on the cake. They are nothing more than paid cheerleaders for the .1%, writing whatever they are required to write to please their oligarch paymasters. Real journalism died out and moved on to places like this years ago.
Personally I’m astounded we’ve managed to keep the rattletrap enterprise aloft as long as we have. Never doubt the power of institutional inertia and wishful thinking. The Times, like most of the rest of the media and politicians, are wholly owned subsidiaries of the plutocracy and will continue with a relentless smiley-faced din of soothing bloviations until the 2×4 of reality hits them square in their well-coiffed faces. Until then, expect the art of distraction to continue: Hey, Kim Kardashian is pregnant again! That should occupy the rabble for the next 7 months. And we can always get ourselves into another pointless international squabble. Iran and the Ukraine aren’t panning out? Fear not, we can gin up China’s interest in the Spratly Islands as the next existential threat to our way of life.
I’ve got a subscription to the e-version of the Times (sorry, but Gail Collins makes me laugh and even Krugman says something profound about as often as a blind squirrel finds an acorn). But overall, the drivel they put out makes me feel like an enabler. Effective today, I have decided I can waste the money more productively elsewhere.
Co-dependent no more!!
Two species that share the same food source cannot co-exist in the same ecosystem. Thus the Grey Squirrel has been replacing the native English Red Squirrel and Pakistanis the native English People.
Ecology isn’t all hugs, kisses, kittens, and puppies. It also involves Mr Darwin and the struggle of races and species to survive against other races and species.
One tiny Indian tribe of 1500 has held a Rhode Island size piece of the Amazon for 500 years against all comers. How? By ferocity in war. They must be our inspiration now. They live in harmony with the Earth. So did their enemies. So what? It doesn’t end competition, strife, and war. That is the way of Nature.
How many happy hours I spent as a boy watching the ants war against each other! And imagine my horror to see a caterpillar being eaten alive by wasp larvae. The wasp lays its eggs right into the body of the caterpillar. Only fools who haven’t loved Nature enough to look believe that Nature is “nice”!
I perused the Times comments, 600+, to the article. They gradually turned more and more negative.
There’s hope for humanity yet.
“Paul Ehrlich was right, just a little off in his timing…”
Same could be said of George Orwell …
I was in high school in the 1970’s, a time which, in retrospect was quite a bit more thoughtful about population, pollution, environmental problems, etc. In the mid 70’s there were approximately 3.2 billion humans. Even then there were terrible problems. Most were written off as “political,” and ignored by the elites. They knew full-well that a growing population was $$$$$$ in their pockets. They knew that people are basically ignorant and concerned with their own self-interest thus making it easy for people to simply disregard facts. Today there are well over 7 billion humans, and there are still knuckle-heads who believe that the earth has a carrying capacity of 11 billion. WTF???
I think it best to trust “journalists” as-little-as-possible these days. Few seem to have common sense and fewer depend on facts in writing their stories. Their sense of duty to the “facts” seems to have been compromised by things other than “the truth” or the public interest.
Yes, the latest blurb is that every living human could fit in Texas. To which I reply: Hell, they could all fit in Dallas or Houston – just stack ’em up like firewood.
The ignorance of such thinking beggars the imagination.
Will Lindsay Graham be our first Gay White President? He is awfully light in the penny loafers. Why, he can just click them three times and he’ll be in Damascus faster than you can say tralfamadore.
I like it when women hold their hair in place with some kind of device and a pencil. What is this called? Anybody know? It must be a number 2 pencil though. That way they can have a spare to share when taking scan sheet tests.
But all women with long hair will be required to wear it loose at least twice a month once we are in power. And women will be encouraged to grow their hair long. Persuasion not pressure.
Just heard in the news: religious Jews tried to stop Christians from praying at the site of the last supper which is also the Tomb of David. They were carted away by the police. Perhaps that’s why Mika is in a foul mood today.
Janos, I just heard on the news, Russian plane almost nips U.S.S. Ross in the Black Sea. I may be wrong on which sea. Last week, china warns U.S. spy plane in international waters. May be nice knowing you all!
If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure and wear a number 2 pencil in your hair.
Nature has a nasty habit of correcting population problems e.g. black death, spanish flu aided by people who just have to have a war driven by elite snots. Nature may have well begun to strike back via bee colony collapse, ebola, cancers, flu of various types, antibiotic resistant infections, crop diseases, radiation, volcanos, fresh water shortages, pollution, human waste amounts, et al. Mother earth will rid itself of the human fleas that are irritating her. Matter of time. Our faith in technology will kill us. It does not depress me at my age though. I have a front row seat to the biggest human disaster in written history. I can even flip channels to watch various scenes. I can watch people have their heads cut off or floods carrying away houses and people. I can watch some former military soul tell me how lucky they are to only have lost 3 limbs. I can listen to the next miracle drug to make me have everlasting erections. I can watch the “lie of the day” on any news channel I choose. I can watch some guys knocking a little ball around until it goes into a small hole and people wildly applaud it. I can watch all sorts of various balls being played with by highly paid ball players. I can watch cars race around a track at big speeds and hope for some form of carnage if I am lucky. Boy, what a life!!!! I shall be sad to leave it. But, I will be turned into a wafer for some bottom 99% to eat and survive so they can have the life I have. Who would have believed?
For those who have not yet seen this month’s “Eyesore”, you should go at once to view this monstrosity. Better than the usual eye clutter that appears here.
Sean is talking about the problems caused by drunken bicyclists in New York. They speed. They ride drunk. They take stupid chances. They cause accidents that kill other people and themselves. Bloomberg’s rent a bike program has only exacerbated the problem.
Should bikes be banned? If not, why ban guns?
Oh you are ripe. Bicycles are killing people! C’mon man!
Growing up we had a red ant colony right in our yard. They are energetic and ferocious, more than a match for the average black ant, except for the huge black soldiers. Each year I would look for them opening up the nest on the first warm spring days. The ants would venture into the upper world, looking pale and tentative. Yet in no time at all they would be in full gear. Then one year the hole didn’t open, evidently the colony had come to an end that winter. All things pass away in the fullness of time.
Janos: “Yes, we have to stop feeding Africa. Their population growth is beyond belief.”
Population reduction needs to be global. Priorities are family planning, contraception, abortion, and education and employment for girls so they can gain positions of power.
When it comes to PER CAPITA ENERGY CONSUMPTION, Africa is not the problem. The countries using the most energy per person are:
1. Iceland
2. Qatar
3. Trinidad and Tobago
4. Kuwait
5. Brunei
6. Luxembourg
7. United Arab Emirates
8. Kuwait
9. Canada
10. United States
11. Finland
12. Australia
13. Russia
14. Japan
15. United Kingdom
Not one of Africa’s 54 countries among the top 15. Stop population growth in the countries using the most energy resources.
…
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Worlds-10-Biggest-Energy-Gluttons.html
I think you are omitting the other side of the equation. The other side to per capita energy consumption is economic output. Your list of countries outproduces all the nations of Africa by several orders of magnitude.
The total GDP of Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium and Finland is greater than all of Africa. The 2014 population of those four countries is 39 million. The 2014 population of the African continent is 1.11 billion, 28 times greater.
Remember ‘We R The World’ [1985]? Save the starving Ethiopians [from their Black dictator – who was starving them].
1985 – 30? million Ethiopians.
Soon – 100 million Ethiopians.
Janos is right. Feeding 3rd worlders creates more misery than it ends.
Iceland gets a good deal of its energy from subterranean thermal hot spots, kind of like those at Yellowstone, so I’m not sure they burn much irreplaceable energy resources.
As of 2011, Iceland generated 100% of their electricity consumption from renewable sources, hydro & geothermal, and 81% of their primary energy consumed from renewable sources. Fossil fuels provided 19% of primary energy consumed where primary energy includes energy used in transportation and heating.
And to think that Iceland was populated by persons who reached its shores via sail no later than 874 and that 60,000 persons were living on the island before the advent of any fossil fuels besides the burring of some coal. The Industrial Revolution didn’t even really get going in Iceland until the 20th century and population of the island is still less than 350,000 people. Looks way, way more efficient and wealthier than any country in Africa is currently or has ever been.
wpa-ccc’s point is basically moot when you delve into the numbers and really start to think about the issues. Perhaps the creation of carbon release by the Icelandic economy is or will lead to devastating earth consequences. Or not.
Africa is a sh-thole, from Cairo to Durban.
People are desperate to get out.
And go to Western Europe, Canada or the US, where the streets are paved with gold, white girls are easy, and everything is free.
Even if one believes that an ever-expanding human population is an issue, is there any political will to deal with it? Is there any viable politician who is willing to go on record and support policies that would cap population growth? Is anyone prepared to tell people like Octomom that they can’t reproduce as much and as often as they want on the taxpayer’s dime? And what, exactly, would the legal remedy be for someone who flaunts a one-child policy? Particularly if they’re on welfare? Even if you’re not a Nazi, you’ll very quickly start to sound like one, which is why no one will touch this subject. What’s left are the default population control measures: war, famine, pestilence.
Eventually I think it will sink in that unless you want to see your sons and daughters starve, you have to help. And then we’ll see how far your 401K goes… One child will make this task easier. They could perhaps even take over your house “when you no longer need it”.
But I realize this view is also for the rich and for the few. None the less, last time I saw an hungry family on the bus around 12am on the way to some shelter, I couldn’t help but think if the mom was regretting having 3 kids with aching tummies?
Then again, maybe she just read the news that everything would be awesome in the future…
But doesn’t all this appear that the human race is fatally flawed? I mean,the average, somewhat educated person with access to all the internet doesn’t even seem to realize we have these issues. I’m optimistic enough to believe we have the ability to resolve our problems, but realistic enough to believe we just may not act on the resolutions.
“…may not act…”
Catch 22: Only a top-down, totalitarian government could act soon enough and big enough; almost all positions of political power are occupied by psychopaths.
shabbaranks: “Your list of countries outproduces all the nations of Africa by several orders of magnitude.”
Yes, I wasn’t going to mention that, but since you brought it up. By several orders of magnitude first world countries are consuming more of the earth’s limited resources and engaging in more environmental degradation. Do we need more stuff? Africa produces less, consumes much less, and pollutes less, in spite of having more population.
So why don’t they stay in Africa if it’s such a paradise? Quadaffi’s Libya was taken down so Libya could serve as a staging ground for the Black invasion of Europe.
I’d wager no American or European would want to trade places with the average African. But a lot of Africans would willingly trade places with an American or European. Low per capita consumption ain’t all that.
I guess nobody really understood Stewart Brand–especially Stewart Brand. Hard to believe he participated in that slander, though it much reminds me of Irivng Fisher’s “The market has reached a permanently high plateau,” and if Brand isn’t dead when the Real End (the descent into a World Made by Hand) does begin in earnest within the next decade or so, he’s really going to wish he were dead. What an embarassement he is.
https://youtu.be/MEc7sE7psJA
Until every person on earth accepts responsibility for the plight of our habitat and the predicaments we are facing, nothing will improve.
I maintain Fall and Winter is a good film for millenials to see.
Thanks for the forum, J. Quite the blog you have here young man.
Janos: “So why don’t they stay in Africa if it’s such a paradise?”
I guess the same could be asked of you. Why didn’t whites stay in Europe instead of going to Africa? Why were whites intent on commercializing human trafficking? Why did whites enslave and export Africans to other parts of the world? Why did the white colonial powers go to Africa to steal its natural wealth?
Now Africa is just going to where their wealth was taken. It is their right and nothing can stop them.
A few gunboats could stop them. It’s them or us. As Jefferson said, the first morality is survival.
Since you’re engaging in counterfactual history, perhaps you could provide us with some speculative answers to your questions unless you have no answers. Your questions about the history of colonialism are rather simplistic but it’s a starting point.
Your final remark is correct in that the flow of emigrants from African nations is to the vastly more economically successful countries in the world, largely located in the EU and North America. However, I think you are confusing rights and reality, values and facts. Unless you are prepared to engage a debate over the fact-value dichotomy (check your David Hume) then you may be in over your head. Of course the advanced nations of the world could stop the flow of humans over their borders. But of course there exist numerous political, economic, social and moral reasons for human movement, as well as the simple biological fact that populations of humans do migrate. Witness the populating of North America, long, long before any substantive use of fossil fuels had been discovered, developed and and widely deployed.
What wealth?
A perusal of old soil survey reports from http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/soilsurvey/soils/survey/state/ would be most instructive. See, for example, any of the early 20th century reports from Georgia at http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/surveylist/soils/survey/state/?stateId=GA. In days of yore, before fertilizers such as anhydrous ammonia and urea-formaldehyde were devised, corn did well to yield 10 bushels per acre in southern Georgia. Early fertilizers such as nitrate of soda and superphosphate pushed yields up to 40/acre. But with today’s petroleum-made fertilizers and petroleum-driven equipment, we expect corn to yield well over 100/acre and fret when yields are held in the seventies, as happened in the droughty Midwest of 1988.
NY Times selected 40 “top comments”, almost all of which were trashing their “report”.
So there is no way out. Looks like our strategy is to blow up the rest of the world, so they don’t consume any resources. The problem with that strategy is that it’s hard to do unnoticed. But the middle east and Africa are tracking nicely on target. Fighting terrorism is the vehicle of choice here.
I think the best people can do at this point is: If you are lucky and still have a job. Stop spending and start saving. Hard cash and some in the bank could be useful one day. It’s much harder to do that you think, because you’re bombarded with messages that if you don’t have the latest gizzmo – you suck.
A few weeks ago I walked into the Tesla store to have a little conversation. We came out at around $1000/month with 40K down – and this was for the 70 model, with pretty much all extra packages punted on. I explained that I just bought a Volvo 740 for $1300. Insurance is $33 a month. And my monthly budget for gas is $20. We agreed that this was the cheapest way to go – for now.
I feel like the Orlov view that cities becomes death traps is not this year. But obviously if you don’t have a job, then the city requires more money to live in.
Activism is great, but it can be hard to do with your friends. You may find that you soon have no friends. The topic can be depressing. So my response is to disengage with the economy (and politics obviously) as much as possible. Repair is fair.
I think this community is long on the analysis, and short on the solutions. Maybe because there are none, but it seems to me that unless you have $2M in the bank, then going ultra-frugal could be a useful response.
The other one is harder – hang on to your job. Because this feeds directly into THE MACHINE depending on where you work.
For families with kids its even trickier. WTF do you tell your kids – if anything? I’ve chosen nothing so far other some talk about the planet warming up. Daughter is only 5, so starting easy would be good. And a little bank account with a few hundred $ MONEY. And beyond that to teach as many life skills as possible. Using a saw, and a hammer, and to sail etc.
What do you guys do?
“Hard cash and some in the bank could be useful one day”
Yes, indeedie….unless the bank is deemed “systemically important”, in which case, instead of hard cash, you could be presented with a stock certificate, in lieu of cash. The 2010 Dodd-Frank banking bill now allows for what is called a “bail-in.
“Hard cash and some in the bank could be useful one day”
Yes, indeedie….unless the bank is deemed “systemically important”, in which case, instead of hard cash, you could be presented with a stock certificate, in lieu of cash. The 2010 Dodd-Frank banking bill now allows for what is called a “bail-in”.
Pardon me for repeating myself…repeating myself.
Maybe to avoid digging our own graves we should start digging our own caves–perhaps not as artfully as this person ( oh yeah, that water problem):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxcftjJ39BU
The NYT does seem to have trouble putting the pieces of the puzzle together, doesn’t it?. About once or twice every two months I buy the Sunday edition. I don’t know why, because I always end up with a headache and a severe case of cognitive dissonance after reading it. The front section of the paper, and the magazine, feature lengthy, investigative articles reading climate change, income inequality, and terrorism, yet the other 80% of the newspaper does nothing but promote the values that lead to these problems in the first place. Give me a break.
Yes, I looked at the ‘Grey Lady’ this am.
I thought, ‘who buys this disinformation’?
May27 -page 1- ‘Veil bans give cover to bias’ [get the pun-veil-cover?]
Police abuses
Colorado’s latinos. AND THATS JUST PAGE 1.
First section is 20 pages. It is dying. Its propaganda is killing USA as well.
It is worth noting that even the father of the green revolution, Norman Borlaug, was less sanguine about the green revolution than his numerous devotees in the press and government. In his Nobel Lecture of 1970, he expressed concern that “Most people still fail to comprehend the magnitude and menace of the ‘Population Monster.” He understood the “green revolution” was not an ultimate solution to global hunger, it merely pushed mass famine off into the uncertain future. Unfortunately, that grim future is becoming less and less uncertain.
Most people aren’t concerned with a “buzz-kill” topic such as overpopulation. In fact, we have been hearing the dire warnings since at least the seventies. Take a FB acquaintance. She recently left her husband and is living in her mom’ and dad’s house. She frequently laments on her timeline the exorbitant cost of renting, especially on her entry level Panera Bread wage. She also seems to take pleasure in the fact there her soon to be ex ‘isn’t doing so good’, emotionally speaking.
But for all of her public FB hand-wringing over not being able to afford her own place it didn’t stop her from getting a rose tattoo on her chest and now she’s talking about getting another one. Of course the deeper irony escapes this dumb shit. She presents her tattoo as a symbol of her ‘liberation’ from the hubby and all the while each tattoo she pays for is money that will not be helping her 59 year old ass live independently of her parents.
Wow! That’s one sad story Buck.
Janos: “A few gunboats could stop them. It’s them or us.”
If your gunboats shoot down the planes African immigrants arrive on, it will be both them and you!
http://afrospora.com/blog/afrosporacom/10-pre-arrival-tips-would-be-african-immigrants
The answer is to get the whole world south of the equator into our ‘Sanctuary Cities’, where immigration law or any kind of law can touch them, New Haven, Hartford, LA, San Francisco, Chicago etc, anybody who can make it here by hook or by crook, and sign them up for the full measure of the welfare benefits they are entitled to, foodstamps, section 8 housing, free tuition at state U, medical care, WIC, Head Start, free cell phones, free meals in schools, free methadone, free needles, free everything … really its the only equitable thing to do if you want to feel good about yourself, and stop feeling guilty.
brh
Right on, brother Heckler! They all lazy bums on welfare, takers, buying booze and drugs and guns and shootin’ white folks, right brh? Now they even gettin’ themselves some free solar energy! Imagine the money they will save on electrical bills… they can use savings for their vices and for sewing gang colors onto their clothes! /sarcasm off
“As the San Francisco Chronicle reported, about $14.7 million raised from the Golden State’s cap and trade system is going toward an initiative by nonprofit Grid Alternatives to install solar panels on homes in disadvantaged neighborhoods for free. The program reduces energy costs for families that could use the help, while simultaneously lessening their environmental footprints.”
OK then, free electricity too, in order to charge up them free cell phones. Yesterday in Hartford police arrested a carfull of gangland driveby shooters, shot up some folks last week walking down the sreet, misunderstood Youfs most likely, any way, besides guns, ammo and drugs, they found a bag full of cell phones. Whether or not they were stolen or were free Obama Phones wasn’t specified.
You mention “Shootin white folks”. You know WPAWCC, that really hasn’t happened yet. They seem to prefer shooting up their own neighborhoods, their own people. They could easily drive out here — its only 12 miles — and start picking us off but they don’t do it. Of course they would stand out like sore thumbs and the police would be down on them pretty quick, maybe that’s why.
brh
Yeah, I think most murders of whites are done by whites, like those nine deaths among motorcycle gangs in Waco, Texas last week. And most murders of Blacks are done by Blacks… like you report to us regularly.
But statistically, millions and millions of whites and Blacks are living in integrated neighborhoods and integrated suburbs, and integrated towns and integrated cities and Black, brown, white, red, yellow… they are all, of all races and ethnicities, just being friendly, respectful, and are not killing anybody.
Of course, the media focuses on the very few who are violent, creating a stereotype in the minds of viewers….
Every day millions of cars pass each other on the nation’s highways and byways… without incident. What gets reported? An isolated incidence of road rage… or an isolated drive-by shooting… not the millions who are obeying traffic regulations and sharing the roads peacefully.
I know lots of cops and they all say the same thing. There are millions of unregistered and uninsured people on the road. That’s why you pay your insurance for uninsured drivers. I don’t give a hoot about color. I have relatives, four in a house, all white, They stopped paying the mortgage a few years ago but the place is in such disrepair the bank does not want it. All on food stamps, Sec. 8 housing assistance, Obama phones, fuel assistance, free health care and all able to work . It really gets my goat when I still work seven days a week babysitting.
shabbarank: “However, I think you are confusing rights and reality, values and facts.”
I am recognizing a reality; not confusing de facto with de jure.
The more you feed the bears at Yellowstone, the more you have to feed the bears at Yellowstone. They come to expect it and consider your food theirs. We taught them that and we can unteach them that. And the ones who refuse to be untaught? Why it will go hard on them of course.
Two can play the boat people game. Tow the boats back to the Libyan coast. Warn the people it’s over. Start deporting Blacks already in Italy – that will show the Blacks back in Libya that you’re not kidding. If they continue after repeated warnings, you start sinking them.
What the problem? That’s the first function of armies and navies: to protect borders. You can’t have a nation if you’re not willing to protect your territory. It works: the Burmese are driving the Rohinga Muslims into the sea – a victory for free men everywhere. Indonesia is going to take them – the perfect solution since they are mostly a Muslim country by a large majority.
Did we create America with Pacifism? No. Nor will we maintain it with Pacifism either. Ditto any and every nation, White or Non-White.
There’s an obvious reason why the NYT article is so out of touch with reality. New York City proper is a bubble unto itself, just like the clown show in Washington, DC. The NYT journalist hacks ala Judith Miller have no clue what is transpiring in the real world. NYC/Wall Street finance and commerce have nothing to do with real world problems, such as the ongoing regional conflicts resulting in massive population displacement, nor the climate change and collapse of the environment, largely due to overpopulation, that we are witnessing in real time.
Those over-leveraged financial derivatives, being that they are not potable or edible, are not going to come in handy when places like California run out of water (very soon) and the major aquifers in the heartland are polluted beyond salvage from fracking. Small-scale farmers, gardeners and craftsmen will have to lead us into a new system not based on money. That’s assuming the angry masses, who will most likely be deprived of their cell phones, Big Macs and video games when large-scale societal collapse happens, don’t kill us all with their 300 million guns.
Janos: “You can’t have a nation if you’re not willing to protect your territory.”
Just the opposite, Janos. In a world of jet travel, internet communication, miscegenation, etc. you cannot have a whites-only nation. It does not, and will not, exist anywhere. Pacifism has already won the day. The vast majority of races and cultures are living peacefully together in multicultural nations like India, Canada, USA, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, etc. You choose to focus on the minority of incidents of friction and crime to blow them all out of proportion in service of your ideology, but billions are living in peace. There have not been any superpower conflicts in over 60 years. There will be no more world wars. History is going in one direction, Janos, and you are fighting against the stream. White nationalists have already lost the battle. White separatists are losers.
Living peacefully? What a hoot you are Asoka!
Yes, the Globalists will have to swim thru an ocean of blood to get the world they want. But they are not deterred.
“Pacifism has already won the day” — wpa
Ukrainian Nationalist “Right Sector” threatens to disrupt the action of LGBT activists planned in Kiev on June 6
Right Sector threatens to disrupt the action of LGBT activists “March of Equality” in Kiev, scheduled for June 6th, the organization announced on its website.
“We, the soldiers of the 13th SS Security AQL, together with other nationalists will do everything we can to prevent in Kiev a “Sodom Sabbath” – the statement says.
In a statement, right-wing radicals called non-traditional sexual orientation “disease to be treated,” and people who defend the rights of people regardless of their sexual orientation – “liberal extremists”.
http://112.ua/obshchestvo/pravyy-sektor-ugrozhaet-sorvat-akciyu-lgbt-aktivistov-zaplanirovannuyu-v-kieve-na-6-iyunya-233567.html
Mutiny on the ship? I wonder what Geoffrey Pyatt – American ambassador to Kiev and a proud representative of gay community is looking at?
” I wonder what Geoffrey Pyatt – American ambassador to Kiev and a proud representative of gay community is looking at?”
Finca,
If he’s got the sense that Gawd gave a goose, he’ll be looking at the timetables of various planes, trains and automobiles and planning a quick, bare essentials getaway to Rotterdam or similar environs. If he’s being quite thorough, he’ll also be checking in with friends who own motorcycles and those who know the little-used walking trails to surrounding borders.
Then again… maybe he’s got the ol’ martyr complex and wishes to have his picture (complete with streaming mascara and feather boa) plastered onto the front page of the NYT just prior to his garrotting with a phone wire and unceremonious dumping into the Dnieper.
In any case, he’d better be aware of the uncompromising nature of those about to stage coup-number-two at his unenviable posting.
“about to stage coup-number-two at his unenviable posting” — ozone
Well, at least he probably had a good time during those “all night instruction meetings” with members of Ukrainian government of non-traditional sexual orientation.
“Most people aren’t concerned with a “buzz-kill” topic such as overpopulation” — Buck
Here is a good essay about the myth of “Carrying Capacity” and “overpopulation” by Webster Tarpley:
http://tarpley.net/online-books/against-oligarchy/giammaria-ortes-the-decadent-venetian-kook-who-originated-the-myth-of-carrying-capacity/
Essentially, it is being pushed by the oligarchy who are constantly concerned about preserving their privileges since the ancient times.
It’s time for your bed time story children. Once upon a time there were there were people called scientists.
It is looking more and more like we are a species about to crap out with regards to the Drake equation. I wonder what intelligent life will make of our TV.
There were people called scientists. They told the people things that made them uncomfortable. Not wanting to feel any discomfort they believed those who told them that Mother Nature was forever giving and forgiving. The people believed that they could take as much as they wanted and they would live happily ever after.
The Scientists didn’t want to be the bad guys so they told faery tales?
Remember David Bowie in “The Man Who Fell to Earth” saying: I’m no scientist but I know everything begins and ends in eternity.
“Shooting yourself in the foot” as a new American strategy
Any operational system should be based on several things that are very transparent. Such as: clear and undisputed rules of the game and, most importantly, the credibility of these same rules.
What the attractiveness of Western model of civilization was based upon?
On the confidence in the rule of law equal for all, the inviolability of property rights, banking secrecy, and respect for legal concept of “procedure” in everything, from human rights to the inviolability of borders.
And virtually all of these things were carefully and consistently destroyed by the “Western civilization” since the fall of the USSR.
First, by the way, collapsed “inviolability of the borders”, and in Europe where one the European capitals has undergone a “humanitarian” bombing. Then, after open public support for thugs and traffickers in human organs in Kosovo, we have seen the collapse of “human rights”: because somehow it is difficult to say about the rights of those whose body parts are sold almost in the open. Then there was Cyprus, which brilliantly proved that you can easily put a bolt to the “sacred right of private property” and rob private investors of the commercial banks, and to do it openly based on “law” passed in a hurry.
Then even Switzerland has retreated, in fact liquidated under pressure from the United States the concept of “banking secrecy”.
But what has finished it all off was the American “fight against corruption in FIFA”.
Some elements of the “corruption” or even “commercial bribery” can be found, in fact, in any large and complex transaction with multiple beneficiaries, and it should be very clearly understood. And when this “any transaction” suddenly appears in the “zone of jurisdiction” of the United States just based on the fact that it uses accounts in American banks (and by using the dollar as a global currency for international transactions accounts are used by the US automatically) as Goering under Hitler, began to determine “who is a Jew” – which means only one thing: the entire Western financial system turned into a kind of “monkey with a grenade.”
From now on only clinical idiots could place trust into the hands of American “deciders”. And, I’m sure an alternative to this madness starts to develop at the fastest pace as we speak. Because the ultimate authority, that secured the value of the US green paper, was a kind of “institution of trust.”
And now it is not secured by anything.
Now US almost lost the entire Latin America: in open revolt by Latin American countries Sepp Blatter was re-elected as FIFA president in a landslide victory
Subtlety ain’t their strong suit.
Yes, right before and after the vote on the extension of the Patriot Act phone taps what do we get?
Lots of bomb threats on incoming flights starting last week and going into this week after Rand Paul pulled his coup for ending massive wiretapping of the American citizens as unconstitutional.
He looked to all of us as the hero in this instance. But I warned my friends on FB that this will be smashed ASAP…..
The private contractors of Top Secret America went nuts, I’m sure…could their funding dry up? Not on our lives!!
How far will they go to get full control again?
Stay tuned for the many more episodes …..
I am somewhat surprised that Americans are concentrated on things that in my opinion have only secondary significance, such as peak cheap oil, peak population or peak “carrying capacity”.
The main driver of everything that affects our lives today is the gradual disintegration of Pax Americana, a unilateral system of global security that was formed after collapse of the USSR. To place the priority on the things that needs to be solved before anything else:
1. System of international security – a reasonable compromise between the worlds’s leading powers: US, China, Russia regarding the zones of responsibility for maintaining security
2. Fair and transparent system of international trade settlement that would not rely on any particular currency of any particular country, but on something like original Bretton Woods system that eliminated the possibility for any country to run huge trade deficits and was based on gold bullion settlement of such deficits
After all, if all current tensions in the world would lead to where they’re leading today – new world war with inevitable use of at least tactical nuclear weapons (which, in turn, could quickly escalate to use of strategic nuclear weapons) worrying about excessive population would be the least of our problems.
Agreed,
Some things are take on the greater importance, though resources are what makes the engine of all these things work. Without resources globalism is dead in the water.
Remember, Finc wants to submerge Russia in a new Asiatic Soviet Union. He’s not the friend of any nation.
No, Janos, it is not USSR-2, it is rather new Golden Horde, brotherhood of nations
Here’s a headline that appeared today in our local rag, ought to make all of you anti Scott Walker, pro Public Sector Union, CFNers happy.
“Police Lieutenant Paid $545,000 For FY 2014”
The chief of the dept., when interviewed, explained it was all perfectly legal, within the tenants of the union contract, and the pay was mostly due to working overtime and double shifts.
The Chief himself makes $250,000 per year, and in this small city of 40,000, average patrolmen bring in about $150,000. I’m not anti police, but if you perceive an elitist or arrogant attitude when dealing with them, perhaps this is the reason: they make more $$$ than anybody else in town except maybe a few 1% executives, certainly more than you plebes who clutter up their working day with all kind of trouble and problems.
brh
Yes, utterly ridiculous, especially in such a small city.
Perhaps some CFN “Dill Holes” (Urethras) might be interested in this course?
“Most Social Security Disability cases involve mental impairments and disorders. Some claimants become mentally impaired as a result of their physical disabilities. The loss of physical function can cause depression and anxiety. Some claimants have severe mental disorders independent of physical limitations. Whether in combination with physical impairments or not, the ability to argue and prove mental disorders is a valuable skill set.
This class will discuss the role and structure of the listings and their evidentiary requirements. Every Mental Disorder listed will be covered along with applicable SSRs. Finally, we will prepare for the ALJ hearing and the often difficult and emotional testimony that can be expected.
How do I prove an impairment that’s not physical?
What are Cognitive Limitations and ADL?
What is good evidence of a mental impairment?
How can I get my client to testify without completely breaking down?
The American Freak Show is really picking up momentum!
Hard ass, real politik places like China, Russia, NKorea and the ISIS Caliphate must be looking at Bruce Jenner, our reaction to it, and taking our measure; I wonder if they’re impressed?
Was it the same day that Jenner’s photos were released that the Russian jet buzzed a US Destroyer in the Black Sea? That China threatened to shoot down one of our spy aircraft? The Pharoah chose to comment publicly on Jenner and not on an international incidents that could easily lead to open combat. Do we still have a free press? Is this a serious country? Is this a serious President?
How do you like it now Gentlemen?
brh
People who speak out against trannies will soon be labeled as deniers, no different than those who question Global Warming or the Holocaust.
It was interesting to see the smugness of Stewart Brand, who mocked Paul Ehrlich in the video.
Later we see Stewart as a kid doing his activist starve-in. He was kind of a brainwashed boob back then. So he’s one of these reformed guys who went too far with the population fear movement at first and now he’s reversed his course 180 and thinks he’s right all over again.
The article really was a low point for the Times. I’d really like to cancel my subscription. But where else comes the news?
nick/charles,
You should be able to find a site or two amongst these to pique your interest and sate the newsy hunger:
http://www.newsblok.com/
Scrollin’, scrollin’, scrollin’;
Keep that wheel a-scrollin’…
Heeeyah! Crrack! 😉
The odd article by “The Washington Times”:
The odd circumstance of Kaliningrad
Historically, before WWII, Kaliningrad was known as Königsberg by its German inhabitants, descendants of the Teutonic knights, and was considered the northern part of East Prussia. During the war, the area was annexed by the Soviet Union and the Germanic people were forcibly removed. The German language was replaced by Russian. The Cold War saw the vast militarization of the district with its warm water access to the Baltic Sea, obviously strategic gold. It is said that more than 300,000 Soviet troops were stationed there during this time.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jun/1/l-todd-wood-odd-circumstance-kaliningrad/
Annexed? We could go very far very fast by trying to rewrite the results of WWII, as fast as the Iscander missiles stationed now in Kaliningrad.
What is it with the freaking New York Times? It seems like the allegedly left leaning staff there have become apologists for “business as usual”. Their lead economic writer, Paul Krugman, was an apologist for right wing Bernanke’s “Helicopter drop” only he wanted at least twice as much money printed. Gee, then the zero-point-one percenters would just be even more obscenely rich because they’re the only ones anywhere near the banking system injection points.
One wonders if the NY Times staff have any real intersections with the actual world where employees are more terrified for their jobs than any time in the last fifty years. Even in the supposedly booming high tech industry, my ongoing correspondence with about two dozen ex-students (who’ve moved all over the USA) reveals that most techies are underemployed in field service/support/QA jobs after obtaining BS degrees in computer science. Very few actually write code that any human outside of their company uses.
Ironically, it’s the people in total crap jobs like sales clerk or waiter that aren’t afraid for their jobs because the turnover is enormous. Apparently the working poor take less kindly to being pushed like plow horses than upper middle class techies.
Therian, The New York Times writes what its benefactor, Mexican Billionaire Gangster Carlos Slim, tells it to write, nothing more, nothing less.
brh
Interesting, BRH. I didn’t even know that Slimeball ran the show at the Times. That kind of explains a lot. Thanks for the info.
German conservative asks if Merkel coalition can survive spy row
BERLIN (Reuters) – A senior member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives talked openly for the first time on Tuesday of the potential breakup of their coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD) due to a row over the activities of Germany’s BND spy agency.
Critics accuse Merkel’s staff of allowing the BND foreign intelligence agency to help the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) spy on European firms and officials.
http://news.yahoo.com/german-conservative-asks-merkel-coalition-survive-spy-row-095152986–sector.html
The most interesting fact is not a potential breakup of the coalition, but the fact that someone continues to leak to the German politicians the information which they should not know .
And that “someone” should sit very deep inside the BND, and the country alive until at least part of its intelligence agencies and intelligence community are not all bought stock and barrel by the US.
Now it is clear that the most “hardcore” part of German intelligence community goes square against the United States.
Let’s see. Until the end of June there is still time, and further events will evolve much faster. The forecast remains unchanged:
1. If Europe is finally freed from the influence of the United States, the “Ukrainian problem” will be solved by Russia likely with People’s Republic’s hands. The logic is: “It is already possible!”
2. If Europe finally gets under full control of the United States, the “Ukrainian problem” will be solved by Russia likely with People’s Republic’s hands. The logic is “Do not care anymore!”
3. If Kiev itself starts fighting, the “Ukrainian problem” will be solved by Russia likely with People’s Republic’s hands. Logic: “You asked for it!”
PetroRuble and NatGasRuble: first steps
Oil:
“In total, the campaign sent seven oil tankers of grade Novy Port, totaling more than 110 thousand tons. All the raw materials which have been taken in the winter season, was sold to consumers of north-western Europe with pay in Russian rubles,” – the “Gazprom Neft” site says.
Gas:
Alexei Miller: discussed payment of gas supplies in rubles and yuan.
“The issue of currency contracts is discussed … but we are discussing the possibility of paying in yuan and rubles”
In the formula, “oil is sold for dollars because the dollar – the main reserve currency the world” the cause and effect are swapped.
If oil could be bought in sufficient amounts not in dollars, the dollar as the main world currency will cease to exist, and quite quickly.
http://crimsonalter.livejournal.com/58176.html
And the USA is FUMING over energy transactions being done in currencies other than the dollar. The “petrodollar” is one of the last holdouts for “dollar only” transactions.
The Global Warming and Kyoto sucker-scam. The Boreal Forests.
It is assumed that the chief culprit of global warming is carbon dioxide, the same CO2, which allegedly concentrates in the upper atmosphere, creating a greenhouse effect, which prevents the planet excessive heat to be released to space. Although any first-year college student, and even school students well know that the density of CO2 is twice that of the air, and it simply cannot reach the stratosphere, concentrating at the earth’s surface. Where it becomes “prey” and “food” for green plants which consume it during photosynthesis to produce oxygen and green mass. Up to 30% of these plants grow in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere in the so-called boreal forests – mixed, ranging from tundra to the woodlands of southern taiga (spruce, pine, fir, larch, birch, aspen). These forests are located in six countries, and more than half – in the Russian Urals and the Urals, Siberia and the Far East.
What is the Nature’s capital?
It consists of the so-called non-fossil natural resources, including the boreal forests. And this capital sum of the forest part has two indicators. On the one hand it is affected by absorption capacity of forests, the processing of “greenhouse” carbon dioxide into oxygen. On the other hand, it is country’s greenhouse gases ejected into atmosphere. Even if we imagine that we really need to fight “global warming”, then inevitably we faced with the question: how to read the specific country contribution to this problem? Elementary logic dictates that you need to calculate the ratio of the absorption and the production of such gases. The country that has a positive ratio, should not limit itself, but the net polluter must.
And what ratio do we have? The best balance – in Russia: four times the amount of absorption (4 to 1!) exceeds the amount of emissions. And it’s officially proven. Data provided by the Presidium of RAS showed that Russia does not pollute the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, and, on the contrary, it accumulates it on its territory.
The negative balances between absorption and emission have the leading developing nations – China and India. The Arab oil-producing countries emissions exceed the absorption as much as 12-15 times.
Similarly, in the most developed Western countries – the US and EU member states, this balance is negative: emissions twice, and in some places four times exceeds absorption. And it is clear why: these countries are not in the northern latitudes, where the CO2 absorbs by the boreal forest, and at the equator, where the same involved in tropical forests already. It turns out that Russia – is lungs of the planet, and “developed” West? .. Well, you guess what this place is …
http://regnum.ru/news/polit/1929982.html
As an addition to the tone of this article, transhumanist Steven Kotler, who is the author of the book “Tomorrowland: Our Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact,” was recently on MSNBC proclaiming how near future humanity will be living in exo-skeletons and mining off world. He said all of this and much else with wide eyed excitement.
What he and others represent are a intellectual culture of hubris, cognitive dissonance, and outright denial. Scientists are struggling, and failing, to get governments to acknowledge the ongoing and planet changing process of climate change, or the catastrophic freshwater collapse that is happening globally.
These are the real struggles of humanity today, not some future episode of the Jetsons.
While I agree with you that climate change and fresh water shortages are very serious, and there’s a decent chance we’ll be seeing a large die-off of humans – actually more likely than not – it is a mistake to treat scientific advancement with disdain. Rather than picking on science, why don’t you talk about our $700 billion or so annual military budget. Halving just that one line item alone in our bloated budget per year would be enough to free up enough financial resources to allow us to make a concerted effort to successfully tackle the issues you mention.
And reforming our medical industry to where it’s run more effectively would free up another half a trillion dollars a year.
The fedgov’s scientific research annual expenditure is less than $100 billion dollars – I believe. After reducing the above items, there’d be enough left over to double scientific research and not cause a dent in the availability of funds to work on our problems.
So why scorn those who dare to dream of a fabulous future? Blame psychopathic war mongerers, greedy, insurance companies, corrupt politicians, evil bankers and an ignorant, apathetic public for getting us in hot water.
Hey Bill I thought the Affordable Care Act (Obama Care) was going to reform our medical industry and make it run more effectively?
Why not just eliminate health insurance altogether — it didn’t exist until 1946 — and let market forces rule the day. I’m old enough to remember being sick as a kid and local MD coming to our house … and my mother paying him $15 to settle up.
brh
We wouldn’t need health insurance except for catastrophic illness or accident if the health care industry was operating honestly and legally.
For instance, can you give one instance where you buy a service or product, but without being told the price by quote or sticker, in advance? Try going to the emergency room and finding out the cost of fixing you up. And try to negotiate the cost.
Did you ever buy a new car for a certain price, with certain features, then get billed a much higher price because the auto dealership decided to add in a moonroof just because they thought it would be best for you? Never? Go into surgery and look at the breakdown of your bill, if you can even get it.
Ever hire a cleaning lady who comes into your house for 60 to 120 seconds and then charges you for a complete cleaning? Never? During treatment by an assistant, the attending physician comes in for a minute or two to see if everything’s going ok, and when you get the bill, find out that the Dr. charged $500 for the “service”?
Imagine going to the grocery store and being told you can’t buy the brand of milk you like, but must buy a brand that costs $20 a half gallon? Preposterous? Well, try getting a medication that costs $5,000 locally, and when you go across the border to buy the same medication for $50, you are breaking the law. These situations happen multiple times every day.
Eliminate gross overcharges and blatant medical monopolies and you’d see the cost of health care go down drastically.
I guess what I’m saying is in what other industry would people allow these things to happen without screaming bloody murder? So why the medical industry?
That is an interesting point, BRH. In point of fact, almost nobody had health insurance all the way through the 1950s. It might have started in 1946 but it was pretty far into the 1960s before it was ubiquitous.
Here’s where we get into the “livable wage” discussion because there is no way doctors would now lower their prices so that a nation of burger flippers, cash register clerks, and bank tellers can afford medical care. In 1952 when I was born, I was a Blue Baby (Rh incompatibility between mom and dad) and spent the first 3 weeks of my life in an incubator in the hospital. The total medical bill was $1500 which caused my family hardship but they came to terms and paid up. My dad was an electrician so they could make the payments. People “came to terms” with their physician directly and on an individual basis and no 2 deals were the same.
In 2015, I bet that the bill for 3 weeks for a newborn in the hospital would be something absurd like $250K on up to $1M. My dad’s salary as an electrician in 1952 was about $4K so that $1500 bill was 37% of his salary. Now that bill would be somewhere between 5X and 20X of a family’s income and the bill would be unpayable.
Bottom line is that medical insurance has raised actual prices by a gargantuan multiple of a family’s income. Doctors had a solid middle class income from Doc’s time in “Gunsmoke” through the middle 20th century. Not a luxurious salary like the average of $200K today which goes from $150K for GPs to $250K for oncologists which is most assuredly UPPER middle class.
Doctors would not accept $70K, still far above median individual American income, as an annual salary. Thus, insurance has put us all out on a limb and if it’s eventually taken away, only millionaires could afford services offered at current actual prices. I had a 45-minute outpatient surgery (with a light general anesthesia) at Stanford in 2013. The bill for that surgery was $35,000 and I didn’t spend one night in hospital. If a surgery is extensive and involves a few days in hospital, the bill is going to be several hundred thousand or more.
The entire medical profession, doctors and clinic/hospital administrators, have put us out on this limb and they won’t agree to go backwards.
I’m certainly not denigrating science. It’s a matter of priority. The planet is like a house on fire. So, the priority is putting the fire out.
New tech. is great, but if you can’t find any potable water, than your exoskeleton is going to be pretty useless.
Summer weather has already arrived in some locales and I’m not sensing a lot of concern from the average American regarding world events. Instead I have been hearing a lot of hip-hop blaring from open windows. Just today a young white girl pulled up next to me –yes I still drive on occasion; my mule was getting some new horse shoes– who was blaring this “music”
I tried not to listen but I did catch something along the lines of ‘ I’ll do you bitch but don’t go trippin that your my main ho’. In other words, not exactly the mindset of a person/society concerned with fertilizing too many eggs.
See the last sentence in my last post just above. I hesitate to pull out my hair in frustration, but only because my hair is finally starting to thin out, and I don’t want to lose any more.
The Blacks have been corrupted by Rap, glorified in that state by the Establishment, and then used to corrupt young Whites. Isn’t that what you wanted?
Not a lot of concern, Buck?
Bruce Jenner’s Twitter account got 50 million hits in one day!
If that’s not concern about important current events I don’t know what is.
#You Go Girl!!!#, most likely what most of them say.
brh
Jenner:—Normally I don’t even mention this story since its such a bs story and it’s just plain weird and I’m open minded—but please….
Here, I’m laughing right along with you. Backrow.
Everyone who has been interviewed about what they think of this on the media is like a trained monkey who have dutifully learned this line:
Oh, “she” is so brave. She deserves a medal for bravery and guess what “she’s” getting a medal for uhhhhh……. bravery! (why?)
As they say, whom the gods want to destroy they first make crazy.
Well Jenner is the flavor of the week, but will be replaced by other distractions as the ship sails into the sunset…..of its own destruction.
Oh do go gently into that good night—that would be the best one could hope for.
I’m not sure what went wrong with Bruce Jenner, BT. Like I said before he was in our HS for awhile, a school with only about 300 kids 9-12 so we all pretty much knew each other. I remember him as a pretty good kid. I know later on there was a series of tragedies and broken marriages. What is there to celebrate? … you should listen to the sportstalk shows around here, they’re all aflutter. In repressive countries, Soviet Union 1938, Nazi Germany 1941, you had to be careful what you said, the wrong thing could get you in trouble and get you dead. But why all the fawning, the praise, here and now? in what really is a pathetic situation and a sad story.
Ernest Hemingway’s youngest son Gregory went the same route; there was a lot of pathos there as well.
brh
I agree that something very tragic has to happen to someone to want to do this, but the media folk are all falling over themselves to praise him. They then congratulate themselves for being so……ahhhh… accepting.
Here’s the problem. They’ve been giving liberal talking points and they say the same words. Usually I complain about the conservative talking points, but this is a prime example of liberal talking points.
Talking points are propaganda no matter who generates them. Phoney is phoney. When people utter the same words, not only are they completely lazy and don’t deserve the money they get for being on the TV, but they sound absurd.
BRH, our entire nation now loves and revels in freakish news and freakish people. Even my high school educated parents in the 1950s and 1960s would talk about the news of the day (Communism, nuclear war, Kennedy, etc.) because news hadn’t been reduced to a tabloid.
Why is Bruce Jenner being turned into a de facto “hero”? Why is he/she/it on the cover of Vanity Fair? In a sane society this guy’s gender confusion would set off a few titters and then disappear from the radar. Now it occupies the front and center of the news for a MONTH.
Anything to keep the attention elsewhere. The “Me generation” is disintegrating into this…..
Every self-indulgence is rewarded if you’re a well known brand.
Who knows, maybe he’ll pose for the box of Wheaties…..
Yes, Jenner will return with his/her post-op photo on that Wheaties box and the National Enquirer will then have a headline that Jenner will be the first person to be TWO people on the Wheaties box. 🙂
LA TIMES: SERIOUS FLAWS REVEALED IN U.S. ANTI-MISSILE NUCLEAR DEFENSE AGAINST NORTH KOREA
Pentagon officials were informed of the problems as recently as last summer but decided to postpone corrective action. They told federal auditors that acting immediately to fix the defects would interfere with the production of new interceptors and slow a planned expansion of the nation’s homeland missile defense system, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office.
As a result, all 33 interceptors now deployed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County and Ft. Greely, Alaska, have one of the defects. Ten of those interceptors — plus eight being prepared for delivery this year — have both.
The flaws could disrupt sensitive on-board systems that are supposed to steer the interceptors into enemy missiles in space.
When Boeing Co., prime contractor for the GMD system, informed government officials of the problem last summer, they did not insist upon repair or replacement of the defective harnesses, according to the report.
Instead, Missile Defense Agency officials “assessed the likelihood for the component’s degradation in the operational environment as low and decided to accept the component as is,” the report said.
The decision minimized delays in producing new interceptors, “but increased the risk for future reliability failures,” the report said.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-missile-defense-flaws-20150530-story.html#page=1
Against North Korea? Deployed in Alaska? Yeah, right. But it seems that they feel pressed for time.
Sepp Blatter, who only 4 days ago was re-elected president of FIFA, has announced that he intends to resign
The guy could not withstand the pressure, gave up. What soccer has to do with all that? The investigation alleged anti-corruption charges by the FBI and US Attorney’s Office, which have no relation to the area of jurisdiction in which this soccer structure operates.
From what direction they blackmailed him and dumped some incriminating evidence does not matter. What matters is the result. US are extremely consistent in their intentions. If they began to kill their prey, they do not retreat. They could pause in the strangulation, even back up so the victim twitching in convulsions, hope for the ability to make peace, to negotiate.
However, the only condition that makes the United States to retreat – this awareness of unacceptable damage to itself (in the military, political, economic and financial spheres). If the balance of power shifted toward the United States, the Americans did not back down until it will fulfill its purpose, or until the balance of power will change.
The trend the last few years in Europe (but also in the world as well) is to sweep the political field from the elements opposing to the US. Simple test of loyalty: can a man carry out the order from United States, even if the order is contrary to the national interests of their country? Count the European politicians, officials or functionaries of the businesses that were opposed to the United States, and trace their fate. The analysis is not in favor of opposition elements.
Any non-systemic opposition potential is eliminated. The United States has a set of tools for coercion to suppress political will. Blackmail, threats, registered criminal cases, discredit or even murder. Due to the resonant character murders of political opponents are rare. Enough of blackmail and discredit, often false, as it was with Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
In the future, political impotence, and total dependence on the US could lead to disaster. Despite the fact that Europe (especially Germany) have paid a heavy price for Hitler’s rise to power, the countries of Western and Eastern Europe fully rehabilitate Nazism right under their nose, contributing to the onset of large-scale war in Europe. In fact, repeating the mistakes of 80 years ago.
Given how far the conflict has gone, there are very high chances of failure of the World Cup 2018 in Russia, which is not a problem at all. Released resources could be more efficiently and effectively spent on militarization and industrial development. Ahead is a long and hard fight. Tanks, airplanes strong economy will come in handy and the infrastructure of World Cup 2018 will not.
http://spydell.livejournal.com/583071.html
The FIFA nonsense is overwrought and just typical corruption whereas the bankster endemic frauds go barely noticed. What’s wrong with this picture? Sports are more important than being financially destroyed, you say?
All this in the face of the bankster class stealing $trillions with a little slap on the wrist and hardly mentioned in the media.
Hint: it’s all about Russia….mhmmm.
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2015/06/03/washington-politicizes-football-paul-craig-roberts-2/
Soccer for Europe, including Russia, Latin America is a very important part of population governance, like football in USA.
So, it is a significant blow.
Oh indeed and the folks all bet on fixed games…another organized crime racket.
Promise them anything, but give them the right to bet…
BT … this makes me harken back to one of JHK’s best articles: “Las Vegas: Utopia of Clowns”.
“I’m not sensing a lot of concern from the average American regarding world events.” — Buck
No surprise there. As oppose to average Chinese or Russian, “average” American is totally out of the loop.
I wonder, when the SHTF, whose strategy will pay off? Is it beneficial in any way to keep citizenry “in the loop”, or it is better that they just do not mess underfoot? Obviously, in both cases they cannot contribute much to the decision making process, or can they?
Don’t you think that it is rather bizarre that many people will literally act crazy in order to get a check from the US government?
I read that it is popularly known in the US as the “Crazy Check”. People act crazy in order to get money from the government.
“Most Social Security Disability cases involve mental impairments and disorders. Some claimants become mentally impaired as a result of their physical disabilities. The loss of physical function can cause depression and anxiety. Some claimants have severe mental disorders independent of physical limitations. Whether in combination with physical impairments or not, the ability to argue and prove mental disorders is a valuable skill set.
This class will discuss the role and structure of the listings and their evidentiary requirements. Every Mental Disorder listed will be covered along with applicable SSRs. Finally, we will prepare for the ALJ hearing and the often difficult and emotional testimony that can be expected.
How do I prove an impairment that’s not physical?
What are Cognitive Limitations and ADL?
What is good evidence of a mental impairment?
How can I get my client to testify without completely breaking down?”
It’s it a bit of a Catch-22?: Since doing something to get money is not crazy, therefore, if one claims that he/she is crazy in order to get money, then one can’t be crazy, right?
Pucker the SSI system is being scammed in many different ways, the way you mention is just one of them. Eventually it will just go bust. A few weeks ago I was on this job in Bridgeport, moving heavy machinery out of this old factory for shipment overseas. There was this guy there, he was kind of supervising, walking around on a cane, partially paralyzed. He told me he had a stroke and was recovering and could only work 4-5 hours per day. He told me when he went down to apply for Social Security the office was filled with young people, which puzzled him. The woman working at the office told him they were all there applying for disability payments.
brh
There is some unintentional irony in your post. “A few weeks ago I was on this job in Bridgeport, moving heavy machinery out of this old factory for shipment overseas.” Unfortunately we have moved a lot of machinery (and jobs) overseas, and we are left with burger flippers and waiters jobs as a result. I do not expect my grandchildren to have a better life than I do. They missed the boat.
BRH, I can attest to the scamming of the SSI system. Unlike the 1950s and 1960s when men would rather work for less money than they could get on welfare to avoid the stigma, people now have all kinds of “diseases” [sic] like depression, PTSD (and you don’t have to be a Vietnam War vet to claim this), bipolar, alcoholism, Aspergers, or even severe ADHD.
When I was still teaching, I had a couple of people in every single class who would come up to me with a slip from the Disability Office of my college who requested all manner of special favors. Of course, some of these young men and women would be blind or deaf … serious, permanent disabilities. The irony, however, is that most of these people with nonexistent sensory systems would still have jobs!! The people with MENTAL disabilities (and for the most part they looked perfectly healthy and able bodied) did NOT have jobs. All of these points could be made about Palo Alto and Mountain View’s street people who mostly look normally healthy.
What’s amazing to me is the paucity of Mexican laborers who are homeless bums in these towns. I’m not in favor of allowing a torrent of illegal immigration but I cannot escape the observation that Mexicans work and they don’t need “support groups” for every existential hangnail. Their families are their support group.
The SSI system is horribly broken and being scammed in a big way.
There are those who know why FDR brought in SS.
To weaken the family.
Now you know as well.
You see it in Shallow Alto.
Everyone thinks that technology is going to save us. Yesterday morning, I had to return the rental car to the Boston Logan Airport. On the GPS under “Rental Car Companies” I entered the name of the rental car company. The GPS took me to a vacant lot in a bad neighborhood. Thank God it was 7:30 am and I had lots of spare time to figure it out myself.
Edward Basurin: DNR is not on offensive, Ukraininas left Marinka on their own
The authorities of the People’s Republic of Donetsk denied the information about large-scale military offensive on the positions of Ukrainian Armed Forces.
“No, there is no large-scale offensive. Kiev’s forces left Marinka on their own”.
According to him, “there is no one to take care of people, we can’t leave them alone”
=====================================
In response to “self-shelling” (according to Kiev) of Donbass cities militias began “self-occupation” of cities controlled by the junta
I was telling you, don’t f*ck with Russians, you’d never be able to figure out what in the hell is really going on and where in the world that blow came from. In war, Russians don’t give sh*t about no rules.
Probably y’all have heard of those cosmological deformations in the space-time continuum called black holes, you know, those whirlpools of matter with gravity so intense that, past a boundary called an event horizon, nothing can escape the pull, not even light. Hence the name “black hole”.
Maybe it would be stretching things to equate NYC or some of its more remarkable entities like Wall Street or the NY Times as black holes. But how would you otherwise characterize such deformations in the societal-cultural continuum, such concentrations of destructive power, such mighty gravitational whirlpools that, in the case of Wall Street, devour a country’s wealth and productive capacity.
But couldn’t the same apply in the sociological and political realm? And, when you look at the Times position in the center of the known universe (that being New York City), and you read the cockamamie pronouncements it regularly posts, you wonder, is this where reason and reasonableness go to swirl around for a bit and then disappear forever? Like its cosmic counterpart, the NY Times gravitas warps and distorts the intellectual space around it so that, to the people that allow themselves to get sucked past the cognitive event horizon, all is well, all are in agreement, nothing is amiss, no matter the grotesqueness of the deformation apparent to anyone outside the boundary. And so you get the laughable article that Mr. Kunstler refers to in this week’s commentary.
To stay safe, stay well away from black holes.
The GPS: “Turn left onto Harvey Avenue. Turn right onto Meridian Street. Step on the gas when you see the young male negroes.”
MIA:
…Prog4What
…Cold N. Holefield
Most people only like to post when they feel they are perched on some prophetic promontory. And since Cold’s ‘Jeb will be the Prez’ prediction now looks anything but prophetic he’s making himself scarce—or so I speculate. Prophetic or not he’s a damn good writer and should make an appearance now and again.
It’s the very rare poster who will still post after declaring themself occasionally full of shit as Vlad Krantz did a few years back. CFN was one big vertical head nod that day and yet he we still eagerly anticipate his posts.
Yes, decades of meditation have taught me the mind is a fun house of mirrors. Admission of humility just provide the springboard to new heights of hubris – I am the most humble! – and to new depths of insight. As Rasputin said, Sin greatly that you might be saved. The lukewarm are spat out after all.
Nah. Not MIA, just lurking more. I’ve decided almost nobody is reading the posts here except JHK and 5 or 6 regulars, so I’m not seeing much point in adding my ideas to the mix. Furthermore, Q, I won’t know whether you’ve read this post unless you respond to it. And I’ll miss any response that you do make unless you post it at the bottom of the thread or I go deliberately looking for it.
Maybe I’m wrong about the number of comment thread readers. We should do a “sound off,” and count ourselves. How many people have read this post?
“ONE!” – p4w Do I hear a TWO?
Glad you like the NewsBlok website, O3.
Thanks for the week’s work, JHK. And yeah, the NYT has become a parody of legitimate journalism – that population opinion piece was a bizarre example. Thanks for commenting on it.
I find it interesting that this week our host banned Mika (good riddance) for making a “scurrilous” comment while last week he merely admonished Janos for an absurd and “scurrilous” comment. True, he did call him “nothing more than a common Nazi” but does he not realize this was like giving Janos one lash on the wrist with a wet noodle. In fact, not even. I’m sure Janos took it as a compliment.
One hardly knows which adjective to associate with banning and which to a warning. I have been warned about making “inane” and “fatuous” comments and I believe it was Buck a few weeks ago who wrote something Jim labeled as “fatuous” but we’re both still here.
Personally, I’d be disappointed if the “common Nazi” were banned. When he’s not being too conspiratorial, Janos often makes quite valid points about race/ethnicity that are decidedly non-PC but, when it comes to crime and social history, are quite supportable with hard data. I was banned for a couple of years and I can only figure that it was because I sided with Janos in some fashion deemed intolerable.
The case of Mika is, to my mind, clearer because he’s a one-trick pony with this Vatican-is-the-root-of-all-evil shtick. It’s really like having a tape reel as a permanent poster. That’s how repetitive his act got.
So you, Janos, and Buck have been admonished. I’m sure many more of us will be admonished soon enough. However, it’s a beach full of shifting sands when you have to figure out our host’s definitions of “fatuous” and “inane”.
Thank you. Glad you said “too” conspiratorial and that you don’t rule conspiracies out a priori. Americans believed in conspiracies far more back when we were a healthy country. And the Founding Fathers were Conspirators so they definitely believed! And after the founding, they greatly feared the Illuminati spreading into the American Lodges and took steps to prevent it. The Illuminati had used the French Masonic System to organize and overthrow the Monarchy and they feared the same thing for America. Indeed Thomas Paine was with them and spoke out for a second revolution against the Founders. The second is always the money shot when all reason and decency go out the window – including whatever the first was all about.
…he did call him “nothing more than a common Nazi”
================
I have come to a greater understanding of what drives Janos while reading, thus far, the first 90 pages of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. CFN is effectively the platform from which Janos is expounding his own Mein Kampf and it is a first cousin of the original.
Thank you good sirs. You pay too much honor, Q. I am but a firefly to the Sun in comparison with the Hero. Indeed I am just a “common Nazi” (as if that was a bad thing) compared to him.
In fact, I’m no Nazi at all since I’m not a German Socialist firstly. Secondly, neither we they since they never called themselves that. They were German National Socialists. Nazi is a slur. Thirdly, and in terms of substance (oh that), America is different and we’ll have to develop our own Fascism to suit ourselves and not clothe ourselves whole cloth in the “gay uniforms” that torment Back Row so much.
Janos, unlike many posters here, has never made any attempt whatsoever to conceal his ideological allegiances. However, I believe that on forums like this that a person’s posts should stand or fall based upon the contents of the posts themselves.
Too many people will respond to points he makes about race/ethnicity based upon his ideological infrastructure rather than the truth or falsity of what he says. Seriously, even JHK and Fred Reed, neither of whom is right wing, have, for example, questioned what we’re going to do about black male aggression in American towns and cities. Does that make them “Nazis”?? Ridiculous.
CFN would be a much better place if the points made in posts were responded to as written. We already have a slew of posters like WPA and Fodase who put words in people’s mouths and end up responding to points that were NOT made in people’s posts.
Personally, I’m not a Fascist but that doesn’t mean I’m going to respond to Janos’ posts in the future by bringing up his overriding political beliefs in every response. Responses should be based on the contents of the post being responded to … PERIOD.
I couldn’t agree more Therian.
Since it had been mentioned a few times on this blog by other posters, I made a point, finally, to read The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail. The author’s prescience is astonishing. The book was written in 1973 but you would think his idea for it came from reading our current news.
It concerns the onslaught of brown third-worlders into white first-world Europe while those countries’ governments stand frozen in the headlights by political correctness and foolishly do nothing to stop it.
I recommend the book highly.
We could the style modern or is it just French? Or are those two inseparable? I found it engaging but disjointed but in any case, unforgettable. Houlebecq (sp?) has some of these qualities so it might just be a modern French thing.
Good book, huh Q?
And it was written 45 years ago!
The Camp of the Saints most likely won’t be on the summer reading list over at Rutgers, what do you think?
In fact, when the new Dept. of Diversity begins banning books that’s going to be the first one tossed into the bonfire, so read it while its still available, and simple possession of a copy is not a capital offense.
Pretty much everything written before 2008 will have to be suppressed. Washington Irving, Melville, Hawthorne, John DeForest, Ham Garland, Twain, Norris, Jack London, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Dos Passos, Kerouac, they all have to go, for obvious reasons.
brh
“The Department of Diversity” … now THAT was funny. Will it be a branch of Homeland Security? Might be since it seems like the people we fast track into America are the very people most likely to riot, bomb, etc..
A true story … I have a friend who married a Swede. It took him one full year and $10,000 to get her over here to California. Do you seriously think you’d have to go to that kind of trouble for Mexican, Arab, or Haitian bride? It’s a rhetorical question.
Yes, those Scandinavians are big, big trouble [sic]. Our country is in a death spiral because we’re fast-tracking exactly the wrong kind of people to enter the country. I’m glad Mexicans are not Muslims so our problem isn’t as great as Europe’s but let’s be clear about one thing: Wherever Mexicans enter there is soon a massive gang problem. I don’t care if you’re talking about Tulsa, OK or San Jose, CA. Yes, they’re hard workers but, no, they’re not a fully civilized culture.
Glad you took the time to read it Q. Shtik. It has gotten so that politically incorrect ideas are scorned by the true believers, who color everything to suit their beliefs. Sometimes the truth is unpleasant, but it is still the truth.
I’m going to take a chance that posting a YouTube here is not a mortal sin, especially since this one is so relevant to the on-going discussion of alternative energy sources.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/84BeVq2Jm88?feature=player_detailpage
Take six minutes out of your busy day to watch the erection of a single wind tower. You really have to wonder what the sum total of ALL costs are and what the payback period is.
For certain followers of this site, the Christian Identity movement died and died hard in 1985 when ZOG dropped a napalm bomb on the roof of a Whidbey Island barn and deep fried the murderers of Alan Berg, big mouth radio creep who regularly baited the faux nazis of Idaho and Montana.
Berg deserved a better fate, for no other reason than he loved his wonderful Airedale canine companion, Fred. Airedale terriers are the finest creatures in all of creation……..to see the unbridled joy of an Airedale terrier on the scent trail is to make the pain of existence almost bearable…..
What happened to Fred? I bet he came to a much better end than the Bruders Schweigen who are in prison for life. The man you are speaking of (whose name I’m blanking on right now) never stopped firing at the police helicopter even as he was burned alive. The Gates of Valhalla swung wide to meet him as the Valkyries bore his spiritual body up to Paradise. He wasn’t CI. You can’t be “Nazi” and CI. You see they contradict. Maybe you can just lump everything into that favorite category, “Fascist”.
These are Mysteries far beyond your Baptist baseball cap wearing ken. But I do approve of your love of the largest of the terriers. I once owned the small lookalike, the Irish Terrier.
I had a 45-minute outpatient surgery (with a light general anesthesia) at Stanford in 2013. The bill for that surgery was $35,000 and I didn’t spend one night in hospital
i went to the ER a few years back in Massachusetts, lovely hospital. laid on a bed for 3.5 hours, spent 15 mins getting a cat scan.
no insurance, hence the trip to the ER.
bill was $13,500, which was torn up upon opening and went right into the trash, along with what was left of my credit score.
U S and A.
still, i’d rather that system than the ‘free’ one here in Brazil, where people literally die on the floor because doctors don’t bother to show up, cuz they earn nothing.
fucking world sux in many respects, doesn’t it.
Q, regarding the energy needed to erect wind towers, i’ve seen figures that say wind farms produce 20-25 times more energy than they take to make.
fodase
i’ve seen figures that say wind farms produce 20-25 times more energy than they take to make. – fodase
===================
Your statement above does not answer my question. For argument’s sake let’s say the one wind tower costs a total of $5M when you count in its share of the design cost, the rental or purchase of the land on which the unit sits, all the overhead people who made all the arrangements for procuring the material and labor to do the job (including the real estate experts who negotiated the purchase or rental of the land) the ongoing maintenance of the tower, the opportunity cost of not farming that plot of land, cost of borrowed capital, etc. etc.
How many years of selling the power produced from this one tower will it take to reach sales of $5M? That is the break even point after which you begin to show a profit.
P.S. I have no idea if $5M is even close to the actual number.
Commercial scale, standard, 2 MW wind turbines installed these days cost $3M-$4M. A 10 KW wind turbine for a single home is in the $50K-$80K range. For the full dope on this subject go here:
http://www.windustry.org/how_much_do_wind_turbines_cost
2 MW turbines have a 2-3 year ROI and a $3 million price. Material cost are normally 50% product cost. So 25 times is a stretch. The big carrot is free fuel, but it is not that big. If you set up a an natural gas engine in the Bakken and generated electricity with flared or “free” gas it would take a year and half to pay the machine off.
Battlefield America: The War on the American People Hardcover – April 14, 2015
by John W. Whitehead (Author), Ron Paul (Foreword)
42 customer reviews
In Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the follow-up to his award-winning book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead paints a terrifying portrait of a nation at war with itself and which is on the verge of undermining the basic freedoms guaranteed to the citizenry in the Constitution. Indeed, police have been transformed into extensions of the military, towns and cities have become battlefields, and the American people have been turned into enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, and denied due process.
Yet this police state did not come about overnight. As Whitehead notes, this shift into totalitarianism cannot be traced back to a single individual or event. Rather, the evolution has been so subtle that most American citizens were hardly even aware of it taking place. Yet little by little, police authority expanded, one weapon after another was added to the police arsenal, and one exception after another was made to the standards that have historically restrained police authority. Add to this mix the merger of Internet megacorporations with government intelligence agencies, and you have the making of an electronic concentration camp that not only sees the citizenry as databits but will attempt to control every aspect of their lives. And if someone dares to step out of line, they will most likely find an armed SWAT team at their door.
Puck,
Nice to see that besides existential, sexual and ideological confusion, you’re still enjoying the simple pleasures of fishing. 😀
Are *YOU* an enemy of the state? Let us know sometime before “Nacht der langen Messer”, okay? Thanks in advance.
— Your Benevolent Managers
Dag-nabit, Puck, I forgot the relevant linky-link!
Sorry. Here’s our ticket to “normal”. Tilted no more:
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2015/06/crazyland.html#more
Yes, I mentioned and posted 2 years ago that a cop told me this was becoming a police state.
I heard Whitehead interviewed on Guns and Butter last year. An excellent interview and thank you for posting.
Just a reminder of my post:
A Gift from a Flower to the Garden of Finzi-Continis
Today on a most glorious spring day, I was running my daily laps around Washington Square Park, where I suddenly noticed big crowds of people and cops of every stripe.
I thought this must be an OWSers special, but alas I was wrong…It was a giant pillow fight to take place and the Cops and EMS were all about.
I finally had to ask someone what was going on and chose a NY State cop standing with an EMS cop and he went on to say:
Since 9/11 everything is on high alert. Whenever there’s a crowd this is the kind of coverage that is warranted and there are even plain clothes cops amongst the pillow fighters.
He went on to say this is becoming a police state and this is just the beginning….(whoa)
He said you could eventually see people put into institutions for speaking their mind (“Cancer Ward”, anyone?)
I asked him whether he thought the SCOTUS meets Abu Gharib decision to strip search people for small infractions if arrested would lead to, ah…Abu Gharib.
I mentioned privatization of police and their pensions and he agreed that there’s going to be a lot of misplaced anger. (—oh boy.)
He also said its all about greed and look who’s running for pres.
He said Obama had to win last time around because the world was furious at W. and Cheney. He said O did nothing for us and can’t do anything because he is told not to.
—Out of the mouth of a cop…
Interesting post, BT.
Also its nice seeing you here on a more frequent basis.
brh
Thanks….
I get to experience a bit of the retirement experience until I go back to work—then it’s crickets from me once again….
I agree that we’re approaching being a “police state” because the evidence is overwhelming. In Palo Alto there are cameras and parabolic ears in so many places, especially public plazas. In two weeks all the units of my apartment complex are going to be subjected to the new “Annual Apartment Inspection”. I have never lived in a complex where residents were subjected to something like this.
Too many data points show where we’re heading.
Just because a few people wanted to clean up on the ole civilization thing…..happens every generation or 2.
BTW Ladies and Gents. Someone posted this li’l beaut on FB, thought I’d share.
9/11 Predicted on The Lone Gunmen
This (pilot) episode aired March 4th, 2001…
Never heard of this show, so I’m not able to tell you whether this really aired, but one would think people would have said the saw it, yet I never heard about it.
but here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rsMG2hHsLo&feature=youtu.be
“Mika just got himself banned….” – JHK –
Umm, beantown bill. Didn’t you once pledge to defend Mika? I believe that “to the death” was the way you pledged it?
Fascinating.
====================
“to the death” -Of Truth.
Q., the National Renewable Energy Laborator has measured LCA (Life Cycle Assessments) of green house gas emissions from cradle to grave, from mining components to final disposal at end of life cycle.
Green house gas emissions contribute to 10% of increased national health dollar costs and that cost is often left out in materials/dollars caculations, as are deaths from fossil fuels.
Green house gases in grams of CO2 per energy/kilowatt hour
979 g CO2e/kWh Coal-Fired Electricity Generation
45 g CO2eq/kWh Wind power
A ratio of 21.7555. So, once again we have a better than 20:1 ratio for green house gas emissions, wind power being 20 times better over directly comparable life cycle assessments. (NREL harmonizes the variables to make direct comparisons)
I know you are addressing dollar costs, but if you care to look at human mortality costs:
Coal – global average 170,000 deaths
Oil 36,000 deaths
Natural Gas 4,000 deaths
Wind 150 deaths
According to the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Academy of Science and many health studies over the last decade, the adverse impacts on health become a significant effect for fossil fuel and biofuel/biomass sources.
Estimates have suggested a 10% increase in health care costs in countries where coal makes up a significant fraction of the energy mix, like the U.S. and Europe (NAS 2010; Cohen et al., 2005; Pope et al., 2002). These additional health costs begin to rival the total energy costs on an annual basis for the U.S. given that health care costs top $2.6 trillion (10% = $260 Billion), and electricity costs only exceed about $400 Billion.
GREEN HOUSE GAS EMISSIONS
If green house gases and type of energy source are taken into account to calculate human deaths, then these numbers do give wind power an additional advantage.
BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN GOVERNMENT SUBSIDIES
If you take into account the billions of dollars of subsidies given to fossil fuel industries and there is no contest. Wind power is much cheaper and will probably never receive as much government subsidy and tax breaks as fossil fuels have received.
HUMAN MORTALITY AND INCREASED HEALTH CARE COSTS
Take into account increases in increased health care costs/deaths due to fossil fuels and wind power wins again.
P4W: Umm, beantown bill. Didn’t you once pledge to defend Mika? I believe that “to the death” was the way you pledged it?
P4W, please stick to content comments and don’t start quarreling with Beantown with ad hominem comments from years ago that are taken out of context.
Quarreling can also get you banned.
You are my friend, P4W, and I don’t want to see you banned. Let’s all just sing kumbayah and get along here… please.
Thank you.
=====
wpa-ccc (Work Projects Admin.- Civilian Conservation Corps)
Yeah. Well. Whatever.
The comment to bill is not out of context. It is part and parcel of the “too many humans on Earth” theme for JHK’s week.
Mika claimed to share ethnic background with bill and JHK. There is a point where too many people and too much “diversity” of background and language will cause a rift, regardless of other claims.
JHK reached that point with Mika.
And you are not my friend. And you need to look up the definition of “ad hominem,” a term which you misuse.
Now as always – you will take the last word –
With Provided Alias – Continuing Calumnious Commentary
Why is there a double standard when it comes to white colar criminal activity?
Why is it we immediately get a mug shot of people who have committed crimes like money laundering but when it comes to the CEOs of the big banks who admiited to fraud….MSNBC just posts the banks brand symbol instead of the faces of those 5 middle-aged white guys?
‘Collar’. And you need one.
Todays newsflash, I read Dimon is a Billionaire.
Jamie Dimon Is Now a Billionaire, and He Got There in an …
http://www.bloomberg.com/…/jamie-dimon-becomes-billionair...
Bloomberg L.P.
1 day ago – Jamie Dimon, who helped assemble Citigroup Inc. and then improved on the experiment with JPMorgan Chase & Co., is responsible for two of …
London is moving to Asia
About a month ago, the British financial authorities sent to all London residents of Russian origin notification of the need to provide information about the source of funds deposited by them in British banks.
The message was understood correctly, and within just a couple of weeks about 300 billion dollars left British banks. Most analysts immediately happily gloat about the large financial losses of the British because of their own stupidity.
Can we blame the British in general stupidity on the basis of all that has happened to this country over several centuries? And do we have reason to believe that managing England Lords suddenly for no apparent reason turned into morons?
And therefore let’s add two more facts and look at the problem in all complexity. The announced referendum on Britain’s withdrawal from the EU and the willingness of one of the largest British banks (HSBC) to transfer its head office from London to Hong Kong. And remember also that even if forced, the British Crown more and more cooperates with Russia and China in opposing neo-conservatives in the US.
For a number of purely political reasons, UK is forced to do it in secret as much as possible. In a public arena England as always is Russia’s most stringent opponent.
Everything is not what it seems
Russia, through its President made a public offer to all capitals, having Russian-Soviet origin to make a choice on which side they want to be in the coming financial battles. Anyone who is with Russia was proposed to transfer their capitals to Hong Kong where they will not be under danger not only from the US, but also from the UK authorities.
Thus, the proposal was made, and to give it more weight was later supplemented by that English notification clearly agreed with Russians. If the British really wanted to grab the money of Russian origin, they would have done everything strictly in reverse order. First freeze the funds, and then ask to explain their origin.
In this case what was planned is something completely different. Anyone who wants to go back under the Russian roof, are welcomed to Hong Kong. And those who didn’t get the message deal with British justice system.
Hundreds of billions dollars already left Cyprus. About $300 billion came out of from Britain. Some significant money left Europe and the United States. The amount of funds obtained quite impressive. They are now concentrated in one place. On the one hand, this is extremely dangerous. On the other, publicly demonstrated friendly relations between Russia and China on May 9 shows that the question of guarantees were somehow resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties.
All this suggests that in the near future (months or couple of years at most) there will be an epic battle for the right to form a new main financial center of the planet. And now the parties are preparing and deploying the “troops” to positions. This center most definitely will not be in London, since it has also moved to Asia. Most likely the battle will be between New York (or even LA) and Hong Kong.
Europe in any case will find itself in financial backyard. It is no accident despite the shouts from Washington all of Europe together rushed to become partners in Chinese Asian Bank for Infrastructural Investments.
We have outsmarted ourselves by becoming full spectrum hegemons in Military and finances but there’s always the possibility that you become a danger to the world and the calculus of change says that you might be find yourself on the outside.
Could just be that the overreach with Russia was too much.
A. There’s no way we can provide Europe with our fracked gas, they must know that after all the wishful thinking of the Neos this was not going to happen. So turning Europe against Russia is a big mistake.
B. There’s no way that the first strike of limited Nuc war is a go even if the Neos espouse it. Yes, I pointed out that we’re using the ME as a launchpad for the process of making Russia defenseless, but Russia’s a big freaking landmass and there’s no fool-proof way of doing it.
The Euopeans know that they’re the sitting ducks for the fallout if they allow us to run them into the ground.
C. The Europeans must be wise to our aim is to compete against the Euro and wreck it, cuz we hate competition so we have to destroy it instead of working with it.
D. Everyone likes a winner and the fiat dollar isn’t it. So what is?
GOLD, of course.
After all the Orwellian spin against gold by our banksters and Neoliberal finance geniuses (speaking of geniuses) let’s just say there’s so much economic theory from the past that we ignore deliberately that sooner of later reality hits. (hopefully not on a battlefield)
Yes, indeed to think China with all the wealth of our manufacturing base wouldn’t want a military and power in the sphere of influence, is just plain unrealistic. If our Neos just recognized economist Thornstein Veblen, a little something called economic determinism would be considered. BUT of course we think Neoliberalism is the only option.
That is our downfall. Our ideology will bury us.
Neoliberal economic philosophy (aka the twin manias of “globalism” and “privatization”) started with Ronald Reagan and continue unimpeded through today with the party of the POTUS being irrelevant.
The ironic humor of the “free traders” is that most of them seem to be okay with bailing out an increasingly dumber plutocracy while insisting that the ninety-nine percenters all be subject to market forces. They couch their support for bailouts with the TBTF doctrine which only means that dumb management gets to keep their jobs.
Naturally, our stupidity hasn’t gone uncapitalized upon by China and Russia which have a very large amount of our Treasuries which act as permanent extortion rackets from the point of view of the White House and the nimrods who run all the gigantic pension funds in the US. See my post below about the approaching liquidity problem in the US bond markets as another piece of data about the real internal condition of the US economy.
The EU, naturally, talks out of both sides of its mouth because they need Russian methane and cheap Chinese goods. So they just quietly increase yuan and ruble denominated transactions and hope that Washington is too financially crippled to remain as bellicose as it’s been for 5 decades.
Actually Neoliberalism started before Reagan with Milton Friedman of the Chicago School of Business. He developed the Shock Doctrine through the Nixon administration using Chile as his theoretical laboratory.
Although Nixon remained a Keynesian, he went off the gold standard at Friedman’s urging.
With Reagan they started the austerity program here and it gets worse with each president of from each side of the aisle.
‘austerity program’. RR spent like crazy.
He cut welfare. Thats what you mean?
Again we walk and talk with blinders. Watch for robots to stand the world on its head. Within the next two decades robots will be more intelligent and dextrous than humans, and they will be replacing most of us in the workplace. Even a robot will be writing your articles, and your readers will flock to it because it will be smarter, funnier, and more clever than you could ever hope to be. Robots consume only a small amount of electricity and a little lube oil, they don’t complain about low wages or lack of benefits, and they seldom call in sick. The main problem facing industry is that robots consume few of the goods and services they provide, which means the whole robot concept will be unsustainable without a major overhaul of our economic structure. Robots are here to stay, so how many years or decades of turmoil before a stable structure evolves?
I doubt very much that robot-based system without the input of human creativity could be stable or even feasible.
And human creativity comes from inner connection to God (or entire Universe, if you like it better), usually expressed as intuition.
There is no simplistic linear dependency. To find a single red dot among 10,000 white ones (100X100), any AI system would have to scan each one of those dots. It will do it with ever increasing expediency, but it will never be able to point right to the red dot the way any human could.
You must love the Terminator movies. Apparently the Army is very interested in robot soldiers, but I don’t think they’ll be at the Terminator level anytime soon. I think snipers will be able to take them out at half a mile or more.
Of course they could make a robot war machine or tank. But then you’ve lost the mobility and they would still be vulnerable to small missiles or mines.
Q, I won’t know whether you’ve read this post unless you respond to it. And I’ll miss any response that you do make unless you post it at the bottom of the thread – Prog
=================
OK Prog, here’s your response at the bottom.
I appreciate your frustration with the way this comment section works… you seem to be as upset about it as you are about immigration.
I read ALL comments……….. except the long ones by Finca which I give a cursory review. I have found a way to not miss any new comments yet not have to scroll thru the whole damn list and I believe it was you who turned me on to the method. Namely, I use the Edit/Find button. I’m not going to go into detail explaining my procedure. People will have to figure it out for themselves. BTW, I use Internet Explorer which has this Edit/Find feature. I don’t know about other browsers, if browser is even the correct term for what Internet Explorer is. As I have admitted many times, I am “technically challenged.”
…won’t be on the summer reading list over at Rutgers… – BRH
=================
No, not likely.
http://www.sexchangeregret.com/Things-Ive-Learned
Humanity get off your knees!
Today’s HUGE announcement on Yahoo Finance: The US bond markets lack liquidity. Even the CEO of Blackrock (aka “The Devil Incarnate) admitted there’s a big problem so the translation is that it is an ENORMOUS problem. Of course, around 50% of a normal pension fund portfolio consists of bonds.
All of the “liquidity” in the US Treasury markets are supplied by the Fed which is almost the sole buyer at its own auctions. Thus, the Fed has, of its own free will, engineered a problem that can only be “solved” with QEInfinity.
The prevention of a deflationary, debt-trap implosion is what the Fed is trying in vain to prevent. However, it’s becoming obvious that the only way to “succeed” is to create ruinous inflation which we’re already seeing in the health care, rental market, and municipal services (garbage, sewer, etc.) markets.
“The US bond markets lack liquidity”
What happened? Bad crops in Afghanistan?
Good one!!
His word should be singular, no ‘s’ at the end of ‘crops’.
Buzz killer.
I swear people who follow economic trends are like lemmings, easily scared to and fro. Credit default swaps! Oh, my! Quantitative easing, oh my! The Fed! Horrors! The Euro! Greece! Italy! Etc.! All going over a cliff! Labor force participation rates! The pits! MSM! Liars! Hyperinflation! Coming to a wheelbarrow near you! Dollar devaluation, economic collapse, etc etc
And now we are told to worry about bond market liquidity! Oy vey!
And where do we get cues about when and where the lemmings need to run? The MSM!
Matt Levine of the Bloomberg View:
“Attentive readers have noticed that my morning newsletter often contains the sentence “People are worried about bond market liquidity.” A Google search finds 16 instances of that phrase, and we’re adding at a frenetic pace. I had to double up on liquidity worries in both today’s and yesterday’s newsletters: You’ve got ICAP, JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank worrying about Treasury volatility, Gary Cohn and Anshu Jain worrying about bond fund liquidity, and Nouriel Roubini worrying about all sorts of liquidity. And here’s Pimco worrying about flash crashes, shortly after the cut-off for today’s newsletter. People are worried about bond market liquidity, is the point I’m trying to make here.
Should they be? I don’t know. I don’t even entirely know what the question means; it is really an assortment of interrelated questions. (What even is the “bond market”? Corporates? Treasuries? Loan ETFs?) Still I figured I would make a series of disconnected observations here, since this stuff keeps coming up. When I first wrote about this a few months ago, I said that I was looking around for a framework for thinking about the issue, and these observations might add up to a very rough framework. It’s probably wrong! So, you know, please tell me about that.”
Liquidity in the Bond Market portends confidence. Lack of liquidity/confidence in bonds and other instruments inspired the last crash (2007)…. Some, who see the glass “half-empty” are waiting for the other shoe to drop. Faith in the US dollar, guarded confidence in our economic system as functional, belief that you can reside in Baltimore and send your kids to public schools there…all a positive state of mind.
Which side are you on, Boys…which side are you on…?
http://www.radixjournal.com/journal/2015/6/2/cat-lady-culture
One in four American Women are on psych meds. And probably another quarter should be. And of course these meds may control depression but make one even crazier in other ways. So that’s half the female population that’s out to lunch.
Let’s bring back Patriarchy. Get women out of the workplace and back into the homeplace. That would be a homerun. That and three kids on base, a grand slam – an above replacement rate for the White population.
All “head meds” fundamentally rewire the nervous system. For example, the infamous SSRIs like Paxil, Prozac, et. al., cause an eventual decrease in the density of Serotonin receptors in the brain and general “downregulation” of the Serotonergic system. I looked up your “one in four” citing and that’s TRUE but it’s women in their 40s and 50s as per:
http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/astounding-increase-in-antidepressant-use-by-americans-201110203624
Still, its an astounding number.
The percent of Europeans on long-term benzodiazepines (the Valium family like Xanax, Ativan, Halcion, and Klonopin) is truly astounding at more than one-eighth of the total Continental population. Something approaching thirty percent or more received at least one one-month benzo prescription within the last year.
The benzodiazepine problem turns out to be far, far worse than the antidepressant problem because antidepressants produce a short, rapid withdrawal that seldom exceeds 2 months. Benzodiazepines create a very protracted withdrawal that often leads to permanent brain damage and very long term social and cognitive impairments that last for years after the last pill has been taken.
As it turns out, when one researches head meds, it turns out that few psychiatrists plan for withdrawal from antidepressants or tranquilizers and intend for it to be a lifetime therapy. The main problem, especially for tranq users, is that usage leads to dose escalation and reaching a maximum beyond which the shrink won’t be allowed to prescribe.
Western Civilization has a BIG problem, Houston, and it has to do with pills as much as anything.
“Neoliberal economic philosophy started with Ronald Reagan” — Therian
People do not really care how their well-being is insured. Free market, central planning, or something in between. The free market is good, but not always. It is better to learn from nature. For example, wolves do not get in packs to have fun together, but because it is easier to get food. In the pack there is no democracy. It is run by a leader – dictator. And when there is enough pray, wolves can live alone or in pairs.
I think there should be no economical dogmas, we should treat that thing pragmatically.
I’m all for a “free market” in theory. It’s just that in practice, the rich are always better connected to the powers that be so that they get socialist protections not accorded to the poor. They get bailouts, Cadillac health plans (if admins in the public sector … a BIG pool of people), and access to opportunities simply by virtue of their proximity and connections to seats of power.
Joe Stiglitz, one of the few Nobel Economic Laureates who actually deserved the prize, showed a couple of years ago that social mobility in America is just about completely dead. Everyone stays in their current class whether they’re a screw-up or a paragon of virtue.
I agree with you that dogmatic worship of any economic system works out better in theory than in practice. In practice, as Germany has shown, socialism can be far cheaper than total privatization in the health care area where their “single payer” is very inexpensive for patients … and for taxpayers.
Did Joe explain why? If not, I can tell you. In a sentence, IQ and Immigration.
Immigration
Charles Murray and shiftless, lazy whites – Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/…/charles-murray…whit...
The Washington Post
Apr 24, 2011 – Charles Murray throws a curve to those who buy into sterotypes about race … A story in a recent issue of Newsweek, titled “Beached White Males,” … is a threat,” Murray said of the increased separation of the social classes.
IQ and Race
Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.
.
.
“Thus, the Fed has, of its own free will, engineered a problem that can only be “solved” with QEInfinity” — Therian
I do not think that QEInfinity is an option. We’re not in Kansas anymore.
Hong Kong and BRICs – bye bye QE.
I agree which is why I put “solved” in quotations because QEInfinity only delays our day of reckoning at an enormous cost i.e., concentration of wealth and limitless debt expansion.
I cannot understand everyone piling on the NYT for… what? Stating that the overpopulation scare of 1970 was overblown? Isn’t that like stating that the hippies did not succeed in levitating the Pentagon?
I am actually old enough to remember those days. Population bomb. Soylent Green. The special editions: “Who will eat in the year 2000?” Who? Billions of people, that’s who. Paul Ehrlich did not just, oh, miss the mark by a year or two. Let’s remind everyone just how wrong he was. Back in 1968, when the planet population was less than half what it is now, he couldn’t imagine anything but imminent mass starvation everywhere. South Asia and Africa were doomed beyond hope, let’s save the assistance for countries that might actually make it. Even the US, back then around 200 million inhabitants, would not be spared. Tens of millions of Americans would die of hunger. What actually occured: the planet has doubled its population and taken it in stride. Not only are there billions more mouths being fed, but it has never been so easy to cover needs. Famine, though not absolutely non-existent, has retreated to the most remote areas on earth. Meanwhile, in the US, best-sellers are not: “how to soften your boots so you can eat them”, but rather “stop pigging out on everything, you blobs of lard-asses”.
And it’s not simply that, in fact, people manage to eat. The Earth population growth is slowing down on its own, no planetary starvation culling the herd needed. Fertility rates have gone nowhere but down, all over the world for decades. In the developped world, all countries are below replacement rate. For some countries, the problem is not overpopulation, but the coming population bust, already occuring here and there. But empty cribs also occur in suprising places. China is at 1.6, Brazil at 1.9, Iran at 1.7, Indonesia at 2.1, Russia at 1.6. And even when above the zero-population growth level, again, it is falling and shows no sign of abating.
Oh, there are plenty of things worth worrying about. Worrying about overpopulation is just not one of them.
Nickel: “Oh, there are plenty of things worth worrying about. Worrying about overpopulation is just not one of them.”
Worrying about overpopulation won’t accomplish anything. But putting into place practical programs like education and empowerment of women, easy access to abortion, family planning, contraception, etc. would at least go a ways toward stabilizing population.
There are two other things I worry about: climate change and loose nukes. Obama worked on loose nukes when he was a Senator from Illinois and has been consistently working on that issue as president.
Not enough is being done about climate change, which might be our final undoing. This is the way the world ends, not with a nuclear bang, but a climate change whimper. (apologies to T. S. Eliot)
The Pharaoh hasn’t done sh-t about anything.
brh
There are some who say that we’re running out of time to stop irreversible climate change — in fact, by some calculations we’re less than a decade away….
According to climate scientists, once a critical greenhouse gas concentration threshold is passed, global warming will continue even if we stop releasing gases into the atmosphere. If this occurs, the Earth’s climate will become more volatile, resulting in catastrophic weather patterns. Plus, as temperatures rise, food will become scarce, air quality will worsen and diseases will spread.
The World Health Organization estimates that 150,000 people are already killed by climate change-related issues each year, and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said that global warming poses as much of a threat to the world as war.
Our new Pope Francis is aware and taking action with his encyclical: “Human-induced climate change is a scientific reality, and its decisive mitigation is a moral and religious imperative for humanity,” the declaration said. “In this core moral space, the world’s religions play a very vital role.”
The Pope declared: “If we destroy Creation, Creation will destroy us.”
Vatican watchers and climate experts say the meeting, “The Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Development,” shows that Pope Francis is—in marked contrast to his predecessors—keen for the Catholic church to be more involved in the climate change issue, and is also urging other religions to become more actively engaged.
Unfortunately, there are those who see climate change as a strategy for the UN to achieve world domination.
“… we’re less than a decade away”.
We were less than a decade away in 1980.
In 1970 the Big Scare was ‘Global Cooling’.
Cimate Catastrophe always seems to be ‘less than a decade away’, no matter what year it is.
\brh
That’s rich….the fag in the gold hat is concerned about climate change. Imagine that. And all this time we thought he was running a baby raping crime family and shaking down morons for billions. Who woulda thunk……..
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff-at-disney-train-foreign-replacements.html?smid=fb-share
Iran has sent 15,000 fighters to Syria
Iran has sent 15,000 fighters to Syria to reverse recent battlefield setbacks for Syrian government troops and wants to achieve results by the end of the month, a Lebanese political source said.
The militia force, made up of Iranians, Iraqis and Afghanis, the source said, have arrived in the Damascus region and in the coastal province of Latakia.
The source said the fighters are expected to spearhead an effort to seize areas of Idlib province, where the regime has suffered a string of defeats at the hands of a terrorist coalition.
Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s elite Quds force, was in Latakia this week to shore up preparations for the campaign, the source said.
Soleimani promised a “surprise” from Tehran and Damascus.
http://www.electronicresistance.net/2015/06/breaking-iran-sends-15000-fighters-to-syria/
If a bloke picks up women at Disney Land, does that make him a pedaphile?
US MIGHT DEPLOY MISSILES IN EUROPE TO COUNTER RUSSIA
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration is weighing a range of aggressive responses to Russia’s alleged violation of a Cold War-era nuclear treaty, including deploying land-based missiles in Europe that could pre-emptively destroy the Russian weapons.
The options go so far as one implied – but not stated explicitly – that would improve the ability of U.S. nuclear weapons to destroy military targets on Russian territory.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_UNITED_STATES_RUSSIA_NUCLEAR_TREATY?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2015-06-04-14-50-26
Synchronously Ukrainian Rada has allowed the stationing of foreign troops on the territory of Ukraine. Including weapons of mass destruction. So missiles with nuclear warheads could easily turn out to be near Kharkov (the city I was born).
Pieter Bruegel: The Blind Leading the Blind
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2f/Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_%281568%29_The_Blind_Leading_the_Blind.jpg
BBC: Pentagon sent live anthrax to laboratories by mistake
4 June 2015 Last updated at 03:53 BST
More than 50 labs in 17 US states and three foreign countries have been mailed samples of live anthrax, Pentagon officials have said.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-33001773
Too many new viruses are spreading on the Island. Probably, it is just natural, but after news like this, who knows…
Courting disaster?
BT, I have a theory. Peak Intelligence. More and more I notice that truly incredible “clerical” errors are happening about an order of magnitude more frequently than I remember as a young man. It’s not just the Pentagon. Everyone who provides you with service tends to do it far less well. You’re on the phone straightening out billing errors with Comcast, with your health provider, with the phone company, with any website you order a product from.
Sometimes it’s because we’re over reliant on technology which, frankly, is full of holes. Sometimes it’s because those phone answerers from your youth who were paid a living wage are now paid $10/hour. Sometimes it’s because the average person’s life is so much more complicated that when they are providing your service they lose focus because they’re preoccupied with the loose threads of their own lives.
In the “old days”, a person didn’t have that many service providers and the services provided were one-dimensional. If you had a phone, it didn’t have 25 possible plans. You didn’t have to negotiate 15 websites to pay your bills. You just licked stamps. You didn’t have to remember 8 different passwords. There was no medical insurance so you didn’t have to do a web search to see who was in/out of “network”. If your kid applied to college, they just wrote out paper applications and didn’t have to mail their application essays in PDF, Word, Plaintext, or Open Document Format. Your kid either was, or was not, “college material” and there was no debating whether his ADHD/Asperger’s/Bipolar/Depression was holding him back. That same kid was NOT on an SSRI combined with Strattera or Ritalin for his ADHD. Kids didn’t see shrinks.
Despite the popular notion that technology has made life simpler and that psychology has made us understand each other better, we have just the opposite i.e., endless small details to remember that didn’t used to exist, marriages that increasingly don’t last, kids that have “diseases” that lead to decades of drug dependencies, and more and more complex relationships with service providers.
I exited technology when I retired and the lesson I learned was … KEEP YOUR LIFE AS SIMPLE AS POSSIBLE.
In California, they now advertise “Classic” Hip Hop and Rap music. No shit.
That really IS rich. It’s as if this kind of music goes back several generations. Pretty soon the length of a “generation” will be five years.
You mean music like this Puck ( she wants to lick a “lollipop” the way it should be licked):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vaN01VLYSQ
Whites create some horrible music too.
http://www.dailystormer.com/dr-william-pierce-on-extreme-music/
WSJ: Germany Falls Out of Love With America
Anti-Americanism has become a fungible aspect of German politics. Blaming-the-Amis is now established as hard currency in matters of security, trade and in setting the tone of public discussion—either directly and gratingly, or managed more evasively but with real recognition of this harsh disaffection’s potential as a voter-getter.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/germany-falls-out-of-love-with-america-1433187158
I want to note that the Americans are badly mistaken when they think that Germany ever loved States.
US Bombers killed during the War countless civilians in Germany – without a special military necessity. After the victory over Germany, the British and Americans were going to divide Germany into small principalities and destroy German industry: exactly as the Nazis propaganda frightened the Germans.
In fact, the Anglo-Saxons almost did it: they even staged a serious famine in post-war Germany.
However, Stalin declared that he will keep German Democratic Republic in one piece, and hatred of the Soviet Union forced the Americans and the British to abandon their violent plans against Germany.
What we did to the Germans after the war was over was essentially pillage and rape what was left. Had the division into East and West Germany not occurred, that evisceration would have proceeded unimpeded. Our alliance with the new West Germany was a political expedient since we wanted a lot of West German bases to keep an eye on the eastern bloc countries. This would have been much more difficult, logistically, had Britain/America broken West Germany into those “small principalities” you speak of.
Fast forward to the Germany of 2015 and we see that they are cozying up to Russia economically and doing ruble based transactions. Germany never really loved us. They do FEAR us.
Bloomberg: China adds crude futures to its domestic commodities markets
The Shanghai International Energy Exchange will start yuan-denominated crude futures in the city’s free-trade zone at the end of this year, Lu Feng, an official at the bourse, said at a conference Friday. The contract will trade in 100-barrel lots, with an American Petroleum Institute gravity of 32 degrees and sulfur content of 1.5 percent, he said.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-29/china-edges-closer-to-own-oil-futures-amid-commodity-ambitions
Oil is sold only for dollars. Really?
There were some complains that there is not enough “ignition point” for a new wave of US financial crisis. Well, maybe this is it?
The oil market does not believe the American lies anymore
OPEC left production quotas unchanged, which many interpreted as a signal to the fall in prices.
And what we got in the end? As a result, the price actually remained in place, easily recouping initial drop. “It’s crazy reaction” – something like this will tell the adepts of “endless and great shale revolution”.
Indeed, according to the US Energy Agency, it turns out that the strategy of the Saudis and their OPEC situational allies, who are trying to bankrupt and squeeze the market of US shale oil producers, which cannot be profitable at current oil prices, is not working.
It turns out that prices – low, the number of US working drills fell by more than 50% from the peak, and the market is still has too much oil and US oil reserves are at a record level.
In this interpretation, it can really seem that OPEC is strangling itself and US shale oil is unsinkable. But that’s only if you really believe to American Energy Agency.
There is a suspicion that the market does not believe.
It is possible (I’m not saying that this is the only explanation simply indicates its probability) that it was because of the distrust of the US data that oil did not fall on OPEC production quota unchanged, despite the supposedly “the existing oversupply of oil.”
If the theory is correct, it is likely that Americans will be able to pull the wool over the entire globe for a few months, not more.
Then they will have to admit that cash flow of shale companies has long been in the area of interest of proctologist, as well as the prospects of shale companies paying their huge debts, which they accumulated in recent years.
http://crimsonalter.livejournal.com/58690.html
Do you remember a couple of years ago when the Chinese en mass starting buying and using Voodoo dolls? The Chinese government had to step in and stop Voodoo.
Classic Rap—it will never go outta style, Mother Fucker….
Pucker,
I must chastise you. It’s spelled “Muhfuggah”. From the Department of Redundancy Department …
T.
Prescient. Now, could someone please read this to the Duggars!
Excellent blog. I know we’re allergic to conspiracy theories, but this thing with the hacking of federal employee records by the Chinese, you want to undermine a country from within, sell them their phones and computers, the machines that they conduct commerce and communicate with. How foolish can we be? Seriously! Beware! Beware!
Youbetcha, the Chinese burn our coal to make our junk for our JUNK culture, The earth HEATS up, Jobs gets wealthy by planned obsolescence. And nothing, absolutely nothing has anything to do whatsoever with the planet that supports all life and its’ limits, the thing that sustains all life!!! Please, go out and get your apple watch, they’ll be another one out in six months with “better” features. That way, you can watch the rest of the bees die with the latest gadget.
This blog is a prime example of JHK for president. What do you say JHK? My guess would be no. Who would want to govern such a bunch of fools?!?! Thanks to the management for allowing this rant. Was I clear as mud?
No, you were quite clear! If only it was Steve Jobs that got wealthy by planned obsolescence. The entire software field would not exist if it weren’t for a particular form of planned obsolescence known as “The Upgrade Game”. You, doubtless, know how it’s played. You can’t get Youtube any more because they upgraded so your browser now must be upgraded. You download the new browser and then two other pieces of software don’t work. At your office, they insist that all the documents be compatible with Word X.Y so you switch to version X.Y and suddenly some old documents from way back when aren’t comprehensible to the new word processor. Of course, Murphy’s Law dictates that these files are CRUCIAL.
As every conceivable service on earth mandates that you do things “online”, even in retirement you’ll be forgetting/memorizing a slew of passwords (every site has its own rulebook about legit passwords), dealing with printers/software/websites, and having human contact taken AWAY from you because the sites have “FAQ” sections and if you write them an email you’ll never hear back.
I don’t know how the elderly in America are going to deal with software, FAQs, file formats, and printers in their senescence but I’m guessing that this really IS a conspiracy to drive them nuts.
Now this is funny! Old white guys discussing hip-hop on CFN! Get that so-called music off my lawn… and out of my life!
=====
Pucker: In California, they now advertise “Classic” Hip Hop and Rap music. No shit.
Therian: “That really IS rich. It’s as if this kind of music goes back several generations. Pretty soon the length of a “generation” will be five years.”
=====
No. Don’t confuse rap and hip hop. Rap is talking in rhyme to the rhythm of a beat. Hip-hop is a culture, a way of life for a society of people who identify, love, and cherish rap, break dancing, DJing, and graffiti. Hip hop and rap go back to the 1970s. A lot of rock from the 70s is called “classic rock.” Your prejudice may be showing. Again.
News flash: I don’t give a rat’s ass about the distinction between rap and hip hop. Another new’s flash: People are regularly KNIFED, SHOT, and BEATEN at BOTH kinds of concerts. Last I checked maiming and murdering after the symphony or opera are exceedingly rare. Yes, this DOES speak to the “society of people” who attend your bullshit “culture”.
As every conceivable service on earth mandates that you do things “online”, even in retirement you’ll be forgetting/memorizing a slew of passwords (every site has its own rulebook about legit passwords), dealing with printers/software/websites, and having human contact taken AWAY from you because the sites have “FAQ” sections and if you write them an email you’ll never hear back.
My, what cynicism from the allegedly former computer science instructor. Therian, here are some solutions to the frustrations you express:
Switch to Apple, use Keychain, and you never have to generate a strong password or remember a password again, as each URL that requires a strong password will be automatically generated, remembered, and auto-filled upon your request. Easy-peasy.
Apple tech support is highly rated. You can actually speak to a human being. My interactions with Apple tech support have shown them to be professional, knowledgeable, courteous, and enjoyable… though I have not had to call them often, less than once a year. Apple just works. In my 30 years owning Apple computers (which last 5 to 6 years average), I have never had a virus or blue screen of death. Updates are a breeze. Software is free and Apple’s walled garden is great for avoiding viruses and incompatibilities. No frustration computing.
Or if you want, Therian, stay with whatever you are using, in the land of viruses, software incompatibilities, no tech support, constant frustration and subsequent bitching on CFN.
I have given you solutions… based on my own experience of over 45 years in hands-on computer use (starting before the personal computer existed).
I will never believe you ever taught computer science, much less as “teacher of the year.” You exhibit little knowledge… and you are struggling far too much.
Therian: “Last I checked maiming and murdering after the symphony or opera are exceedingly rare. Yes, this DOES speak to the “society of people” who attend your bullshit “culture”.
===
My so-called “bullshit culture” cannot come close to the holocausts and massive commercial enslavement perpetrated by European “cultured” whites who enjoy their classical music and classical art.
The most cultured white societies, like Germany and Italy and Russia, are those whose atrocities and calculated genocides are so heinous they are unable to be described in words. Cultured white violence is gargantuan and cannot be compared to any melees at or after a hip hop concert.
Civilians killed during World War Two, in white-on-white violence, totaled 38 million, including 19 to 25 million from war-related disease and famine. Hip hop should not be mentioned, nor compared to the white violence of the cultured westerners who love their opera and their symphonies.
When hip hop was being born, Nixon was carpet bombing in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, dumping more ordinance than in all World War Two. And you dare speak of violence related to hip hop?
There is no competition when it comes to mass slaughter of innocents. Those who commit murder on a grand scale are those who attend the opera and symphony. They are the ones who work in war related industry, make war policy, own stocks in armament companies, and are responsible for invading and bombing and killing on a scale my “bullshit” hip hop culture cannot even imagine.
Journalist: What do you think of Western civilization?
Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.
Little known, fact: Gandhi said this while squatting for a shit on the side of the road.
Your brothers in Africa are the people who sold their own people into slavery. Genocide is just Africa’s modus operandi. It’s the one continent in a perpetual state of war. Because that’s not “news” it doesn’t get covered in the “what have you done for me lately” western media. If African blacks were smart enough to create nukes, believe me, the entire continent of Africa would be a sheet of glass. The average IQ in Africa is about 65 to 70. The atavism which is daily business over there is stunning.
Tribal warfare NEVER STOPS in Africa. Millions are killed in forgotten places like Rwanda and yet you speak as if the people of the Dark Continent were a pacific peoples. Rwanda, Somalia, the Sudan, and many other countries NEVER have peace over there. Ever. Over here on this side of the pond, they’re the most atavistic group to such an extent that even Fred Reed and JHK, both liberally inclined, even write articles about the pervasive fear of blacks in every city and town where they form a majority in neighborhoods.
So, WPA … go fuck your cherrypicked data. Wherever your people go, fear and violence follow. It’s as simple as that. And it’s woven into the fabric of everyday life and not a once-in-a-lifetime event like a World War. There’s no white society on the face of the earth where little girls get killed in shootouts so routinely as black culture … here and on the Dark Continent. There’s no white society on the face of the earth where half of its members go through the prison system. There’s no white society on the face of the earth that is perceived as universally dangerous IN EVERYDAY LIFE as the black male society of the USA.
But you’re a disingenuous asshole and know all of this is true. War is a political phenomenon and even your “brother”, Mr. Obama, has been responsible for thousands of deaths, some advertised, some not. Concerts are part of everyday life and people who go to those symphonies and operas are NEVER afraid while in attendance … unless the concert hall is in a ghetto. Any person of sound judgment should be mortally fearful of what happens before, during, and after rap and hip hop concerts.
If we had African leaders like Mr. Taylor of Liberia, this entire country would be a killing field. Don’t you dare talk of genocide as a white-only phenomenon. It’s a gigantic lie. If African leaders (like the buttwads in Zimbabwe, Liberia, et al) ran the show throughout the world the human race would be EXTINCT.
The NYT piece is not very surprising. Humanity isn’t there yet. There being the place where people finally accept that humanity is nothing special, that consciousness-the aberrant trait that defines humanity with its linear conception of time and self-is a dead evolutionary branch, and that the planet and all its contents would be very much better without our presence. Until then, people readily accept without so much a blink that support for growing human populations is a GOOD thing; it’s sacrosanct… end of argument. Of course it’s not, but that goes against every tenet of our programming. We are creatures that suffer incredible ennui when not consuming… something, anything (be it animals, oceans, forests, media or fabricated consumer goods). Did not Schopenhauer warn on man being absolute in misbelieving that he can do, or will, what he wants? Yet we persist. As the trend line indicates, it will only be a matter of time before humanity questions its relationship with the planet and the lie that places humanity first and foremost. We are of course still hung-up, no pun intended, on the trannnygendered issue. Perhaps, when we move past this navel gazing self-absorbed epoch of selfie-sticks and the me-me-me all the time electronic postingverse we will come to accept that humanity is not sacrosanct, that we are not special, that we are a pox on ourselves and our planet, and we can certainly not be entrusted with caring for the former let alone the latter. As in moving past the flat-earth theory, the concept of religion, moving past the idea of man as center of the universe, or at least the last twig in the evolutionary branch will take incredible courage, and that is, as are the few admirable human traits, in short supply. But, please continue… feeding the starving overproducing masses is good in and of itself, despite its degradation on the planet and the health of everyone (GMOs, factory farming, etc). Because, don’t you believe all human life is sacred. Yes, but I do know better.
Frankiti,
I share your view of the “indispensable” and “exceptional” species.
You’ve put it compactly and thoughtfully. Thanks.
Therian, your whole post is full of lies. I will address one, one that is repeated by others on CFN: “The average IQ in Africa is about 65 to 70.” This “truism” seems to be all over the internet. It is your version of cherry-picked data.
The number comes from Richard Lynn, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Ulster. He took some studies where IQ tests were given to Africans, took the average and got 67.
The number is suspect for a very simple reason: Africans do way better at school than you would expect from an average IQ of 67. Given their PISA scores and other measures of school achievement, you would expect an IQ somewhere near 82.
As it turns out, Lynn’s 67 is based in part on children who lost points because:
Some were not used to pencils and could not draw. One boy said it was the first time he ever drew a picture.
Some were not familiar with line drawings.
Some did not wear Western clothes and so did not draw people that way.
Many did not know about telephones, tennis, dollars, miles or other things common in America.
The main one: Most knew English only as a foreign language.
On top of that, Lynn marked down some scores and did not say why or how:
Boys in Uganda who averaged 86 Lynn marked down to 80.
Zulu children in South Africa who averaged 89 were marked down to 74.
From a study on Nigeria and Sierra Leone he took the two worst samples out of five. No reason given.
Of the 42 studies he could have used, Lynn used 11. They had an average IQ of 67. The studies he did not use had an average IQ of 80. He gave no reason for his choice (though he did not seem to know about those that appeared only in African journals).
There are good reasons to throw out some studies:
The test was not properly administered.
The test was not given in full.
The test takers were not a representative sample.
The test has known cultural biases.
The test has not been tried on a broad Western sample, making it hard to compare.
If you throw out all those you are left with 12 of the 42 studies. They have an average IQ of 81. Very close to the 82 expected from school achievement.
That is where the Netherlands was in the 1950s if you take into account the rising IQs of the Flynn Effect – which seems to have run its course in the West but not in Africa.
Citing bogus IQ scores for Africans is how you intentionally mislead CFN, Therian, and degrade Africans.
WPA,
Care to critique The Bell Curve (Hernstein and Murray)?
Man oh man, did you have to shake, rattle, and roll to come up with that 81 which, even if true, is waaaay below average. Moreover, guys other than Lynn came up with these numbers and some countries have tested with IQs of FIFTY-EIGHT. ROTFLMFAO!!!!!
Your refutation is like: “Take into account the curvature of the earth and the effect of gamma rays on man-in-the-moon marigolds and deduct the gravitational constant and you come up with 81”. I can’t say you don’t have a future in comedy.
“I can’t say you don’t have a future in comedy.” — Therian
(And by that destiny) to perform an act, Whereof what’s past is prologue; what to come, In yours and my discharge…
The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 1
So you admit to 81? Thanks, because 81 is stone cold stupid, far too dumb for college or much of anything else. You are now a brother: a believer in Black inferiority. Welcome to the Land of Truth.
But in fact, many Black Africans are below 70 – little better than the estimated IQ of Border Terriers, the smartest breed of dogs. Now that you’ve admitted the basic fact of Black inferiority, why not accept the real truth of just how inferior they are?
The old economics textbooks asserted that excessive money printing causes inflation. And today we see signs that the West creeps into deflation. Red hot money printing presses cannot reverse this trend.
And there is no mystery. All production of printing presses either goes outside of the country, or on the financial markets. Those who are afraid of deflation while trying to combat it using printing press, should understand that there is always a danger that enormous mass of money from the financial markets will flow into commodity markets – and the world will drown in inflation. Something like that experienced Weimar Germany in the early 1920s, when inflation was measured not on an annual and not even on a monthly basis, but on a daily basis.
Economic science, monetary authorities, businesses, philosophers cannot yet understand what is happening today with the banks, financial markets, money. And most importantly cannot understand how all this will end. Capitalism that is going into the negative zone, some people with rich imagination call “anti-capitalism”, “Financial Wonderland” …
How to live and earn money in this financial wonderland? That is the question that preoccupies today everyone: financial speculators, retirees, institutional investors, central banks, conventional banks (deposit-credit organizations) … The institutions that were created over the centuries of capitalism are crumbling today before our own eyes.
It’s deliberate.
They have to understand what they’re doing.
Right now in the moment they’re trying to funnel money to the top and then after them….the deluge.
There’s no accountability by design. Inflation, deflation, so what?
They’ll let the whole economy go down when they’ve gleaned enough for themselves. Then they’ll get us into one helleva hot war.
Frankly my dear, they really don’t give a damn.
“They have to understand what they’re doing.”
I am not so sure. They must have a master plan, but due to non-linear complexity of involvement of multiple players it is next to impossible to calculate everything.
Even “Western” player has at least too faces: on one hand it is Financial interests who are making their money mainly on ForEx, facilitating the currency exchange – let’s call them “The Money Changers” – they are mainly represented by the City of London financial interests, the Windsor House and associated with them the Rothschild group.
On the other hand, we have the “The Pirates of the America”, grouped around the Rockefeller’s clan. Those guys mainly make their money off the FED printing press and Military Industrial Complex.
What is interesting new development is appearance of the third group – let’s call them “The Regulators” – the national bureaucracy of US grouped around Obama.
For instance, huge fines recently imposed on the big banks is the publicly known results of their activity.
The “Money Changers” are the ones who wants the world to be split into multiple currency zones, so they’re actively playing into the hands of Russians and Chinese.
Forget The Noise: Oil Prices Won’t Crash Again
Oil rising to $60/bbl is displeasing some people, particularly the shorts. Some of the more extreme –those calling for oil in the $20’s – have wisely fallen silent. Others, like Goldman Sachs, who a few months ago had set their flag in the 30’s, have unfortunately not gone so silent. They recently moved their flag into the 40’s but they continue to talk a lot. A better strategy – though one that would require some humility — would be to stop talking and listen.
Recent and compounding data will soon wash away the walls of worry erected by the experts. Four consecutive weeks of inventory draws, each one larger than the last is irrefutable proof that a 60% decline in the rig count means something.
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Oil-Prices/Forget-the-Noise-Oil-Prices-Wont-Crash-Again.html
BT, articles have been appearing in various venues claiming rise in violent crime in NYC due to DiBlassio’s policies, returning to the days of Mayor Dinkins. Do you sense this, going out and about? Or is it just more BS?
brh
No. There are a couple of violent crime perpetrated by people that should have been institutionalized.
Of course Reagan let them out of the hospitals to live in the streets as the homeless, but that doesn’t seem to figure into any analysis of who are committing the crimes.
BT I thought the closing of large state mental hospitals occurred in the 1960s, and was a State matter, not federal. The only Fed psychiatric hospital I know of is the one Ezra Pound was held in after WW2 in DC.
brh
Article appears this morning in WSJ Business and Finance section, “OPEC Will Keep Taps Open”, explains 12 OPEC nations produce about 30 million bpd, world now consuming 90 million bpd. The theme of the article seems to be because of fracking in the US and a few other developments OPEC is not the power it used to be, and is no longer ‘calling the shots’ in the petroleum business. Nobody is in the driver’s seat anymore.
Is ‘peak oil’ still in the mix? In many articles I see it as a source of ridicule and the butt of jokes. Producers don’t seem to be having any trouble keeping up with the 90 million bpd demand, in fact I read there’s a large surplus all over the world, a glut if you will. What’s the deal on petroleum, are we on the downhill slope of Hubberts curve? It doesn’t seem like it. This is not too say that its not a limited resource and will some day run out. But when, next year, or 2 centuries from now?
brh
Here’s another great article this week from Charles Hugh Smith on our wonderful economic system where the middle class is being blamed for not spending…..
Rule #1 in my book: Always blame the victims. You are not allowed to save your own money or your home…..
http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjune15/hilsenrath-Fed6-15.html
Here’s my note to him:
Hi Charles,
Great article, but the whole system is based on the appearance that nothing has ever changed since the ’60’s.
They went from the strong manufacturing base to a ketonic system of inverted communism and just between you and me, it can’t possible work.
They know what they did, but free market ideology is nothing more than freedom from oversight to do whatever manipulations they want while keeping the top eschelon in an uncontrollable feeding frenzy.
Rule # 1: No Accountability. The manipulators who control the global roulette wheel of finances always win. You may think you’re winning but they will always take the rug out from under you when the gains look yummy enough.
Now, are you feeling lucky?
#2 keep the delusion going that there’s a functional economy. Lie about how the nature of the beast while they use the people to destroy their wealth. Whether through the healthcare system with no price discovery to heating your home. Build more onto your home to turn it into your very own casino, but the banks will eventually get it for a song.
#3 and most important —Always blame the victim. It’s a tease.
Why we’re giving you all these cheap goods from China. Why aren’t you buy, buy buying! HOW DARE YOU SAVE FOR A RAINY DAY.
DON’T YOU KNOW YOUR MONEY DOESN’T BELONG TO YOU?
Neither does your home.
His response:
Excellent summary—esp. blame the victim. That is so true on every level. Yet it still works so well…
warm regards,
charles
I got stopped by the cops coming home from work this morning, 4 am on a remote stretch of state highway … said I was swerving, I wasn’t swerving, but just being out at that time is suspicious enough in itself I suppose. “Have you been drinking?, “No, haven’t been drinking.Coming from work.” Had to produce license and reg. and all that, meanwhile another cop pulled up, I’m thinking, uh-oh, here we go. The 2nd cop asked me a few questions like where you coming from, where you going, have you been drinking, examining me the whole time. Next thing I know my ‘papers’ are returned to me and I’m being told to ‘carry on’. That was it, whole thing took about 5 minutes. If I had been drinking (which I don’t) things wouldn’t have gone so well for me. i gotta say these guys were pretty polite and businesslike, just doing the their job.
brh
They asked whether you had been drinking. You said no, but they didn’t ask you to get out of the car and walk a straight line or give you a breathalizer test.
So they took you at your word.
Do you have any idea why they accepted your answer without proof?
Don’t know. That’s just the way it went down. I think just by talking to me they could tell I wasn’t drinking, no slurred words, no smell of booze, etc. But I’m just guessing.
brh
Yeah,
Coherence, demeanor, lack of physical attributes (smell of alcohol, bloodshot eyes) of alcohol use…no seeming physical impairment.
Your question begs a racial metric.
Bingo. She’s a shill for all things Big Sister.
Of course it goes without saying (though I’ll still say it) that even if you HAD been drinking the “swerve” excuse the cop gave for stopping you would have stood up in court though, in stopping you for a false reason, your 4th Amendment rights are being violated.
Allow me an observation. Aside from called-for services, 100% of good law enforcement (you know, catching bad guys, solving crimes, developing “clues”) occurs by observation…in fact, profiling…. The term has become pejorative, but only used as such by the detractors of law enforcement today. Inside the departments, a “good on-view” is complemented…a car stop, noticing bug residue on the rear license plate, etc. is the essence of the job…the protect side of “protect and serve”.
The police, on the street, are allowed, within reason, to “violate” the 4th Amendment…and are then second-guessed by their Supervisors, administrators, and a slew of judges. If you can present a paradigm where the thin blue line can keep you safer, without observations of, and contacts with, the population, I would like to hear it.
‘Course I could be wrong…I attended SJSC….
Call me a silly idealist but I still think of the Constitution as one of the political world’s most enlightened documents of the last thousand years. The key with the 4th Amendment is “probable cause”. If a car is following the rules of the road and there are no pieces of said car in a state of illegal disrepair, you simply don’t stop that car.
People who are about to commit crimes tip their hands in innumerable ways (swerving, road rage, simple moving violations that will permit a cop to see inside the car with his flashlight). You may have noticed that criminals tend to be criminal on the roadways as well as in their communities. They should be stopped the way we all are i.e., via commission of moving violations.
“They should be stopped the way we all are i.e., via commission of moving violations.”
In a perfect world, this would be the case. It is an axiom in law enforcement that, given a few minutes of observation, an infraction, or violation of the codes, equipment or moving, can be found on a vehicle only minutes away from the show-room floor…it devolves to observation, knowledge of pertinent laws and codes, and judgment of the observer.
P.S. ” Road Rage” is not necessarily an infraction or violation of the law, but it could be an indicator of other issues….lips moving and a shaking of the fist? Your call.
“WPA, Care to critique The Bell Curve (Hernstein and Murray)?” –nsa
nsa, check out the subtitle of the book… The Bell Cuve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life… The book isn’t about race, it’s about social structure, as the subtitle states.
If you have the book, nsa, check out Chapter 13, “Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability.”
If you don’ have the book, I’ll quote from the conclusion Of Chapter 13 and let Herrnstein and Murray speak for themselves:
“If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate.”
Being There,
You’re right about one thing: they, meaning the oligarch class, don’t give a damn. That much is clear. Seeing as they have abundant justification for their actions from academic theory and also political ideology (what is America about if not unfettered capitalism) they are totally shameless (the Kardashians in this sense comparative pipsqueaks).
And they have on their side not only academics and ideologues but a friendly justice system that will not file charges against oligarchs no matter the profusion of evidence of criminality. Not only all that but law-makers that make laws to deliberately legalize out of bounds conduct.
You’re right, they’ll let the system go down because, as you say, they really don’t give a damn. You’re right of course that the object of the whole exercise is to devour as much as possible, the thinking being that it’s better in their account than in yours. And, given that such a result is consistent with prevailing ideology, theory and law, it’s a just and proper result.
But you go too far in one sense, that they must know what they’re doing. To a limited extent, they know what they’re doing. But only to a very limited extent.
These people are driven by blind greed. BLIND greed. And if one of them expresses any doubt or reservation about what they’re doing, then he has no balls and deserves to lose everything to someone more ruthless.
These people are deformed in character and intellect. They can’t see past their wants. Every other consideration is subordinated. Not the intellectual A-List that’s for sure.
Self restraint? Forbearance? Some consideration for societal health accruing to their own self interest? Bah, pussy-talk, all of it.
So they WILL crash the system. They try to steer discourse via control of media, via their corruption of regulatory institutions and even via interference in websites like this one, towards the BAU, towards the no problems, blue skies, everything-is-looking-up mode of thinking so as to keep the party going, so as to accommodate their behind the curtains machinations, so as to maximize their own advantage.
And, when the system crashes, they think they’ll be fat and happy in their yachts and mansions. They think they’ll collapse the system and then buy in again at the bottom and ride the upswing back.
See, that’s the thing. They don’t seem to grok (and this includes the NY Times) that systems are not infinitely bendable, that you can only abuse food-chains, be they biological or economic, only so much before they break down completely.
The oligarchs CANNOT conceive of their stocks and bonds as meaningless pieces of paper. It’s inconceivable to them to imagine that what they consider their iron-clad legal rights, enforceable in a court of law, backed up by the armed might of a country they control, to be un-enforceable, where the armed men turn against them.
Collapse isn’t accommodative. History is instructive in this.
V and BT, I’m curious as to who the ‘oligarchs’ are, pulling the strings?
The cast seems to change all the time. In 1902 Frank Norris wrote a novel called ‘The Octopus’, about the SPRR, the dominant org in Southern Cal at the time. They still exist but aren’t that powerful anymore to say the least. The people on top in in previous decades, the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s aren’t even around today! Also, many billionaires like Tom Steyer and George Soros, oligarchs if there ever were any, set themselves up as part of the opposition, ‘Down for the Revolution’ if you will. When people talk about ‘Oligarchs’ here they seem to mean the Koch brothers, crucible of all evil, and Neo Cons, which to me appears slightly anti semitic.
brh
I think V and BT are referring mainly to plutocrats, whatever their putative political ideology. At state dinners and parties many “enemies” clink glasses together. It’s kind of like “We pretend to be enemies but, it’s true, we play that role on TV”.
That’s why they have the banksters acting as financial intelligence to make sure their holdings have value.
That’s why they don’t go to jail for fraud. Because they need the manipulations to keep them above the world.
If this thing goes down, they will say :Apres moi la deluge.
get ready for some fireworks–they won’t be pretty.
Ventriloquy might come in handy if I ever have to talk myself out of a hairy situation, such as a sky jacking, or a bank robbery? Or if I have to testify in court under oath?
Do any of you CFN “Dill Holes” know of any good “Dual Degree Programs” for Siamese Twins?
Now THAT gave me a good laugh. Thanks for the levity, Pucker.
Ahhhh, none so beloved as the blood-sworn servants of Beelzebub…… bub. See if you can spot the pustules.
https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/bush-sotu-2003-applause.jpg?55ac53
I seem to recall the NYTimes as boosters/enablers of these fine leaders, once upon a blighted time.
Which deadly lies would you like to see transcribed today?
BRH, for starters, you might want to look to Wall Street, you might think about who crashed the system in ’08 and who was instrumental in creating the conditions that made the crash unavoidable. Then you might want to look at the aftermath, the multi-billion dollar bail-outs, and notwithstanding the bailouts, who got paid the massive bonuses.
That’s just for starters because it’s not just a handful of banks that created this gutted and stripped-down economy that we have now. This has been going on for years. No, the rot goes deeper, and to that end you might want to extend your gaze down into the Fortune 500. Not much deeper though for those businesses and the comparative handful of people that control them control a huge chunk of the US economy.
You might want to think about who it was that wrecked the industrial economy of the US, who moved the productive assets of those businesses offshore thus depleting the buying power of American consumers and who used the dictatorial powers of the Chinese elite to suppress the rights and wages of the Chinese sweat-shop worker.
You might also wonder how we got into this seemingly perpetual cycle of asset bubble, asset bust, slight recovery, even bigger asset bubble, even bigger bust and how the problem of depleted American demand got temporarily plugged.
To that end you might want to look at the tools of the oligarch class, those being the Federal Reserve and the US federal government and the 18 trillion dollar federal debt and the years of QE and interest rate suppression. The debt was the plug, the interest suppression was the fuel for asset bubbles and the mechanism for temporarily suppressing the calamity of the 18 trillion dollar debt circling the US economy.
There’s not that many people at the pinnacle who are commonly referred to as the 1% or point one percent. Yeah, the cast changes over time. People die after all. But, in aggregate, via their actions and with the complicity of the US government, they siphoned upwards massive income and wealth and so control an outsized proportion of US economic capacity.
So it’s a relatively small a network of people. To some extent they compete for money and power among themselves. And, if they don’t engage in explicit conspiracy, you can bet it’s an implicit understanding as to how things ought to work. And so we have the mess we have now.
OK thanks. Good answer.
brh
What do you CFN “Dill Holes” think about the potential market for a “Ventriloquist Sex Doll”?
“Debbie can still talk even with my cock in her mouth!”
Greek PM says will not accept deal without debt relief
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras told parliament on Friday that he would not accept an agreement with lenders that did not include the promise of debt relief that has been his government’s long-standing demand.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/greek-pm-says-not-accept-deal-without-debt-192429411–business.html
Well, the time has come for the EU to determine which is better: a horrific end or horror without end?
If Greece leaves the EU, it will be very painful in terms of financial markets. A couple of days ago, investors have begun to dump German bonds, which caused shock among European politicians and the media. They thought that “this music will play forever”. It wont.
Greece does not have a good exit out of the situation, but in any case, the coming spectacular financial fireworks will be a feast for the eyes.
“The Pharaoh hasn’t done sh-t about anything.” –brh
Labor Force Participation is increasing, not decreasing
Unemployment at 5.5% (not Bush caused double-digits)
Salaries (average hourly wages) are up
Home sales up
Auto sales up
Unemployment applications down
More new jobs are good-paying jobs
Dollar 19% stronger just in last year
Leading economic indicators say recovery is happening
Pharoah is happy…. and so are millions of Americans
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/05/may-jobs-report_n_7518260.html
What has the pharaoh done?
Not much – just won the TripleCrown of horse racing.
90,000 race fans at Belmont, and they say horse racing is dying.
Well, a lot of the tracks have closed Bill, including the one up by you.
Its a great day, tho!
brh
The drought is OVA!
Janos, I.Q. is not a freestanding number but a value attached to a specific time and a specific test.
I.Q. tests are calibrated or “normed” so that the test-takers in the fiftieth percentile—those exactly at the median—are assigned a score of 100.
But we know from Flynn’s work that I.Q.s are always rising. The only way to keep that hundred-point benchmark is periodically to make the tests more difficult—to “renorm” them.
1940s … original WISC was normed.
1970s … renormed as WISC-R
1980s … renormed a third time as the WISC III
2000s …. renormed again as the WISC IV
Each version has to be just a little harder than its predecessor. The notion that anyone “has” an I.Q. of a certain number, then, is meaningless unless you know which WISC he took, and when he took it, since there’s a substantial difference between getting a 120 on the WISC IV and getting a 120 on the much easier WISC.
This is perhaps, difficult for you to grasp, Janos. You seem to be an I.Q. fundamentalist who does not appreciate that I.Q. is neither immutable, nor innate. Check out James Flynn’s, Intelligence and Human Progress (2013). I think you need it as a counter to older outdated stuff in your head from Jensen and Rushton.
I.Q. tests do not measure some hard and identifiable trait that predicts the quality of our thinking. And … I.Q. is not stable, because I.Q. is not determined by our genes.
Besides, it is not the score that is so important: it is what you do with it. Among whites, virtually everyone who joins the ranks of the managerial, professional, and technical occupations has an I.Q. of 97 or above. Among Chinese-Americans, that threshold is 90. A Chinese-American with an I.Q. of 90, it would appear, does as much with it as a white American with an I.Q. of 97. Asians succeed not because of their higher I.Q.s. but despite their lower I.Q.s. Asians are overachievers. Hard work and focus pay off.
I.Q. is not impervious to environmental influences. For example, hundreds of years of forced slavery/Jim Crow segregation, by morally depraved white barbarians, could be considered a negative environmental influence.
I.Q. measures not just the quality of a person’s mind but the quality of the world that person lives in. Also, the black-white gap differs dramatically by age. Tests we have for measuring the cognitive functioning of infants, though admittedly crude, show the races to be almost the same. By age four, the average black I.Q. is 95.4—Then the real gap emerges: from age four through twenty-four, blacks lose six-tenths of a point a year, until their scores settle at 83.4.
I.Q. is neither immutable, nor innate. I.Q. is not a freestanding number but a value attached to a specific time and a specific test, whose importance is blown all out of proportion by I.Q. fundamentalists.
Good post. I also read somewhere a while ago that IQ tests aren’t effective on someone past the age of 8-10 or so.
Bias plays a big role in valuating IQ. If one is prejudiced against a certain group, any which gives a negative regardless of whether accurate or not, will be
So what should we do, Bill? Write the tests in Ebonics? Invent tests which don’t test basic language and analytical skills? I think that your proclamation that IQ tests “aren’t effective on someone past the age of 8-10 or so” is just an assertion unbacked by the slightest evidence on either the age count or the validity count.
I’m not saying these tests are perfect. They are blunt instruments. However, it’s precisely their bluntness that allows them to make crude distinctions very accurately i.e., genius from average, average from very unintelligent. A genius will rarely be mistaken for average and an average person will rarely be mistaken for an idiot. A genius won’t make a mistake on a long division problem that could stump an average person. These tests are also cross correlated with other similar exams to see if they FAIL to make crude distinctions with accuracy verging on near perfection.
The politically correct canard that the tests are biased in this respect is simply unbacked by statistical analysis or common notions about which skills are “basic”, “intermediate”, or “advanced”. For example, long division is basic but addition is much more basic. These are the crude distinctions of which I speak and I find them incontrovertible.
I agree with what you are saying. However, being a “blunt instrument”, shouldn’t that fact be given more attention by the rank and file? Instead, I find many people use IQ scores as a “blunt weapon” in making disparaging comments solely because of an individual belonging to a certain class or employment status. This is another case of misuse or ignorance of science and math.
On the other hand, I think some have taken the ‘cultural bias’ argument too far. For instance, the spacial relationships and number progression type questions on an IQ test seem unbiased to me.(Or maybe that’s my opinion because I did very well on those aspects.)
But seriously, what does recognizing/re-arranging various types of shapes or correctly answering a number progression based on previous progressions have to do with “cultural bias”?
These aspects of an IQ test seem very revealing to me personally and free from cultural bias. Please explain why they might not be?
I didn’t see Therian’s excellent response above otherwise I wouldn’t have wrote my own response.
But still the question remains: Why are the seemingly “incontrovertible” aspects of an IQ test “culturally biased”?
Have you become comfortable with the fact of Black intellectual inferiority? Excellent.
Good post. I also read somewhere a while ago that IQ tests aren’t effective on someone past the age of 8-10 or so.
Bias plays a big role in valuating IQ. If one is prejudiced against a certain group, anything which gives a negative result, regardless of whether accurate or not, will be given excessive weight by the prejudiced individual.
If the “morally depraved white barbarians” were sold black slaves by black African slave owners, then what do you say about them? Slavery in black Africa BEFORE slavery in white America proves that slavery is an economic relationship between people and not a racial relationship. Slaves were poor people and their masters, whether in Africa or the US, were simply more well heeled.
Therian: Slavery in black Africa BEFORE slavery in white America proves that slavery is an economic relationship between people and not a racial relationship.
What it makes it morally depraved is the western idea of buying and selling people on a massive scale, treating them very badly, as no more than property. This is very different compared to slavery in Africa, which was based within a kinship model.
We have good source documentation on the nature of slavery in Africa. Slaves in Africa were not treated in any way like they were treated by morally depraved whites. Africans selling slaves to white slave traders had no idea of how badly the slaves would be treated, because that is not the way it was in Africa.
In a paper read to the Ethnological Society of London in 1866, the vice-roy of Lokoja Mr.T. Valentine Robins, who accompanied the expedition up the River Niger aboard the HMS Investigator in 1864 described slavery in the region:
“Upon slavery Mr Robins remarked that it was not what people in England thought it to be. It means, as continually found in this part of Africa, belonging to a family group–there is no compulsory labour, the owner and the slave work together, eat the like food, wear the like clothing and sleep in the same huts. Some slaves have more wives than their masters. It gives protection to the slaves and everything necessary for their subsistence– food and clothing. A free man is worse off than a slave; he cannot claim his food from anyone.”
Does African slavery sound anything like the way Blacks were treated, purely as property, by depraved whites in the “New World”? I know it requires some critical thinking, Therian, but try to see some nuance, Notice the difference in treatment in African kinship slavery before trans-continental slave trade, versus Blacks as chattel owned by whites in the New World. Try thinking based on evidence instead of wrongly generalizing about all slavery being an economic relationship.
The biggest slavers were Muslims working out of Zanzibar, lasted from the 15th century all the way until about 1890, when the British Navy was able to shut it down
Thanks for skipping over my primary question. If whites owned slaves then what’s your comment about African blacks selling out their brothers? You’re an a-hole, WPA. I’m done.
it’s good to see another Permie on this forum. – Subvert
==================
Speaking of Permaculture, whatever happened to Trip Ticket?
Hey Fincain,
What do you know about an outfit called ‘Internet Research’, located at 55 Savushkina Street, St Petersburg, a group of paid bloggers charged with posting pro Putin and pro Russian propaganda in the comments section of popular western political sites? Sound familiar?
brh
Ah, gosh, brh, you blew my cover, you got the address!!
Spent all night erasing discs, eating sensitive Putin’s instructions, neuralizing postman and piroshky-delivery guy.
BRH,
Fair enough questions, but as your intel background solidly informs, that’s a double-edged broadsword (it cuts both ways).
Now hear this:
We Are The Propagandists:
How The New York Times And The White House Has Turned Truth In The Ukraine On Its Head
— By Patrick L. Smith, International Herald Tribune’s bureau chief in Hong Kong and then Tokyo from 1985 to 1992.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article42045.htm
Trust is a hard won thing, and easily lost on the most vaporous of slights or deliberate (seemingly inconsequential) deceits.
(Questioning one’s own motives from time to time is clarifying, if somewhat shocking.)
European Commission demands that France, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Poland, Luxembourg, Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, Malta and Lithuania in two months to adopt new rules, known as Bank recovery and resolution directive (BRRD). Apparently the rest of the EU countries have already adopted this directive. If the rules are not implemented in time, the Commission threatens a legal action.
http://ca.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idCAKBN0OD14Z20150528
This directive also is called rescue from inside (bail-in), which means instead of the usual saving bankrupt banks using state bailouts, funds of account owners will be used. That’s the scheme worked out in Cyprus couple of years ago.
This leads to the following apocalyptical scenario: expected mass bankruptcies of banks in the euro zone before the fall. Greek negotiations are at an impasse once again, in the absence of agreement, the euro will go towards parity with USD and possibly below. Euro zone bond yields will start to rise, as the temperature of the Ebola patient (there are first bells already). Given that the Europeans are such cheap whores, one could predict massive financial panic that inevitably spreads to the real sector.
About $550 trillion derivatives linked to exchange and interest rates revolve around the global financial system. Could that be a shot that will give the signal for a general collapse?
Yup, we’re the Madoffs of the world!
Our vassal states of Europe walk in lockstep with us in a giant loser wind-down of the Western world. How stupid is that?
Why didn’t Germany demand their gold back pronto? Not in a few years but now?
We’ve been manipulating the global economy, but hey I was just saying that we faked ourselves out, by suppressing the price of gold. As we denigrate the price of gold, our competition in the BRICS have been buying gold in a frenzy. Who will be the last nation standing?
—In the meantime China is buying our real estate and nobody even talks about it on our wonderful free market media…..free for but a few…
Because of ZIRP, you lose money against inflation at near 0% interest rates and because they have no other tricks in their magic act, it means they will eventually go after all our money. The richer you are, the more you’ve got to lose.
So in the heady days of 2008 the number of derivatives came to $1.4 Quadrillion. Carl Icahn wouldn’t say the number but he said when they saw the numbers they freaked out!!!!
Then we gave the banks who got us there free reign to do play it again, Sam.
I think Max Keiser said it right. We’re stuck on the wrong side of an interest rate Apartheid.
TPP SUPPORTED BY OBAMA
SLAVERY DEBATE CONTINUES THIS WEEK IN JUNE 2015
“But the task of watering down the slavery language is made more challenging by the exploding humanitarian catastrophe, which couldn’t come at a worse time for trade deal negotiators, who have argued that the Trans-Pacific Partnership, in the words of Obama, will be “the most progressive trade deal in history. While that’s a low bar, the active participation of a country that so blatantly participates in the slave trade calls that claim into question. American workers argue that they will face downward wage pressure from competition from Southeast Asian countries, and the fact that some of those workers will not be paid at all, but rather will be forced to work for free, only feeds those suspicions.”
Obama is following orders he doesn’t know what’s in it either.
I always imagine someone saying, do this if you want to dance at your daughters’ weddings…..
“American workers argue that they will face downward wage pressure from competition from Southeast Asian”
What American workers? Could you name, please, a single industrial enterprise (outside of defense industry), that is still competing against Asian counterparts?
In a word … software. What competition do Facebook, Apple, and Google really have in their domains except other American tech companies?
Credentialed idiots stands out in this post Not much else was necessary to write. Isn’t the Times a conservative rag. One of their players stated they make their own reality.
JHK, climate change isn’t real. Right! But, this just in, Lindsay Graham states on CNN today that climate change is real and is manmade! Who’d a thunk it, Lindsay Graham??!?!?
Yep, getcha that Apple watch, impress, while the earth burns, the only home we have, the only home our children and grandchildren have.
In defense of the common man, industrial man is killing the planet.
The film Surviving Progress should be mandatory viewing for all high school seniors. The film starts out with an IFO moon landing, JHK wrote about it at the end of one of his books. It’s a great film. My cousin who teaches high school classes in CA does show it to her classes. You go Cy.
Industrial man wouldn’t be killing the planet if overconsumption wasn’t a way of life. It’s not just a way of life. It’s considered the way civilized people SHOULD live. Thrift and parsimony are supposed to be only for the poor who can’t afford to live any other way and they abandon thrift any chance they get because they’re arguably even more of a victim of Madison Avenue than the upper classes. The new model of child rearing is for junior to have 200 toys in his playroom. People brag about their globetrotting and constant lengthy auto trips.
There’s enough junk just on the SURFACE of the oceans that if you put it all together it would be a continent the size of Africa. I forget where I saw that but it was about 5 years ago and doubtless has worsened. To those over 60 like myself: Do you remember when fish was the cheapest dinner possible? Now the projection is that virtually all marine life will be dead in 50 years. Even at this moment eating fish is fraught with the peril of heavy metal poisoning.
There’s nothing wrong with things and “stuff” but it seems that average people have so much stuff that they arrive in middle age with a serious need for storage. I’ve never understood the “average” 12,000 mile year on one’s autos and I had a 26-mile roundtrip to the college where I worked for 23 years. Still, my lifetime annual mileage is around 5000 miles. I know it’s a quaint notion but how about the idea of getting to know one’s own community by walking all through it and by patronizing local businesses within a walking or bicycling distance?
The irony of “green” people is that they think of themselves as such if they drive 250 miles to be in a forest or to go fishing. It’s much worse in the Western US where people tend to have longer commutes from their sterile, exurban communities. Any way one slices it, the modern American is an incredibly wasteful and entitled being who isn’t even acquainted with his own community.
According to LME (London Metals Exchange) the steel price just plummeted in June from $300/tonn to $150/tonn. This is a second sharp decline during 2015, just in February this year it was $500/tonn.
This behavior of the steel market is very bad symptom. What is happening is very similar to the last call before the large-scale collapse of the world economy.
Some very good posts, BeingThere, it’s good to have you back for a while. And I’m in agreement with you on 80-90% of your points. The internet magnifies differences though, so I’ll pick a point of possible disagreement to highlight.
“They’ll let the whole economy go down when they’ve gleaned enough for themselves. Then they’ll get us into one helleva hot war.” -bt-
IMO, you’re defining “they” a little to precisely. Furthermore, if “they” really does consist of the 100 to 10,000 wealthiest oligarchs on the planet – don’t they ALREADY have enough? Most of the truly wealthy people I have known will admit that, after a certain point, money is just a way of keeping score. Which is to say that those who already have a lot – are in a competition with themselves and others to get ALL of the rest of it. There is no one group to ever declare that the competition is over and it’s time to crash the system and go “home.”
And aren’t some of the true oligarchs at complete cross purposes with some of the others. Oligarchic Chinese, for example, still seem to have a more enlightened sense of national pride and the need for national self-preservation. So, for that matter, do the oligarchic Japanese. There are other ethnic groups of oligarchs who seem to place greater than “normal?” emphasis upon the interest of their own ethnic group or Nation – than they do upon their own individual wealth or self-aggrandizement.
As far as the possibility of a hot shooting war – – it’s certainly not negligible. But I’d argue that it will be caused by a cascade of small mistakes and misunderstandings – much like the (oligarch-mediated) series of events that lead Europe into WWI.
This is a great interview on the subject. Since I don’t know whether you’ll see this, I will re-post in the next segment.
This will explain this issue of an elite top “1%” globally and how it will effect you and I.
Knowing how you feel about immigration, you are not gonna like it.
This is immigration on the top and it means great jobs for the immigrants, not so much for us.
This economist believes that it will take 300 years for us to get back to anything that looked like the economy we enjoyed in the 50s and 60s
Introducing Dr. Clark.:
Professor of economics at the University of California-Davis and an editor of The European Review of Economic History, Dr. Gregory Clark is also a research associate at the Center for Poverty Research at Davis. Author of The Sun Also Rises: Surnames and History of Social Mobility—a book that the NY Times referred to as “incendiary”—Dr. Clark used surnames to “track the rich and poor through many generations” in many countries and on several continents.
In his eye-opening conversation on Smart Talk, Dr. Clark points out that social mobility has occurred but “at a very slow rate. It can take several centuries for it to occur.” In addition, he points out that “As much as 60% of the variation in social position in each generation is inherited.”
The author of A Farewell to Alms, A Brief Economic History of the Worldalso discusses the cultural and genetic roots of the Industrial Revolution, pointing out that after the Industrial Revolution, the success of nations was based on the quality of their productivity and their “efficient use of knowledge. … Factors such as capital and land became unimportant moving into the 20th century.” According to Dr. Clark, America has had higher income than other societies “because people work harder by putting in more hours.” This advantage has helped attract the most talented people from all over the globe. At the same time, “It entices people at the bottom end of society to migrate to America, which can cause a development of unequal societies.”
http://hgsss.org/smart-talk-with-andrew-mazzone-and-dr-gregory-clark/
Just some advice concerning being pulled over by police. Regardless of your alcohol consumption for the particular night, day, week, month, or year in question – the proper response to “Have you been drinking?” is always “No,” or “No, sir,” depending on the situation.
Any admission to the contrary – drastically increases your odds of being sobriety tested on the side of the road, which increases the odds of negative interaction with the criminal justice system.
Worse anecdote I’ve ever heard involved a friend of the family who was taking his trash to the dumpster near his lake house. Local cop pulls in behind him at the dumpster, checks his registration, etc. Cop’s about to let him go back home when the question, “You had anything to drink this morning, sir?” gets asked.
“No, but we had a great party last night, officer.”
The cop had ZERO probable cause for anything serious until this admission.
Sure enough, breath analysis device comes out. Guy still has alcohol in his system. Even though he’s less than two miles from his house on a Sunday morning on a quiet country road; Handcuffs. Jail. Lots of money.
“No, sir,” would have been a better choice of words.
The Ventriloquy Dummy gets a huge bulge in his pants when he talks to women.
Does he look like you? He needs the axe and then the fire. The world needs to be purified with fire and steel.
“As far as the possibility of a hot shooting war – – it’s certainly not negligible. But I’d argue that it will be caused by a cascade of small mistakes and misunderstandings – much like the (oligarch-mediated) series of events that lead Europe into WWI” == progress4what
That is very anecdotal version of real events that lead to WWI. It was a thoroughly developed plan by British to get rid of its main Continental competitors: German Empire, Russian Empire, Austro-Hungarian empire and Ottoman empire.
King Edward VII of Great Britain: Evil Demiurge of the Triple Entente and World War 1
http://tarpley.net/online-books/against-oligarchy/king-edward-vii-of-great-britain-evil-demiurge-of-the-triple-entente-and-world-war-1/
US is no longer satisfied with vassal relations with the EU, they need full and complete submission of the Europeans to looting by American multinationals (TTIP). America is in a hurry, because the second wave of its internal structural crisis is already knocking at the door and you need to get all available resources from Europe and ignite the rest of the world.
“Russian aggression” should scare the European society and the part of the European elite, which has not yet decided whether it is ready to go under US or take the risk and to fight for freedom.
http://politrussia.com/world/putin-veshaet-ukrainskie-569/
Thanks for putting the shout-back where I would easily find it, Q.
And yeah, there are two big problems with this comment software.
You highlighted one, by quoting, “it’s good to see another Permie on this forum. – Subvert”
Subvert made his comment on the 6th. But subvert was commenting to a comment made on the 1st. How many people could possibly have seen Subvert’s comment. I’m guessing two, you and me. I do still use that search function, when I have time. I search by date, for example ” 6, ” That works fine as long as you wait until after midnight to do the search for the day. I’ll usually forget about the whole thing for a couple of days – rather than remembering to check back.
The other problem is the way linked comment responses get smeared across date and time. Consider the recent interchange between beantown, therian, backrow, and buckstud. Who is talking to whom? Who is answering whom? Beats me. And I don’t know many posters who would care enough to try to figure it out.
Most here just seem to enjoy talking into the void.
And, yeah, US population growth due to immigration is going to prove the worst possible thing for human freedom and the Earth’s environment. But I’ve moved with that issue on to more rewarding venues. Anyway, every recurrent poster here @ CFN is in agreement on the topic pretty much – except, of course, “The One Who Must Not Be Named.”
===============
Trippticket is doing fine, far as I know. I try to talk to him every once in a while. His blog is still up and running. http://smallbatchgarden.blogspot.com/
“US population growth due to immigration is going to prove the worst possible thing for human freedom and the Earth’s environment.” –P4W
“Worst possible thing”? Immigration is a non-problem. Immigration is beneficial. Population growth in the U.S. is not even a problem. Worst? Hahaha. There is no there there.
“An aging Baby Boomer population and slower immigration combined for nearly stagnant U.S. population growth in 2013 as the total number of residents increased at the slowest pace since the Great Depression.
Figures released Monday by the U.S. Census Bureau show that growth for the 12 months ending July 1 was 0.71%, or just under 2.3 million people. That’s the slowest since 1937, according to Brookings Institution demographer William Frey, who called this year’s growth “underwhelming.”
“Just” 2.3 million people? Cancer is a growth, too.
Therian: “Just” 2.3 million people? Cancer is a growth, too.”
Considering that the number of deaths last year was 2,596,993, we are actually shrinking population-wise, not growing. So you, Therian, have just proved immigration is not a cancer.
Look again, wpc.
All you’ve proven is that you can cherry-pick sources.
And that you can’t do basic math.
I think that was established long ago, P4W but thanks for the moral support. He can’t read either because the quote he gave said there was 0.7% population GROWTH. He can’t even read his own citations thoroughly.
Fincal writes:
“What American workers? Could you name, please, a single industrial enterprise (outside of defense industry), that is still competing against Asian counterparts?”
Oh, how about the high quality (fill in the blank) industry. Take furniture for example. The Chinese manufacture junk while many American craftsmen known for high quality products accept commissions from wealthy Chinese clients in search of quality. Of course a little “education” is in order. For instance, when said wealthy Chinese clients start questioning the “exorbitant” prices of high quality American craftsmen, one must explain the difference and long range implications between a mortise and tenon joint and furniture joinery attached with staples typical of inferior Chinese “craftspeople”.
I recently executed a commission for an Asian designer whose was decorating a VIP suite in an upscale Beijing hotel. The shipping turned into a hassle as apparently keeping track of paperwork is a difficult thing to do in the Far East.
You really are a corny “duck” at times Fincal. Get back in the waters you know something about.
Good to know that the fine art of wood craftsmanship is still alive in US. I used to have a shop here on the Island producing hand-carved pieces of furniture made out of real Cuban mahogany by Haitians craftsmen.
The business didn’t go too far due to low buying power of locals, but I still enjoy couple of fine pieces around the house.
The good mahogany is like a good wine, gets only better with time.
I actually have quite a few mahogany trees growing on the Finca. It’s illegal to cut them here without permission, and permission is absolute hustle to get.
Once I spent almost a year to get a permit for 4 large trees, only to find out at the end that I have to ship it to some authorized shop so that they’d cut for me into workable pieces, and the whole point was to cut it using my own equipment.
http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4044/5133310332_06b78dbb28_z.jpg
Worker on my farm milking a cow
Lots of chickens. The girl is daughter of my friend.
http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4133/5133252104_9593d22a0b_z.jpg
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8835/18387475630_faafccbcb5_z.jpg
Palm nuts ready to go to the drying drum. To the left is pyrolisis oven. Girl is just for show.
Sources are Census Bureau and CDC. Annual statistics for arrivals and departures are standard, not cherry picked.
Births and deaths are well-documented.
Basic math? You have to know decimals, and I know they teach that in Georgia. I have family in Georgia and I consider you a friend.
2.3 million arrivals ……(native births and immigrants)
2.6 million departures (deaths, subtract 2.6 from 2.3)
= decreasing population (2.3 is less than 2.6)
What am I missing P4W? Do you have different sources? Are they reliable, neutral, not agenda-based? What are they? Do they teach math differently in Georgia? Have another look, my friend.
You don’t even read what you post, do you?
“Figures released Monday by the U.S. Census Bureau show that growth for the 12 months ending July 1 was 0.71%, or just under 2.3 million people” – wpc’s original post –
That’s this year’s growth AFTER deaths are subtracted.
You are subtracting deaths twice to get negative population growth.
Not a math error, I suppose. More of a logic error, or an honesty error.
And again, you are the only recurrent poster on CFN who argues generally in favor of immigration. There may have been others at one time, but you talked over them month after month. Now they are gone.
I wish I knew why JHK put up with your trolling of his website, month after month.
It’s a mystery.
P4W: “you are the only recurrent poster on CFN who argues generally in favor of immigration”
I have not been on CFN very long. All I am doing is occasionally sharing my point of view, with facts, data, and reasons to help explain. What kind of forum would this be if honest rational discourse is banned? My contributions are honest assessments.
There is no requirement to be a pessimist in order to be a realist.
Not everyone is waiting for the absolute worst case (“black swan”) collapse to happen. Some of us are seeing the negative AND the positive, creating solutions instead of spreading fear, and enjoying the present in the short time we have on this earth.
There are many lurking who share my point of view. It is my understanding that a clusterfuck is not an echo chamber. Am I wrong?
You’ve been here forever because you are Asoka. Either that or you’re the best mimic of another person I’ve ever seen.
It is often an echo chamber haunted by the same racists, anti-semites, chicken little conspiracy theorists week after week.
That being said you do need to brush-up on your understanding of the true nature of “pessimism” (Descartes, Leopardi, Unamuno, Freud, Schopenhauer…), lest you be confused for someone that believes an epicurean to be a glutton for foodstuffs.
Racists? Or realists?
racists
You were wrong when you used invalid math, logic, and honesty to “prove?” negative population growth “occurred” for this past CDC statistical year.
You have never acknowledged being wrong, not once on CFN in the past 5 years in ANY of your many now-banned aliases, the most nasty and persistent of which was “asoka.”
And now, you change the subject. You are a perfect manifestation of what it means to be an internet troll.
And referring to me as a “friend,” repeatedly and over my objections, is also wrong, not to mention obsequious and creepy – at minimum.
Those tens of thousands of refugees out of Africa, crossing the Med in rickety boats and being picked up by various European navies, where are they all going to end up? In Europe?
Story today states 500,000 are poised to make the crossing at this time, from the shores of NAfrica.
CBS is doing stories on this phenonema, from the angle “isn’t it wonderful these ‘folks’ are getting a chance of a new life in Europe (and possibly the USA)”. Appears to be the plan to resettle the entire 3rd world in W Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. What, you got a problem with that?
Ok, it doesn’t get any better than this. Al Sharpton came to Hartford Saturday to lead a ‘March for Peace’, a reaction to the numerous murders occurring there since the Baltimore riots. They marched down Albany Avenue and it ended up in a church, where Sharpton was to give a speech. In the speech he began asking for donations for his organization from the people of Hartford. Some in the audience took exception to that, heated words were exchanged, and before too long fists began flying between Sharpton’s people and the locals, inside the church and spilling out onto the street. Police had to be recalled to restore order.
brh
Funny you should mention that BRH. Just this afternoon after coming out of a Fed Ex/Kinkos a light skinned black lady came up to me in a rather panicked way because she had locked her keys into her car and left it running. Looking at her car I noticed that she left maybe a half inch of her window open so I knew I had a chance to save her day. We both went over to inspect the situation and when we did so she leaned one of her breasts into my arm and then seemingly amplified the press of breast against arm in that way that is unmistakable in intent to both persons involved. I have to admit this felt incredibly good and so I hung out assessing the situation longer than I needed to in order to prolong the moment. I then went my car to look for something to try and unlock her door with but I didn’t have a coat hanger but I did have an old windshield wiper that I thought might work. It was a tight fit and I was afraid to push very hard for fear of damaging her window but she wanted that windshield wiper inside her car bad so she forced open the window just a bit more in order to allow entry into the inside.
When I started probing the sweet spot of the lock itself she began anticipating the windshield wiper maneuvering into just the right position in order to unlock the interior. Going back and forth but never quite unlocking the door, I listened with a certain sort of demented pleasure as her anticipation took on the aural angst of some very guttural and yet soft moans of anticipation.
Finally I had the windshield wiper into exactly the right spot and I gave a sudden final thrust which resulted in that sweet sound of an unlocked door. She was almost crying because she was so relieved and she gave me a big long hug which I did not deny. I then told her she was very beautiful and asked her what country she was from and she said Ethiopia. I noticed she had a wedding ring on so I privately wondered if she were a mail order bride of sorts but of course I did not ask.
When it was time to part ways she again profusely expressed her gratitude with multiple offerings of “thank you Sir” . “Just call me Buck’ I insisted, “Buck Stud”.
Buck, you’re wasting your talent here.
there are magazine’s and web sites of a certain type that pay good money for what you wrote in post above.
brh
Story today states 500,000 are poised to make the crossing at this time, from the shores of NAfrica. – BRH
=================
Foreseen in The Camp of the Saints written 42 years ago.
Therian: “Either that or you’re the best mimic of another person I’ve ever seen.”
I don’t know what Asoka said or believed. I do know I am not Asoka. I have looked into the CFN archives to learn a little bit more about Asoka. Some said he was a government paid agent and that is why he posted hundreds of off-topic provocative posts each week. Some weeks 80% of the posts were attributed to Asoka.
So let’s look at the evidence:
CONTENT
Asoka posted completely off-topic on esoteric, metaphysical bullshit, adobe construction, permaculture, simple living, etc. I do not post on those topics.
FREQUENCY
Asoka posted several hundred times a week. I average four or five posts a day. So, both my post content and post frequency are different from Asoka.
STATUS
Asoka apparently was banned, or went away. I am here.
SUMMARY OF EVIDENCE
I don’t post off topic. I don’t post hundreds of times a week. I don’t post about religion/new age/metaphyical/adobe/permaculture/etc. And I am not banned.
It is annoying that some insist I am Asoka, even without evidence. It is fundamentally disrespectful to accuse someone of being someone else. Therian and P4W, please stop this nonsense.
Here in Ft. Meade and Langley, we can verify an identity by simply jabbing a keyboard. Yes, WPA is the same Asoka that so antagonized this site…..the very same Asoka who bragged about being an early follower of Maharaj Ji and taking on all cummers on “fish” night at the Rajneeshees encampment in central Oregon. Oh, and the fruity little weasel Ji was one of our assets until he was run out of the country.
WPA/Asoka has a real talent for spreading disinfo and creating cog diss and should consider joining us here in Ft. Meade………..
Oy vey!
Oy vey! – wpa
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wpa couldn’t be Asoka, Asoka was black. Obviously wpa is Jewish ;o)
He likes that Wild Kingdom type porn. And yeah, he can write but does he live it too?
He would have loved to have been this cop.
http://www.dailystormer.com/mckinney-tx-hero-cops-condemned-for-handling-blacks-with-tact-and-good-humor/