Tags
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Capitalism, Carrington Event, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Democracy, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecocide, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Growth, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, George Mobus, Greenpeace, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Overpopulation, Planetary Tipping Points, Robert MacNeil, Robert Scribbler, Russian Arctic Drilling, Security and Surveillance State, Terence Mckenna, The Elite 1%, unwashed public
The question of whether the human species is smarter than yeast is answered daily as the ecocidal and homicidal activities of industrial civilization continue apace. I learned a few days ago that September 2013 was the warmest in recorded history, and this morning I read that 2012 was a record breaker for GHG emissions:
“The laws of physics and chemistry are not negotiable,” said Michel Jarraud.
“Greenhouse gases are what they are, the laws of physics show they can only contribute to warming the system, but parts of this heat may go in different places like the oceans for some periods of time,” he said.
This view was echoed by Prof Piers Forster from the University of Leeds.
“For the past decade or so the oceans have been sucking up this extra heat, meaning that surface temperatures have only increased slowly.
“Don’t expect this state of affairs to continue though, the extra heat will eventually come out and bite us, so expect strong warming over the coming decades.”
Speaking candidly about the prospects of the industrialized world being able to reduce its GHG emissions and avoid catastrophic warming, the only three living diplomats responsible for leading past and present UN global warming talks had this to say:
“‘There is nothing that can be agreed in 2015 that would be consistent with the 2 degrees,’ said Yvo de Boer, who was UNFCCC executive secretary in 2009, when attempts to reach a deal at a summit in Copenhagen crumbled with a rift between industrialized and developing nations. ‘The only way that a 2015 agreement can achieve a 2-degree goal is to shut down the whole global economy.’”
Another study explains that not even the supposed eco-friendly state of California is likely to meet its GHG reduction targets by 2050. So you see, the ‘radical ecoterrorists’ were right all along. Industrial civilization has to go, or we go. The improbable list of actions needed to preserve any semblance of humanity was recently laid out by George Mobus. But as you know, even if we stopped everything right now, there is still a lot of pent-up manmade global warming in the pipeline from past industrial activity that will wreak havoc for millennia to come, as Robert Scribbler points out:
“…we’ve already released enough greenhouse gasses to at least return Earth to climates not seen in 3.6 million years. In this respect, the Baffin Island study adds to research conducted at Lake El’gygytgyn showing that levels of CO2 comparable to those seen today resulted in Arctic temperatures 8 degrees Celsius hotter during the deep past…
…Most likely, we are headed to at least the temperatures last seen during the Pliocene, in which global averages ranged 2-3 degrees Celsius hotter than the present and during which oceans were 25-75 feet higher. Unfortunately, these are the long-term consequences we have probably already locked in. But without rapid reductions in carbon emissions to near zero over the coming decades, we can expect far, far worse outcomes.”
Russia recently answered the concerns of environmentalists over Gazprom’s drilling plans in the Arctic by summarily arresting numerous members of Greenpeace and charging them with piracy. This is a high-profile case illustrating that ecocide is embedded and enforced within the system of capitalist industrial civilization. A further example of the system’s omnicidal nature is the construction of nuclear-powered ice-breaker ships by Russia to plow through the waters of the Arctic:
“Russia has started building the world’s largest universal nuclear-powered icebreaker capable of navigating in the Arctic and in the shallow waters of Siberian rivers. The unique vessel will further increase Russia’s dominance in the region…
…Powered by two “RITM-200” pressurized water reactors the “Arctic” is being built to generate 175MWe. Its efficiency and power allows the new model to crack ice fields 3 meters thick…”
Then you have Canada racing towards eco-apocalypse with its tar sands, and America exporting its coal into the maws of China and elsewhere as well as fracking the countryside into toxic wastelands, but of course the disease has spread globally. As Michael T. Klare clearly stated after weighing the PR propaganda with observable reality:
“…The result is indisputable: humanity is not entering a period that will be dominated by renewables. Instead, it is pioneering the third great carbon era, the Age of Unconventional Oil and Gas….”
Delicate ecosystems are ground up into commercialized and commodified pulp and fed into the machine of capitalism, lost forever in the fumes of our consumptive madness. A rash of mass wildlife deaths is occurring this year to further evidence the fact that industrial man is pushing the planet to the brink. It appears we may be reaching more tipping points in ecological breakdown:
Also…
- Giant Oarfish Wash up in California
- Bees Turn Up in Parking Lot
- Manatees Threatened by Algae
- Pigs Dumped in Chinese River
- Dolphins Die of Virus on East Coast
- Moose Die-Off
and…
Robert MacNeil once observed, “Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.” Our global self-destruction is not visible to the Television-hypnotised masses when they look out their window, but for the few environmentally conscious beings amongst us, the destruction is as personal and painful as wartime torture. How depressive it is to see the natural world being chewed up and spit out at such an alarming rate. We are part of the environment and its death is humanity’s suicide. Some hope for a super-Carrington event that would leave the machine dead in its tracks, but then there is the problem of those hundreds of nuclear plants scattered around the world like the bomb-rigged vest of a terrorist.
A sociopathic economic system that crushes democracy, decency, and justice in the name of growth and profits has led to the catastrophe we now see unfolding. When the masses are dumbed-down to mere ‘consumers’ and powerless to make meaningful change, then those sociopaths at the helm of the ship are free to pull us all down into the black hole of war, famine, disease, and extinction.
Collapse of Industrial Civilization 
‘The only way that a 2015 agreement can achieve a 2-degree goal is to shut down the whole global economy.’”
And as we know that 2 deg means 3, 4, 5, 6, deg C and the extinction of most if not all life on Earth, then the only sane choice must be to shut down the whole global economy.
Which divides the human population neatly into two categories – at least, if one were George Bush, it would – ‘Those who are with us, and those who are against us’.
The ones who want to end life on Earth, and the ones who want to end the global economy.
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Just as the wildlife are being infected and dying off from various parasites and diseases spread by a warming planet, so too will humans be vulnerable to such spreading diseases and bugs. Couple this with ‘peak antibiotics’ and the development of resistant pathogens and you can see where we are headed.
What if some rogue scientist or terrorist released something into the population, or an accidental escape from a bio-weapons lab infected a city?
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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=flying-the-coop-antibiotic-resistance-spreads-to-birds-other-wildlife
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This comment from that frightening article nails it:
“I love how everyone, so far, has danced around the subject. The ’cause’ is greed. We’ve allowed cheap food, cheap labor, cheap everything to overwhelm any sense of values we might have had. When cost is the only criteria, foolish and dangerous practices are approved as the simplest expedient.
Yes, we can solve this issue tomorrow, if we really wanted to. All we have to do is destroy the multinational agribusinesses that have destroyed farmers the world over. Yes, that means you, Monsanto; and all the pharmaceutical companies that push their products onto every conceivable user.
Okay, I take it back. We won’t solve this problem, because, just like climate change, it’s long term survival vs. short term profit. Guess how that’s been working out so far.”
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I forget who said it. “We’ve put a price on everything and know the value of nothing.”
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I think it was Oscar Wilde.
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I think it’s now very simple and easy for any smart person with the knowledge of genetic engineering to bioengineer Salmonella to make it very much more dangerous. Certainly a State sponsored effort could organise such a bioweapon. I imagine that many have them, and much worse, already prepared on the shelf in their labs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Rajneeshee_bioterror_attack
http://news.sciencemag.org/africa/2012/10/spread-lethal-salmonella-africa-linked-hiv
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I was listening to Immanuel Wallerstein today, and his theory of capitalism and history, and he mentions the debate that has gone on since ancient Greece, determinism v. free will, and he has an interesting take on that. He says, from a systems theory approach, sometimes free will works, sometimes not, depending on the condition of the system. So, for the French and Russian revolutions, even though enormous quantities of energy, ‘free will’, were thrown at the system, it still rebounded back, more or less, to where it had been. But when a system is already reaching a critically unstable condition, then even a small quantity of free will can tip it.
Struck me that Edward Snowden is a good example. One man throws the whole of global geopolitics into an entirely new phase. And the 600 US corporations trying to force through the Atlantic and Pacific ‘trade’ partnerships, are the very opposite, trying to prop up an old order which is going to fall apart whatever they do, because it’s already dead and obsolete.
The insanity of suing and taxing for profits that you might have made, hypothetically, is absurd. It’s a lot like what happened when Martin Luther broke the power of the Catholic Roman church to charge money for the forgiveness of sins. Those 600 corporations want to keep on looting and pillaging the planet to destruction, when anybody with a pea sized brain can see that it won’t work and has to stop. But they don’t have a Plan B. as far as I know.
That’s what happened during the Reformation too. The old order didn’t understand what had happened. They didn’t have a Plan B. The printing press was the internet, it meant everybody could read the news and hear what was going on, and the dirty little secrets spread across Europe like wildfire and couldn’t be contained, however many people they threw into dungeons and burned at the stake.
Do the bankers and CEOs and PR consultants and paid off corrupt politicians really think that the global population, the younger generation, are going to put up with this shit, these so called ‘zones’ ? Totally undemocratic imposed areas for corporation to rip off and extort and exploit and destroy so that a few psychopathic lunatics can exist in pampered luxury for a few more years while the whole planet goes to hell ?
There is ABSOLUTELY NO CHANCE. That system is DEAD. Just that the people involved do not have the imagination to have noticed yet.
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U,
I believe you are underestimating the phenomenon of baseline shift and its effect on moulding the perceptions of younger people. I put it to you that most young people living in industrial societies are just like the clones of Brave New World, and cannot conceive anything other than being mindless consumers, utterly detached from reality but totally unaware that they are. .
A couple of years ago a group of three young people set up camp in town as part of the global ‘occupy’ movement. Although they got some support, after a week they gave up, defeated by the apathy and insults of the majority…
In my experience the people who are most awake are those over the age of 60, i.e. those who have experienced something quite different from the gross overpopulation and rampant consumerism that now exists, e.g. Britain in the 1950s. I read on The Independent today that the population of Britain is expected to exceed 70 million, driven largely by immigration. . .
I agree that the system has reached a critically unstable condition and is going to fail anyway, and by all reasonable analysis quite soon. But that does not stop anyone immersed in the system from believing the system has a future, and making life decisions on the basis that the system will persist for many decades, if not forever.
As we all know, governments and the corporate media churn out delusional nonsense on a daily basis. And because it’s ‘official’ or on television, people believe it. .
.
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I was really musing upon Wallenstein’s model of how history works, which is quite a sophisticated one. There aren’t very many to choose from. Same as there aren’t very may of the much longer geological history of the planet to choose from, e.g. Ward, Lovelock.
There’s a lot of different takes on Capitalism, but nobody has ever had the opportunity to watch it run its course on some other planet to see what happened, so can’t be sure about the end of the story.
We can be pretty clear about how it started, with banking in Italy, and feudal kings wanting to hoard and invest their wealth, and Protestant work ethic in England, and all kinds of cultural stuff, and the first corporation, and so on.
I don’t think anybody has too much of a problem accepting a market, where people trade, and exchange goods and services, but as we know from Marx and others, inevitably cartels develop and wealth funnels upwards, and it leads to late stage capitalism, and financialism, and all the crap we see going on, which is just gambling really.
Just watched a Doug Rushkoff video about Present Shock where he explains how the capitalists bought the book publishers, expecting them to ‘grow’, as all investors expect their companies to ‘grow’. Except people don’t buy 20% more books every year, it doesn’t work like that. So the investors get pissed off, why aren’t they seeing their returns ? So the CEO’s expand and get ‘growth’ by buying up other book publishers, and keep doing it, until there are no more left to buy… just huge book publishers that don’t make any money because they can’t grow and people don’t buy more books, they read stuff online… so then what ?
So that’s what’s happened to all those 600 US corporations trying to do those evil ‘trade’ treaties. They are all dead corporations walking, and all they can think of is how to extort money by coercion by dirty tricks that they plot in secret and try to push through by bribing corrupt politicians.
But you’re right, kevin, Wallenstein is good on history and finance and Capitalism and mentions Occupy and other social stuff but seems utterly clueless about ecology and climate and extinction events. Just another expert living in his box.
What I found interesting is the idea of the instability. Maybe some very small unforeseeable perturbation can push the whole thing into free fall.
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A black swan.
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I don’t think that anyone has a complete and satisfactory theoretical model of how human history rolls out. I tried to study this once, having read that a woman set out to assassinate Lenin, but her shot missed because she had forgotten her glasses. I mean, if she had been just a little more thoughtful, and taken her glasses, and killed him, then presumably the entire history of the 20thC would have been completely different.
Or would it ? That’s something we can never know.
The covert agencies are constantly meddling, trying to manipulate history, and from looking at the record, as often as not, they get exactly the opposite of what they wanted, by their nefarious blackmailing and assassinations.
Bernays and the propaganda and public relations industry that followed him has been been very successful at manipulating Americans, and seems to me, the MSM is now solely concerned with manipulation and nothing else. Almost as if history had a will of its own and resists being pushed around.
That would fit with Wallenstein’s idea that sometimes, to some degree, it is deterministic, because it’s the result of untold numbers of human decisions and opinions and choices, moment to moment, as to how they feel about Caesar, or Napoleon, or Hitler or whoever it is, and how they perceive their place and interests in the great scheme of things.
But who can foresee a Black Swan ? I seem to recall that the so-called vegetable seller who set himself on fire as a protest to start the ‘Arab Spring’ revolution in Tunisia, was a totally contrived event that never actually occurred. The fellow is alive and well and has been interviewed. But what difference does it make, if everyone believes that was the trigger ?
That was an artificial Black Swan, if you like, hahaha, a white swan, spray painted for the media.
Even more startling, nobody got massacred in Tiananmen Square, that day. Yes, people got killed, but not in the Square, and nothing like what was reported in the Western media, and the people who were killed… well, it all depends upon whom you believe, doesn’t it.
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America’s History of Great Tragedies and the Butterfly Effects
“Understanding the history of the “butterfly effect” resulting from misconduct of America’s leaders might—might help the American public understand the reason for the endless series of harm and tragedies during the past 50 years, and continuing.
http://www.defraudingamerica.com/ripple_butterfly_effects.
If this doesn’t do it, we might have to insert Lady Gaga into it somehow to get attention!!”
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A lot of the conflict in Egypt and Syria is more closely linked to climate change and drought conditions than western media like to report. The west seems to have a very low threshold for blaming religious conflict or extremism as that simplifies the narrative. The fact is that when people dont get food on their tables, they tend to grow restless and violent – I believe we can already see the first signs of that after the typhoon disaster in the Philippines.
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ulvfugl sez: … Wallenstein is good on history and finance and Capitalism and mentions Occupy and other social stuff but seems utterly clueless about ecology and climate and extinction events. Just another expert living in his box.
This just about encapsulates it. Lots and lots of experts in various fields who still can’t or won’t grasp the full story. I recently read this comment by Morris Berman at his blog:
“Farther shore?” I thought (just like you thought of Wallenstein) that Berman has no clue about chemistry, physics, biology, etc. so can’t conceive of NTE or the end of history. I like his cultural criticism immensely, but his blog has become a bunch of jokes about deli meats and cranial-rectal embedment amidst some legitimate handwringing.
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Another great article xraymike and the usual high quality comments and links from ulvfugl (i’m sure the other great commenters here, kevin moore and others will be along with their insights).
What a quandary, eh? We can’t think our way out of something for a change and actually take the medicine as a species – in other words, we’ve reached a limit we can’t “work around.” Those natural limits that we’ve trashed and gone too far past were there for our protection. We didn’t listen or think about consequences and now the lesson will be fatal.
In the next few years I expect every part of life on earth to degrade significantly (of course I don’t WANT this to be the case, but it’s clear as day that’s where we’re heading). All the interconnected parts are going to impact each other in a systematic way – the warming will cause pests and pestilence to rise exponentially, the global economy will implode, it’s going to be much harder to get a crop to grow to maturity and harvests will become scarce as all parts of the grain belts of the world are affected. Meanwhile governments will have to try last ditch efforts like military control and martial law. The problem there will be that we’ll all be in the same sinking boat by then and they’ll be mass mutinies and walk-outs by unpaid and overworked police, ineffective homeland security and secret police who see the end involves their own demise as well and just give up. Another reason the power structures will fail is that the energy to maintain this overly complex beast of a military-industrial cabal will become ever more hard to get while using it up will only shorten the amount of time it can go on – so it kills itself by its own hand, mirroring the ecological and population situations.
2019 could be the threshold year – where it’s so obvious to everyone that we’ve run out of track and that civilization will soon go off the rails completely with the electrical grid going down, Antarctica significantly melting (maybe the Pine Island glacier goes into the sea just before this date), volcanoes and earthquakes reacting to the increased mass displacement of all that ice causing even more damage – it just goes on and on degrading and amplifying year after year until all of a sudden we get the cascading collapse of all systems at once and we’re out of here in a hurry.
Nothing is going to save anyone, no matter how much money they have or how well they think they’ve “prepared” for an event that’s never happened before to mankind.
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And a high quality comment from you!
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Lily Tomlin:”Things are going to get a lot worse before they get worse.”
I truly enjoy this site- the posts,comments and links.I glad my feet are planted firmly on the ground or I could be living a life of fear & depression.
The following music link describes how I’ve chosen to live my life.
http://www.elyrics.net/read/r/rare-earth-lyrics/i-just-want-to-celebrate-lyrics.html
ALICE MORSE EARLE:
“The clock is running. Make the most of today. Time waits for no man. Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That’s why it is called the present.”
Smiles to All
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http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/the-life-aquatic-how-earth-would-look-if-all-the-ice-melted-8925734.html
“If we continue adding carbon to the atmosphere, we’ll very likely create an ice-free planet, with an average temperature of perhaps 80F [26.6 C] instead of the current 58F [14.4C].”
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“…Human beings began the twentieth century thinking that they were at the apex of global evolution, the planet’s most intelligent and most innovative species. We begin the twenty-first century facing the real possibility that we are mediocre dodos, well-enough adapted to our initial niche but not smart enough to survive in a changed environment. Ironically, we are the ones inducing the changed environment, and aren’t even smart enough to stop digging the hole we’ve gotten ourselves in. Virginia politics, which once gave us Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, now produces bullying ignoramuses like Cuccinelli. It is small comfort that he will likely lose. His ilk is setting national and most state policy on climate.”
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Trans-Pacific Partnership: “We Will Not Obey”; Building a Global Resistance Movement
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/19843-trans-pacific-partnership-we-will-not-obey-building-a-global-resistance-movement-to-transnational-corporate-power
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The Environmental Protection Agency is being accused of trying to silence two longtime EPA enforcement attorneys who have publicly criticized a key component of the climate change legislation being considered by Congress. Last week the EPA directed Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel to remove or edit a video they posted to YouTube that warns a cap-and-trade plan will not effectively combat global warming and is “fatally flawed.” The couple instead advocate for a solution involving carbon fees with rebates.
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/12/defying_gag_order_epa_attorneys_speak
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A collapse of industrial civilization is unavoidable but it’s a HOPE for Earth. Now it’s too late: economic-demographic growth is a terrible pathology of Earth. But we can try to degrowth, for a lesser trauma. We hope better…AFTER.
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Via ‘The Folly of Man‘…
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Trans-Pacific Partnership: “We Will Not Obey”; Building a Global Resistance Movement
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/19843-trans-pacific-partnership-we-will-not-obey-building-a-global-resistance-movement-to-transnational-corporate-power
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The ECB is running out of ammunition.
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/nov/07/ecb-eurozone-interest-rates-cut
After its monthly policy meeting in Frankfurt, the ECB’s governing council announced that it would reduce its key refinancing rate to 0.25%, from 0.5%.
While the economy of the 18-member single currency area clambered out of recession earlier this year, Mario Draghi, the ECB’s president, warned that the outlook could deteriorate in the coming months.
“The risks surrounding the economic outlook for the euro area continue to be on the downside,” he said. “Developments in global money and financial market conditions and related uncertainties may have the potential to negatively affect economic conditions. Other downside risks include higher commodity prices, weaker than expected domestic demand and export growth, and slow or insufficient implementation of structural reforms in euro area countries.”
As well as the rate cut, which took financial markets by surprise, Draghi said the ECB would continue making low-cost loans to eurozone banks until at least mid-2015, to try to prevent the financial sector from seizing up.
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It’s just a gift to the banks who can borrow this money after inflation at “free” rates and turn around and lend it to the public at 30-40%. Or use it to undercut markets and attack working people in other countries; or finance and buy up assets basically for nothing. EU and ECB could toggle reserve requirements, apply taxes and tariffs, restrict capital flows, etc etc.And that is what they should be doing.. but they don’t. And they know it. They are perfectly aware of it. They are ideologically committed to a scorched earth war against anyone who might challenge their power – and the fact that all life on earth won’t bow to their pathology means that the Pequod will be sacrificed. Playing king of the hill in a suicidal final run where everything is smashed to bits and the “hill” remaining is little higher than a dust mote. Hierarchy is for suckers.
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This is for bonhomie
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I first saw this particular story at Jonathan Turley’s site, but then saw it again via Carolyn Baker’s news letter and decided to take a closer look…
Absolutely unimaginable this could happen in America
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It’s always worse than one may think?
http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/crime/timothy-young-subject-forced-anal-probe-new-mexico-cops-2nd-victim-come-forward#
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Time to bring down the perverse terror campaign of Butch and Zed.
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In case any of you haven’t already read it, this award winning scifi short story by Paolo Bacigalupi (fantastic name eh?) is an excellent and chilling read. I don’t want to say more as it would spoil the real impact of the story, which reveals itself as you follow along. But it deals with the theme of ‘life’ as capitalism continues its relentless devouring of the planet. You can read the whole thing online, you won’t be sorry you did.
http://windupstories.com/books/pump-six-and-other-stories/people-of-sand-and-slag/
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Thanks for the tip; I’ll take you up on it.
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Brilliant story. Thanks for sending the link. The main theme of the story for me was the devouring of life and humanity by science (and capitalism). Jarring, but beautiful imagery. 10+.
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thanks for another brilliant post mike. you are right about everything, and that’s sad.
a quibble–to be fair, the US is exporting about the same amount of coal to China as to the Netherlands, and a fifth of that which we export to old Europe taken altogether. China mines a staggering quantity, and our friends in Ausland top off the pile.
but steady or rising coal and gas consumption in advanced countries (all countries, really), in the face of all this ecocide (not that so many actually consider it to be in their face) illustrates the inability of either producer or consumer to dial back within the confines of our system–a polygamy of empire and finance and thermodynamics. fossil fuels will only get more expensive, yet always be cheaper than solar, wind or nuclear per kWh, as the costs of ev-er-y-thing continually ratchet upwards. res ipsas loquitur.
our innate fuckedness. we can’t get off the train…not in one piece anyhow.
also–is that a pyre of human skulls in the first pane? nice touch.
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This can’t be true, can it?:
“According to a November 2012 working paper released by the World Resources Institute, there are 69 proposed coal plants totalling 65,421 MW in Europe (excluding Russia). The paper estimated that an additional 26,000 to 48,000 MW of coal-fired electrical generating capacity will also be added in Russia by 2030, but did not list project names or locations.” – source
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interesting chart, i don’t see any reason to doubt it. if you sort the 4th column you’ll see that maybe half are ‘abandoned’ or ‘shelved’ and only maybe a 1/8 are under construction. of those, construction amounts to ~15 GW of capacity. at the link below the histogram (third chart) shows China having built something like 600GW of coal capacity between 2000 and 2011. the US has generation capacity of all types of ~1100GW, maybe a third of it coal, built over generations. energy and labor arbitrage offer China massive advantage. think they will cut their coal dependence?
http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2012/10/01/obamas-war-on-coal-other-countries-promote-its-use/ IER are flagitious energy flacks, but i think their data are ok here.
one irony is that all the inexpensive PV washing around, upending PV manufacturers and shuffling energy economics worldwide, is predicated on Chinese industry burning a shitton of coal.
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“One day, when we had become very friendly, I said to him, “Tell me now–how was the world lost?”
“That,” he said, “is easy to tell, much easier than you may suppose. The world was lost one day in 1935, here in Germany. It was I who lost it, and I will tell you how.
“I was employed in a defense plant (a war plant, of course, but they were always called defense plants). That was the year of the National Defense Law, the law of ‘total conscription.’ Under the law I was required to take the oath of fidelity. I said I would not; I opposed it in conscience. I was given twenty-four hours to ‘think it over.’ In those twenty-four hours I lost the world.”
“For the sake of argument,” he said, “I will agree that I saved many lives later on. Yes.”
“Which you could not have done if you had refused to take the oath in 1935.”
“Yes.”
“And you still think that you should not have taken the oath.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Perhaps not,” he said, “but you must not forget that you are an American. I mean that, really. Americans have never known anything like this this experience–in its entirety, all the way to the end. That is the point.”
“You must explain,” I said.
“Of course I must explain. First of all, there is the problem of the lesser evil. Taking the oath was not so evil as being unable to help my friends later on would have been. But the evil of the oath was certain and immediate, and the helping of my friends was in the future and therefore uncertain. I had to commit a positive evil, there and then, in the hope of a possible good later on. The good outweighed the evil; but the good was only a hope, the evil was a fact.”…
“And it would have been better to have saved all three million, instead of only a hundred, or a thousand?”
“Of course.”
“There, then, is my point. If I had refused to take the oath of fidelity, I would have saved all three millions.”
“You are joking,” I said.
“No.”
“You don’t mean to tell me that your refusal would have overthrown the regime in 1935?”
“No.”
“Or that others would have followed your example?”
“No.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You are an American,” he said again, smiling. “I will explain. There I was, in 1935, a perfect example of the kind of person who, with all his advantages in birth, in education, and in position, rules (or might easily rule) in any country. If I had refused to take the oath in 1935, it would have meant that thousands and thousands like me, all over Germany, were refusing to take it. Their refusal would have heartened millions. Thus the regime would have been overthrown, or, indeed, would never have come to power in the first place. The fact that I was not prepared to resist, in 1935, meant that all the thousands, hundreds of thousands, like me in Germany were also unprepared, and each one of these hundreds of thousands was, like me, a man of great influence or of great potential influence. Thus the world was lost.”
“You are serious?” I said.
“Completely,” he said. “These hundred lives I saved–or a thousand or ten as you will–what do they represent? A little something out of the whole terrible evil, when, if my faith had been strong enough in 1935, I could have prevented the whole evil.”
– Milton Mayer, “They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45”, Chapter 14, “How the World Was Lost”
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These tanks at Fukushima are going to be leaking shit everywhere….already are. Here is a reason:
“Uechi and co-workers were under such pressure to build tanks quickly that they did not wait for dry conditions to apply anti-rust coating over bolts and around seams as they were supposed to; they did the work even in rain or snow. Sometimes the concrete foundation they laid for the tanks came out bumpy. Sometimes the workers saw tanks being used to store water before they were even finished.”
http://my.earthlink.net/article/int?guid=20131108/2c1f15e1-6a71-4379-be01-11aa34a78d59
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Capitalism at its finest.
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Seems likely the work was contracted to the Yakuza.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/11/gaius-publius-japanese-mafia-feared-in-charge-of-fukushima-cleanup.html
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Long-time reader from the UK here. I am broadly in agreement with everything you say, Xraymike, and am consistently impressed by the quality of the the editorials and the comments section. I find it comforting to hear the truth spoken, unpalatable though it is. Life among the oblivious narcoleptics is starting to get creepy.
I only un-lurk at this juncture to point out that the site is only accessible to me if I search for it on google and then select it from their menu. If I try to type the address directly into my browser it’s as if the site doesn’t exist. Is anyone else having this problem?
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That’s quite odd. I had an incident where I was locked out of this site for a week due to a glitch with the ‘google authenticator'(a supposed security feature). It was when I wrote the post ‘Psychos at the Helm‘. As I was conversing with ulvfugl about the problem via google email, one comment that I made in an email suddenly appeared as a comment on the aforementioned post. Now that creeped me out.
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Hi Harry,
I’m in UK, I have the site bookmarked, it’s usually very slow to appear and load compared to all others, possibly because of the many links it has to find on the side bar, or possibly because the ISPs now weight traffic and favour certain commercial customers against private blogs ? Could be something else of course…
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Let’s say you’re an independent thinker who wants to become a little more “off-grid.” Well, now you have even LESS options to keep yourself warm and to cook by:
http://www.offthegridnews.com/2013/10/02/epa-bans-most-wood-burning-stoves/
The EPA, supposedly put there to enforce CO2 regulations and others that may harm the environment, which allows fracking, mountaintop-removal coal mining and uranium and other mining which are all devastating (not to mention the power plants that use this crap but don’t worry about the waste), now bans wood burning stoves.
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But if you’re Big Pharma, what happens ?
On the surface, Johnson & Johnson’s $2.2 billion settlement this week for illegally marketing drugs to the elderly, children and the mentally disabled looks like a victory. J&J’s subsidiary, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, will plead guilty to illegally promoting the antipsychotic Risperdal for “controlling aggression and anxiety in elderly dementia patients and treating behavioral disturbances in children and in individuals with disabilities,” reports Reuters. The promotions included a brazen kickback scheme to Omnicare Inc, a pharmacy supplying nursing homes, exposed by a whistleblower.
At least 15,000 elderly people in nursing homes die a year from drugs like Risperdal said FDA drug reviewer David Graham in Congressional testimony a few years ago. Eli Lilly who makes the similar drug Zyprexa and AstraZeneca who makes Seroquel have also settled charges that they churned the elderly drug market at the price of Grandma and Grandpa’s lives.
But it is not a victory. J&J made $24.2 billion off Risperdal from 2003 to 2010 and shareholders won’t even notice this week’s nano loss. J&J milked Risperdal for all it was worth and the patent had already run out by the time it was charged with illegal schemes. Other drug giants charged with illegal marketing schemes–Abbott for Depakote, Pfizer for Bextra, Eli Lilly for Zyprexa, AstraZeneca for Seroquel, GlaxoSmithKline for Paxil and Merck for Vioxx–also got their money’s worth before the trivial nuisance of suit. Many, like Pfizer who illegally marketed its seizure drug Neurontin while under probation for illegal Lipitor activities–are brazen and shameless repeat offenders.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/08/the-withering-of-big-pharma/
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Yes, Tom. EPA = Empire Protection Agency and Ecocide Promotion Agency.
Anyone with a modicum of knowledge recognises the Orwellian nature of most official institutions and their policies. Indeed, proper analysis quickly demonstrates that practically all official policies are counterproductive in the long term.
Fortunately for the opportunists and the minions of the empire, the vast majority of people are completely clueless, and those who are not clueless are easily rendered powerless by the system: the looting and polluting continue.
Having spent so many years exposing the complete idiocy of officialdom without bringing about ANY fundamental change, I now recognise that the system cannot be changed: it will collapse as a consequence of its own internal contradictions, and will generate much unnecessary suffering.
Nowadays, when someone suggests some form of mitigation I say: “Yes, that probably would have worked if it had been implemented before 1980.”
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Don’t know how I feel about it. Generally I think wood stoves should really only be used in an emergency and not as an “off the grid” solution. Imagine what would happen to the worlds forests if everyone started doing that. In addition to massive CO2 emissions, which I guess is the main reason for EPA’s ban.
Here in Bergen, Norway we have the discussion of pollution from old wood stoves every cold winter as easily get “inversion” problems due to the city being between several mountains and it easily builds up as a good old smog lid on the city. Electricity is cheap here in Norway, but people still like to burn wood for the “coziness”, so it really doesn’t have a function besides making life a hell for people with asthma and other lung diseases during this time – and ofc the rise in CO2 emissions from it.
But I do believe anyone should be allowed to own one, just in case the grid does fail.
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First Rule of Bureaucracy: Incompetence rises, Second Rule: Increased Incompetence at higher nodes of Bureaucracy results in paralysis of network. This is known as the Water Hyacinth Effect.
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