JHK’s Three-Act Play
I t looks like 2016 will be the year that humanfolk learn that the stuff they value was not worth as much as they thought it was. It will be a harrowing process because a great many humans are abandoning ownership of things that are rapidly losing value — e.g. stocks on the Shanghai exchange — and stuffing whatever “money” they can recover into the US dollar, the assets and usufructs of which are also going through a very painful reality value adjustment.
Of course this calls into question foremost exactly what money is, and the answer is: basically a narrative construct. In other words, a story explaining why we behave the way we do around certain things. Some parts of the story have a closer relationship with reality than other parts. The part about the US dollar has a rather weak connection.
When various authorities — the BLS, the Federal Reserve, The New York Times — state that the US economy is “strong,” we can translate that to mean giant companies listed on the stock exchanges are able to put up a Potemkin façade of soundness. For instance, Amazon.com. The company continues to seem like a good idea. And it reinforces that idea in the collective imagination by sending a lot of low-priced goods to your door, (all bought on credit cards), which rings your (nearly) instant gratification bell. This has prompted investors to gobble up Amazon stock.
It’s well-established by now that the “brick-and-mortar” retail operations are majorly sucking wind. Meaning, fewer people are driving to the Target store and venues like it to buy stuff. Supposedly, they are buying stuff at Amazon instead. What interests me in that story is the idea that every single object purchased these days has a UPS journey attached to it. Of course, people also drive to the Target store, though I doubt they leave the place with just one thing.
That dynamic ought to call into question just how people are living in the USA, and the answer to that is: spread out all over the place in a suburban sprawl living arrangement that has poor prospects for being reformed or mitigated. Either you drive yourself to the Target store for a slow-cooker and a few other things, or Amazon has to send the brown truck to each and every house. Either way includes an insane amount of transport, and sooner or later both the brick-and-mortar chain store model and the Amazon home delivery model will fail.
Now I don’t believe that will be the end of retail trade, but it will open the door for a painful transition to whatever the next iteration of retail trade will be. Probably much smaller and more local with less stuff. Unfortunately, it is difficult to imagine a resolution of that without also imagining a transition away from suburbia. The loss of faith in the suburban disposition of things will probably represent the greatest loss of perceived wealth in human history — which is how it should be, since it also happened to be the greatest misallocation of resources in human history. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and now its time has passed.
I suppose the loss of faith in value of all kinds will play out sequentially. It is starting in financial “assets” because so many of these are just faith-based stories, and in this quant-and-algo age it has gotten awfully hard to tell what is good story and what is just a swindle. One wonders, for example, how many well-dressed young people at the bond desks have been able to pawn off sub-prime car loans bundled into giant, tranched bonds with attractive yields to hapless counterparts at the asset allocation desks of the pension funds and insurance companies. My guess is the situation is at least just as bad as it was 2007.
The problem is that when this sucker goes down, to paraphrase the immortal words of George W. Bush, you have to wonder how much other stuff of everyday life for everyday people it will take down with it. The discovery phase of our predicament began ever so crisply in the very first business week of the new year. I’m going to hazard to predict that the damage halts briefly in mid-winter and then resumes with a vengeance in March. This may give thoughtful people a chance to rest and assess.
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“Either you drive yourself to the Target store for a slow-cooker and a few other things, or Amazon has to send the brown truck to each and every house. Either way includes an insane amount of transport, and sooner or later both the brick-and-mortar chain store model and the Amazon home delivery model will fail.”
The “insane amount of transport” is why I emphasize the importance of America moving on oil to my students. Right now it’s cheap in nominal dollars, but all of your readers know that it’s actually expensive to produce, so the current episode of low gas and diesel prices will pass. One of the more sane responses from my students was to talk about trailer tails for trucks, which could save up to 12% of fuel consumption and greenhouse gases. That’s a stop-gap to keep the current system going. My students liked that talk, but the presentation they really enjoyed was about self-driving cars. The feedback was that they’d had enough of doom and gloom and wanted something hopeful. They aren’t ready yet to give up on the current model of doing things. Instead, “They’ll think of something” prevails.
“‘They’ll think of something’ prevails.”
Sure, for a while longer. (Jim is a lot more willing than I am to take a stab when that while ends.)
I think optimism evolved as an adaptive trait throughout our development (whether that’s the 2.5 million year for all homo-somethings or the 200,000 for fully modern humans). It makes sense: if the job is picking berries for the clan, the clan will have more willing berry pickers and more berries (on average) if there is a shared belief that berry pickers are unlikely to be eaten by predators. Optimism and hope are adaptive.
Of course, occasionally, a berry picker will, indeed, be eaten, so belief in an amulet that will protect pickers from predators may get the reluctant ones back to the berry patch. Adaptive.
But what to do when an amulet wearer is eaten? Well, belief in a god or gods who will welcome the faithful eaten wearer into a wonderful afterlife may help quite a bit to encourage production. For much of our development, optimism and unquestioning religious belief (and even organized religion?) may well have been adaptive.
Since the Industrial Revolution, belief and optimism have focused more and more on science and technology. Unsurprising, since these pursuits have produced so much that seems so miraculous and have solved (or seemed to, at least) so many of our most serious problems and relieved us of so much labor.
Of course, the development of science and technology to the levels we have reached requires serious concentrations of labor and other resources, which is accomplished in our system by “investing capital” — so the “owners” of that capital (in the form of money) have become the high priests of what is, effectively, our current dominant religion.
To keep it all working, the cubicle slaves (the berry pickers) have to believe the priests when they say it will all be fine: Pie in the sky even before you die.
What they don’t/won’t/can’t understand is that we have reached a point where our continued practice of this religion is necessarily going to bring civilization (at least) to a crashing or crumbling end.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ~Upton Sinclair
Hope, optimism and belief have become maladaptive, and I doubt that the necessary evolutionary changes that might fix this terminal problem can happen nearly fast enough.
Thank you for that post Doug. It takes some intelligence to have that kind of insight to relate human genetics, evolution and natural selection, science, religion, our engineering feats and our technological advancement, our consumption based economics and our eventual downfall into a single post. Absolutely brilliant. I made an account just to applaud your intelligence.
Do you think hungry is an adaptive trait? What about seeing people you care about hungry. K.I.S.S.
Optimism is a necessary trait. We are a species trapped in a linear time perspective construct. The only being that can predict and recognize its assured eventual demise.
Perhaps berry picking led us to this sorry state. You cannot unlearn.
The evolutionary changes needed either bring us back to the watering hole with our animal brethren living by moment more perfectly than any zen master or they lead “us” without need of it.
Robots don’t drink water, they have not the DESIRE.
The basic problem is that the laws of physics are extremely favorable to the development of information technology, but they are extremely hostile to the development of technologies that involve the bulk materials and energy that are involved in housing and transporting human beings.
This bipolar situation is only going to intensify, leading to bizarre outcomes such as vehicles with incredible ability to operate autonomously, but with no fuel available to power them.
I guess it may be time to start researching a possible book about Peak Oil.
Tentative title: “What about asphalt?”
The idea being, in a post-fossil fuel world, it is very dubious that there will be substitutes to replace the use of fossil fuels for electricity and transportation fuel, but the applications of fossil fuels for which alternatives appear the most unavailable are the materials applications. Plastics, asphalt, concrete, fertilizer, etc. All absolutely essential to propping up a human population in the billions. Not only could humans not enjoy a modern lifestyle without those, but most of them could not survive at all, since, for example, today’s food supply is dependent on massive use of fossil fuels.
Well said, and succinctly too.
Jim doesnt want links to you tubes but I hope he will not mind this one, posted today at YT,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCV6tXArUE0
Thank you, Malthuss. Had not heard of Art Berman before, but the man is obviously a genius – we arrived at the same conclusions. Seriously – it’s nice to hear an industry insider with the same views.
@ Isjogren:
I like the way you’re thinking here, going right after the overlooked assumptions and elephants in the room. You’d be a good risk manager.
Cheers!
In complete agreement.
When is oil is necessary in the making of so many modern life necessities, burning it to drive ourselves around is incredibly foolish.
Which is why I don’t understand why there isn’t more of a push towards scooters, mopeds and e-bikes.
especially when over 70% of trips are solo, and an even higher percentage involves trips of 5 miles or less.
Cars not only use a large chunk of our oil supply, they are becoming increasingly unaffordable to a majority of Americans.
Not to mention the congestion they create and contribution to CO2 in the atmosphere.
We’d better come up with an alternative soon. We’ll never be able to afford mass transit for the masses, and probably don’t have enough time to wait for that even if it were affordable.
What other options are there?
That means massive drops in food prices due to 20 dollar oil? Don’t hold your breath. We are going into year two of slashed oil input costs on every level and so far the only noticeable item for price reduction is gasoline.
Shipping costs from the brown truck have not gone down, air fares have risen and food rises faster than the stores can change the labels or restaurants to redo menus.
Who is pocketing the savings not the consumer!
Just to many non productive people and people in general to make it a go in a post petrol world. There will be billions of what they call now “USELESS EATERS” taking what they can by any means they can.
Then you have that small minority of survival educated peppers who most likely will be overrun burned out and killed as they try to defend their turf and goods. The numbers are against them. The only survivors will me the very people who made the most money and gained the most power all along. They will be living in underground condos fully furnished with the best of everything to live years until the have and have not’s have killed each other off.
Then these Politicians Military heads and other “USELESS EATERS” will come up to reclaim the world or what is left
“They will be living in underground condos fully furnished with the best of everything to live years until the have and have not’s have killed each other off.”
Not exactly. They will be living in those luxury condos with the best of everything until their guards decide that it’s more profitable to point the guns the other way.
And so it goes.
What I find so interesting about the commentators to this blog is their obsession with everything financial and an ignorance of the coming ecological doomsday, which will make all other arguments moot.
ffkling-
Can’t speak for others, but the “obsession with everything financial” in my case is due to the likely hood of financial meltdown happening sooner than ecological collapse, NOT “an ignorance of the coming ecological doomsday”.
There is no doubt in my mind of such a doomsday on the way,
and I’d guess most readers here feel similarly.
And, unfortunate as it is, financial/economic issues seem to have far more influence on human behavior than environmental concerns (at least in this country).
Well, it’s a matter of quantities. Unless we’re simply going to burn all the fossil fuels for electricity and transportation, completely ignoring climate change, there should be quite a lot left for pharmaceuticals and plastics (where we can do a lot of recycling, by the way). As for asphalt, we can probably get along without it, though it is very convenient. Concrete? There it’s a question of energy for production, I think, not fossil fuels as an ingredient; presumably other forms of energy can do the job. Fertilizer and food are really big problems, and population is obviously at the root of them; but as I understand it, phosphorus is more likely to be a constraint than petroleum.
“I’m going to hazard to predict” that nothing like subprime mortgage crisis will hit pension funds and insurance (especially providing medical) companies.
On the contrary, I’d expect that selective, relatively high-yielding triple-A bonds, would be allocated to them under some “targeted project financing” program.
Capitalism is over, at least for the duration of the wartime, say hello to central planning.
There’s no doubt about the future being central planning. But it depends if there can be a plan of action in time to roll it out before chaos steps in, probably 36 hours max.[depending on how much food there is].
Good Morning,
Much smaller and local with less stuff does indeed seem to be the future we are heading towards. In addition to all the driving to distribute goods in this country, consider that most of it is now being shipped half way around the planet before it even gets put on a truck.
I’m completely baffled at how people can be so willingly blind to how unsustainable the current economic setup is on so many levels. In addition to making lifestyle changes that require using less energy and stuff, I am still fighting to wake people up. My writing focuses mostly on supporting domestic industry through various means. I realize this won’t solve the problem by itself but if it gets people in the mindset of buying things made closer to home it’s at least a start. They’ll need that as things start to slide. For those curious: http://americareforged.blogspot.com/
Here was an interesting story in the NY Times of the sort of new enterprises we are likely to see more of just like the flowering of Community Supported Agriculture (ie delivery of LOCAL fresh organic produce as opposed to factory shipped):
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/business/a-start-up-that-aims-to-bring-back-the-farm-to-vase-bouquet.html
After reading Krugman’s usual robotic praise of Obama vs crazed Republicans (yeah Republicans ARE crazy!) and endless growth Keynesian economics, I have been thinking about the famous phrase
“somebody who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”.
It is good to have Kunstler back on the suburban sprawl disaster bound to blow up when oil prices rebound as they will. Thinking about “price” versus “value” – no doubt the “price” of suburban sprawl was huge and created of course the housing blowup but what was the “value” of all that farmland and paved over woods and space in reality?
As for Amazon, the whole retail bricks & mortar system is in a breakdown. I wanted to buy a roofrack for my Prius at Sears whose Website claimed it was available at my local Sears. I could combine that purchase with other purchases and get it immediately.
But the Sears store clerk said “no we don’t have that in stock in the Store, the Online website lies..” So I ordered online from Sears only to find that after they verified my order (presumably then it was in stock) and impending expedited shipping, the order was cancelled with the news that it was “not in stock”. So I ordered it from Amazon for cheaper, it arrived on time but was the wrong item based on the recommendation from the Sears Website. So Amazon allowed me to return it (more shipping!) with no questions asked…
This sort of no questions asked guarantee from Amazon is what Sears used to be known for and Sears actually started as a gigantic mail order outfit in the 19th Century out to the West.
Whatever you may say about Amazon and Bezos is as greedy and controlling a plutocrat as you can find, they do deliver from a well-oiled Website to on-time delivery partnering with even the old snail-mail US Postal Service for many deliveries.
In my Transit Village from the 19th century we do not get mail delivered but have to pickup from the Post Office but we still get
legions of UPS trucks such as delivered my roofrack. But we do not need that – the Postal truck delivery (and the train is just down the hill) would actually service us just fine when suburbia collapses…
A co-worker’s daughter recently quit an Amazon executive post to move to a lower-paying (executive) job in another State – requiring her give back half of her sign-on bonus. Her complaints were mostly centered around how Amazon is run by millenial assholes all screaming at each other trying to prove they’re the one higher in the pecking order. Ridicule is the norm, work well done is not rewarded. This was related to me just a week prior to the newspaper article discussing this same thing. She apparently wrote to Bezos about her experience following the news article, and was told she could keep the other half of the sign-on! Bezos knows how to put the kibosh on any unsubstantiated rumors!
orbit7er: Sear’s began here in Minnesota when a young station agent bought a load of gold watches that had been refused and resold them. That was in 1886.
A little story concerning the mail (and diminishing service):
I have a postcard that my Great Uncle Charlie mailed from San Francisco in 1908 to his young sister in a tiny hamlet called Blue Mountain, Mississippi. This was long before jet aircraft, zip codes, automation and so on. But the amazing thing is the post card was delivered (with post mark stamps showing date and time at origin and destination) and it only took 5 days. The stamp is for one cent.
It would be interesting to repeat this today and see what the delivery time would take.
It’s interesting that the woman with the local flower business starts out selling flowers from local farms to local people, but then soon expands to shipping nationally. Which kind of defeats the whole purpose, because there are most likely local farmers growing flowers in other parts of the country who could supply those markets. It seems that there is always this urge to get bigger and sell things further away from where they are produced.
As a substitute rural mail carrier, I deliver to 400 households. In the past few years, parcels have become a very big part of the Postal Service’s business. A parcel delivered by the Postal Service requires essentially no extra fossil fuel use since I, the carrier, will be driving by each of those 400 mail boxes anyway, six days a week. I could be wrong, but seems pretty fuel efficient to me.
Smaller includes much smaller human population. How many people could a sustainable economy support? Probably not an easy question, but my guess would be under 1 billion.
To me that is probably the biggest inconvenient truth of all.
Just keep one eye on what happens in China when a half billion people are put out of work very soon and all try to go back to the farm. The outcome will be our future
“My writing focuses mostly on supporting domestic industry through various means.”
1. Targeted protective tariffs on certain goods.
2. “Sales” (or Tobin, or Robin Hood) tax on all financial speculation
3. Targeted project financing of infrastructure and hi-tech manufacturing under strict FinControl – NSA style with up to10 years mandatory, no parole for thieves.
All three of the examples you listed are solutions that I think would definitely do some good with respect to loss of American jobs through globalization and ‘free’ trade. The trick is, those are top down solutions, which may be possible but remember many of the people at the top are the ones profiting from shipping jobs overseas. It would take a lot of pressure to implement your suggestions and while I am helping to get that kettle hot enough to whistle (and could certainly use yours as well), we can’t expect too much help from that direction just yet.
In a sense, the market is good at giving us what we ask for it’s just that the problem right now is most Americans are asking for cheap shit from China. That attitude needs to change and I aim to do it through a combination of logic and emotional approaches from encouragement through to mockery and ridicule of people who are too ignorant or lazy to change. My current post advocates action that is even subversive in some ways, a kind of social media insurgency. In essence, I want to win enough hearts and minds to contribute to change from the bottom up.
RE | 2. “Sales” (or Tobin, or Robin Hood) tax on all financial speculation”-FitM.
We already have laws like that in place, they just aren’t enforced. For instance New York has a financial transaction tax that would have delivered $18B to the states coffers back in 2009, when they sorely needed it.
The problem isn’t ‘more laws needed’ at the strategic level, it’s enforcement of them.
Cheers!
I had to look up Tobin Tax…..and came across an interesting quote.
Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the situation is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation.
–John Maynard Keynes
“1. Targeted protective tariffs on certain goods” — me
Let’s go back to $100 – $150 jeans made in USA. How many of those god damn things do you need, anyway? Especially made like they’ve been made back in 1980s – I still have a pair. And back then it costed me a monthly salary (in Russia).
Finc,
A month’s salary…But they did get you laid, right?
Sure, that was the whole point…
You don’t need to spend that much. I’ve found some that are around $50-60. Somewhat expensive up front but not out of reach. It’s a small premium to pay to keep your native economy functioning.
They’re even cheaper when you can find them in a secondhand store. And they’re already broken in and have been washed enough that they’re never going to shrink.
But Helen,
We’re not supposed to wash our jeans, right?
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/05/22/living/dont-wash-jeans-levis-ceo/index.html
… a least not with a machine… 😉
Cheers!
😉
Import tariffs are the Donald’s plan to restore America. And it will work but with some pain and hardship due to price increases to the public. But the reality is we need money to pay off the debt secure SS and Medicare costs and rebuilt the country.
I would start right now with a big tax on imported oil and use that revenue to help save the USA oil industry. Defaults and loss of oil field specialists from long term low prices will destroy our industry and leave us open for a repeat oil jack up shocks from the Arab cartels. They have declared war on our industry we need to fight back now
We will not be able to use tax. Even now we don’t use tax to pay for government spending.The Central bank just purchases the government’s debts [such as pensions, the military, etc.] and so injects money into the economy. That’s now.
In the future the unemployment will be maybe 80% so there’s going to be no tax receipts already. The government will have to tell the banks to abandon all their fiat money loans and close the secondary market.Thus allowing everyone to suddenly own their homes, unencumbered etc etc. The government will have to run everything.
I love how we can get in a Kunstler essay the word “usufructs” followed just a few sentences later with the phrase “majorly sucking wind.” Ha ha. Reminds me of one of James Fennimore Cooper’s literary offenses, as described by Mark Twain, although I don’t think in this case it is unconscious, but a matter of style.
Anyway… I’m in the process of trying to convince my wife to withdraw enough from her 403b (now that she’s able to do so without the penalty) to pay off the modest balance on our mortgage (55K). Admittedly, the retirement account is not a huge amount, and a conventional financial advisor would probably advise against it. But to me, one is “magic” money, which could be, while there’s still time, turned into something more real.
“I love how we can get in a Kunstler essay the word ‘usufructs’ followed just a few sentences later with the phrase ‘majorly sucking wind.’”
I have insisted, for a long time, now, that Jim is the Big Kahuna of savage genius of English language construction among current social observers and analysts.
I can still remember with crystal clarity reading the description of Atlanta in The City in Mind and making everyone within hearing range listen to me read it aloud.
Nobody does it better. (Don’t pay any attention to this, Jim; we want you to remain your humble self and not have your head turned by uncritical praise. ;^)
In Urban lingo, the situation that JHK teases us with here, “usufruct”
turns into “yusofuct.” That’s the real “discovery.”
I wonder could the Yap Islander concept of money/wealth be resurrected after the collapse of Hyper-Finance-Capitalism?
Imagine George Soros or the Walton family members sitting on huge wheel like stones in front of their assorted palaces and pied-a-terre.
http://quinsprogress.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/license-plate.jpg
Well the NYT, of all rags, now on board supporting Trump in a major way:
Germany on the Brink
Ross Douthat Ross Douthat JAN. 9, 2016 511 COMMENTS
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ON New Year’s Eve, in the shadow of Cologne’s cathedral, crowds of North African and Middle Eastern men accosted women out for the night’s festivities. They surrounded them, groped them, robbed them. Two women were reportedly raped.
Though there were similar incidents from Hamburg to Helsinki, the authorities at first played down the assaults, lest they prove inconvenient for Angela Merkel’s policy of mass asylum for refugees.
That delay has now cost Cologne’s police chief his job. But the German government still seems more concerned about policing restless natives — most recently through a deal with Facebook and Google to restrict anti-immigrant postings — than with policing migration. Just last week Merkel rejected a proposal to cap refugee admissions (which topped one million last year) at 200,000 in 2016.
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The underlying controversy here is not a new one. For decades conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic have warned that Europe’s generous immigration policies, often pursued in defiance of ordinary Europeans’ wishes, threaten to destabilize the continent.
The conservatives have made important points about the difficulty of assimilation, the threat of radicalization, and the likelihood of Paris-style and Cologne-style violence in European cities.
But they have also trafficked in more apocalyptic predictions — fears of a “Eurabia,” of mass Islamification — that were somewhat harder to credit. Until recently, Europe’s assimilation challenge looked unpleasant but not insurmountable, and the likelihood of Yugoslavian-style balkanization relatively remote.
With the current migration, though, we’re in uncharted territory. The issue isn’t just that immigrants are arriving in the hundreds of thousands rather than the tens of thousands. It’s that a huge proportion of them are teenage and twentysomething men.
In Sweden, for instance, which like Germany has had an open door, 71 percent of all asylum applicants in 2015 were men. Among the mostly-late-teenage category of “unaccompanied minors,” as Valerie Hudson points out in an important essay for Politico,” the ratios were even more skewed: “11.3 boys for every one girl.”
As Hudson notes, these trends have immediate implications for civil order — young men are, well, young men; societies with skewed sex ratios tend to be unstable; and many of these men carry assumptions about women’s roles that are diametrically opposed to the values of contemporary Europe.
But there’s also a longer term issue, beyond the need to persuade new arrivals that — to quote from a Norwegian curriculum for migrants — in Europe “to force someone into sex is not permitted.”
When immigration proceeds at a steady but modest clip, deep change comes slowly, and there’s time for assimilation to do its work. That’s why the Muslim population in Europe has been growing only at one percentage point a decade; it’s why many of the Turkish and North African immigrants who arrived in Germany and France decades ago are reasonably Europeanized today.
But if you add a million (or millions) of people, most of them young men, in one short period, you get a very different kind of shift.
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In the German case the important number here isn’t the country’s total population, currently 82 million. It’s the twentysomething population, which was less than 10 million in 2013 (and of course already included many immigrants). In that cohort and every cohort afterward, the current influx could have a transformative effect.
How transformative depends on whether these men eventually find a way to bring brides and families to Europe as well. In terms of immediate civil peace, family formation or unification offers promise, since men with wives and children are less likely to grope revelers or graffiti synagogues or seek the solidarity of radicalism.
But it could also double or treble this migration’s demographic impact, pushing Germany toward a possible future in which half the under-40 population would consist of Middle Eastern and North African immigrants and their children.
If you believe that an aging, secularized, heretofore-mostly-homogeneous society is likely to peacefully absorb a migration of that size and scale of cultural difference, then you have a bright future as a spokesman for the current German government.
You’re also a fool. Such a transformation promises increasing polarization among natives and new arrivals alike. It threatens not just a spike in terrorism but a rebirth of 1930s-style political violence. The still-imaginary France Michel Houellebecq conjured up in his novel “Submission,” in which nativists and Islamists brawl in the streets, would have a very good chance of being realized in the German future.
This need not happen. But prudence requires doing everything possible to prevent it. That means closing Germany’s borders to new arrivals for the time being. It means beginning an orderly deportation process for able-bodied young men. It means giving up the fond illusion that Germany’s past sins can be absolved with a reckless humanitarianism in the present.
It means that Angela Merkel must go — so that her country, and the continent it bestrides, can avoid paying too high a price for her high-minded folly.
“This need not happen. But prudence requires doing everything possible to prevent it. That means closing Germany’s borders to new arrivals for the time being. It means beginning an orderly deportation process for able-bodied young men. It means giving up the fond illusion that Germany’s past sins can be absolved with a reckless humanitarianism in the present.”
And, most importantly, it means the West must stop creating and promoting the horrors that encourage these people to flee. And that we work to right some of the wrongs of which we are guilty.
We have a lot of penance to do for the messes we’ve made and made worse since carving up the remnants of the Ottoman Empire for Europe’s (and, less directly, America’s) benefit.
And it won’t be easy (if it’s even possible). The losers and those who feel themselves oppressed have *much* longer and more vivid memories than the victors and occupiers.
That’s the attitude that go us to the brink of the precipice, one cynically manipulated by the power hungry elite. Individuals are guilty, do penance, etc. Not whole cultures, races, and nations. No? Then what penance is Islam going to do for the unspeakable amount of suffering it has caused Europe, Central Asia, and Blacks Africa?
Ever actually meet an Arab or Turk? They think they are fucking great. In their book, it’s an honor to be conquered by Arabs or Turks or Muslims in general. Nothing is sadder than when Westerners with an inferiority complex have to interact with people like this and their superiority complex.
“Nothing is sadder than when Westerners with an inferiority complex have to interact with people like this and their superiority complex.”
Au contraire. It’s much sadder to have to listen to clueless Westerners who refuse to understand “why they hate us”:
It’s because of our policies.
= = = = =
Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication — US Department of Defense, September, 2004
[. . .] 2.3 What is the Problem? Who Are We Dealing With?
The information campaign — or as some still would have it, the war of ideas,” or the struggle for “hearts and minds” — is important to every war effort. In this war it is an essential objective, because the larger goals of U.S. strategy depend on separating the vast majority of non-violent Muslims from the radical-militant Islamist-Jihadists. But American efforts have not only failed in this respect: they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended.
American direct intervention in the Muslim World has paradoxically elevated the stature of and support for radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to
single-digits in some Arab societies.
• Muslims do not “hate our freedom,” but rather, they hate
our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections
to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf states.
• Thus when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than
self-serving hypocrisy. Moreover, saying that “freedom is the future of the Middle East” is seen as patronizing, suggesting that Arabs are like the enslaved peoples of the old Communist World — but Muslims do not feel this way: they feel oppressed, but not enslaved.
• Furthermore, in the eyes of Muslims, American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering. U.S. actions appear in contrast to be motivated by ulterior motives, and deliberately controlled in
order to best serve American national interests at the expense of truly Muslim self-determination.
• Therefore, the dramatic narrative since 9/11 has essentially borne out the entire radical Islamist bill of particulars. American actions and the flow of events have elevated the authority of the Jihadi insurgents and tended to ratify their legitimacy among Muslims. Fighting groups portray themselves as the true defenders of an Ummah (the entire Muslim community) invaded and under attack — to broad public support.
• What was a marginal network is now an Ummah-wide movement of fighting groups. Not only has there been a proliferation of “terrorist” groups: the unifying context of a
shared cause creates a sense of affiliation across the many cultural and sectarian boundaries that divide Islam.
• Finally, Muslims see Americans as strangely narcissistic — namely, that the war is all about us. As the Muslims see it, everything about the war is — for Americans — really no more than an extension of American domestic politics and its great game. This perception is of course necessarily heightened by election-year atmospherics, but nonetheless sustains their impression that when Americans talk to Muslims they are
really just talking to themselves.
Thanks for that. Officers with integrity and politicians without – who would a thunk it?
Actually, I’m not surprised.
When I was both an antiwar activist and a member of the Air Force, during the late 60s-early 70s — a combination that got me into a lot of trouble — my squadron commander, a lifer bird colonel, told me during a private “counseling” session that he was ashamed of what we had gotten ourselves into in Vietnam.
He said he was retiring and going to raise horses back in his home town as soon as he could — he had joined the military to defend his country, not to help bomb the shit out of poor little bastards in rice paddies for half-assed political schemes.
He may have been in a minority, but I met a lot of lifers with real integrity who were having a hard time reconciling what they thought their mission was with what it had turned out to be.
Sorry to be obscure, Doug. I was attempting irony.
Oh, I didn’t miss the irony, I just phrased the response as if I had.
The Internet is tough that way.
Islam goes thru cycles of weakness and strength. And when strong, begins the Jihad again. And even when they are weak, they tend to hold the lands they have conquered. Europe was unusual in being able to throw them out after a long and terrible struggle.
But all this is Greek to you. You are as innocent of history as a butterfly or a little girl. Suffice to say this: the renewed Jihad against Europe was inevitable given its proximity and the fact that large parts of it were previously conquered. And yes, that we conquered them is certainly a catalyst too. I’ll give you that. But it’s not a primary cause: their own expansionist religion is the primary cause. Jihad everywhere is ultimately inevitable, if given enough time and if they are not stopped. Why? Because that is what their religion teaches.
Need it simpler still? Ok, they attacked us first. North Africa, Asia Minor, the Middle East, etc were all Christian until the Muslims conquered them.
No they hate our freedoms too. That’s why they are attacking women without hijabs in Europe. And beginning to patrol cities stopping people from drinking, etc. In some areas, Western women put on veils to avoid harassment and attack. How is it that you don’t know about this? Or is it just that you approve?
Btw, some of their criticisms of our culture are on target. Their remedies tend to be worse than the problem, and in case, utterly alien to us. But you don’t even grok how alien they are since you see Conservatives and ordinary Westerners as the ultimate enemy. You’ll take any ally you can get against us. Anybody, including ISIS obviously.
“But you don’t even grok how alien they are since you see Conservatives and ordinary Westerners as the ultimate enemy. You’ll take any ally you can get against us. Anybody, including ISIS obviously.”
Clueless, viciously Islamophobic, insulting and just plain mean-spirited.
In addition to our policies, it is because of people like you, Janos, that “they” hate us.
Douthat does not represent the NYT’s views.
They generally do not provide much room in their paper for those who don’t share their Fundamentalist Progressive outlook, but they do occasionally publish a bit of contrary opinion.
Douthat is the NYT token house conservative.
The still-imaginary France Michel Houellebecq conjured up in his novel “Submission,” in which nativists and Islamists brawl in the streets, – fodase
================
I read the book and I don’t recall any brawling in the streets. The scary part, in fact, was that the Islamic takeover was accomplished non-violently…. no push-back at all……. just a handover of the French culture to Islam.
90 % of these immigrants are military age males. Why are they fleeing the mid east and Africa? No jobs we are told. Lets give them jobs not welfare. Farms can be converted to use Manuel labor that is what is needed.
lots of hoe operators and plow operators.Reapers and wagon drivers for harvest process the grains wash the veggies slaughter the animals and process them.
The Germans need to take the lead no work no food you get sent back to Syria period no second chances weed out the good from the bad fast. When my grandparents came to Ellis island they were not handed ebt cards and housing medical cards. They were told to get a job to eat and put a roof over your head.
“90 % of these immigrants are military age males. Why are they fleeing the mid east and Africa?”
Well, mostly to try to find less horrendous conditions to resettle their families, those who have families.
And then, there’s the fact that they are the people most like to be conscripted into the local extremist group or killed for refusing, hiding, etc.
And, in some places, they are the people most likely to become “collateral damage” in Western airstrikes and drone attacks — and listed afterwards as terrorists or insurgents themselves, for the crime of being too close to some cellphone our genius commanders are tracking to decide whom they’re going to blow to smithereens next.
“Lets give them jobs not welfare.”
Absolutely. And when they’ve learned the skills needed to grow food with minimal high-energy, high-tech inputs, they can teach succeeding generations of Europeans and immigrants alike — because those are likely to be among the most important skills to have in the not-too-distant future.
Here in California, by far the largest class of people who know how to do actually useful things are our Latino migrants. Some of our racist residents had better hope that Mexico doesn’t decide to take back the 50% of their country we stole from them when the balance of political power shifts. ;^)
Which way will Europe go? Muh Ham Head or Hitler?
I want Churchill back (although at this point, Mussolini might be OK).
What I don’t get is WHY??????? All over the world Islam is being jammed down everyone’s throat. No discussion. No reasons given. No proclamations. No justification. No paper trail anywhere that I’ve run across. No announcements. No NOTHING!!!!!
They just starting migrating, and damn near every government, including ours, let them in. But why? It’s an attempt to totally destroy civilization all over the world. Who the hell wants that?
Why? Islam must be nurtured so it becomes strong enough to bring on the 3rd World War which will destroy the West and Islam as well. Then the Elite can reign as gods on Earth.
Pike’s Amazing Predictions
Of Three World Wars
2-1-8
Albert Pike received a vision, which he described in a letter that he wrote to Mazzini, dated August 15, 1871. This letter graphically outlined plans for three world wars that were seen as necessary to bring about the One World Order, and we can marvel at how accurately it has predicted events that have already taken place. Pike’s Letter to Mazzini It is a commonly believed fallacy that for a short time, the Pike letter to Mazzini was on display in the British Museum Library in London, and it was copied by William Guy Carr, former Intelligence Officer in the Royal Canadian Navy. The British Library has confirmed in writing to me that such a document has never been in their possession. Furthermore, in Carr’s book, Satan, Prince of this World, Carr includes the following footnote: “The Keeper of Manuscripts recently informed the author that this letter is NOT catalogued in the British Museum Library. It seems strange that a man of Cardinal Rodriguez’s knowledge should have said that it WAS in 1925”. It appears that Carr learned about this letter from Cardinal Caro y Rodriguez of Santiago, Chile, who wrote The Mystery of Freemasonry Unveiled. To date, no conclusive proof exists to show that this letter was ever written. Nevertheless, the letter is widely quoted and the topic of much discussion. Following are apparently extracts of the letter, showing how Three World Wars have been planned for many generations.
“The First World War must be brought about in order to permit the Illuminati to overthrow the power of the Czars in Russia and of making that country a fortress of atheistic Communism. The divergences caused by the “agentur” (agents) of the Illuminati between the British and Germanic Empires will be used to foment this war. At the end of the war, Communism will be built and used in order to destroy the other governments and in order to weaken the religions.” 2 Students of history will recognize that the political alliances of England on one side and Germany on the other, forged between 1871 and 1898 by Otto von Bismarck, co-conspirator of Albert Pike, were instrumental in bringing about the First World War. “The Second World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences between the Fascists and the political Zionists. This war must be brought about so that Nazism is destroyed and that the political Zionism be strong enough to institute a sovereign state of Israel in Palestine. During the Second World War, International Communism must become strong enough in order to balance Christendom, which would be then restrained and held in check until the time when we would need it for the final social cataclysm.” 3
After this Second World War, Communism was made strong enough to begin taking over weaker governments. In 1945, at the Potsdam Conference between Truman, Churchill, and Stalin, a large portion of Europe was simply handed over to Russia, and on the other side of the world, the aftermath of the war with Japan helped to sweep the tide of Communism into China. (Readers who argue that the terms Nazism and Zionism were not known in 1871 should remember that the Illuminati invented both these movements. In addition, Communism as an ideology, and as a coined phrase, originates in France during the Revolution. In 1785, Restif coined the phrase four years before revolution broke out. Restif and Babeuf, in turn, were influenced by Rousseau – as was the most famous conspirator of them all, Adam Weishaupt.)
“The Third World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences caused by the “agentur” of the “Illuminati” between the political Zionists and the leaders of Islamic World. The war must be conducted in such a way that Islam (the Moslem Arabic World) and political Zionism (the State of Israel) mutually destroy each other. Meanwhile the other nations, once more divided on this issue will be constrained to fight to the point of complete physical, moral, spiritual and economical exhaustionWe shall unleash the Nihilists and the atheists, and we shall provoke a formidable social cataclysm which in all its horror will show clearly to the nations the effect of absolute atheism, origin of savagery and of the most bloody turmoil. Then everywhere, the citizens, obliged to defend themselves against the world minority of revolutionaries, will exterminate those destroyers of civilization, and the multitude, disillusioned with Christianity, whose deistic spirits will from that moment be without compass or direction, anxious for an ideal, but without knowing where to render its adoration, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of the pure doctrine of Lucifer, brought finally out in the public view. This manifestation will result from the general reactionary movement which will follow the destruction of Christianity and atheism, both conquered and exterminated at the same time.”
4 Since the terrorist attacks of Sept 11, 2001, world events, and in particular in the Middle East, show a growing unrest and instability between Modern Zionism and the Arabic World. This is completely in line with the call for a Third World War to be fought between the two, and their allies on both sides. This Third World War is still to come, and recent events show us that it is not far off.
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So Israel dominates, huh? Here’s a sample of headlines from the Jihad Watch front page:
Iranian video: US captain apologizes for entering Iran’s waters
Iran: Boat seizure “should be a lesson to troublemakers in the U.S. Congress”
Biden: Iran saw US boats in distress, acted “like ordinary nations would do”
Muslim registered as refugee a week before he murdered 11 in Istanbul
Iran confiscates GPS equipment from seized Navy boats, says it will “prove that the American ships were ‘snooping’”
White House spokesman: Iran’s seizure of Navy boats “precisely” why Obama made the nuke deal
Islamic Republic of Iran executed 1,084 in 2015, leads world in state-sanctioned executions
Maryland: Muslim indicted for training with jihad terror group
Islamic State murders 18 with car bomb and jihad suicide attack at Baghdad mall
Iranian video: US captain apologizes for entering Iran’s waters
After hours of interrogation, Iran says 10 captured U.S. sailors “released in international waters after they apologized”
Feds urge schools to shield Muslim students from harassment
Iran accused of giving nearly $5.5 million to left-wing populist party in Spain
Iranian military seizes two U.S. Navy boats, holds ten American sailors
Islamic State jihad suicide bomber murders 10 in Istanbul
Democrats invite Hamas-linked terror org CAIR to State of the Union
France: Muslim screaming “Allahu akbar” attacks Jewish teacher with machete, says he did it for the Islamic State
And for dessert, here’s a photo showing the real relationship between BB and O B: http://www.frontpagemag.com/sites/default/files/uploads/2014/07/caucus-obama-netanyahu-blog480.jpg
Never give up!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27DAspsuKJ0
Man is nothing more than a sly ape.
What is going on around this planet is living proof .
“We have met the [sly ape] and he is us”.
Surely, we have been clever monkeys to pull so far ahead of the competition (and actually eliminate the competition at an alarming and accelerated rate). But how clever are we when we know we are bringing it all down by our arrogance and hubris?
Jim,
amazon is talking about starting up their own distribution network — bypassing UPS, the USPS and Fedex — using drones, electric cars, and driverless trucks.
(powered up by fairy dust maybe, I don’t know)
brh
Drones to deliver pizza and pizazz.
That Bezos hasnt made much money in 22 years, well who cares?
Truth is Amazon came of age when oil was going through the roof. Now the price has come down dramatically. Now is it more fuel efficient for many to drive to a single store, or for trucks to go to individual houses? I have not done that cost analysis, but I would guess the cost structure has to be similar, with a slight edge going to the big store model. I suspect that is why Amazon cannot make a profit. I also suspect that the business strategy is to drive the brick and mortar system out of business, leaving Amazon to deliver retail goods to your home. Investors have bet Amazon will win, and it certainly appears so with so many brick and mortar stores closing. But when Amazon starts charging so that they can make profits, or if oil prices rise dramatically making the big store model more competitive, or in they incur some anti-trust action in their monopolization of retail, all bets will be off. They know the weak point is delivery, that is why all this crazy drone business from Bezos.
What makes you think the cost structure will remain the same?
Without a paradigm shift, what could change it? It has to be one or the other. I for one have not been to a mall in at least 10 years, and I am not alone. But I still go to the grocery store every week. That’s because retail is fungible, but food less so. Granted a box of cereal is a box of cereal.
“Without a paradigm shift . . .”
What could prevent a paradigm shift?
With ever-decreasing affordable energy per capita (and/or fuel rationing), real wages for the vast majority steadily declining over decades, the vast majority of purchases consisting of needless junk and ongoing fracturing of the social order, how could “one or the other” possibly persist?
Existing infrastructure is the greatest impediment. Addiction to convenience a close second. Sense of entitlement a third.
If online retailing becomes widespread enough, I can imagine that it could be in principle comparable if not superior to conventional retailing in efficiency.
Except for one thing: Packaging up your nickel dime consumer products in cardboard boxes slathered in mass quantities of probably unrecyclable plastic and fiber tape seems pretty resource-inefficient.
Amazon ‘Prime’ will get you your box of cereal with free shipping.
“Amazon ‘Prime’ will get you your box of cereal with free shipping.”
Well, they will until they put all the other cereal sellers out of business — at least, that’s what they think is going to happen.
Amazon is testing out a UBER form of local delivery setting up little distribution centers. You and I can look at the daily manifest of items to be delivered in your area go to the store pick it up and deliver it for a set fee. Its going to be a game changer
too many thieves among us.
“Its going to be a game changer”
Until, like the Uber drivers, the “sharing economy” delivery folks realize that Amazon is ripping them off, big-time.
Or Amazon and the customers realize that the delivery drivers are robbing them blind.
Not gonna work.
Overhear rumors on the web—–
Ukraine Admits Its Gold Is Gone: “There Is Almost No Gold Left In The Central Bank Vault”
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-11-1 … -gold-gone
The Latest Heist: US Quietly Snatches the Ukraine’s Gold Reserves
http://21stcenturywire.com/2014/03/21/t … -reserves/
“Note how gold flows into New York, but has difficulty flowing out of US private banking hands as is the case with the ‘confiscation’ of Germany’s gold. Numerous attempts by Bundesbank to repatriate its gold reserves have been met with a brick wall, and to date, Germany has only recovered a miniscule 5 tonnes directly from the NY Fed – out of the total 674 tonnes”
“Additionally, like Libya, both Syria and Iran are two of the world’s last remaining nation states who both have state-run central banks and gold reserves which fall outside of the world’s private central banking syndicate.”
HOLLAND GOT THEIR GOLD BACK — So who shot down MH17 ?
The Dutch report doesn’t say. Coincidence I guess.
The Australian coroners opinion – not a BUK missile – no shrapnel
Pilot’s relatives – saw body – not torn up by missile shrapnel
Funny how JHK mentions that brick-and-mortar business are sucking wind while the Amazon model seems to be the new norm.
Let me proffer a real-life experience from just this morning:
The kitchen faucet hose assembly had a leak (perhaps for a week) small enough not to be noticed until the cabinet underneath was opened and voila – a wet mess with kiddie pool. Ugh.
Called the manufacturer of the faucet. Sorry the faucet is a discontinued model. Contacted the local large plumbing supply distributor – sorry not in stock and discontinued. They said check Amazon.
I checked on line and what-do-you-know: Amazon has the hose assembly ready to ship for a not-so-nice price of full retail, but they have it. Ordered it and it should be here Wednesday so I can fix the damn leak and return to the 20th century with indoor plumbing that works. A convenience, that I might add, that we all assume will always work and, in a “world made by hand” most of us will probably be “drawers of water” as well as “hewers of wood’ if we can find any.
Credit card readily and happily accepted. Ability to acquire a discontinued part on the Internet for an essential and critical resource: priceless.
Peq,
Why didn’t you just change the make of the faucet? By the way, places like Home Depot carry low-end versions of decent products. It is always best to go to a plumbing wholesaler with a retail showroom and ask what line they offer? Bulk hardware products tend to lose their plating and can corrode in a few years.
I now have to replace a few taps myself.
regards
Thanks for the tip about the plumbing wholesaler as I checked with them – but spend $400 for a replacement (local sales tax alone for the, minimally suitable, $250 unit approximately $32 plus gas and time hanging around the parts counter waiting for Lenny to come back from the toilet or lunchl? Made in Chiner? Go to the dreadful (but thanks for a 10% veterans discount Messers Blank and Marcus) Home Depot??? I don’t think so.
The faucet was an expensive model to begin with so I’ll spend the $70 dollars (with shipping included ) for a less than 1/5 the price of a new piece of junk made in the PRC.
As a bonus I get to lay under the sink and fiddle with the hoses, washers, gaskets, white tape and perhaps while down there, put some nice poison “mignardises” down for my four, six and eight legged (unwanted and disgusting) visitors.
As Jim suggests, a knowledge of plumbing will be a valuable skill in the “discovery” phase of this, the 21st century Follies.
Sad thing is, pequiste, some guy the next street over just threw out a sink with a perfectly good spray hose that you could get for nothing. If you can wait and have access to Goodwill or an appliance salvage yard you might be able to get one for cheap.
There’s always the Red Green solution: duck tape with maybe a dab of Shoe-Goo.
Pogo,
Actually I’m about the biggest practitioner of ecology-mindedness you could imagine. In my little sub-division there is the “12 Hour Rule.” Put anything usable, functional, recyclable or sellable at the curb on the day before trash pickup and within 12 hours it will be gone like magic. I have picked up everything from terra-cotta planters to Japanese wood-block prints from the trash.
Near me a Christian rehab place called Faith Farm coupled with the fantastic Habitat For Humanity Restore usually fit the bill for all manner of parts and materials for the house and yard. Good causes that are local, help the community, and recycle everything under the sun.
Do love that Red Green engineering also, but with certain aspects of living, got to have the right stuff that works. In the case of water in the house there is just no fooling around with it. Floods and subsequent water damage suck!
I too buy expensive faucets. They’re much nicer. I focus on Brizo, KWC, Herbeau, etc., because they’re often available on eBay for a FRACTION of the original price. Plus, if there’s a part missing, they’ll fedex overnight the missing part (you pretend you paid retail).
Example: Brizo bathroom faucet. Retail $450. My cost: $34. Missing connection on wide-set faucet hose – called Brizo and had part in three days. (Basically, you’re inventorying the parts for $400/hr.)
Great way to retrofit your RV, with sailboat faucets, again, for a fraction of the original cost.
To me this could be the role of distributed 3D printers in hardware stores. Imagine if you could summon up the template for out of business parts like this to send to a 3D printer in your local hardware store for one of a kind type production.
While I doubt 3D printers will prove cost effective for mass production, they could be perfect for making one of a kind parts which could fix old machines and extend their useful lifetime which will be greatly needed as we hit the resource wall.
Of course there could be a number of issues in terms of the materials amenable to 3d printing. I would assume carbon fiber could be as strong as metal, I am not sure about flexible parts like rubber…
But it certainly seems like a prospect to avoid transportation costs while also providing access to millions of out of production parts…
UPS is working on that model as we speak
Your example shows an example of a very valuable application of online retailing, but it is not necessarily a representative example of online versus store retailing.
Yes, modern culture is incredible. Let us give thanks for its many blessings. A World Made by Hand will entail great suffering, especially for we who have known something better.
Indeed.
Many will suicide rather than get their hands dirty growing food.
Jim K, do you know which companies are FANG?
Facebk
Apple
Netflix
Google.
Take their increases out of Dow and Nasdaq and what do you then have?
re,
When various authorities — the BLS, the Federal Reserve, The New York Times — state that the US economy is “strong,” we can translate that to mean giant companies listed on the stock exchanges are able to put up a Potemkin façade of soundness. For instance, Amazon.com.
Very true Malthuss. Taken as a whole the PE ratio for this group is off the charts. Most S&P 500 companies are flat to down in this recovery.
On Friday, Financial Times explained that nine giant companies are propping up the S&P 500 this year.
The nine stocks are Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN), Facebook (FB), Netflix (NFLX), Priceline (PCLN), eBay (EBAY), Starbucks (SBUX), and Salesforce (CRM).
Investment research firm Ned Davis calls them the “Nifty Nine”.
If the Nifty Nine were an index, it would be up 60% on the year, according to Financial Times research.
The Nifty Nine is propping up the rest of the market. That’s because the S&P 500 is weighted by company size. Bigger companies influence its performance more than smaller companies.
10 stocks driving the rebound in the S&P 500
MARKETWATCH 1:44 PM ET 12/4/2015
NEM 19.99 +1.26 (+6.73%) newmont
SWKS 88.25 +4.81 (+5.76%) skyworks
EA 70.265 +3.045 (+4.53%) elec arts
DLTR 77.36 +3.27 (+4.41%) DOLLAR TREE
LLY 86.97 +3.91 (+4.71%) LILLY
CME 99.8423 +4.4123 (+4.62%) CME OPTIONS GRP
ENDP 62.625 +2.815 (+4.71%) ENDO JAPANESE DRUGS
MDLZ 44.37 +1.76 (+4.13%) MONDELEZ
ICE 264.89 +11.05 (+4.35%
Starbucks—bwaaa…Salesforce–is that for temps?
Malt,
S&P down 10% for the year.
Those companies you mention aren’t doing to good a job of ‘propping up’.
brh
The “A” in FANG is for Amazon, not Apple. The FANG companies are all Intertubes companies.
Again quite true. Apple has real earnings and a bucket load of cash to prove it. Amazon not.
And Apple has gone from what [10.2001] to what- now?
@ seawolf77:
Yes, AAPL has “a bucketload of cash” – offshore – which they refused to tap into when they needed to boost their ‘earnings’. That is why they _borrowed_ $60B so they could increase the share-price and get Mr. Icahn (among others) off their backs.
AAPL sales actually _suck_. They come overwhelmingly from China in the Spring of the previous two years, and they are the result of Apple’s VP of Sales/Marketing (in coordination with Central Committee members) to sell them in China at the tear-down price – releasing a flood of resold or re-gifted ‘used’ iPhones globally.
If Apple is what we’re down to…
[nearly undetectable shake of the head and arch of the eyebrow]
😉
Cheers!
seeking alpha.com
You might have started hearing the word “FANG” thrown around in recent months and have questions on what it means.
Like many terms before it, such as BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China), FANG is a recently-coined term associated with Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX), and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG). The performance of these stocks has been nothing short of impressive this year (avg. +87% return year-to-date), but what’s more important is the FANG’s impact on other investments, such as the NASDAQ ETF (NASDAQ:QQQ).
Though investors think they might be diversifying by owning ETFs, the FANG stocks make up about 20% of the ETF’s composition. When we include Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), that number increases to 41%.
So when you think about diversification, remember that over 40% of your investment is allocated to just six companies. This has been a pretty great issue to have this year, but it’s important to realize this before choosing your investments.
More importantly, this heavy allocation into six companies skews what on face value looks like relatively great performance out of the NASDAQ this year:
James, Neon Vincent, and all the others who believe that the era of cheap energy is over; You now have a golden opportunity to save yourselves from the coming apocalypse. Beg, borrow, or steal all the money you can. Mortgage your house and go out and buy oil futures, oil company stock (in companies with low debt) and ride it back up. When oil hits $100, sell. Use the dollars to buy gold, land that has water and a house on it, horses, livestock, and horse drawn farm equipment, tools, guns, ammunition, and food.
Timing that wave is the hard part.
what about just buying the sticks? Is Dutch shell selling cheap?
I meant ‘stocks’..oops.
@ Zeke’s Dad:
RE | “and ride it back up. When oil hits $100, sell.”-z.
Assuming oil goes back up?
Good idea, Jim. An article on “stuff”. It is such a good word. It is all around us. It fills hundreds of thousands of storage units scattered around the country. And is also packed away in millions of garages and attics. It is manufactured, transported, bought, but often rarely or never used.
I chuckle to myself when I hear people say, “I’m not selling my stuff for ‘this much’ money. I know It’s worth at least ‘that much’ money.” When we all know, or should know, that something is only worth what someone else can and will pay for it. I’m trying to get rid of lots of my “stuff” now. It’s not easy to do. I can’t even give much of it away. And no, I don’t have a “slow cooker” to discard.
Now there is a story in itself. Electric slow cookers need to be periodically replaced. They break down. More manufacturing and transportation, etc is required for the replacement model. In the distant past, a cast iron pot was used for cooking. It lasted for a lifetime. Fewer resources were used, and less manufacturing and transportation was needed. It should be obvious to all that our modern, material and energy intensive civilization, can not be sustained. And now Jim, an important question for you. What is more essential for human life on this earth? A slow cooker or a plastic salad spinner? Only in America. Isn’t this a great country. Good essay, Jim
Yes, Retired Guy, “Stuff” really is a great word. An if you’ve never seen George Carlin’s comedy about this, you should watch it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac
Another good video about stuff is The Story of Stuff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GorqroigqM
Women are always going on about their “stuff”.
Jim;
I like the idea of communities structured around small
businesses with local connections. Montpelier Vermont as a paradigm is appealing. But liking it ain’t going to make it so. Maybe you should back off a bit on the “World made by hand” theme for our future. An uglier and more unequal version of what we have now with a larger mass of the dispossessed and more authoritarianism is probably our likelier future.But I think your beating the small town drum all these years is harming your creds as a futurist.
I see small communities/towns with the expertise to become as self reliant as possible very credible. And ‘liking the idea’ is how anything begins
Some great little independent bookstores up there in Montpelier, too.
brh
usufruct – Getting to use stuff that belongs to others.
Not everything has UPS journey attached to it. The Playboy mansion is up for sale but apparently a stipulation on the $200 million price tag would allow Hef to continue living there.
Sucker, If I pay you $200 million for five measly acres you are going to be moving. I don’t care if the place has a zoo license and that you qualify.
Now America becomes the flea-market empire where having your cake and eating it too becomes institutionalized. Like in the fiefdom of Saudi Arabia which now also attempts to maintain business as usual while trying to redefine its living arrangements so it no longer needs a financial pump to keep tomorrow looking like yesterday. They are innovating with terror and swords instead.
Keep tomorrow looking like yesterday without the money it took to make yesterday happening in the first place. This must be an example of the ‘innovation’ that rich suckers are always jumping up and down about as the answer to Americas problems.
But the innovation of continuing to have to kiss rich ass when rich asses are no longer flush with bling is not going to happen. Unless of course they take away our guns.
I am not sure if it fits but throwing in a quote by Mare Antoinette seems like a cool thing to do as we discover that America’s fate, like its problems, is nothing new under the sun.
“There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.” — Marie Antoinette
Very well said, K-Dog. I would only suggest adding a couple words at one point. How about modify “…without the money it took to make yesterday…” to “…without the money, resources, and mores it took to make yesterday…”
Growing something, building something, repairing/maintaining something are the three categories of actual productive work……the rest is just so much fluff i.e. 80% of the population could just disappear and not be missed.
And they probably will.
Retired Guy,
good point about the iron pot. But I think that there could come a time when such a simple thing like an iron pot gets out of reach for a lot of people.
But there’s alternatives. Like the clay cooker that north Africans use. A “tagine” pot I think it’s called.
Did anybody else catch the hit piece that 60 minutes did last night on Putin/Russia and their exploits in Syria? How shocking that they (60 mins.) would assume such a castigating, holier than thou attitude regarding Russia’s efforts to bring some semblance of stability to the region. Because, you know, the Western intervention has been soooo much more effective.
What I found particularly amusing was the 60 mins condemnation (and associated video footage) of Russian warplanes loading up supposed “dumb bombs” to be used on ‘opposition targets’, with the implied notion that the use of such weapons was so archaic and imprecise. If I were the Russian official that was being interviewed, I would have replied…”Oh, you mean versus the “smart bombs” that are used by the USAF, like the ones that annihilated the Doctors without borders hospital in Afghanistan and killed all those innocents recently?”…
How pathetic that CBS and the venerated flagship program 60 mins is nothing more than a mouthpiece of the powers, whoever they are, that dictate the storyline…facts be damned.
This is the same sorry excuse for a “news” organization that threw Rather under the bus, no doubt thanks to some “help” from the White House, when he “maybe” got one small detail wrong in an otherwise truthful report on the cowardice and AWOL behaviour of a sitting president. Crucified Dan for a minor detail, buried the real story. Move along, folks, nothing to see here.
We haven’t had real news organizations since people like Bill Paley, Sarnoff and Katharine Graham left the scene and self-interested corporatists changed public-service news divisions into self-contained infotainment profit centers. If Watergate happened today, we’d never hear about it – just compare today’s Washington Post to Graham’s family-owned newspaper.
And we wonder why people are more ignorant today than before the communications revolution.
“Did anybody else catch the hit piece that 60 minutes did last night on Putin/Russia . . .”
Got rid of my TV, yet again, but Russia and (after the drunken Western patsy, Yeltsin, was gone) Putin have been on the official enemies-targets list for a long time and that includes every minute since the collapse of the USSR.
See, e.g. Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard and the Wolfowitz Doctrine.
Gotta have a demon when your nation’s “healthiest” industry is war.
Interview in Hermann Goering’s cell, in 1946:
= = = = =
Göring: Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
= = = = =
And it helps to have plenty of demons in reserve, because it’s important to maintain “agility” in the march toward Empire:
“We have always been at war with Eastasia.” ~Orwell
@ Doug:
Thanks for posting this famous exchange. It never ceases to amuse me, and on CFN it should probably be posted monthly – as a ‘mental tonic’.
Cheers!
The biggest and most valuable stlock of unused machinery sits in driveways and parking lots. That represents a gigantic mis-allocation of capital, renewed annually.
When it costs more to drive yourself to the mall than is does to have something delivered to your door, you know that something is wrong. That something is a mis-allocation so large that it can pay for national delivery out of the round-off error. And what an inefficient delivery! Not every house, like the mail, but every 500th house.
Amazon is a further symptom of a system in crisis, with drastic change on the horizon.
Sorry, “The biggest and most valuable stock …”
I figured you meant, ‘schlock.’
It was a toss-up. Which got tossed up.
Something may be wrong, but what is it? You have to get goods from the factory or farm to your house. How do you do that? Unless we go communist and live in large apartment buildings, how else are you going to do it? It is one or the other, the retail model where you drive to the store or the online model where goods are delivered to your door.
” Unless we go communist and live in large apartment buildings, how else are you going to do it?”
I’m not sure why you associate dense communities with communism. Last time I checked, Amsterdam Centrum and the districts around it were happily capitalistic (too much so for my personal taste), and the same is certainly true for Venice, etc.
Anyway, I assure you that, if even pockets of civilization are to be sustainable, we will, indeed, be living in much denser settings than American sprawlburbia. Ain’t gonna have the energy or other resources to do otherwise.
We used to say that we’d be burning the salvage from tearing down the crappy snout houses in the suburbs for heat, but, recently, the materials in those damned things are often too toxic to burn.
The Globalists want to pack humanity into as small a space as possible under the rubric of environmentalism. Which in their minds means keeping the planet for themselves as in “No one hunts in the King’s forest but the King and his friends.”
FEMA CAMPS
Don’t get me wrong I agree cars are an egregious waste. The government should have regulated it so it would be like buying a yacht. We should all use public transportation i.e. trolley goes past the Wal Mart.
but, but, but… Uh. Freedom!! Fine Corinthian Leather!! And something about a very convenient personal parlor away from prying eyes, you know. I mean, you just got to have a car. Because we’ve designed the ‘burbs to make it darn near mandatory
But seriously, it is a gigantic misallocation of several generations worth of capital and resources.
“Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.”
~Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead
(Jim did an interview with Jane, late in her life. I don’t know if it’s here, somewhere, but it’s well worth finding and reading.”
Author Booth Tarkington had some good insight how the automobile deconstructed and destroyed his beloved Indianapolis back in the early part of the 20th century. Its still worth reading a century later.
brh
@ russ:
RE | “Because we’ve designed the ‘burbs to make it darn near mandatory”-r.
Or, it was the other way around: the ‘burbs are built-to-order for cars.
Yup. I’ll go for that, too.
How about a compromise? Small cities with small golf cart type cars that can’t go more than twenty. Vroom, Vroom! It will be funny to see the young Turks trying to burn rubber with them.
To me, the most interesting part of this week’s essay is the statement that money, ultimately, is a story about why we behave the way we do around certain things. This calls into play deep questions about human mentality.
In reality, I think the only things that matter are air, water, food, shelter and relationships. We cannot live without the first four, and we cannot live healthily without the latter. Except for tools to obtain the necessities, everything is just adornment.
So I wonder what it is about us that we highly value material things.
We value material things because abundance for the masses is very recent.
What is more surprising is that we are in thrall to the Religion of Financianity.
I recall a science fiction story from my youth, in which a race commits suicide because heavenly bodies come into a particular alignment. It seemed very far-fetched to me, until I realized that money had everything in common with a constellation-based religion. That put the Great Depression into perspective, when not much changed except the distribution of goods (good leadership could have made the dust-bowl irrelevant).
And we are set to do it all again, but this time with an unsustainably large population, 400 nuclear reactors that need a grid tie, and dying oceans. Unless we rid ourselves of this oppressive religion many of us are certain to perish prematurely.
Mention the death of oceans and I say Soylent Green.
Material things are the common currency of experience on which place value. The problem is, the abstraction of money replaces inherent value and obfuscates the true measure of things. This results in insanity because the abstraction hides reality since abstraction signifies loss of detail. This insanity varies from person to person as the ability to appreciate abstraction is quite variable.
Don’t get me wrong I agree cars are an egregious waste. The government should have regulated it so it would be like buying a yacht.
That was tried, see East Germany, Soviet Union et al.
The government should also regulate residential heating, food production, how much you can make, how much you have to work, whether you can get medical help.
They’re doing such a good job in so many areas already.
Fodase, you say, “They’re doing such a good job in so many areas already.”
Yes indeed. Drinking water is mostly safe. Sewage is disposed of. Fatalities from faulty electrical appliances, electrical distribution, electrical fitments are rare (because of government standards). CDC protects you from the worse ravages of disease. Government sponsored science produces most of your new drugs. Remember the X-15? The list goes on and on, although, I must admit, it gets shorter every year, thanks to the Republicans.
Glad you’ve seen the light.
The Post Office has done an incredible job for over a century now. No private agency could have done better. Libertarianism is the purest folly, one that even Adam Smith wouldn’t have bought. And he had his share of illusions.
The old joke was ‘PO workers are Black’ but now my PO has Asian workers, not USA born Asian Americans.
“In a sense, the market is good at giving us what we ask for it’s just that the problem right now is most Americans are asking for cheap shit from China. That attitude needs to change and I aim to do it through a combination of logic and emotional approaches from encouragement through to mockery and ridicule of people who are too ignorant or lazy to change. My current post advocates action that is even subversive in some ways, a kind of social media insurgency. In essence, I want to win enough hearts and minds to contribute to change from the bottom up.” == mdl17576
[They say] if you had not had the Protective Tariff things would be a little cheaper. Well, whether a thing is cheap or dear depends upon what we can earn by our daily labor. Free trade cheapens the product by cheapening the producer. Protection cheapens the product by elevating the producer. Under free trade the trader is the master and the producer the slave. Protection is but the law of nature, the law of self-preservation, of self-development, of securing the highest and best destiny of the race of man.
President William McKinley
I am afraid that “encouragement through to mockery and ridicule” ain’t going to work on systemic level, a good 45% tariff will.
Besides, more revenue for the Federal budget.
Jim,
Now that NYMEX crude futures are trading at $31, and your nemesis Gary Schilling is predicting $10 bbl crude, are you willing to revisit your conclusions in your “Schilling Shilling” blog post of November 18, 2013?
Thanks,
shabbaranks.
TEL US HOW TO MAKE MONEY ON THIS, PLEASE.
A good way to play the declining price is to purchase inverse oil ETFs. DDG & SCO are two good inverse oil ETFs. As the price of oil declines, holding a position in either one will produce gains. Other methods like shorting oil stocks like Exxon (XOM) or Chevron (CVX) or purchasing put options on oil futures are generally more complex and better handled by advanced investors.
DDG is the ProShares Short Oil & Gas (DDG) ETF. It tracks the inverse daily performance of the Dow Jones U.S. Oil & Gas Index. It closed up 2.84% today.
SCO is the ProShares UltraShort Bloomberg Crude Oil (SCO) ETF. It tracks 2x the inverse performance of the Bloomberg WTI Crude Oil Subindex. It closed up 11.06% today.
DDG up 2.65% today.
SCO up 1.41% today.
NYMEX Feb 2016 (NMN CLG6) oil futures closed at $30.58/bbl, down 2.64%.
DDG up 4.29% today
SCO up 10.52% today.
NYMEX Feb 2016 (NMNCLG6) is down 5.61% today to $29.45 per barrel.
Y-a-a-a-w-n…
Suburbia is not going away, Amazon is not going away. Things will continue on as they are for a long time…until they can’t.
Are you old enough to remember when the Peso was devalued?
What happened after that?
How many Mexicans moved north since?
WHAT IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN TO THE DOLLAR??? HUH?
The dollar is strong. nsa says to buy UUP, the dollar express is about to leave the station… maybe it will leave as early as next week.
I won’t see their demise in my lifetime (I’m 62). Peak oil will eventually drive human history but I see no sign that the current glut of fossil fuels is going to dry up in the next 10 or 20 years.
Were it not for fracking we would not be having a glut now. When this glut completes the ruination of the fracking industry the glut will be over and low gas prices will be gone. Ten years is a long time and twenty years is a double long time. I think you must have sniffed some cornicopian dust.
The Camp of the Saints, a 100 page pdf.
There _will_ be a quiz.
http://www.jrbooksonline.com/pdfs/camp_of_the_saints.pdf
Now I know where Janos gets his ideas. This is book is simply misanthropic trash. Raspail clearly holds much of humanity (white as well as brown, black, and yellow) in contempt. The book is thinly disguised racism. Tan is the future. Resistance is futile.
Impression on watching Sunday’s TV news
Trump this time sounded really presidential, and was not performing like a comedy actor, but behaved like a man walking firmly into the White House, with a clear determination on his face to sweep out of his way any obstacle, feeling behind unlimited financial and power resources (besides personal).
And political commentators, who only a month ago, could not calmly discuss even a possibility, yesterday clearly looked upon him as the most likely, and even the most desirable winner of the presidential race of 2016.
And this fact overshadowed the events of last week, when the publication of the next portion of Secretary Clinton emails, from which it became known that the true cause of the Arab Spring and the Libyan tragedy, which has become the preamble to the emergence of Islamic state, was Madam’s Secretary understandable desire to lay her own hands and the hands of her friends on the Libyan oil fields and 143 tons of gold that belonged to Muammar Gaddafi.
Which, incidentally, confirms the words of Donald Trump that Ms. Secretary can’t be his rival in the elections, as the obvious criminals are not eligible to be a candidate for the President of the United States.
Trump has made an occasional statement that is rather over the top, but most of the time he is very articulate.
I would say in interviews he is the most articulate of any of the candidates.
I would add that some of his specific policy prescriptions come across as rather seat-of-the-pants and iffy in terms of whether they would actually be realistic.
But what he is good at in interviews is coming across as having a good common sense grasp of the big picture.
That’s interviews I’m talking about, he comes across a lot weaker in debates.
“If Watergate happened today, we’d never hear about it – just compare today’s Washington Post to Graham’s family-owned newspaper.”
That’s funny – you still don’t know anything about Watergate, about technology of separable nuclear warheads, about Nixon not wanting to give it a green light to keep his Detente policy, and about Hillary Clinton denying Nixon the presence of his attorneys during the interrogation and pulling a “Deep Throat” on him.
Although you often write interesting things, Finca, I don’t think that this is your finest post. Of course, any sensible person can see that Nixon did many good things in arms control, but Viet Nam? Remember his 1968 campaign against HHH, “Those who have had 4 years to end this war do not deserve another chance.”
I am not talking about Vietnam, however, 40,000 of dead American soldiers and hundreds of thousand of dead Vietnamese made the Nixon Detente possible, as well as a joint Russian-American space flight Apollo-Souz, and it all went to shitters after the young attorney Hillary Clinton pulled a “Deep Throat” on Nixon, which I am sure she is pretty good at.
Just refreshing your historical memory.
“. . .however, 40,000 of dead American soldiers and hundreds of thousand of dead Vietnamese made the Nixon Detente possible. . .”
That would be 58,000 dead Americans and probably two million Vietnamese.
I get a sort of Madeleine Albright feeling about your post(s):
= = = = =
On May 12, 1996, Albright defended UN sanctions against Iraq on a 60 Minutes segment in which Lesley Stahl asked her “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” and Albright replied “we think the price is worth it.”
Sorry about uncounted 18,000 soldiers.
But what would you suggest, on top of that terrible tragedy to continue nuclear arms race? Do you know that the technology of separable nuclear warheads increases destruction potential of a single ballistic missile by an order of magnitude? Nixon wanted to halt it and sign a nuclear treaty with Russians prohibiting deployment of such weapons.
I hope you’re sorry about the uncounted million-plus Vietnamese, too.
Do I know about MIRVs? You betcha.
As of today, the United States, Russia, Britain, France, Iran (maybe not nuclear), China and India have them — at least..
And that’s Killary Rodham’s fault, somehow, because she did something as a 20-ish staffer for the Senate Judiciary Committee?
I think she’s a war criminal and should be brought before a tribunal in the Hague, together with a long list of other American and other leaders, but I don’t understand how she facilitated Woodward’s and Bernstein’s Deep Throat communications.
I don’t think that one can discuss Nixon without reference to the Viet Nam War. Or with his attempt to use the Federal Government as a weapon against political opponents.
Also, Finca, could you explain what you mean by “pulled a “Deep Throat” on Nixon”, please? I don’t quite get it. And I don’t see what’s wrong with sex acts in marriage, either.
Vietnam was not a war, it was a slaughter. 3,000,000 dead Vietnamese and 57,000 dead Americans is a kill ratio of 50 to 1. That is genocide. It is not war. That is what Nazi used to do if you killed a German. They would kill 50 of the people in the city. We did that to a whole country for 10 years.
Ah, yes, sauerkraut, and his “Secret Plan” to end the war.
It took a while to find out what that plan was, but it turns out that it was “Operation Giant Lance.”
http://www.wired.com/2008/02/ff-nuclearwar/
Of course, it’s entirely true that Nixon must now be seen as moderate-to-liberal on many domestic and economic issues (and he must be given credit for opening the door to relations with China, although I can’t feel warm and fuzzy about the outcome) — in comparison with both today’s Republicans and the Clintons and the Democratic Leadership Council.
However, when it came down to matters of military and paramilitary intervention, both he and Kissinger were full-on crazy motherfuckers.
“…and about Hillary Clinton denying Nixon the presence of his attorneys during the interrogation and pulling a “Deep Throat” on him.”-FitM.
Phrasing?
😉
“Also, Finca, could you explain what you mean by “pulled a “Deep Throat” on Nixon”, please?”
The Nixon impeachment, the Nuclear Missiles with separable warheads and Hillary Clinton
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/yesterdays-tomorrowland/
Almost before anybody else the danger to democracy in US from its own defense industry was expressed by the Commander-in-chief of the armies of Britain and the United States in Europe during World War II, US President Eisenhower. It is an irony of fate that in the struggle against the global “war party” Putin’s Russia and Obama’s United States are allies again.
Yes, and START II (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), which the outgoing Bush Sr. still managed to sign before Hillary Clinton managed to reign in the White House as first lady, was primarily aimed at the prohibition of technology of separable warheads.
And who knows, if Hillary Clinton wouldn’t prevailed in a few months to the White House as first lady, the START-II would be ratified, that would prevent the Yugoslav tragedy, and the seizure of the maternity hospital in Buynaksk, and the abandonment of restrictions on the construction of missile defense that made the Ukrainian tragedy inevitable.
But before Hillary Clinton’s role in the Watergate scandal could be disclosed at least in a purely hypothetical way, we must talk at least at the basic level about the relationship of separable warheads with the impeachment of President Nixon and the role Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in it, who was responsible to the hawks of Military Industrial Complex for the destruction of the Russian missiles R-39 (RSM-52) installed on submarines of project-941 and were the USSR answer to this technology.
The fact that decisive progress in this technology had been made by US in the early ’70s, and the specter of a world power again loomed before the hawks’ eyes, despite the 3000 aircraft and helicopters downed in one month in Vietnam.
President Nixon in 1972, just with a sigh of relief after the end of the Vietnam nightmare signed the START-1, strictly limiting the construction of missile defense, apparently refused to give the green light to this project that threatens to derail all his achievements as President.
And immediately an agent nicknamed “Deep Throat” notified the editor in chief of “The Washington Times” Ben Bradley that aides of President Nixon were going to install wiretapping equipment in the headquarters of the electoral campaign of the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party George McGovern, located in the Washington hotel “Watergate “.
At this point, one of the greatest tragedies in the history of mankind, which later led to the failure of the policy of detente, has become a cheap comedy, as the nickname of the agent clearly refers to pornographic films of the same name, and suggests that the agent had the appropriate skills, in detail shown in this film.
The young attorney who managed to “crack” President Nixon, despite the fact that there was no direct evidence of his involvement in the installation of eavesdropping equipment was one Hillary Clinton and the “Deep Throat” was the FBI’s Assistant Director Mark Felt. The latter, however, for 30 years, refused the honor, despite the fact that it was “Deep Throat” who was a real hero, who showed that democracy in America that the President may be put on his knees in front of a young woman named Hillary Clinton, and not vice versa as in the movie “Deep Throat”, were a young woman named Linda Lovelace who looked very similar to Hillary stood the entire film on her knees in front of various men.
27-year-old graduate of Yale University began her fabulous career with the interrogation of the acting President of the United States and refused him the presence of his lawyers during these interrogations.
And her ex-boss Jerry Zeifman, today regrets that when he fired her, he did not report her unethical behavior to the mighty Bar Association or to the Rodino Committee and hints that if lawyers were allowed to Nixon, the last was likely not to resign, the policy of detente would continue for much longer, and the Soviet Union would enter the third millennium arm in arm with the United States.
It is not surprising that soon after these events, the lawyer married a classmate, who was rumored to be the illegitimate son of the governor of Arkansas Winthrop Rockefeller, and soon he inherited the position.
Finca, I think that there is some confusion here. The way I remember it, is that Nixon’s treaty was SALT 1, not START 1, and that it was signed and ratified by the senate, quite a bit before the end of the View Nam War. Shortly after he became president, Ford continued with this work, and the SALT 2 treaty was signed and ratified under Carter.
That means that the SALT treaties were accepted as done deals by most everyone. Therefore, a conspiracy theory has very little traction, because a conspiracy ought to succeed. And it obviously did not – Nixon’s successor continued the work, and so did his successor. And the senate ratified it all.
I repeat, I think that Nixon’s arms control initiatives were good, and quite possibly saved us from WW3.
The Watergate burglary happened a month or two after SALT 1, and the FBI quickly found a link to the White House. Then Dean testified against Nixon, but without independent corroboration, he was marginalized. Then it was revealed that Nixon had taped everything, and the legal battle shifted to disclosure of the tapes. Which ultimately shifted Nixon.
The Viet Nam war ended after the 1972 election.
So I don’t think that this conspiracy theory happens to be true. In addition to its being wholly unsuccessful, the time lines are wrong.
“President Nixon in 1972, just with a sigh of relief after the end of the Vietnam nightmare signed the START-1, strictly limiting the construction of missile defense”
that should read
“President Nixon in 1972, just with a sigh of relief after the end of the Vietnam nightmare signed the ABMT, strictly limiting the construction of missile defense”
Sorry for being mixed up in all abbreviations.
“President Nixon in 1972, just with a sigh of relief after the end of the Vietnam nightmare signed the START-1. . .”
Umm, no. That was signed in 1991 by George HW Bush.
“And immediately an agent nicknamed ‘Deep Throat’ notified the editor in chief of ‘The Washington Times’ Ben Bradley that aides of President Nixon were going to install wiretapping equipment in the headquarters of the electoral campaign of the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party George McGovern, located in the Washington hotel “Watergate “
That didn’t happen. Felt contacted Bob Woodward, about a month *after* the Watergate story broke. And Woodward worked for the Washington Post, not the Washington Times, which wasn’t founded until the 1980s (by Moonies).
“27-year-old graduate of Yale University began her fabulous career with the interrogation of the acting President of the United States and refused him the presence of his lawyers during these interrogations.”
Nope. Hillary never interrogated Nixon. She was part of the Judiciary Committee staff that listened to the White House tapes after John Sirica ordered them released. And she drafted a memo about representation the thrust of which was dictated by her boss.
“And her ex-boss Jerry Zeifman, today regrets that when he fired her, he did not report her unethical behavior to the mighty Bar Association or to the Rodino Committee. . .”
It’s not even true that Zeifman fired her; he had no authority to do so.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/clintons/zeifman.asp
“. . . a classmate, who was rumored to be the illegitimate son of the governor of Arkansas Winthrop Rockefeller, and soon he inherited the position.”
You should really stop reading Prison Planet and Above Top Secret. It makes your brains mushy.
The link that is given mistakenly leads to JHK main article and should be changed as follows:
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/yesterdays-tomorrowland/#comment-238721
Just figured out how to make a link to individual comment in the blog.
Linking to individual comments would be really useful. Can you explain how to do it or is it too complicated?
See the little symbol next to the timestamp on the comment, the one that young people call a “hashtag” and people who learned it as a symbol on a telephone dial or other common usages refer to as the “pound sign”?
If you right-click on that, you should get a context menu that includes something like “copy link location” — depending upon your browser and which extensions you may have added. Click on that and then paste the direct link to the post wherever you want it.
~Doug
P.S. My favorite term for the symbol comes from Bell Labs, from a time when the were working out the design of touch-tone keypads: “octothorpe”
THERE ARE times when Mr. Kunstler puts thing in such a succinct and pithy way that it makes me laugh aloud. For instance:
“Some parts of the story have a closer relationship with reality than other parts. The part about the US dollar has a rather weak connection.”-J H K.
A nice ‘1-2’ in a good weekly post. Then there were some interesting speculations about Amazon, UPS and inherent (in)efficiencies. That’s an interesting and big can of worms that deserves a quick peek – before resealing.
For instance, UPS delivery trucks don’t roll out of their depots without loading a requisite number of packages, padded envelopes etc. Each one of those represents a trip to the mall (or fraction thereof).
What this says is that each time you see a delivery truck on the road, you see more than one vehicle that does not have to be on the road. Batching orders together in one vehicle, then delivering them in one route saves time & resource, in other words.
This inherent efficiency is called ‘Overhead Spreading Effect” (in that the ‘overhead’ of transportation is ‘spread’ out among many different consignees sending their cargos on the vehicle). This system has worked since the Age of Sail and overland stagecoaches and is why we have the concept and expectation that we can reliably order things from afar, and what made a business like ‘Sears & Roebuck’ possible.
Regarding Amazon; it is fearsomely efficient at what it does. It has no real-estate risk exposure or overhead for stores, retail stock distributed from automated warehousing in areas with cheap land and labor costs and all the tax advantages and simultaneity that the Internet can muster. There’s a reason why Amazon Inc. is ‘Batman-Slapping’ market-share away from Walmart. It is not an accident. [*]
AND YET, despite all of the above, ‘amazing’ Amazon is LOSING money;
http://seekingalpha.com/article/1336931-amazon-loses-money-on-both-prime-and-its-entire-direct-retail-business
That’s right, Amazon loses money on each and every order we place. [**] It might have everything to do with the fact that almost every business in the tangible goods-and-services universe is losing money. Imports are down, Exports are down, Discretionary Income is down, Consumer Demand overall is down. . . As usual, ZeroHedge is ‘johnny-on-the-spot’ with a snap-analysis;
Consumer Demand is down overall:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-11/shrinking-global-economy-3-awkward-charts
So what’s the upshot? Tactical Strength does not fix Strategic Weakness? Same as always.
Cheers!
😉
— — —
[*] For a helpful demonstration of what a ‘Batman-Slap’ looks like, see the ‘reply’ attachment.
[**] The crown jewel in AMZN’s portfolio isn’t retail, it’s cloud services – AWS – which is amazing dominant in it’s market segment, and they are ‘ever-so’ proud of their CIA contract… Just ask them!
F Y I:
Batman-Slap = http://i.imgur.com/5rrb52F.jpg
““Some parts of the story have a closer relationship with reality than other parts. The part about the US dollar has a rather weak connection.”-J H K.
A nice ‘1-2’ in a good weekly post
Yes, and without an emoticon….
coordinated rapes by packs of mulsims in Germany, Denmark, etc. covered up by the media, police and politicians…
….now Sweden admits they’ve been covering it up for years:
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/01/11/swedish-police-now-accused-of-migrant-sex-crime-cvoer/
yes, the left certainly is for women’s rights.
“but, but, white men do this all the time, patriarchy, rape, rape! evil white rapey men!”
fucking leftists deserve to rot in jail for this crime against women
Fodase, you write, “fucking leftists deserve to rot in jail for this crime against women”.
Like all f-ing rightwingnuts deserve to rot in jail for Sandy Hook?
Are you sure you want to go down this road, F? With all of us in jail, who will be left to guard the prisons? Janos?
‘fucking leftist’ is so 1960.
I know for a fact the politics of the Lanzas’ were rather progressive, not ‘right wing’.
In 2015, of the 20 most interviewed politicians on weekend TV news shows, 16 were Republicans… because we have a Conservative press. Don’t believe the claims of a “liberal” press.
And I thought that all media in US that matters, except for Fox News, which is owned by the Pirates, is owned by the City of London – the Money Changers.
F*cking with your brains is their prerogative.
Could partly be due to the plethora of Republicans running for president.
Also could be due to the fact that there are a lot of different types of Republicans- social conservatives, libertarians, fiscal conservatives, neocons, border/sovereignty hawks, tea party (if one could ever figure out what they stand for).
Democrats are fairly monolithic- so-called progressives.
With all those different types of Republicans the media can hand-pick one who happens to serve the political agenda of that particular program.
Still, there are two major parties. But it seems they only want to ask questions and hear the ideas of the conservative side of things.
How else you can get on business magazine front page, semi profile, confident gaze with arms crossed over the chest and (important) raised
pinky finger?
Meant as reply to Helen Highwater 2:23 post above re flower business.
New to the blog 🙂
Damn, I wiki’d “usufruct” and I am having a heck of a time figuring out what it means.
It refers to the (legal?) right to use the profits of something belonging to someone else.
no concrete evidence, but I have a feeling its women mostly driving amazon, at least in this house. Packages arriving every day, stuff ordered by daughter, wife, nieces. and no matter how mundane, its always a big event when the UPS truck stops in front of the house. Great excitement ensues. “Who’s it for?” Packages are cut open, then the ladies get together and ooh and aah over the latest — todays — purchase, even if its a few pounds of Ethiopian Coffee.
brh
Whilst I myself have never ordered anything thru amazon.
BRH,
It’s actually a very old business model just powered by a recent technological innovation and dressed in Jeff Bezo’s livery:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8LHlJSBkg0
Correction: Jeff Bezos’
re usufruct:
This interesting legal term refers to a right to the “use and enjoyment of the fruits” of a property without any connotation of ownership, and with the implied restraint on any change or damage to said property. It is related to the medieval concept of the commons.
It was also a concept in slavery where any property acquired by a slave automatically belonged to the master.
Somethings never change.
I am not happy Rand Paul is being kept off the main debate stage. But I am happy Sean Penn took down El Chapo.
Bernie Sanders just mopped the floor with Hillary in the Iowa Brown&Black Forum. Bernie was cracking jokes and showing himself at ease. Bernie also demonstrated he is much better informed and more empathetic than Hillary. The moderators in the post-debate show agreed that Bernie Sanders connected with the audience demographic and had policy proposals that resonated for them. Hillary…not so much.
Now I understand better why Bernie is going to win both Iowa and New Hampshire. He’s getting better every day. And he polls better against the Republican candidates than Hillary.
Bernie Sanders 2016.
“He’s getting better every day”
How many days does he have left? The guy’s pushing 80 for Chrissake!
BRH
80 IS THE NEW 60
News today is Clinton may indeed be indicted.
Sanders could get in that way.
Then what? redistributionist utopia?
On the other hand, what does it matter, and who gives a sh-t?
brh
Students who want a university education.
“News today is Clinton may indeed be indicted.” –brh
If Clinton is out, expect another candidate to enter, maybe Joe “BFD” Biden, who now says he regrets every day his decision not to run.
They asked Bernie Sanders how a socialist could live in the White House. He replied: “I consider it public housing”
He’s 74. The average life expectancy for a male his age, today, is 11.5 years.
You can probably do the multiplication to find the number of days.
MEN ARE LIVING TO 85! If they get to 74.
Malthus,
Somewhere above you asked how to make money speculating in oil.
You get a discount brokerage account or a commodity trading account and place your bet. Trading is a nasty little ZERO SUM game….you buy a share from someone who thinks its a sell. The fees, bad fills, insider skim are probably close to 10%….so essentially you have to effectively generate 13% to retain 3% profit (which is taxed).
There are many real estate millionaires, but very few equity or commodity millionaires. In this respect, the above WPAsoka finally got something right…. just buy a date certain instrument like a CD (taxable) or general obligation muni bond (tax free for the high income earners), hold it to maturity, and sleep well at night.
“Author Booth Tarkington had some good insight how the automobile deconstructed and destroyed his beloved Indianapolis back in the early part of the 20th century. Its still worth reading a century later.”
The Magnificent Ambersons–highly recommended.
You get to write the ending yourself.
German Woman eagerly accept cans of pepper spray to defend themselves against Muslim rapeugees. Glocks would be better but it’s a start.
http://www.dailystormer.com/halle-identitarian-activists-hand-out-pepper-spray/
Western Culture has been the most successful in history for having emerged as the most secular; having through 2000+ years inculcated the scientific process, reaching the fullest of objectivism as applied to governance via the Enlightenment.
Surrendering such progress in the name (sic) of ‘diversity’ is making a travesty of the term ‘humanism’. Because of our culture having been embued with a more empirical grasp of ‘reality’ religious denominations in the West aren’t making cerimony of slitting one anothers’ throats as is happening in more backward cultures which we are now being admonished to absorb as ‘equals’.
Janos,
Yes, Glocks will eventually be made available to them. Your post reminded me of a private lunch I had, back in the ’90’s, with Gaston Glock and his wife….
Check out this compilation video of New Year’s Eve in Cologne: some of the Muslims have guns already and were shooting them into the air – as well as shooting fireworks at people.
Is saying or showing this fact “Islamophobic” as Doug would have us believe?
Here!
http://www.dailystormer.com/this-party-is-just-getting-started-or-youll-cowards-dont-even-race-war/
Is it representative of all Muslims? I think not. Janos, your kind of like the Fox news of CFN
“You should really stop reading Prison Planet and Above Top Secret. It makes your brains mushy.” == Doug
Disappearance of the Soviet Union – geopolitical and more importantly, an ideological rival to the United States, led to the disappearance of party ideology and demoralization of the party struggle.
It first manifested by the use by Hillary Clinton of Ross Perot as spoiler in 1992 elections, who managed to grab almost 20% of George Bush senior votes (twice more than ever gaining by an independent candidate or a candidate from a 3rd party) which led to Bush defeat.
That undoubtedly enraged the Republican establishment, dashing all gentlemen’s agreements, and has led to the fact that from the first moment of the Clinton presidency, the Republicans immediately started a bunch of investigations aimed at not only impeachment, but landing the Clintons couple in jail.
And the commander of these attacks and investigations has been the hero of Sunday’s elections in South Carolina, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
And the first dragon killed by this knight was the health care reform program, dubbed Hillary-Care, due to the fact that it was headed by the wife of President Clinton, Hillary Clinton.
It all ended with a series of suicides in the immediate vicinity of the Clintons and Congress clarifying the meaning of the words “sexual relationship”.
The degree of demoralization of the political struggle in the United States manifested itself when the Republicans have used for impeachment such an unworthy and disgraceful for a country reason, and most of the Democratic Party, knowing full well that Bill Clinton, having no character to refuse to answer a rather vile questions committed serious crime – perjured himself, – nevertheless found it necessary to support their leader.
But the true apotheosis of this demoralization and the corresponding political crisis appeared in the 2000 elections, when the center of power represented by Clintons decided to hand over the world’s power to Vice President Al Gore. As a result of fighting without rules, which included a spoiler Ralph Nader, “butterfly ballot” and a manual recount of votes in Florida, where the governor was the brother of presidential candidate George W. Bush, the world within few months, did not know who will be the president of the sole superpower and the final decision was in fact made by the judge of the Supreme Court of Florida.
Cheniere Energy’s shipment turns US into gas exporter
Momentous step for US energy industry that is marred by poor LNG pricing amid oil rout.
The Energy Atlantic, a 290-metre tanker steaming slowly through the Gulf of Mexico, is about to make history. It is scheduled to arrive on Tuesday at Cheniere Energy’s Sabine Pass liquefied natural gas plant on the coast of Louisiana, to be loaded with the first cargo of LNG to be exported from the “lower 48” contiguous states of the US.
The shipment is a momentous event for energy markets, marking the arrival of the US as a gas supplier to the world.
ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f1773832-b5ee-11e5-b147-e5e5bba42e51.html#axzz3wvx2S7Cv
For those who don’t want to subscribe to paid FT services and still want to read the article, a little hint:
1. Copy the title of the article – in that case “Cheniere Energy’s shipment turns US into gas exporter”
2. Paste the title into the Google Search box and hit “Search”
3. When that article comes up in search results, click on it, so FT server knows that you are coming from Google and would allow you to read the article without subscription.
That trick could be applied to other subscription-based news sites, but not to all.
Donald Trump represents the best features of the Bush political axis: emphasis on the major, if not dominant segments of the national electorate, and in international relations reliance on the nation-states and alliances and negotiations with them.
On the other hand, Clinton emphasis orientation on so-called elite, largely cosmopolitan, on transnational corporations and international media, as well as the Supra-National bureaucracy such as the European Union and NATO.
It would be interesting to make a case study on American shale oil and gas industry as a fundamental paradigm shift in the American economical policy – the collapse of usual “for profit” capitalist economy and return of well-forgotten Lincoln-Quincy-Roosevelt “central planning”, especially in the questions of strategic long-term development under the duress of the hot stage of world military-economic confrontation.
What if we are all just missing a big picture here under non-stop propaganda of City-Of-London-controlled mass media, mainstream and alternative alike? What if we are witnessing is not Collapse but a birth of new (or well-forgotten), better economic paradigm?
Finca,
What if it’s just *you*, eh?
I understand your concern about “non-stop propaganda”, but you’ll forgive me if I should reach different conclusions (even though I find your dueling oligarch theory interesting and not altogether preposterous). Winnowing will most certainly come first, and then it’s on to, “Geeze, we’d better try something different this time if we’re talking about survival of the species.” I simply don’t think that being overly optimistic is an appropriate mindset at this point in human history. Realism is not necessarily pessimism to the point of paralysis, in fact, far from it; it’s a call and spur to *appropriate* action.
Shale gas having a last laugh
Data released for 2015 shows that Russian Gazprom is loosing to American shale gas in terms of production.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/TaHQ-pMGnpC4TodbTPt2dNWMhQ4Shd1XykW85LvquzJI0y7ytCDf71_AjoA_msJ3Wp7pTmfAzGyyWX-Lz3Sw04BZyYRpuNn5Vt-IHn70aR7syZwHH-vUtPI0YEBA5jT3Ghq_-4FQ
Orange line on the chart: American shale (in billions of cubic meters per day)
Blue line: Gazprom
In the US, there is an overproduction of natural gas.
Prices fell below the floor.
Storage of natural gas in the United States is at maximum for this time of year
Thus, production growth will stop and will stagnate. A further substantial increase in shale gas production is due to the commissioning of the projects of liquefaction of natural gas for export (2016-2020) in the amount of about 100 billion cubic meters per year. (0.27 Billion cubic meters per day).
If I hadn’t read your other comments here, I’d think you were joking.
First: visit Shale Bubble: http://shalebubble.org/
Then: Google “shale oil depletion” — if you like, limit results to the past year.
Oops. “shale gas depletion” will produce similar results.
Both products come from “tight” formations and the behavior of the wells is similar.
Doug, do you know folks at shalebubble.org? Who are you going to believe, them or your own lying eyes? (or folks at eia.gov, or specialists in Gazprom who published the chart)
http://www.interfax.ru/business/489140
Is that a serious question?
There’s almost nobody I trust less on the subject than manipulators with political guns at their heads. like EIA and Gazprom — well, actually, there are the guys who report the magical KSA reserves . . .
Anyway, your graph brings to mind that famous warning:
“Past Performance Is Not An Indicator Of Future Results”
You really ought to do those Google searches I suggested, and read as many of the articles they return as you can.
That’s really funny, Russian “Patriotic” bloggers every day publish the data about “shale gas depletion” and “massive bankruptcies of shale companies”, American “Collapsniks” sing to the same tune, and the f*cking thing just keeps growing (in terms of real production).
Is there something wrong with this picture?
“Is there something wrong with this picture?”
What’s wrong is that you’re wrong:
= = = = =
Crashing Oil Prices And Dropping Rig Count Take Their Toll On U.S. Output | OilPrice.com
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Crashing-Oil-Prices-And-Dropping-Rig-Count-Take-Their-Toll-On-US-Output.html
[. . .] “I have plotted the key oil producing regions of the Permian, Bakken, Eagle Ford and Niobrara in varying shades of green and even the most optimistic believer in the U.S. shale miracle has to admit the tide has turned. The rig count continues to fall sharply in these plays and that will keep undermining the levels of shale production in months to come.”
= = = = =
You really, really need to do that research I suggested.
Half of US Shale Drillers May Go Bankrupt
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/11/half-of-us-shale-drillers-may-go-bankrupt-oppenheimers-gheit.html
Half of U.S. shale oil producers could go bankrupt before the crude market reaches equilibrium, Fadel Gheit, said Monday.
The senior oil and gas analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. said the “new normal oil price” could be 50 to 100 percent above current levels. He ultimately sees crude prices stabilizing near $60, but it could be more than two years before that happens.
By then it will be too late for many marginal U.S. drillers, who must drill into and break up shale rock to release oil and gas through a process called hydraulic fracturing. Fracking is significantly more expensive than extracting oil from conventional wells.
“Half of the current producers have no legitimate right to be in a business where the price forecast even in a recovery is going to be between, say, $50, $60. They need $70 oil to survive,” he told CNBC’s “Power Lunch.”
“Half of US Shale Drillers May Go Bankrupt” –Doug
Operative word being “May”
Get back to me when the shale oil boom turns out to be bust… because I have been reading about the imminent bust now for years… and it just keeps on booming.
Who are you going to trust? I would say trust reality. Reality will slap you up the side of the head. Since we have felt no such slap… go with the reality that “shale depletion” is not happening.
Jim said: “What interests me in that story is the idea that every single object purchased these days has a UPS journey attached to it”
There’s still no comparison, Jim. The UPS (and Fed Ex) truck is already out there, passing my house most nights. Stopping (and turning off the engine) to drop off a package is a huge saver, both in energy and carbon over my own trip to big box.
It’s the same with transit. Yeah, if I ride the bus, it’s likely a 6 mpg diesel and spews tons of carbon. But it’s already out there anyway, driving the route regardless, every day. If I choose to leave the car home and take the bus, it still nets one less tailpipe.
Personally, with all the evils associated with Amazon, I find it hard to condemn them. As a bike/ped advocate, anything that threatens the existence of big box, strip malls, parking craters, and reduces the volumes of Target shoppers terrorizing our roads is fine with me.
“will keep undermining the levels of shale production in months to come”
“half-of-us-shale-drillers-may-go-bankrupt”
Doug, that’s all forward looking statements, I was pointing out the actual delivered production results.
So far, the production is not slowing down, or even growing. Let’s see what happens in the Q1 of 2016.
It looks like the 5-year plan (2016-2020) on projects of liquefaction of natural gas for export is on track so far, first gas tankers are scheduled to live US,
“I was pointing out the actual delivered production results.”
I think you need to learn the reality that underlies those “actual delivered production results” — but belief perseverance is likely to prevent that from happening.
One more try. Read slowly and carefully and study the charts and graphs.
= = = = =
Special Report: The Coming Bust of the U.S. Shale Oil & Gas Ponzi
http://www.outsiderclub.com/report/the-coming-bust-of-the-us-shale-oil-gas-ponzi/1041
@ Doug:
RE | “Is that a serious question? There’s almost nobody I trust less on the subject than manipulators with political guns at their heads. like EIA and Gazprom — well, actually, there are the guys who report the magical KSA reserves . . .
“-Doug.
Hello Doug! Just read the back-n-forth between you and whoever FitM is. You’re hitting a wall that I repeatedly reach on CFN – one based on stubborn willful ignorance or dogged adherence to sock-puppet SOP.
Either way, it’s a waste of time on day when the Royal Bank of Scotland is advising premium clients to “sell everything” and oil’s forecasted to drop even lower than $20/bbl (ie., under KSA best-case scenario breakeven price).
Here’s the latest analyst to hop aboard the ‘I-told-you-so’ train:
“Given that no fundamental relationship is currently driving the oil market towards any equilibrium, prices are being moved almost entirely by financial flows caused by fluctuations in other asset prices, including the USD and equity markets,” – Paul Horsnell @ Standard Chartered.
All I’m saying is: don’t burn up much time on trying to explain the abundantly obvious to those who have no room for the truth.
Cheers!
Thanks, MD.
I’ll try to restrain myself — but I’m not good at restraint.
Doug,
Just please don’t feel yourself obligated to counter every blast of BS from the resident ‘Baghdad Bobs’. Periodically we launch a punitive expedition & burn them back to their holes, but that’s purely a discretionary, ‘economy-of-force’ mission.
Cheers!
“One more try. Read slowly and carefully and study the charts and graphs.”-Doug.
LOL… I’m not sure that the effect of breakeven prices + NPV on projects past & future has ever dawns on some people.
I’m pretty sure it has dawned on a bunch of drillers in, e.g., the Bakken. ;^)
@ Doug:
Not to mention in Alberta and spreading everywhere else in the sector. ExxonMobil just bailed on their Alaskan offshore oil project – which was a bitch for even them to put together – because the price was at $50/barrel and they forecasted much lower. It’s at $31 today… If that didn’t get through to the high-volume yappers on CFN nothing will.
Oh, just in case you haven’t seen it yet, BP’s is laying off 4k more. That’s how strong the market is.
/S
I’m pretty sure it has dawned on a bunch of drillers in, e.g., the Bakken. ;^)
Since 2005, production of oil from the Bakken formation of North Dakota has increased substantially, and the region now supplies about 1.5% of global oil output.
(part 1 …. to be continued)
MisterDarling – MrZeroHedge in a flesh….
@ FitM:
Hey there! I’m a little flattered – even though I don’t share all of ‘Tyler Durdens’ opinions I do respect him for the work that he (and team?) do. On the other hand, I frequently (mostly) research from other sources, which I frequently post the links to (for reference).
Well, just whenever I read your posts, ZeroHedge comes into mind. Not bad, not good, just saying…
in THE flesh
Mr.Q, stop acting as a spell-checker for a change, put back on your bean-counting hat and do an actual research for us on the status of shale oil and gas production in the US.
I don’t know what you’re talking about, I did not correct your spelling. I spell ‘a’ the same way you do. You must be ‘loosing’ your mind……… and why should I waste my time doing actual research on shale oil and gas production when the results I’d get are so obvious?
“Read slowly and carefully and study the charts and graphs” – doug
Read slowly and carefully…Look at the blinking charts and graphs I’m showing you … You are falling asleep… You are going to believe any bullshit I am about to tell you…
I think you need to learn the reality that underlies those “actual delivered production results” — “belief perseverance is likely to prevent that from happening.” –Doug
Doug, please do not insult our intelligence. This is not a question of “belief” … Either we will have energy or we don’t. Your belief is that we won’t, because oil is finite, but reality says otherwise. Because oil is no longer king.
JHK for years wrote about peak oil, as if oil was the most precious substance in the universe. U.S. oil production did peak in the 1970s and sank for decades after, exactly as Hubbert’s theory predicted. But then it did something the theory didn’t predict: It started rising again in 2009, and hasn’t stopped, thanks to a leap forward in oil-field technology. Hubbert’s model may work well under the assumption that everything else other than currently proven reserves remains equal, but of course in real life they never do.
Believe me, Doug, I wish you were right. I wish we would stop investing in fossil fuel extraction and increase investment in alternatives that do not threaten our future. I’ve been wishing that for the last 25 years. But the reality is otherwise. And wishing won’t change it, nor will your belief perserverance.
In many ways CFN’s belief perserverance reminds me of born-again Christians preaching the end is near.
The Christian version says just because Jesus has not come, doesn’t mean he is not coming… sooner rather than later… and no one will survive, except for the true believers.
The CFN version goes like this: “Things work… until they don’t” with the underlying belief being that we are headed for a fall and no one is prepared (except for maybe a few true believers/preppers)
I’m pretty sure it has dawned on a bunch of drillers in, e.g., the Bakken. ;^) –Doug
part 2
Engineering-based assessments of the energy intensity of Bakken crude oil production relative to the NER (net energy return) from Bakken hydrocarbon production indicate that median energy consumption equals about 3.4% of net crude and gas energy content, while mean energy consumption equals about 3.9% of hydrocarbon energy.
The combination of horizontal drilling and multi-stage hydraulic fracturing have boosted the oil production from Bakken tight oil reservoirs. However, the primary oil recovery factor is very low due to the extremely tight formation, resulting in substantial volumes of oil still remaining in place. Hence, Finca’s suggestion of the potential of applying enhanced oil recovery methods to increase oil recovery in the Bakken formation, such as carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), which is widely used in conventional reservoirs to improve oil recovery, and could be used in the Bakken formation.
Behind Obama there are people who understand that the United States paid for the “victory” in the Cold War with a cancerous tumor of the economy. It turned out that the socialist system served if not as immune system, but a least as a limiting factor of growth of this cancer. Even many uneducated Americans realized that after the collapse of the Soviet Union the printing press went into overdrive and began to churn out dollars with ever increasing speed. And the American people had no option not only to stop this machine, but even to reduce its speed.
This is one of the obvious symptoms of malignant tumor in the economy, the only result of which could be destruction of the financial system and death of the real economy.
Obama said that the US faces a choice: either reindustrialization and isolationism, or globalization and war, war, war to maintain the dollar afloat and ensure US with resources to maintain the status of sole superpower in the world. Which guaranteed the same end, but in conjunction with hatred of all those whom the United States decided to bomb in the transition period.
Obama said that the US can not give up the role of the leader, sought the development of “green” and energy-saving technologies, electrification, “hybridization” and simple expansion of public transport, the introduction of new methods of energy production such as shale oil and gas, etc. etc. And the most important thing is the tax incentives and direct investment in the construction of a new generation of industrial production in the continental United States.
Even his medical reform aims to redirect it from sole concentration on the treatment of cancer patients to the maintenance of a skilled workforce in a healthy shape.
And if he succeeds, and the dollar will cease to be accepted as means of payment outside the US, its economy will not collapse. Will introduce Amero and that’s it, the rest of the world can do with their dollars whatever they want.
Paradoxically, this vision affects investors around the world so that the inevitable collapse of the dollar pyramid keeps being postponed into the indefinite future. Moreover next to it there is a big question mark, because in a capitalist economy time and inflation are Siamese twins, and there is good reason to believe that along with a bunch of unsecured dollars will be burned the malignant tumor of the economy.
“I’m pretty sure it has dawned on a bunch of drillers in, e.g., the Bakken. ;^) –Doug
As Finca indicated, CO 2 diffusion plays a significant role in improving oil recovery from tight oil reservoirs, which cannot be neglected. Additionally, the tight oil formation with lower permeability, longer fracture half-length, and more heterogeneity is more favorable for the CO 2 huff-n-puff process and the effectiveness of CO 2 injection for enhanced oil recovery in the Bakken formation.
You blew off Finca with a “belief perserverance” comment. Unfortunately for you, for Hubbert, and ultimately for all of us, the industry is adapting and innovating, and will get the tight oil out, even at $30 a barrel. If they believe it can be done, they will do it, even at $20 a barrel. Damn belief perserverance!
“Unfortunately for you, for Hubbert, and ultimately for all of us, the industry is adapting and innovating, and will get the tight oil out, even at $30 a barrel. If they believe it can be done, they will do it, even at $20 a barrel.”
Yeah? When will they do it? Why aren’t they doing it now instead of idling all those rigs and sending the lackeys home and the local economies into depression?
And which Wall Street geniuses are bright enough to convince their bosses that funding this new magic is a great idea with oil at $30 and headed to $20? Maybe a new derivatives approach . . .
= = = = =
Oil price plunge curbs capital raising
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1a78932e-b546-11e5-b147-e5e5bba42e51.html#axzz3x4LXyH9E
Financing for US independent oil companies slowed sharply last year, in a sign of growing financial pressure following the plunge in crude and natural gas prices.
US exploration and production companies raised just $3.26bn from equity sales in the second half of last year, down from $14.6bn in the first half, according to Dealogic, the information service.
The companies, which led the US shale oil and gas boom over the past decade, also raised $4.57bn from issuing bonds from July to December, down from $23.9bn in the first half.
More at source (Financial Times)
= = = = =
Now, I’m bored.
Doug, I keep telling you – forget the “capitalist” economy, they’ll keep producing the oil and gas even at a loss (not forever, obviously) and US will find money to bridge them over.
The overproduction of money is the problem, not overproduction of oil or gas.
“BP’s is laying off 4k more. That’s how strong the market is. /S” –MD
NEWS FLASH: Despite declaring profits of nearly £ 9 billion, BP has said it is cutting 5,000 jobs world-wide.
Mr. Darling, get a grip. We have quite enough drama queens on CFN.
The NEWS FLASH above is from February… that is, February of 2008.
Here is another news flash for you: layoffs and downsizing are regular features of capitalist enterprises as markets go up and down. In other words, BP layoff off 4k is not unprecedented and does not provide evidence for “how strong the market” is.
BP cuts 4,000 jobs in face of falling oil prices
6 hours ago
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35289771
No shipping at all? Could this be?
https://www.dollarvigilante.com/blog/2016/01/11/shipping-said-to-have-ceased-is-the-worldwide-economy-grinding-to-a-halt.html
That spooky story is going over the Net for at least a month. On one of the sites I found explanation:
Indeed, the picture is terrible … with regard to blatant ignorance of those who wrote it
How are vessel positions recorded?
The system is based on AIS (Automatic Identification System). As from December 2004, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) requires all vessels over 299GT to carry an AIS transponder on board, which transmits their position, speed and course, among some other static information, such as vessel’s name, dimensions and voyage details.
What is AIS?
“Normally, vessels with an AIS receiver connected to an external antenna placed on 15 meters above sea level, will receive AIS information within a range of 15-20 nautical miles. Base stations at a higher elevation, may extend the range up to 40-60 NM, even behind remote mountains, depending on elevation, antenna type, obstacles around antenna and weather conditions. The most important factor for better reception is the elevation of the base station antenna. The higher, the better. We have seen vessels 200 NM away, with a small portable antenna placed on an island mountain on 700 meters altitude! Our base stations cover fully a range of 40 miles and periodically receive information from some more distant vessels.”
Well if the map is based on AIS signals it will only show activity close to shore… but the English channel is covered and you can see and identify the shipping through there in bound and outbound… So if a ship is appearing moving west through the English Channel and then 15 days later it appears in Newark… it likely (maybe?) sailed across the north Atlantic!
But there are also satellite trackers… which the map likely does not show.
Weird story!
Thanks, Finca, you beat me to it.
Next we’ll hear more dire predictions from MD based on the Baltic Dry index. This is what happens when people believe what they read on the internet and get their “news” from sources like ZeroHedge.
Nothing is Moving, Baltic Dry Crashes As Insiders Warn Commerce Has Come To a Halt –Zero Hedge
Completely false. But that is what Zero Hedge wants to believe, so that’s the “news” it publishes. Damn belief perserverance can give you a distorted picture of reality.
“No shipping at all? Could this be?” == Sandero
That is exactly what I am talking about. Somebody found a scary picture on the Internet, and now peddling that “collapse” story all over.
And what are we to believe? Does anybody have time or habit to do an actual highly technical research?
That virtual reality paradigm over the Internet and TV starts to freak me out.
“Yeah? When will they do it? Why aren’t they doing it now…” –Doug
The answer to those questions was contained in my post, which you obviously did not read carefully. Conditional sentences are statements discussing known factors and their consequences. These sentences use conditional construction and verb forms, which is called the conditional mood. Complete conditional sentences contain a conditional clause and the consequence.
Consider the following sentence:
“If a certain condition is true, then a particular result happens.”
=====================
Now I’m bored.”
Yes, that often happens with true believers. When you believe that you are saved (Christians) or that you are doomed (CFN), then the thrill is gone. Damn belief perserverance strikes again.
Aww, English lessons. How sweet.
So, reinterpreting your assertion with an emphasis on the “ifs”:
“If they believe they can make money at $30/bbl, they will do it, but they aren’t doing it right now, because they *don’t* believe it, yet, although they *could* believe it at some point in the future, *if* a mostly-untried (in the real world) technology actually allows the economic extraction of vastly larger percentages of already-expensive oil locked in tight formation.
So, that’s a maybe. What percentage of your investment portfolio would you like to bet on it?
What was that book Jim wrote? Oh, yeah: Too Much Magic
Too much magic? Like the “magic” that destroyed Hubbert’s peak oil bell curve?
Actually, light sweet crude (the good stuff) peaked a decade or so ago. But our society still desperately needs liquid sources of energy, and so more and more resources are used to extract it.
The result is that now, out of 90,000,000 barrels per day, about 20% is stuff like alcohol and gas condensate, which has lower energy density. Of the remaining 80%, more and more is medium, heavy, or bitumen, also with lower energy density.
Since
1. the energy content is getting lower and lower,
2. energy cost of getting energy is getting higher and higher (tar sands, deep water, fracking),
3. the environmental cost is getting higher and higher (fracking uses a lot of water, tar sands work may be polluting the McKenzie, Deep Water Horizon), and
4. the risk is getting higher and higher (especially of pollution),
it follows that looking only at distorted numbers like dollar cost and crude plus liquids, is a bit naive.
No shipping at all? Could this be? – Sandero
==============
Of course not, that’s absurd, but…………..
A picture is worth a thousand words: $32 to a buck in 2 years.
http://www.otcmarkets.com/stock/ISHC/chart
Wasn’t the world supposed to end last week? Or the market collapse? At 2:58 pm on Jan. 8, or some such?
What happened? And why is the market stable? Why is the DJIA up? Why is the S&P 500 up? Why is there so much love in the world? Why is NASDAQ up? Where is our promised apocalypse?
Thousands of Canadians of all races are streaming over the porous northern United States border. Some of those crossing the border could be terrorists, some say they are “visitors” but could just decide to stay and apply for welfare, some say there are crossing the border to buy lottery tickets in advance of Wednesday’s record Powerball drawing. When will this invasion by foreigners stop? /sarcasm off
President Obama is set to give a State of the Union speech unlike any in the history of the United States, giving guidance for the next Democratic president for the next eight years. This is a great country. Always has been. Still is. Trump has it all wrong using the word “again”
The situation with the oil price as explained by a popular Russian blogger – WARNING, it’s a bit emotional, some adult language used:
“I am sincerely surprised by forecasts of the leading economists in the government that the oil is not expected to fall below 30 dollars a barrel, citing the fact that the extraction of shale oil in the States becomes uneconomic. Dumbasses! Let me explain something to you, idiots … There is a war going between us, and they can lower the oil to 0 (zero) f*cking dollars per barrel (for the idiots – they’ll give it the f*ck away). For the dummies: the companies that submit to the will of the Washington and suffer serious losses, they with a few keystrokes could increase their bank accounts in the amount of incurred losses, can even stick a profit for a good measure. Cabish, you morons? This situation will continue as long as we will not repeat 1991. I hope I explained to you, motherf*ckers, now you can go to Kolyma and screw yourself in the snow…”
Cavepainter writes:
“Western Culture has been the most successful in history for having emerged as the most secular; having through 2000+ years inculcated the scientific process, reaching the fullest of objectivism as applied to governance via the Enlightenment.
Surrendering such progress in the name (sic) of ‘diversity’ is making a travesty of the term ‘humanism’. Because of our culture having been embued with a more empirical grasp of ‘reality’ religious denominations in the West aren’t making cerimony of slitting one anothers’ throats as is happening in more backward cultures which we are now being admonished to absorb as ‘equals’.”
Excellent post Cavepainter. But I wonder why PC dogma insists that ‘all peoples should be equal’? Of course, inequality also implies abuse and subjugation. But on the other hand, superiority can also spur ‘the lesser’ on to greater heights. In fact, I would argue that’s how human beings are innately wired: By emulating superiors as in the small boy emulating his father. And how ridiculous would it be, to insist that a young boy is equal to his father?
But back to the ‘other hand’. Unfortunately, how can one argue for a group to willingly accept inferiority status and humbly embrace the culture superiority of others when that very status has historically translated to repression and abuse?
We read that very refrain constantly here on CFN: ‘Those people’ are low IQ stock and culturally deficient.’ As opposed to ” our culture leading by example and naturally inspiring others’. And oh by the way, giving those who do succeed in emulating the best of ‘Western Culture’ a metaphorical pat on the ass instead of continually emphasizing the ‘culturally deficient theory’. After all, a kind, honorable and effective father cultivates and nurtures his son with love and encouragement. If the plant is to grow, it needs water as opposed to denigration and denial.
But I’m afraid the two opposite ends have convoluted the rope into a twisted, historical mess. To enable historical circumstances to unwind would require the collective human ego to release its diabolical grip and that simply ain’t happening–in the past, present or future. But just because it’s hopeless on the macro human level doesn’t mean I have to embrace the bullshit of the ego- maniacal racists who continue to play a huge role in ‘twisting the rope’ of humanity.
But the little White boy can grow to become like his father. The Black can never become like the White, not until the Spirit moves over the Waters and the Black Race undergoes a mutation or evolutionary leap. If ever. In other words, it’s out of our hands. And as a humanist (some weeks), that burns you.
Fodase, you write, “fucking leftists deserve to rot in jail for this crime against women”.
Like all f-ing rightwingnuts deserve to rot in jail for Sandy Hook?
Yes, you are correct. People who obtain guns legally, under the law and typically with background checks and waiting periods, are responsible for a crazed nitwit on anti-depressants grabbing a gun and killing people.
As if this wouldn’t have happened even if gun acquisitions were illegal. Just like no more crime would happen if buying guns were made illegal.
Leftist governments do not allow migrants to be arrested, suffocate all news of their raping epidemic, forbid sufficient policing of raping migrants, arrest people for speaking out against raping migrants, blame women for being raped by muslim filth. All to keep themselves in power.
Thanks for pointing out that equivalency of these two things.
Took the bait, did you, F?
Happy to, “point(ing) out that equivalency of these two things.”
As you now can see, a more careful analysis is required if you want to be remotely correct. If you are going to apply a more careful analysis to one side (the right), you have to do the same for the left. Or else, you sound like …
The rest is homework.
The Republican response to Obama is being given by Nimrata Randhawa Haley, Republican governor of South Carolina, and she is blaming Republicans for the loss of public trust, the war on women, and persecution of immigrants. She makes a good point: if the Republicans don’t change they have lost huge demographics.
Republicans for Bernie
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-lifelong-conservatives-who-love-bernie-sanders/417441/
@ Doug:
RE | “Now, I’m bored.”
Well, bless your heart for ‘fighting the good fight’. At this point I just try to stay focused on productive conversations. Consider the latest set of data-points;
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-12/gundlach-power-as-oracle-faces-test-after-nailing-oil-junk-debt
1) Oil’s under $30/bbl as of today and 2) it hasn’t been there since 2003 – which was the trough after the Tech Bubble (which seems so rinky-dink at this point).
I see this as significant. The bubble-blowing role of The Fed made buying the dips in 2003-4 and 2009 an easy move. It’ll be interesting to see how that same crowd fares when they buy this time around, expecting it to bounce back to $100/bbl.
The thing I find amusing about all of this is how disconnected these nitwits are from reality. They’re expecting that there’ll be something to bounce back _to_ when the last two rebounds were accomplished on the fumes of 1) Mortgage Equity Withdrawals the first time, and 2) MASSIVE central bank intervention the second.
At this point I kind want them to give it a shot and see what happens!
Cheers!
😉
Thanks, MD, for admitting your pessimism. Thanks for admitting your inability to see how we get out of the current predicament.
Since you incorrectly called the last two successful maneuvers, it is not unexpected that you fail to forsee the way out now.
Sit back and watch, and prepare to be amazed.
“Thanks for admitting your inability to see how we get out of the current predicament.”
Believing that there *are* ways out of all predicaments is a symptom of that “genetic optimism” I spoke of earlier. It isn’t true: Sometimes the bear eats you.
I know that people walking through life in the cultural trance of classical economics just *can’t* accept or understand this; to do so would be to undermine the very foundations of their world.
One of my very favorite doom-sayers, Jay Hanson, probably summed it up most succinctly:
“The Earth is a closed system; it contains a finite amount of stuff.”
Now, it’s true that Jay leaves insolation out of his little mantra, but that doesn’t mean there’s much excuse for hope: we already appropriate and/or seriously impact an astonishing (and big-time scary) percentage of the biosphere’s net primary production:
= = = = =
Global human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP)
http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/153031/
Introduction
Humanity’s impact on the biosphere’s structures (e.g., land cover) and functioning (e.g., biogeochemical cycles) is considerable. It exceeds natural variability in many cases. Sanderson and others have classified up to 83% of the global terrestrial biosphere as being under direct human influence, based on geographic proxies such as human population density, settlements, roads, agriculture and the like; another study, by Hannah et al., estimates that about 36% of the Earth’s bioproductive surface is “entirely dominated by man”.
HANPP, the “human appropriation of net primary production,” is an aggregated indicator that reflects both the amount of area used by humans and the intensity of land use. NPP is the net amount of biomass produced each year by plants; it is a major indicator for trophic energy flows in ecosystems. HANPP measures to what extent land conversion and biomass harvest alter the availability of NPP (biomass) in ecosystems. It is a prominent measure of the “scale” of human activities compared to natural processes (i.e. of the “physical size of the economy relative to the containing ecosystem;” Daly, 2006). As human harvest of biomass is a major component of HANPP, it is also closely related to socio-economic metabolism as measured by material flow accounts.
Much more at source.
“At this point I kind want them to give it a shot and see what happens!”
Yup!
What else can we do with people who think that manipulative financial schemes can produce a cornucopia of energy from the most inaccessible places and formations.
Attention, optimists: No matter how much money you print, or what incentives you devise, when it takes more energy to lift the “bucket of energy” from its well than you can pour from that bucket when you’ve retrieved it, YOU WILL STOP, because there is no other choice.
Doug,
I’m sure you realize that smoking the hopium pipe that wpasoka persistently and pestiferously offers leads to a paralysis of action and is a disincentive to *Discovery*. That is specifically by design and why I find it so distasteful and dangerous. Propaganda of the very worst sort: “Let Big Daddy take care of it for you, and if you believe correctly we’ll allow you lifetime access to powdered unicorn horn.”
Conversely, when the Potemkin facade finally rots away, large lessons in trust and reasonable suspicion (and the basis and reasons for them) are learned out of necessity. Knowledge gained in the school of hard knocks is the most illustrative and lasting.
CBS/NYT poll shows Bernie Sanders approaching a statistical tie with Hillary NATIONALLY. Bernie started at 2% and is now leading beating Hillary in Iowa and New Hampshire and soon… NATIONALLY. Bernie also defeats any of the Republican candidates easily, including Trump.
wpa_ccc: (Posted at 7:36 pm today)
President Obama is set to give a State of the Union speech unlike any in the history of the United States, giving guidance for the next Democratic president for the next eight years. This is a great country. Always has been. Still is. Trump has it all wrong using the word “again”
Montage: 140 Unfulfilled Obama Promises from Past State of the Union Addresses:
https://grabien.com/file.php?id=72235&searchorder=date
Sticks-of-TNT
Promises Obama Kept
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/rulings/promise-kept/
*This was published Monday at MarketWatch.com:
J.P. Morgan Chase has turned its back on the stock market: For the first time in seven years, the investment bank is urging investors to sell stocks on any bounce. “Our view is that the risk-reward for equities has worsened materially. In contrast to the past seven years, when we advocated using the dips as buying opportunities, we believe the regime has transitioned to one of selling any rally,” Mislav Matejka, an equity strategist at J.P. Morgan, said in a report.
Aside from technical indicators, expectations of anemic corporate earnings combined with the downward trajectory in U.S. manufacturing activity and a continued weakness in commodities are raising red flags.
“We fear that the incoming fourth-quarter reporting season won’t be able to provide much reassurance for stocks,” he said.
Expectations for earnings are so bearish that the hurdle rate–the minimum rate of return on an investment that makes it worth the risk–for fourth-quarter results is now minus 4%, compared with plus 5% several months earlier.
“If this were to materialize, it would be the weakest quarter for EPS delivery so far in the upcycle,” said Matejka.
Further adding to the grim outlook is the slowdown in the manufacturing sector, which pushed J.P. Morgan’s profit-margin proxy — the gap between pricing power and the wage costs — into negative territory in the fourth quarter, for the first time since 2008.
The Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing index, released last week, dipped to 48.2% in December from 48.6% in November, the lowest since the Great Recession.
The positive correlation between oil prices and earnings on top of the sustained gains in the U.S. dollar — which has an inverse correlation to results — will also weigh on the market, he added.
*Full Story At:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bearish-jp-morgan-says-sell-stocks-on-any-bounce-2016-01-11?dist=afterbell
Forget the bounce. Sell now.
Sticks-of-TNT
@ Sticks:
“Forget the bounce. Sell now.”-s.
Nice post. I saw that little info-ditty this morning but I’m glad you’ve presented and elaborated. It really is hoot watching these goofballs wheel out arguments based on data that the rest of us stopped trusting 15 years ago – as much to try to convince themselves as confuse everyone else.
We’re at a pretty interesting juncture: what was ‘only a matter of time 2 years ago is happening before our eyes now – while the Baghdad Bobs out there adamantly deny it all.
Some of us are very familiar with this general scenario, but that doesn’t make it any less weird. There’s something about it that speaks to the very nature of Life, Choices, Ethics and the limits of any human’s power of volition. I find myself creating allegorical vignettes to keep things in perspective:
1. You’re going to meet a guy with a house in the hills – someone you know from ‘way back’. Things have been going his way lately, he’s feeling flush, so he invited you to one of his “get-togethers”. ‘Word around the campfire’ is that he throws some pretty interesting parties, so you say ‘what the hell’, figure you’ll arrive and leave early and keep things simple.
There are a few people there when you arrive, you chat with this guy for a minute, grab a drink and head out to the back deck to enjoy a smoke – making very sure to sealed the double-paned deck doors to keep the smoke out of the house.
A few drags later you hear some gunshots from somewhere nearby, you figure that it must be crazy neighbors or someone’s gigantic home theater, and you finish your cigarette.
When you slide the doors open you hear the music but you smell the cordite – you’re on high alert (no choice). You find your old acquaintance standing alone in the living room – babbling like a crazy person. His eyes are dilated, forehead waxy-pale and he’s cold-sweating so you dart over and check the back of his head.
“You need an ambulance” you say.
He tries to argue with you so you grab him by the collar and show him the bullet-hole in the back of his head reflected in the mirror-work on the mantelpiece. His eyes are still blank, he’s still arguing, your message is not getting through…
So what can you do? You sit him down on the couch, dial 9-1-1 on his phone, set it down, give his shoulder a pat for old time’s sake (shoot, you don’t hate the guy), you wipe everything you touched and get out before things get complicated.
Wow! That was a quick party.
2. You’re driving in the woods real slow (so you don’t ram a herd of deer) when you hear a bunch of howling & garbled gobbled-gook coming from the a mining tunnel. You wonder “w-t-f”?, pull over, grab a couple things and go check it out.
You are met at the mouth of the tunnel (“condemned”.. “no trespassing” signs etc.) by a pack of whacky-looking trolls.
“Can I help you?” you ask, as they belch their Troll-Speak at you. It takes a minute but you realize that they want you to join them in their lair. You explain why that doesn’t seem like a good idea, ask if there are any children present, and strike a road flare to get a better look at what the hell is going on behind them.
This sends them into a rage – it is *Light* after all, and they hate that – so they start flailing their arms and advancing, attempting to menace you.
You’ve had enough of this noise (literally) turn about while giving the flare a hearty flip over your shoulder and head back to the car. Well, the flare sets off the moonshine vapor and that sets off the messy meth-lab inside the mine.
You hear explosions, some prolonged wailing and a few cut-short screams as you pull back onto the road, but by then you’re fascinated by the dramatic chiaroscuro created by the tall trees, long-shadows and pale late-afternoon sunlight.
Cheers!
Excellent! You might be able to give Buck some competition in the creative writing department. -Sticks
“You might be able to give Buck some competition in the creative writing department”-s.
LOL! I doubt that… 😉 I write a decent 1-page memo though, so there’s that.
I chuckled at your mention of Baghdad Bob in recent posts. I had completely forgotten about that goof. He was the poster boy for reality denier. I wonder what became of him? Thanks for the memories! -Sticks
“earnings are so bearish that the hurdle rate–the minimum rate of return on an investment that makes it worth the risk–for fourth-quarter results is now minus 4%”
This is what I have been telling nsa and Q for a while now: I can make more money with a guaranteed 2% interest in a credit union account than they can with losses in the 2015 stock market.
Case in point: UUP, the “dollar express” stock nsa recommended weeks ago that has remained in negative territory (-2%) since nsa recommended it.
This is a test.
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/discovery/#comment-257966
Forget the bounce. Sell now. – Sticks
============
I MAY have gotten the ultimate BUY Signal today. Everybody and his brother’s uncle is saying SELL!!!
When the crowd on one side of the boat grows too large, contrarianism kicks in. But how large is TOO large?
Well, today my daughter, who knows less than nothing about the stock market, and who spends her free time reading People and US Magazines and drooling over on-line shoe ads, emailed me to ask if I was heeding RBS’s advice to “Sell Everthing!!!!!!”
Follow your heart, Q…
😉
Cheers!
If you are right-wing enough, white enough, and armed enough, you can literally get away with anything.
If you are Black… even if you are a Black police officer… things are different:
“Reuters interviewed 25 African American male officers on the NYPD, 15 of whom are retired and 10 of whom are still serving. All but one said that, when off-duty and out of uniform, they had been victims of racial profiling, which refers to ‘using race or ethnicity as grounds for suspecting someone of having committed a crime’.
The officers said this included being pulled over for no reason, having their heads slammed against their cars, getting guns brandished in their faces, being thrown into prison vans and experiencing stop and frisks while shopping. The majority of the officers said they had been pulled over multiple times while driving. Five had guns pulled on them.”
Why the world needs supercomputers
Even many professional developers of software and hardware will not be able to tell you what the importance of supercomputers is. In today’s world, in the age of pervasive Internet, huge halls full of stands dedicated to the processing of complex computing tasks seem the romantic past of the beginning of the 1960s-70s era.
After all, today the resources of even a single personal computer’s enough to solve many complex problems, and commercially available servers allow serving the needs of huge companies.
But in fact, supercomputers are the only thing that gives today seven billion humanity a chance to continue to develop and live without fear of Malthusian curse.
All the advanced problems can be solved only with the help of very large computing power and a supercomputer where all the components of computer technology are optimized is the most appropriate tool for solving these problems.
Moreover, the direct computer simulation can be interpreted as a third of the scientific method in the appendage to the theoretical and experimental research. Let’s take a look at several examples.
Oil
It has long been almost impossible to find oil without powerful super computers.
Aviation
In designing of new airplanes computer simulation have reduced the number of physical tests in the wind tunnel from 77 in 1979 to 11 in 1995 and since then the value remains at the same level.
In some ways, because of this, our aircraft have remained roughly the same that it used to be. The transition to a fundamentally more accurate computer simulation on the basis of direct application of Navier-Stokes equations requires computing power of 50 exaflops, which is 1000 times greater than that of a modern leader – Chinese Tianhe 2 of 33 petaflops. If the calculation of external aerodynamics is still relatively simple – but, for example, a typical motor consists of thousands of moving parts, and simulation of internal streams require even higher computational power.
Thermonuclear energy
In the field of fusion physics designing of the next generation of tokamaks is impossible without progress in the modeling of high-temperature plasma in a magnetic trap. Already the models involve several billions particles that are positioned in space with a resolution of 131 million pixels. For such scale uses the most powerful systems on the order of petaflops and obtained good results, but it is clear that sufficient accuracy for complete simulation we need to increase computing power by a “modest” 13 million times.
Climate and weather
Today forecast for 4 days is as accurate as in 1980 for one day.
Climate modeling and accurate weather prediction allows optimal plan for our actions – forecast accuracy increases with the performance growth of supercomputers. In the future it will be possible to predict the heavy rains and, accordingly, floods and landslides, droughts and crop failures.
Increasingly accurate predictions require a more detailed model of planetary scale and need a constant decrease in cell size simulation. Currently cell models for short-term regional projections have dimensions 10×10 km, and long-term climatic models utilize netting having hundreds of km, while the required scale of 1×1 km surface (10,000 times larger than at present) and 100 meters vertically.
Medicine and Biology
Medicine is no exception. Today, high-end supercomputers are able to simulate only small parts of the cells.
There are billions of molecules in a human cell, and the cells themselves – almost quadrillion. The process of designing new drugs and getting them to the market takes 5-15 years and now there is talk of new concepts in drug design.
Just imagine how you can speed up the process and improve the effectiveness of drugs if to simulate a complex situation – from the DNA of the pathogen and ending with a model of the human body based on individual genetic characteristics.
http://mirvn.livejournal.com/
The Chinese cyber-troops remove “back doors” from the Intel Xeon processor:
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/qYxO2vX6VK3oj9IPL-UQeUwIePV5H2NU2vTFkNTvgH7JSAzj2FdZSS3IDEnH6swnh0QU252khmCSkBtYm29HFFLi6HDJrPT69cqPT9AvX3PsMG14sABjXPJCzEvsfTlYG1cl4mOh
Supercomputers. Review of the world situation.
At the moment, the top 500 supercomputers is 418 petaflops of computing power, the table below shows the distribution by country. Despite the fact that the most powerful computer (Tyanhe-2) is in China, the US leads with nearly double margin on the total supercomputing power.
USA – 65.4%
China – 22.2%
Japan – 4.4%
France – 3.8%
Russia – 1.2%
Germany – 1.0%
Holland – o.6%
Poland – 0.4%
India – 0.2%
Australia – 0.2%
Brazil – 0.2%
Switzerland – 0.2%
Italy – 0.2%
But in fact the gap even more than it seems at first glance. If we are talking about “Chinese supercomputer,” “Russian supercomputer”, what do they mean when they say it?
You can talk about where it is located geographically, and this gives the picture above. You can talk about where the organization is located that designed it; you can talk about the country of chip designers … These gradations allow to understand more about the disposition of forces. In the list of the top 500 there are thirty countries that have supercomputers, but there are only a dozen countries that could design them.
And there are only two and a half countries that can boast that they produce their chips for supercomputers. American manufacturers here almost completely dominate the field, only 5% of the total computing power fall on Japanese companies and purely nominally China is present:
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/q76pj_BMqzwK07V9FonGd9ZXYkxp-xjeIlUqkNtz4ablJcZ6v40wZmLq5tzp4UkbIS82CRYwz58JESoF7vcOF3aQKOH_mtOZYFu-rw0KRaAvC1FSnp-JGYhWpmaDLnF75dHP_UA9
This means that more than 95% of supercomputers are made on the basis of the American chips, and that in any competition on the computing power the United States and its allies will have a very strong strategic advantage over others. And any attempt to beat them at their own game using their own chips will lead to nothing.
http://mirvn.livejournal.com/68228.html
http://www.dailystormer.com/blond-queen-ann-shuts-down-evil-paki-nikki-haley-says-trump-should-deport-her/
Republicans are for infinity brown immigration and then wonder why Trump is so popular.
Trump: Hillary has been having a laugh at our expense for years
Trump Ad Features Hillary’s Laughing Head Superimposed over Ruins of Benghazi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ysxhUebD1g
Trump’s new political advertising that is likely to bring him another 10 points and will eventually lead him to the White House.
“Trump’s new political advertising that is likely to bring him another 10 points and will eventually lead him to the White House.”
Maybe, but his lead has been steadily shrinking recently in the early caucuses and polls. And I’d almost be willing to bet that the Republican National Committee has been planning for a long time how to derail him, no matter what happens in the early contests.
And then there are the infinitely flexible convention rules. With apologies to Stalin: “The people who decide the degree to which primary success applies to nomination determine everything.”
Finally, if he breaks away and runs as an independent, any Democratic nominee will just coast into the Oval Office.
Well, there is an opinion that Trump can take even more Democratic votes than Republican – and all votes of Obama’s Democrats.
You claim to be for localism, yet you still favor mass immigration. Does that make any sense, Doug? That’s the kind of thing Stalin did to weaken the societies of the Soviet Union. Ancient Empires like the Assyrian and Persian did similar things. How did it come to be part of modern Liberalism? Modern Liberals are so deluded that they think it’s a good thing and not State Malice.
You’re digging our grave, Doug.
“You claim to be for localism, yet you still favor mass immigration.”
Did I say that, ever? Where?
I do think that when we spend decades — nearly a century in the case of the former Ottoman Empire — fucking things up beyond belief for our own 0.1%’s greedy and power-mad purposes, killing and displacing millions and making life unbearable hell for others, we have a moral obligation to help clean up the mess — and sometimes that will mean finding humane ways for dealing with the refugees we so regularly create.
Reading comprehension: important. Otherwise, you just end up misunderstanding and responding with your favorite memorized arguments, relevant or not.
When I was a kid, many little girls (we were comfortable with societally-imposed gender identity then) had one of these little dolls called Chatty Cathy — the child pulled a string protruding from “her” stomach and “she” “spoke” one of a limited number of pre-recorded phrases.
Most little girls quickly learned all the possible responses and grew tired of pulling the string.
Who gave the Ottomans the right to rule the Arabs? Think they liked being ruled? Ever watch Laurence of Arabia? The real life Laurence felt ashamed Britain favored the Wahabbis over more moderate elements.
Ever hear about how the Turkish Emperor behaved when he took Constantinople? How he ordered Lucas Notares, the son of a high official, to become his catamite. The Father refused. The family was slaughtered.
Did the Turks stop there? Or did they spread their reign of murder and rape into the heart of Europe? Go to site Gates of Vienna to find out. The name is a clue, clueless one.
“Who gave the Ottomans the right to rule the Arabs?”
It’s not who, it’s what. And the answer is: hunger for empire and superior military power.
And if you ask what gave the West the”right” to break up and rule the ME (and some of central and much of south Asia, etc.), the answer is the same.
Apparently, in your world, x number of wrongs justify y number of retaliatory wrongs, which in turn . . .
If those are the rules we’re playing by, I can think of dozens of people I could justifiably kill and confiscate their property. If we want something like civilization (not that we’re going to be able to maintain much of it for a lot longer), we have to play by other rules.
And I don’t need you to lecture me on Ottoman history, I keep Jason Goodman nearby for that. He’s not only better at it, he’s a better writer.
But, obviously Obama’s campaign came up with a much better ad, which, I think, put Obama into the White House in 2008.
Kennedys must have better PR people than Trump.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5ayK694PZI
The coming elections are about the two views of the future of US:
Reindustrialization and isolationism, or globalization and war, war, war to maintain the dollar afloat.
We know which part of equation represents Trump and which Hillary.
“10 million more refugees on the way.”
–Gurd Miller, German Economic Minister
Doors wide open, folks, come on in!
brh
I don’t think that Europe could take more than 2 – 3 million more ME refugees without disintegrating into civil war chaos.
So, most likely that is not going to happen, otherwise Russia would be in big trouble – imagine all that modern French and German weaponry including nuclear weapons in the hands of passionate Wahhabits.
Then Russia will have to build a wall on its Western border.
Walls don’t worked too good. The Maginot Line was a complete failure.
brh
The Maginot Line was a complete failure because of the betrayal of the French generals, majority of whom were secret Nazi admirers, just like significant portion of Wall Street elite, against whom Roosevelt used “Trading With Enemy Act”.
Kind of similar situation we have today, just replace Nazi with Wahhabis.
Finc,
Please show some grace as victor over vanquished… the German General Staff, and the Wehrmacht defeated the Maginot line…If France was betrayed, it would not have made more palatable the defeat, nor hastened the demise of the French military and state.
How many Wall Street executives are dreaming to star in ISIS beheading movies in black rope with a big knife in hand?
Yes, and who would have thought all that has been learned from research re human behavior — cultural inculcation effect on self-concept formation (personal identity) and subsequent behavioral patterns — would be tossed aside in favor of a Disney-ized fantasy view of human behavior? Yep, rather than face the grim, predictable outcome of admitting all those ‘refugees’ from backgrounds yet more attuned to the 9th Century than to the Western Enlightenment, we here in the Western World choose to dance along in chorus with John Lennon’s fancifully un-realistic lyrics to “Imagine”.
Oh yes, let’s embrace to death the PC dictum that preaches there are no significant contentious differences between cultures.
“the PC dictum that preaches there are no significant contentious differences between cultures.” –cavepainter
That was old PC. New PC does not deny differences. Nor does new PC say cultural differences should lead to separation of cultures. Just preserve your own culture and celebrate the diversity of cultures co-existing peacefully.
“imagine all that modern French and German weaponry including nuclear weapons in the hands of passionate Wahhabits”
I am sure that the Mosul(Iraq) scenario, when ISIS took large cache of weapons, cash and other supplies, was one of possible version of developing the European refugee situation on the minds of the planners.
We are in their countries. We want their oil. We are still paying in blowback for 1953.
Actually, since Sykes-Picot, 16 May 1916.
“War in the Garden of Eden” — Kermit Roosevelt, 1920
Teddy’s 2nd son, served as a 2nd Lt. with the BEF in Iraq in 1916.
Tells about the effectiveness of roadside bombs, how the British Army was terrorized by them.
brh
This is what I have been telling nsa and Q for a while now: I can make more money with a guaranteed 2% interest in a credit union account than they can with losses in the 2015 stock market. – wpa
================
Wpa takes every opportunity to tell us how wonderful the economy is doing but apparently he thinks it’s too risky to invest in stocks. He would rather take a low risk and measly 2% in a credit union. Hmmm, I detect a lack of conviction.
Oh, so now YOU are equating the health of the market with the health of the economy?
SO HERE’S a good question: What *could* send oil back to “$100” per barrel? Not demand from normal activity – decades of financialization (a functional “capital strike”) destroyed that. What else might do it, at least in the short-term? War between Iran and the KSA? What are the chances?
That depends on who would benefit (or believes they would), who wouldn’t and their relevant strengths/weaknesses. Certainly there’s a lot of interest (even on the US side) in starting a conflagration:
https://imgur.com/gallery/XKHJqQB
“Iran Wants War”… “Which Path to Persia?”
😉
“SO HERE’S a good question: What *could* send oil back to “$100” per barrel?”
Russia giving up on Ukraine and Syria and, perhaps, disintegrating into smaller “stans”?
What could send oil back up? Just the will to do so, by OPEC, KSA, or Russia. The margin of oversupply is only about 1%, so that would be easy.
“What *could* send oil back to “$100” per barrel?”
Nothing. We have so much in our storage capacity and a major refinery has signed an agreement with American Midstream Partners to lease 650,000 barrels of storage capacity at its Harvey Terminal. This will bring total storage capacity at the facility in the Port of New Orleans to around 1.1 million barrels in 2016.
We have so much we are exporting light sweet crude, now that the United States is a net energy exporter. Brent crude oil prices will probably average $40 per barrel in 2016 and $50 per barrel in 2017.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-exports-first-freely-traded-oil-in-40-years-1452643962
Wpa, you write “This will bring total storage capacity at the facility in the Port of New Orleans to around 1.1 million barrels …”
You do realize, do you not, that this is substantially less than 2% of one day’s production?
I do. This sucker is going down, as W said. We only have 600 million barrels in storage around the country. /sarcasm off
I do realize our entire oil inventory is not all squirreled away in New Orleans. That would create quite a bit of energy insecurity!
The United States produces about 14 million barrels per day. So, New Orlean’s 1.1 million divided by 14 million would be about 7.8% of one day’s production.
Of US production, yes. Global production, no. 600 million barrels is still only 6 week’s domestic consumption; and, of course, civilians would get precious little of that.
Dow down 300.
It looks like the slide continues.
The ‘Big Slide’ if you will. (with apologies to Jim)
brh
So you are ignoring JHK’s prediction last week in “Pretend to the End”?
Here it is:
“I’ll be even more precise this time around. I predict that the S & P will top on January 15, 2016, at 2142, and then crumple below 1000 by June.” –JHK
We have two more days. Do you think JHK’s prediction will come true?
Not to worry. A new model I Phone is in the offing, available in early summer, lots more apps and features.
Starbucks is mixing up an interesting new concoction for Valentines Day, 16 oz of tasty coffee goodness, guaranteed to get the juices flowing and the attention of that special someone in your life.
And Netflex has something in the works too. Stay tuned for that.
brh
There you go! I like your optimism, brh.
We have two more days. Do you think JHK’s prediction will come true? – wpa asking BRH
============
Sure, no problaymo…….up 126 points tomorrow and another 126 Friday and — Bingo — we’re right there.
Thanks to Kerry’s efforts at diplomacy over the last few years, the sailors are free today. A peace dividend of talking to Iran.
Reagan was more belligerent and got 220 Marines and 18 sailors killed in Beirut, Lebanon. The killing was retaliation against Reagan. In all, four truck bombs killed 398 people to take revenge for months of Ronald Reagan using the offshore guns of the U.S. Navy to shell Lebanese villages.
“Teach them a lesson” from Reagan in the Oval Office had produced unanticipated consequences, like the eventual formation of Hezbollah.
It was Reagan’s Benghazi. The problem, the Reagan admitted, was that the repairs hadn’t quite been completed on time. As he put it, “Anyone who’s ever had their kitchen done over knows that it never gets done as soon as you wish it would.” Imagine how Congressman Issa and Fox News would react to a similar explanation from President Obama today.
Obama’s way, using diplomacy, is better. Less carnage of the American military.
“It was Reagan’s Benghazi” == wpa
I doubt that Reagan would abandon his Ambassador and CIA operatives to slaughter by Wahhabi cannibals.
What could send oil back up?
Anglo-Saxons like to repeat their tricks that worked once for them: in the late 80s they dropped the price of oil as one of the tools to put pressure on the USSR.
The difference in now and then is that USSR back in 80s was a net grain importer and was dependent on petrodollars for crucial food supplies.
Now Russia is a net grain exporter, and no matter how badly oil sanctions hurt Russian economy, it far from the critical point reached in the early 90s – Russia is about 95% food independent.
In a meantime Putin exchanges the petrodallars he gets from the suppressed by AngloSaxons oil prices for gold, which price is also suppressed by AngloSaxons.
When I win the Power Ball drawing tonight it should just about cover what I lost in the market today……. assuming there are not multiple winning tickets. ;o)
“When I win the Power Ball drawing…” –Q
Here is what we have learned from Power Ball:
Psychics have no power whatsoever.
Time travel isn’t real or someone would have used it by now.
And God can ignore millions of prayers at once.
… so I guess there is a silver lining to the jackpot after all.
Your space ship knows which way to go – down. Try to bail out over Bedford Falls. Potter is giving 50 cents on the dollar – Cash! Watch out for Violet Bick though. She’s not giving anything away and your weakness is known all over town.
Too bad you didn’t listen to your daughter, the shoe drooler.
If you are Black… even if you are a Black police officer… things are different:
didn’t a black female police officer authorise the strangulation of Eric Garner (all caps out of respect. he should only have been handed a citation and that’s it)???
wait…..
She was recently suspended from the NYPD.
i mean, didn’t the black female police officer racially target a black man for abusive handling, including strangulation?
so are black police officers targeting blacks based on race, like white officers do?
It’s a power thing, not a race thing.
didn’t a black muslim just shoot 13 bullets at a white police officer? are blacks targeting white officers who are protecting the citizenry?
when you say ‘citizenry’ flo-nase you must be excluding black males, for they seem to receive scant protection. And you say,”didn’t a black muslim just shoot 13 bullets at a white police officer?” Well then I guess that settles the matter. Your Honor, Flonase rests his case.
You’re a fool and a racist Flonase. And like they say about fools: there’s one born every minute. In your case we’re lookin’ at about ten minutes worth
didn’t a black murderer assassinate a white police officer in NC (maybe wrong state) in the past few months, sneaking up behind him and killing him?
are blacks targeting white police officers on the basis of race???
If police are abusing their power, the attacks against them will be independent of race.
we need to have an honest conversation on race
We need to have a conversation about responsible use of power. If African-American police are having their heads slammed into car hoods, that indicates an abuse of power, regardless of what race the offending officer is.
“Trump Ad Features Hillary’s Laughing Head Superimposed over Ruins of Benghazi.
Trump’s new political advertising that is likely to bring him another 10 points and will eventually lead him to the White House.”–Fincal
So Trump must believe that HRC will be the Dem nominee? But what about Bernie? He seems to be rising in the polls?
Right now Bernie hasn’t been touched much. But if he were to become the Dem nominee one could be sure the GOP would bring out the big guns and start illuminating some facts about Bernie. Facts, such as his honeymoon to the old Soviet Union back in the Cold War years. Before the GOP finished with Sanders he would be portrayed as the second coming of Joseph Stalin, intent on constructing gulags for true warm-blooded Americans., Still, if there’s one politician Trump doesn’t want to face it would be Bernie Sanders,IMO, Because nobody does populism quite like Bernie.
I haven’t seen the HRC ad you mention but I must admit it reads to be very effective. I would think that Trump has some real creative types on his payroll who could go wild in the political ad game.
“But the little White boy can grow to become like his father. The Black can never become like the White, not until the Spirit moves over the Waters and the Black Race undergoes a mutation or evolutionary leap. If ever. In other words, it’s out of our hands. And as a humanist (some weeks), that burns you.’–Janos
So you believe the fate of blacks is “determined”? So much for “free will” then. IOW, if the behavior of blacks is [pre] determined as you seem to suggest, then how can one condemn them to disproportionate prison sentences for behavior that is beyond their control?
But you don’t really believe that do you? In fact, you probably know plenty of blacks who ‘act white” and funny enough, economic justice seems to be the real ‘determining’ factor.
“if the behavior of blacks is [pre] determined as you seem to suggest, then how can one condemn them to disproportionate prison sentences for behavior that is beyond their control?” –Buck Stud
Excellent point!
Disproportionate? You mean longer than Whites for the same crime? I don’t believe it. They get longer sentences sometimes because they’ve worked up to it with other crimes.
Or do you mean since they’re so fucked up they should get shorter sentences because it’s not their fault they’re fucked up? Like pit bulls in other words? A very persuasive argument Buck, but one that can’t be put into effect. We need deterrents after all or better yet, just cut them loose and let them police themselves like they seem to be asking for. It will be the world’s greatest reality show. Unlike the Fall of Detroit, this could be minutely televised.
Pitbulls were bred for combat. Dobermans were bred for aggressive guarding. Maybe only 25% of these two breeds ever attack a fellow canine or human….but commonsense dictates that you do NOT take your normal breed (terrier, retriever, herder, spaniel, etc) into a dog park containing a pit or dobie….they are genetically prone to erratic behavior and violence. Get the analogy, lefties?
what does nsa stand for? non-sensicle ass
Nice Spelling Alf….definitely a product of the public schools.
I hope Jim Ks prediction of DOW 3000-4000 is finally correct. It didnt happen in the 00s, but maybe soon.
Aaaaaand… we’re back to more discovery!
(“Why, why, why?”, they ask, wringing their hands and soundlessly weeping.)
Those who would rather kill the messenger so that the pretending can continue are encouraged to skip this little exercise in the application of Occam’s Razor. (We’d appreciate it if you would do so; thanks so much.)
So, on to something germane to the assiduous *prevention* of discovery:
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2016/01/financial-collapse-leads-to-war.html#more
War as a prevention of political collapse in the wake of financial and commercial collapse! Who’dathunkit? Elegant, but we’re sorry to inform you that it is only a temporary measure; madness overload is bound to eventually ensue.
Ozone, you posted Orlov from a year ago, republished by Orlov, just in case he gets it right this year. Kind of like JHK in that way. Sooner or later there will be a war and Orlov will say “see, I told you” … Orlov is a useless capitalist for the gullible.
Bullshit. You don’t understand the article or the reason it was reposted. You’re engaged in murder of the messenger.
“But I would venture to guess that at some point failure will translate into meta-failure: America will fail even at failing. I hope that there is something we can do to help this meta-failure of failure happen sooner rather than later.” == DmOrlov
Exactly, Dmitry. Keep on hypnotizing your followers into rolling on their backs and exposing their bellies.
More obfuscating Bullshit. You don’t understand the article or the reason it was reposted. You’re engaged in murder of the messenger. Why would that be?
I see that the denialists/cornucopians purposefully missed the thrust of this article and the theory confirmed. Please, continue living in Big Daddy Warbucks Land-of-the-mind, we’re sure you’ll be happy and comfortable there…. for a while. Another invitation (since the first was ignored): Please do nothing and report how that has worked out for you in a couple years.
A theory has no time stamp; it is eventually either proven or dis-proven.
Got war? Why yes, in one form or another, we surely do. What does a state of perpetual war indicate? Maybe it’s all just a silly misunderstanding.
Putin has decided to defeat the ISIS and Ebola to remain the only world’s evil
Russia registered a cure for Ebola. According to the Minister of Health V. Skvortsova after grafting new Russian drug comes a 100% resistance to infection by the virus.
Recently, after the memorable speech of Barack Obama at the UN General Assembly, where he called the three major threats to peace and security: the Ebola virus, which threatens to become a pandemic, “Russian threat” and the international jihadism, the anecdote is spreading on the Internet:
“Putin has decided to defeat the ISIS and Ebola, to remain the only world evil.” It looks like he can …
Skvortsova: Russian vaccine surpasses world analogues. Russia has developed two vaccines against Ebola, superior in performance compared to world counterparts, one of the vaccines is for patients with immune deficit disorder.
“Right now Bernie hasn’t been touched much.” –Buck Stud
An understatement. He has been ignored until he gained the lead over Hillary in both Iowa and New Hampshire, and the lead over Trump. Now the media can no longer ignore him. They are even noting that Bernie Sanders has more support than Obama did in January 2008, when few people thought Obama could defeat Hillary.
CFN regulars like Cold, of course, announced months ago that TPTB had “put in the fix” for another Bush/Clinton election…once again showing how clueless CFNers are. They also had McCain and Romney in the White House. Meanwhile, Bush’s likeability is polling in NEGATIVE numbers. Cold has to eat his hat since he swore that Bush, with the machine, name recognition, and money, would be the Republican candidate.
Over the past seven years, certain private US pharmaceutical companies have almost unlimited access to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), as well as the Military Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
A cocktail of antibodies was developed by USAMRIID, which ZMapp vaccine is based on, but the profit from this development will now receive a private company.
The human tests are required to obtain a license to enter the market with these new products. Imagine an organization testing vaccines against Ebola virus for FDA certification in the US!? And then it happened, just what was needed, contamination in the mysterious laboratory in Guinea, which caused an outbreak that grew to epidemic.
Curious, this laboratory is mysterious for a number of reasons. How else to name the place in Africa, where side by side with American scientists working under the supervision of the CIA foreigners of different specialties, from microbiologists, biochemists and immunologists to nuclear physicists and specialists on chemical weapons? Yes, even such people who according to American ideas, should be in Guantanamo (and some of them are actually taken from that place).
Why by the way? Yes, because you can go to CNN Money and search for: Tekmira shares surged as the Ebola crisis intensified. Or: “The company’s shares jumped 45% on Friday, reaching the highest price since April.
Not a huge brainer. In January, they announced the start of human trials, in March – laboratory contamination in Guinea, in April company stock takes off like a rocket.
The russians must really have it in for the euroweanies. The population of africa is projected to reach an astounding 5 billion by the year 2100, even with all the disease…..who could possibly foresee these hordes migrating north? Eradicate ebola, cholera, malaria, dengue, hiv, hepatitis and the number could be even larger…much larger. And the pressure to migrate will be enormous. Long before 2100, europe will resemble some turd world hellhole like baltimore or detroit……
The rest of the world is not sitting around fretting about the price of fossil fuels. They are moving to other sources of energy.
“1. The German electricity system has reached a new milestone, generating 85.4 billion kWh of wind power in 2015, the highest amount ever recorded and 66% more than 2014. Nationwide, wind energy accounted for 13.3% of German electricity generation during the last year. According to grid operators storm “Bjarni” set a new output record of 32.6 million kWh at the end of the year. Consequently wind power saw its best month ever in December 2015. With an electricity generation of 12.7 billion kWh it achieved a new record and was even ahead of lignite coal powered production. Hence, wind is Germany’s most important source of energy for that month.”
2. In Scotland in 2015, “Turbines provided 10,392,439 MWh of electricity to the National Grid, enough on average to supply 2.34 million homes, up 16 per cent compared to the previous year.” In 6 of the 12 months, wind supplied enough electricity to power 97% of the region’s households, and over all it supplied 41 percent of electricity for both residential and business sectors.
3. In the United States, there are now 50,000 wind turbines, generating 70 gigawatts (GW) of electricity, enough to power 19 million homes. The cost of wind-generated electricity is down 66% since 2009. It is now nearly 5% of American electricity, up from 1 percent in 2007. In Iowa, wind power accounts for over 25% of electricity generation.
4. Brazil has put in 6.9 gigawatts of wind power, making it number 4 in the world for installed capacity. It has another 10 gigawatts in the pipeline, with 3.6 GW already under construction. It is expected that 45% of the electricity in the northeast of the country will be generated by wind turbines by 2025.
5. China is planning to put in 20 gigawatts of new wind power in 2016 alone! That will bring it to 120 GW in wind generated electricity by the end of this year.
6. India committed at COP21 to increasing its 25 gigawatts of wind energy to 100 GW by 2022. India has pledged to generate 40% of its electricity from renewables by 2030. Improved government incentives and regulations have raised estimates of the investments likely to flow into wind energy in India by 2020 to $15 billion.
One can only wonder whether the feds would be standing idly by if Bundy and his white, heavily armed followers were African-American, Latino, or Muslim.
We have processes in our country that allow us to challenge the government without taking up arms or holing up in federal buildings. They’re called elections.
Don’t like a law or a federal policy? Petition your member of Congress — that’s a constitutional right. We can also march in the streets, solicit support in the press, and file lawsuits. It’s the American way.
Taking over a federal building at the point of a rifle, on the other hand, gives protest a bad name. If we all protested that way, our country might look more like Somalia than the land of the free. Anarchy is a poor answer to tyranny.
Situation developing/devolving nicely. German Patriots are attacking Muslims on the streets. Communists attacked a Nationalist rally and got trounced. Nothing is worse than the vision Merkel and the Globalists have for Germany and Europe. Civil War is far preferable.
http://www.dailystormer.com/merkel-admits-weve-lost-control/
GERMAN FASCISTS FAIL
Police said that around 1,700 Pegida thugs had been kept apart from 1,300 counter-demonstrators in simultaneous protests outside the city’s main railway station.
A police spokeswoman said around half the Pegida crowd were from the “hooligan scene.”
Pegida banners read: “RAPEfugees not welcome,” and: “Integrate barbarity?” while anti-fascists chanted: “Nazis out.”
Police responded with pepper spray and water cannon when Pegida members pelted them with bottles and fireworks.
TRUMP LOSING IN IOWA
The Des Moines Register poll released Wednesday morning, conducted by Selzer & Company, found Trump at 22 percent in Iowa, trailing Ted Cruz’s 25 percent. Selzer has an A+ rating.
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/discovery/#comment-257966
test
It works. Thanks, Doug.
Canadians will be glad to sell their oil at $10 a barrel!
Think oil at $30 is low? Prices for Bitumen (superheavy oil) from the Canadian Alberta dropped to $8.3.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-13/crude-at-10-already-a-reality-for-canadian-oil-sands-miners
An excellent opportunity to prophesize the collapse of Canadian production, but nothing like that. Despite the job losses, the investments have already been made, and no one is going to stop, and for the next years is projected to increase production.
To counter a possible move by OPEC and Russia to decrease their production quota and take some oil volume off the market, the Anglo Saxons will keep increasing production in their area of direct responsibility.
All monetary losses of the producers will be compensated from the war chest. Welcome to war time economics.
“Situation developing/devolving nicely. German Patriots are attacking Muslims on the streets. Communists attacked a Nationalist rally and got trounced. Nothing is worse than the vision Merkel and the Globalists have for Germany and Europe. Civil War is far preferable.” == Janos
What do you mean, nicely?
New Year’s Eve raping incidents were just a drill, to check the readiness of the troops to gather for an attack. Shall their handlers decide that critical “refugee” mass is achieved, next step is going to be taking over military arms depots, and establishing control over contiguous areas of European territory, just like it was successfully accomplished in Iraq and Syria.
Only systemic, coordinated response from Government, military and intelligence services could turn the situation around, not some sporadic rallies by “German Patriots”.
If Europe will not do it, they are done, finished, caput.
Putin offered them an alliance, they refused. Now Putin is washing his hands off.
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/51154
Not Ukraine becomes the second global problem (after ME), but the internal situation in Europe itself. Today it is becoming increasingly clear that Europe is ready for greater internal civil war, launching in Germany where are more than one and half million healthy ME men.
Parallel to this was published a practical guide for the Germans, what they should do in a situation when they see rape of a hundred women a day at the complete inactivity of the police. This is the first in many decades, publication of the Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”. In absence of reaction of authorities, certain part of German establishment carried out a direct appeal to the German people, even in such a radical way. But apparently, there are no other options left at all.
The chaos is gradually capturing the vast expanses of Eurasia, leaving no doubt as to whom this process is most advantageous.
What do you know, that American woman murdered in Florence, Italy last week, an honored ‘refugee’, from Senegal was arrested for the crime, had only been in Italy for a few weeks. How surprised he must have been when she invited him to her place after meeting her in a cafe, just like he dreamed back in Africa. Something went wrong, tho, and he had to strangle her. But maybe that’s simply how its done back in the slums of Senegal. From the woman’s point of view, I think the old adage “Too soon old, too late smart” applies here.
Things are getting back to normal too, here in the Nutmeg State. Down in New Haven, hometown of Yale, a distinguished citizen, a Brotha of the highest order, proposed marriage to his beloved. She said ‘No’, a rejection he didn’t take very well, because he threw a cup of acid in her face, disfiguring her badly. Right now he’s in the New Haven lockup. Meanwhile, on Monday, the FBI showed up at a suburban house in Cromwell with shovels and an bobcat digger. 17 years ago this was the home of one of ‘Hartford’s Finest’, Hector ‘Macho’ Camacho, police officer extraordinaire, when a 25 year old woman and her 4 year old daughter disappeared, last seen with Macho. It turns out the woman’s armless and headless body was found in a swamp in New Jersey, but the little girl was never found. Macho is no longer on the force.
brh
As packs of Hyenas roam the world, eating the scraps and devouring what remains of Western Civilization.
For the Day of the Hyena is upon us.
brh
Brh, is your second name Dmitry?
No, But I consider Russia, home of the distinguished Dr Anton Chekov, as part of the civilized west, maybe the lynchpin of the whole thing.
brh
Was disfigured gal a coalburner?
DOW down 500 this am, before lunch time.
Putin: I am no friend, bride or groom; I am the President of the Russian Federation
You asked me if I was a friend or not. The relations between states are a little different from those between individuals. I am no friend, bride or groom; I am the President of the Russian Federation. That is 146 million people! These people have their own interests, and I must protect those interests. We are ready to do this in a non-confrontational manner, to look for compromise but, of course, based on international law, which must be understood uniformly by all.
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/51154
Russian president has declined an invitation to attend February’s Munich Security Forum, where he was very awaited and sends instead Sergei Lavrov.
A few days before the official refusal of Vladimir Putin, Chairman of the Munich Security Conference, Wolfgang Ischinger, said that despite the approaching date the official response from Vladimir Putin has not arrived.
The fact of the invitation of Vladimir Putin to the Munich conference, the organizers of which, according to them, were waiting for Putin’s Munich speech 2.0 – a sign of the apparent desire on the part of Germany to terminate diplomatic distancing from the President of the Russian Federation.
In the Netherlands, male politicians will wear mini-skirts in solidarity with women’s rights
The unusual event will be held in Amsterdam in solidarity with the victims during the Christmas attacks in Cologne.
Men from four major parties of the Netherlands after the events in Cologne decided to conduct an unusual action in solidarity with women’s rights. On January 16, representatives of the political groups will take to the main square of Amsterdam in mini-skirts, to complain to the mayor of Cologne Henriette Reker, who suggested the females “to keep at arm’s length” from strangers, to avoid harassment.
http://lifenews.ru/news/179304
I told you, Europe is done.
“In the Netherlands, male politicians will wear mini skirts” — Finca
I’m sure ISIS militia cells roaming Europe have taken note, and are impressed.
brh
44-year-old Croatian Ivan Yurkevich, doorman at the hotel near the railway station of Cologne, rescued six women from the crowd of crazed drunken Arabs.
“That night two girls ran up to me, about 20 years old, begging me to save them from pursuing men. Immediately after that came four young Arabs and told me not to get involved, because it was “their women”- says Ivan.
“The girls were modestly dressed, jeans and coats, nothing provocative. They were very frightened. I told them to stand behind me. ”
“The loudest of the gang of Arabs came at me with a bottle, but I knocked him out with one blow. Second, I punched in the face, he immediately collapsed. One of them ran his finger across his throat, indicating to me that I’m dead and that they will return for me”
“Arabs raged in the area overnight. One woman came to me and asked me to lead her through the square, where her husband was waiting for in a car. Several girls I hid in the hotel. What else could I do? The square was doomsday”
http://rusvesna.su/sites/default/files/images/19102015/ivan-yurkevich04.jpg
“devouring what remains of Western Civilization.” –brh
You are assuming “western civilization” ever existed. The last five 500 years of imperialism, colonialism, slavery, etc.
When Gandhi was asked what he thought of western civilization, he answered: “It would be a good idea.”
In the 1970s in Los Angeles there were days when people could not go outside due to smog. Thanks to catalytic converters, unleaded gasoline, etc. now you can go outside and breathe the air, thanks to the intervention of Big Government. Progress. Or would you prefer no regulations and air you cannot breathe?
If it’s a choice between not being able to breathe and Big Government I will, of course, choose not being able to breathe. 😉
Your rosy outlook is akin to the warriors at Wounded Knee who embraced the reassurance of their spiritual guide who distributed white shirts to them with claim that wearing the shirt made them invincible to the soldiers’ bullets. Both, yours and that of the shaman, illustrate how the human psyche puts up barrier against objective reality which informs that the vast forces of nature are indifferent to us meager humans. Viola,…thence our outsized neo-cortex serves up concepts of all manner of super natural/mystical forces that can be cajoled to intervene on our behalf. That is, religious beliefs — or, as with today’s Left, belief in secular utopianisms.
This human trait of side-stepping empirical evidence allowed a tiny minority of our specie line to survive over evolutionary time, but double edged as are all specie traits it has taken the greater majority into oblivion not different from the fateful outcome of those ‘invincible’ warriors at Wounded Knee.
We are the only specie that apprehends reality by digesting sensory input into concepts (reality a concept too, residing in the matrix of concepts that constitute language). Unless we adopt recognition that nature runs a cruel numbers game and not try to trump the ‘house’ with a limp hand of ‘booga-booga’ – Vegas style – then survival outcome for even a small portion of humanity will be lost.
The ‘trait’ evolved to prevent our over-sized, gas hog brain (consumes vast amount of calories) from driving metabolism at “peddle to the metal” anxiety rate, causing caloric burn rate to be greater than affordable calories during evolutionary time.
So,…..likelihood of survival for just a small proportion of today’s human population will be pissed away if we as a specie don’t come to terms with our innate proclivity to momentary ‘feel-good’ fantasies that deny that earth’s carry capacity has been exceeded.
NOTE: Those hands in the air, ‘speaking in tongues”, foot stomping, endorphin charged ‘coming to Jesus’ moments familiar from tent revival meetings aren’t different from crowd response to Obama’s platitudes.
Addressed mainly to ccc_wpa.
“Obama’s platitudes”
You betray an ignorance, a willful ignorance, of substantial advances made by Obama’s actions. His platitudes are good, too. But they are accompanied by effective action. That is why he is so hated.
The Somali pirates are dead. Bin Laden is dead. Al Qaeda has been decimated. ISIL is on the run, from a US-led coalition. Iran does not have a nuclear bomb. The national deficit has been reduced by 75%. The 2nd amendment has been respected. Unemployment has been cut in half. 14 million good paying jobs have been created, 900,000 in manufacturing. The auto industry had its best year ever. Anyone who want to get married to the person they love can now do so. The US military is the most powerful in the world, after seven years of Obama. etc. etc.
Think its good now?
Just wait ’till the ladies begin filtering into Marine and Army Combat formations, which is already happening, Armor, Infantry, Airborne, Artillery. Also, Tranny NCOs are being trained to mediate between the two genders and keep tension, sexual and otherwise in the face of the enemy, to a minimum. Its a whole new world.
Russian Spetznatz, impeccable Chinese Elite Marines, brutal ISIS Militia, disciplined NKorean die hard Goose Steppers 7 million strong … take note! Its a whole new kind of Army challenging you, Carter and Obama’s New Model American Army of the 2016, sensitive, yes, a little effeminate, big on style and very fashionable.
brh
Wow, what a turn-around on your part; in one of your posts this week you contended that the floods of refugees was a deserved ‘blow-back’ to the wars waged in the Islamic world, so the American citizenry (referred to by you as ‘We’) should absorb unlimited migration into our country as act of penance – consequence be damned. Now you seem praiseful of our military which really hasn’t acted in the interest of the American people as much as a mercenary force on behalf of trans-national corporate ambitions. Pay-back, are you serious? Your contention would have some weight if the American public had reaped any benefit from these wars, not, instead, trillions in national debt and loss of lots of blood and crippled lives that will be a cost obligation long into the future. And maybe you didn’t notice that these wars were all conducted before any citizen vetting process – you know, voting? But too, neither has what effectually has been an open borders policy.
But you have been consistent in following the Left’s meme of make no distinctions between the sexes, or cultures, or urban ethnic sub cultures who’s raison d’etre is ‘da knockout game’.
I like your reasoning, Cave.
Viola: a stringed musical instrument in the violin family.
Unemployment has been cut in half.
–comical.
@ Sauerkraut:
RE | “What could send oil back up? Just the will to do so, by OPEC, KSA, or Russia. The margin of oversupply is only about 1%, so that would be easy.”-s.
I like the way you’re thinking about this issue (and others) BUT I think that there is an error of formulation here. I’m not convinced that the level of oil consumption that pertained prior to the recent price drop (upon which your “1%” rests) was at all sustainable. In fact, I believe that oil was vastly overproduced on the back of enormous intervention by the US Federal Reserve and Chinese PBOC.
Consider the fact that globally we are overstock or idle almost every area [*]: coal (both thermal and coke), copper, steel, timber, petroleum products as well as all products produced by burning petroleum – like that most basic commodity of all, grain:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-10/unwanted-piles-of-corn-soy-spur-most-bearish-crop-outlook-ever
When food is this *unwanted* that tells us something: supply has been cantilevered out across a wide chasm driven by speculative investment and the market is astronomically distorted. We now know that the supporting understructure does not hold. That’s how we’ve arrived at the awkward moment of it all being so painfully obvious in the first place.
BTW, though I didn’t mention it at the time I thought that your reply to Elysianfield on Jan 4th was excellent, and I agreed with the sentiment of your conclusion. Capitalism – much like Monogamy – was not something tried and found wanting, so much as it was found difficult and never tried. Problem is, it is nigh impossible to imagine a realistic scenario where it would be.
Cheers!
— — —
[*] except precious metals, strangely enough. The number of paper claims (and short-sales) on gold, silver, &c. vastly outweighs the tangible global amount of these metals… ‘for some reason’. Yet the demand for precious metals – from China, Russia & India especially – is so stiff that it counterbalances the sheer mass of fictitious sales. It couldn’t be that someone in the Eccles Building wants to keep price-discovery from happening, could it?
“Problem is, it is nigh impossible to imagine a realistic scenario where [capitalism] would be [found practicable/workable].”
In a world of growing population and shrinking resources, including, most importantly, energy, I think you could remove the “nigh” from that sentence.
“Would you prefer socialism (and population control) or Mad Max, today, Sir?”
“I’m not convinced that the level of oil consumption that pertained prior to the recent price drop (upon which your “1%” rests) was at all sustainable.”
Nor are the recent record levels of production sustainable. As we approached Peak Oil (which I think we passed around 2009), those of us seriously discussing the issue knew that there were all sorts of ways that the peak could be flattened, or even that brief, higher spikes could be manufactured.
All of those ways involve subsidies of one sort or another. With the fracking bubble, the main subsidy has been artificially cheap financing, and even that has only permitted record production because it allowed the drilling of new wells at an insane rate to cover the rapid depletion of the ones drilled in the preceding couple of years. The producers weren’t really making much money, even at the higher prices, but at least they were able to keep up payments to the banksters.
I’m sure there will be new schemes devised (CO2! Yeah, that’s it!) and new kinds of subsidies hidden in the schemes, but the inevitable is, indeed, inevitable, and the desperate (in many cases probably already EROEI-negative) over-production will only steepen the depletion curve once the tricks can’t hide reality any longer.
MD, you raise an interesting point about inventories. I suspect that inventories are high because distortions in the markets are so large that common sense allocation has now become the exception to the rule.
For example, infrastructure crumbles and nothing is done about it. Why not? Every generation until this one has invested heavily in infrastructure. I doubt if it is a co-incidence that this is also the first generation of prefect deregulation. QE gives huge amounts to the banks – is it $9T now – yet there is little for welfare, foodstamps, infrastructure, etc. Even the Post Office goes begging.
I think that Doug gave a very good analysis above. He points out that current production rates are unsustainable. I just saw an article discussing nearly 30B bbl. cancelled in 2015; for reference, that is nearly the annual global demand. A few years ago the IEA warned that $1.5T in new investment was required in each year (including exploration, development, and infrastructure). Clearly that did not happen in 2015.
Too much is not happening for the future to look very much like the recent past.
So interesting to see who is ‘Heading East’:
https://www.rt.com/news/328583-steven-seagal-serbian-citizenship/
Mister Seagal: New Serbian Citizen… Sign ‘o’ the Times?
😉
Cheers!
Have you ever considered becoming an expat?
http://www.dailystormer.com/black-baltimore-mayor-suggests-killing-of-white-bicyclist-by-multiple-blacks-ruined-lives-of-victim-and-the-black-suspects/
Why do these White “victims” keep ruining the lives of young Black Men? It’s racism.
‘Heartbreaking tragedy.’
‘Senseless violence.’
Passive voice.
“brutal ISIS Militia” –brh
brh, ISIS is the JV team and is already being defeated. You blow them up to be so powerful that they may contact you to help with recruitment. Their “caliphate” is bogus. They are on the run.
“On Thursday morning France’s defence minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, announced that ISIS militants were retreating in Iraq. Talking about France’s strikes against ISIS (also known as the Islamic State, ISIL or Daesh) on BFMTV, Le Drian said: “What we can say today is that Daesh is retreating in Iraq.” He also claimed recent French air attacks had hit a “communication and propaganda centre” close to Mosul and that seven strikes had been conducted since Monday. Over the last few months, the Iraqi army, aided by support from the US-led coalition, has carried out a series of successful offensives against ISIS targets.”
“Just wait ’till the ladies begin filtering into Marine and Army Combat formations” –brh
brh, women serve in all military branches and in elite infantry troops and Special Operations forces, as are homosexuals and transgendered individuals. Your disrespect, as if they somehow weaken our military, is disgusting. They are serving honorably. Women have only been serving in armed forces for about 3,000 years.
Do you also disrespect women in the Israeli military? Or is you venom reserved for criticizing the American military.
Rest assured that for anyone on the receiving end of an F-15 Eagle, the least of their concerns will be the gender of the pilot.
Wpa flips from pacifist to warmonger in the blink of an eye.
A drone delivery would be significantly superior to having to drive or walk to the local hardware store to pick up your Chinese made screwdriver… that got to the hardware store in a box on a freight truck.
I assume a boxcar or conex box of screwdrivers unloaded at an Amazon distribution center from a freighter from China then sent on delivery by electric drone is simply more efficient.
Sure, you’re not doing the folksy stroll on the nonexistent Main Street, passing by all the happy faces that make up your deeply intertwined community, but that’s because those days are long gone for the majority of us. It’s contrived. Replaced by outdoor malls and outdoor malls with condos. Space built for lease as opposed to built by need, over time.
But alas, we want the conceit. We want to walk to the store to buy a screwdriver made by old Caleb who works in the foundry up past Squirrel Level Ridge. And we all know those days are not coming back, those days we yearn for, unless we keep praying to the rain gods to crash everything.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d prefer the quaint scenario. But the idea that all production will or can be local is a daydream. Yep, UPS delivery will be going away, and in its place is will be drones, or a fleet of electric vehicles. The suburbs, regrettably, are not going away, we will be locked away in our homes, using electric car-shares when we need to. Enjoying products shipped by nuclear powered freighters.
Now, the next hope is that there won’t be people to earn a living after it all crashes. People destitute, people jobless. People replaced by robots. AI relegating humans to the role of HD screen addicted pets. We’ll be VR goggled-up and strung out on WIFI in virtual reality based planes of existence if anyone/thing decides to keep us around as all. That not techno-narcissism, it’s techno-fatalism and it’s here.
There’s no going back come crash or come peak.
“Enjoying products shipped by nuclear powered freighters.”
Uh-huh. And where will the fuel for the reactors in those freighters come from?
In 2009, the Nuclear Energy Association estimated that the world had a sufficient supply of uranium for 200 years, AT CURRENT RATES OF CONSUMPTION. I just love that phrase when energy optimists sneak it into their optimistic estimates.
Now, you don’t have to do much math to figure out how that estimate changes if fleets of freighters, millions (or billions) of electric cars, drones, and/or whatever other fantasies catch your fancy, require the construction of countless more reactors to power the ever-expanded and more demanding grid. We don’t have nearly enough uranium to accomplish what you and so many other cornucopians imagine.
Now, there is a way to produce plenty of fuel for those reactors you’d need: fast breeders. However, fast-breeder reactors produce a somewhat problematic fuel, which can be used in many ways other than in power-generating reactors: plutonium (Pu239).
How much Pu239 would you like to make and have floating around the world for all those new reactors?
Maybe you’re not worried. After all, a pound of plutonium dust that becomes airborne in an urban area probably wouldn’t kill more than 2 million people.
And the criticality issue isn’t too scary, if you’re an optimist: it takes about 6 kilos, carelessly (or deliberately) mishandled, to achieve critical mass, and that’s only happened, oh, maybe a dozen times, so far, that we know about.
And then there’s flammability — but why worry about a substance that is toxic, radioactive and can burst into flame at room temperature in moist air?
Nah, no worries. Get going on the fast breeders, order up some of them freighters and start building the drone hangars.
You won’t need many cars, there will be nowhere to go.
Travel here is based on consumption.
Get a coffee.
Get a beer.
Get a rubber made tote from Target.
You live at home in a VR world serviced by electric drones.
Kids go to class in a VR world. You will be an avatar.
Fine have it your way, the cheap shit made in china or made in latin america will be made here.
It’s still more efficient to get your Iowa produced screwdriver by drone than by a walk or drive to Ace.
You have missed the forest and the trees.
“had a sufficient supply of uranium for 200 years”
Oh, so uranium is finite? Oh, my, oh my, what are we going to? It might only last a 100 years at future rates of consumption. Oh, we are soooo fucked.
So don’t use uranium. Use thorium. Thorium is more abundant in nature than uranium. Then when that runs out… what are we going to do? Oh, my, let’s worry about that and become paralyzed. We aren’t smart enough to figure these things out. I guess our nuclear powered submarines will just have to be dry-docked… because Doug says we can’t solve these problems. We are doomed. /sarcasm off
Ending one of your pseudo factual rants with “sarcasm off” is so…….senile silly….indicates you are a retired pedagogue or something even more wretched.
“Use thorium.”
Yeah, we’ve been hearing that from nuclear cornucopians for 50 years and, still, nobody has ever built a commercially viable thorium reactor.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/jun/23/thorium-nuclear-uranium
If we do, I propose we store the waste products, at your house.
Jim’s such a smart guy and I’ve enjoyed his work for so many years, that I actually expected that coming “below the line” would result in interesting discussions with interesting and well-informed folks. Nope. Same standard-issue, smug, half-bright assholes you can find on any random forum.
Except that there is even more blatant, vile racism here than one usually finds, except on Stormfront and its like. I’m talking to you, Janos.
Wrong again. Story of my life.
I’m beginning to think the Internet was a big mistake.
Doug,
I know we’ve careening off-topic here, but:
One part of the disappointing level of insights on the intertubes could be the bubbling madness that is the American zeitgeist, which Norman Pollack dubs, “Thanatosean America”. I think he’s got something there… another “discovery”, if you’ll allow.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/01/15/the-politics-of-cultural-despair-americas-self-immolation/
(Now, due to exactly what you’ve pointed to, we’ll have a drawing and quartering of this messenger. Do not discount paid distortionists and distractionists in this regard.)
Gosh, they’ve left us alone, for now.
Fine piece by Pollack. Depressing, of course, as all realistic assessments and analyses of our predicament must be, these days, but a very good piece.
Thanks for the link!
Why? Because I think James Watson knows more about genetics than you do? Because I “believe” Blacks can run faster than Whites? Because I “think” East Asians are better at Civilization than Australoids? Or because I “imagine” that Whites created most everything? Or because the only Ottomans I like are the kind one sits on?
Can you even define that word you throw around so freely? Or is your “racism” really just like calling someone a witch?
Janos:
“Why? Because I think James Watson knows more about genetics than you do?”
No, because although Watson knows more about genetics than I do, he knows a lot less about the impact on childhood development of environment and socioeconomic status and the balance between nature and nurture. And because he’s a flat-out nasty racist, as I believe you are. He’s a grumpy sexist, too. I can’t remember, at the moment, whether that term applies to you.
“Because I ‘believe’ Blacks can run faster than Whites?”
If you even believe that “race” is a biologically sound notion, you’re out of step with long-accepted majority views in anthropology. And, if you believe that genetic determinism is the indisputable basis for the fact that people we call black tend to dominate some sports, you’ve hugely over-simplified a very complex issue.
“Because I ‘think’ East Asians are better at Civilization than Australoids?”
That just tell us that you think some particular form of “civilization” is somehow inherently superior to other forms, and that the differences among the forms are genetically determined — and, again, that you subscribe to the notion that “race” is a real thing.
It is trues of course, that “Australoids” didn’t invent gunpowder or nuclear weapons, but I’m not sure that makes them (if there is a “them”) an inferior civilization. It’s also true that they didn’t invent technologies that have permitted the human population to grow to 7 billion and counting — all wanting cars and iPhones — but, again, I’m pretty sure that’s not a real indicator of inferiority.
Ishi, California’s “last wild Indian,” thought matches and running water were pretty neat, but that most of the white man’s inventions were silly. He called Europeans “clever children.”
“Or because I ‘imagine’ that Whites created most everything?”
Yeah, I’d just call that straight-up racism, not to mention an indication of a pathetically narrow understanding of what creativity is and what is and isn’t valuable.
“Or because the only Ottomans I like are the kind one sits on?”
Well, I’m not sure how to categorize this one. The name, Ottoman, is just formed from the name of the first ruler of the empire, so, this could be xenophobia rather than racism. OTOH, the people in question arise, mostly from various groups of Anatolians, who are ethno-linguistically distinguished, and you might think of them as a “race” — so it’s an open question.
“Can you even define that word you throw around so freely?”
I don’t throw it around freely; I try to reserve it for situations where it best fits. I define “racism” as the belief or understanding that different groups of humans can be distinguished by variations in appearance, genetic traits, etc. sufficient to assign them to one or more “races” and that membership in a “race” conveys to individuals specific abilities, inabilities, tendencies, limitations, etc.
Usually, racism is manifested in prejudice or discrimination, against one or more “races” and racists typically believe that the “race” they believe they belong to is superior to others.
For convenience, in informal discussion, I often use the term racism when bigotry, xenophobia, etc. might be more precise; I’d be more careful in formal writing. In any case, if your recent posts here are valid representation of your views, all three terms apply to you.
“…I actually expected that coming “below the line” would result in interesting discussions with interesting and well-informed folks.”
A real f**king genius here folks. He did not think it necessary to read before trolling the depths. Yet here we are with the feigned incredulity… how could this site possibly be haunted by tin-hats, antisemites, crackpots, racists, and pseudo intellectuals like every other comment section on the internet?
* If you are speaking in regards to WPA_CCC, than I take all the words above back. She is a multi-personality troll that makes it really difficult to accept that using the mild invective, ‘retard’, is verboten.
Well at least you get the general drift: the PC House of Cards depends on mathematical equality between widely diverse peoples – in defiance of all evolutionary theory. So you will deny, deny, deny because you must. It’s really comical. Everyone knows Blacks run faster and they hold all the records in sprint. And East African Mountain Blacks seem to be the best distance men in the world. They brought some of their High School kids up to Sweden to train with Olympians – the kept up, no problem. It’s genetic, dumbbell. One early Champion, Kip Kano, hated the idea too: he just thought it was all a matter of training – as if the countless White athletic programs didn’t exist. In other words, to him it was character and Blacks were just better people.
Question: some heart medicines work on Blacks but do little or nothing on Whites. Do you think they should be abandoned for moral reasons a la your Church of Human of Equality?
I’ll write more later. This is fun. You’re a very serious, silly person right out of Monty Python. There is a tragic element since you’re obviously a man of high intelligence. As Jared Taylor said, only very smart people can delude themselves this deeply. It takes intellectual power to deny the obvious. Jean Paul Sartre was one of the last to admit the nature of the Soviet Union. His solution? He transferred his affections to Maoist China.
So since Race is just a social construct without any real referent, was not Yahi a racist when he called Whites clever children? Did Yahi know that his people didn’t exist? So why all the books bemoaning their extinction I wonder?
With your defense of Australoids, (dumber even then Blacks), you sound like a Jared Diamond fan. Now Jared says Race doesn’t exist, but somehow the Austraoids are smarter than Whites. And even though Race doesn’t exist, Jews do. And apparently their existence is very valuable and needs to continue. Coincidently (maybe?), Mr Diamond is Jewish.
Btw, I’m not a racist according to the usual definition of racism – thinking my race superior. After all, East Asians are smarter on average and Blacks faster and better jumpers, etc. Nor do we want to rule other races anymore for the most part. We’ve learned our lesson. But of course since I believe race does exist, I guess that does make me and almost everyone else a racist in your very little, and very red book.
Here’s some sanity from the other Jared. Maybe it will help.
http://www.amren.com/news/2016/01/donald-trump-white-supremacism-and-the-insanity-of-the-washington-post/
One of our Navy’s boats suffered mechanical problems off of Farsi Island. The Iranians gave shelter to ten sailors and fed them. The Iranians worked all night to fix the mechanical problems on the boat and sent the sailors on their way the next day. Iranians are good people.
“If we do, I propose we store the waste products, at your house”
You don’t know much about Thorium, do you? Or about the history of functional non-commercial reactors, or about the difference between Thorium and Uranium re:waste.
“You don’t know much about Thorium, do you? Or about the history of functional non-commercial reactors . . .”
Actually, I know quite a bit about thorium (we don’t capitalize the names of elements). I’ve been seriously involved in in studying energy matters for a couple of decades, now, and have run into innumerable nuclear cornucopians in the process, so I could hardly avoid learning about it.
And I’m well aware of the history of the non-commercial reactors — which doesn’t change the fact that nobody has yet built and operated a commercially viable one.
“. . . or about the difference between Thorium and Uranium re:waste.”
Here’s the main difference: thorium reactors (may, theoretically) produce smaller volumes of waste than “conventional” reactors, but the waste is more highly radioactive.
I know quite a bit more about thorium reactors, but I get tired of typing for the benefit of people who refuse/are unable to abandon their religious beliefs, so, let me do a quick search for easy-to read explanations . . .
Here ya go:
Thorium: Not Green, Not Viable and Not Likely
http://nuclearfreeplanet.org/thorium-not-green-not-viable-and-not-likely-oliver-tickell-june-2012-.html
The saga of Kara Hultgreen might be instructive to those who favor females in the military. In the early 90s, powerful Colorado political hack, Patsy Schroeder, decided women should be represented in all the elite branches of the military, including carrier pilots. The boys in the pentagon capitulated immediately and scrounged around for some suitable females to enter the training program. Kara, with a lot of patience and coaching, was the first to graduate. She crashed a lot in the simulators, but what the hell. She finally graduated but failed to qualify after several attempts, which Ms. Schroeder found unacceptable…seen as a failure of training as women are of course the equal of men in all endeavors. The brass rolled their eyes and qualified her to fly the overweight and poor handling F14 Tomcat. She was assigned to the carrier USS Lincoln. The result was inevitable. The captain of the Lincoln reported that of the five worst carrier landings he had witnessed…all five belonged to Kara. When Kara was flying, helmets were donned by all hands and fire trucks readied. The F14 is a two seater but no one would fly with her willingly… so flying with her was used as punishment. On her last flight, a much disliked Lt Klemish was her assigned copilot. The landing came in overspeed and overshot the hooking cable. In a panic, she kicked in the burners for a go-around but one turbine flamed out. The F14 twisted out of control with all moving surfaces banged to the limits. Klemish hit both ejectors and blasted out straight sideways…his chute making one oscillation and then he was in the sea. Kara went down with the F14. Klemish was so mentally damaged from his near death introduction to feminism, he refused to ever fly again no matter what the punishment. RIP Kara….a very gutsy girl who got in way over her head ….4000′ of saltwater to be exact.
She needed women trainers. The men failed.
classic BS from you.
Apparently this has happened again and again with women pilots in the military – pushed too far too fast. Some say it even happened to Amelia Earhart, even though she wasn’t flying in the military the pressure from Feminism pushed her too hard.
Feminism is basically women’s bad choices, particularly about men.
equality. we are all equal.
no such thing as race, gender, IQ etc.
Yes, when asked about the relative weakness of Female Firefighters, Gloria Steinem replied they could drag their victims out if they lacked the strength to carry them. It’s cooler down there anyway, she quipped.
Bloomberg: China’s stock market is the most expensive in the world (in terms of P/E)
China once again devalued the Yuan and markets for the second time in a year tumbled by 7% and then closed to avoid panic. Chinese Politburo struggling with falling markets using sales bans. How is it possible to drive the market higher, if there is nowhere to buy? Interesting. But the most interesting – is the chart below, which shows us that the Chinese market- the most expensive in the world, its P/E (price to equity) is 65, while the normal average PE in the West historically is 12, and in Russia about 3. That is, by conservative standards, the Chinese stocks overvalued several times.
http://assets.bwbx.io/images/igLnjXSgYvos/v2/-1x-1.png
Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-05/china-battles-to-shore-up-world-s-priciest-stock-market-chart
Bloomberg: China’s stock market is still the most expensive in the world
China once again devalued the Yuan and markets for the second time in a year tumbled by 7% and then closed to avoid panic. Chinese Politburo struggling with falling markets using sales bans. How is it possible to drive the market higher, if there is nowhere to buy? Interesting. But the most interesting – is the chart below, which shows us that the Chinese market- the most expensive in the world, its P/E (price to equity) is 65, while the normal average PE in the West historically is 12, and in Russia about 3. That is, by conservative standards, the Chinese stocks overvalued several times.
http://assets.bwbx.io/images/igLnjXSgYvos/v2/-1x-1.png
Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-05/china-battles-to-shore-up-world-s-priciest-stock-market-chart
Sorry for duplicate comment – fat-finger problem.
Compared to China US markets are not much overheated, although lots of folks like to write that the United States is concealing the real state of the economy and finance, and a large landslide is coming.
FED slowly lets the steam out. Record contraction of US monetary base.
Throughout the post-war history Federal Reserve has never burned as many dollars in absolute or relative terms.
Five times in 2015 the Fed switched to remission. Burned 175.5 billion dollars year to year, about 4.5% of the monetary base.
https://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/3900/157123027.8/0_120db4_7b407bb8_orig.png
Source: http://kubkaramazoff.livejournal.com/210691.html
Just one small quibble: There is no “post-war”.
(I think, “since the end of WW2” would be more accurate.)
Sorry, to me as Russian, “post-war” automatically means since May, 1945.
Yep, makes sense from that perspective. Like I said, small quibble.
The Truce is over. You broke it. You will pay, but not in quarters or quibbles but in land and treasure.
Do you like cats? They really are tribbles without the trouble. Their purring lowers blood pressure. But you must be humble enough to listen. Are you?
I agree btw: post war is pre war is post war. War is the natural state of lower man. Man is something to be surpassed. What have you done to surpass Man?
DEBT BOMB – The Global Financial Crisis Stripped Bare
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXcLVDhS8fM
Do you listen to Schiff, Sprott, Rogers etc?
I used to, not anymore.
A “small” question of 9 trillion dollars
After the bust of dot-com business in US, a lot of dollars went into so-called carry trades – funding various projects outside of the country. If during the Asian crisis of 1997, which was caused by strengthening of the dollar, the total amount of dollars outside of US was “only” 400 billion, now it is around 9 trillion.
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/11465481/Global-finance-faces-9-trillion-stress-test-as-dollar-soars.html
The dollar began to strengthen in the past year, and the FED launched a program of rate hikes. This means that the spiral of the return of the dollars back home (to the US) has begun, because of the so-called feedback loop: strengthening of the dollar will force economic agents to cover their short dollar positions that would lead to further strengthening of the dollar and so on, “in a circle”.
The dollar vacuum-cleaner has been turned on.
The dollars coming back to US must be controllably burnt out, without causing panic or collapse, in a chopping ride of the stock markets.
Fed goes into full attack mode
The previous record of 25 December 2015 is beaten again. January 6, 2016 the contraction of the monetary base amounted to 291 billion dollars year to year.
On night of December 31 Monetary Base compression was astronomical 766 billion year on year. If we take US Monetary base as of December 31, 2014 – 3.929 trillion it is a negative 19.5%.
The compression of Monetary Base through reverse REPO operations broke all historical records of burning dollars since 1918:
In December 1921 was minus 14.4%, in July 1937 minus 14.3%.
Source: http://kubkaramazoff.livejournal.com/
Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead?
Hillary’s Lead Disintegrates: She Is Now Doing Worse Than In 2008, As Trump Surges
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-14/hillarys-lead-disintegrates-she-now-doing-worse-2008-trump-surges
Bernie Sanders raises $1.9 million off attacks from Hillary Clinton’s camp
Hillary Clinton’s new focus on rival Bernie Sanders appears to be paying off — for Sanders.
The Vermont senator had raised $1.9 million as of Thursday morning, following attacks this week from Clinton and her surrogates. About 66,000 people have donated to Sanders’ presidential campaign since Tuesday afternoon when his camp sent out a fundraising appeal, highlighting Clinton’s denunciations of his universal health-care plan.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/01/14/bernie-sanders-raises-millions-off-hillary-clinton-attack/78787484/
Yale U may need to be moved out of New Haven, to somewhere in the countryside.
They’ve been in the same New Haven location since 1701 (among the 1st graduates, Ernest Hemingway’s Great Great Grandfather.)
In December a distinguished elderly professor, walking home from campus, was beaten down and robbed by ‘Youts on bikes’. Eventually, 5 ‘Youts’ were rounded up for the crime. The professor did not die, but you can imagine the effect a severe street beating would have on a 78 year old man.
Last nite another Yale associate was robbed and this time stabbed on the street, not by 5 ‘Youts on bikes’, but 3 ‘Youts in a stolen car’. New Haven police tracked the assailants right away, and, after a low speed chase thru the city and smashed up cars a helluva row ensued, including police dogs used in subduing these ‘Youts in a stolen car’. The victim is severely injured, 3 stab wounds to the chest.
Here we have two worlds up against one another, trying to occupy the same space, an historic University with roots that go back to England and the beginning of the American Republic, created by Connecticut Citizens to train Congregational Ministers and funded by Eli Yale, a wealthy Pasha in India, and the Modern American Welfare State, a more recent entity, feral, bloody, predatory, and corrosive, with roots in Africa and Latin America. It looks the latter is more dynamic and, in the end, may come out on top. The future belongs to the Welfare State.
brh
Robbi Ponsi.
check ‘sbpdl.com’
Eli Yale? Don’t like the sound of that. The evil of America lies very deep. As the Devil said in The Devil and Daniel Webster, Who is more American than me? When the first slave ship came into the harbor, I was there.
Penn State is now encouraging minorities to come forward to report micro-aggressions – and keeping a record of them. Maoism 101. Academia is finished and that’s a good thing considering what it’s become. All these schmarty pantsim are getting their comeuppance.
Are you still in New England or have you transferred to New Mexico? Before you go, be sure and check out the historic Temple in Newport, RI. It was the hub of the Slave Trade in the North and the Jews had a corner on it.
Indeed, cultural revolution 2016.
PS is also the place that hid Sanduskys offenses and hired [gayley?] to buy his silence.
Folks, something is happening in the markets this morning.
Dow futures plunge 400 points, and oil below $30 per barrel.
Like Jim says, we’re finding out what things are worth, which isn’t as much as we thought. I’ve lately wondered what the value of these house around here are now. Down across Rte 10 along the abandoned Farmington Canal a developer has recently built 6 McMansions on a former wheat field; not a one has been sold, not one. Asking price was about $750,000.
brh
BRH,
Good. I’m hoping that turning [*very*] productive bottomland into cheesy, overpriced, fake colonial enclaves has passed its sell-by date. Are we out of suckers yet? Mmm, probably not.
490 and counting, before lunch.
“Folks, something is happening in the markets this morning” — brh
Putin, in an interview with Bild, told that the Russian State safety net is at $540 Billion dollars: Central Bank has about 340 billion in gold and foreign currency reserves, there are also two reserve funds of the Government of the Russian Federation. One of them holds $70 billion, the other – $80 billion.
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/51154
The most interesting thing is that yesterday Western media, including television, covered that, but a desire that Russian reserves were smaller could be felt.
And today is a sense of desperation, with the forecast of panic for tomorrow, as the figure given by Putin means a complete failure of the policy of sanctions and oil dumping.
Meanwhile, to the goal of reduction of Russian currency reserves a lot of American resources were thrown and no more are left, so that the continuation of this policy increasingly threatens the United States, or rather the overcoming of the current economic crisis.
The catastrophic decline in the Dow Jones as a result of the devaluation of the Yuan in China was a warning shot in the direction of the United States, and if it will be joined by Russia, the Great Depression will seem like a picnic.
Zerohedge shows Rick Santelli having a good 2 minute rant about several things but especially about the Fed lying about jobs data. A bunch of us have been saying the same thing, that jobs data and other stats coming out of official government channels is nonsense.
WRT to Orlov and his theory of U.S. governance of bankers, by bankers, for bankers, and a country basically there for banker exploitation:
It’s not a bad theory. Not perfect but no theory to explain something as complex as a country with so many moving parts, IS perfect. But it’s workable. It’s not a bad theory because there’s a lot of facts that fit. To measure socioeconomic phenomena there aren’t instruments like those multibillion dollar detectors on the Large Hadron Collider that measure and track movements of multitudes of subatomic particles. People don’t behave as predictably as subatomic particles. This isn’t physics.
But, given inherent limitations, like I said, not a bad theory. Because in the end, whether you’re a high-end physicist or ordinary schleps like us, you use your eyes and ears to make sense of the world. Does the theory accord with what you see?
He’s right, a handy fallback to financial and economic collapse is war. It isn’t like we haven’t seen that movie before.
“or ordinary schleps like us.” -V
“I resemble that remark!” -Norm Crosby
Current events from a point of view of Russian “black humor”
At our doorsteps arrived triple systemic crisis. Oddly enough, there is nothing catastrophic.
The crises, including the economic and systemic, accompany our civilization since ancient times, but each time mankind survives, as a population of cockroaches after a nuclear explosion.
Speaking of nuclear explosions
Right now (that is at that very moment) comes a great time to experience a deep sense of gratitude to those who created our nuclear shield, and to those who financed, planned, maintained and updated it.
You can also silently thank those who spend oil revenues on the army and defense industry.
It is thanks to these people you, my dear citizens of the Russian Federation; the global crisis does not involve the risk of physical death in another world war.
Arrange the war to reshape the world in the context of another economic crisis – a long-standing, well-established and quite effective tradition of humanity. If you apply to timetable of economic crises (local, regional, global) the timetable of wars, you could easily see that the crisis without a war – it is like a hipster without an iPhone.
This is the best news for today: others are going to die, not you.
http://politrussia.com/ekonomika/zdravstvuy-krizis-634/
Why fear of war weighs heavily for Russians in the New Year
The Russian public is worried about a full-on conflict with the US, fed in part by a drumbeat from the Kremlin and in part by US and NATO foreign policies.
MOSCOW — Magomed Tolboev, a former Soviet bomber pilot, says he feels that relations between Russia and the US are worse today than they were even in the depths of the cold war. In those days his job, for which he trained rigorously, was to take out a US air base in Turkey with a nuclear strike.
Mr. Tolboev’s fears are mirrored by many Russians, who say that for the first time since the collapse of the USSR 25 years ago, they feel the clouds of war gathering, exacerbated by an anti-American sentiment that has reached new highs. Older Russians say they’ve been through it before and can endure it again; some younger Russians seem more alarmed.
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2016/0113/Why-fear-of-war-weighs-heavily-for-Russians-in-the-New-Year
With 3.5 hours left in this trading day on the 15th day of January 2016, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that Jim’s prediction of the S&P 500 closing at 2142 today will not happen. Its current level is 1862 and the DOW is down – gulp – 500.
But you moved to a cash position, so you are laughing… Right?
Over the past 12 months, an investor in an S&P 500 index fund has lost nearly 5 percent, a negative return, a loss of capital. Yaay, capitalism!
A saver with a credit union account with a guaranteed 2% interest rate has a positive gain, an increase in capital.
Needless to say, the S&P 500 did not go anywhere near JHK’s prediction of 2142.
Bernie said enough with Hillary’s damn emails.
Maybe the FBI never got the memo. David Stockman is saying that she’s under investigation by that illustrious organization for failure to safeguard state secrets.
An investigation would be no surprise. I’ve said it myself, her carelessness, at least with respect to her emails, while she was Sec of State was jaw-dropping and should have disqualified her.
But I guess there was an extreme scarcity of willing bodies in the Democratic Party. So we get this bunch, a nobody, an aging Brooklyn hippie and this scarred and battered Washington swamp-thing.
Well, we’ll see what transpires. The decision to prosecute, or NOT prosecute, is a political decision that will reverberate for a long, long time. This is after all the administration that decided that bankers are untouchable. THAT decision, by itself, will echo through the decades ahead.
IF they decide to prosecute, IMO that ends Hillary’s shot at the presidency. Stockman says that, if they don’t prosecute, to expect a raft of leaks of draft indictments, FBI resignations and, in general a shitstorm of trouble that effectively shuts the door on Hillary.
With this decision, one way or the other, Obama and Loretta Lynch change the course of history.
Hillary will have to drop out, leaving Bernie and O’Malley. I am supporting the “aging hippie”
I bet another couple of thousand points drop in Dow, and they are going to take out Saudi Arabia, together.
PPT (Plunge Protection Team) against the two remaining hours. Who will win? Could they close above 16,000?
Q, a lot of people put this all down to Fed misbehavior and central bank misbehavior in general.
Remember the stretch between about 1966 and 1982 when the DOW ended where it started and inflation essentially slaughtered stock values?
Remember the Death of Equities? Or in the mid 70s when the DOW was down below about 600 and, according to some, had a sporting chance at zero?
You can spin this different ways, that see, in the end the stock market WAS a money making proposition, after all where are we at now? 16,000? More or less?
That is, if you ignore the long stretches of time when it wasn’t, when your investment was eaten by Fed money printing.
Just don’t ask the question where it’s been for the last 15 years. Because you may not like the answer. It ended Dec 2000 just under 11,000.
What does your HP financial calculator give you in terms of annual return? My back of the envelope number is roughly 3% per year since then and that’s BEFORE fees and inflation.
In any case, a case could be made that it’s the Fed and its sister central banks around the world with their manipulations that turned “price discovery” into misinformation.
In my view what the Fed did was to try and cover up the effects of a massive degradation in U.S purchasing power because of the shift of good paying jobs from the U.S. to China where people get paid shit. An overall degradation in worldwide demand IOW.
And the Fed did this via its repression of interest rates and blowing of various asset bubbles.
So the Fed’s fiddling with the monetary dials, trying to sustain the unsustainable, did confuse some people for a while. But only for a while.
V,
Great post.
And I’m impressed you use an HP financial calculator. RPN rules!
-Sticks
Oil is headed to $15/bbl for NYMEX crude. The US is entering recession as a deflationary trend hits asset prices worldwide.
The political implications of this contraction are only beginning to be felt.
The shining hill of 16,000 is very, very close – just 35 points separate the brave men and women of Plunge Protection Team from their goal… One more effort… You could do it, guys!
“brave men and women of Plunge Protection Team”
Sorry, forgot to mention all other genders. Need to make a list in alphabetical order.
It’s now added appendages… LGBTQUN-C
Where I felt the U for undecided may have been covered by the B, we now have the N-C for noncommittal to prove that the transitional state of U is not superfluous.
Please disregard my previous statement. It should read:
The shining hill of 16,000 is very, very close – just 35 points separate the brave Agenders, Androgyne, Bigenders, (Nonbinary) Butches, Ceterosexual/Ceteroromantics, Crossdressers, Demigenders, Enbys, Epicenes, (Nonbinary) Femmes, Gender fluids, Genderfluxs, GenderFucks, Genderless, Gender neutrals, Girlfags, Graygenders, Guydykes, Intergenders, Neutrois, Pangenders, Pomosexuals, Third Genders, Trigenders, Transmasculines, Transfeminines, Transmedicalists, men and women of Plunge Protection Team from their goal… One more effort… You could do it, guys!
Is it politically correct to use word “guys” in that respect?
That’s the short list… but why the need to label others? Why the interest in gender identifications. Just accept people for whoever they are, without feeling the need to morbidly dig into details or label others.
^for whomever they are^
If they have a GenderFucks as a new gender, we could appoint ClusterFucks as well, like in “look at that pretty clusterfucka!”
Were the applications are mailed to?
http://bbs.dailystormer.com/t/snake-slut-emma-watson-uses-alan-rickmans-death-to-push-feminist-agenda/1060
Truly we have attained the classless society. Emma made a great little English girl and adolescent. If only she could have become her character in real life. Instead she’s become an Illuminati/UN spokes- creature. A plaything of Voldemort.
“Oil prices may hang back in the low $60s for a little while … In any case, I don’t expect oil prices in America to lay low for long.” –James Howard Kunstler (Sept. 26, 2005)
What a difference 10 years makes! Predictions of $200 dollar a barrel oil (remember “peak oil”?) now seem quaint.
Who among us, even true-believers like Doug, dares to say what the world will be like in 2025?
So far, the cornucopians are winning… we are swimming in energy, at low prices not seen for some time. Gas at the pump in going down to below $1 a gallon… something I never thought I’d see again.
I sure wish someone would get the memo to lower gas prices in San Jose. I just filled up the ol’ minivan and paid $2.39 a gallon.
Jen
Are you a member of Costco? The Costco at 2201 Senter Rd & Parrott St in San Jose is selling gas for $2.29.
Or if you are in north San Jose the Costco at 1709 Automation Pkwy & Hostetter Rd is also selling gas for $2.29.
The Costco in Edison NJ is selling regular for $1.59. There is a Gulf station in Edison selling at $1.54. In either case it’s a long way to $1.00/gal.
Not from $4.
4 to 1.50 is a big drop.
another .50 is 1/6.
Was David Bowie the unconventional dancer who was imitated by Jagger, or was Jagger the original moves-man? These are the real questions worth exploring. The great English rock stars. There is substance there.
@ Doug:
“I know quite a bit more about thorium reactors, but I get tired of typing for the benefit of people who refuse/are unable to abandon their religious beliefs, so, let me do a quick search for easy-to read explanations . . .”-Doug.
Because you’re new to the CFN ‘community’ I may need to inform you that what you’re experiencing is part of an entrenched pattern:
1) the person you’re attempting to communicate with does not know anything of marketable worth with rigor, 2) this person relies on cutting and pasting from a proprietary ‘expert-system’ (that’s why there’s few if any independently verifiable links), 3) as soon as you destroy their ‘argument’ with actual references, facts and an airtight counter-argument they will change the subject and/or their screen-name, and 4) the whole exercise may end us seeming like a time/energy donation to one of the least worthy fucks in the info-sphere…
Time management: they choice is yours!
Meanwhile, 2nd-Stage Collapse is now clearly underway. Walmart Inc. can no longer pretend:
[1]
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/01/15/walmart-to-close-269-stores-in-us-and-abroad/78840020/
[2]
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35328098
WLMT down! Next!
😉
Well, MD, trolls and assholes are common on almost every unmoderated forum.
The disappointing factor here is the relatively small number of participants and the high percentage of those who are clueless, nasty and suffering from terminal Dunning-Kruger. That there may be a majority of such individuals among the human population as a whole will help seal our fate even more surely. It’s because being exposed to this stubborn & defiant stupidity is so stressful and depressing that I’ve been on the edge of unplugging from the ‘net for a while, now.
Now, the clueless and the unshakable cornucopians will have a thousand ways to explain why Walmart’s closing of a few hundred stores is insignificant and unrelated to the process of collapse — and they’ll have at least a few hundred more when China’s manufacturing economy grinds to a halt, commodity prices fall below even subsidized costs of extraction (or spike far above affordability, or are rationed), or whatever variation manifests itself next in the continuing collapse.
They really all need to be sent to their rooms until they truly understand the most basic of the underlying realities:
IPAT & EROEI
And then they should be made to read Jim’s books (I’m sure most of them really haven’t) and the remarkable H.T. Odum’s* last and most accessible book :
A Prosperous Way Down
http://www.amazon.com/Prosperous-Way-Down-Principles-Policies/dp/0870819089/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1452970684&sr=8-1&keywords=a+prosperous+way+down
* I had the privilege, rather late in his life, of participating in a long, moderated discussion to which HT was a contributor along with a number of other (IMHO) energy superstars — but no name-dropping needed. He was an honest-to-goodness genius, almost breathtakingly smart. HT basically invented the field of ecosystems ecology and conducted the most striking work on energetics in the real world anyone has ever done, resulting in the difficult-to-grok-in-its-fullness but critically-important notion of emergy.
P.S. My smart friend, Joe, a few years ago when it seemed to the masses that US gasoline prices would be in the $4-5 range forever:
“It’s not $5 gas you have to worry about, it’s $1 gas that you still can’t afford.”
A lot of what we talk about here could be described as dysfunction.
The dysfunction isn’t out there,nature functions as it should indeed it is in here, our consciousness. As long as you keep focusing on out there you will stay stuck in the dysfunction as you only see the antagonism of the opposites. In politics this is left and right in religion God and the devil rich and poor and so on. Facing our deeper fear ,indeed we seem to have a difficult acceptance of our mortality is the key to our understanding of dysfunction inner and outer.
Animals also have to fight for their survival. They make mistakes and pay for them. A couple of pitbulls got into my yard. The cats were shocked by the strange occurrence. They had a strong position on the porch rail but felt they had to do something so they did the wrong thing and went down into the yard for a closer look. Then they had to run for their lives.
Environmental Law: two species that exists on the same food cannot exist in the same ecosystem. The invasion of the Gray Squirrel has been a disaster for the native English Red Squirrel. Larger and more aggressive, they are ethnically cleansing the natives even as we speak.
So? You have a naïve, sentimental view of nature which you then try to apply to human affairs. Work it the other way. War is not only human but exists among the animals, birds, fish, insects, and plants.
Have you read the novels? The Judge ignored his duty to Union Grove until Brother Job and his militia came in. Why make rulings he couldn’t enforce? And why provoke bad people which would have lead to conflicts he couldn’t win? So he kept his peace and ruled his own estate. When the conditions improved, he was willing to assume his duties. A rational man.
Gray Squirrel has been a disaster for the native English Red Squirrel
I thought the greys had a disease or parasite or germ that killed the reds.
I dont like the greys. they look like rats.
Why don’t you start a refuge for Red Squirrels? Centuries from now you image and icons could show you with a Red on your shoulder.
“. . . two species that exists on the same food cannot exist in the same ecosystem . . .”
Right, the three species of herons, egrets, kingfishers, otters, the swallows, mallards, an occasional osprey, etc. who, together or in various species groups, eat the same fish, the same insects, the same amphibians, in the freshwater marsh 100 feet behind my home are actually impossible. And so are the numerous species of herbivores in the same environment.
You need to read “Fundamentals of Ecology” by my pen pal H.T.’s brother, Eugene Odum. Coincidentally, just as the HT book I recommended was his last, the 5th edition of Fundamentals was Eugene’s last academic text.
So in terms of our conversation, you’re saying that Blacks are a separate subspecies of Humanity, probably further from us than Chimps are from Bonobos.
I know you have far too much integrity to try and change the subject instead of answering.
Try ‘to’ change.
[Thats in honor of Q]
Doug, the entity communicating with you, claiming we are in stage 2 of societal collapse because of Walmart store closings is known for posting misinformation and hyperbole. Once in a while we respond to provide facts, but mostly it’s best to ignore him/her/it.
For example, in the lastest post from this entity we read:
“WLMT down! Next!”
Here are the facts:
Walmart has 11,600 stores worldwide. 269 are closing. Do the math. It hardly announces economic collapse when a corporation makes a rational business decision to close 0.23% (less than a quarter of 1%) of its stores.
But the entity would like you to believe otherwise.
Correction
There are only 154 stores to be closed in the USA. Do the math. That translates to 0.01 of Walmart’s store total.
“Collapse is now clearly underway. Walmart Inc. can no longer pretend” –MD
Yes, the sky is falling! Walmart has made a rational business decision to close 1% of its stores. This definitely spells the end of Walmart. /s
The sky brightens before the Sun rises. Likewise the Sun gets low before it disappears. Things get dark before they get really dark. A few Walmarts close and that’s it? Maybe and yet maybe not.
The most widely followed commodity index is the Reuters CRB has imploded! This index consists of 6 components: energy (oil and gas), grains (wheat, corn, soybeans), industrials (copper, cotton), meats (cattle, hogs) softs (coffee, sugar, oj), precious metals (gold, silver, platinum). The CRB is a broad measure of the cost of real stuff necessary for modern society to function i.e. not virtual stuff like porn, netflix, cuntbook, etc. IT HAS TOTALLY COLLAPSED BACK TO 1973 LEVELS WITH LOTS OF ROOM LEFT ON THE DOWNSIDE!!!
1972 = 110
1973 = 180
2008 = 463
2016 = 160
20?? = 110
Now here is the truly interesting aspect of the longterm CRB chart: if you turn the chart upside down, does it not represent the increasing value of the unbacked paper dollar? This is THE paradox of this unhappy era………
correction: …..index, the Reuters CRB, has……..
Will food prices go to 1975 levels? 1-5 dollars a day per person?
What I find interesting in the discussion above concerning the WalMart store closings is that wpa-ccc STILL does not understand simple arithmetic. 269 divided by 11,600 = 0.023, NOT 0.23%.
Yes, and I corrected it, revising it to 1% … whether it is 2.3% or 1% my point remains valid. Walmart is not collapsing because it is closing a small percentage of its stores.
Not true. What you did was recalculate to show the US percentage rather than the worldwide percentage. You never mentioned having misstated the worldwide percentage.
I agree with you, however, that the closings amount to a nit. In fact, the relevant figure is not the number of stores closed but the dollar amount of revenue represented by those closed stores (a large number of which are small operations meant to compete with “dollar” stores. Apparently that strategy was not bearing fruit so they are wisely abandoning it.) And I wonder if anybody actually read the link which said that WalMart would be OPENING 300 new stores this fiscal year.
From a purely business angle (ignoring the perception that they are the evil empire of retailing) what WalMart is doing sounds astute.
Hello Q,
WalMart exemplifies the _Cost Leadership_ corporate strategy. It’s not the number of stores that are closing that is the salient issue (that’s a sophomoric interpretation), it’s the fact that they’re surrendering market-share and that strategy – while under pressure from Amazon.
This has been a long time coming. Over the past 5 years their in-store revenue has steadily dropped Y-o-Y. Nothing seemed to be working – despite their laudable CapEx investments in JiT inventory technology and personnel training.
Finally they admitted that their core customer no longer had the discretionary income to keep buying from them – the low-cost leader. Problem is, WalMart is the largest private employer in the world (@ >2M employees), AND the employer with the greatest percentage of employees requiring food-stamps and other assistance. If any one organization is most culpable for lowering wages in America and elsewhere to the detriment of consumption, it’s WalMart. And they did all this while having the tax-payer subsidize their employee compensation. [*]
Ironically, WalMart killed itself by winning the race to the bottom.
— — —
[*] As well as ‘inadvertently’ hiring an enormous amount of undocumented workers…
MD believes in Orlov’s five stages and thinks Walmart closing 1% of its stores is evidence of entering stage two. Let’s be clear about this. Here is Orlov’s stage two:
Stage 2: Commercial collapse. Faith that “the market shall provide” is lost. Money is devalued and/or becomes scarce, commodities are hoarded, import and retail chains break down, and widespread shortages of survival necessities become the norm.
None of that is happening in the United States. Just the opposite. Hiring is happening all over the United States. For example:
NEW YORK — According to the Associated General Contractors of America and Sage Construction and Real Estate, a whopping 70 percent of New York construction firms and general contractors will be hiring in 2016. The monumental job growth is being driven by an increase in available work, with the construction industry booming in the larger cities such as New York City, Albany and Buffalo. The amount of jobs created is expected to be substantial, with 60 percent of firms expecting to hire up to 16 new employees. Most firms surveyed for the report responded that multifamily, health care and power projects are expected to drive most of the growth. A worker shortage is expected initially, which will also drive up the average salary in the area as well. (Albany Business Review)
Orlov’s Stage 2 collapse is not happening.
OKLAHOMA CITY — Love’s Travel Stops plans to open more than 40 locations in 28 states in 2016, the most the company has ever opened in a single year. The company, based in Oklahoma City, added 27 stores in 2015. Love’s Travel Stops are the company’s core business. In addition to adding new stores, Love’s maintains a remodel schedule to ensure existing locations remain clean, safe and well-maintained. The company continues to grow in other areas that complement the stores. Love’s will begin working with Dunkin’ Donuts, IHOP Express and Taco John’s this year. Its interstate hotel business also continues to expand, with 10 new locations scheduled to open next to Love’s Travel Stops in 2016. The company currently operates four hotels. (The Oklahoman)
Orlov’s stage 2 collapse is not happening:
BOZEMAN, Mont. — The tech industry in Montana is currently undergoing a renaissance, seeing a monumental increase in jobs as well as nearly twice the median salary of other jobs in Montana, according to the Montana High Tech Business Alliance. Tech giant Oracle is expanding in Bozeman, creating more than 1,000 high-paying jobs statewide. Other large tech firms such as Zoot, a credit decision and loan origination software development firm, and Apttus, a business automation and application software firm, both have offices in Bozeman as well, making the growing city an emerging technology hub. But it’s not just the giant firms that are growing in Montana. Even small companies such as Elixiter, a tech marketing firm, has grown from a handful of employees to more than 30 the past few years. Due to such tremendous growth in recent years, tech jobs in Bozeman offer competitive salaries, paying an average of $63,248 per year.
Orlov’s stage 2 collapse is not happening:
ALABAMA, N.Y. — The Empire State Development Corporation recently announced it will grant up to $5 million to the Genesee County Industrial Development Agency for 1366 Technologies and the Western New York Science, Technology and Advanced Manufacturing Park (STAMP). The funds will be used for land acquisition, engineering and soft costs related to infrastructure for 1366 Technologies new state-of-the-art solar wafer production facility. 1366 Technologies will be the anchor tenant at STAMP, and the facility is expected to open in August 2016.
Based in Beford, Massachusetts, the company develops practical manufacturing solutions to the solar energy industry, primarily to drive down the levelized cost of solar electricity, according to its website. The Empire State Development Corporation approved 23 projects total, providing more than $101 million in funding and creating more than 600 jobs. (Rochester Business Journal)
@ Doug:
RE | “If we do, I propose we store the waste products, at your house.”-d.
The funny thing is that in some (possibly many) areas that is already the case. Doug, are you aware of the __Farallon Islands Nuclear Waste Dump__ due east and in sight of San Francisco? This is a pointed question.
— — —
cursory reference:
http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/farallon-islands
Thorium waste management can be optimized through the use of molten salt fast reactors to meet increased demand for carbon-free energy.
Longer fuel cycles and higher burn-up result in improved waste form characteristics, reduction of plutonium inventories, and in-situ use of bred-in fissile material. In terms of waste, thorium oxide [ThO2] is relatively inert and does not oxidize, unlike uranium oxide. My house is small, but ThO2 could be stored there.
“Doug, are you aware of the __Farallon Islands Nuclear Waste Dump__ . . .”
Oh, yes, indeed. Sailed over them in fishing and whale-watching boats a number of times.
Forty-some thousand drums a bit south of Southeast Farallon and another few thousand off to the southwest, just at the dropoff of the continental shelf.
“What, we worry?”
CFN allegations that the USA is becoming “third world” means a lot of CFNers have never lived in the third world.
Orlov’s stage 2 collapse is not happening:
OKLAHOMA CITY— Officials from Cox Communications were joined at the Oklahoma State Capitol Jan. 7 by Gov. Mary Fallin and Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett to announce that the telecommunications company has launched gigabit Internet service in areas of Oklahoma City and Tulsa for its residential customers.
Percy Kirk, region manager for Cox, touted the company’s investments in the state. He said Cox has been in Oklahoma since 1979, and now employs about 1,800 in the state. He said a strong customer base and a healthy business climate led Cox to invest here.
“This is an important development for Oklahoma, adding another quality of life factor that will help lure more businesses, families and young people to our state,” Fallin said.
Cox reported the service offers speeds as fast as 1,000 megabits per second. It will deliver more speed, a powerful home network and rich broadband enabled services to customers. The service also includes the latest high-speed WiFi router, one terabyte of cloud storage, Cox Security Suite and Family Protection and 10 email boxes each with 15 gigabytes of storage.
While focused on bringing gigabit speeds to its residential customers, Cox has consistently increased Internet speeds for all of its packages. Cox recently increased the speeds of its Ultimate package to 200 mbps. Also in 2015, the company made its Starter package five times faster and the Essential package three times faster, offering choice and access to meet all customers’ individual needs.
In the last 10 years, Cox has invested more than $15 billion in its communities through infrastructure upgrades to deliver video, phone and high-speed Internet and home security and automation service to homes and businesses in the company’s service area. Additionally, the company gives tens of millions of dollars annually in cash and in-kind contributions to support the communities in which it operates.
Orlov’s stage 2 collapse is not happening:
PLANO, Texas — Cloud-based mortgage industry technology firm Optimal Blue will be expanding its Plano headquarters by 30 percent in 2016 in order to accommodate the company’s robust growth. The new headquarters will be approximately 43,809 square feet, which is about 18,000 square feet larger than its previous home. Located at The Campus at Legacy, 4340-5360 Legacy Drive, Plano, more than 200 employees will move into the new facility once open in March. Optimal Blue is currently hiring in several business units, including marketing, account management and software development. (Dallas Business Journal)
Orlov’s stage 2 collapse is not happening:
SAN ANTONIO, Texas — San Antonio’s construction industry continues to boom, adding 4,800 new jobs the past 12 months. The job growth equates to a year-over-year increase of 10 percent, increasing total employment from 46,900 to 51,700 between November 2014 and November 2015. Large and intensive projects…are the main drivers behind this growth. The addition of new jobs lands San Antonio as the 38th fastest growing metro in the country. Other Texas cities that experienced growth in 2015 include: Austin at 2,600 jobs, Houston at 4,000 jobs and Dallas at 2,600 jobs. (San Antonio Business Journal)
============
Orlov’s stage 2 criteria: Commercial collapse. Faith that “the market shall provide” is lost. Money is devalued and/or becomes scarce, commodities are hoarded, import and retail chains break down, and widespread shortages of survival necessities become the norm.
=============
Orlov’s stage 2 is not happening in the United States in 2016. What is happening is growth, infrastructure, new employment with wages much better than Walmart in energy, transportation, manufacturing, construction… the cornucopians are winning. Doom is not happening. Just the opposite.
MD has adopted Orlov’s stages and is looking for data to plug in as evidence. The countervailing evidence quashes Orlov.
We went to the movies tonight and saw Star Wars. Even my wife who has almost never seen a movie she didn’t LOVE felt this latest version was “corny.”
It was exactly what you would expect: cute robots and lots of explosions and noise. I had to remove my hearing aids or kiss my ear drums goodbye.
Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford have become scarily old and will not be winning any supporting actor awards. Casting was done according to leftist PC principles: so many blacks, so many whites, so many females, so many males, etc, etc. Not that he did a bad job as the updated Darth Vader-like character but I couldn’t help wondering who Adam Driver had to blow to land that role.
The female lead, Ray (played by Daisey Ridley) is, of course, smart as a whip and tough as nails (a galactic Katniss Everdeen). The male lead, Finn (played by John Boyega) is black. You are not far into the story before you can see that Ray is attracted to Finn but this angle is played very subtly, probably on the basis of focus group studies showing that that sort of thing might harm worldwide box office receipts.
There is no sex or nudity of any sort in the film. At one point they hug out of some sort of emotional relief that they are both still alive, and near the end, when Finn is lying motionless (possibly dead?), Ray kisses him on the forehead. I immediately thought of what Janos’s reaction would be, viz. incensed revulsion.
We still have a lot of work to do to promote miscegenation. In 2014, 37% of Americans said having more people of different races marrying each other was a good thing for society. That should be 97% acceptance (to allow 3% for people like Janos)
Well you must admit he’s no Sidney Poitier. Those huge nostrils, huge jaw, low forehead – it’s like they went out looking for the most primitive Black they could find so they could laugh when Whites say how handsome he is. At least none have so far, though one lady I talked to resolutely refused to admit how grotesque he was. Oh, he’s attracted to her? Of course he is – at least that much is realistic. You think he would want a woman who looked like him? Are you crazy? Too much blood is in your brain because of the stock situation. Try bathing your feet every morning in cold water like Jefferson used to do. Prabhupad used to put sandalwood paste on his head to cool it.
The future of outer space is back to the stone age. We’ll see muscle men tearing robots apart with their bare hands just like in the old pulps.
what he posted is the opposite of what you state—-
Ray is attracted to Finn.
More miscegenation drivel from TWMNBN.
My mistake doesn’t negate my insight. My post stands!
Check –youtube– Adele ‘hello’ [ abillion views] and see who she is begging to love her.
yuk.
The major propaganda of Star Bores is ‘young white female w powerful black buck’
–why not asian man with 6 foot tall muscular black woman?
The Chinese Poster downplayed the Black. Made his image small.
King Kong becomes Bonzo the chimp.
Chipstone: The dollar vacuum cleaner, the ME refugees in Europe and who gets the money
The dollar vacuum cleaner is turned on to the fullest power, not letting the US debt market into an uncontrollable dive.
One may shift money from one pocket to another and take suckers for a ride, taking their money with elaborated market tricks, but all these operations will not produce the main thing – the real goods, providing for normal business activity. And those products could be only produced in the real sector of the economy.
To date, the financial and the economic system as a whole came to a point where debt overhang over the economy has reached such proportions that no profit of the real sector is able to maintain the stability of the swollen debt market.
But greed and fear of the inevitable by a financial oligarchy lead to the fact that instead of trying with pinpoint bankruptcies of unviable entities and gradual reduction in the production of new debt to reduce the resulting gap, the impact is applied to already half- strangled real sector.
Today, all are talking about the fall in oil prices. But it is not only oil. The aggregate index of all commodities for the year fell by 34%. By sector: the drop in agriculture 19%; Metal Index fell by 30%; the index of industrial goods by 26%. If it were not so sad, it would be laughable, but of all industrial markets resistance is only shown by the beverage market, which fell by only by 2%. People still need to get drunk.
The picture of the destruction of real production is complemented by Baltic Dry Index, which reflects the cost of maritime transport of dry cargo, and in fact is an important indicator of demand for commodities underlying any real production. Moreover, not in monetary, but in quantitative terms, which is especially important. This index is falling almost non-stop for three consecutive years, from 2270 to 394, that is almost 6 times.
The actual production is reduced, followed by reduction in the international trade. Money accumulates in the financial sector. And that state of the financial sector in the form of a vigorous performance of stock indices, lower rates on loans and similar drivel many analysts around the world are trying to portray as “everything is just peachy”.
But the trouble is, there is one small rub. Markets do not exist independently. Each market is consuming a certain amount of money. And if some market sags, it begins to consume significantly less money. The money accumulates in banks and poses a risk of inflationary overhang. First, the banks are trying to offer the extra money on preferential conditions in loans on production and trade to revive the sector. But it is impossible. Then you have to dispose of the excess cash using financial markets, lifting the stock indexes through the roof. This stage we just passed.
In any market, there are always two sides – seller and buyer. And if the banks with excess liquidity comes to the market, somebody at the same moment exits out. That is, the money is returned to the same bank. The overhang remains. Here the debt market comes to the rescue. None of the Western states during the beginning of the actual collapse in 2008 has reduced their respective debt burden in absolute terms. Moreover, the debt burden of all this time has been steadily increasing, partly due to the nationalization of formerly private debt, partly due to the inability of any Western state to live within its means, balancing its own budget.
And the extra money actively goes to finance budget deficits. The deficit is growing, which means two things at once. The private financial sector, which is just a few years ago, “improved”, throwing the burden of their debts to the state, is once again saddled with these debts, but now sovereign.
A whole mass of money in the economy is occupied exclusively servicing sovereign debt, since nothing remains for the rest. Very little goes to the real sector. But money is also not enough for the financial sector in its entirety. And under the knife gradually start to go the financial markets that are not public debt related. That is what we are now witnessing.
But nobody cares about the real sector, and equity markets, the real fight for the money has already started between various states. United States, with a more powerful and sophisticated mechanisms in this area are in a privileged position. Their main competitor becomes Europe. And here is the noticeable trend is quite curious.
Europe is not in a hurry to go under the knife. On the one hand, its stock markets sagged much deeper than in the US (about 20% against the US 10%). But adequate flow of money in the direction of America is not visible yet. That is, until the money were sucked out of commodity and precious metals markets, everything was normal.
But when it came to serious contradictions Europe shows enviable stability.
The flow of money from Europe to the United States would have to be expressed in a decrease of the euro against the dollar, but this is not happening. On the contrary, the euro is fighting for life, even growing up in early December from the level of 1.05 to 1.09 to the present time.
But recently the dynamics of the exchange rate was quite different. From August to November, the euro sank against the dollar from 1.17 to 1.05.
But in both cases there was an interesting pattern. As soon as the stock markets are growing we see a rush of money from Europe across the ocean. Once they start to fall, the money even faster returns to Europe. Europe does not want to become a sacrificial lamb for delaying the fall of the United States, preferring to sit out in its own debt markets, not American.
Sucking money out of the economy into the debt market leads simultaneously to deflation, which is increasingly exacerbating the real situation.
Here there is one interesting nuance.
It seems the salvation of the problems is in emission. Well, what difficulties may be, in order to print a few trillion dollars or euros, and thus to maintain the stability.
But not all that simple. The method of parallel coherent emission, such as the center in turn became the United States, Japan, Switzerland, China (this step is now), and the funds from this emission are shared by all actors it seems exhausted itself.
Too much increased money supply in relation to shrinking real economy. Now, any country that dares to launch emission first for their own interests without taking into account the interests of “partners” is in danger of falling into a tailspin of hyperinflation.
The risk is that it will be appointed the main culprit of general collapse, with the far-reaching consequences for the perpetrator.
So, what the United States do in these conditions? They began to increase interest rates.
Raising key rates, reducing monetary base should lead to a sharp deficit of dollars, its growth relative to other currencies and redirect the cash flows to New York.
In this case, Europe will have only two choices. Either remain without money, or run at infinite hyper emissions. Where it leads, Europe remembers from the history of the 20-ies of the 20th century.
At the same time Europe is in a very ambivalent position. If it endures pressure from across the pond it has all chances that the US will collapse first. Theirs debt problems are much more acute, and the pre-election year did not contribute to the timely and active anti-crisis measures.
On the other hand, the US has in his pocket a huge trump card that can significantly affect the situation. This is the problem of refugees.
Christmas events in Cologne, but as it turned out, not there alone, some have called a rehearsal for “orchestra”, is actually the prelude to the chaos that could erupt in Europe, where conflicts between Europeans and refugees escalate into open conflict.
And odds are very high that we will see a very hot spring in Europe with the organization attempts of nationalist revenge even against the policy of the authorities. And sufficiently serious armed clashes with groups of refugees that could be much better organized than it seems today.
What happens in this case to the finances in Europe, one can guess.
“Thorium waste management can be optimized through the use of molten salt fast reactors to meet increased demand for carbon-free energy.
Longer fuel cycles and higher burn-up result in improved waste form characteristics, reduction of plutonium inventories, and in-situ use of bred-in fissile material. In terms of waste, thorium oxide [ThO2] is relatively inert and does not oxidize, unlike uranium oxide. My house is small, but ThO2 could be stored there.” — wpa
Tablets of a mixture of uranium-238 dioxide and plutonium – the basis of today new generation nuclear
http://s5.postimg.org/ff2nkqbbr/pastillas_de_uranio.jpg
1 gram of this metal is capable of producing 150 kWh – roughly a consumption of single family house over a month.
Thorium could also be used, but current production installation in Urals uses U238 – it is 200 times more plentiful in Nature than U235.
There are also rumors of currently strictly military-use compact proton accelerators (size of a cargo plane) that could be used to produce chain reaction in U238 or Thorium for energy production.
They are not being considered for civil use due to the high impact they have on detection of small terrorist nuclear devices that could be smuggled into the target country as well their ability to remotely destroy any nuclear reactor, including the power station of US Air carrier.
Cars are killers or…?
Google publishes interesting statistics, the number of situations in which drivers had to disengage the autopilot of robo-mobiles. The most interesting graph is the number of traveled miles per one disengagement or auto-pilot:
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/wBGQY_oqVhpa54IcwngL1z01763mKLwDN3ornI8kyJImuY78AtL8M_2JAP9pc4U-uT8wroEYzcjtQuNqiWbxmtufjuKXqtEvyEI67lwPnyvYOERJQqc_BYQTKzeg7cbPynZdSqrx
Looking at the statistics on the use of vehicles in the USA, we learn that the average driver in the US drives 13,476 miles a year, that is, if you give him the Google robo-car we get almost 5 accidents per year.
On the other hand, the robo-car a year ago was giving up to 6 times more accidents per year – almost 30, progress is very impressive, if progress is linearly continue for three years, robo-mobiles reach the level of one accident per 650 thousand miles or in other words, one accident in 50 years of driving for the average person.
Source: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//selfdrivingcar/files/reports/report-annual-15.pdf
All we have to wait for is appearance of hi-tech Google-banks, that will blow TBTF banks out of the water.
Obama should consider separating the money circuits in US into at least two flows – one for fin.speculators, another one for the rest of us.
In other terms, we shall create a sand-box for the banksters were they could continue on with their risky speculative games without any chance of harming the rest of us.
Something like Google-glass-steagall act of 2016!
For the brick-an-mortar offices of Google bank we could use local existing USPS places.
Mr Darling,
the third paragraph in your post lays out the gaping illogic in C-suite business strategy.
“Finally they admitted that their core customer no longer had the discretionary income to keep buying from them – the low-cost leader. Problem is, WalMart is the largest private employer in the world (@ >2M employees), AND the employer with the greatest percentage of employees requiring food-stamps and other assistance. If any one organization is most culpable for lowering wages in America and elsewhere to the detriment of consumption, it’s WalMart.” – Mr D
Each individual CEO wants his company work-force to be poor (for what could be better for the company bottom line?). So they all go relocating their factories to shit-holes like China.
Or, like Wal-Mart, they make sure to have as many minimum wage and part-time workers as possible.
But, OTOH, and this is where the illogic comes in, each CEO wants his customers to be rich, to have the discretionary income to buy his own company products and services.
You can only conclude that the business class are fucking idiots. None of them seems to ask, if they’re all strenuously pushing their own employee wages down, where do the rich customers come from?
When the Wal-Mart customer (ie Wal-Mart employees) can’t afford to buy at Wal-Mart, the house of cards comes down.
Which is what we’re seeing in the stock market.
“You can only conclude that the business class are fucking idiots” — Volodya
No, they are not. They just not thinking of operating “forever” – get the loot as long as it lasts and run with it to something else.
Hey, let’s check out what’s happening over in the Windy City, hometown of our esteemed president and the distinguished professor Bill Ayers, as well as the ‘Capital of Black America’ (Now that Detroit is toes up, unlikely ever to be revived.) From HeyJackass/:
Since Jan. 1, 2016
Shot and Killed: 25
Shot and Wounded: 137
Total Shot: 162
Total Homicides: 25
Now there’s the real ‘State of the Union.’
Incidentally, that empty chair at the SOTU speech, meant to represent ‘victims of gun violence’, a little lefty symbolism, how about an empty chair for American Citizens murdered by illegals, another one for Americans murdered by ISIS jihadists, another one for Police Officers murdered by BLM thugs?
brh
how about an empty chair for American Citizens murdered by illegals, another one for Americans murdered by ISIS jihadists, another one for Police Officers murdered by BLM thugs? –brh
Murdered by guns, correct? One empty chair works for all victims of gun violence. Or are you trying to make a partisan point using dead bodies of certain victims? Shame on you.
Sometime a knife will do, like the woman in Oklahoma who was beheaded on the job by a co worker, a jihadist shouting ‘Ali Akbar!’
brh
TNB –Buddy.
TNB.
In 2014, 37% of Americans said having more people of different races marrying each other was a good thing for society. – wpa
===================
In 2014, 63% of Americans said having more people of different races marrying each other was a bad thing for society.
Zowie! You are right, Q. Thinking like that: 37% favor Trump. That means 63% do not favor Trump. I will sleep better tonight. I would vote for the Candian before I would vote for that liberal New Yorker.
TRUMP’S LIBERAL IDEAS
Trump thinks affirmative action is okay.
Trump would fund Planned Parenthood except for abortion. (This is current federal policy, though Trump doesn’t seem to know it.)
Trump supports a progressive income tax. He does not favor a flat tax.
Trump doesn’t believe you should be able to fire someone just for being gay.
Trump doesn’t want to cut Social Security or Medicare.
Trump’s in favor of a ban on assault weapons.
Trump invited Bill and Hillary Clinton to his wedding.
Trump doesn’t “fully” believe in supply-side economics.
Trump wants to “lead from behind” on Ukraine. Trump believes that
Germany should take the lead on Ukraine.
Trump hates the Iran deal, but he wouldn’t abrogate it after taking office.
Bernie Sanders, the Hippies last Go Round!
brh
4 to 1.50 is a big drop.
another .50 is 1/6. – Malthuss
==============
Perhaps we can get you into the remedial arithmetic class with wpa-ccc.
.50 divided by 4.00 = .125 which is 1/8th not 1/6th
But, Princeton-level mathematics aside, let’s deal with today’s reality: the cheapest gas in Edison NJ is $1.54. To get to $1.00 requires a $0.54 drop. i.e. a 35% drop (.54 divided by 1.54 = .35). Each penny of decline becomes more difficult than the previous penny. Gas stations would be dropping (failing) like flies.
Have you ever noticed how difficult it is in football to gain yardage the closer you get to the goal? That’s the compression effect. Same thing with declining prices.
“Have you ever noticed how difficult it is in football to gain yardage the closer you get to the goal?” –Q
No. I see my favorite quarterback just throw a pass into the endzone. Much faster than grinding it out, yard by yard, on the ground. By the way, I passed regular math with flying colors. I also scored high on the MAT… your facility with analogies (football/gasoline) leaves something to be desired.
By the way, I passed regular math with flying colors. – Malth
===============
Well then how do you get 1/6th as the answer to .5 divided by 4?
I know, I know…….this is just a blog comment…….this isn’t a doctoral math dissertation.
Correction: I miss-attributed wpa’s comment about ‘flying colors in math’ to Malth.
It is OK, Q. We all make mistakes. We are human. I imagine things are even more complicated for those who contain multitudes.
STOP PICKING ON ME.
And fyi, JHK has a wiki page!
I was calculating –like–1 to 3, not 1 to 4.
If any one organization is most culpable for lowering wages in America and elsewhere to the detriment of consumption, it’s Walmart. – MisterDarling
=============
If I understand correctly the argument being put forth by Volodya and yourself is as follows: The business managers of WalMart are idiots because their low wage structure makes not only their own employees too poor to ‘consume’ at Walmart but also causes low wages in the rest of the world and therefore the inability of those other low wage people to consume at Walmart as well.
Further, that (by implication) the obvious answer is to raise wages at Walmart. Those at minimum wage (say, $7.50/hr) would be doubled to $15.00. This would be repeated across the globe wherever grossly low wage structures existed, not just at Walmart. Now no one would be too poor to ‘consume’ at Walmart. US and World-wide consumption GDP would improve as if by magic.
If this is your message I say: increase the lowest hourly pay rate to $30………….oh what the hell, make it $50 an hour.
And while we’re at it, let’s have Walmart voluntarily double or quadruple what they pay for ALL their costs from rents to toilet paper. The ascent in world GDP would be fantastic!!
You go, Q! By raising wages as you recommend, the taxpayers also benefit because the Walmart workers will no longer means-test to qualify for welfare checks or food stamps… on your dime.
It is not hard to see why you have been hired as Dr. Pangloss for the socialists and not as CFO of a corporation.
Speaking of socialists…….where the hell is Buck Stud lately?… carving some new “Gates of Paradise?”
“Dr. Pangloss for the socialists”
I do not advocate socialism. I advocate democratic socialism, which is what we have now with our public roads, public libraries, public parks, medicare, veterans’ hospitals, etc. all paid for by a collective pooling of resources, then democratically REDISTRIBUTED from those who have the ability to pay taxes to those who have the greatest need. America is the greatest multicultural country on earth. America is still great. Trump is disgusting. During the last Republican debate Trump went to the restroom. I don’t even want to tell you what he did in the restroom… it’s too disgusting. He wants to bang his daughter, too.
Q.,
Another small quibble. The *status quo* is anything but socialism. Dr. Pangloss is here to put a fine polish on the turds dropped by the status quo. (I like the slip o’ the curtain moment when “we” was blurted. My, my, who would this mysterious “we” be? That’s what’s good about not being able to edit the posts.)
Ps. There will follow an attempt at spinning the slip soonish… Wait for it…
We = taxpayers
My, my, what a “slip o’ the curtain moment”! Taxpayers was implicit from the context.
We are enjoying democratic socialism. And the clean water you drink is not a “turd dropped by the status quo” … it is a result of socialist water purification systems to guarantee clean water for the public. Be glad you don’t live in Michigan, with a Republican governor “saved money” on clean drinking water.
Still around Q…and not “Gates of Paradise” but “Holy Doors”. As you probably know the Pope declared 2016 a “Jubilee Year of Mercy:
“Pope Francis has called on Catholics around the world to use the ongoing Jubilee year of mercy to “open wide” the doors of their hearts to forgive others and to work against social exclusion, even of those that may have caused them bother or upset.”
Thus, the symbolic representation via Holy Doors. One of the doors I am working on will feature a Christ figure and the other door four Marian apparition scenes. They will be carved in quarter sawn white oak because regular plain sawn oak typically has too much ‘wild grain’ which can detract from subtle facial feature details. Quarter sawn lumber features very straight grain patterns and beautiful ‘white flecks’ that one often see’s in liturgical wood work/carving.
Raising worker wages will also benefit Walmart by lowering turnover, hiring costs, training costs, better customer service, better brand image, etc. It’s a win-win-win for employer-emplyee-taxpayer. (see Costco for an example of how this is being done successfully)
VIENNA — Iran released Washington Post correspondent Jason Rezaian and three other detained Iranian Americans on Saturday…
Obama’s Iran deal, besides stopping Iran from getting the bomb, just keeps on yielding dividends. In the Bush era those 10 sailors would have been held as prisoners, instead of being fed and housed and sent on their way. Now we have more prisoner releases, which were not part of the Iran deal, but are the result of statesman Obama’s diplomacy.
Now for some history of how we got to the
…preamble of collapse:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-16/deflation-monster-has-arrived
The discovery of very bad decisions (for the commonweal). Big fun!
Regarding Zerohedge…
Again, for the second week, I was reading a post when my computer came under attack and went into “safe mode”…scary DOS messages, reboot, etc. Windows 7 64-bit. I’m outta there for good.
Too bad, because I found the articles there entertaining….
Hello Volodya!
RE | “You can only conclude that the business class are fucking idiots. None of them seems to ask, if they’re all strenuously pushing their own employee wages down, where do the rich customers come from? When the Wal-Mart customer (ie Wal-Mart employees) can’t afford to buy at Wal-Mart, the house of cards comes down.”-v.
I’m not interested in writing-off the current crop of decision-makers as a class – they’re stuck in a situation with very little latitude. What I do see is the end of an unsustainable situation: the expectation of endless economic growth on the back of endless debt expansion.
What happened was a grotesque distortion in the market and a complete disconnect between PRICE and economic VALUE. This disconnect is profoundly apparent everywhere now – including the price of labor.
Lastly; Debt is not “self-cancelling” and the figurative ‘snake’ cannot survive by eating it’s tail. This is what drives the unwind.
@ FitM:
“You can only conclude that the business class are fucking idiots” — Volodya
“No, they are not. They just not thinking of operating “forever” – get the loot as long as it lasts and run with it to something else.”-f.
What I see is a bunch of people whose idea of “always” is just the past 40 years. Their sense of what is ‘normal’ exists entirely in the post-Bretton Woods Era. Debt expansion and financialization are the structural supports for every one of their plans. They are totally out of touch with how little is left to float their next market squeeze.
And now the results are in.
Cheers!
hey MD
I have this book around here about the textile industry in New England, really America’s first foray into the industrial revolution beginning about 1795. Much of the early machinery and technicians were brought in from England. The business lasted until about 1970, a pretty good run, and many of the empty mills are still standing, alongside rivers mostly, massive granite edifices built to last centuries. Imagine how surprised I was then to learn that the original investors in Textile, as well as the early industrialists, did not look at cloth manufacturing as a long term prospect; they expected to make some $$$ on their investments then get out as quickly as possible, and like you say, move on to something else.
brh
Do you know what ‘Berkshire – Hathaway’ were?
And do you know what ‘TNB’ stands for?
Hello Q,
RE | “If this is your message I say: increase the lowest hourly pay rate to $30………….oh what the hell, make it $50 an hour.”-q.
If your referring to WalMart’s too-little too-late hail-Mary wage increase, I agree it accelerates the collapse of their business and does as much harm as good at this point. My actual “message” is that it should never have come to this is the first place – please feel free to review my replies to Volodya and FitM.
The bottom-line is that price-discovery has been stalled for far too long. There seemed to be some ridiculous belief that ‘The Market’ hovered on some ethereal plane _separate_ from tangible reality – while generating tangible wealth to spend in that ‘lesser’ tangible reality at the same time.
Welcome to the New ‘Age of Discovery’!
Cheers!
😉
“preamble of collapse” – Ozone
For somebody it is a “collapse”, for somebody is an excellent opportunity…
The main goal of dominating the global Western financial oligarchy is to maintain and, if possible, the multiply the wealth and political influence on the results of an imminent global financial crisis.
Ideal for the financial oligarchy would be a repetition of global scenario of the Great Depression, when the bankers for a pittance bought production assets and lowered to the floor the cost of labor and social security (and then dramatically increased capitalization during and after World War II, buying trophies and emitting dollar as world currency).
And there is every reason to believe that such a global political upheaval the financial oligarchy had prepared this time.
This is for someone at the bottom is a deep crisis, and for them – “Mamma-Mia”. Long-term calculation was exactly on the Greatest Crisis and the Greatest Depression (and even its mystical interpretation as the “Last Judgment Day” banksters – Calvinists or Judaists alike, fully imagined in their favor that only could cheer and carry away).
After the Second World the ruins of the Reichstag became a symbol of futile quest for world domination by brute military force. After the Third World Restart the same symbol of the failure of the same purposes by a rough, aggressive manipulation of the information field will be the smoking from the liquid shit ruins of once powerful empire of the liberal media.
(CNN)Crews are searching for 12 Marines missing at sea after two CH-53 helicopters apparently collided during an overnight training flight off the Hawaiian island of Oahu, authorities said.
Bet they were straight male pilots crashing into each other, not transgendered or female pilots.
@ Doug:
RE | “Oh, yes, indeed. Sailed over them in fishing and whale-watching boats a number of times. . . Forty-some thousand drums a bit south of Southeast Farallon and another few thousand off to the southwest, just at the dropoff of the continental shelf.
A lot more was dumped out there than just the drums apparently: the hulk of an irradiated warship that was anchored off Bikini Atoll for years, radioactive animal carcasses, etc. The best part is that it’s spread out over “1400 sq. km” and only “15%” of it has actually been located on the bottom, but they have the ability to find them if they wanted to – so that’s comforting… /S
Basically they ‘handled’ the disposal in an utterly cavalier and unprofessional way. That’s why it was the EPA’s ‘target no. 1’. Shutting it down was one of the most productive things the agency ever did. Too bad there wasn’t much they could do about remediation…
I need to know whether we can discuss a current issue in terms of microsieverts & actual date-time-location data?
Simon Winchester covers all that in his new book ‘Pacific’. Bimini Islands, 23 nuclear detonations, many of them hydrogen bombs including some of the largest blasts in history (the absolute largest belongs to the Soviets), it was interesting as hell to read about.
brh
excuse me, not Bimini, Bikini Atoll of course.
I love reading Winchester — he’s a master of English composition and, at his best, verges on the poetic.
However, I think Pacific is aimed at too big and broad a topic to provide in-depth coverage of a particular sequence of events and their consequences within the much broader scope of the volume.
I think Simon is at his very best when he narrows his focus to more manageable subjects: The Professor and the Madman is his masterwork, IMHO.
“I need to know whether we can discuss a current issue in terms of microsieverts & actual date-time-location data?”
Sure we can. I’m not a specialist, but I try to maintain a modest overall understanding of the basics, and Fukushima Daichi means that my aging memory has been refreshed in the not-too-distant past.
Oh, yeah, I forgot about the Independence.
“So Trump must believe that HRC will be the Dem nominee? But what about Bernie? He seems to be rising in the polls?” == Buck
Hillary and the Black Project she personifies never going to have their geopolitical and meta-political plans depend on the clueless voters.
The problem with Hillary is that her crimes on the post of Secretary of State were so horrible that opponents of Hillary in the US fear that their disclosure would destroy the reputation not only of the US State Department, but also of the United States.
But apparently the survival instinct played a role (as Trump, the Bushes and Obama know what awaits them if Hillary becomes president of the United States), and so it became known that the rapid response unit of the USA was on its way to Benghazi to the rescue of Ambassador Stevens, when Islamists stormed the CIA safe house in Benghazi, and that AC-130U Gunship was on-Scene in Benghazi, and somebody in the White House refused to let it fire.
https://pjmedia.com/trending/2016/01/15/report-u-s-rescue-team-was-on-its-way-to-benghazi-but-was-turned-back/
https://pjmedia.com/blog/ac-130u-gunship-was-on-scene-in-benghazi-obama-admin-refused-to-let-it-fire
Obama will have to follow these leads and find out who gave this stand-down order that doomed to death four Americans, and the US ambassador to Libya Stevens, as there are suspicions that the death of the US ambassador was “ordered” from the United States and Obama is one of the suspects. He can no longer cover her even in order to save the reputation of the United States.
I hope that commander of the SWAT team that will be charged with arrest of H.Clinton will be smart enough to load his team rifle’s magazines with silver bullets.
@ Doug:
SO, HERE’S THE THING: I’m sure that we all recall some brouhaha several years ago when a guy took a Geiger counter to a beach in the vicinity of Pacifica, CA and flipped out when the audible/visual alarm went off (they’re factory preset to ‘alarm’ at 0.30 micro-sieverts).
At that time I had a chat with someone in the area with an established track-record and relevant expertise. He proceeded to conduct sweeps on area beaches. He got the same results: 0.30-0.40 micros in sizable pockets at three of them, and none around at the smaller beach areas nearest the Golden Gate Bridge, interestingly.
He continued the periodic sweeps and reports. Over the past few years the pattern that emerged indicated that it was strongest after storms and waned almost entirely during the Summer. So, whatever it was it is probably not due to Fukushima (yet). The pattern of dissemination is localized.
Well, very recently this same correspondent went out for his routine low-profile sweep and two things happened: 1) the alarm on his device went off as soon as his feet touched the sand, and 2) the readings were > 3X previous. Readings bounced from 0.91 micro-sieverts down to 0.50 throughout the length of the area under inspection.[*]
We recall (from reference material) that the US limit for an airport screening is 0.25 micro-sieverts. . . So, what is happening on this beach is that toddlers are playing on that sand, ingesting it, people are lounging on it and later at night having sex on it, all while having their genitalia gently but thoroughly irradiated.[**]
The risk to the public is obvious. The financial and legal impact is also direct. This news pretty much means that many of these scenic seaside neighborhoods are part of a nuclear waste dumpsite.
How will that square with San Francisco’s sky-high real estate valuations? What are your thoughts?
— — —
[*] This occurred at Ocean Beach, SF., CA. between Vicente and Rivera Streets.
[**] This waste was supposed to be all but expired by “1980”… The US federal government and other relevant parties decline to discuss what effects the waste is having, and how much of it is being released to this day.
Well, the first thing we need to know is what these readings mean in terms of *uSv per hour*, and then, whether he was measuring radiation in contact with the surface or in the air at some height above the ground.
If we’re talking about *total* exposure of about 1 uSv/hour, including normal background radiation, that’s not too alarming (although it’s higher than normal *low-level* background radiation by about 4 times). It amounts to a lifetime maximum dose in about 50-some years.
If we’re talking about that level of *additional* exposure, over long periods of time, it’s a different matter, maybe worth investigating carefully.
And if it has anything to do with the Farallons dump and/or Fukushima, maybe we should ask the captains of some of our fishing and whale watching boats to take Geiger counters along on a few voyages.
Also, there are folks at Berkeley who have been monitoring various forms of ionizing radiation pretty closely since Fukushima Daichi fell apart. I’ll check with them and ask what they are seeing.
I have a very, very smart bioscientist friend who lives in Anchorage. She has absolutely no tinfoil hat in her possession or anywhere nearby. Since Fukushima Daichi, she’s taken a Geiger counter to the grocery store with her. I don’t think she’s a bit crazy.
she’s taken a Geiger counter to the grocery store
WHAT DOES SHE READ ON THAT GC?
All this doom and gloom–maybe there’s an antidote:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbnueb2OI4o
Pretty good Buck. I like clicking on this when the troll phalanx advances:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Wl_uQOABxg
Project Proposal: the next time a new lady-poster shows up on CFN, we collectively “make some lady-space”…
LOL MD…Fortunately as we age the elderly female lament of ‘not enough dicks’ work in our numerical favor. As long as we’re still part of the living and breathing, that is Isn’t Nature grand 😉
@ CFN:
I’m always amused at the cavalier attitude some of our posters have about nuclear material safety, energy, testing, waste-disposal etc. – blissfully unaware of how much crazy crap has already been done and how well that (did not) work out.
For instance, the DoD (among others) wanted to measure EMP effects of nuclear blasts, and they also wanted to know if an EMP would ‘skip’ off the ionosphere – so they conducted a series of very high-altitude blasts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
Some of which could be seen in Honolulu…
Cheers!
Oh, yeah. And let’s not forget Hanford and the radioactive and poisoned Columbia River.
http://www.psr.org/chapters/washington/hanford/hanford-and-human-health.html
As Jimmy Durante used to say:
“I got a million of ’em, a million of ’em.”
As he didn’t say: I wish I didn’t.
The disappointing factor here is the relatively small number of participants and the high percentage of those who are clueless, nasty and suffering from terminal Dunning-Kruger. – Doug
==============
Oh shit! I think I caught Dunning-Kruger.
“I think I caught Dunning-Kruger.”
Don’t worry about it. Those who display the signs of the condition are perfectly happy and confident. It’s the rest of us who suffer.
Q., ignore the trolls.
“Hillary and the Black Project she personifies never going to have their geopolitical and meta-political plans depend on the clueless voters.” — me
Peculiarities of the Black Project in Nazi Germany and US
Nazi Germany defended the so-called social Darwinism in its extreme, racial form. According to this theory, people and nations are not part of common humanity, but are biologically different, namely on the genetic level.
This ability to be a man as fundamentally different from the animal on the basis of certain anthropological factors was denied for sub-humans, part of which was declared harmful animals that needed to be destroyed and the other part had a right to exist only insofar as they were useful to supermen.
And any subhuman could be killed by superman simply because of its lack of utility, without any remorse, or other damage to the conscience of the superman. Thus, humanity was divided into supermen and subhuman, and the actual people and humanity simply ceased to exist.
And this ideology in a veiled form existed in Western Europe since the 12th century already, in the form of the ideology of the Teutonic Order and the Northern Crusades, and was officially blessed by the Catholic Church. So concordat with Hitler was not an accident. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichskonkordat
Moreover, in its extreme form, the theory of the division of the human race was first articulated in the course of the conquest of America by Anglo-Saxon Protestants, as the basis of ongoing Indian policy and the construction of the Institute of racial slavery.
In fact the only fundamental difference of Hitlerism from the Anglo-Saxon racism in the United States, was the spread of racial profiling from skin color to other anthropological characteristics. And to think that genetic archeology combined with Aryan linguistics in the near future will contribute to support the desire to be a superman and kill neighbors, without being tormented by remorse.
Three photographs of President Obama
Widely circulating the photo of Obama in 2008 and now:
http://s00.yaplakal.com/pics/pics_preview/2/8/3/6945382.jpg
And here how he looked after he just won his reelection in 2012:
http://guardianlv.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/bbobama.jpg
I think that significant changes happened to Obama in the last 2 years, or, may be in just one day.
Only these pictures are enough to understand how close in 2014, mankind has come to the edge of the nuclear abyss.
The Norman ultimatum and a Negro child with two heads
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-spectacle-so-far/#comment-245104
Jim might get a laugh from this “story” about buildings…
https://www.thrillist.com/travel/nation/the-most-beautiful-building-in-every-state?utm_content=feature&utm_campaign=20160117:%20NATION&utm_term=4186102&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email
Q,
Here’s what I actually wrote in my post to you:
“In my view what the Fed did was to try and cover up the effects of a massive degradation in U.S purchasing power because of the shift of good paying jobs from the U.S. to China where people get paid shit. An overall degradation in worldwide demand IOW.”
Here’s what I wrote in my post to Mr Darling:
“Each individual CEO wants his company work-force to be poor (for what could be better for the company bottom line?). So they all go relocating their factories to shit-holes like China.”
In sum, my focus in these two posts was the action of corporate management whose strategy of reducing wage costs by relocating to places like China caused a massive degradation of demand in especially in the U.S. economy and a gigantic degradation in the income of middle class tax payers. A huge accumulation of public and private debt was the consequence.
Central bank manipulation and easy credit was the stop-gap and massive and disastrous asset bubbles were the result.
From the perspective of the Wall Street-oligarch class there’s two ways out of this mess:
1) either Chinese workers are paid to buy what they make
or
2) American workers are paid to make what they buy.
The issue is one of division of wealth and income and always has been. And there’s three problems embedded in that issue:
1) the division of wealth and income between American workers and American one percenters. And, now that U.S. business is effectively under Chinese government control,
2) the division of wealth and income between Chinese workers and American workers.
3) the division of wealth and income between American oligarchs and Chinese oligarchs.
As Barry Lynn pointed out recently, U.S. companies operating and producing in China are now under the boot of the Chinese government, police and military. And the Chinese government, police and military favor the interests of Chinese oligarchs over those of Americans oligarchs. So we have a pretty good picture of how the division of wealth and income between the Chinese and American oligarchs will work out.
The American oligarch not only screwed the United States, the American oligarch screwed himself royally by moving to China. To which I can only say ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Looks good on them.
And, BTW, my posts don’t address issues of overpopulation and resource and energy supplies.
And no, I don’t have a PhD in economics. But IMO I’m better off because of it.
Post script to my post to Q:
The industries relocated to China are not coming back. This is because China is sitting on an economic and political time-bomb partially of its own making. The Chinese know that the legitimacy of Chinese ruling cliques rests on their delivery of a good-enough standard of living to enough of the Chinese people
In the end, the Chinse will squeeze and squeeze and force a de-facto abandonment by Americans of those assets to Chinese government and Chinese oligarchic interests. In short, the golden age of the United States is done.
I think it was Bill Gates that noted some time ago that the relocation of all those industries was a problem of national security. Well, he was right. Not only is Joe Sixpack screwed, the United States days as a latter day Britannia, whose naval forces ruled the waves, are over.
Speaking of Bill Gates and “National Security”: Russians are planning to abandon use of any Microsoft operating system by governmental agencies due to multiple back doors left in it for use by NSA.
http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/fritzmorgen/12791732/313835/313835_900.jpg
Hello Volodya,
This is an interesting way to arrange the data available, and it’s a useful one. I certainly agree with you that American Oligarchs “screwed themselves” as a class by offshoring as much as they did.
Where did they think that would lead? Oh, *r-I-g-h-t*… They didn’t think that controlling the shop-floor of a bunch of old-fashioned “smoke-stack industries” would matter in the future they self-servingly imagined. America & it’s vassals were going to be the finance and ‘high-tech design’ capitals of the globe, and everybody else was going to get stuck doing the heavy-lifting and dirty work.
Well, The Federal Reserve is going on record stating that the whole “recovery” thing was a sham fabricated by their direct intervention, and Zero Hedge is having a lot of fun with that:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-17/feds-stunning-admission-what-happens-next
Why not? ZH did inform the public early and often about this cluster-fuck, and those of us that listened & verified did what we had to do to cover our butts against the eventuality.
Cheers!
AgoraVox: Nuland warned Russians of “imminent NATO attack”
Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland met with the advisor of Vladimir Putin in Kaliningrad, in the hope “to avert a world war.” Like Rudolf Hess – Hitler’s henchmen, who came to Scotland in 1941 for the conclusion of peace with Great Britain – Nuland tried to prevent further aggravation of Russian-American relations, for which “everybody would have to pay”.
US diplomat “strongly” requested a personal meeting with Vladimir Putin, whom she, by the way, likes to call “your fucking tsar”. The Russian president, knowing the “undivided commitment” of Nuland to Hillary Clinton, not Barack Obama, refused her a meeting, however still sent his influential adviser Vladislav Surkov to meet Nuland.
The meeting was held behind closed doors. Journalists don’t know anything about the meeting, except for the official topic of the discussion. However, people who accompanied Victoria Nuland in this unexpected journey, say that she was “extremely excited” and kept saying, “War is coming! War is at the gates! “, While adding that Russia” did not keep its promises” and “now all will have to pay for it”.
“Quite excited”, she also said that Barack Obama holds a “purges of the White House”, which may soon affect her, the magazine writes.
http://www.agoravox.fr/tribune-libre/article/que-cache-l-escale-mystere-de-176542
FitM;
“US diplomat “strongly” requested a personal meeting with Vladimir Putin, whom she, by the way, likes to call “your fucking tsar”.-f.
And we can assume that Mr. Putin is completely aware of her contempt, and her carelessly arrogant loud mouth. Given his KGB background, I have to wonder how many times he has pictured himself yanking her across a conference table and putting two bullets in the back of her head – while she screams into the table-top… Brutal? Yes, but also an effective closing statement.
“”Quite excited”, she also said that Barack Obama holds a “purges of the White House”, which may soon affect her, the magazine writes”-f.
If there is a purge of staff it can’t come soon enough. Who remembers sycophantic advisors of failed potentates? Absolutely goddamned *nobody*, that’s who. May the Great Door of History slam shut on her, and may it also whack her on her way out.
Cheers!
“From the perspective of the Wall Street-oligarch class there’s two ways out of this mess:
1) either Chinese workers are paid to buy what they make
or
2) American workers are paid to make what they buy.” — Volodya
From the perspective of the Wall Street-oligarch class there’s only one way out of this mess:
Drop prices below the floor, contract monetary base and buy everything for pennies on the dollar.
After that’s done, hyper inflate the current dollar pyramid and start a new one. Too bad for those who will not survive that.
@ FitM:
“Too bad for those who will not survive that.”-f.
Then it will also be too bad for a lot of oligarchs who would not survive that. There’s no amount of money that can buy safety from the chaos that would unleash. On the other hand, if they want to cull their own ranks…
😉
Cheers!
Luke Rudkowski: How Hillary Clinton Is Responsible For Civil War In Ukraine and The Possible War With Russia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6N3K5VFcUs
Luke Rudkowski, Independent Journalist – We Are Change
Moscow’s rumors. WARNING – a complete nonsense, but provides a different point of view on the current affairs
Hillary Clinton made a coup d’etat on the eve of the address of Obama to Congress, in which Obama was to request Congress to declare war on the Islamic state, but after a coup word “war” was never uttered, and Obama began to look like he looks now.
In this coup intervened Putin and handed to Bush clan irrefutable evidence of Hillary Clinton involvement in the organization of multiple attacks: the sinking of the submarine Kursk, Dubrovka, September 11, 2001 in the United States, the war in South Ossetia, the catastrophe of Malaysian Boeing in Ukraine and the Russian Airbus in Sinai, the murder of Ambassador Stevens in Benghazi, the assassination of John Nash and his wife, the terrorist attacks in Paris and Bombay, the establishment of warehouses with weapons for ISIS in Mosul, and other little things like attacks on Russian ambassadors to Iraq and Qatar, 3 attempts of coup d’etat in Moscow, the attempt of physical removal of Putin, assassination of Benazir Bhutto and attack on consul of India in New York. This is in addition to the Arab Spring and the coup d’etat in Ukraine.
The very fact that such transfer was a violation of agreements with Hillary Clinton on Russian non-interference in the affairs of the United States, followed by her recognition of Russian sphere of influence in the former republics of the Soviet Union, that were concluded between Putin and Hillary after her men took Barack Obama under a house arrest.
The violation also consisted of Putin warning to his friend George W. Bush that Barack Obama and John Biden were to be eliminated physically, and power had to be passed to Paul Ryan, whom she in 2012 appointed Vice-President to Mitt Romney.
Besides “refugees” from Syria and Turkey were waiting for weapons in the US and Western Europe, and Hillary Clinton was to become the head of the “Islamic” caliphate of the United States of Europe and America.
That coup was disrupted a week ago, when all guards of Barack Obama in Hawaii have been replaced by people of Bush and Trump, and Boris Gryzlov arrived in Ukraine to present Poroshenko with ultimatum in relation to this particular situation, because Russia can no longer tolerate the existence along its borders of the Protectorate of Hillary Clinton, being a Nazi and Islamist enclave of ISIS.
And Nuland came to Russia for handing Putin ultimatum from Hillary Clinton in connection with the breach of the pact, but Putin refused to accept it, and sent for negotiations Surkov.
Of course it’s all nonsense, but it helps to look at the situation from a different perspective. There are other rumors associated with the creation of anti-Western military and economic alliance between Russia and China, which can be understood only in the light of the nonsense presented above.
Have a good laugh
I notice that I get cranky on Mondays and Fridays but I could never put my finger on WHY? And then it hit me. Those are the days Paul Krugman’s op-ed pieces appear in the NYT.
And they are always the same, they never vary: The evil ignorant Republicans and the evil of wealth inequality.
Take the title and first sentence of Krugman’s latest installment:
Is Vast Inequality Necessary?
How rich do we need the rich to be?
OMG, how infuriating these questions are!! As though the needs of the great ‘we’ should determine the driving forces of the free individual. The purpose of the individual, apparently, is to serve society. We are ants. We are bees.
He hints strongly that the fruits of having been ‘lucky’ to be born to the right parents should be reversed. Smart people tend to marry other smart people and have smart kids and smart people tend to be wealthier. This is not fair. Something must be done about this!
Google the above title and read the entire piece for yourself. It is filled with Krugmanesque insanity.
I wonder how much swag Krugs got stashed In the bank? I’ll bet its not a little, big NY media like that.
brh
@ Doug;
RE | “Well, the first thing we need to know is what these readings mean in terms of *uSv per hour*, and then, whether he was measuring radiation in contact with the surface or in the air at some height above the ground.”-doug.
The measurements were taken at a distance of 1 meter from the radiating surface, updated every ten seconds and recorded digitally by the instrument.
The normal background radiation baseline for San Francisco is 0.10 microsieverts… So the levels measured represents a significant departure from the norm.
By either accepted definition (CIPM or ICRP), a ‘sievert’ is a measure of ionizing radiation measured in joules/unit mass/unit time and represents the *probability* of stochastic damage such that 1 Sievert = 5.5% chance of developing cancer. It is of course a unit utilized for lower-radiation dose levels which don’t cause immediate damage. The salient thing in this case is that safety standards exist for the simple reason that at a certain threshold the chance of adverse health risks are measurably increased, and at multiples of that level more-so.
From a managerial standpoint, if I receive a report that an portion of an area under survey is 3X or more ‘hotter’ than its surroundings, that calls for enhanced scrutiny. Conversely, if there’s an ongoing project and an inspector reports something like this, an audit will immediately need to be scheduled, because somebody goofed and they need to pay for remediation.
Regarding your suggested action steps; I think that might be wise, and I will work the issue from my side of the line – bearing in mind that we exist in an era of diminishing resources and institutional hostility to the very idea of environmental responsibility.
If the broad consensus is that there’s ‘nothing to worry’ about, then there’s no reason for a broader segment of the public to be appraised of the situation.
Cheers!
EDIT: “…no reason for a broader segment of the public to NOT be appraised of the situation.”
[chuckle]
Cheers!
apprised = informed
appraised = assessed the value of
MD is going to be…..appissed.
Nah, MD appreciates being apprised of his errors.
😉
Thanks for the edit Q!
Thanks, Q. I would’ve missed that.
I think that, if the levels recorded really do exceed the “standard” background radiation levels for the site, by a factor of five to ten times, further investigation is definitely called for.
In addition to talking to the Berkeley folks, I’d download and review a copy of the EPA’s Blue Book
http://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-05/documents/bbfinalversion.pdf
and then talk to the local chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility,
http://sfbaypsr.org/
who generally think the standard “safe” and “lifetime” dosage numbers are overstated by a factor of ten! (Ask about the Washington chapter’s work at Hanford.)
Now, you’ll get a lot of mainstreamers dismissing this concern, but they all tend to have professional and/or economic reasons for bias.
Note that a lot of the radioactive elements that were windblown toward us from Fukushima have short half-lives and are likely mostly immeasurable by now, although the decay products may be analyzable.
Nevertheless, if I had what seems to be your level of concern about this (which I think is perfectly sane), I’d definitely dig deep and see what ore can be discovered.
~Doug
Hi Doug,
RE | “Nevertheless, if I had what seems to be your level of concern about this (which I think is perfectly sane), I’d definitely dig deep and see what ore can be discovered.”-d.
I just don’t like to be blindsided, that’s all.
Thanks for your help and input!
The Hanford Necklace. Hanford on the Columbia River produced the plutonium used to vaporize all those jap civilians (including their kids, dogs, goldfish, even 16 or so captured yank pow fliers). The Hanford Nuclear Reservation is the most toxic of the superfund cleanup sites….in fact, half lives being what they are, it will never be cleaned up. The genii cranked the toxic stuff into the air and water directly….it flowed directly downstream through Portland and out to sea. It wafted all over Eastern Washington. Neck scars from thyroidectomies were so common in the area, they became known as “the Hanford Necklace”. When you fish the Hanford Reach for returning king salmon, you still see heavy machinery working the river bank to remove contaminated soil caused by leaching from the open radioactive ponds. The fish, being migratory, are probably ok to eat…..they don’t glow in the dark….but maybe fish a little upstream of the reservation to be sure.
Democratic debate is actually debating on guns, climate change, Wall Street corruption, ISIL, and they are not in agreement. Bernie Sanders is winning. Hillary could not respond to the moderator’s question: “Why does Bernie Sanders have twice as much support as you do among the young?” Hillary is in trouble.
Why, when Bernie Sanders speaks, do we seldom see his upper teeth? When only his lower teeth show it makes him appear angry and strident.
Hillary needs to lose her turkey waddle.
Sorry if I’m unable to come up with something more substantive.
Q.,
I’ve never noticed how Hillary walks (nor do I care to), but I think what you were going for there was “wattle”.
My apologies as well. 😉
Hey WPA, if Comrade Sanders gets elected, and he starts gouging billionaires and passing around the swag to us proles, Bolshevik style, I got a hankering for a new Henry rifle, brass frame, large loop, 18″ octagon barrel .357/.38 cal., runs about $900. also I need a new truck, my F250 is 4 years old now. I’m talking about $45,000 total here. You know what would be sweet: if he could ding oligarch Mike Bloomberg to buy my gun for me, and 1%er Tom Steyers to pay for my truck. That’s what I call socialism!
Yours in Solidarity,
Comrade Marlin Williams
“my F250 is 4 years old now”
My vehicle is from the last century. I have not bought a vehicle in the 21st century. Vehicles can last more than 20 years. Bernie should not replace your vehicle for another 16 years.
Didn’t you learn anything from the Great Depression and the Greatest Generation? Fix, reuse, recycle… don’t expect shiny new things after only four years of use.
http://modernsurvivalblog.com/lessons-from-history/8-lessons-learned-from-the-great-depression/
Yours in solidarity, frugality, and patriotism,
wpa-ccc
Hell, I musta been misinformed. I thought it was all about free stuff, that is stuff somebody else pays for, what you want, when you want it.
Comrade Marlin Williams, Socialist (who wants free stuff)
“Then it will also be too bad for a lot of oligarchs who would not survive that. There’s no amount of money that can buy safety from the chaos that would unleash. On the other hand, if they want to cull their own ranks…” — MD
During the 90s the loss of Russian population due to malnutrition, lack of access to medical care, drug and alcohol overdose exceeds 50 million people – that’s why Putin calls the breakup of the USSR “the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century”.
But the state survived, so did the oligarchs.
@ FitM:
RE | “But the state survived, so did the oligarchs.”-f.
That’s a good point and mostly true (ie., not all of the newly minted oligarchs survived, many of those that did had to relocate beyond the borders of Mother Russia, or they ”survived” for years in prison).
However things are moving along at an ever-quicker pace, as they will tend to during a collapse. Under these circumstances, by the time it occurs to you that something is _very likely_ to happen you’d better have a plan to deal with it when/if it does – not unlike being in combat.
For example, it appears that the culling process is already underway:
http://www.theage.com.au/business/the-economy/sixtytwo-people-have-the-same-amount-of-wealth-as-half-the-world-says-oxfam-20160116-gm7h6y.html
Apparently there are already fewer billionaires around now than in 2010.
Cheers!
“things are moving along at an ever-quicker pace, as they will tend to during a collapse.” –MD
Oh, really? You live in a fantasy-land.
There is no collapse, using the criteria provided by Orlov in his description of stage 2. There are no shortages of fuel, food, etc. … The economy is booming. People are traveling, commuting, laughing at low prices at the pump, going on shopping sprees.
Get back to me when traffic stops and parking lots are empty.
Here is more proof you live in fantasy-land:
“Consumer confidence rose in January to the highest level in seven months as low inflation helped support households, whose outlook for wage gains remained subdued.
The University of Michigan’s preliminary sentiment index climbed to 93.3, the highest since June, from 92.6 in December. The median projection in a Bloomberg survey called for 92.9. The gauge averaged 92.9 last year, the best annual performance since
2004.
Americans’ projected inflation rate over the next year dropped to the lowest level since 2010, helping to give consumers added buying power.”
The line that wpasoka is attempting to obfuscate:
“Under these circumstances, by the time it occurs to you that something is _very likely_ to happen you’d better have a plan to deal with it when/if it does – not unlike being in combat.”
If you get that, you get it, if you don’t, you’re in denial of what is happening in high-finance Fantasyland.
“Hillary is in trouble” — wpa
She should be in f*cking jail.
MoveOn votes Bernie with overwhelming 78.6 percent over Hillary’s 14.6 percent.
MoveOn is endorsing Bernie for president because MoveOn is our members. MoveOn only endorses candidates for office after formal membership votes, and in this case, the outcome of our internal democratic process was overwhelming: the vast majority of voting MoveOn members want the organization to support Bernie, so that’s what we’re going to do. We’ve pledged to run a 100% positive campaign.
http://front.moveon.org/top-5-for-bernie/#.VpyGBZorIdU
“Hillary and the Black Project she personifies never going to have their geopolitical and meta-political plans depend on the clueless voters.” — me
In tonight’s debate she said Putin and Hillary respect each other, but that she stands up to bullies and makes them toe the line. Poor Putin.
“but that she stands up to bull[ies]ets” == wpa
Never mind, I bet Putin has silver bullets prepped up for her.
Nuclear bullets: one shot could melt down a tank:
http://img.allzip.org/g/117/thumbs/1442359.jpg
Another obvious example – the Saudis plans of privatization of ARAMCO. That is a very good example of Western pressure on clients from the “second world” that could again become a “third”. Targeted pressure on prices of raw materials, the deflationary shock reached the weakest link in the top twenty.
Another thing is that the Saudis’ close “partners” – the Pirates (Rockefeller clan), expected to get their sticky hands on that delicious asset. But that’s why the rest of the banksters and especially in London and Boston – maintain tension in the Shiite enclaves on the border and inside the kingdom.
So they would share assets not only among “the family”, but according to bankster’s “fairness”.
Saudis in this situation got nothing to do but to provoke a transatlantic “partners” to help out in the open, but they can’t, have been moved away from the military and political levers.
It is this example with Saudis clearly shows that the reset has started after deflationary speculative attack by the Fed.
Hong Kong (AFP) – Oil prices plunged below $28 a barrel early Monday, hitting energy firms and extending losses across Asian markets after sanctions were lifted against Iran, allowing the key producer to resume crude exports. (Monday January 18, 2016)
Deflationary Shock
We could see an analogy of the current economic situation with tsunami that goes in two stages: the stage of rapid compression followed by the actual all-crushing wave.
Before starting actual tsunami water goes out to sea exposing the shore and the more shore is getting exposed, the more powerful wave is going to hit it.
Now this is just a phase and will continue for some time.
Something unlikely to ever be discovered (by the narrow focus of this day of remembrance): LBJ was intimately involved in the assassination of Kennedy (perhaps both) and King. As we’ve seen by the [supposedly] insane actions of this nebulous ISIS, ISIL, Whatever, it’s certainly easy enough to goad a patsy into murder. (Gun, knife, bomb, falling from a height; it matters not; dead is dead.)
King had stepped out of his box and was concerned with the civil rights of all humans. One of those would be the right to be free of death from imperialist militarism. LBJ didn’t like that because he *represented* just such horror. Thus he began listening to the whisperings of Hoover the Snake and took back-channel action based on this intel.
I just became a ‘patron’ of this site, $5.00 per month. What about the rest of you who, like me, regularly exploit this site as a screed for your own meme, rant,…..etc.