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Arctic Ice Melt, Capitalism, Charlie Smith, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Eric Schlosser, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Geoengineering, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Natalia Shakhova, Normalcy Bias, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Peter Wadhams, Regulatory Capture, Resource Wars, Robert Callaghan, Runaway Climate Change, Simon Hasleton, Sunken Costs, Techno-Optimists, The Convergence of Crisis
In spite of their own economic and scientific data overwhelmingly pointing towards a very bleak future, the experts in their various chosen fields appear to be happy-faced optimists about the world our descendants will inherit. So says columnist Charlie Smith:
He concludes his essay with the following remarks:
“…I confess that I’m troubled by all the optimism I encounter from leading thinkers on inequality, climate change, overpopulation, and oil depletion.
Adding up all the variables, I’ve concluded that more global food shortages and increased famine are inevitable. Despite this, our premier plans to build a new bridge to Delta that will result in the loss of some of Canada’s finest farmland.
Having a cheery disposition may make someone sound more pleasant in radio and television interviews.
It might even enhance a person’s likelihood of obtaining book contracts, becoming a media or entertainment executive, or getting elected to high public office.
But it has a way of sugar-coating problems, diminishing the sense of urgency that we should all be feeling about these crises.”
The apocalypse has been commodified as a Hollywood thriller to be viewed in the comfort of a movie theater or living room sofa. Faith in technology, normalcy bias, sunken costs, and the mass propaganda of vested interests are just a few of the human blinders preventing any change from the status quo. To say that there is no future for the human species would be to admit that we are all living in a fictitious construct whose time is quickly running out. Who openly discusses such things in their place of work? I would wager to say that the answer is zero. In his essay ‘The Convergence of Crisis‘, Simon Hasleton writes:
“…There is, also, a sense in which denial should be seen as a psychological defense operating on the personal level. AGW presents an immense challenge to our lives: to our health and safety and the survival of our grandchildren, and their grandchildren. How will we handle it, when the water fails or the crops fail and the food reserves are empty as the population passes the nine million mark? When when Amsterdam or Kolkata are inundated? When (as in Texas) temperature pushes into the high 30s, for weeks on end? This is the future AGW promises. And there doesn’t seem to be anything we can do about it, so we blank it out, or prefer the trivia of the tabloids, or retreat into a blinkered concentration on the immediacy of everyday concerns….”
There is no escaping the capitalist system which now encompasses the entire world. Who is stopping the Brazilians from clearing the Amazon just as America and Europe slashed and burned their own virgin forests to make way for cities, highways, railroads, farms, etc.? Who is stopping China from burning through the world’s remaining fossil fuel? This is how industrial civilization defines “progress”. Our next step is to try to control the climate through seeding the atmosphere and other geoengineering experiments. Aside from nuclear weapons and their evil counterpart, nuclear energy, I can’t imagine a more dangerous and hubristic scheme. Charlie Smith has an article on that subject as well, entitled ‘Eric Schlosser raises alarm in Vancouver about nuclear weapons and nuclear power‘:
“…Schlosser also told the audience that his research into nuclear weapons has strengthened his opposition to nuclear energy. He cited the research of Charles Perrow, who examined the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear-power plant in 1979.
This helped Schlosser understand how a seemingly minor event—a dropped socket in a missile silo in Damascus, Arkansas in 1980—nearly caused an explosion that could have killed millions of people.
“These are complex technological systems,” Schlosser said. “Again and again, we find ourselves inadequate to manage them.“
His biggest concern is that the waste from nuclear reactors remains deadly for tens of thousands of years. He said that it’s “highly irresponsible for us to be creating poisons that future generations might suffer from“.
There has never been a central storage facility created in the United States, which means that the waste remains at the nuclear-reactor sites.
“And these reactor sites were never designed to store nuclear waste in the way it’s being stored,” he said. “They are huge targets, potential targets, for terrorists. But they are also at enormous risk in a natural disaster, in earthquakes, things like that. And a lot of these nuclear reactors are near large urban areas…”
He didn’t mention that all nuclear plants are built on the shores of lakes, rivers, and oceans in order to satisfy their cooling water needs. Not such a great idea in a future that includes the ravages of climate chaos – sea level rise, shrinking and flooding rivers, and violent storms. Sea level rise will also increase the damage from earthquakes as this 2014 study for the city of Berkley, CA mentions:
“…Like regions across the globe, the San Francisco Bay Area is experiencing and will continue to increasingly experience the impacts of the changing climate. By 2100, average temperatures in the San Francisco Bay Area will increase up to 11° F. In 2100, Berkeley will have 6-10 additional heat waves each year, which will disproportionately impact the elderly, children under five, and the low-income community members.
Climate change will also cause additional extreme rainfall events, which will lead to more flooding. San Francisco Bay sea-levels will rise up to 55” by 2100, impacting infrastructure and community members in west Berkeley. Climate change impacts will also exacerbate the natural hazards of concern outlined in this plan. Rising sea levels will increase Berkeley’s exposure to earthquake liquefaction, tsunami inundation, and flooding. Increases in precipitation and severe storms will make flooding more frequent, and will increase the landslide risk in the hills. California’s water security will be reduced, and drought will become a more persistent issue….”
How does San Francisco adapt to an 11°F increase in average temperature? It doesn’t. It will be a ghost city by then; the human population will have crashed and be well on its way to the black void of extinction. The city officials of Berkley have not figured that out yet since climate change is a newly added threat to their plans:
“…Climate change is a newly-introduced hazard of concern for the 2014 plan. The climate change section describes the anticipated impacts to Berkeley from climate change. It also outlines how climate change exacerbates other hazards identified in this plan. The City discusses potential impacts from sea-level rise on Berkeley’s western coast, and maps areas in Berkeley that are vulnerable in 55-inch sea-level rise…”
Modern industrial civilization with its exploding human population is protected from the laws of nature only for as long as resources are plentiful and the climate remains stable. Technology cannot be created and supported without inexpensive and highly concentrated energy. Technology is simply a byproduct of human ingenuity and energy expenditure. For over four billion years everything on Earth has evolved and adapted, most recently under the benevolence of the Holocene climate. The current climate catastrophe is a manmade disruption that is several orders of magnitude greater than the average rate of change over the last 300 millenia.
The primary problem with most ‘news’ today is that its filtered through corporate gatekeepers. Another problem with the ‘news’ is that its fragmented and does not connect all the dots to give a person the full picture. As Neil Postman said, “The whole problem with news on television comes down to this: all the words uttered in an hour of news coverage could be printed on a page of a newspaper. And the world cannot be understood in one page.” So let’s connect some dots, courtesy of Robert Callaghan:
FUN WITH NUMBERS:
The acidity of the oceans will more than double in the next 40 years. This rate is 10 times faster than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine life occurred. It is also faster than during 4 of earth’s biggest mass extinction events during the last 300 hundred million years — faster than even the great Permian mass extinction event where 95% of life on earth vanished 250 million years ago. The oceans are now 30% more acidic than in pre-industrial times. In less than 40 years they will be 60% more acidic than then.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/05/08/1976351/acidification-arctic/
http://www.earth.columbia.edu/articles/view/2951
http://readthescience.com/2012/09/17/climate-change-book-review-under-a-green-sky/
When ice ages come and go the planet can change temperature 5°C in as little as 5,000 years. 50 times slower than what we are doing to earth now. In the past, a 5°C change normally takes 20,000 years, we are going to do 5°C in 50-100 years, 200 times faster.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/page3.php
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/pd/climate/factsheets/iscurrent.pdf
Climate change is happening 100 times faster than in the past.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=todays-climate-change-proves-much-faster-than-changes-in-past-65-million-years
By 2025, humans will impact 50% of earth’s biosphere. This will cause a planetary ecological state shift leading to a mass extinction event that is unstoppable and irreversible once started.
http://www.ecoshock.info/2012/06/planet-shift-no-return.html
Why does nobody talk about the thousands of 1-kilometer wide bubbling methane seabeds recorded in 2011.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/vast-methane-plumes-seen-in-arctic-ocean-as-sea-ice-retreats-6276278.html
Only 1% of methane needs to be released to cause total disaster.
Peter Wadhams interview.
Natalia Shakhova interview:
Do you believe scientists
who spent 30 years in the arctic,
or do you believe scientists
who spent 30 years at their computer?
And the latest on the methane monster:
Extinction is a taboo word – bad for busine$$ and a real downer for everyone involved. Best to keep to the cultural storyline that such horrible things only happen on the silver screen with the aid of expensive CGI effects.
xraymike sez: Modern industrial civilization with its exploding human population is protected from the laws of nature only for as long as resources are plentiful and the climate remains stable.
I need no further convincing, though I remain unconvinced that anything we do now is other than mitigation before the last hurrah. So I’m with you on all this except what’s quoted above. In my view, we’ve never been protected from nature and physics. We just ignore it for as long as the power to do so remains. The time it takes to really ruin things, as we’ve done, is surprisingly short on a planetary scale, but within a human timescale, it seems still far off — for now.
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If the planet was infinite, then humans could expand forever. Just order up a few more planets as needed.
The oceans are not infinite, the atmosphere is not infinite, oil is not infinite, carbon sinks are not infinite, etc… If they were, then yes business-as-usual could continue into infinity and humans would avoid the laws of nature. Open up a newspaper and you’ll see that most still believe the latter, not the former.
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Hey, Mike,
Nice site you got here!
While true that the industrial machine uses resources and does so exponentially, there’s something else on which the beast runs: credit, which is, for some twisted reason, seen as money. You know, the more you get into debt, the “wealthier” you are. But I digress…
Credit is what really runs the industrial machine (I tend to be rather hard headed about the fact that nothing else can run it), and, not surprisingly, the machine has sputtered a few times before, when inevitably credit reached the point where it could not be paid back (simple arithmetic says that credit can never be paid back because of interest, but I digress again…).
So, one of these fine mornings (next year at the latest from the signal that the oil price triangle is trumpeting), we’ll wake up to the machine not running anymore, because the credit evaporates, only this time, the resources are so depleted (not run out, though), that running the machine would be impossible, since the level of complexity required to process those thinner and thinner inputs from everywhere, will have disappeared in that overnight evaporation.
Point being, I would not worry about resources, they’re going to be still plenty left out there, but the industrial machine won’t be able to process them. Whether this is good news or bad news, I can’t tell, because the question then is: can anything else still run the machine after this happens? I tend to think no, the machine will stay dead, and all the exponential functions will go in reverse rather quickly. Is this reason for joy? Does it cheer you up that the machine has only between 6 months and a year to run?
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Money or credit has to be backed up by real resources, namely energy – the real life blood of the machine. Read up on Biophysical economics.
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It might be, or it might not be. Me, I say you got it backwards. Credit (money) and economic dogmas are just a means of patting ourselves on the back for wasting the resources when they are available, which is what all life is programmed to do.
That’s why they are correlated, but the causation reversed: excess energy creates the need for something (credit, money, economy) to be used as means, excuse and plan to waste said surplus of energy.
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I defer to Kevin Moore to clarify this.
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Not necessary. I don’t want to debate this. My point was we have less than a year until shutdown, but I digressed, as usual 🙂
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Far be it from me to make specific, near-term timetables on the future other than what I have done over the next century. ‘The Machine’ has proven to be pretty rugged.
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‘For over four billion years everything on Earth has evolved and adapted under the benevolence of the Holocene climate.’ ???
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I fixed that error. Doesn’t it show on your end?
“For over four billion years everything on Earth has evolved and adapted, most recently under the benevolence of the Holocene climate.”
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It didn’t, but it does now.
The extraordinarily benevolent climate conditions of the past 13,000 years are rarely acknowledged as a factor permitting human overshoot.
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Critical point indeed. No one has any experience otherwise, although we are now starting to see the beginnings of climate chaos.
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Yeah this http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/sunday/audio/2574252/paul-ehrlich-predicting-collapse is another example of someone who knows where we are heading, yet falls into happy chapter crap when asked what to do?
Paul Ehrlich started this interview saying at best we have a 10-11% chance of surviving extinction (my paraphrasing) yet then goes on about how if we have equal rights for woman it will help bring down the population bla bla bla ….
At 400 ppm it doesn’t matter if there are 0 humans or 10 billion of us, we are totally screwed.
About the only ‘human right’ we should hope to maintain is the right to kill ourselves as ‘humanly’ as possible.
If our leaders had any sense of reality and understanding, they would be stock piling suicide pills.
But na we got hope.
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LOL. No hope, just hopium.
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Of late there appears to be a big pushback against the Near Term Human Extinction (NTHE) meme. I voluntarily left a FB group, Earth Matters, after having my knuckles whacked (among others) by the heavy handed moderator for discussing the following article:
Terror, Hatred, Despair, and Hope Must Co-Exist: Reflections on a Discussion with Believers in Near Term Human Extinction
Something remarkable happened a few days ago in the Facebook Group “Global Warming Fact of the Day,” (GWFoTD) something that I think there is much to learn from, especially regarding the emotional and psychological elements of climate change.
Summary of events
What happened is this: the group — which has over 2,500 members, many of them scientists, activists, and others deeply engaged in climate change — had a long, heated series of conversations and arguments which resulted in approximately 10 members being removed from the group (as well as several leaving on their own), and the group becoming “Private,” meaning only members could access and comment on conversations.
The topic of contention was “Near Term Human Extinction,” (NTHE) the idea espoused most publicly by Guy McPherson, that climate change tipping points have already been reached and that there is nothing that humanity can do to stop the climate from changing so drastically that humanity will be extinct within decades. For many who subscribe to NTHE, including McPherson himself, this belief about the future is paired with the political belief, most popularly advocated by Derrick Jensen, that human civilization is inherently “omnicidal” and must be dismantled.
http://theclimatepsychologist.com/?p=441
What the author seems to be arguing is the self-selected group of “…2,500 members…deeply engaged in climate change” booted GRM and 10 others who espouse the self defeating mantra of NTHE.
Then Dave Cohen of DOTE (whose blog I read and respect) said the following:
“I can not in any way endorse Guy McPherson, who most emphatically does NOT understand the climate science he quotes.”
Dave maintains that personal bias, not sound scientific data, is what is driving this need to discover “the Pearl Harbor moment”. He completely discounts the sudden release of “methane hydrates” in the Arctic but in the next paragraph states that “ocean acidification” will most likely destroy civilization.
What confuses me is many of the people seem to be in agreement fundamentally but petty sniping is the order of the day.
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I had a personal interaction with Cohen perhaps 18 months ago which changed my opinion of him for the worse. I also witnessed a strange reaction that Cohen had on America2.0 concerning the theory of the “maximum power principle” with Nate Hagens. I still have both of these incidents recorded in my google email.
McPherson may be off on his timing for human extinction, but Cohen is too wimpy to even pin a date on it even though he tacitly accepts that extinction may be in the cards in the distant future (hundreds of years?).
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Ehlrich is another blowhard attention wh*re who exhibits himself as a Priest of Science (biologist, no less) yet has absolutely no f-ing clue as to what causes the populations to grow (he thinks it’s the lack of condoms). He’s also an environmentalist (whatever that word means), but he thinks the human species is exempt from the laws that govern other species and is somehow separated from the “environment” and someone (preferably him or someone employing him) should dictate to others when and how to be born, live and die. Wrong: nature should decide this, and if the decision is delayed until 8 or 15 billions are screaming in pain walking the Earth (it won’t, trust me) before nature reacts in some way, then so be it.
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The system demands business as usual and will only allow discussion centred on business as usual.
What is interesting is that huge chunks of business as usual are discarded (or evolve) rather quickly.
Sixty years ago business as usual in Britain meant digging up coal, building nuclear power stations, making steel, plastics, textiles, leather, cars, lorries, planes, apparel, footwear, furniture, and pianos etc., and trading with the remnants of the empire. Forty years ago BUA meant racing to extract oil and gas from the North Sea, closing down coal mines, building motorways, and developing hi-tech industries. And double glazing. Lots of double glazing. Twenty years ago BAU meant closing down the remnants of manufacturing and shifting production to Asia, encouraging tourism and blowing financial bubbles. Now it means squandering the last of the cheap energy and resources on white elephants, printing money furiously to maintain financial bubbles,, and pushing the lower layers of society off the cliff. And BAU means desperation measures to maintain an energy supply.
Here in NZ, BAU meant feeding Britain. Then it meant developing a broad-based economy. Then it meant dismantling and selling-off the broad-based economy. Now it means buying stuff from China in exchange for food and natural resources, and building houses and shopping malls for migrants and local opportunists. And depriving the next generation of a future. There just isn’t enough concrete and asphalt in NZ yet, so BAU is centred on creating more, by any means possible. And BAU means desperation measures to maintain an energy supply.
Anyone who points out over-consumption and environmental collapse is ignored (of course).
I think we have another 2 to 5 years of the current BAU, by which time it will be blatantly obvious to even the greatest of denialists that everything is totally screwed.
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I think this is a great quote, one to remember:
The system demands business as usual and will only allow discussion centred on business as usual.
Thanks Kevin.
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Kevin says: “I think we have another 2 to 5 years of the current BAU”
Here, I do not think the trees (all the trees) are going to stand for more than that. For now, they did not have the strength to shed their leaves, so the first heavy wet snow will hit them hard. I just cannot imagine another great ice storm (1998) with what we lost in resilience since … Everything is already so dead, so fragile.
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Thank you for providing the site. Where BAU is 200 days or 200 years, it will come down pretty quickly. Of course, I may be wrong. It’s not important either way.
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DAS KAPUTALISM!!!
China plans to build 500 nuclear reactors before 2050.
China is down to building just 1 coal power plant per week.
China now imports more oil than the U.S.!
The U.S. spends $1 trillion per year protecting Persian Gulf oil.
if $1 = 1 second: $1 million = 12 days, $1 trillion = 30,000 years.
The U.S. poisons its own water for natural gas and oil.
World food riots are foreseen in the near term future.
:
Half of all species may disappear before 2040.
Land Animal populations down 28% since 1970.
Marine Bird populations down 30% since 1995.
Big Ocean Fish populations down 90% since 1950.
Fresh Water Fish populations down 50% since 1987,
All Marine Animal populations down 28% since 1970.
Plankton populations down 40% since 1950.
Bumblebee populations down 70% since 1970.
There are more Siberian Tigers in zoos than in Siberia.
Human sperm counts down 50% since 1950.
Human population up to 9 billion by 2050.
Ocean acidification to double by 2050.
World temperature rise may triple by 2050.
:
An ECOLOGICAL TIPPING POINT may be by 2025.
Nobody knows when we will pass this tipping point except in retrospect. Once passed, mass extinction becomes unstoppable and irreversible. It is impossible for me to convey how final this is. Cascading extinction collapse is forever. This is way more important than just climate change alone! If we want to reverse these declines and watch life spring up, it may only be by watching Emily Ratajkowski, Esquire’s Woman of the Year.
:
THE BIGGEST PROBLEM SINCE OUR CAVEMAN DAYS!
:
THE BIGGEST PROBLEM IN THE NEXT TEN YEARS!
:
THE BIGGEST PROBLEM RIGHT NOW IS ANYONE WHO MAKES OVER $50K PER ANNUM.
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Yesterday’s news was better than today’s:
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A few from today…
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Regarding the debate as to whether lack of resources or credit will bring the system down, there is no clear answer.
We know that without energy nothing happens, so energy must be the primary consideration. An average human requires 10,000kJ of energy per day to remain alive, and a human in a developed nation ‘needs’ 20 to 100 times that amount to continue to function as a member of that kind of society. Declining net energy is clearly already in the process of demolishing historic arrangements. But there is still plenty of energy at moderately high EROI, so we are unlikely to witness a truly off the cliff crash until net energy falls somewhat further. That certainly looks likely to occur over 2014 to 2016.
The lesson of 2008 was that market speculation and supply constraint triggered energy prices that were beyond what globalised economies could stand. TPTB seem to have learned that lesson and have ensured that energy prices have been constrained in a fairly narrow range. However, TPTB have done nothing to address the underlying depletion and EROEI dilemma. Nor can they, other than via demand destruction which destroys the consumer society they have so carefully constructed over many decades.
The spiking of energy prices was a major factor in triggering the financial meltdown of 2008, when credit seized up and global trade plummeted.
We are living in unprecedented times in that interest rates have never been so consistently low (in order to prevent sovereign debt blowout). And humanity, at unprecedented population levels and unprecedented consumption levels, has never had to face declining net energy and a collapsing global environment.
I had an interesting conversation about much of this earlier today. Amongst the many points I made, I pointed out that I had spent 15 years attempting to wake people up, and had failed because most people are scientifically and financially illiterate, and refuse to accept reality (as discussed many times here and elsewhere in recent times). Indeed, most people are ignorant, stupid and stubborn. (I am careful who I say that to these days.)
Many of us have been caught out many times since 2004, when Matt Savinar pronounced that it would all be ‘all over after the election’ [of 2004]. The system has an extraordinary capacity to sacrifice the environment in order to maintain the illusion of status quo.
Now I think in terms of death-by-a-thousand-cuts, with dozens of ‘black swans’ circling overhead.
It’s not easy being one of the 0.1% (at the wrong end of the spectrum).
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Great summation.
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“We are living in unprecedented times in that interest rates have never been so consistently low (in order to prevent sovereign debt blowout). And humanity, at unprecedented population levels and unprecedented consumption levels, has never had to face declining net energy and a collapsing global environment.
I had an interesting conversation about much of this earlier today. Amongst the many points I made, I pointed out that I had spent 15 years attempting to wake people up, and had failed because most people are scientifically and financially illiterate, and refuse to accept reality (as discussed many times here and elsewhere in recent times). Indeed, most people are ignorant, stupid and stubborn. (I am careful who I say that to these days.)”
This sites appeal : No BS jut REALITY
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I wish I could give you all a clear and full analysis that would settle the matter re credit and resources, but although I believe I understand the resources part well enough, the finance part is something I can’t speak about with any confidence. But then who does understand it ? There’s that derivatives black hole thing, isn’t there ? 300 times total world GDP or something ? Or is it 3000 x ? Which could sort of melt down like a nuclear chain reaction and eat the whole banking and financial system. Or could it ? I don’t know.
Anyway, this :
In his new book, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, the US economist Philip Mirowski recounts how a colleague at his university was asked by students in spring 2009 to talk about the crisis. The world was apparently collapsing around them, and what better forum to discuss this in than a macroeconomics class. The response? “The students were curtly informed that it wasn’t on the syllabus, and there was nothing about it in the assigned textbook, and the instructor therefore did not wish to diverge from the set lesson plan. And he didn’t.”
Something similar is going on at Manchester University, where as my colleague Phillip Inman reported last week, economics undergraduates are petitioning their tutors for a syllabus that acknowledges there are other ways to view the world than as a series of algebraic problem sets. I was puzzled by this: did that mean Smith, Marx and Malthus weren’t taught? Yes, I was told, by final-year undergraduate Cahal Moran: in development studies. What about Joseph Schumpeter and his theory of creative destruction? Oh, he gets a mention – but literally only a mention.
This isn’t all the tutors’ fault: when you have to lecture to 400 students at once, it’s hard to find time and space to go off-piste. But the result is that economics students come out of exam halls and go off to government departments or the City with exactly the same toolkit that just five years ago produced a massive crash.
Economics ought to be a magpie discipline, taking in philosophy, history and politics. But heterodox approaches have long since been banished from most faculties, claims Tony Lawson. In the 1970s, when he started teaching at Cambridge, the economics faculty still boasted legends such as Nicky Kaldor and Joan Robinson. “There were big debates, and students would study politics, the history of economic thought.” And now? “Nothing. No debates, no politics or history of economic thought and the courses are nearly all maths.”
How do elites remain in charge? If the tale of the economists is any guide, by clearing out the opposition and then blocking their ears to reality. The result is the one we’re all paying for.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/28/mainstream-economics-denial-world-changed
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I suppose I do not need to feel too ashamed that I do not understand exactly how those derivative thingees work…
Gillian Tett has a talk with Alan Greenspan
The ‘Maestro’ admits he didn’t understand derivatives he touted; calls for bank breakups
The Financial Times’s Gillian Tett sits down with Alan Greenspan for a two-hour interview and gets some eye-opening admissions from the fallen “Maestro”:
What also worries Greenspan is that this swelling size has gone hand in hand with rising complexity – and opacity. He now admits that even (or especially) when he was Fed chairman, he struggled to track the development of complex instruments during the credit bubble. “I am not a neophyte – I have been trading derivatives and things and I am a fairly good mathematician,” he observes. “But when I was sitting there at the Fed, I would say, ‘Does anyone know what is going on?’ And the answer was, ‘Only in part’. I would ask someone about synthetic derivatives, say, and I would get detailed analysis. But I couldn’t tell what was really happening.”
This is simply outrageous. As Tett notes, Greenspan, who we now know didn’t understand them at all, touted the risk-dispersing benefits of derivatives as Fed chairman and fought those who would regulate them.
http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/gillian_tett_talks_to_alan_gre.php
Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/10/links-103013.html#3mZ0bvdwPXX4lt1k.99
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ulvfugl sez: I suppose I do not need to feel too ashamed that I do not understand exactly how those derivative thingees work
Considering how these financial instruments were purposely designed to obfuscate, there is no shame in being confused. That said, the basic structure has been explained lots of times, which is that various holders of debt/credit were repackaged via tranches that carried higher/lower risk and reward. Turns out that the high risk/reward, abetted by ratings agencies that didn’t do their jobs properly, lured lots of unsuspecting and credulous investors (including unions and pension plan trustees) who were left holding the bag when so many derivatives turned out to have no underlying value (read: were toxic). The internal details of alphabet finance aren’t all that important when in the end you’re being sold the Brooklyn Bridge.
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Yes, I understand that much. I’ve been reading Yves Smith’s blog for years, and it’s all been discussed and dissected by many different authors there. But seems it’s been going on ever since, growing in size and complexity.
I don’t have a talent for that stuff, or even an interest in it, I just feel I ought to try and get some grasp. Seems to me, a lot like Las Vegas. You just assume that everything is designed to be a rip off, but a few people understand the many different games, and make a profit and survive.
I can see that much. I can see the Ponzi scheme, pyramids, fractional reserve thing, all sorts of bits I understand. But globally, what’s the relationship between all of those shenanigans to real resources ? I’ve never been able to understand that. Perhaps someone can clarify. I’ve read Graeber’s book, and I can see how money originated and at one time there was a clear relationship, but all the stuff that exists now bonds, equities, futures, high speed trading etc, etc, too much for me to get my head around to be able to say anything sensible.
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… “At first they said it was necessary for fighting against terrorism. I don’t know if Angela Merkel is a terrorist. I think it is clear they used surveillance programs for economic reasons, for helping their transnational companies,” he told RT Spanish. He was referring to the latest leaks – according to which the NSA had an ear to the phones of 35 world leaders, including the German chancellor.
Ecuador’s president also said the NSA scandal revealed double standards in global politics, as Correa believes that any other country would have been put on international trial for such large-scale spying.
“But in this case nothing is going to happen, because international justice, as in the Chevron case, still does not work. And until now, justice works only for the convenience of the stronger. In this case, the stronger is the USA,” Correa said. …
http://rt.com/news/ecuador-correa-moscow-putin-888/
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The present UK government is legally obliged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% by 2050, but they’re thinking: why should we care about the law when we are the ones making the law?! And if the government so obviously flaunts the law, how can it force companies to uphold it? How can it? It doesn’t even want to. It’ll just change the law. That’s what Dr. Lee’s letter to the editor is announcing in veiled terms. Accompanied, of course, by the scare tactic that if people don’t comply, their electricity and gas bills will rise even further. It’s like a 21st century scorched earth strategy.
And they really don’t give a rat’s derriere about the law. Any law. Not if it stands in the way of increasing profits. These people just use the billions they ostensibly spend on reducing emissions as a further profit vehicle for their friends, paid for by the taxpayer. Who will invariably be left with less money and more emissions.
Statistics suggest UK is not on track to reduce emissions by 2020
Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/10/ilargi-energy-is-a-power-game-3-they-cheat-and-they-lie.html#UJ3QB6JDHJd6MC7u.99
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The prime purpose of governments is to protect and promote the interests of those at the top of the pyramid -especially to facilitate the looting of the commons and exploitation of the general populace- and to maintain social order: transfer wealth upwards and crush anyone who gets in the way.
The goals of government are usually achieved through deception (lying continuously). And when lying does not generate the required result, goals are achieved through the use of violence. At this stage in the game the agendas of governments are entirely short-term (though they go through the pretence of generating long-term plans as a component of the general deception).
The best kind of slave is one who thinks he/she is free; such a slave will often defend to the death the slave master’s right to own and exploit slaves. Decades of dumbing-down and corporate propaganda have generated vast armies of slaves who are willing to kill themselves in the pursuit of materialism and the transfer of wealth upwards.
The more I see of it, the more I believe George Carlin was absolutely right when he said: “People are fucking stupid.”
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“As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.” – John Dewey
The gov is a corporation. It charters, collects taxes from and accordingly supports and protects, through law and the courts, its baby corporations.
The various original American colonies, as well as Canada, Australia and New Zealand were corporations chartered by the British Monarchy. The British East India Company was a corporation which colonized India for centuries.
Every government is a government of occupation.
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xray, i don’t post here often, so when i do, it bears repeating how much i appreciate this blog, your fine art work, the finely written essays and comments, and the wealth of relevant information that’s provided. thank u.
‘About the only ‘human right’ we should hope to maintain is the right to kill ourselves as ‘humanly’ as possible.
If our leaders had any sense of reality and understanding, they would be stock piling suicide pills.
But na we got hope.
rob atack, always good to read your comments. hope u can hold off on suicide a good while longer, and post a little more often, even just to say basically the sos.
i agree with your quote above more or less completely. of course, it should always have been our ‘right’ to live and die as we wish so long as in so doing we not infringe on the ‘rights’ of others to do the same. of course under civilization all such ‘rights’ are infringed. but as long as one maintains a modicum of ‘freedom’, with determination and fortitude (and luck) one may execute successfully a painless suicide. if one is additionally fortunate to have the support of others and the comfort of their knowing companionship to the not so bitter end, the angst of saying fare well to this life may be greatly reduced if not eliminated. it’s how i dream of going out.
i think o.d.ing on opiates might be the best way to go. not much chance tho that ‘our leaders’ will become rational/informed before the great collapse is complete. instead of a war on ‘drugs’, how about a war on dogmas? i know, no chance, it would be too rational. anyway, just thought it was a worthy idea.
with some good dope, there’s hope at least in the possibility of humane suicide. considering the future, it’s good to keep that hope alive. a good death may not be redemption, but it certainly is consolation.
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‘there is still plenty of energy at moderately high EROI, so we are unlikely to witness a truly off the cliff crash until net energy falls somewhat further. That certainly looks likely to occur over 2014 to 2016.’
kevin, surreality is full of twists, turns, and surprises. things like major resource wars may well trigger the cliff fall, and may come at almost any time with very little warning. but barring something like that, i think the ‘big one’, the great catastrophe may still be a decade or 2 off. in the meantime expect great economic convulsions that will rock our lives, but not prove fatal to industrial civilization. it may even sputter on in pockets well into mid century, in some fashion, as long as fossil fuels can still be extracted, climate hasn’t turned deadly everywhere, ecosystems haven’t all been completely devastated, and everyone hasn’t been killed in wars or been victims of other foolishness or misfortune. imho. btw, it also bears repeating how much i appreciate your particularly lucid and well informed comments. i’m humbled by your extraordinary determination in the face of utter discouragement, frustration, and despair, as a concerned citizen activist. thank u.
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Thanks for the kudos Terry.
Nice write-up here by Patrice Ayme:
Excerpt…
“…The increasing injection of about 40 BILLION TONS of CO2 each year in the atmosphere is a large scale physics experiment. A natural change of 100 ppm takes 3,000 to 20,000 years. We have done more than that in a century. Atmospheric CO2 is at its highest level in 15 to 20 million years (Tripati 2009). During the Middle Miocene, temperatures were around 3 to 6 degrees Celsius warmer (12 Fahrenheit). The ocean was 25 to 40 meters higher than at present, with a density of CO2 similar to present levels.
But don’t worry: Obama’s golf is doing fine, his skin is brown, rejoice: you‘ve got the change you can believe. All the more as the administration of the USA is doing its best to augment the production of fracking and freaking fossil fuels, while saving the coal industry by exporting all the coal possible to other countries. Something facilitated by new ports. Craftily, the administration has oriented the conversation towards the XL pipeline…. while the trains carrying all the fuel roll away in the night.
The fossil fuel and gas production of the USA, the highest in the world, is twice that of Saudi Arabia at its peak. The CO2 craze, by shrinking vital space, the Lebensraum, guarantees a war of extermination. Is that the subconscious desire of the elite of the USA? What else? Just plain stupidity?”
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News bites in the last 24 hours:
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And lastly, happy Halloween…
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One of the most anticipated documentaries on drones, directed and produced by Robert Greenwald, has been released so that audiences worldwide can finally see the US drone program for what it really is. The film takes viewers on a journey through the struggles of Pakistanis who have been affected by the strikes as well as a former USAF drone operator’s feelings about what he has done (VIDEO).
http://voiceofrussia.com/2013_10_30/Unmanned-America-s-Drone-Wars-reveals-the-hidden-truth-behind-the-US-drone-program-8786/
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Since this self-organizing complex adaptive system did not need any rational inducement to form, except for the well entrenched human behaviors of competition and greed, themselves formed without any rational inducement, it is apparent that rational inducement to limit our activities will not be forthcoming. If you consider our origins you will see that no “plan” has ever existed, but rather adjustments have been made by evolution to maximize energy and resource acquisition and flow. Howard Odum named this the maximum power principle. Man is the marionette of the thermodynamic puppeteer and cannot overcome, nor see the need to overcome the desire to consume………….everything. Our morality and limited cooperation is self-serving, existing only to facilitate the order necessary to consume at the fastest rate possible.
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Some hunter-gatherer groups have shown some sense of the problems of over consumption. They have used aborticants when they felt their resources were getting stretched thin. And they were very concerned about taking too much of certain foods and materials at any one time……for instance certain trees that would be perfect for making canoes. They would designate the young trees for their children, not to be touched until the kids are grown. They seemed to have a certain sense for the needs of the next generation.
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I’m a compatibilist on this subject. As pfgetty pointed out, humans have the capacity to alter genetically-based behaviors.
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Great article here on the tunnel vision of America:
Excerpt…
“…But here in the U.S., the best we seem to be able to muster on the oceanfront is to elevate structures.
Which brings us to shoreline stabilization. Raising buildings is only a workable solution if you also commit to holding all the beaches in place . . . forever. This is what the federal government has done for New Jersey and New York. The U. S. Army Corps of Engineers will be spending upward of $5 billion on shore protection projects following Hurricane Sandy. The vast majority of these funds will be spent pumping sand onto beaches from Delaware to Connecticut. The amount of sand they will move is staggering, approaching 20 to 30 million cubic yards. This is equivalent to filling up an 80,000-seat football stadium roughly 10 times.
The cumulative environmental impact on near-shore ecosystems from this level of dredging and filling is unknown. The fact that sea levels are rising tells us that in the future the costs will only be higher and the environmental impacts will only be greater. As rising sea level pushes the system even more out of equilibrium, we will have to undertake these projects more frequently and use more sand. Yet if raising houses is your primary response to coastal hazards, you have to hold the shoreline in place.
Some try to put green lipstick on these dredge-and-fill projects by calling them beach restoration. But let’s be clear: Rebuilding beaches and dunes in front of buildings is not restoration; it is engineering. The beaches and dunes are not designed to maximize their effectiveness as ecosystems. They are designed for storm protection.
The Society for Ecological Restoration has very specific guidelines for what constitutes “restoration.” Beach fill projects meet none of them. For example, restoration should return an ecosystem to its former state or natural trajectory. (Dam removal is an excellent example of a restoration project that clearly returns an ecosystem to its natural trajectory.) Beach replenishment, on the other hand, is an effort to fight that natural trajectory by simply pumping sand onto a shoreline that is changing due to natural erosion or rising sea levels. Rebuilding beaches and dunes may be a “soft solution,” as it is often described, but it is not restoration, nor is it environmentally benign.
The Army Corps of Engineers has so overhyped the benefits of beach nourishment that every coastal community in America is standing in line to sign up. The corps is examining 50-year projects for the entire shoreline of Walton County, Florida, and for the small community of Edisto, South Carolina, among many others. When the federal government endorses spending billions to pump sand on the beaches of New York and New Jersey in an effort to provide the next 5 or 6 years of protection, how can we deny all the other communities that will also want big, expensive beaches? But should U.S. taxpayers be funding a $23 million project in a very small oceanfront community like Edisto? And what about the next coastal community, and the next? …”
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Thirty years ago Orrin H. Pilkey, Jr., wrote a great book and presented this film by the same name that showed how destructive development of the barrier islands is to the entire coast, and how it eventually leads to the senseless beach nourishment system we are seeing, wasting countless dollars.
Here is the film, worth watch even today:
“The Beaches Are Moving” is a 60-minute documentary that focuses on North Carolina’s barrier islands. It describes common beach processes, as well as processes that are unique to the barrier island system. Produced in 1983 by UNC-TV, this documentary focuses on the work of Duke marine geologist Orrin H. Pilkey Jr.
http://video.unctv.org/video/2365007946/
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Obvious solution: exterminate all bats.
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White-nose syndrome has been doing that job.
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James said:
‘ Man is the marionette of the thermodynamic puppeteer and cannot overcome, nor see the need to overcome the desire to consume………….everything.’
The existence of this blog is certain proof that is not so. Millions of people can see the need to consume less. But they form a tiny minority amongst the compliant slaves of the system.
The sad reality is that a tiny minority of psychotic sociopaths have been manipulating the bulk of society for their own short-term selfish ends for centuries (and continue to do so). Indeed, it seems that it only takes 0.1% of the populace to be well armed and manipulative to establish a reign of terror.
The really clever aspect of the current reign of terror is that it still does not feel like a reign of terror to the bulk of the populace living in industrialised nations. Give it another 5 years and that is certain to change..
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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/pacific-ocean-warming-15-times-faster-than-ever-before-8916297.html
Deeper regions of the Pacific Ocean are warming 15 times faster now compared to previous warming phases over the past 10,000 years, a study has found.
The findings lend further weight to the idea that the recent “pause” in global surface temperatures may be due to large amounts of heat in the atmosphere being absorbed by the deep ocean, scientists said.
The study used indirect, “proxy” temperature readings estimated from the chemical makeup of the shells of tiny marine creatures which had been washed from the middle depths of the Pacific into seabed sediments that had built up off Indonesia.
These showed a gradual long-term cooling of the Pacific Ocean over thousands of years at depths of between 1,500 and 3,000 feet, until they started to rise slightly at the start of the Medieval Warm Period in northern Europe around 1100AD.
Temperatures then fell again with the rate of cooling increasing during the so-called Little Ice Age of the 17 and 18 Centuries, when “frost fairs” were held regularly on the frozen River Thames, the study found.
However, the temperature of the deeper Pacific Ocean over the past 60 years of direct thermometer readings has risen 15 times faster than they did during the warming cycles of the past 10,000 years, based on proxy measurements, said Braddock Linsley, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York.
“Our work showed that intermediate waters in the Pacific had been cooling steadily from about 10,000 years ago. This places the recent warming of the Pacific intermediate waters in temporal context. The trend has now reversed in a big way and the deep ocean is warming,” Dr Linsley said.
“We’re experimenting by putting all this heat in the ocean without quite knowing how it’s going to come back out and affect the climate. It’s not so much the magnitude of the change, but the rate of change,” he said.
The study, published in the journal Science, is the latest to suggest that huge amounts of heat are being absorbed by the deep ocean. A previous study for instance found that changes to the cold Pacific current, called La Nina, may have resulted in the absorption of excess heat from the atmosphere.
Although global surface temperatures from land-based stations show that the world is warmer now than for thousands of years, the rate of increase has levelled off over the past 15 years or so, leading climate sceptics to question the link between global warming and carbon dioxide emissions, which have continued to increase during the same period.
The oceans and atmosphere are intimately related to one another, exchanging gases as well as heat, and heat energy can be transported to deep layers which can store vast amounts of heat for long periods of time.
One recent estimate for instance suggested that the heat being absorbed by the deep ocean is equivalent to the power generated by 150 billion electric kettles.
Yair Rosenthal of Rutgers University in New Jersey, who led the latest study, said that the findings indicate that the deep ocean may be storing far bigger quantities of heat than previous estimates had suggested.
“We may have underestimated the efficiency of the oceans as a storehouse for heat and energy. It may buy us some time, but how much time, I don’t really know, to come to terms with climate change. But it’s not going to stop climate change,” Professor Rosenthal said.
The temperatures of the Pacific over the past 10,000 were estimated from levels of magnesium and calcium in the shells of Hyalinea balthica, a one-celled organism that gets buried in the seabed sediments off Indonesia as water flows from the middle layers of the Pacific Ocean.
Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist with the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, said that global surface temperatures are unlikely to go down for any length of time and are more likely to start to rise again.
“With global warming you don’t see a gradual warming form one year to the next. It’s more like a staircase. You trot along with nothing much happening for 10 years and then suddenly you have a jump and things never go back to the previous level again,” Dr Trenberth said.
Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Columbia University, said: “Surface temperature is only one indicator of climate change. Looking at the total energy stored by the climate system or multiple indicators – glacier melting, water vapour in the atmosphere, snow cover and so on – may be more useful than looking at surface temperature alone.”
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Possible Senate candidate David Barton: Climate change is God’s ‘judgement’ for abortion. By David Edwards Thursday, October 31, 2013 15:51 EDT.
The Raw Story
http://climatecrocks.com/2013/11/01/tv-evangelist-climate-change-is-gods-punishment/
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Website for the possible senator blaming abortion for climate change is: http://mobile.rawstory.com/therawstory/#!/entry/possible-senate-candidate-david-barton-climate-change-is-gods-judgement,5272b4e5025312186c75ec22
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http://vidrebel.wordpress.com/2013/10/31/video-fukushima-is-frying-the-world/
Video: Fukushima is Frying The World.
Posted on October 31, 2013 by horse237
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That blog post is some seriously spooky shit. I wrestle with collapse daily; it’s never far from my mind. I know we’re in the midst of the sixth great extinction event (underway for decades or centuries already). I know that nature is in freefall. I know that the house of cards can tumble at almost any point with little perturbation. But the prospect of a two-year-old event frying us to extinction before anything else has got me spooked all over again.
Other posts by the same author have some wild and woolly claims, though, including childhood visions and some rabid anti-Semitism. I eschew a lot of conspiracy theories because they’re frankly irrelevant. But what if, along the lines of the greatest trick the devil ever played was to make us believe he doesn’t exist, so many of us are bending over backwards to avoid anti-Semitism for entirely wrong reasons? I don’t have an answer to that question.
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I read today that Fukushima Unit #4 is sinking due to the soggy earth from all the rain and shaking by winds and recent earthquakes. If it topples and all that fuel spills . . .
http://www.naturalnews.com/037556_Fukushima_power_plant_collapse.html#
(NaturalNews) Though the mainstream media has long since abandoned the issue, the precarious situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility in Japan is only continuing to worsen, according to a prominent Japanese official. During a recent interview, Mitsuhei Murata, the former Japanese Ambassador to both Switzerland and Senegal, explained that the ground beneath the plant’s Unit 4 is gradually sinking, and that the entire structure is very likely on the verge of complete collapse.
This is highly concerning, as Unit 4 currently holds more than 1,500 spent nuclear fuel rods, and a collective 37 million curies of deadly radiation that, if released, could make much of the world completely uninhabitable. As some Natural News readers will recall, Unit 4 contains the infamous elevated cooling pool that was severely damaged following the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami that struck on March 11, 2011.
According to the Secretary of former Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan, the ground beneath Unit 4 has already sunk by about 31.5 inches since the disaster, and this sinking has taken place unevenly. If the ground continues to sink, which it is expected to, or if another earthquake of even as low as a magnitude six occurs in the region, the entire structure could collapse, which would fully drain the cooling pool and cause a catastrophic meltdown.
“If Unit 4 collapses, the worse case scenario will be a meltdown, and a resultant fire in the atmosphere. That will be the most unprecedented crisis that man has ever experienced. Nobody will be able to approach the plants … as all will have melted down and caused a big fire,” said Murata during the interview. “Many scientists say if Unit 4 collapses, not only will Japan lie in ruin, but the entire world will also face serious damages.”
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here’s some appropriate music for reading such news:
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That really gives me the creeps. Great dark atmospheric music!
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Causes of high methane levels over Arctic Ocean
Methane levels in the atmosphere over the Arctic Ocean are very high, as illustrated by the image below, by Leonid Yurganov, showing IASI methane readings for October 10-20, 2013.
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com
Malcolm says: The massive methane release in the Arctic this October is partly because the Gulf Stream waters got massive heating in the Atlantic off the North American coast in July. It takes the Gulf Stream currents almost 4 months to reach the emission sites along the southern side and end of the Eurasian Basin. This combined with the earthquake activity along the Gakkel Ridge and deep pyroclastic eruptions is escalating the rate of methane release by destabilizing the submarine Arctic methane hydrates at increasing rates.
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Tom,
I prefer to go out with a little more of the old fashioned beauty and class. I just can’t do the dark stuff. Enjoy.
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Satan made us do it…
Excerpt:
…and this one out today:
What I found most interesting in the second article was something called incestuous amplification which the author defines as…
“…a feedback loop in which propaganda (or bad information) is taken as truth (good information). The result is that people caught in this amplification loop become increasingly detached from reality or make faulty decisions because their underlying beliefs have become corrupted by the incestuous amplification process.
This is happening both on the American left and right, only in different ways…”
Other sources define incestuous amplification as…
A condition in warfare where one only listens to those who are already in lock-step agreement, reinforcing set beliefs and creating a situation ripe for miscalculation.
-Jane’s Defense Weekly
If some people only listen to people or broadcast programming that supports their viewpoints, they become more polarized and less willing to consider other (sometimes better informed) views. This ongoing process, called incestuous amplification, springs from three psychological defense mechanisms we’ll discuss.
Over time, incestuous amplification makes the compromises necessary for progress within a democratic society less likely. In addition, this can degenerate into a closed-minded “us” and “them” mentality. – link
This sounds similar to confirmation bias.
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Incestuous amplification sounds a lot like what I’ve heard called the hype cycle.
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Many children when confronted with who broke a vase will point to their sister or brother even though they know it was themselves. Believing in demon possession is a classical case of placing the blame on some entity besides yourself and your own actions, a trait we find in most humans. Once you base your beliefs on faulty information that means you don’t have to take responsibility for anything in your life, they become more and more the reason for everything that is wrong – and the reason why you couldn’t do anything about it. CO2 pollution is a classical case, and today there are so many distraction “theories” that its very easy for people to find some odd quasi-science they can believe in to point the finger and not take responsibility for their own CO2 emissions.
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Hello my Name Is Mike and I’m a colapsitarian.
I’ve been an out of the closet-doomer now for about 3 years. The last time I blooged about collapse was this morning. My story. Yes…Once upon a time I spotted this small insignificant book, “Out Of Gas” by David Goodstein which led to The Long Emergency to The Oil Drum, Clusterfuck Nation and then finally Zuckerberg invented Facebook which led to Nature Bats Last, the crack cocaine of doom. I can see from your nods that you’ve all heard it before and in your own way you had a similar experience. At first I keep it under-cover and made it a private little secret, a harmless hobby. But then you can’t keep your mouth shut and you offer to give a Peak Oil presentation…and then you lose a couple of jobs…
So finally I said fuck-it man! I’m going to party on the way down cause it’s too god-damn late. But then you have moments where you suddenly think that maybe just maybe we’ll all come to some kind of collective realization. That “100th monkey” thing. Hmmmmmm
But I’m not buying it. Deep down I know it’s bullshit. Although I have no idea how the collapse will proceed I can say with confidence that we’re already there. It’s happening right now but it won’t occur on a timetable. Collapse for me is 20 years give or take for my poor aunt in hospice maybe a week. It’s all relative. Just because your private world hasn’t collapsed yet doesn’t mean it’s not collapsing for somebody else. I’ve seen too much of it in the last 5 years to stay in denial for long.
I’m currently reading: Red Rubber: The Story of the Rubber Slave Trade Flourishing on the Congo on the Year of Grace 1906 [E. D. Morel] about how King Leopold II of Belgium turned the Congo into his private colony between 1885 and 1908 and murdered more than 10 million people (half of the countries population) to get filthy-rich. Beside putting Himler to shame the king CAN also be credited with having had the academic discipline to study the American system of government particularly concerning our paper-treaties with indigenous peoples. Finally he invented “commission-on-production” to his rubber agents. This gave the agents “The proper zeal” for cutting off hands. If you’ve ever worked on commission you can thank ol’ King Leopold for that.
How he pulled off this international scam while he was soft soaping the rest of the world that he was bringing “religion and civilization” to the savages leaves me gaping in horror. The murder and tortures were happening in plain sight witnessed by thousands of missionaries but most (not all thankfully) kept their mouths shut because they didn’t want to piss the king off and after all they’re “saving souls”. If that soul happens to get murdered at least they were saved. The Royal Family of Belguim has never paid reparations and neither have the Belgians who all got rich and the king gave it to Belguim. The material theft was so enormous it’s beyond a scale of evil that an individual had ever achieved (until you look at present times of course) Those mother-fuckers wouldn’t give their shit to crows.
Well we’re the Belgians now and we aren’t all going to get religion suddenly. We’re too far along this crooked road to turn back.
Club Of Rome looks on course though.
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Join me and the elves, mike. The fight back has begun.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/10/why-so-many-icelanders-still-believe-in-invisible-elves/280783/
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Mike said:
“But then you have moments where you suddenly think that maybe just maybe we’ll all come to some kind of collective realization. That “100th monkey” thing. Hmmmmmm
But I’m not buying it. Deep down I know it’s bullshit. Although I have no idea how the collapse will proceed I can say with confidence that we’re already there.”
This is purely guesswork, but I’d say after devoting nearly 15 years in total and 7 years specifically where I am currently living to activism, I have raised the level of general awareness from 0.1% to 0.5%. The other 99.5% are oblivious or do not want to acknowledge anything connected with reality; being scientifically illiterate is a useful tool in the denialist’s irrationality kit.
For a long time I was concerned about the horrors that the complete economic collapse and die-off phase would bring. But know I recognise it is all unstoppable and there will be no culture change.
Around here obesity is currently a far greater problem than starvation, and I cannot see that changing for several years. The political elites and the bureaucrats will not contemplate any change in direction from business-as-usual-empire-building-promotion-of-dysfunction until middle-aged people are dropping like flies and the taxation base is significantly collapsing. We are witnessing the first indication of middle-aged people dropping like flies, but nowhere near enough to make a difference yet.
I see that oil prices have fallen (again), presumably in response to demand destruction and manipulation, so the game can continue a while longer.
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Nature at work in the Amazon.
Jaguar taking out a Crocodile:
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Orwell was too optimistic
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Great video.
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Stephen, I don’t blame you (and the song is appreciated – thanks). It’s so much worse than we can even fathom: listen to this radio program when you get a chance.
http://robinwestenra.blogspot.co.nz/
this program is shocking in the extreme and connects a lot of dots we bring up on this site
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“Employees at the Department of Homeland Security routinely bill unworked overtime hours, according to seven whistleblowers at six different offices, and the overtime pool — referred to by some employees as a “candy bowl” — is even advertised as a “perk” to new hires.
The abuse, the Washington Post reports, is thanks to an overtime option known as Administratively Uncontrollable Overtime (AUO), intended for use by agents who are given urgent work that couldn’t be scheduled in advance.
Instead, office employees routinely bill an extra two AUO hours at the end of the day, often passing the time just sitting at their desks…”
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I don’t watch much TV at all, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a series all the way through. But this Breaking Bad is riveting. The conflicted character of Walter White is mesmerizing. Up to episode 4(Season 1) now – ‘Cancer Man’.
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Resistance Radio
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A big Thanx ulxfugl
I’ve enjoyed his writings and commentary for some time now but was aware
that he must be listed on some kind of eco-terrorist list too from his strong views
and “almost call-to-action”, which i agreed with until i took into account the
nuclear component of the world societies (over 400 plants and then some).
Sorta we are all made hostage to the current form of society type deal.
anyhow, on my radar he has been quiet for some months until i came across this today.
i haven’t listened to them yet but knowing Derrick i’m sure they should be of interest.
And by the way I’ve found a number of your posts in various places of interest too.
Not all but many, mind you. Would you be open to a phone interview at some time?
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Hi chazk,
Probably not but if anybody wants to contact me I’m at
wolf dot bird at virgin dot net
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David Suzuki: October 30, 2013: “Fukushima is the most terrifying situation I can imagine… First of all you have got a government that is in total collusion with Tepco, they’re lying through their teeth… if there’s another quake of a 7 or above that that building will go, and then all hell breaks loose. And the probability of a 7 or above quake in the next 3 years is over 95%. … They don’t know what to do… Right now the Japanese government has too much pride to admit that. I’ve seen a paper which says that if in fact the fourth plant goes under an earthquake and those rods are exposed, it’s bye-bye Japan, and everybody on the West Coast of North America should evacuate. Now if that isn’t terrifying, I don’t know what is.”
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Try mentioning the frightening facts of Fukushima to people you know……you get vacant stares, maybe even a polite nod.
Of course, they know the enormous threats of Iran supporting terrorists, they knew the threats of WMD, etc.
All about what the media wants us to understand. Incredible power.
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