An excellent essay which pinpoints the underlying causes of societal disintegration and the breakdown of traditional social support systems. Capitalism destroys local community and sustainability in order to bring all resources (human and otherwise) into the global “free market”. People, cultures and ecosystems are then fed into the conveyor belt of profit extraction as they become commodities in the labor market, consumerist culture, and natural resource market. The onslaught has been global and its destruction is seen everywhere, especially in the rise of mental illness in America:
“…We are today disengaged from our jobs and our schooling. Young people are pressured to accrue increasingly large student-loan debt so as to acquire the credentials to get a job, often one which they will have little enthusiasm about. And increasing numbers of us are completely socially isolated, having nobody who cares about us….”
“The rising popularity of the consumerist life-model has been imported from the West or rather imposed by the globalization of Western standards… conspicuous consumption had been cut off from the task to satisfy survival needs and put in the service of positional rivalry and cut-throat competition for social standing, renown and prestige.”
~ Prof. Zygmunt Bauman
Addiction is big business and obscuring its roots is its ideological handmaiden. Despite the incessant chanting that everything that happens to you is solely your fault, social ills do have social roots.
We need not lay this “personal responsibility” mantra solely at the feet of neoliberal ideologues, for such beliefs pervade capitalist society, even among those who are critical of capitalism’s excesses. New age philosophy, for example, routinely blames the individual for all manner of personal misfortunes and overemphasizes personalities at the expense of collective effort.
An episode of Oprah that featured Nelson Mandela saw Oprah Winfrey repeatedly tell the former president that he had accomplished so much by himself; she was oblivious to his protestations that he could not have brought an end to apartheid except as part of the collective movement of which he was a part. On the personal level, a friend still angrily recounts an incident…
View original post 1,873 more words
Another great bit of info about the consequences of our way of life. Thanks.
I’ve been thinking about land recently, as I sometimes do. Just look around and see how we view this, the most fundamental resource on which we all depend. Forget about “capitalism” just look at what we’ve all allowed to take place. Forget about the “corporations” too. Land is the fundamental way the “common man” exploits the other “common man”.
End that and you end the whole mess, almost. But I don’t think that’s possible unless we live communally in some fashion or another.
http://www.the-communal-solution.us/index.html
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I came to realise that almost everything in mainstream culture is Orwellian several years ago. And many aspects are becoming increasingly surreal. I use both words to describe the culture I live in and the systems that are used to impose that culture on the general populace of most nations, including NZ.
It is interesting that at the time of the Second World War there were war departments, war ministries, expeditionary forces etc. Although regularly used to attack other nations, these were later renamed to become components of ‘defence’.
‘Free market capitalism’ is founded on rigorous control and manipulation of markets, the only aspects that can be truly described as free being the freedom of corporations to loot and pollute, and the freedom of money-lenders to extract interest from individual victims or entire nations caught up in their money-created-out-of-thin-air scams. Legislation is being introduced by the saboteurs of society and sustainability in various ‘elected’ houses around the world to increase the opportunities for corporations to loot-and-pollute and for money-lenders and ‘derivatives traders’ to expand their various Ponzi schemes. It’s all a grand illusion, a great game of deception.
In England the last battle was fought and lost in the early 1800s, when Luddites attempted to stem the tide of land dispossession and rampant industrialisation of ordinary people’s lives, Men with guns and ‘the weight of the law’ won, of course.
I believe the present system can be traced back to the Norman invasion of England, when a group of opportunists imposed land theft and tax-collection on a populace that spoke a different language, using violence or the threat of violence. Unlike the Roman Empire that disintegrated when the army was called back to base, the Norman Empire incorporated, evolved, and conquered most of the world. Trace it back to the Viking (Norsemen) conquest of western France if you wish. Just what made people living in what we now call Norway so ‘special’ is conjectural. Presumably population pressure and confined valleys with ‘nowhere to go but south and west’ were major factors.
If you want to trace it back further you’d have to consider the outcompeting of Neanderthals by ‘Sapiens’ because of their better ability to run and throw, their better spear heads and their better social organisation. However, that path leads to something of a dead-end, since indigenous people all around the world seem to have come from the same ‘Sapiens source. In other words, overall we are genetically extremely similar. Everything I have seen and read indicates that social conditioning by far overrides genetic factors.
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“Money, as Karl Marx lamented, plays the largest part in determining the course of history. Once speculators are able to concentrate wealth into their hands they have, throughout history, emasculated government, turned the press into lap dogs and courtiers, corrupted the courts and hollowed out public institutions, including universities, to justify their looting and greed. Today’s speculators have created grotesque financial mechanisms, from usurious interest rates on loans to legalized accounting fraud, to plunge the masses into crippling forms of debt peonage. They steal staggering sums of public funds, such as the $85 billion of mortgage-backed securities and bonds, many of them toxic, that they unload each month on the Federal Reserve in return for cash. And when the public attempts to finance public-works projects they extract billions of dollars through wildly inflated interest rates.
Speculators at megabanks or investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are not, in a strict sense, capitalists. They do not make money from the means of production. Rather, they ignore or rewrite the law—ostensibly put in place to protect the vulnerable from the powerful—to steal from everyone, including their shareholders. They are parasites. They feed off the carcass of industrial capitalism. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They just manipulate money. Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged….” ~ Chris Hedges
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Add declining conventional oil extraction, falling EROEI, increasing climate instability and the unresolved Fukushima debacle to this list and see what you come up with;
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via Peak Prosperity,
At the beginning of this year (2013), I identified eight key dynamics that will play out over the next two to three years (2013-2015):
Trend #1: Central Planning intervention in stock and bond markets will continue, despite diminishing returns on Central State/Bank intervention
Trend #2: The omnipotence of the Federal Reserve will suffer a fatal erosion of confidence as recession voids Fed policy and pronouncements of “recovery”
Trend #3: The Mainstream Media (MSM) will continue to lose credibility as it parrots Central Planners’ perception management
Trend #4: The failure of what is effectively the “State religion,” Keynesianism, will leave policy makers in the Central State and Bank bereft of policy alternatives
Trend #5: Economic Stagnation will fuel the rise of Permanent Adolescence
Trend #6: Income, the foundation of real economic growth and wealth-distribution stability, will continue to stagnate
Trend #7: Small business—the engine of growth—will continue to decline for structural reasons
Trend #8: Territorial disputes will continue to be invoked to distract domestic audiences from domestic instability and inequality
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-12-31/trends-watch-2014
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Addictive greed seems so deeply entrenched in “civilization” that a substitution of this modus operandi with something more communal is unlikely in the time remaining before climate change makes civilization intolerable. Thus we rapidly drift into chaos. And who has the pathway out?
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Nobody.
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I guess I would say about this (communal) thing. I don’t think one does the right thing because it’s going to change or save the world. One does the right thing because it’s right. Is living communally the “right” thing? I don’t know for sure. I think so because I’ve yet to see or hear of any other alternative to “capitalism” or “civilization” . The communal idea may, too, be hard to swallow for two reasons. One is that it is quite a bit more involved than simply (living communally) as most seem to think. That is in thinking the word communal means one thing and one thing only and to this I say that’s categorically not true. And the other thing that’s hard to swallow is that there isn’t much of an excuse why one couldn’t live that way now….. if that is one knew HOW one wanted to live communally and could find others of similar mind. Even if the world is coming to an end, I’d still like to know how we should have or could have lived to have prevented it. I don’t think it’s as simple as it is (their) fault or it’s simply human nature.
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There are people on this planet who are trying what seems to be impossible, yet they do exist. These are two movements I’ve had personal experience with, the Zapatistas (I hope y’all know where they are lol) and the Movimento Sem Terra (Movement of the Landless) in Brazil, both full of tension, conflict, flaws and contradictions–in short the full range of human behaviors–yet almost miraculous in what they do achieve in real life against staggering and terrifying odds. Its life and death. I very much doubt anything of this caliber will ever come into existence in this country, I’m not sure I’m even brave enough to join them if they do. The Deep and Repressive State seems to one of the few aspects of our society that is rather high functioning and fully funded. Pay attention to the role and words of Chase Bank in the first article. That’s your bailout tax dollar at work.
http://climate-connections.org/2013/12/31/on-the-20th-anniversary-of-the-zapatista-uprising/
http://www.mstbrazil.org/
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Yes, pretty shocking. We live in the belly of the beast. That’s why I say we need to starve it here to save the world there. What fascinates me more than the powers to be, is how the American radical left utterly fails at unity. The point being, not to lament (too much) about the Zapatista, but to live like them here. And not to, necessarily, (win or to change anything) but because its the right thing to do.
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I was going through some book notes this evening and came across this excerpt from Eric Fromm’s book “To Have or to Be”
“One of the gravest objections to the possibilities of overcoming greed and envy, namely that their strength is inherent in human nature, loses a good deal of its weight upon further examination. Greed and envy are so strong not because of their inherent intensity but because of the difficulty in resisting the public pressure to be a wolf within wolves. Change the social climate, the values that are either approved or disapproved, and the change from selfishness to altruism will lose most of its difficulty.”
more here http://www.the-communal-solution.us/to_have.html
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From the great article at the top of this post:
“On a global level, substantially reducing the addiction problem requires nothing less than exercising sensible, humane controls over markets, corporations, environments, public institutions, and international agencies to reduce dislocation. This cannot be achieved without conflict, because it will inevitably impede the pursuit of ever-increasing wealth and ever-freer markets. Of course it would be naive to hope for a return to any real or imagined golden age. However, it is at least as naive to suppose that society can continue to hurtle forward, ideologically blinded to the crushing problems that free markets create.” [page 22]
In a rational society designed to meet human need rather than private profit at any cost, this conclusion would be obvious. That it seems a fantastic goal is a morbid manifestation of the cancer that is our economic system.”
Crushing problems? You mean new markets and opportunities for profit. Just as the subprime market targeted those who thought they were middle class but were actually poor, the addicted are just more consumers of corporate products at both ends. The big banks and corporate behemoths provide the capital needed to manufacture the illicit products that create addiction, the means to get these products to the consumers, the pharmaceutical ‘treatments’ marketed as solutions, and the systems of control/punishment that warehouse their bodies and minds. Its win win. And its purely rational on the part of those who control, design and manage the system. The only ripples of uncertainty are the conflicts between the sociopathic ‘persons’ that play these very lucrative games.
There is no problem to fix. And society? That doesn’t exist, remember? Who cares where that figment of imagination hurtles? Not anybody that matters. (I noted that among the items listed as Best of the year on naked capitalism, one poster mentioned the lonely memorial of that evil witch Thatcher.)
http://www.amazon.com/The-Fight-Save-Ju%C3%A1rez-Mexicos/dp/0292738900/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1388641512&sr=8-1&keywords=the+fight+for+juarez
http://www.amazon.com/Murder-City-Ciudad-Economys-Killing/dp/1568586450/ref=pd_sim_b_7
http://www.amazon.com/McMafia-Journey-Through-Criminal-Underworld/dp/1400095123/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1388641596&sr=1-1&keywords=mcmafia
If bringing these new consumers into the corporate embrace isn’t as efficient as demanded by sophisticated formulas and profit expectations, expulsion is always a good option and increasingly apparent, as Saskia Sassen discusses in that lecture I linked to. Its all good, money will still be made.
Funny/spooky that just today I spent hours talking about addiction with one of the very few people I know in real life with whom I can honestly linger just at the edges of all these deep dark and terrifying truths. He’s visiting from out of town. We were laughing and also rather horrified to discover that yes, we are among the only people we know that are NOT taking designer drugs for mood disorders, anxieties, depressions, attention deficits, concentration/performance/sexual aids, whatever. He moves in much higher social circles than I do and lives in the libertarian paradise of Silicon Valley (but not as part of it) and yet the insanity of the successful all around him is something he can’t help noticing on a daily basis. He lives amidst a different flavor of crazy than I do here, but he started out here and I used to live where he is now, so we can compare and contrast notes and experiences.
We discussed the implications of this omnipresent addiction for making friends and creating intimacy, how to know what a person is ‘really like’ when they are so carefully doped up all the time, how to assess what we can realistically expect from our romantic partners. We talked about our own addictions, behaviors that we can joke about but that we recognize are not quite within the bounds of comfort because of the ways we engage in them. We affirmed our commitment to use substances for recreation only, never as some new ‘normal’.
We found a bit of comfort in acknowledging that we are also insane, but maybe just less so, or in less repulsive ways than many/most people that we know and interact with. (Of course we would think that lol, right? Well, if we are strangers to ourselves and only come close to knowing something true-ish about ourselves through the eyes of those who love us, then at least we can have some hope of accuracy in this mutual assessment.)
http://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Ourselves-Discovering-Adaptive-Unconscious/dp/0674013824/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1388641695&sr=1-1&keywords=strangers+to+ourselves
I told him about how this year I had met one of the very few people in all the years I’ve lived here with whom I’ve experienced one of those miraculous and serendipitous fundamental chemical and soulful compatibilities that we are capable of as sentient mammals. This person is a celebrity of sorts, brilliant, fascinating, charismatic, attractive, someone with whom I can spend uncounted open-ended hours and feel completely engaged with body and mind. Books, ideas, experiences, philosophy, hopes and dreams, we never run out of things to talk about, and in ways that I simply do not talk about these things with anyone else I know here. Its a drug in itself, the intense pleasure of our association, it leaves me buzzing for days afterwards. (Full disclosure, I met him through an app on my extremely resented smartphone, in an experiment of using it to ‘meet’ people I would never otherwise meet in this chilly lonely place; it has been an adventure and perhaps even worth the betrayal of my Luddite convictions lol.)
This person is also a junkie, who spends most of his time high, and with drugs that have always really spooked me, even though I’m pretty pro drug on principle. His utterly unusual life makes my own unconventional days look like the epitome of mainstream. It was a real education for me and I had a lot to learn. I still do.
I told my visiting friend that given everyone I know is addicted and on drugs of some sort, I far preferred the company of this new person, who is so very beyond the sorts of addictions and drugs that are ‘okay’ and even desirable in this society. The tedious grey hell of my ‘normal’ social life, having to spend time with people who talk about their therapies and meds and victimization stories and schemes for money and status and possessions and the junior high ways of their romantic endeavors, its wrist-slittingly awful. Being with the junkie is like being with a real human and in a human way I mostly only encounter on my trips abroad. It is so very worth answering his texts at 3am to go hang out for however long we hang out, and it doesn’t involve a plane trip.
I think I’ve mentioned it here before, but its only half a joke that within the group of my far flung few close friends, we consider it a major goal to make sure our own addictions and coping strategies don’t feed the Beast, as much as that is possible. My junkie friend has lost that battle and is enmeshed within a system that will kill him and discard him in the end, and he knows it and can discuss it calmly. But in the meantime, somehow he is alive in ways nobody else I know locally is alive. His despair is of a kind I just didn’t know existed, he pulses with life as we talk about death. If capitalism has so twisted and distorted all of us that true health and sanity are no longer possible, maybe adapting includes things I’ve never really considered. I’m still sorting out the whole experience but it has shaken me.
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Another great comment. You see, I knew this was your forte.
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Thanks for sharing that insight with us.
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Eric sez: I … met one of the very few people in all the years I’ve lived here with whom I’ve experienced one of those miraculous and serendipitous fundamental chemical and soulful compatibilities that we are capable of as sentient mammals.
Quite an interesting comment. The irony of finding a soulmate (but not significant other, I presume) who is a walking embodiment of one of modernity’s primary scourges is rich. I’ve known a few myself who are immoderately adapted to a glamorously insane way of being in the world, but I’ve never admired or wanted to be that way myself. I’d be lying, though, if I said the vividness of their experiences didn’t also enliven me somewhat. The full range of human experience includes those who are fast flames, burning brightly but often briefly.
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There’s a new drug of choice in the area that’s cheaper and easier to find, but police say it’s also dirtier and deadlier. Heroin is making its way into western Kentucky from Illinois and Ohio. It’s becoming more popular than meth,even though more people are overdosing and dying from it.
http://www.wpsdlocal6.com/news/local/A-new-drug-of-choice-heroin-238381491.html
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Mission accomplished in Afghanistan, then?
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The Top 25 Most Censored Stories of 2013
http://www.projectcensored.org/category/top-25-of-2013/
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The trouble with greed is that it has a sound biological basis. Until relatively recently, periods of famine were quite normal in regions remote from the tropics, and especially in winter. If you didn’t stuff yourself with all you could get, and put on weight when there was plenty of food, you faced the prospect of not getting through the next winter.
On the other hand, being part of a group was vital, as loners were unlikely to take kill large animals alone; so it was a good strategy to share food and protection, and keep everyone in the group healthy and active.
Faced with seemingly limitless supplies of (whatever) humans in consumer societies have to override their biological urges: nearly impossible for most, it seems.
One thing we know for certain. in any group, as long as everyone is at the same level, there is harmony. The moment there is disparity in food/money/possessions there is trouble.
.
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But it is pretty well established that true hunter-gatherer groups rarely suffered from real famines. They may have gone through tough times in droughts and other bad weather times, but generally had many resources to at least help them stay alive.
Real famines, causing lots of death, came about after the move to agriculture.
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I found this documentary fascinating because it demonstrates the ill-preparedness of the military planners and the callousness of senior officers towards their own soldiers.
It also relates to the comment about surviving alone in a cold, hostile environment without sufficient food and protection, and comradeship etc.
Most of us [60+-year-olds] have no idea compared those to just one generation before us. And those who follow have even less idea.
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http://thetyee.ca/News/2013/12/23/Canadian-Science-Libraries/?fb_action_ids=1442469055981651
Fahrenheit 451?
“Tell me, is it true that firemen used to put out fires before they started burning books?”
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Lots of serendipity here today. I was going to post this exact article from the same source, but then, as I often do – I read the comments first. Hoot, there it is! Thanks for posting this Kevin. When societies get to the point where they won’t even share important, even vital, information with its citizens, that society is in decline.
I podcast I listened to yesterday contained the information that almost all of the peer-reviewed papers emanating from our public institutions is confiscated and locked away before it can become public knowledge. Thousands of documents on a wide variety of subjects, all unavailable for viewing unless you have the thousands of dollars and go through the tedious process of application to view such material.
I also found that many of the federal and state agencies paid for by our tax dollars have been shuttered (due to ‘budget cuts’ – while the military and ‘Homeland security’ gets all the money it wants).
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I just finished reading Eric Schlosser’s latest, Command and Control. Too many mind-boggling things in the book, definitely worth a read. There have been so many accidents that the Big Men in charge honestly credit divine intervention that we haven’t had a catastrophic incident (or three) already. Lying about virtually everything was (and likely is) just standard procedure. Talk about callousness and being ill prepared, the degree to which those were part of this whole project of creating the most destructive machines ever made, its unfuckingbelievable. Its made me rethink some of my skepticism about a lot of the more extreme stuff out there about Fukushima and claims of massive coverups. I guess I’m still capable of being shocked.
http://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Illusion/dp/1594202273/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1388685501&sr=8-1&keywords=command+and+control
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“According to new research, Britain bears ‘significant responsibility’ since 1945 for the direct or indirect deaths of 8.6 million to 13.5 million people throughout the world from military interventions and at the hands of regimes strongly supported by Britain.”
http://aangirfan.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/nazis.html
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Great post xraymike, and the comments are spot-on as usual.
Yes, how can we possibly expect anything different when all the conditions we’re born into form our very world-view (or “belief system”) by which we make all our decisions?
Alienation, separateness, individuality – all fostered and programmed into us at the earliest age (when we don’t have the ability to weigh consequences, decide for ourselves after considering other ways people have lived, or do anything to counter the 24/7 indoctrination we’re immersed in). By the time we reach the age of rebellion and have the mental capacity to make life-changing decisions, we’re so caught up in the society we’ve been part of that trying to undo all the old influences and walk a different path are near impossible. Depression at realizing that we’re captured debt slaves is actually normal behavior and takes years to overcome, at which time we’re usually not mentally or physically equipped to change much in society, even if we’re fortunate enough to have escaped into a new mental framework that leads to health and well-being.
ulvfugl, I saw this and wanted to bring it to your attention.
http://robinwestenra.blogspot.co.nz/2014/01/radiation-measurements.html
Thursday, 2 January 2014
Radiation measurements
Radiation spike in Wales, UK
Radioactive rain in Wales, UK. This is a sample of fresh rainfall, today, 1st January 2014, and taken with tissue paper from a flat surface approximately 500cm x 300cm. The sample was introduced to and removed from the Geiger counter at the white crosses.
We got waves today throughout CA, UT, CO, SD, WV, MA..
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@ Tom
cheers, 😦
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Great comment. The mental shackles were there at birth. As they say, the poor in America see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
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I totally agree with you. Its why I feel so strongly that WE could not be the pioneers of a new way of living on the earth, if a habitable earth still exists. We are too fucked up to save anybody, better to focus on documenting every nook and cranny of our disease on the chance that whoever survives later can know what NOT to do.
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“Assault on Wall Street” Preaches Revolution……and so they want to bury this movie:
As the trailer indicates, “Assault on Wall Street” shows how the credit crisis of 2008 destroyed the life of an average American working man, Jim Baxford, an armored truck guard,played by Dominic Purcell .
Baxford’s life savings, invested in mortgages, disappear. His wife who is getting expensive therapy for a tumor, kills herself and his home is foreclosed. The average American is credibly depicted as being screwed by the medical, financial and legal systems, and by government itself. A background chorus of TV commentary documents how the criminal elite got richer while the masses were robbed. No one served time for the worst calamity since the Great Depression, just as no one has served time for allowing 9-11 to happen.
Instead of griping on the Internet, Baxford, an army veteran, researches the culprits and starts killing them. The movie ends in a rampage where he murders nearly everyone at his brokerage.
– See more at: http://henrymakow.com/2014/01/assault-on-wall-street.html#sthash.JGu9aOQT.dpuf
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Reblogged this on Gaia will prevail.
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“People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.”―
Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
“An addict is someone who uses their body to tell society that something is wrong.”
Stella Adler (1901-1992)
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“Capitalism destroys local community and sustainability in order to bring all resources (human and otherwise) into the global “free market”. People, cultures and ecosystems are then fed into the conveyor belt of profit extraction as they become commodities in the labor market, consumerist culture, and natural resource market.”
The word Capitalism means nothing to me but just a word without knowing there are people “Capitalists,” behind the facade of Capitalism. These are the people one needs to look at. What motivates them into thinking their ism is better than any other with talk of the invisible hand of the market BS and knowing they would not support the concept without lining their pockets and living the fantasy that all is well while stepping on everybody’s neck to be where they are. To improve Capitalism one must improve capitalists which looks like will never happen until some horrendous cataclysm happens. Find these capitalists and get in their faces and see if their mutant brains can even comprehend some other form of reality that truly benefits the planet and all species alive on it.
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What I listened to this morning with coffee and enjoyed a lot; might be of interest to some of you, relevant to discussions of human nature, knowledge and experience, even drugs and addictions (including religion/spirituality). There’s a lot of interesting stuff at synthetic_zero, along with plenty of post modern entertainment whose value you can judge for yourself.
http://syntheticzero.net/2014/01/02/on-being-touched-and-moved-guy-claxton/
I personally find the idea of embodied consciousness pretty compelling, a great antidote to the omnipresent mechanistic explanations that make capitalism and homo economicus seem inevitable and just the way things are. A great book in case you haven’t already seen it is
http://www.amazon.com/Out-Our-Heads-Lessons-Consciousness/dp/0809016486/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1388684477&sr=8-1&keywords=alva+noe
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Earth after agricutlure and civilisation…
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2013/12/31
Pollution Rising, Chinese Fear for Soil
…An alarming glimpse of official findings came on Monday, when a vice minister of land and resources, Wang Shiyuan, said at a news conference in Beijing that eight million acres of China’s farmland, equal to the size of Maryland, had become so polluted that planting crops on it “should not be allowed.”
A signal moment came in May, when officials in Guangdong Province, in the far south, said they had discovered excessive levels of cadmium in 155 batches of rice collected from markets, restaurants and storehouses. Of those, 89 were from Hunan Province, where Ms. Ge farms.
The report set off a nationwide scare. In June, China Daily, an official English-language newspaper, published an editorial saying that “soil contaminated with heavy metals is eroding the foundation of the country’s food safety and becoming a looming public health hazard.”
One-sixth of China’s arable land — nearly 50 million acres — suffers from soil pollution, according to a book published this year by the Ministry of Environmental Protection. The book, “Soil Pollution and Physical Health,” said that more than 13 million tons of crops harvested each year were contaminated with heavy metals, and that 22 million acres of farmland were affected by pesticides.
But the government has refused to divulge details of the pollution, leaving farmers and consumers in the dark about the levels of contaminants in the food chain. The soil survey, completed in 2010, has been locked away as a “state secret.”…
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Creepy message…
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UK braced for more severe weather as further storms appear on the horizon
Large swaths of coastline – from Isles of Scilly to Wales and Scotland – are at risk of severe flooding, say forecasters
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/02/uk-braced-further-floods-storms-atlantic
An interesting anecdote.
I spoke with my brother, who still lives in England, a few days ago. A relative by marriage living in Abingdon, Thames valley, had the only house in the street not to be flooded a while ago. Thinking it time to move he put the property up for sale and got a prospective buyer. However, the deal fell through because the prospective purchaser could not afford the insurance.
Industrial civilisation is being hammered from all directions.
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Wet
http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/homeandleisure/floods/142151.aspx
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They tell us that Britain is doing well and is returning to being an economic powerhouse. That probably means a major step-down is fairly imminent.
http://www.independent.co.uk/student/news/unemployed-young-people-feel-they-have-nothing-to-live-for-9034146.html
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An interesting start to 2014, with Australia about 1oC warmer than normal in 2013. The major population centres have been lucky so far.
http://www.theguardian.com/weather/2014/jan/02/heatwave-temperatures-climb-towards-50c
Temperatures in parts of Australia are set to reach almost 50C in the coming days, with total fire bans in place in northern regions of South Australia and a week-long heatwave enveloping Queensland.
The Bureau of Meteorology has forecast the temperature to hit 49C in the South Australian town of Moomba on Thursday, while Oodnadatta, which reached 47.7C on Wednesday, will warm to 48C.
South Australia’s Country Fire Service has rated fire conditions for the north-west and north-east regions of the state as “catastrophic”, with winds from former tropical cyclone Christine exacerbating conditions.
Regional Queensland towns are also having to cope with prolonged temperatures above 40C, with Mount Isa hitting 45C and Birdsville expected to reach 48C on Thursday. According to Weatherzone, Roma had its hottest day since records began in 1870, reaching 44C.
Weatherzone said an “intense air mass” was centred over northern NSW and western Queensland, with towns including Longreach and Dubbo also expected to endure temperatures in the mid-40s.
The Northern Territory has been also caught up in the heatwave, with both Alice Springs and Tennant Creek expected to reach 43C on Thursday.
Temperatures in capital cities will be relatively mild, with Sydney forecast by the bureau to reach 34C on Thursday, Brisbane 32C, Perth 25C and Melbourne just 23C.
There are no total fire bans in Victoria, Queensland or NSW.
The bureau is expected to announce on Friday that 2013 had been Australia’s warmest year, with average temperatures trending about 1C above the long-term average.
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The United Kingdom tabloid the Daily Mail could be dubbed “the Fox News of the Internet.” It has a huge audience, a conservative slant and has a blatant disregard for the facts. The paper wields huge power in the UK, and with its website plotting a U.S. expansion and reportedly receiving about 154 million global unique browsers each month, it is increasingly gaining that traction in the U.S. as well.
The Daily Mail is best known for its celebrity gossip, but this year U.S. media turned to it for science reporting. The tabloid had huge influence in stirring up faux controversies about climate science, often shredding facts and then abandoning the damage it had done in the name of viral traffic. In fact, four times this year the Mail published climate stories that required corrections, which the paper often skirted by revising its article without a formal correction, helping the misinformation to continue to spread. In September, for example, the Mail‘s claim that Arctic sea ice had increased by 60 percent not only pushed a misleading narrative about the clear long-term decline in Arctic ice, but also got the figures wrong — the real increase was less than half that amount. Yet the claim was repeated by two U.S. Congressmen in a hearing and at least 36 different U.S. news outlets.
For these reasons, the Mail earns the distinction of being Media Matters’ 2013 Climate Change Misinformer of the Year…
Read the rest
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A well-established tactic of those who wish to misinform is to place cherry-picked information or outright lies very prominently, repeat many times, and then subsequently apologise for ‘having got it wrong’ in a very inconspicuous place.
It worked superbly for Bush, B. Liar and their criminal associates, and some people still believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, ready to launch.
I am a bit confused at the moment. Is Iran our enemy or our ally? Are we at war with Eurasia or Eastasia?
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Let me check my calendar. Yes, I see that we go to war with Eastasia starting next month. Or do I have that the wrong way round? Now I’m confused. Hell- let’s just bomb them both. I’m sure they deserve it.
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while the antacrtic ice may be growing Auatralia and Argentina are experiencing record high temperatures.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-25564633
113 degrees is hot, i don’t care where you are.
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Yesterday evening I reviewed the 1963 film “Dr.Strangelove Or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the Bomb”. I realised the parallels between the unstoppable B52 nuclear bomber which cannot be recalled, due to air defense attack damage knocking out its radio, which penetrates and bombs a missile base in the the USSR having flown directly over the pole and triggers the Soviets “Doomsday Machine” a retaliatory device designed by the Soviets to end the human race once and for all! The film ends with Nuclear Armegeddon. This plot parallels Industrial Civilisation’s unstoppable trajectory of total destruction of our Planet and humanity itself despite the fact we do know better. Every second the Earth’s atmosphere due to heat trapping gasses generated by fossil fuel burning is accumulating the equivalent in heat energy of 4 nuclear bomb explosions I say again every second! (re Hanson). Positive feedbacks are kicking in is this not equivalent to the Soviets “Doomsday Machine”? And we cannot recall this process now it’s unstoppable!
The crazed Commie hating general gives the orders for the attack wing to go in and refuses to recall them and commits suicide – rather like our denialists and anti science politicians like Tony Abbott of Australia who is building a new coal export port off the barrier reef, and dumping the detritus into the ocean and damaging the same reef and its life, to export more planet wide death (More Doomsday Machine stuff) and who has closed down his climate change reporting bodies.
Dr Strangelove,the ex Nazi Scientist asserts Humanity can still survive the Doomsday Machine’s massive killing radiation, the elites will be able to live at the bottom of 1000 foot deep mineshafts, especially fitted out with all the mod cons, for 100 years until the radiation lessens sufficiently! A Parallel with collapse and all the World’s nuclear reactors going Fukushima as we no longer can wind them down safely. Humanity has, I believe, triggered the “Doomsday Machine” which is unstoppable run-a-way climate change, refer “The Arctic death spiral and the methane time bomb”. The Black Comedy is that no amount of posturing, or ego can help (Presidents are as powerless as the ordinary man) – The time when real action would have made a difference is gone, we’re helpless just as in the film with the unrecallable nuclear bomber!
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Perfect analogy!
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an excellent movie, just the wording of the script is clever. i fall asleep to it every night, i find it soothing.
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TOM THE DANCING BUG:
Five Tips for Living In a Surveillance State
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This may be a bit off topic, but a particular thought has been bothering me and i can’t ignore it any longer. If it sounds foolish, share your view with me please, because everyone i know is convinced i’m crazy for believing that near-term extinction is a reality. Another perspective would be helpful here.
I’ve been convinced that the power structures which are killing, polluting, and dominating everything on the globe were worth subverting in any way. But recently i’ve had doubts…
If the current worldwide economic paradigm is destroyed, aren’t we doomed as well? It’s eating me up… accepting the thought of supporting the machine as possibly the most realistic way to prolong any life on our planet. But hear me out.
I was wondering (and i have very little knowledge of these things) that if a “student loan bubble”, or for that matter, any jolt to the global economy resulted in its collapse, wouldn’t almost all life as we know it end because nuclear reactors around the globe don’t have long-term back-up power supplies? Wouldn’t economic collapse alone result in a dead planet due to hundreds of nuclear meltdowns?
Capitalism is going to fail, probably soon, and as much as i dislike it’s fundamental evils, i’ve begun to wonder if the only way to stall the end of life on earth is to hope that the shitty economic train we’re on continues chugging as far as possible down the track.
IF WE CAN’T BEAT EM… IS THE ONLY HOPE FOR PROLONGING LIFE ON EARTH TO JOIN THEM, AND HOPE FOR A SHIFT TO A BETTER ECONOMIC MODEL?
I’m all for economic alternatives, but the global power elite are very good at subverting any potential threat to their regime. I’m trying to be logical about all of this, and from what i know about it, the current surveillance/neo-feudal state would be impossible to change.
I guess it would be cool to hear a wiser person’s perspective. Thanks everyone… i have a lot to learn, so i’m asking questions and testing the waters. I hope 2014 is a good year for all of you. Over and outtt
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This is probably not going to provide you with much comfort, but this is how the documents I am working on commences:
‘Synopsis:
Application of elementary laws of mathematics, physics and chemistry to extant global and local economic-social-political arrangements readily demonstrates that they are totally unsustainable, and that complete collapse of extant arrangements is inevitable. The current state of numerous crucial factors, particularly EROEI, the net-energy Hubbert’s Curve, debt-to-resources ratios, and rapidly declining climate stability clearly indicate that a substantial collapse, or a complete collapse, of existing global economic-social-political arrangements will occur over the coming decade, i.e. in the period 2014 to 2024.
In practice, the collapse of historic arrangements has already commenced, though the bulk of the populace of NZ remains ignorant and complacent, or chooses to deny it. This state of ignorant complacency and denial is largely a consequence of misinformation promulgated by government departments and the near-complete avoidance of all basic truth and important information by the short-term-profit-driven corporate media; in other words propaganda and censorship.
The collapse of extant living arrangements will accelerate as fundamental factors necessary for industrial societies to function continue to deteriorate. Interaction between ever-worsening fundamental factors may result in rapid, cascading global collapse of industrial civilisation. However, those who are profiting from present arrangements and plan to maximise short-term wealth acquisition throughout the collapse phase are likely to attempt to ensure the economic collapse is as slow as they can possibly facilitate via financial manipulation and extraction of low EROEI fossil fuels etc. It should be noted that, irrespective of deterioration of fundamental factors and political manipulation, ‘black swan’ events would cause very rapid unravelling of the living arrangements of most people in ‘developed’ nations, including those in Taranaki.
Such is the nature of the economic system that short-term attempts to prop-up existing arrangements are inherently counterproductive and will result in a more catastrophic collapse when the [delayed] full-magnitude collapse does finally occur. The later that significant collapse occurs, the greater the level of suffering (both numerically and by intensity). This is true both globally and locally.’
With regard to your specific concern about nuclear reactors, it would theoretically be possible to devote a large portion of remaining resources to the decommissioning of reactors, and the semi-safe storage of nuclear materials in places such as caverns or missile silos, or even returning material to deep quarries such as Olympic Dam in the form of sub-critical-mass ceramic capsules. However, I see no indication there is any political will to even attempt a ‘soft landing’ for industrial civilisation. Every aspect of the system is geared to maintaining status quo arrangements for a long as possible and therefore to generating a super-hard landing which leads to NTHE.
As long as dysfunctional paradigms are tenaciously adhered to by the masses there really is little hope of anything other than the Woody Allen crossroads.
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MBP: if I may. You have “discovered” the basic truth that no one wants to talk about and the conclusion you’ve reached is exactly what’s going on. Kevin’s answer below will spell it out in more detail, but welcome to the Beach of Doom. If you visit NBL (Nature Bats Last), you’ll find that many are becoming aware of this fact and are in various states of grief over it. The sites host, Guy McPherson, spells it out plainly by connecting the dots between various scientific peer-reviewed research papers to show that we’re on track for total collapse and NTHE by mid-century (I actually don’t think anyone is going to be alive by 2030, but it’s just my guess. After thinking long and hard about the interrelated systems, it looks to me that 2019 will be the pivotal year – but, again, this is just my estimate). Listen to one of his many presentations to see it all for yourself.
Here’s the gist of it in his frequently updated Climate Change Summary and Update
http://guymcpherson.com/2013/01/climate-change-summary-and-update/
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Man.Bear.Pig sez: If the current worldwide economic paradigm is destroyed, aren’t we doomed as well? It’s eating me up … accepting the thought of supporting the machine as possibly the most realistic way to prolong any life on our planet.
Interesting question. Yours is an eminently practical response to our dilemma. I’ve been of the mind that it’s precisely because we humans end up extirpated no matter what we do, the open question is whether we focus on practical or moral responses, which I find to be in conflict with each other. Some want to go out with in a blaze of foolish glory, others first want revenge on some of the folks whose active decisions got us into hot water, and yet other want to save what other life we can, since we can’t save ourselves. It’s eating me up, too, but my sense is that the moral choice, the right thing to do, namely, save others besides ourselves, would be the best route to take and also the least likely. My guess is we’ll be foolhardy, viscous, and barbaric right to the end because we’ve rarely been able to rise above our worst natures, and then, only as individuals, not as societies.
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http://robinwestenra.blogspot.co.nz/
Okay, 1.2oC above normal. And seas 0.5oC above normal in 2013..
Nothing to see here. Move along.
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Hey Kevin: Yeah, and since this was common practice all along, the oceans must be just fine by now, eh?
http://pastebin.com/ffYD8GsS
Nuclear Waste Sits on Ocean Floor
U.S. Has Few Answers on How to Handle Atomic Waste It Dumped in the Sea
By John R. Emshwiller and Dionne Searcey
Dec. 31, 2013 11:10 a.m. ET
More than four decades after the U.S. halted a controversial ocean dumping program, the country is facing a mostly forgotten Cold War legacy in its waters: tens of thousands of steel drums of atomic waste.
From 1946 to 1970, federal records show, 55-gallon drums and other containers of nuclear waste were pitched into the Atlantic and Pacific at dozens of sites off California, Massachusetts and a handful of other states. Much of the trash came from government-related work, ranging from mildly contaminated lab coats to waste from the country’s effort to build nuclear weapons.
Federal officials have long maintained that, despite some leakage from containers, there isn’t evidence of damage to the wider ocean environment or threats to public health through contamination of seafood. But a Wall Street Journal review of decades of federal and other records found unanswered questions about a dumping program once labeled “seriously substandard” by a senior Environmental Protection Agency official:
How many dump sites are there? Over the years, federal estimates have ranged from 29 to more than 60.
How much of various types of radioisotopes are in the waste containers? While some isotopes are short-lived, others remain radioactive for hundreds or thousands of years.
Has evidence of radioactive contamination in fish been adequately pursued? A 1983 California law calling for fish testing and annual reports on a major dump site off San Francisco produced just one state report, in 1991, even though that study found fish contamination and recommended follow-up research.
Where are all the containers—whose numbers top 110,000, by one federal count—on the sea floor, even at known dump sites? For instance, an estimated 47,000 containers lie at the site near San Francisco. Though there were three designated dump areas for the containers, “many were not dropped on target,” according to a 2010 report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which called the waste site a “potentially significant resource threat.”
Much of the site—about 50 miles west of San Francisco, near the Farallon Islands—is within a national marine sanctuary that the federal government describes as “a globally significant” ecosystem “that supports abundant wildlife and valuable fisheries.” Only about 15% of an estimated 540 square miles of sea floor containing the barrels, at depths from 300 to over 6,000 feet, has been evaluated, the NOAA report said.
In a recent response to questions, NOAA said it wants to further study the dump site but lacks the funds. Representatives of federal agencies recently contacted reiterated that the evidence collected over the years shows that the dump sites aren’t posing any threat to the environment or the public.
Concerned about the Farallon site, the California legislature passed the 1983 law calling for fish sampling in the area, where commercial fishing occurs. A spokeswoman for the California Department of Public Health said the law only required reports as funds were available, and they haven’t been since 1991. Plus, she said, researchers “didn’t find anything in the first survey.”
“I would beg to differ,” Thomas Suchanek, the principal investigator and lead author of the 1991 study, said recently. The study found americium, a radioactive decay product of plutonium, in some fish samples from the site as well as a comparison area about 60 miles away. The report calculated that plutonium in underwater sediment at the dump site was up to about 1,000 times normal background levels.
Regularly eating such contaminated fish, about a pound a week, could expose a person to up to 18.5 millirems of additional radiation a year, the report said. A chest X-ray typically gives about 2 to 10 millirems, while the average American gets about 300 millirems a year from natural background radiation.
While an occasional meal of such fish wouldn’t be a worry, “I wouldn’t want to eat it as a steady diet,” said Dr. Suchanek. Current scientific thinking holds that even small doses of additional radiation can over time raise cancer risk by a small amount.
The California health department, in a written response to questions from the Journal, said continued monitoring of the dump should be a federal responsibility. The agency also provided a 1990 document from a now-defunct state advisory board saying the fish tested “do not appear to have a significant level of radioactivity.”
A 2001 federal study of part of the Farallon dump site found indications of leakage from barrels, but only “very low levels” of radioactive contamination in sediment samples. The Food and Drug Administration said that in 1990 it found traces of plutonium in fish samples from the site but at levels well within safety standards.
Questions about the sites stem partly from the government’s approach to discarding the waste. Early on, waste drums were simply “taken out to a convenient location and put overboard,” said a 1956 report from the now-defunct Atomic Energy Commission. “Little administrative or technical control of those operations was required or exercised.” Estimates of the radioactivity amounts in the containers “could be off as much as a factor of 10,” the document said, adding “little is known of the fate of radioisotopes added to the sea.”
Commercial fishermen have at times hauled up waste containers from various parts of Massachusetts Bay, home to a dump site. Frank Mirarchi, a 70-year-old retired commercial fisherman, said his catches occasionally included nuclear junk containers. After one such discovery, Mr. Mirarchi said government officials checked him and his crew for radiation but didn’t find problems.
Early government survey efforts had difficulty finding the dumps. One 1980 report by an EPA official noted that in 11,000 underwater photos taken in the early 1960s during dump surveys in the Atlantic and Pacific, no photo captured a single waste drum.
Years after it started, the federal government began having second thoughts about the ocean dumping, as did other countries over their own programs. A 1970 report from the federal Council on Environmental Quality recommended no further ocean dumping except as a last resort. That same year, ocean dumping off the U.S. coasts effectively ended. (In the 1990s, the U.S. signed on to an international compact banning the practice.)
Government and public interest in the fate of that offshore waste has waxed and waned over the decades. Perhaps the biggest flare-up came in the late 1970s and early 1980s amid talk dumping might resume in the U.S.
Environmentalists and some elected officials jumped into action. A leading voice of alarm was W. Jackson Davis, a now-retired professor of biological and environmental sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who argued in papers and hearings that evidence showed environmental damage and health threats were already arising at the dump sites. In a recent interview, Mr. Davis recalled that the more he learned about the subject, “the more appalled I became.”
At a 1980 congressional hearing, the EPA, which had primary oversight of the dump sites, reiterated its belief there wasn’t a public health or environmental problem. However, it agreed information about the dump sites was “certainly inadequate.”
A subsequent monitoring plan was scaled back due to “changing program priorities,” a 1982 EPA letter to California state legislators said. The EPA and FDA would continue radiation sampling of commercial seafood purchased in cities, such as San Francisco and Boston, near dump sites. Sampling, to date, had shown “no unusual results,” the letter said.
Testing through the early 1990s “showed no hazard present in the fish and shellfish collected” from near the dump sites, the FDA said in response to questions. The FDA said it routinely does a broader marketplace sampling of foods, including fish, for a range of contaminants, including radionuclides.
Officials have declared a no-fishing zone for two bottom-dwelling species at the radioactive waste site in Massachusetts Bay and issued an advisory against fishing for bottom-dwelling creatures. The worry, said the EPA in a recent response to Journal questions, wasn’t that the fish might be contaminated but rather that any nuclear debris hauled up might “expose individual fishermen to elevated doses of radioactivity as well as further spreading any contamination.”
It isn’t clear how well the warnings are working. On various occasions, federal reports say, government researchers have encountered lobster fishermen or lobster traps inside the no-fishing advisory zone.
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Addiction is something of which I regrettably have much personal experience. I am currently suffering a prolonged bout of cognitive impairment after withdrawing from benzodiazepine medications but hope to comment more frequently as it lifts.
A very Happy New Year to all.
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Kevin: I saw this today and thought of your recent post (above)
http://robinwestenra.blogspot.co.nz/2014/01/climate-change-acknowledged.html
Friday, 3 January 2014
Climate change acknowledged
For these ‘experts’ ‘disastrous’ means disastrous to the economy. Extinction is bad for the economy (sic)?!
Experts say 5°C rise disastrous for NZ
A climate scientist says an Australian study predicting global temperatures to rise by up to 5 degrees Celsius over the next hundred years, is a wake up call for New Zealand.
Radio NZ, 3 January, 2014
The findings by the University of New South Wales study are published in the renowned peer review science journal Nature.
Jim Salinger, who wrote the book Living in a Warmer World, says the study provides a true reality of global warming.
Dr Salinger says New Zealand will be seriously affected if no action is taken over the next decade.
He says a 4°C temperature rise would be bad for the country, and anything higher would be terrible – leaving much of lowland New Zealand frost-free with a third more rainfall and depressed beef and sheep production.
Dr Salinger says New Zealand has the technology to use and develop alternative energy sources.
Cath Wallace, the co-chair of Environment and Conservation Organisations of New Zealand and an economist, agrees that many industries could be affected.
“For New Zealand that could mean massive destabilisation of tourism, coastal settlements, of agriculture and probably also a lot of forestry.”
The scientist behind the study says the dramatic warming can be reversed by moving away from fossil fuel use. The study shows a 4°C rise would be the minimum to expect if no policy changes are made by governments.
Lead scientist from the University of New South Wales Steven Sherwood says the study looked at different calculations made by scientists around the world. He says it found estimates of a 2°C global temperature rise were too conservative.
Professor Sherwood says the effects of a 5°C rise in global temperatures would be catastrophic for the planet and it would take aggressive measures such as moving away from fossil fuel use to reduce temperature rise predictions below 2°C.
[notice it’s all about the economy and “industry”]
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This freaky, compartmentalised thinking is surreal. Don’t they understand that an inhabitable biosphere is a pre-requisite for tourism and agriculture? I’ve also read articles enthusing about the additional shipping routes, mining opportunities and fishing territories that an ice-free Arctic will bring. Crazy – as if such commercial concerns will have any relevance when we lose one of the planet’s primary thermal regulators.
These are disconcerting times and I am glad for sane websites such as this one.
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They are ALL idiots, Harry, right across the board, the politicians, the scientists, the CEOs, the newspaper editors, the TV news people, the general public, almost the whole fucking 7 billion are totally fucking clueless, that’s why we all get dragged into extinction. Even the ever-so-smart climate scientists can’t join two dots together, because it’s not what they’ve been trained to do. They all sit in their own little box and get to be very good at looking through their own little hole and describing what they see. Nobody gathers all the info together and stands back and says ‘What does it all mean ? What does it look like when you put all the pieces of the jigsaw together ?’
They simply don’t know how to do that, it’s never been their job or their responsibility.
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Developing a well-rounded understanding of the human predicament has reversed just about every polarity in my poor, drug-addled brain. All of my sacred cows have been packed off to the abattoir.
I come from a reasonably privileged background and have highly intelligent friends in senior roles in the banking and energy sectors. None of them have a clue. None of them seem able (or willing) to grasp the big picture, the jigsaw, as you say, Ulvfugl. It is very discombobulating. I barely feel like a member of the human race anymore and often find myself commenting on humans as if I am not one of them.
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It only gets worse… 🙂
http://guymcpherson.com/forum/index.php?topic=534.msg40860#new
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I love the obligatory caveat that is always inserted in such articles – “if no action is taken over the next decade”. How many years and decades have to pass before it becomes obvious that no action will be taken? As many here are fond of saying, “Action should have happened decades ago.” We’re hovering over the cliff like Wile E. Coyote just waiting for gravity to kick in. Why do people think zombie flicks are so popular these days? — we’re all the walking dead.
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All:
I’ve mentioned this before, the insurance industry is on the verge of collapse, just like the banks – due to bad bets (ie. they can’t pay out if too many claims are made against the pool of money from payers because then they wouldn’t make any profit).
case in point
http://www.npr.org/2014/01/01/258706269/federal-flood-insurance-program-drowning-in-debt-who-will-pay?utm_medium=Email&utm_source=share&utm_campaign=
Federal Flood Insurance Program Drowning In Debt. Who Will Pay?
by Christopher Joyce
January 01, 2014
Millions of American property owners get flood insurance from the federal government, and a lot of them get a hefty discount. But over the past decade, the government has paid out huge amounts of money after floods, and the flood insurance program is deeply in the red.
Congress tried to fix that in 2012 by passing a law to raise insurance premiums. Now that move has created such uproar among property owners that Congress is trying to make the law it passed disappear.
Caught in the middle is the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA provides food, shelter, money and pretty much whatever people need after a disaster. But before a disaster, FEMA helps with flood insurance — cheap flood insurance. You can buy a FEMA flood insurance policy for about half the “actuarial” rate private insurers would offer. (The actuarial rate more accurately reflects the value of a property at risk.)
But now FEMA has a problem. “We are $24 billion in debt,” says Craig Fugate, who directs FEMA. Fugate delivered that bit of news to Congress’ House Financial Services Committee in Washington, D.C., recently, as he tried to make the case for raising insurance rates.
A string of hurricanes and floods over the past decade has drained FEMA’s insurance fund. Meanwhile, people keep rebuilding in flood zones, in part because FEMA offers cut-rate prices on one-fifth of its policies. At the hearing, Fugate made it clear that this is bad policy: “The moral hazard of subsidizing risk is, we’re going to rebuild right where we were, just the way it was, and we’re going to get wiped out.”
The weird thing in this case is that Fugate was trying to convince Congress not to undo what it had just done. The 2012 law Congress passed — the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act — instructed FEMA to charge more realistic insurance rates that are in keeping with the rates private companies would charge. Congress said, in effect, “It’s OK to stop subsidizing those policies.”
So FEMA did just that. In 2013, it began phasing in higher premiums — mostly for second homes and for properties that have changed hands since then. In some cases, premiums went up by thousands of dollars.
Right away, the phones in Congress started ringing — ringing so much so that Congress called Fugate in to demand a stop to the very law it had passed. Among the most outraged was Maxine Waters — the co-sponsor of the Biggert-Water’s Act. At the hearing, Waters described her law as “well-meaning,” and then scolded Fugate for not coming to Congress earlier to explain just how high the premium increases would go (though they were specifically called for in the Biggert-Waters Act).
“Let me just say,” she told Fugate, “all of the harm that has been caused to thousands of people across the country —[who] are calling us, [who] are going to lose their homes, [who] are placed in this position — is just unconscionable.”
[there’s a little more, but you can see what’s happening and the inevitable result]
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An email from Nate Hagens whom we featured here:
Nate Hagens: What if the Future is Real?
Friends,
just a short little story to share
in my local town the 15 year old daughter of a friend of mine watched one of my online lectures. She is in 11th grade and taking something called ‘AP Economics’ which is advanced placement for kids who want to push the subjects they normally learn in high school. She got together 4 of her friends and met me at a coffeeshop because they wanted to ask me some questions.
What started with my intent to just talk about energy and economics got into a full blown discussion of population, neuroscience, ecology, addiction, economics, capitalism, the future etc. They asked awesome questions and didnt feel threatened about much – they were all hopeful about capitalism ending (though i doubt they intuited what that actually means). But my hope (and reason for sharing) was that they understood everything. About natural capital being our real wealth, about humans evolving to have strong beliefs that belie the facts, become addicted to concentrated energy and novelty sources, and that we are using dead matter (fossil energy) for much of our living standards. I was shocked how easily they grasped these things, in a 2 hour discussion.
At the end I said ‘does this all make sense to you’? And their response was (I paraphrase); “Economics in class is so many lines and charts -we get the answers right on tests but really dont understand what it means or why it’s important. The way you’ve described the situation makes TOTAL sense. The things you said are obvious. Why can’t they teach that stuff in our schools”?
Which leads me to my 2 intuitions:
1) they dont teach those things in schools because they are too threatening and dont lead to profits – and profits is what we currently optimize
more importantly
2) I think the 12-17 year old demographic is where I might focus my efforts – they are mature enough to play around with abstract concepts, not yet indoctrinated into conventional thinking, not yet pressured to have jobs and pay the bills, and naive/idealistic enough to try to change the world.
happy new year
nate
Post Script:
~ Obviously they didnt understand everything the way we do on this list, but they were soaking things up like sponges and I could tell they got most of the concepts by their questions. I LOVED how they immediately understood the example of wanting a 3k sf house when your neighbors had 2k instead of having a larger 4k sf house in a neighborhood of 6k sf houses. They are petitioning their teacher to have me come speak to the entire 11th grade class
~Yes, these are not normal kids. I would say they are in the top 5%. Different narratives probably are needed for the average kid/adult. But some need to be shown the whole enchilada
~ As I’ve said many times, I don’t think there is anything we will do on climate or energy descent or anything long term until it arrives. It’s how we are wired and our individual concerns and alarm are squelched by the needs of the collective. The Human Borg if you will. So we need to prepare physically (this means literally physically for individuals and supply chain/ trade routes for regions/countries), we need to prepare psychologically/behaviorally by being more resilient to gradually (or suddenly) losing access to many of the daily/weekly dopamine/feeling providers that are currently readily available. These things are obvious but hard to do. The underlying meta-need is to inject some new ethos of what humans should aspire to, what are our responsibilities, if any, beyond hedonic pursuits, what is the 1000 year plan? etc. I think the first 2 ‘to dos’ need to be done by adults, at local and government scale to whatever extent they can be done. But the third – the ethos – might have to come from young adults. I’m still thinking on these things. But im setting up more meetings with that age group, who to be honest I’ve kind of ignored because I thought these messages might be too obtuse and or threatening.
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@ the Hagens comment: attaway! I’ve spoken with my 15 y.o. grandson who admitted that he and all his friends “know we’re all gonna die” [before too long – in other words they probably won’t reach my age of 64]. I said that they’ll have to learn to do what they can with much less energy, maybe even electricity, but that he should try to enjoy every day, and do everything he wants to because, in the end, none of us know how much time we get before we’re “called” (back into the great universe we’ve always been a part of) and that we all go eventually, so really nothing is any different (which is of course a lie, in one sense).
As to so-called “education” – what a useless bunch of bullshit our children (like us) are being forced to concentrate on! That’s one of the things that bothers me the most (because I’ve been a teacher for quite a while now) – how we’re decidedly NOT preparing them for the future they’re going to be encountering (and before very long). I make short remarks in my classes that point to the problems so that anyone paying attention can research it further, but by and large most have no idea what I’m “going on about.”
One thing they should learn about real soon is radiation and foods that mitigate our increasing exposure to it (as much as possible).
This year is going to see a further degradation of the environment, but will also evidence desperation making itself well-known in the general sphere as food shortages hit, food prices skyrocket and the social sphere begins to implode. I see increasing violence by both the state and the aforementioned desperate people. This will cause unrest, instability and panic in the rest of society as the collapse moves into the next phase. Eventually, maybe not this year, we’ll hit the steep plunge where chaos abounds, systems fail, and all hell breaks loose. The police (and military) will realize they’re in the same foundering boat as the rest of us and governments will dissolve into ineffectuality. Money will become meaningless as there won’t be much to buy that one can live on, and everything will grind to a halt.
Those who have prepared for this ahead of time with barter and local farming communities may last a bit longer, but between the increasing desperation-borne violence, the complete breakdown of civilization (including electricity and running water for example) and the worsening environmental situation (leading to pandemics and global nuclear meltdown) even the most prepared will succumb before very long.
There really isn’t any way out, so fight as hard as you can for as long as you can and help wherever you can. Good luck.
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This short video of the 2013 climate change-influenced floods in India sums up the eternal optimism and rationalization of homo economicus in the face of climate chaos. Listen to what is $aid at the end:
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I found the Lierre Keith talk interesting. Although most of her perspective on destruction of the Earth’s natural systems was pretty accurate, her suggestion that this was due to males, or misguided males, missed an important component. Men seek power and wealth (and cause planetary destruction) in order to impress women and obtain mating preference.
The notion that honouring or elevating femininity will improve the situation we are in ignores Margaret Thatcher’s role in trashing traditional values and in promoting rampant consumerism founded on rapid looting of oil and gas from Mother Earth, and overlooks the British Crown’s role in exploiting minerals in Australia for short term gain.
There is no way out of this mess except through the bottleneck.( And, as Robert Atack is fond of saying, the bottle has a cork in it.)
I think of it as a series of bottlenecks, each narrower than the previous. And yes, the last may well have a cork in it.
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Kevin, the argument is against patriarchy. That argument does not say men = bad, women = good, does it. Thatcher was a proxy male. Many females are, and have been, absolutely appalling. Apparently Thatcher was sexually abused by her father from an early age, as were other girls in Grantham. It was common knowledge that he sexually abused the girls who worked in his shop. Seems this may be a partial explanation why she tolerated known paedophiles in her cabinet and party and was such good friends with Saville and other known paedophiles whom she protected. She considered such conduct ‘normal’.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/ex-tory-cabinet-minister-caught-2903907
As I understand it, dismantling patriarchy isn’t simply about ‘honouring or elevating femininity’ as you put it. It’s a lot more complicated and difficult than that.
Like you, I don’t think we can fix this thing anyway. However, for the sake of discussion, it’s at least worth seeking common ground re analysis and diagnosis of where we came from, I think. I’m broadly in agreement with L K on the wide general vision, although there’s many small details and additional points I’d want to add, but heck, we could talk about world history for weeks without covering everything 🙂
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You see, first we’d need to agree an analysis of the disease, so to speak.
Civilisation, agriculture, patriarchy, capitalism, industrialisation, what have you..
Then we’d have to agree how those diseases could be cured, remedied, dismantled, so to speak. And then we’d have to agree upon whatever came next…
The odds against any such agreement so overwhelming that it hardly bears contemplating, but still, some of us think about such things…
And why not ? In the face of NTE, why shouldn’t we ? Even if only for something to pass the time and haggle over, that is more interesting than getting drunk or committing suicide.
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See, you don’t replace patriarchy by honouring women and dishonouring men. Patriarchy is a pyramidal power structure. It’s a hierarchy as you get in the typical corporation, where the CEO thinks HE is very important and the cleaners, usually coloured women who work at night on crappy contracts without benefits, are least important. But, if there are no cleaners the whole fucking enterprise grinds to a halt, bogged down in its own filth, because cleaning is a vital to functioning as managing.
But you can have a non-pyramidal structure, where every worker gets paid the same, or every worker cleans up their own mess. Or a pyramid that’s owned by the company of cleaners rather than an investment bank. Whatever. The structure is independent of the individuals, but more or less defines their relationships.
Similar to military. General at the top, servers politicians, infantry grunt at the bottom, all following orders because they get paid and were trained to be obedient. Or else a guerilla army of small cells who fight for a cause, without being paid, because an enemy is on their land.
Point is, to make a power structure that incorporates the values that you want rather than the ones you don’t want. If the Mosuo, a matriachal soceity, had NO murders and NO rapes, that’s interesting. I think the war chief of the Iroquois was chosen by the women and could be kicked out by the women. So you’d get none of the shit of Blair and Rumsfeld concocting fake WMDs.because the WOMEN would not permit their sons to be killed for some trumped up bullshit.
I’ve given thought to this stuff and argued with people about it and I don’t think it presents any easy simple answers. If it did, we’d have done them a long time ago. It’s like Marx and Engels great analysis of capitalism – and I just notice David Harvey’s name on the left of this page – it’s one thing to come up with a radical idea and to explain how it could fix a problem, it’s quite another to persuade people to accept it, and quite another to overcome opposition, and after all that, as we’ve seen with Christianity and just about every other ‘good’ idea, as soon as it’s up and running, some nasty creepy shabby wretch will degrade it and exploit it and ruin it and corrupt for their own selfish advantage.
However, on the positive side, it is impossible to envision anything WORSE than what we have, which is oncoming corporate fascist dystopian hell followed by a mass extinction event as everything melts down into ultimate ecological catastrophe.
So we have about five minutes to think about this and what we want to do about it…
Well, maybe a little longer 🙂
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Yes, it is hierarchy that is at the root of the problem. In indigenous societies the chief might have had more feathers in his hat and a few more wives, but not much more. The idea that one person deserves ten times, or a hundred times a thousand times as much as another is obscene, especially when the person who claims that reward is a scumbag.
The CEO of my local council is scientifically and financially illiterate, and gets paid over $300,000 per annum to progressively wreck everything she touches.
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Thanks for those thoughts, ulvfugl. I’m all for as much sharing of knowledge as possible and as much discussion as is worthwhile.
Okay, so how can we argue against patriarchy or attempt to dismantle it when the biological imperative is for males to both dominate and protect females? One only has to look at the social organisation of chimpanzees or gorillas to see that males need to dominate and be somewhat aggressive for the group to survive, particularly in the presence of leopards or other bands nearby.
The dominance of male lions is such that a new leader of a pride will kill all the cubs before inseminating as many females as possible.
Clearly we have to distinguish between dominance and abuse, I have seen plenty of examples of females dominating males in British and NZ society, but the dominance tends to be verbal or emotional rather than physical.
I know I am repeating myself here, but it seems to me the ‘progress monster’ which led to agriculture, defence of surpluses and attempted theft of surpluses, armies, and empires was out of the bag the moment an early human worked out how to tie a knot.
The only answer I can come up with to the question unanswered by Lierre (why humans shifted to agriculture when it was such hard work and reduced overall health) is that agriculture led to greater numbers of humans, even if they were less healthy. A human only has to live to age of age of 25 to procreate a sufficiently large number of offspring to outcompete hunter-gatherers..
For me a more interesting quest would be to discover why humans gave the rights of humans to corporations around 1890, and why corporations have been given more rights than humans in recent years.
Another aspect I am trying to come to terms with at the moment is why bureaucrats enthusiastically promote the destruction of their own progeny’s futures, or even their own futures (if they are young). The present answer, as you commented earlier, is that most people in the system are idiots (insane, as Derrick Jensen puts it). The system makes them insane and makes them behave irrationally. They get rewarded for behaving like idiots, so they continue to behave like idiots.
Perhaps when the rewards stop coming they will stop behaving like idiots
In the document I am working on I point out that practically all the policies of central, regional and local government are irrational and that the only rational response to the burgeoning crisis (which will render the Earth largely uninhabitable by mid-century if nothing changes fairly immediately, and it may already be too late) is rapid decoupling from the use of fossil fuels. And we all know that is not going to happen.
Thinking, writing and reading about all this ‘is a lot more interesting than getting drunk or committing suicide’ However, I don’t think I have made much progress in understanding it in the past 2 years.
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I’ll reply below because of the off setting..
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Okay, so how can we argue against patriarchy or attempt to dismantle it when the biological imperative is for males to both dominate and protect females? One only has to look at the social organisation of chimpanzees or gorillas to see that males need to dominate and be somewhat aggressive for the group to survive, particularly in the presence of leopards or other bands nearby.
The dominance of male lions is such that a new leader of a pride will kill all the cubs before inseminating as many females as possible.
This genetic deterministic stuff is bullshit promoted by Dawkins, Pinker and other neoliberal neodarwinist shills, just as social darwinism was promoted by Herbert Spencer and the robber barons of late 19th and early 20th C like Carnegie, because it justified and excused their greed. It’s ideology and not science. It’s no different to the various ‘theories’ that were used to justify slavery. When Wilberforce and others were attempting to start a movement to abolish capture of Africans to transport them to the Indies, etc, the counter movement argued that they were not really fully human because they interbred with chimpanzees, and anyway, Africa was a ‘farm’ God had provided for white people as a source of working animals, and these creatures were always being attacked by wild beasts their, so it was a kindness to save them and give them a better life in the plantations where they enjoyed their work, blahblah.
The British public, who knew no better, believed this fucking bullshit, just as the American public believe the bullshit re climate they get told by Fox News.
It’s no different, imo, re what we get told about ‘what we are’ by certain ‘scientists’, like Dawkins and Craig Ventner and fucking Monsanto.
It’s obvious, if you look through the eyes of anthropology, that human behaviour is NOT genetically determined, because there are, or have been, many thousands of completely different behaviours. I mean COMPLETELY different. See Wade Davies.
We are not lions or bonobos. Yes, we are influenced by our genetic heritage, no question, in all sorts of ways. But we are almost totally flexible, and we have absolutely NO IDEA WHAT WE REALLY ARE., or what our potential is.
Robert Sapolsky is good on this stuff, imo. He says forget genetic determinism. He says how we share most of our genes with fucking fruit flies, NONE of our behaviour or form is anything like fruit flies. He has shown definitively how the baboon colony he studied completely changed its behaviour and power structure when all the old dominant violent males died from a disease. The colony switched to having gentle friendly non-aggressive non-violent culture.
So, for me, it’s all to do with the culture. If we could start from scratch, and had infinite wisdom, we’d raise the kids in a way that produced our utopian ideal, no problem. We’d structure the society along Jeffersonian lines, in the sense of checks and balances, like the Iroquois, recognising all the human weaknesses and tendencies. There’s always a percentage of sociopaths and psychopaths, because they have a evolutionary advantage under certain circumstances, just like those miniature dwarf male salmon that exist, that sneak in and fertilise a few eggs, unnoticed by the full size males. There’s always a few lunatics like me, who don’t fit anywhere and need to be shamans outside the community, but have value as consultants for special issues. All these matters were resolved in practical ways by pre-civilsation societies and could be again, I’m sure.
Clearly we have to distinguish between dominance and abuse, I have seen plenty of examples of females dominating males in British and NZ society, but the dominance tends to be verbal or emotional rather than physical.
I know I am repeating myself here, but it seems to me the ‘progress monster’ which led to agriculture, defence of surpluses and attempted theft of surpluses, armies, and empires was out of the bag the moment an early human worked out how to tie a knot.
The only answer I can come up with to the question unanswered by Lierre (why humans shifted to agriculture when it was such hard work and reduced overall health) is that agriculture led to greater numbers of humans, even if they were less healthy. A human only has to live to age of age of 25 to procreate a sufficiently large number of offspring to outcompete hunter-gatherers..
Yes, there are many fascinating questions that get raised, it’s unfair to point them towards Lierre, because she only had an hour or so, and maybe she has answers, maybe not, but seems to me the key is coercion.
Is it the Brazilian Yanomami where the Chief states that as soon as he makes another man do something against his will, he is no longer Chief ?
You can’t get civilisation, i.e. first city, e.g. Sumer, without coercion. Someone has to dig the drainage and irrigation ditches, which is a massive labour intensive team job that has to be repeated every year to feed the city, and was done under supervision of soldiers by labourers who were told that was what they HAD to do.
For me a more interesting quest would be to discover why humans gave the rights of humans to corporations around 1890, and why corporations have been given more rights than humans in recent years.
Interesting question. Goes back earlier than that, to QE 1 doesn’t it ? She gave the right to be a pirate and rob upon the high seas under license, so long as she got her cut of the proceeds. Same thing as a corporation. She got her ideas from John Dee amongst others.
Essentially what it amounts to, give a safe haven to thieves, in return for a percentage of their loot.
These other questions, re the contemporary world, I’d prefer to leave for the moment, they carry me too far into too many areas… thanks for the stimulation.
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Whoops, avoiding offsetting didn’t work, because lost my connection briefly..
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Hahahaha…
I have to say that if confronted with the actual teachings of JC, most self-described “Christians” would reject them without a second thought.
Twice in my life I have witnessed “fundamentalist” Christians shocked at the revelation that Jesus was a Jew (strangely, one was from Russia, the other from Texas).
The Pope has only scratched the surface.
The Messiah was a dirty, bleeding heart, socialist, long-haired, liberal, pacifist, non-conformist, Arab.
God help us.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/01/bill-moyers-talks-thomas-cahill-peoples-pope.html#comment-1797409
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Liars and idiots…
Why are there reports of increasing radioactive Iodine 131 levels in surrounding towns in 2014? The short half life of this element means it should be completely gone by now, if everything is cooled off and under control.
The only way this can happen is if there is an underground corium underneath Fukushima, and it is ‘burping’ fission products up.. Where is the evidence of this burping, besides the pictures of liquid corium masses coming out of at least two buildings, and then going into the ground?
http://robinwestenra.blogspot.co.nz/2014/01/the-big-lie.html
One wonders why the above media feel that they still have to promote the nonsense of such a hopelessly delusional idiot?
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2014/01/hopeless-for-ohanlon.html
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@ Kevin
Further thoughts from above
See, when people interpret so-called scientific ideas as to what humans are or what our nature is, they pretend or believe that they are being neutral or objective. But this is never the case, because they are always operating within the frameworks of earlier sets of ideas.
Sometimes these are extremely subtle and sometimes crude and blatant.
As I understand it, there is an undercurrent within the Judaeo-Christian mythic worldview, that God made this world less than perfect, and put us here to improve it, or to make it perfect.
If parents have that assumption, conscious or unconscious, inherent in their belief system, and a child grows up in that ambience, and learns everything with that background, then they’ll naturally feel justified and righteous in doing whatever they are doing, even if at a fairly conscious level they reject ‘God’ or ‘religion’, because the traces and subtext remains, that this world needs ‘fixing’ and ‘making into a better place’.
We hear this ALL THE TIME. ‘I want to make the world a better place’
WHO THE FUCK ARE THESE PEOPLE WHO THINK THEY HAVE THE RIGHT TO GIVE THEMSELVES THE RIGHT TO DECIDE WHAT IS BETTER ?
Of course, they’ll come up with all the usual anthropocentric shallow waffle, about feeding the hungry and stopping the wars and blahblahblahblah, and most of what they intend to do is EXACTLY more of the same shit that got us into this mess in the first place..
These are the people you are up against, Kevin, who are destroying the future of their own progeny. Basically, they are as smart as turnips.
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I started out in life with this mindset. The college I attended was quite manifest about this, which attracted a lot of reform-minded students. The nonperfectibility of human nature and our social arrangements became clear early on, but the intention to do some good remains. If I refrained from believing that anything was better or worse than the alternatives, that radical conclusion (a subset of relativism?) would grind everything I do to a halt. So yeah, there is some hubris involved in deciding what’s better, but there never was a right to decide, just the power to decide and act on it according to whatever our endowments may be.
Clearly, the ruling class (over time, not just now) has a greater endowment of such power and uses it more to maintain its power than to do good. The reasons for this aren’t really so complex, and the powerless play along for a long time before eventually rebelling in one form or another (or just dying meekly).
Any one of us can understand these dynamics, disapprove of them, and refuse to participate, but I don’t know that retreating into the untainted zone is a very good option. Your mileage may vary. Personally, I don’t have much of a will to power, wealth, celebrity, or any of the other things that wreck character. I may still do a little good with whatever understanding I have acquired. If nothing else, I share my ideas, just as you do, which I recognize as a good thing.
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I don’t see it as ‘retreating into an untainted zone’. That smacks of ‘holier than thou’ or something. I see it as becoming fully conscious of the influences. I’m not a hyper-relativist either. Some things are undoubtedly ‘a bad thing’.
What I’d try to point out is that we are immersed in propaganda, often extremely subtle and cunning, often quite unintended, stories that go back deep into history, that we can become aware of, and then the picture of our contemporary reality changes.
Sometimes this is really painful. I mean, I had the idea that the Amazon Forest was a wonderful natural Edenic haven that had been untampered with. It was quite difficult for me to accept that my fondly held myth was wrong, and that it had been densely populated by humans, and was to a great extent an artificial production.
So how we see, for example, that forest, depends upon the story that we bring with us, which in turn depends upon the stories that we have been offered by the culture which educated us, and the selection we chose from those on offer. Any of them may be wrong.
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I think what I am hacking away at, is that just about everything in this culture is garbage.
On NBL, where you’d think some would know better, people have recently quoted Einstein, as the eponymous scientific hero, well, he just wasn’t, he was a smart fellow who made a breakthrough, but he wasted 10 years of his life on an ego trip trying to prove the quantum stuff was wrong, and he gave us nuclear bombs and nuclear power stations, big deal, great for the elite, useless for the rest of us and for wildlife and the biosphere, but he’s always wheeled out as the genius, even though there are hundreds of others nobody has ever heard of, and someone else quoted the Nobel Prize as the epitome of integrity, again, big deal, it’s always those who serve the interests of power and the elite, and with Kissinger and Obama it’s a farce, along with all similar awards. Nothing that the establishment ever does serves any interests but its own. Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Art, Big Film, Big Advertising, Big every fucking thing, they are all linked together and they are all self-serving corrupt mendacious useless murderous wankers who are only interested in money.
All these organisations are blind. They don’t have eyes or morality or any sensibility, they are machines programmed to deliver results to accountants every quarter. And yet they are deciding our fate, and we are allowing this to happen.
We are being dragged along by this insane fetishisation of technology and ‘progress’ and adoration of certain kinds of folk heroes who are presented to us as idols, just like the mediaeval saints, for us to worship. I want to point this out and I want to destroy this, just as I want to point out that every time there’s a report re climate disasters it’s always followed by the final paragraph ‘unless urgent action is taken’ which I have been reading now for twenty years, every fucking week, and the inevitable sentence that reminds us how there will be an impact upon the economy.
THIS is our true enemy. This rancid noxious culture that we are immersed in, that we are all drowning and suffocating in, that nobody knows how to escape from.
Sorry, I’m in a ranty mood today 🙂
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Right on! I was just watching Anima Mundi again and it really brings together a lot of my thoughts:
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I appreciate your further comments. Perhaps “retreating into the untainted zone” is an unfair characterization. I was responding to what you wrote, which suggested something different to me from what you intended.
Your subsequent remarks register on me strongly, and we share antipathy for what’s going on in the world. Like you (I think), I want to do no more harm to the natural world through my own behaviors than necessary, but merely being in the world requires a level of engagement that brings about harm. Ranting and railing against our miserable options makes total sense to me. So, too, with open condemnation of those whose behaviors are far more egregiously harmful.
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However the final letter on 6 April 1984 was clear that the CIA did not consider it to be the work of the KGB, and repeats the press reports that ‘have attributed the production to the anarchist punk band CRASS’
http://history-is-made-at-night.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/national-archives-release-documents-of.html
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Well done Bush and Blair and coalition of the willing. Heck of a job.
Al-Qaida Takes Control of Iraqi City
http://www.voanews.com/content/alqaida-takes-control-of-iraqi-city/1823344.html
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LOL. More business for the war profiteers.
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The ‘inclusive’ capitalist economy at work:
“As many as three quarters of a million young people in the UK may feel that they have nothing to live for, a study for the Prince’s Trust charity claims.
The trust says almost a third of long-term unemployed young people have contemplated taking their own lives.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-25559089
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One way to think about demons (if you happen not to believe in supernatural evil) is that they are a way of representing human hatred, rage and failure — the stuff we all set out to exorcize in our New Year’s resolutions. The anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere, who grew up in Sri Lanka, got a Ph.D. from the University of Washington and, eventually, a job at Princeton, once remarked that all humans deal with demons. (He was quoting Dostoyevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov” — “In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden.”) The only question, he said, was whether the demons were located in the mind, where Freud placed them, or in the world. It is possible that identifying your envy as external and alien makes it easier to quell.
But it is also true that an external agent gives you something — and often, someone — to identify as nonhuman. In West Africa, witches are people, and sometimes, other people kill them or drive them from their homes. In an April poll conducted by Public Policy Polling, over one in 10 Americans were confident that Barack Obama was the Antichrist— and the Antichrist is, as it happens, associated with war in the Middle East. If those people think that demons are real, they don’t mean that Obama is misguided, confused or mistaken. They mean that he is real, inhuman evil.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/29/opinion/sunday/when-demons-are-real.html?hpw&rref=opinion&_r=1&
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“The best thing a moral individual can do is to try to live ‘in the truth’. Life is tragic and sometimes there are no solutions.”
~ The Future Is Not What it Used to Be: Climate Change and Energy Scarcity, by Jörg Friedrichs
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Now, which ponzi is most despicable, a religious or financial one? Both are based upon deceit and both serve primarily the enrichment of the scheme officialdom. One promises a payoff in eternal life while the other promises financial success. One examines your credit score while the other applies tick marks in you behavioral ledger of good and evil. Both systems of fleecing are based upon human fear and herd mentality. Society shuns the heretic of either ponzi and damnation awaits those that do not participate fully. Ponzis collapse when increasing numbers of fools, resources and energy can no longer be sucked into their cancerous growth schemes. The religious structures will be more enduring as they can always find plenty of poor dolts to give their last penny to gain a chance at the big after-life payoff. The financial schemers, faced now with meeting the absolutely unbelievable limits of growth will have to leave all those little nest eggs of promises, unhatched. The key is to convince the ponzi participants that the U.S. is the new Saudi Arabia, that fracking oil and natural gas is the future and we can get enough oil from shale to last a million years. “Just relax folks, you’re all gonna get your money back”. Not. What a miraculous world we live in.
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There’s been a lot posted since NZ midnight that I want to respond to.
ulvfugl: ‘This genetic deterministic stuff is bullshit promoted by Dawkins, Pinker and other neoliberal neodarwinist shills, just as social darwinism was promoted by Herbert Spencer and the robber barons of late 19th and early 20th C like Carnegie, because it justified and excused their greed.’
Actually, no. If you read ‘The Selfish Gene; it makes perfect sense. No bullshit at all. Genes compete, and successful genes increase in numbers until some change in conditions makes them maladapted and they decline in numbers or die out.
Should I die to save a brother? No, Only 50% common genes.
Should I die to save two brothers? Maybe. 50% x2 =100%
Should I die to save three brothers? Yes. 50% x 3 = 150%.
The ‘go forth an multiply’ edict was not excessively damaging as long as there were large carnivores, and population-decimating diseases.
There has been, without question, a cultural narrative which dates back to medieval times, that regards the world as a place to be subdued and civilised. I mentioned ‘Robinson Crusoe’ a while ago. The hero, having disobeyed his father, went to sea and subsequently became a victim of slavery. Using a little treachery, he made his escape and spent the rest of his life killing every large beast he encountered and killing or exploiting smaller animals until he ran out. He exploited practically all the people he encountered, honouring and thanking God for giving him the opportunity to do so.
I don’t know that Daniel Defoe was particularly bigoted and racist compared to other Englishmen. Probably most people living in England at the time thought wild beasts should be exterminated and that Africans were not truly human, The monarchs of the times set the example when they set up the Guinea Company.
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Very sorry, Kevin, but i have read the Selfish Gene and everything else by Dawkins, and I’ve argued about this at length with several other people already, I’m not going over it all again in detail. It makes sense to you because the fucking NUMBERS make sense, the numbers were worked out on an blackboard and then they tried to apply them to the real world. It’s the Platonic Idealism thing. They should do science the other way around, observe the real world and then, try and figure out what is going on. The two guys whose ideas Dawkins popularised were lunatics with a preconceived notion of what the world and humans SHOULD be like. They’ve been shown to be wrong.
We’ve had epigenetics since then. Lynn Margulis trumps Dawkins, as does E O Wilson for that matter. Dawkins is fascistic and bigoted and wants an elitist supremacist interpretation of genetics because it fits his ideological cultural worldview, he’s inherited a large country estate from his ancestors who earned their wealth from the slave trade. The logo of his organisation is indistinguishable from that of the Greek neonazi Golden Dawn movement which has murdered anarchists and leftists in cold blood and is supported by big right wing banking interests.
Look, there’s absolutely nothing in the human genome or genetic determinism to suggest that we humans would have a tendency to climb mountains to look at the fucking view, is there. There’s no record that anyone ever did, until Petrarch came along. This is inexplicable by Dawkins take of what we are. It doesn’t further our survival in any way or benefit our species in any way, it’s a total waste of time. And yet we do it.
Dawkins IS bullshit.
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ulvfugl: “It’s obvious, if you look through the eyes of anthropology, that human behaviour is NOT genetically determined, because there are, or have been, many thousands of completely different behaviours. I mean COMPLETELY different. See Wade Davies.: ‘
Let’s consider Rapa Nui (Easter Island)..
Ancestors of Polynesians sailed eastward and southward from what is now known as Taiwan, reaching Rapa Nui, the most remote place on Earth, some time between 700 and 1000AD. Nobody knows how many people arrived in the first canoes, but a reasonable estimate would be a few dozen. Theirs was a stone age culture, supposedly living in harmony with nature. Yet there was clearly population and resource pressure on Hawaii in the first millennium, otherwise people would not have looked for other places to live.
To have managed to paddle/sail across thousands of kilometres of empty ocean would have required extreme cooperation and perhaps self-sacrifice.
As Rapa Nui became denuded of vegetation and overpopulated, clan warfare broke out, and that ‘descended’ into cannibalism.
A similar story unfolded in NZ, which was settled by Polynesians some time before 1300AD. Again it commenced with a few canoe loads, probably carrying a few hundred people. By around 1500 the large flightless birds of NZ had been exterminated and tribal warfare to acquire and hold the best land was underway. Capturing enemies and enslaving or eating them was normal at that time.
The Maori were not noted for constructing cities or irrigation systems, but hill forts surrounded by ramparts and ditches were commonplace.
So, were slavery and cannibalism the cultural norm for the ancestors living in ‘Taiwan’, or did they emerge in NZ from genetic programming as conditions favouring slavery and cannibalism developed? Were slavery and cannibalism the cultural norm of people who moved out of Africa and progressively occupied what we now call Taiwan 50,000 years ago?
http://mythicjourneys.org/bigmyth/myths/english/eng_maori_culture.htm
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We’re talking across one another, Kevin.
If it was, say, a species of toad, that had behaviour determined by genes, everywhere it was found and when raised in a laboratory, it would follow that behaviour. That would be genetic determinism. That is what we find for toads, and what we find for lions.
But we humans are nothing like that. Although genetically almost identical, all around the world, the anthropologists have recorded thousands of completely different behaviours. That’s because the crucial factor is cultural determinism.
But it’s MUCH MORE than that. Not only are we, as a species, immensely flexible and able to come up with thousands of completely different cultures, this whole thing is open ended, we have absolutely no idea WHAT we are at all. There has never been ANY other species remotely comparable, none of the theories we have that draw upon our biological heritage make any sense of where we have arrived at this present time, with our bi-hemispheric brains.
Why do we have those ? Nobody knows. Why did we evolve them ? Nobody knows.
We can completely re-invent our culture if we so wish. We ARE DOING that, whether we like it or not, at a frenzied pace. We love it. In one year a billion new mobile phone users come online. Who cares what the Maoris did ? This is what we have become.
Look, I’m not celebrating this. It’s totally insane. What I’m saying is that you cannot contain it within Dawkins pitiful neodarwinism. Our brains have more connections between neurons than all the particles in the Universe, or some such, and they are constantly reconfiguring themselves, dynamically. Nothing is determined. Potentially, we can be, can make, anything that we want. At the same time, we have this nightmare heritage from the past, and a collapsing biosphere.
We began, earlier on, discussing Lierre Keith’s vision, as some sort of common ground. When it comes to Dawkins, I’m drawing a line. When Selfish Gene first came out I read it, and thought what a great biologist, but now I can’t stand him, he’s a fanatical ideologue representing ideas and politics to which I am fundamentally opposed.
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Perhaps one of the best cultural metaphors for the times we live in was that of the Icelandic colonisers of Greenland. If what I have read is correct, they refused to adopt any of the strategies employed by the Inuit, and persisted with attempting to live the way their ancestors had done in Norway, putting cattle out to graze and housing them indoors through the winter.
Just keep doing what worked in the past and hope it will work in the future.
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Yes, I think Jared Diamond talks about that. But so what ? If genetics ruled, we humans would always be doing the same thing everywhere. But we don’t. Inuits developed a culture, Vikings developed a culture. The two are not completely separable, because, for example, the ability to digest cow’s milk into adulthood was a genetic change which gave pastoralists an advantage.
But we are still talking at cross purposes.
I’m talking about what human nature IS. Now. Not what it was.
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It does not matter to me what Dawkins background was or what he is doing now. What matters to me is whether the theory explains observations, whether it has predictive value, and whether there is a better theory to explain and predict.
‘I’m talking about what human nature IS. Now. Not what it was.’
???? What human nature IS NOW is no different from what human nature WAS 10,000 years ago or 30,000 years ago.
Behaviour at any particular moment is determined to a large extent by culture (conditioning) and the willingness of an individual to override what they know to be their nature. Chris Hedges is probably a good person to talk with about human nature versus behaviour. How people behave in well-fed, pampered societies is very different from how the same people behave during civil war. There are the famous prisoner-guard experiments, of course.
Zeitgeist III did a pretty good job on the nature versus nurture debate (but then got lost in the mire of Venus Project ‘solutions’ to energy depletion and resource depletion). The behaviour of organisms is determined by their genetic makeup and early-life experiences. Inappropriate early-life experiences leave a lasting mark, and so does the lack of appropriate experiences. On the other hand, brains have a remarkable capacity to rewire themselves following damage.
I am very keen to get to the bottom of all this because I want to tackle the maniacs who are wrecking things around here, especially now that is perfectly obvious that Cassandras have been right all along.
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There’s your problem. Or everyone’s problem.
Take Dawkins and a bunch of evolutionary biologists back 100,000 years, show them a sample of what’s going on, no way can they predict from their Homo Sapiens in front of them that they get Sumer or Rome, or that Petrarch climbs a mountain just to see the view, followed by millions of others.
Take any bunch of scientists, academics and intellectuals back 30,000 years and let them have a look at what they see, and none of them would say ‘ Ah, yes, it’s obvious that this species will soon produce New York and iPhones and nuclear submarines and Monsanto. You can tell by their genome and their culture’.
We were a species that lived in small bands of hundreds. Something happened, Nobody knows what it was. SERIOUSLY. Not a clue ! We suddenly changed into a mass soceity species.like the ants and the bees. Or rather some of us did.
The theoretical basis for human evolution is a hodge podge of twaddle. Imho, we need to be looking at out ancestry rather as we look at breeds of dogs. We’ve been trying to follow the paradigm of biological species as we’ve been applying it to other species ( which itself is problematic in many ways, as taxonomists have always known) and we’ve been trying to declare ourselves as some neat clear-cut ‘special’ creatures that emerged from a lineage of proto-forms. Well, it’s obvious it was nothing like that.
I have been advocating that the morphological differences observed within fossils typically ascribed to Homo sapiens (the so-called modern humans) and the Neanderthals fall within the variation observable in a single species.
It was not surprising to find that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred, a clear expectation of the biological species concept.
But most people were surprised with that particular discovery, as indeed they were with the fifth skull and many other recent discoveries, for example the “Hobbit” from the Indonesian island of Flores.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25559172f
If we compare ourselves to dogs, then we’d all be the same species (as it is agreed that dogs are) whilst have a huge range of behaviours and characteristics. Almost no dogs are quite like the ancestral wolves. (which would be our pre-civilisation ancestors of 30,000 years ago, equivalent, perhaps).
So under this thesis human nature is NOT what it was 30,000 or 100,000 years ago.
Look, we could not have had the development of farming across Europe and pastoral tribes dependent on herds of cattle, eating cheese, without a genetic change.
Sorry, I’m not really interested in getting diverted into Hedges or Zeitgeist, at the moment.
There is epigenetics. Lynn Margulis was pointing to the IRREFUTABLE evidence for epigenetics 40 years ago, which Dawkins scoffed at and ridiculed because it didn’t fit his selfish gene model. And what you say about the brain rewiring itself is rather crude. That’s not it. The brain is in constant flux. It’s dynamic, it’s never fixed.
Look, we are not talking about the behaviour of organisms we are talking about human beings.
There ARE no comparable organisms. Even though it is obvious that we are closely related to the other primates, that we are mammals, that we share features, blahblah, the idea that we are confined or explained by what we understand by what we know from the other species is totally absurd.
Yes, sure, let’s try to get to the bottom of THAT 🙂
Because nobody else has… 🙂
I don’t know that anything will help to tackle the maniacs though.
The trouble is, this is, to some extent, a re-run of the twenties and thirties. These ideas are not new. There was a big panic about over-population and the eugenics movement and changing culture all through those decades, which lead to horrors in Germany and USA and elsewhere.
You see, it’s clear that if you want to change the culture, then take all the children away from their parents and indoctrinate with your new culture, is the way to go.
Only the parents are not happy (so kill them ? Mao’s Cutural Revolution, or Pol Pot’s version) and what is the ‘new culture’ going to be like ? Who decides ?
Seems that the neoliberal global banking elite’s version is to use money as the weapon, and let those with it buy their survival and those without it perish.
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I mean, what use are poor people ?
Push them out of their homes and let them die in the streets. Why not ?
The problem of social housing tenants falling behind on rent will get much, much worse shortly, when the “universal credit” scheme is introduced — a massive change in the way benefits are paid that has delayed by massive IT problems.
The hardest hit groups of tenants are elderly people and single mothers, as well as people who are too disabled to work.
http://boingboing.net/2014/01/04/english-mega-landlord-evicts-a.html
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This discussion about Dawkins and The Selfish Gene comes at the issues from so many angles it’s impossible to sort out. I read the book a long while back, and as I recall, it’s about memes, not genetic determinism. Memes are a theoretical construct, falling within information science, that purports to explain the mechanics of cultural transmission. Of particular importance here is the related dual inheritance theory a/k/a gene-culture coevolution. But let me point out that genetic evolution and cultural evolution operate on wildly different timescales, so any discussion of them must address the nature-nurture question as well.
Granted that we have some constant, immutable aspects to our natures arising out of our genetics and biology, the cultural environments we grow out of have significant and perhaps more immediate influences over behavior. For instance, the sexual/reproductive urge is within all of us, but it can be thwarted for a variety of reasons. Humans are omnivores, but many opt to be vegetarian or vegan out of conscience. The human mind is massively effective at learning, but many people have their development severely stunted or forestalled due to social factors. Examples could go on and on.
In addition, genetic and biological factors are determinative only in the aggregate, like actuarial tables used by insurance companies. Patterns do arise that are observable over time with sufficiently large samples, but they’re not very predictive when it comes down to the fine-grained behaviors of individuals. There’s way too much variation, plasticity, and unpredictability there. True, most people fall solidly within established norms, not toward the extremes, but those norms change over time, such as with the obesity epidemic in N. Amer.
As to Dawkins, I know nothing about his biography and influences and could really care less, but I’ll opine that as his influence has waxed, he has become more shrill, unforgiving, and extreme in his politics. He is a true believer, which is never a good thing. His militant atheism and public squabbles over interpretations of scientific theory caused me to tune him out long ago. It’s no longer a question of whether he’s right or wrong; he’s unhinged and doctrinaire, which makes him untrustworthy as an educator and popularizer of science.
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Memes is an afterthought he added in the final chapter. He wanted to try and fit culture into his model, then he’d have the whole field covered.
I studied the meme thing in depth, because it was the first intellectual forum that I joined when I first got online whenever that was, some time in the 90s.
It works up to a point, in the sense that certain ‘packets of information’ let us call them, are contagious and jump from mind to mind and ‘go viral’. But claims that it can explain culture or be more than that as some people want, I don’t accept myself.
Dawkins has been on a vicious fight with the American Evangelical Fundamentalists for a very long time. They deserve each other.
He’s a very articulate, well educated, charming, man who made a lot of money and became famous because of his books, which popularised the ideas of W D Hamilton and George R Price. If it were not for Dawkins nobody would have heard of those ideas. E O Wilson has had an acrimonious dispute with him and stated that ‘he is not a scientist, he’s an author of popular books’.
A good analogy of the situation, is that it is comparable with neoclassical economics, which has tried since its beginnings to be a ‘hard science’ like physics, and based itself upon the idea, extracted from Adam Smith, of the perfect consumer, who always maximises their economic advantage under all circumstances.
One reason why economics is such a dismal failure is that only psychopaths and bankers and economics graduates think like that. Ordinary human beings mostly are casual and sloppy and generous and hardly ever maximise their efficiency in the market place, you know, they lend money to friends and don’t really expect to get paid back, and that sort of thing. They buy stuff on impulse for really silly reasons that make no sense to economists.
Well, it’s sort of like that, re W D Hamiltons equations re human behaviour. In theory, they make sense on the black board, because the numbers add up. But in the real world, Auntie Janice does not give 1/8 of the cake to her cousin’s daughter after calculating her kinship relationship to be 1/8. People do not follow the rules.
Adam Curtis has a documentary on Hamilton and Price. They were both, erm, cranky.
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“The culture of capitalism is devoted to encouraging the production and sale of commodities. For capitalists, the culture encourages the accumulation of profit; for laborers, it encourages the accumulation of wages; for consumers, it encourages the accumulation of goods. In other words, capitalism defines sets of people who, behaving according to a set of learned rules, act as they must act.
There is nothing natural about this behavior. People are not naturally driven to accumulate wealth. There are societies in which such accumulation is discouraged. Human beings do not have an innate drive to accumulate commodities; again, there are plenty of societies in which such accumulation is discouraged. People are not driven to work; in fact, contrary to popular notions, members of capitalist culture work far more than, say, people who live by gathering and hunting (see, e.g., Shor 1993). ”
~ Prof. Richard H. Robbins, GLOBAL PROBLEMS AND THE CULTURE OF CAPITALISM
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“…to transform buying habits, luxuries had to be transformed into necessities. In America, this was accomplished largely in four ways: a revolution in marketing and advertising, a restructuring of major societal institutions, a revolution in spiritual and intellectual values, and a reconfiguration of space and class.
Marketing and Advertising
First, there was a major transformation of the meaning of goods and how they were presented and displayed.
For most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, retailers paid little attention to how goods were displayed. The first department store—Bon Marché— opened in Paris in 1852, allowing people to wander through the store with no expectations that they make a purchase. Enterprises such as Bon Marché were devoted to “the arousal of free-floating desire,” as Rosalind Williams put it (cited McCracken 1988:25). The displays of commodities helped define bourgeois culture, converting the culture, values, attitudes, and aspirations of the bourgeoisie into goods, thus shaping and transforming them (Miller 1994).
But Bon Marché was an exception. In stores in the United States, most products were displayed in bulk, and little care was taken to arrange them in any special way. Prepackaged items with company labels did not even exist until the 1870s, when Ivory Soap and Quaker Oats appeared (Carrier 1995:102). Shop windows, if they existed, were simply filled with items that had been languishing in back rooms or warehouses for years. Even the few large department stores of the mid-nineteenth century, such as that of Alexander Turney Stewart, the Marble Palace in New York, paid little attention to display. It was not until the 1890s and the emergence of the department store in the United States as a major retail establishment that retailers began to pay attention to how products were presented to the public.
The department store evolved into a place to display goods as objects in themselves. When Marshall Field’s opened in Chicago in 1902, six string orchestras filled the various floors with music and American Beauty roses along with other cut flowers and potted palms bedecked all the counters. Nothing was permitted to be sold on the first day, and merchants in the district closed so that their employees could visit Field’s. Later, elaborate theatrical productions were put on in the stores, artworks were displayed, and some of the most creative minds in America designed displays that were intended to present goods in ways that inspired people to buy them. The department store became a cultural primer telling people how they should dress, furnish their homes, and spend their leisure time (Leach 1993).
Advertising was another revolutionary development that influenced the creation of the consumer. The goal of advertisers was to aggressively shape consumer desires and create value in commodities by imbuing them with the power to transform the consumer into a more desirable person. Before the late 1880s, advertising was looked down on and associated with P. T. Barnum-style hokum. In 1880, only $30 million was invested in advertising in the United States; by 1910, new businesses, such as oil, food, electricity, and rubber, were spending $600 million, or 4 percent of the national income, on advertising. By 1998, the amount spent globally on advertising reached $437 billion, a figure that rivals the $778 billion spent on weapons.
By the early twentieth century, national advertising campaigns were being initiated and celebrities were being hired to offer testimonials to their favorite commodities. Advertising cards, catalogs, and newspaper ads became a regular feature of American life. Outdoor advertising—billboards, signs, and posters—appeared everywhere. Electrical advertising—neon and flashing signs—were marketed, and Broadway became famous as the “Great White Way.” Today, advertising plays such a ubiquitous part in our lives that we scarcely notice it, even when it is engraved or embroidered on our clothing.
Another boon to merchandising was the idea of fashion: the stirring up of anxiety and restlessness over the possession of things that were not “new” or “up-to-date.” Fashion pressured people to buy not out of need but for style—from a desire to conform to what others defined as “fashionable.”
It is hardly surprising then that the garment industry in America led the way in the creation of fashion; its growth in the early 1900s was two or three times as great as any other industry. By 1915, it ranked only behind steel and oil in the United States. Fashion output in 1915 was in excess of $1 billion; in New York alone, 15,000 establishments made women’s clothes. New fashion magazines—Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and The Delineator— set fashion standards and defined what the socially conscious woman should wear, often using royalty, the wealthy, and celebrities as models. The fashion show was introduced in the United States by Ehrich Brothers in New York City in 1903; by 1915, it was an event in virtually every U.S. city and town. Relying on this popularity, the first modeling agency was founded in New York by John Powers in 1923 (Leach 1993:309). The entertainment industry contributed by making its own major fashion statements as American women of 1920s sought to imitate stars such as Clara Bow.
Another addition to the marketing strategy was service, which included not only consumer credit (charge accounts and installment buying) but also a workforce to fawn over customers. Customers became guests.
William Leach suggested that service may have been one of the most important features of the new consumer society. It helped, he said, mask the inequality, poverty, and labor conflicts that were very much a part of the United States at this point in its history. If one wanted to understand how consumer society developed, Leach said, one could look at the rise of service. As economic inequality rose in America, and as labor conflict increased, Americans associated service with the “promise of America.” Service conveyed to people the idea that everything was all right, that they had nothing to worry about, and that security and service awaited them. Service expressed what economists then and now would refer to as:
the “benevolent side” of capitalism, that is, the side of capitalism that gave to people in exchange for a dependable flow of profits—a better, more comfortable way of life. In this view, capitalism did not merely “strive for profits” but also sought “the satisfaction of the needs of others, by performing service efficiently.” “Capital,” said one turn-of-the-century economist, “reigns because it serves.” (Leach 1993:146–147)
The Transformation of Institutions
The second way in which American buying habits were changed was through a transformation of the major institutions of American society, each redefining its function to include the promotion of consumption. Educational and cultural institutions, governmental agencies, financial institutions, and even the family itself changed their meaning and function to promote the consumption of commodities.
Before 1900, the contributions of universities to the capitalist economy largely dealt with how to “make” things, that is, with the production of commodities. Virtually no attention was paid to selling or keeping track of what was sold. For example, there was no systematic examination of mass retailing, credit systems, or banking offered by America’s schools or universities. In the twentieth century, however, that began to change. For example, in New York City there was the good-design or arts-in-industry movement; schools, such as the Pratt Institute and the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts (now Parsons School of Design), developed and began to prepare students to work in the emerging sales and design industries and in the large department stores. The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School for Business and the Harvard School for Business introduced programs in accounting (virtually nonexistent before then), marketing, and sales. In 1919, New York University’s School of Retailing opened; in the mid-1920s, Harvard and Stanford established graduate business schools as did such schools as Northwestern, Michigan, California, and Wisconsin soon after. Today, there are virtually no two-year or four-year colleges that do not offer some sort of business curriculum.
Museums also redefined their missions to accommodate the growth of the consumer culture. The American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Newark Museum, all heavily endowed by wealthy patrons such as J. P. Morgan, began to make alliances with business. Curators lectured to designers on Peruvian textiles or primitive decorative art. The head of the American Museum of Natural History, Morris D’Camp Crawford, assisted by the head of the anthropology department, Clark Wissler, urged businesspeople and designers to visit the museum. Special exhibits on the history of fashion and clothing were arranged, and Wissler even borrowed the window display techniques of New York department stores for his exhibits (as window display designers had borrowed the idea of the mannequin from anthropologist Franz Boas’s display of foreign cultures at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago). The editor of Women’s Wear magazine praised the museum for being “the most progressive force in the development of the designer” (Leach 1993:166).
The second set of institutions to aid in the development of consumer culture were agencies of the local and federal governments. The state, as an entity, had long taken a lively interest in commerce within its borders (as we’ll see when we examine the history of global capitalist expansion in Chapter 3). But prior to the twentieth century, the state’s concerns focused largely on the manufacture of commodities, the organization of business, the control of labor, and the movement of goods. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that state agencies began to concern themselves with the consumption end of the business cycle. In fact, it may not be an exaggeration to say that the government did more to create the consumer than did any other institution.
Nothing better represents the increasing role of the federal government in the promotion of consumption than the growth of the Commerce Department under Herbert Hoover, who served as its head from 1921 until his election as president in 1928. When the Commerce Building opened in Washington in 1932, it was the biggest office structure in the world (and was not surpassed in size until the Pentagon was built a decade later). At the time, it brought together in one building virtually all the government departments that had anything to do with business, from the Patent Office to the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce (BFDC), then the most important agency of the department. From 1921 to 1930, the congressional appropriation for the BFDC rose from $100,000 to more than $8 million, an increase of 8,000 percent. The number of BFDC staff increased from 100 to 2,500.
Hoover clearly intended the Department of Commerce to serve as the handmaiden of American business, and its main goal was to help encourage the consumption of commodities. For example, between 1926 and 1928 the BDFC, under Hoover’s direction, initiated the Census of Distribution (or “Census of Consumption,” as it was sometimes called) to be carried out every ten years. (It was unique at that time; Britain and other countries did not initiate government-sponsored consumer research until the 1950s). It detailed where the consumers were and what quantities of goods they would consume; it pointed out areas where goods were “overdeveloped” and which goods were best carried by which stores. The Commerce Department endorsed retail and cooperative advertising and advised merchants on service devices, fashion, style, and display methods of all kinds. The agency advised retail establishments on the best ways to deliver goods to consumers, redevelop streets, build parking lots and underground transportation systems to attract consumers, use colored lights, and display merchandise in “tempting ways.” The goal was to break down “all barriers between the consumers and commodities” (Leach 1993:366).
Hoover also emphasized individual home ownership. In his memoirs he wrote that “a primary right of every American family is the right to build a new house of its heart’s desire at least once. Moreover, there is the instinct to own one’s own house with one’s own arrangement of gadgets, rooms, and surroundings” (cited Nash 1988:7). The Commerce Department flooded the country with public relations materials on “homebuying” ideas, producing a leaflet entitled Own Your Own Home, along with a film, Home Sweet Home. They advocated single-dwelling homes over multiunit dwellings and suburban over urban housing. The leaflet recommended a separate bedroom for each child, saying it was “undesirable for two children to occupy the same bed—whatever their age.” Regardless of the reasons for these recommendations, the materials produced by the Commerce Department all promoted maximum consumption. Thus, the government responded, as much as did educational institutions, to the need to promote the consumption of commodities.
Another step in creating a consumer economy was to give the worker more buying power. The advantage of this from an economic perspective is not easy to see. From the point of view of an industrialist or an employer, the ideal situation would be to pay as low a wage as possible to keep production costs down and increase profits. However, each producer of goods would prefer other producers to pay high wages, which would allow the other producers’ workers to buy more products. The ideas that higher wages would serve as an incentive for laborers to work harder or that higher wages might allow the worker to become a consumer, occurred relatively late to factory owners and investors. The working class, they assumed, would work only as hard as they needed to get their basic subsistence, and to pay them more would only result in their working less. And when an occasional economic boom gave workers the spending power to consume at a higher level, the middle and upper classes would condemn them for their lack of thrift.
The economic power derived from turning workers into consumers was realized almost by accident. As industry attempted to increase efficiency, it developed new methods. Henry Ford introduced the assembly line, one of the apparently great innovations, to the manufacturing of automobiles. Workers occupied positions on the line from which they did not move (“Walking,” Ford said, “is not a remunerative activity”) and from which they would perform a single task. It was a process that required almost no training and that “the most stupid man could learn within two days,” as Ford said. In essence, each worker had to repeat the same motion every ten seconds in a nine-hour workday.
Workers resisted this mind-numbing process. When Ford introduced his assembly line, absenteeism increased and worker turnover was enormous. In 1913, Ford required 13,000 to 14,000 workers to operate his plant, and in that year 50,000 quit. But Ford solved the problem: He raised wages from the industry standard of two to three dollars per day to five dollars, and he reduced the working day to eight hours. Soon labor turnover fell to 5 percent, and waiting lines appeared at Ford hiring offices. Furthermore, production costs for Ford’s Model-T fell from $1,950 to $290, reducing the price to consumers. Most importantly, the rise in wages made Ford workers consumers of Ford automobiles, and, as other manufacturers followed suit, the automobile industry grew. By 1929, there were 23 million automobiles in the United States; by 1950 there were more than 40 million. Today, including light trucks, there are 1.3 cars for every individual.
In addition to the money coming from higher wages, buying power was increased by the expansion of credit. Credit, of course, is essential for economic growth and consumerism because it means that people, corporations, and governments can purchase goods and services with only a promise to pay for them at some future date. Furthermore, whenever credit is extended—whether it be by a store, a bank, a corporation, a person, or a government—in effect, money has been created, and more buying power has been introduced into the economy. Buying things on credit—that is, going into debt—has not always been acceptable in the United States. It was highly frowned on in the nineteenth century. It was not fully socially acceptable until the 1920s (Calder 1999), at which time it promoted the boom in both automobile and home buying.
The increased ease of obtaining home mortgages was a key to the home building boom of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, a boom that in turn fueled subsidiary industries— appliances, home furnishings, and road construction. By 1960, 62 percent of all Americans could claim to own their own home up from 44 percent in 1940. By 2002, U.S. homeowners owed more than $6 trillion in mortgages. Home mortgages had the further function of disciplining the workforce by forcing it to work to make credit payments. At the same time, homeowners gained a capital asset that served as a hedge against inflation. Automobile loans also added to consumer debt and, similarly, fueled subsidiary economic growth—malls, highways, vacation travel, and so on. Credit cards gave holders a revolving line of credit with which to finance purchases. In 2002, U.S. household debt reached $8.5 trillion, and 20 percent of American households have more debt than assets, or 40 percent when real estate is factored out. This debt represents enormous confidence in the future of the economy because this money does not exist. Lenders in our economy simply assume that the money will exist when it comes time for people to repay their debts.
None of this would have been possible without a government financial policy that put limits on interest rates (“usury ceilings”), passed “truth-in-lending” laws, made it easier for certain groups (women and minorities) to borrow, and offered subsidized student loans. Thus, credit increased consumer debt while creating a “mass market” for consumer goods, which served further to stimulate economic growth (see Guttman 1994).
In addition to changes in the way workers were viewed and the expansion of credit, there had to be a change in the way retail establishments were organized. The emergence of the consumer was accompanied by an enormous growth in retail chain stores. Until this point, distribution of goods was primarily controlled by small stores or large family-owned department stores. The 1920s saw the rise of the large retail conglomerates. In 1886, only two chains operated more than five stores; in 1912, 177 companies operated 2,235 stores; by 1929, nearly 1,500 companies were doing business in 70,000 outlets.
The Transformation of Spiritual and Intellectual Values
In addition to changing marketing techniques and modified societal institutions that stimulated consumption, there had to be a change in spiritual and intellectual values from an emphasis on such values as thrift, modesty, and moderation toward a value system that encouraged spending and ostentatious display. T. J. Jackson Lears argued that, from 1880 to 1930, the United States underwent a transformation of values from those that emphasized frugality and self-denial to those that sanctioned periodic leisure, compulsive spending, and individual fulfillment (Lears 1983). This shift in values, said Lears, was facilitated in American life by a new therapeutic ethos, an emphasis on physical and psychological health. This shift was promoted in part by the growth of the health professions and the popularity of psychology, along with the increasing autonomy and alienation felt by individuals as America ceased being a land of small towns and became increasingly urban. Advertisers capitalized on these changes by altering the way products were advertised; rather than emphasizing the nature of the product itself, they began to emphasize the alleged effects of the product and its promise of a richer, fuller life. Instead of simply being good soap, shoes, or deodorant, a product would contribute to the buyer’s psychological, physical, or social well-being (Lears 1983:19).
Clothing, perfumes, deodorant, and so on would provide the means of achieving love; alcoholic beverages would provide the route to friendship; the proper automobile tires or insurance policy would provide the means of meeting family responsibilities. Commodities would be the source of satisfaction and a vital means of self-expression. Ponder, for example, the following description by a forty-year-old man of the relationship between himself and his expensive Porsche:
Sometimes I test myself. We have an ancient, battered Peugeot, and I drive it for a week. It rarely breaks, and it gets great mileage. But when I pull up next to a beautiful woman, I am still the geek with glasses. Then I get back into my Porsche. It roars and tugs to get moving. It accelerates even going uphill at 80. It leadeth trashy women…to make pouting looks at me at stoplights. It makes me feel like a tomcat on the prowl…. Nothing in my life compares—except driving along Sunset at night in the 928, with the sodium vapor lamps reflecting off the wine-red finish, with the air inside reeking of tan glove-leather upholstery and the…Blaupunkt playing the Shirelles so loud that it makes my hairs vibrate. And with the girls I will never see again pulling up next to me, giving the car a once-over and looking at me as if I was a cool guy, not worried, instead of a 40-year-old schnook writer. (cited Belk 1988:148)
In the late nineteenth century, a series of religious movements emerged that became known as mind cure religions. William James, in his classic 1902 book, Varieties of Religious Experience, drew attention to the mind cure movements, although he was not the first to use the term. These movements—New Thought, Unity, Christian Science, and Theosophy, among others—maintained that people could simply, by an act of will and conviction, cure their own illnesses and create heaven on earth. These movements were, as William Leach (1993:225) phrased it, “wish-oriented, optimistic, sunny, the epitome of cheer and self- confidence, and completely lacking in anything resembling a tragic view of life.” There was no sin, no evil, no darkness, only, as one mind curer said, “the sunlight of health.”
These movements held that salvation would occur in this life and not in the afterlife. Mind cure dismissed the ideas of sin and guilt. God became a divine force, a healing power. Proponents argued that Americans should banish ideas of duty and self-denial. As one early twentieth-century advocate said,
If you want to get the most out of life, just make up your mind that you were made to be happy, that you are a happiness machine, as well as a work machine. Cut off the past, and do not touch the morrow until it comes, but extract every possibility from the present. Think positive, creative, happy thoughts, and your harvest of good things will be abundant. (cited Leach 1993:229)
These new religions made fashionable the idea that, in the world of goods, men and women could find a paradise free from pain and suffering; they could find, as one historian of religion put it, the “good” through “goods.”
Popular culture also promoted the mind cure ideology. As examples, there were L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which Leach characterized as “perhaps the best mind cure text ever written,” and the Billikens doll, a squat Buddha-like figure, sometimes male and sometimes female, which represented the “god of things as they ought to be.” Its success was without parallel in the toy trade and helped incite the doll craze in America. Billikens, it was said, would drive away petty annoyances and cares. One contemporary put it this way: “An atmosphere of gorged content pervades Billikens. No one can look at him [or her] and worry.”
The popularity of the Billikens doll signaled change in spiritual values: It was now permissible to seek self-fulfillment in this life and find elements of satisfaction in manufactured commodities. The world was a good place: There was no misery; poverty, injustice, and inequities were only in the mind. There was enough for everyone.
These changes were not unique to America. Many of the same changes occurred in other nations, most notably Great Britain, Germany, and France (Carrier 1995). The consumer revolution of the early twentieth century was not the first of its kind either; but it happened with the most intensity and rapidity in America.
Thus by the 1930s, the consumer was well entrenched in the United States, complete with a spiritual framework and an intellectual rationalization that glorified the continued consumption of commodities as personally fulfilling and economically desirable and a moral imperative that would end poverty and injustice.
The Reconfiguration of Space and Class
The creation of the consumer did not stop in 1930. Since that time, the institutions of our society, particularly those of corporate America, have become increasingly more adept at creating sandpaintings in which people inhabit worlds whose very nature requires the continuous consumption of goods. The need to consume has reordered our living space, created new spaces for the encouragement of consumption, and altered the ways that we view each other. Home ownership, for example, particularly of the product-greedy single-family home, cast people out from city centers into the sprawling suburbs, which necessitated new roads, more cars, and virtually destroyed public transportation. Retailers and developers quickly realized the possibilities inherent in these new communities; people, they reasoned, had an endless desire to consume. “Our economy,” said Macy’s board chairman Jack Isodor Straus, “keeps on growing because our ability to consume is endless. The consumer goes on spending regardless of how many possessions he had. The luxuries of today are the necessities of tomorrow” (cited in Cohen 2003:261). But it was also believed that suburbanites were growing reluctant to travel to urban centers to shop. The solution was to bring the market to the people, and retailers and developers relocated shopping areas from city centers to spacious shopping centers and malls. Consumers gave various reasons for shifting their shopping from downtown to shopping centers, but the most important issues seemed to involve convenience—easy accessibility (malls and shopping centers were always constructed adjacent to new highways), easy parking, improved store layouts, increased self-service, simplified credit with charge plates, and greater availability of products. Market researchers concluded that shoppers were attracted to the ease and “progressiveness” of shopping center shopping. Consumers seemed to share the developers’ sense that shopping centers were the modern way to consume (Cohen 2003:268).
The new ease of shopping, however, came with some costs. Shopping centers and malls were, unlike city centers, private spaces in which owners could control political activities. They were also easily accessible only to people with automobiles, thus removing from the suburban landscape those shoppers at the low end of the social ladder. And they redefined the nature of social interaction; shopping malls, as Zygmunt Bauman put it
are so constructed as to keep people moving, looking around, keep them diverted and entertained no end—but in no case looking too long—by any of the endless attractions; not to encourage them to stop, look at each other, think of, ponder, and debate something other than the objects on display—not to pass their time in a fashion devoid of commercial value…. Hence a territory stripped of public space provides little chance for norms being debated, for values to be confronted, to clash and to be negotiated. (Bauman 1998:25)
In addition to defining the spaces in which we live and shop, marketers also redefined categories of people. In the early days of advertising, and up until the 1960s, manufacturers and retailers pitched their products and services to the mass market, continually stimulating demand by offering new products, changing styles, and so forth. But in the 1950s a new theory of marketing gained acceptance; rather than marketing products and services to a vast, undifferentiated middle class, sellers would differentiate or segment the market, appealing to the desires and needs of each special group. A new field emerged that became so sophisticated that the chief executive of Spiegel Company would boast that armed to the teeth with information, the marketer was “the friend who knows them [consumers] as well as—perhaps better than—they know themselves” (Cohen 2003:299). Target marketing singled out children and minorities for pointed appeals; marketers used “lifestyle” branding”—selling products by attracting consumers to a particular way of life rather than the good itself. Advertisers segmented by class and income, and then by gender and then age. They categorized consumers with statistical precision and gave them labels such as “blue blood estates,” “shoguns and pickups,” and “hispanic mix residents,” singling these groups out for direct marketing, telemarketing, and Internet shopping solicitation. “Rather than sell commodities in as much volume as possible to the masses,” says Lizabeth Cohen (2003:299), “modern-day marketers, equipped with advanced psychographic tactics, identify clusters of customers with distinctive ways of life and then set out to sell them idealized lifestyles constructed around commodities.” Magazines probably represent the clearest example of segmentation—note the shift from the dominant magazines of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s (Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post) and examine a typical magazine rack today. We might ask ourselves to what extent has the market segmentation created or exaggerated social and cultural divisions that might otherwise not exist, leaving people with less and less to share.
As Lizabeth Cohen (2003:318) points out, if any kind of segmentation epitomized the goals of marketers and advertisers, it was segmenting by age. First targeting teenagers and then children, they succeeded, with the help of governments, schools, and other institutions, in redefining childhood itself…”
from GLOBAL PROBLEMS AND THE CULTURE OF CAPITALISM
by Prof. Richard H. Robbins
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Outstanding…worth reading further
The text continues with the section “KINDERCULTURE IN AMERICA: THE CHILD AS CONSUMER”
All of Chapter One available as pdf here…
Click to access 0205407412.pdf
Thanks
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It’s a premier analysis. I’m glad someone read it.
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ulvfugl.
:We were a species that lived in small bands of hundreds. Something happened, Nobody knows what it was. SERIOUSLY. Not a clue ! We suddenly changed into a mass soceity species.like the ants and the bees. Or rather some of us did.:
I think the suddenness of the transition from nomadic or semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer society to agricultural has been grossly exaggerated. There is now evidence it took 6,000 or even 10,000 years. For instance the ‘villages’ discovered in Turkey and India, dated at something like 18,000 BC.
And I’m rather sick of all the discussion about how special humans are. We are not that special. We now know that chimpanzees have better short term memory and recall than humans. And that dolphins have complex social arrangements that include family support and play. Kangaroos can have three stages of development at eh same time, and can conserve water in an extraordinary manner. And ants worked out farming millions of years ago, protecting aphids and milking them, collecting leaves, storing them and harvesting the fungi that grow in them. All that with a brain the since of a full stop (or period, as Americans would say). Chimpanzees worked out how to hunt in groups and kill, They know how to use stones as weapons. In a recently documented case a chimpanzee at a zoo collected stones overnight to throw at humans the following day. So there is some serious premeditation going on in some chimpanzees brains. The only bit they did not get round to was shaping stones and creating sharp edges.
Despite what you think, humans are organisms, sharing something like 96% of genes with gorillas and chimpanzees over millions of years and sharing some basic biology with sea cucumbers. Indeed, the only significant differences between chimpanzees and humans are the size of the brain case and the comparatively long legs and short arms of humans, and a few unusual feature that probably arose as a consequence of living in of near shallow water, i.e. downward pointing nostrils, the ability to cry salty tears etc..
I think a lot of the cultural arrogance that humans display is rooted in the idea that we at the pinnacle of creation/evolution. it seems to me we are just a plague of greedy apes that got lucky for a short time. (Okay, a little bit more than that, but not much.)
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Dear Kevin,
I think it may be time to insert a little humor. This is some years old but pertinent to the discussion. I try to watch this about once a year especially when I have just shaved the hair from my body, in blatant denial of my true monkey nature.
All the Best
Stephen
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Thanks for that, Stephen. The first time I have seen it.
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I don’t think that’s quite true. I mean we may not know what happened tens of thousands of years ago, but we do have present day examples which might give us “a clue” about what happened then.
For instance, I think it’s pretty clear why the kibbutz phenomenon pretty much came to an end. It began when individual families sought individual housing and began eating by themselves. Also, people began to receive different levels of pay for different jobs.
Now trying to sum it up the kibbutz situation in just a few sentences is simply not enough analysis. For instance, we don’t know (though probably can assume) how much work people were expected to do and to get (what?) In return.
Communal is just a word, in fact even what’s going on (in mass) has all sorts of communal characteristics such as all the agreements and expectations almost everyone goes along with and also the density of most of our living arrangements.
Human beings will always have the option to destroy whatever they create, including human relationships. I don’t think endings or failures or even the self-destruction of human institutions is necessarily all bad, change happens and we learn things.
I think the unfortunate thing though is when we don’t have the will, motivation or courage to try new things or simply try again in a new way.
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Whatever you are talking about, c s, and however valid it is, it’s miles away from what I was talking and thinking and arguing 🙂
Which was about how we went from small groups of hunter gatherers to become a social species that built cities and civilisations, and changed our behaviour whilst our genetics remained basically the same as it had been for 100s of thousands of years.
In just 12,000 years we have gone from Gobekli Tepe to what we have today. This is astounding, if viewed from an extra-terrestrial viewpoint.
My main point is that we do not have ANY adequate theoretical understandings which contain and explain what we are and what our potential is. That’s my opinion.
I’ve checked out everything on offer. It’s all very well for the evolutionary biologists to say ‘Hey look.we’re a lot like social spiders’. It’s true. We are. There are similar patterns. We can learn interesting things. But no social spider ever decided to go off by itself and write Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner nor did any social spider come up with Darwin’s Origin of Species.
We did these things. We are very strange. We don’t fit into our own paradigms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_spider
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I need to make it very clear, which I have not, that I not glorifying the human species or putting them on a pedestal. I think I am being misunderstood. I’ve been through all that and come out the other side.
There was/is a battle between those who view humans as ‘special’ and those who view humans as ‘just another primate animal’. I most definitely took the latter view.
However, I’ve come to understand that there’s much more to this.
I get so pissed off with the pathetic level of education and the pathetic level of argument on the internet. You know, like it used to be, if you’re not in favour of American Capitalism you MUST be a fucking Commie who supports the Soviets.
Or, if you don’t love Dawkins and Hitchens then you MUST be a bible bashing Creationist who hates Darwin. This is pitiful.
Most humans are mired in a horribly benighted condition. I am not responsible for that, I didn’t cause this fuck up. A very few of us manage to rise out of that condition and discover something of what it means to be truly human, which is so amazing as to be beyond words.
None of our theories or belief systems can account for this. That’s what I’m saying.
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It is all very interesting, but none of this discussion helps me with the immediate problem I have. how do I get ‘the idiots’ to accept that everything they do reduces the resilience of the district I live in and increases the prospect of early NTHE? How do I get the ‘idiots’ to see that they are actively destroying their own progeny’s futures, and in the case of young ‘idiots’ actively destroying their own futures?
For want of anything better, I am still trying logical arguments based on facts.
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Although resource exploitation is clearly the basic cause of the destruction of small-scale populations and their cultures, it is important to identify the underlying ethnocentric attitudes that are often used to justify these exploitative policies. Ethnocentrism, the belief in the superiority of one’s own culture, is vital to the integrity of any society, but it can threaten the well-being of other peoples when it becomes the basis for forcing irrelevant standards upon another culture. . . . [People] often overlook the ethnocentrism that until recently commonly occurred in the professional literature on economic development. Ironically, ethnocentrism threatens smallscale cultures even today through its support of culturally insensitive government policies.
─ John H. Bodley, 2008b:21
The implications are clear: “some of the world’s most serious social problems─including poverty, war, and pollution─can be seen as problems of scale and power” (Bodley 2003).
Click to access capitalism-and-globalization.pdf
(open with acrobat pro to access links)
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White males with business contacts who want business-as-usual. White females who want the trinkets of consumerism to be supplied to them.
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Also worth reading “Capitalism and Globalization”…
Click to access capitalism-and-globalization.pdf
Excerpt:
…In reality, the primary human agents who created capitalism were elites with vested interest in increasing the scale of consumption in order to disproportionately enhance their own power. This is not to deny that many other people have also benefited from improved material conditions, but the point is that a few people produced a cultural system that worked for them but may not have been the best, or most sustainable, human alternative. Capitalism is not just a culture, it is also a society that takes the shape of overlapping networks of individuals with varying degrees of ability to influence material outcomes.
[W]hen a few aggrandizing people gain monopoly or oligopoly access to global-scale transactions and can gain disproportionate benefits from directing these transactions, elites have an immediate incentive to expand the scale and scope of the ‘market’ and to push resource consumption beyond sustainable limits. This growth-oriented monopolistic commerce is far removed from the local and regional markets that support communities.
─John H. Bodley, 2008a:98
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@ Kevin
I think the suddenness of the transition from nomadic or semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer society to agricultural has been grossly exaggerated. There is now evidence it took 6,000 or even 10,000 years. For instance the ‘villages’ discovered in Turkey and India, dated at something like 18,000 BC.
Hahaha, well, I tend to think on geological time scales, but even on the scale of human evolution, that is still pretty much ‘instant’, isn’t it ? After hundreds of thousands of years, or even a couple of million, depending how you define ‘Homo’.
But this seems to me to be trivial. And anyway, hunter gatherers don’t have to be nomadic or semi nomadic. If there’s plenty of food in a place, they’ll stay there.
The point is that SOMETHING happened that changed, and it cannot or has not, been explained by anyone yet, although there are myriad theories, and we became something different to what we had been.
Nobody looking at, say, contemporary species in Africa, 100,000 years ago, say, crocodiles, would have said that they’d expect them to gather together into colonies and domesticate other species and so forth. They’s expect them to keep on being just like crocodiles. Same for elephants and everything else. We’ve changed out of all recognition.
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I think you keep presenting fallacious arguments. Would ‘anyone’ 200 million years ago have expected ants to start harvesting leaves and taking them underground to grow fungi on? Or would ‘anyone’ 200 million years ago have expected wasps to figure out how to collect cellulose, chew it, and build structures out of it? Would anyone have expected gliding dinosaurs to evolve into birds that collect materials to make nests, or in the case of bower birds, make nests and decorate them with bright objects? 60 million years ago would anyone have expected shrews to evolve into mammals that could communicate across distances of many kilometres, hunt in packs, dig burrows, build nests, make tools to extract bugs from holes in trees etc? Would anyone have expected shrews to grow wings and develop the capacity to fly at night using sonar?
As for proto-humans, they were using stones and fire at least a million years ago and may have been experimenting with agriculture 200,000 years ago.
As long as people regard humans as special and not part of nature, humanity remains trapped on the railcar that is headed for the cliff, gripping the handrail of the Titanic, stuck on the tree limb that it is being sawn through, or whatever metaphor you might choose. As long as people think of themselves as separate from and above nature they think they can control it.
I think you credit humans with greater ability and intelligence than they generally have, and I think you credit other species with less intelligence and ability than they have.
Most humans are actually not much more intelligent than chimpanzees, and homo colossus’ actions are frequently less intelligent than those of chimpanzees.
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Not really, I think we are talking at cross purposes.
I’m still at the stage of getting the analysis correct, as per Lierre Keith’s outline.
I’ve already stated that I consider most humans as thick as turnips and I consider that most scientists grossly under-estimate the intelligence of other species. My personal philosophy is very my anti-anthropocentric.
The point is that we KNOW about the ants and other species changing their behaviour by way of standard fucking genetics, Kevin. That’s genetic determinism.
That’s what Dawkins and his followers wanted to use to explain what has happened to US. That is the point that I am making all along. It doesn’t. It’s CULTURE, not genetics.
Look you’ve wandered off up an alley of your own there, that has nothing to do with what I’ve been talking about at all.
You’re perfectly entitled to follow mean reductionism Dawkins if you wish, same as anybody is entitled to believe anything they want, but that’s where I part company with you. I’m not even going to attempt to argue the case, because I’ve done it many times before on NBL and elsewhere and it’s as tedious for me as arguing against the Genesis account of creation.
I’m a solid Darwinian, I go along with Ernst Mayr, Lynn Margulis, E O Wilson to a degree, Robert Sapolsky, of course we are biological organisms ! but that does not explain what we are as HUMANS, anymore than motorcars explain what computers are. Sure they are both machines. Great. So what ?
We do not have any paradigm or theory which explains US.
I’m not talking about the mediocre muddle headed fools with their heads buried in their tv sets who have been reduced to zombies by a whole range of factors. I’m talking about the highest accomplishments of the human quest, in whatever terms you’d care to frame it. Leonardo or Picasso or whomever you’d care to select.
When Dickens wrote his monthly stories about life in Victorian London, that isn’t just telling stories around the campfire, the way our palaeolithic ancestors did. It’s jumped up a whole lot of levels, it’s meta-meta story telling – Julia Kristeva’s intertextuality. There’s nothing in our genes, in our mastery of technology, that explains this ability, or the compulsion that drove Dickens. This is only a PART of what is so bizarre about us and so unique about us. 90% of humans have no idea of what their potential is.
This is what infuriates me re Robin Datta and his obscene idea that we are ‘meat robots’. Meat robots do not write Little Dorrit, or James Joyce’ Ulysses.
Nobody has any explanation for WHY we bother to these things.
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U said:
‘You see, it’s clear that if you want to change the culture, then take all the children away from their parents and indoctrinate with your new culture, is the way to go.’
There is a horrifying trend in NZ towards establishing early childhood education centres, i.e. indoctrination centres for pre-schoolers. The poor little victims get taken to these places by car, are surrounded by artificiality while they are there, and get taken home by car. From what I have seen from the outside these centres promote corporate bullshit, as per McDonalds, Shell Oil, tourism, helicopter flights, ain’t industrial civilisation wonderful.
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Yes. Well, lots of people have understood the principles, so it depends upon who instigates them and what their motives are.
Lierre Keith mentions the guy who has written the classic text on starting revolutions – sorry, my brain fails me for a moment re his name – but she speaks of him approvingly as do others on the left who want to see democracy and freedom of speech and human rights and so forth.
Unfortunately, most of these folk are very naive. The cunning bad guys in the black government that we never see or hear about got there first. They thought ‘Wow, cool stuff’. So they’ve used those principles in the so-called colour and spring revolution to mobilise the idealistic useful idiots to destabilise and overthrow regimes, and then to get the result that THEY want, which has nothing to do with democracy, or freedom or human rights, but everything to do with oil and empire and selling arms and subverting the Russians and Chinese, and so forth.
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Nice piece of writing
And without a capacity for complexity there is not much hope of knowing even what needs saving. The great biologist E. O. Wilson speaks about a coming wave of extinctions whose scope eludes us, because though there may be anywhere from ten million to a hundred million species in the world, we have identified far fewer than two million. Unlike the passenger pigeon, these creatures may be hidden in oceans, forest canopies, handfuls of earth. It takes effort and imagination to sift through this information, just as it requires an educated humanism to figure out whether a de-extinction project holds real environmental promise or is only an ancient longing for resurrection disguised as bioengineering.
Thoreau, in a mysteriously beautiful passage in his 1862 essay “Walking,” likens the diminishing numbers of passenger pigeons in New England to the dwindling number of thoughts in a man’s head, “for the grove in our minds is laid waste.” Thinking of the birds as missing thoughts is a good way to honor them. Martha and her billions were undone by the complicated, pitiless tangle of our modern industrialized world, but Thoreau’s nineteenth-century protest—“Simplify, simplify”—will not help us in the twenty-first. Indeed, when it comes to our relationship to nature, the wish for simplicity may be the most destructive thing in the world.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2014/01/06/140106crbo_books_rosen?currentPage=all
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Spear kills large quadruped. Lots of searching, running, spear making. EROEI ? Still good. Man trades spear and harpoon for chainsaw, plow and oil well drill. EROEI? Very, very nice, lots of complexity and luxury, but then it declines. What will we consume next? I don’t know, not much remaining, but the siege of Wall St. and Washington will begin soon, the armed reinforcements and spying on potential enemies is in full swing. I’m sure they will have more than hot oil and stones to cast from the parapets at the angry mobs that would only be temporarily placated by a redistribution of their accumulated wealth. Perhaps recombined flu virus or atomized dopamine zombie potion spread by low-flying drones. In any case, malignant neoplasms don’t last very long wherever they occur in nature and the only sustainability they seek is GROWTH.
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Kevin: I’m following your (ulvfugl and Brutus’) discussions with interest and your “problem” with the local “leaders.” The trouble is, as I’m sure you know, that there isn’t any alternative. What are you going to offer them as a “different way” of keeping business as usual and society going? You don’t naively think they’re going to give up their positions of authority and privilege, do you?
We’re talking about collapse! Nothing is going to work, the economy is going to implode, diseases are already beginning to sweep the globe, resources are becoming ever more scarce and food prices, while we can still produce some food in between flooding, droughts and storms of all kinds, are increasing dramatically. The political people are circling the wagons to provide what’s left to themselves as everyone else is left to die. Once the rule of law is gone, which will happen as soon as the masses become aware of how dire things are (and all the broken promises government gave them about security, “the system”, jobs, money, etc.), chaos will take over and no one will be safe. The rich will be hunted down mercilessly by mobs of angry people with nothing to lose. After all, we know where they live! Same with the police – they’re our neighbors! When the shit hits the fan, is the cop going to report for duty and leave his family to the roving mobs of zombies? I have to laugh at the militarization of the police. Those guns will be used on the political leaders, and the police will be just another gang trying to protect itself from what’s coming. It’s all going to break down.
So, not to interrupt, but I saw this today and wanted to bring it to everyone’s attention, because of its immediacy:
http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13921014000267
Underground Nuclear Explosion at Crippled Japan Atomic Plant Shocks World
TEHRAN (FNA)- An edict issued from the Office of the Russian President said a series of underground nuclear explosions occurred at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Aomic plant on 31 December.
The edict issued to all Ministries of the Russian Government ordered that all “past, present and future” information relating to Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster now be rated at the highest classification level “Of Special Importance”, stressing that this condition is “immediately and urgently needed” due to a series of underground nuclear explosions occurring at this crippled atomic plant on 31 December as confirmed by the Ministry of Defense (MoD).
[further down the article is this conclusion]
The MoD further reports that evidence that these underground nuclear explosions were about to occur began after mysterious steam plumes were first spotted on 19 December for a short period of time, then again on 24, 25, 27 December, and confirmed by a report Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) published on its website.
Most curious to note, this report continues, is that the United States appears to have had a more advanced notice of these underground nuclear explosions as evidenced by their purchase earlier this month (6 December) of 14 million doses of potassium iodide, the compound that protects the body from radioactive poisoning in the aftermath of severe nuclear accidents, to be delivered before the beginning of February 2014.
With experts now estimating that the wave of radiation from Fukushima will be 10-times bigger than all of the radiation from the entire world’s nuclear tests throughout history combined, and with new reports stating that dangerous radiation levels have been detected in snows found in Texas, Colorado and Missouri, this MoD report warns the US, indeed, is going to face the severest consequences of this historic, and seemingly unstoppable, nuclear disaster.
And not just to human beings either is this nuclear disaster unfolding either, this report grimly warns, but also to all biological systems as new reports coming from the United States western coastal areas are now detailing the mass deaths of seals, sea lions, polar bears, bald eagles, sea stars, turtles, king and sockeye salmon, herring, anchovies, and sardines due to Fukishima radiation.
As to the American people being allowed to know the full and horrific mass death event now unfolding around them, this report warns, is not be as the Obama regime has, in effect, ordered all of their mainstream news media organs not to report it, and as recently confirmed by former MSNBC host Cenk Uygur who was told not to warn the public about the danger posed by the meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant during his time as a host on the cable network.
And with Russian experts now warning that as Fukushima pollution spreads all over Earth (as large amounts of fish, seaweeds, and everything in ocean has been already been polluted, and these products are the main danger for mankind as they can end up being eaten by people on a massive scale) this report warns that Putin’s order to classify all information relating to this nuclear mass death event “Of Special Importance” is vital to protect the economic and social stability interests of the Russian Federation as this global catastrophe continues to worsen by the day.
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You don’t naively think they’re going to give up their positions of authority and privilege, do you?
The filthy fuckers are laughing at us. They won’t stop until they see their buddies corpses hanging from lamp posts. Why should they ? It’s easy money and good fun too.
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just a quick aside.
there is no more frontier, the tentacles of the state reach everywhere.
in each individual society we are reduced to the state of helpless children, we are dependent upon the current arrangement.
humanity as a whole has gone so far down the path of dependence upon technology that we are no longer exactly human, we are essentially symbiotic.
as the battered person becomes narcissistic as a defense mechanism, so does the society, we can only look at the state of the masses as we would look at an abused individual only on a grand scale.
drug usage and addiction, consumerism and capitalism, a disease which builds upon itself in a hostage population.
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I remain totally, utterly, eternally defiant, my friend.
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i like it, not sure what to think. the dancers movements seem almost robotic, an expression of the inability of modern humans to relate to nature?
what i posted at systemic disorder.
in simple terms modern industrial society has produced such a surplus that we are able to satisfy our needs and move on to what we want, a surfeit if you will.
methods of mass advertising constantly barrage us with messages convincing us that we should want this or that, and we buy into it, i do.
like little babies we must have our pacifier, something to make us feel good, so we spend money on sweets, meat, cigarettes, booze, at least i do.
a constant stream of something, anything, to soothe our savaged souls.
as i light another cigarette and take a drink of coffee.
the masses of modern society also suffer from a sort of stockholm syndrome on a wide scale, so beat down by everyday life that they look to their oppressors for protection, a truly sick sate of affairs.
it’s not battered spouse, or battered children, it’s a battered population;
any analysis of modern industrial society must necessarily start from this premise.
must go read more of the other posters.
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A lot of honesty there, I can relate.
I think a lot of the problem with manifesting something other than our “capitalistic industrial civilization” is that we discuss it in terms of the whole. The “whole” is good for generalizations or social commentary but I don’t think the “whole” is where to look for an opportunity to change it.
I think change comes individually, but not as “individually” is commonly thought of today. Today individually means just one or two. Why not individually as in 150 or 300? Compared to changing millions, these numbers (requiring some consensus) seem much more manageable, attainable.
Ah, but do what? I think if we really wanted to do something different, it wouldn’t be that hard to at least agree to a starting point.
As for a “battered population”, yes, definitely; but it’s a battered population that basically does not care about each other enough to create something different.
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A Point of View: The perils of belief
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25561810
Nice commentary on the power of belief systems, and their pervasiveness in human culture. I was disappointed in the somewhat superficial final analysis regarding WHY we buy into these systems. A fear of our own mortality? That’s it? Something tells me there is more to it than that.
I did enjoy the closing paragraph:
[Norman Lewis, a great travel writer with a passionate interest in indigenous peoples around the world] didn’t share the modern belief that the human animal is improving, so he didn’t look forward to any better time. Nor did he have any faith in a higher power. In an interview towards the end of his life, he declared he believed in “absolutely nothing”. He also described himself as being “exceedingly happy”. Wisely, he didn’t believe in belief.
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Here’s a little bit more evidence to show just how insidious and cunning these nuclear people have been and continue to be:
http://independentwho.org/en/who-and-aiea-aggreement/
The Agreement WHA 12-40 between WHO and IAEA
(selected quote from short article)
The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) signed the Agreement “WHA 12-40” on 28th May 1959.
Since the signing of this agreement, WHO has shown no autonomy of action towards achieving its stated objectives in the field of radiation protection.
On the contrary it has shown its capacity for misinforming the public about the health consequences of radioactive contamination caused by the civil and military nuclear industries.
WHO waited five years before visiting those territories that had been heavily contaminated by the accident at Chernobyl. They gave no instructions for evacuation or for the provision of clean food to the affected populations.
WHO has kept hidden the health consequences of this catastrophe, especially by not publishing the proceedings of the 1995 and 2001 conferences.
WHO still estimates the number of deaths caused by Chernobyl at less than fifty and attributes the health problems of populations of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia to fear of radiation.
WHO does not recognise the validity of the work published in 2009 by the Academy of Sciences of New York which estimates the number of deaths caused by Chernobyl to be nearly one million.
With Fukushima, WHO has the same attitude as for Chernobyl.
________
So much for nuclear “watchdog” agencies, eh? Adding to the campaign sign above:
Who will protect you and inform you about nuclear problems? NOBODY!
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Gotta read this. Surprising coming fro a popular alternative site:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/01/05-3
Excerpt:
“First the bad news: To address anthropogenic climate change, capitalism will have to be replaced as the dominant world economic system. How do we know this? Well, we know that eliminating ongoing exposure to a poison is a prerequisite for curing an illness due to poisoning. We know that any hope of modifying a dog’s aggressive behavior requires, at a minimum, that you stop rewarding the animal when it bites someone. In short, we know that to solve a problem you must eliminate the causes before you can hope to effectively treat the symptoms.
But is capitalism itself part of the problem? Are private ownership and management of the world’s resources, energy supplies, industry and infrastructure compatible with the current needs of society, the environment and our planet? Is the current system sustainable when it rewards industrial titans for maximizing returns at all cost, while existentially punishing any who might forgo profits for the public good? These are crucial questions.”
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