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Ambrose Bierce, An Inhabitant of Carcosa, Ann Coulter, Capitalism, Carcosa, Cardinal John Henry Newman, Corruption in Religion, Dead can Dance, Death in June, Eco-Apocalypse, Exploitation of Labor, Fascism, Foxconn, Free Market Ideologues, Friedrich Nietzsche, Google, Greenwashing, Matthew McConaughey, Nox Arcana, Oppression through Dependency, Privatization, Public Relations Propaganda, Ron Paul, The Coercive Power of Capitalism, The Evangelical Right, The Federal Reserve, True Detective, UAW, Yellow King
Set in the foreboding shadow of Louisiana’s oil refineries, Matthew McConaughey recounts an ominous story, while the camera lens brings into focus a modern day monster.
Made popular in the current television drama of some note, True Detective is the story of a psychotic serial killer who leaves behind cryptic talismans of occult origin, with unknown meaning. The killer invokes oblique references to the Yellow King, a mythical exiled ruler from the lost city of Carcosa, a dystopian city not unlike the capital of a doomed planet.
Over all the dismal landscape a canopy of low, lead-colored clouds hung like a visible curse. In all this there were a menace and a portent — a hint of evil, an intimation of doom. Bird, beast, or insect there was none. The wind sighed in the bare branches of the dead trees and the gray grass bent to whisper its dread secret to the earth; but no other sound nor motion broke the awful repose of that dismal place. A few blasted trees here and there appeared as leaders in this malevolent conspiracy of silent expectation.
This is also the name of a play nearly 200 years old, never completed except in short story form. It is said if the entire play is read, the reader will go insane. Indeed, the protagonists in the TV show edge closer to insanity as they circle the truth.
We don’t know much about the Yellow King, or Carcosa except that its sky has black stars and two suns, and its dead landscape is ravaged by centuries of evil. Existence in this city is purportedly centered in a fourth dimension, where time is represented as a flat circle, a Nietzscheian reference indicating the inhabitants are doomed to repeating the same events over and over again, unable to change and unable to stop the repetition.
A sudden wind pushed some dry leaves and twigs from the uppermost face of the stone; I saw the low-relief letters of an inscription and bent to read it. God in Heaven! My name in full! — The date of my birth! — The date of my death! A level shaft of light illuminated the whole side of the tree as I sprang to my feet in terror. The sun was rising in the rosy east. I stood between the tree and his broad red disk — no shadow darkened the trunk! A chorus of howling wolves saluted the dawn. I saw them sitting on their haunches, singly and in groups, on the summits of irregular mounds and tumuli filling a half of my desert prospect and extending to the horizon. And then I knew that these were ruins of the ancient and famous city of Carcosa.
There is speculation that Carcosa was never really a place, but a destination for a future of collapse, and the Yellow King was not an exiled ruler, but a disguise- a mask of sorts that once worn, occludes the truth from those who might see.
Once the mask is removed, the truth is laid bare and the viewer is transported to Carcosa. If so, the Yellow King is with us in force today manifest in many forms, most of these designed to disguise the true nature of our world. For we stand to inherit a Carcosa, a towering existential recreation of hell, with circular, unbreakable patterns of dysfunctional behavior.
And the Yellow King walks among us, unabated, spreading misinformation amplified by mass media, advising us, extolling us to ascend to the power of liberty and free markets, get what’s yours while the gettin’ is good, and valorizing those who crush the most souls on the way up.
Free market apologists reign supreme, their carnival barking and incessant media chatter filling the airwaves with blather and bloviation, coiffed and blow dried edifices of carefully constructed perfection lecturing the faithful in the ways of the good and righteous. The downtrodden and sullen worker class unabashedly enamored by the sparkling white teeth and tanning parlor afterglow of the likes of Ann Coulter, with her simmering promise of bleach blond playdates in Republican nirvana.
Give the finger to the underclass, step up to a Brooks Brothers suit with power tie, and the kingdom is yours.
Long considered just an annoyance, at worst, a screeching nails-on-the-blackboard offense endured among polite company as the uniformed contrivances of the political class, merely the monosyllabic utterances of the unenlightened. Which is to say, to be ignored, or in a flight of compassion, to debate the helpless bastards in the hopes that common sense may prevail, and they may see the light, amongst earnest and heartfelt protestation.
Why, forgive them as they know not what they do.
But perhaps they do.
For the Yellow King, with his sycophant protégés donning the mask of illusion lay forth this banter of iniquity, they hold sway as full participants in the court of world opinion. Their voices of reason, their faces of envy, and their politics of grace conspire to deliver a message finely honed through the millennia.
A message warned of for more than 2000 years by an institution not treated well in the Age of Reason. An institution of former glory consumed from the inside out by the very evil it warned of, now one of the largest Capitalist entities on the planet, its crippled and corrupt exoskeleton only occasionally eking out a coherent message, a sporadic, diminutive cry of caution.
Such a cry can be heard by 19th century Cardinal John Henry Newman, in a quote recently featured on Jesse’s blog:
Do you think he is so unskillful in his craft, as to ask you openly and plainly to join him in his warfare against the truth? No; he offers you baits to tempt you. He promises you civil liberty; he promises you equality; he promises you trade and wealth; he promises you a remission of taxes; he promises you reform.
This is the way in which he conceals from you the kind of work to which he is putting you; he tempts you to rail against your rulers and superiors; he does so himself, and induces you to imitate him; or he promises you illumination, he offers you knowledge, science, philosophy, enlargement of mind.
He scoffs at times gone by; he scoffs at every institution which reveres them. He prompts you what to say, and then listens to you, and praises you, and encourages you. He bids you mount aloft. He shows you how to become as gods.
Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his.
J.H.Newman, the Times of Antichrist (Circa 1850)
He makes the disturbing claim that such representations are not mere affectations of the less enlightened, not musings of a political counterfactual, not the flip side of rationed debate, but the deliberate and finely considered dialogue of evil.
The ascendancy of the evangelical right has long mouthed consternation that society is decaying, and claimed vindication when they should be claiming responsibility. Their inversion of right and wrong, their overt sponsorship of capitalist society, in fact their insistence of capitalism as the only Christian means of life moves them well beyond the moniker of fascism firmly into the category of evil incarnate.
For the Yellow King the disguise of illusion is a world of opposites, a world of up really being down, not a matrix style hologram of technology, but a bending of light, an Alice in Wonderland vignette where three lefts make a right and the fun house mirrors portray you to be wealthier than you really are. A world where you argue against your best (or anyone else’s) interests, a world where you degrade, prostrate, and mutilate yourself on the advice of those gleaming faces of prosperity.
In the hope that you may be like them, someday to exchange your station in life, to become that gleaming face and to dispense the wrath of your tortured ascendancy on the filthy groveling masses sullying your shoes as they struggle to feed themselves.
Much is made by the armchair economist and pundit as to causality for our American nightmare as it careens from crisis to crisis. The Yellow King advises this is purely monetary in nature, we have simply oversubscribed our creation in money-capital and succumbed to the avarice of too much government. Why it’s just too much fiat money, and too much government, let’s get back to sound money and free markets, and let her rip.
The narrative takes on fairy tale proportions, indeed, even a child can see through such gas baggery. But a child does not have a vested interest in this belief system, and the rest simply apply religious fervor to the notion that capital just has to succeed, and will accept any preposterous explanation, however dubious, to keep the mask firmly in place.
One of the more hysterical diversions is the demonization of the Federal Reserve System. Made popular by demagogues such as Ron Paul, who stifles his repulsive free market evangelization long enough to divert attention away from this atrocity onto a tangible target that can mobilize the “base”- he and his gullible minions make fast with the scam that all things bad are due to financial manipulation of the monetary system- and nothing more.
With only the occasional, yet telltale reference to the “free market” in his rhetoric, he directs the majority of the pent up frustration of the populace towards an institution that he knows full well will never change or be made obsolete. He knows that the Federal Reserve and the existing monetary system are not only endemic to capitalism- but required for capitalism to function.
Bleu Noir
As capital’s organic growth becomes more visible, new and ever more insidious ways of extending its reach is realized. In San Francisco, privatized Google buses now make the morning rounds to pick up employees at city municipal bus stops, ostensibly to make a “green” contribution in lower emissions. But The Deceiver’s fingerprints are all over this one as well, green emissions is but a public PR job, the real concept is an extension of the social contract between employer and employee.
By providing privatized mass transportation into a living community that does not require a car for subsistence transportation, Google can add a value dimension for being an employee, and increase dependency on Google for not just wages, but transportation as well.
This extends also to the long provided “loaves and the fishes” style cafeteria, wherein free food (and as much as you want) is given without charge to employees through the company cafeteria, discouraging off campus lunch breaks and building dependency.
Corporate planners know full well that large scale provisioning of food and transportation eventually allows the company to reduce cash compensation, as the use value of their products is directly tied to the cost of labor reproduction.
The next natural steps forthcoming are no doubt company provided housing, “on campus” of course, again to be pitched as some environmentally favorable/humane means of freeing up communities with impacted housing (such as San Francisco) so that “others less fortunate” may procure much needed housing.
All that’s missing is the FoxConn standard issue suicide nets- because you just never know when a “team member” might just want to step out for a smoke- from the ninth floor.
King’s X
In a most sadistic twist of labor relations, the recent voting down of UAW expansion to VW’s new car plant in Tennessee shows the Yellow King to be in his cups. The usual suspects lock horns to first admonish the workers that any yes vote for unionization will “force” VW to locate subsequent plants out of state in a parade of displeasure. Or so say the Republican lawmakers from this state.
This is an obvious case of the captured legislature doing the bidding of capital. Oddly, VW remains silent, and uncharacteristically encourages the vote.
But the UAW is voted down, the workers are no dummies and are well aware of their predicament, they can see who owns the means of production and the ominously cold winds of a gut hooked Detroit blow even in Tennessee.
The real agenda is soon brought to light, first noticed with VW’s “disappointment” with the lost election, as they had hoped to bring forth their legendary company sponsored “Work Councils”, and required a union vote to legally deploy this tactic.
In a master stroke of labor relations, modern Capital does not fight organzied labor, it simply steps in pro-actively to organize itself. Why leave to chance a critical control level when you can step in and hold the controls yourself? By self-organizing and seeding the work council with specially trained “conflict managers” they can discretize any grievances and head off at the ground floor any dangerous mobilization against management’s interest.
The work councils become modern day privatized versions of the Stasi, with employed informants providing up to the minute labor logistics to the council members. And the beauty of it all, why, it’s all in the name of employee empowerment.
The noose of universal commoditization is tightening, the ligature marks are getting harder to hide as we inch closer to the realm of a dying sun……
We need to replace the Petro Dollar with a World Hydrogen E-Dollar based on a combination of Hydrogen Power and a progressive carbon tax dividend for private citizens only but not for governments and corporations. This will address national regulatory and currency/credit asymmetries to relocalize and deglobalize economies. It will whither corporate state hegemonies.
Hydrogen economics will proliferate over rural economies. Cities will have to use 4G reactors to burn nuclear waste from reactors and the military. We can filter uranium out of the oceans for millions of years, helping to safely rid the planet from radioactive waste.
That’s the easy part, the tough part is that we will have to get off of meat.
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I think ‘the tough part’ will be attempting to break the laws of chemistry and physics. Alchemists tried for about 500 years before giving up.
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He had another extensive comment on the hydrogen economy, but I left it in the queue for that reason.
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Get off meat?
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Very ingenious weaving of my favorite show True Detective with the unremitting propaganda of capitalism. You even managed to include a visual from one of my all-time favorite artists – Frank Frazetta!
I look back over time and see that the same arguments continue to be made over and over again. I look at the issues I write about– once again discussed many times before. It seems we are trapped in an endless cycle of self-destruction.
“Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, ‘The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning,’ is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that ‘productivity’ and ‘earnings’ keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it’s only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which must sooner or later crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide . . . though he’s amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker . . .”
~ Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
“The Man has a branch office in each of our brains, his corporate emblem is a white albatross, each local rep has a cover known as the Ego, and their mission in this world is Bad Shit. We do know what’s going on, and we let it go on. As long as we can see them, stare at them, those massively moneyed, once in a while. As long as they allow us a glimpse, however rarely. We need that. And they know it – how often, under what conditions…”
~ Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
“Don’t forget the real business of war is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ‘n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets.”
~ Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
“Death has been the source of Their power. It was easy enough for us to see that. If we are here once, only once, then clearly we are here to take what we can while we may. If They have taken much more, and taken not only from Earth but also from us – well, why begrudge Them, when they’re just as doomed to die as we are? All in the same boat, all under the same shadow … yes … yes. But is that really true? Or is it the best, and the most carefully propagated, of all Their lies, known and unknown?
We have to carry on under the possibility that we die only because They want us to: because They need our terror for Their survival.”
~ Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”
~ Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
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There is always something interesting to read and watch on CoIC.
Thanks to darbikrash for another view into the pit.
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Great song and video. I hear J.L. estate made 12 million last year….go figure. It’s not enough to simply be a (fill in the blank) or simply say what the problem is. We have to actually live differently….together with others.
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The Global Dimming factor is frequently overlooked. This report is both comforting and alarming; comforting in that if there is an increase in volcanic activity (which many claim) temperatures may not surge quite as quickly as emissions indicate.; alarming since volcanoes emit global warming gases that will exacerbate the predicament a little later.
Nature kicking the can down the road?
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/volcanic-eruptions-contributed-to-global-warming-pause-scientists-claim-9147856.html
The impact of volcanic eruptions on global warming could provide a new explanation for the so-called “pause” used by sceptics to deny climate change is happening, scientists have said.
According to a study in the US, models for predicting the rate at which temperatures around the world would rise from 1998 onwards did not take into consideration the measurable impact volcanoes can have.
Rather than contributing to global warming, eruptions release particles into the air that reflect sunlight – causing temperatures to drop.
Experts from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California said this phenomenon was not taken into account when predictions were made – offering an explanation for why the world seemed to stop heating up.
“We show that climate model simulations without the effects of early 21st century volcanic eruptions overestimate the tropospheric warming observed since 1998,” wrote Dr Benjamin Santer in the journal Nature Geoscience.
“To reduce these uncertainties, better observations of eruption-specific properties of volcanic aerosols are needed, as well as improved representation of these eruption-specific properties in climate model simulations.”
Powerful volcanic eruptions send small sulphur droplets, or aerosols, high into the atmosphere where they act as a mirror to reflect the sun’s rays and prevent them warming the ground.
In 1991, the second largest volcanic eruption of the 20th century occurred when Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines exploded with enormous force, killing almost 1,000 people and causing widespread damage.
Millions of tonnes of ash and gas were blasted into the atmosphere from the mountain, reaching an altitude of 21 miles.
Over the next two years, average temperatures across the whole of the Earth fell by up to 0.5C.
The research showed that Mount Pinatubo and the earlier major eruption of El Chichon in Mexico in 1982 “had important impacts on decadal changes in warming rates”.
In addition, 17 “small” eruptions occurred after 1999 which had a cumulative effect increasing the reflective effect of aerosols in the upper atmosphere by up to 7% per year from 2000 to 2009.
Scientists have provided a number of explanations in recent years as to why the apparent global warming “pause” came about, including natural climate variability to failures in accurate surface temperature measurement.
British climate expert Professor Piers Forster, from the University of Leeds, said: “Volcanoes give us only a temporary respite from the relentless warming pressure of continued increases in CO2.”
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So much for 350.org. So much for an inhabitable planet.
I’ve been suggesting 320ppm was the upper safe limit for a while, and now Wasdell says 310ppm,
There is no known mechanism for achieving 310ppm, especially when we are adding 35 billion tonnes of carbon a year.
Seemorerocks item:
* Avoiding dangerous climate change is no longer possible. Limiting its intensity requires restriction of the target temperature increase to no more than 1°C.
* Achieving that goal requires reduction in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gasses to around 310 ppm of CO2e (from the current value of some 450 ppm CO2e).
http://robinwestenra.blogspot.co.nz/2014/02/heading-for-10c-temperature-rsie.html
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Corporatism and Globalization: The Context of the TTIP and TPP
…if one wants to continue with complex commodification and globalization, one must accept the domination of bureaucracy in one form or another. The whole question becomes simpler if we understand that commodification and globalization as such are unnecessary for prosperity and undesirable from any human point of view. If we then seek not just to abolish corporations but to abolish all supply-based planned economy and restore purely demand-based economies, we can think of dispensing completely with bureaucratic rule. We can even think of having a choice among various forms of direct or assembly-based democracy.
Those are questions for another time. Under today’s conditions centralized representative government is not and cannot be anything but a sham. Neoliberalism has been, among other things, the art of perfecting the aesthetics, emotional manipulation, and intellectual astroturfing potential of this sham. It hasn’t just enlisted the mass media, the entertainment industry, the arts, the law, academia, the scientism ideology and scientific establishment, and the twin bourgeois ideologies of conservatism and liberalism, all of which would have happened anyway. It has convinced these adherents and practitioners to accept corporate rule as veritably a law of nature, something never to be questioned or even noticed, even in thought, and brought all these realms to the most potent level of marketing appeal to the atomized mass. All this is just the facade of power and culture.
Real power is inertially in the hands of the bureaucracies, “public” and “private”. But of course bureaucracies don’t just passively receive and use the power which economic structures deliver to them. On the contrary, globalization is a planned economy. It’s been planned by those same bureaucrats toward the goal of permanently increasing and expanding their power. Going back to the rise of imperialist ideology and corporate lobbying in the 19th century, corporatism has relentlessly and with ever greater self-consciousness and intentional focus sought to build this command economy. (I won’t here get into the history of where corporatism came from in the first place, but I wrote extensively about it here and here.)
This reached a new level of aggressiveness in the post-war time, and especially since the end of the Cold War. NAFTA and the “trade” pacts based upon it have comprised the state of the art in post-Cold War globalization offensives. Today the TTIP and the TPP propose to expand the NAFTA model from North America across both oceans to encompass Europe and the Pacific Rim under a single corporate umbrella, turn the Atlantic and Pacific into ponds upon one big corporate park, use this power position to overawe Latin America and ruthlessly subjugate Africa, and to crush what’s left of the substance of democracy and economic self-determination in every country encompassed, including America and the EU.
The twin bureaucratic structures, corporate and regulatory, understand this mission well. They see total power within their grasp. Today they’re gearing up to reach for it. The coupled mechanisms of the globalization compacts through which they intend to attain the totalitarian goal are “investor-to-state dispute settlement” (ISDS) and “regulatory coherence”. The former is a direct assault on democracy, civil society, and politics as such, as well as being a massive corporate welfare conveyor. The latter is a formula for total bureaucratic Gleichschaltung (coordination). More specifically, it’s a plan to fully and formally institutionalize the subservience of government bureaucracy to corporate bureaucracy, and to fully rationalize the processes of this subservience…”
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Darbikrash: good read, thanks. I don’t think we’re going to be around long enough for terminator-type robots on a grand scale start wiping us out (unless the droids are a metaphor for all of modern civ’s “gadgetry” including computers, vehicles, etc.). Ecosystem collapse will overtake and make moot all our efforts to kill ourselves with them. Drought causing food shortages looks to be step one, but other things are happening which will accelerate the pace through the bottleneck. Here’s one:
http://utopiathecollapse.com/2014/02/23/eight-banker-commits-suicide-as-mystery-over-string-of-deaths-deepens/
Eight banker commits suicide, as mystery over string of deaths deepens
February 2014 – FINANCE – “RIP … What happened to all the promises and plans you made? What happened to your return to Toronto? I didn’t know you were that upset! I will miss you always,” remarked the friend. Junjie had recently bought a HK$5.5 million apartment in Hong Kong and friends commented on how he always had a smile on his face.The fact that Junjie did not seem to be depressed and had made specific future plans suggests that his suicide was quite spontaneous and may have been in response to information he was told or had uncovered in the 48 hours preceding his death. … Grady Means, economist and advisor to Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, predicted that the 4th of March 2014 would be the date on which the economic collapse accelerated, followed by, “A run on the bank (that) will start suddenly, build quickly and snowball.” “The doomsday clock will ring then because the U.S. economy may fully crash around that date, which will, in turn, bring down all world economies and all hope of any recovery for the foreseeable future – certainly over the course of most of our lifetimes,” wrote Means in a 2012 Washington Times editorial. infowars
Last month, Gabriel Magee, an American senior manager, 39, fell from the 33-storey skyscraper at around 8am and was found on the ninth floor roof, which surrounds the Canary Wharf skyscraper. His body was left in full view of City workers in surrounding buildings for up to four hours as police investigated the death. He was a vice president in the corporate and investment bank technology department having joined in 2004, moving to Britain from the United States in 2007. Mr Magee, who lived in North London, was an expert in highly specialist software which reaps huge profits for the US company by predicting market patterns.
Senior colleagues were last night investigating Mr Magee’s recent workload as rumours swirled around the City over what may have prompted his death. Last night a colleague said: ‘They’re going to be going through his stuff to try to find out if he’d made some kind of terrible error. It’s possible he had been in the office all night trying to put it right before the fall.’ -Daily Mail
[Ryan Henry Crane, Executive Director Global Program Trading ] was the head at the program trading desk. Meaning he over saw all of the trades and was familiar with all of the software ( trade platforms) that these trades were done in. This job works closely with guess what? That’s right the London desk and who died last week in London? That’s right Gabriel Magee the one who jumped off the 33rd floor. What was his post? Head of IT and trade platforms meaning he had access to info that Ryan Henry Cross would have. They knew each other and uncovered something they were about the same age and these hits happen when two big announcements by JPM. One they are out of commodities and two the wholesale selling of their HQ downtown.
Seven Dead Bankers, No Questions Asked… What is going on with this apparent epidemic of banker “suicides”? Is anyone buying this as suicides? Can so many bankers be so mentally ill that they would all decide to go at the same time? … Did they sing to government investigators? Did they talk to missing Wall Street Journal reporter David Bird? Were they whistleblowers? Were they negotiating for sentencing? Were they going to sell out their masters? … Dead men tell no tales, or do they?
Russell Investments chief economist Mike Dueker was discovered dead from an apparent suicide Thursday, January 30, 2013. It was the fourth such instance of suicide by a prominent banker in just a week’s time. Dueker, who had previously been an assistant vice-president of the St. Louis Federal Reserve, had worked for Russell since 2008. William Brocksmit, a 58-year-old former senior executive at Duetsche Bank AG, was found dead of a suicide in his home in London on January 26, 2014. On January 27, 2014, at the Shangra-La Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand, international banker Karl Slym, there to attend a board meeting of Tata Motors, was found to have committed suicide in his hotel room. The next day, January 28, 2014, in London, 39-year-old Gabriel Magee, of JP Morgan, jumped from the roof of the company’s European headquarters. -Xenophilia
We’ve been on economic borrowed time since 2008 technically (ie. nothing was corrected that caused the crash), but it probably goes all the way back to the creation of the Federal Reserve and fiat money. When the money system goes, chaos erupts. In the meantime climate change effects (drought, floods, erratic and extreme temperatures, etc) grind on and on with more and more bizarre “weather anomalies” experienced and the natural world shutting down ecosystems everywhere with volcanos, dead zones, novel diseases, thermo-haline slow-down, and the like. Loss of habitat is the final outcome of polluting and overpopulating civilization.
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Oppression through Dependency:
A major talking point of the conservative base is that government “hands outs” to help the unemployed and the disenfranchised of America’s corporate economy creates dependency. Yet what we see is just the opposite – corporations intentionally creating dependency through their “large scale provisioning of food and transportation” and “campus housing” to workers in lieu of decent wages, as described in DK’s essay “The Yellow King”.
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IGNORE MY WORDS CHECK MY LINKS AT THE END
by Robert Callaghan
Dust off the old
thinking hat, it’s
time to get serious about where we stand regarding life, the universe and everything.
As the age of newspapers die off, we stand at the precipice of the most fundamental change in geologic history. Life is changing so fast that things can easily slip out of hand. But, it is my pleasure to inform you that we have stumbled on a way out. And, that way is hydrogen. So, dust off the Ballard Energy stocks and put one over the mantle. This is going to get interesting.
In May of last year, researchers at Virginia Tech University discovered a technology breakthrough that challenges our beliefs in life, the universe and everything.
We can now produce hydrogen in more ways and more cheaply than ever before, and we’re just getting started.
Honda and GM teamed up to develop a solar panel that electrifies water to produce hydroten under high pressure. This eliminates the need for a compressor, making it cheap and easy to fuel a Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicle. It takes 8 straight hours of sunlight to drive 35 miles — for now. Imagine if you add wind power? It’s still early days yet.
More importantly, it means you wake up in the morning and drive to town in your Ballard Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicle with only tiny water bubbles coming from your tailpipe. How good is that?
Hydrogen fuel cell cars are twice as efficient, more reliable, safer and easier to maintain because they have fewer moving parts. They are much lighter and also don’t require huge banks of expensive, unreliable batteries. New carbon fiber tank technology makes hydrogen storage safer and cheaper than ever. Even dynamite and gunfire won’t easily damage them. Sound too good to be true? You betcha it is!
Safe, Cheap, Plentiful
The Hindenburg disaster unfairly gave hydrogen a bad name. When it burned down, the visible flames were from the diesel fuel and aluminum oxide coating ( later used for rocket fuel ) that covered the ship. Hydrogen is more explosive than it is flammable. That is why it is so great a fuel. If you have a hydrogen leak it shoots straight up into the sky at 45 miles per hour, with no harm to the atmosphere. You don’t need to pipeline hydrogen very far, because it can now be made everywhere. NASA has developed extensive experience in the safe and effective handling of hydrogen.
Hydrogen is now easy, cheap, ultra-clean, plentiful and safe. It is no more dangerous than the natural gas system that surrounds you right now. Most people are not too afraid to use their barbecue. You can even cheaply and easily convert your current car to run with hydrogen, if you mix in a little flammable alcohol. Roy McAlister, of Nevada fame, has been burning hydrogen fuel in cars since the 1960s. He can tell you how.
No Coincidence
Last May, at the same time as the Virginia Tech discovery annoucnement, reasearchers at the Delft University of Technology have successfully stored nearly five percent of solar energy chemically in the form of hydrogen. This is a major feat as the design of the solar cell is very simple and cheap.
“Basically, we combined the best of both worlds,” explains Prof. Dr. Roel van de Krol, head of the HZB Institute for Solar Fuels: “We start with a chemically stable, low cost metal oxide, add a really good but simple silicon-based thin film solar cell, and – voilà – we’ve just created a cost-effective, highly stable, and highly efficient solar fuel device.”
What it Means
Hydrogen is extraordinarily abundant in water. We will never run out. It is super clean, efficient and now cheap and easily accessible. We can create hydrogen gas directly from the sun. New fuel cell vehicles are being rushed to manufacturing by auto giants right now. We can even easily and cheaply convert our current automobiles to burn it right now. It’s all good, and we have to embrace the hydrogen economy right now to save life on earth. I’m not exagerating.
http://www.gizmag.com/honda-solar-hydrogen-fuel-cell-refueller-electric-vehicle/14049/
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101315717
http://www.knowledgepublications.com/
https://www.google.ca/search?q=make+hydrogen+from+any+plant+material&oq=make&aqs=chrome.2.69i57j69i61j69i59j69i65l2j69i61.5368j0j4&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=122&ie=UTF-8
http://www.knowledgepublications.com/06252010.htm
https://www.google.ca/search?q=solar+powered+hydrogen+generator&oq=solar+powered+hydrogen+generator&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j0l5.5215j0j4&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=122&ie=UTF-8
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Lies connected with hydrogen are similar to the mythological Hydra. Cut off one and another grows in its place. You can spend a lifetime chopping down lies about hydrogen but they just keep coming.
The truth: hydrogen does not exist as an energy source (except in the Sun and stars) and making hydrogen consumes more energy than is released when it is utilised, so it is an expensive energy ‘black hole’. And the storage and transport of hydrogen is a technological nightmare because it cannot be liquefied above its critical temperature, which is about MINUS 240oC! Above that temperature it boils away and eventually escapes past any kind of valve because the molecules are so small.
Needless to say, there are plenty of ignorant fools who desperately want to believe the lies about hydrogen which are predicated on breaking fundamental laws of chemistry and physics. And there are plenty of shysters ready to make a fast buck out of ignorant fools. .
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The True Detective subreddit has become the Internet’s de facto water cooler, around which fans gather to analyze recursive theories and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it details – link.
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THOUSAND YARD STARE | a Rust Cohle fanmix : for the preacher and the atheist, the lawman and the criminal, the only truthful man in Louisiana.
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2-24-2014
The Fateful Collision – Floods, Catastrophe And Climate Denial
By David Edwards
An epic struggle is currently taking place that will determine the fate, and perhaps the survival, of our species. It is a collision between natural limits and rational awareness of the need to respect those limits, on the one hand, and the forces of blind greed, on the other.
Over the next few years, fundamental questions about who we are as a species really will be answered: Are we fundamentally sane, rational? Or are we a self-destructive failure that will end in the evolutionary dustbin?
As former Conservative energy minister Charles Hendry says, the recent UK floods ‘have ended political debate about climate change impacts’. Indeed, recent global weather extremes suggest that something of ‘enormous magnitude is happening’.
Even taken in isolation, the UK floods may constitute an ‘absolutely devastating environment incident’, a recent study by conservation scientists reports:
‘Noxious hydrogen sulphide fumes and lead poisoning are among the threats from floodwater contamination – while animals at almost all stages of the food chain, from insects to small mammals and birds, are already thought to be drowning or dying from lack of food.’
And these floods are merely the latest in a very long list of extreme events, including the ongoing, record-breaking Californian drought. Of this, University of California, Irvine, hydrologist James Famiglietti has said:
‘We are standing on a precipice here.’
In addition, we have seen the vast US ‘polar vortex’ and ‘Frankenstorm’ Sandy. Last year, Australia ‘recorded its warmest year on record,’ while Supertyphoon Haiyan, ‘the strongest tropical cyclone on record to hit land’, devastated the Philippines. India was also afflicted by massive floods. 2013 was ‘the 37th consecutive year with a global temperature above the 20th century average’.
Tony Juniper, former director of Friends of the Earth, commented to us:
‘The period of consequences is evidently upon us.’
The Bottom Line – Preparing For Human Extinction
Let us look more closely at the nature of this fateful collision.
In a quietly despairing blog, Guy McPherson, professor emeritus of natural resources, ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, nutshells one-half of the problem facing us:
‘If you’re too busy to read the evidence presented below, here’s the bottom line: On a planet 4 C hotter than baseline, all we can prepare for is human extinction.’
Could that happen? McPherson quotes professor of climatology Mark Maslin:
‘We are already planning for a 4°C world because that is where we are heading. I do not know of any scientists who do not believe that.’
That second sentence is worth reading again. Or we can recall the comments made by Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, on the BBC website in 2010:
‘Yet over a pint of ale or sharing a coffee it is hard to find any scientist seriously engaged in climate change who considers a 4C rise within this century as anything other than catastrophic for both human society and ecosystems.
‘Moreover, ask those same scientists if 4C is likely to be as high as it could get prior to the temperature beginning to fall, and many will shake their heads pointing to a range of discontinuities (tipping points) that may see us witness temperatures increasing well beyond 4C.’
This, then, is one-half of our problem: McPherson is right about the significance of a 4 C rise in temperature, and he is right that scientists widely believe that we are indeed heading for a catastrophic 4 C warmer world, or worse.
There is, of course, debate about the timing of this temperature rise…
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‘Thieves’, and a nice little graphic showing the decline in extraction of oil/gas from 4.5 to 1.5 million barrels per day.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/independence-row-gets-vicious-as-first-minister-alex-salmond-accuses-uk-government-of-being-thieves-who-plunder-scotlands-oil-and-gas-reserves-9150233.html
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http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/22002-the-march-of-anthropogenic-climate-disruption
The March of Anthropogenic Climate Disruption
Monday, 24 February 2014 09:11
By Dahr Jamail, Truthout | News Analysis
“The fact that the planet is most likely long past having gone over the cliff when it comes to passing the point of no return regarding ACD is a fact most people prefer not to contemplate.
And who can blame them? The relentless onslaught of distress signals from the planet, coupled with the fact that the governments of the countries generating the most emissions are those marching lock-step with the fossil fuel industries are daunting, to say the least.”
Much more….
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Monday, February 24, 2014
Methane Levels Continue to Destabilize Arctic- Yet Silence
…As outlined previously on this blog the precipitous drop in Arctic sea ice we have been seeing is now causing methane seepage from the depths of the Arctic Ocean. This indicates positive feedbacks that threaten to catapult the Earth into abrupt climate change are now happening. However, we see little if no mention of this even by environmental organizations and definitely not by the media or this government. They all continue to push their pet causes to either collect donations or push their political agendas for votes. It is very disconcerting to think that even those who claim to be concerned about addressing climate destruction don’t seem to be as concerned as they should be now. It is a given that those who become wealthier from selling doubt and lies would ignore this or try to discredit it. However, to see it being ignored and even challenged as untrue by those who certainly know it is true is not only disconcerting but curious.
I sit here looking at this information, checking it out and studying the reports. The previous entries written here about it contain much information to explain how it all works and that abrupt climate change is something that we should all be concerned about. I am baffled by what appears to be the lack of real concern about methane feedbacks in the Arctic by those who claim this to be a planetary emergency. Is it because this is so intense in its possible scope that even those who fight denial are in denial about this? Concentrations of CO2 reached 400PPM last May and have been hovering at that mark ever since. Last year was the 37th consecutive year of above average temperature. We are seeing the trend of more frequent and extreme events pertaining to the hydrologic cycle in concert with rising CO2 concentrations that bring about these feedbacks covering a greater percentage of the globe affecting agriculture, water, social systems and life itself.
Yet, methane seems to be the gas that is OK to forget in placing CO2 above it all instead of making the connection between them. Now, I am not saying CO2 is not important. It is the driver of climate change and its concentrations on land, sea and in air are now bringing the world to a place unseen by humans in all of our existence. However, methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas in the short term and its releases due to melting due to burning fossil fuels and other destructive habits is the very spark that can lead the Earth to abrupt climactic shifts on a timescale that we are not prepared to deal with!
Therefore, I hope those reading this take a look at all the information provided at the link posted above. These extreme events in concert with the jet stream becoming more erratic (Arctic amplification) give us a limited time in which to truly take this seriously. There is no time for political initiatives to beg the EPA to push “new plants” alone to decrease their carbon emissions. It must be EVERY SECTOR and it must be now and it must include leaving all fossil fuel reserves currently in the ground there. There is also no more time to continue to use this human crisis as a way to boost individual egos or to give praise to those who claim to be our saviors by throwing their billions at the very corrupt individuals in Congress who enabled this and continue to profit from it! The time for expecting those in government agencies in league with polluters to have an attack of conscience about this is over.
We will not get another chance to do this right. We may already have crossed the tipping point and keeping this information hush hush in order for both political sides to keep their business as usual in an election year is immoral on all counts. This supercedes elections, egos and revenge. This is about telling the truth and starting a global WW2 effort to shut down the cause before irreversible damage is done to the ecosystems that give all species life. But what do I know. I’m just one little person shouting this into the void because I love my son and I want him to HAVE A HABITABLE WORLD….
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It was (Louis) Pasteur, the father of microbiology, who 150 years ago said, “Gentlemen, at the end, it will be the microbes that will survive.”
~ MOSELIO SCHAECHTER
“…Here at TTP the interest is primarily on glacier microbes, which are highly susceptible to climate change and underpin Arctic foodwebs. Glacier retreat will ultimately deliver them to proglacial ecosystems where ‘psychrophiles’ will suffer both environmental and competitive stresses, while some ‘cryotolerant’ species may thrive in the warmer, more nutrient rich conditions. Reduced nutrient transformation and community structuring will limit the efficacy of the supraglacial zone as a metacommunity shaping downstream ecosystems. Complex ecological shifts are likely to result from glacier retreat, and the fundamental functioning of Arctic ecosystems will certainly change. One possible outcome is a homogenisation of the global species distribution and overall reduction in biodiversity driven by the decline of endemic species and proliferation of cosmopolitan ones. A warming climate will therefore revolutionise Arctic ecology.
It is not only temperature changes and glacier melt that impacts Arctic microbial communities. Anthropogenic pollutants have been shown to alter modes and rates of microbial activity in a number of ways. Firstly, the delivery of bio-available nitrogenous compounds has inhibited nitrogen fixation in cryoconite communities in Svalbard. Nitrogen fixation requires high energy expenditure and is only carried out by nitrogen fixing bacteria when there is insufficient bio-available nitrogen to support their growth. The identification of Nifh genes but lack of active nitrogen fixation in Svalbard cryoconite holes indicates that despite nitrogen fixing bacteria being present, their growth and proliferation is entirely sustained by nitrogenous contaminants from anthropogenic pollution. Human activity has therefore had a huge impact upon the mechanisms of nutrient cycling in these communities.
Secondly, black carbon, persistent organic pollutants, heavy metals, pesticides and radionuclides originating from industrial emissions and other anthropogenic sources are increasingly deposited on Arctic glacier surfaces. This can significantly alter the biodiversity and community structures of supraglacial ecosystems as well as glacier surface albedo, and the bio-accumulation effects are as yet unknown….”
http://tothepoles.wordpress.com/2014/02/20/arctic-ecology-and-climate-change/
“…Cold temperatures and ice sheets have kept pathogens from moving north, but warmer temperatures in the Arctic have not only allowed new pathogens to move in, but the “big thaw” happening now has also allowed for pathogens from the north to move south and cause infections.
“Ice is a major eco-barrier for pathogens,” Michael Grigg, a molecular parasitologist with the U.S. National Institutes of Health and an adjunct professor at UBC, said in a statement. “What we’re seeing with the big thaw is the liberation of pathogens gaining access to vulnerable new hosts and wreaking havoc.”
In separate work, these researchers also identified a parasite, Sarcocystis pinnipedi, that originated in the Arctic and moved south. This new strain was responsible for a die-off of grey seals in Nova Scotia in 2012, in addition causing the deaths of an endangered Steller sea lion, seals, Hawaiian monk seals, walruses, polar and grizzly bears in Alaska and as far south as British Columbia….”
http://www.care2.com/causes/why-is-a-deadly-cat-parasite-attacking-arctic-belugas.html#ixzz2uJ5gvDsg
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“Media manipulation in the U.S. today is more efficient than it was in Nazi Germany, because here we have the pretense that we are getting all the information we want. That misconception prevents people from even looking for the truth.”
~ Mark Crispin Miller
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Rest assured Mike, manipulation, lies and gibberish are everywhere:
‘While the newly proposed 2 per cent rates rise did make the increase more affordable the report accompanying the draft annual plan said it would put some upward pressure on future rate increases.
But the downside is that under the revised draft annual plan rates next year would rise from 6.4 per cent to 7.8 per cent and council would also borrow $2.8m from itself.’
http://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/news/9763831/Council-revises-rates-increase
.
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It’s not the Federal Reserve, it’s the system it serves
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On the creation of the Federal Reserve:
This is from Doug Henwood’s 1997 masterpiece Wall Street:
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Great and terrifying article here:
[excerpt]
Federal officials have designated portions of 11 drought-ridden Western and Central states as primary natural disaster areas. Map from UDSA.gov. Image from NBCDFW.com.
How bad is it?
According to NBC Dallas-Ft. Worth, “Federal officials have designated portions of 11 drought-ridden Western and Central states as primary natural disaster areas, highlighting the financial strain the lack of rain is likely to bring to farmers in those regions.” [See map above.]
California has gotten a huge amount of recent drought publicity, mostly because of its large population and its importance as a national breadbasket, with both these needs competing for the same water. The scope of the federal declaration is the big red area covering the Southwest on the map above, making it clear that the current drought should be seen as a cross-country mega-drought. Climate experts are saying that it likely signifies a “dust-bowlification” of the American Southwest.
How bad is it in Texas? Some West Texas reservoirs, like Lubbock’s Meridian Lake, have gotten too dry to use, forcing Lubbock to turn to groundwater. The Texas Panhandle is now in worse shape than it was in the the 1950s. Most Texas ranchers who have not already gone broke are losing money. Now California ranchers are actually shipping cattle to Texas, apparently based on the theory that the Texas drought is a different drought!
Texas politicians mostly deny man-made climate change is happening to Texas
Texas politicians, starting with Gov. Rick Perry at the top, but also including most of the Republicans who run the state, seek to reward the business interests who fund their political campaigns. In Texas, where there are no limits on campaign contributions, the top contributors to Texas politicians typically tend to be home builders and various land development interests. For example the late Bob Perry, a home builder who was the top Texas political contributor, had recently given over $10 million.
Texas is a state where it is impossible to bribe a politician, just so long as you call it a campaign contribution.
As they say, Texas is a state where it is impossible to bribe a politician, just so long as you call it a campaign contribution. The home builders hope to profit by persuading politicians to attract or create new (low wage) jobs, and new business investments, which of course would expand the market for new homes. All this while opposing any limits or regulations on growth, and while expecting local taxes on current residents to provide the roads — and now water — needed for development.
Whenever climate science, environmental considerations, or legal reform get in the way of making money on land development, the Texas bankers, developers, and land speculators know how to play to win. Since the Texas constitution was written mainly by and for the landed gentry of Texas after the Civil War, this legacy means that Texas landowners have “property rights” — meaning the right to develop almost anything in the untaxed, unincorporated suburban areas outside a central city.
There is the prospect of making billions of dollars from suburban sprawl land development surrounding the major metropolitan areas where most Texans now live. Natural limits to growth? Any limits on land development come as bad news and have always been strongly opposed by the well-organized, well-funded Texas growth lobby. The big money in Texas is largely made through selling and developing raw land for ever-expanding rings of suburban sprawl growth that surround its big metropolitan areas.
Austin is now in the midst of a highly profitable Austin-area growth boom, Climate change denial prevails through most state agencies (although the state climatologist believes that climate change is real). The politicians who make the rules outrank the scientists no matter how good the science, or how urgent the scientific warnings.
In Texas, climate science is considered subversive because it tells the politicians stuff they would rather deny. When Gov. Rick Perry was running for president he made his climate change denial very clear. Perry considers global warming a scientific hoax.
In accord with climate science denial, a new special report by Texas Comptroller Susan Combs warns of severe Texas water shortages to come due to population growth while never mentioning either global warming or climate change! Her 23-page report titled “Texas Water Report: Going Deeper for the Solution,” is available online. This report has a map of Texas surface reservoirs showing that many reservoirs in the west half of Texas are severely depleted. “According to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), 46 of the state’s public water systems were at risk of running out of water within 180 days as of Jan. 8, 2014.” (Page 8)
Evidence of pervasive climate change denial is to be seen even in mainstream Texas media.
Evidence of pervasive climate change denial is to be seen even in mainstream Texas media. For example, a front page October 6, 2013, Austin American-Statesman article said that if current trends continued, then Austin’s Highland lakes reservoirs could go completely dry in three years, perhaps toward the end of 2016. This article tells its readers that Austin is a city in serious water trouble, while never mentioning that the probable cause of the drought severity is global warming and climate change!
Water is for fighting
If there is one misguided Texas water planning policy that should win a blue ribbon for bad planning, it is probably the fact that there are two completely different bodies of law that apply to surface water and underground water. Surface water is in short supply, tightly regulated, and mostly already fully allocated to users. Underground water, on the other hand, is governed by “right of capture” law which holds that any property owner has the right to pump whatever they can from beneath the land they own.
The reality is that it is all the same water. In a world that makes sense, all of this water needs to be regulated by the same law, or else some deep pocket water-hustlers are liable to come along and try to steal all the ground water.
Nate Blakeslee recently wrote an article in Texas Monthly describing the needless water wars that are arising as a result of these policies. Corporate water lobbyists like Forestar are trying to obtain the legal right to drain the most easily tapped aquifers, and to pipe this water to supply private developer interests around Austin.
Since Texas has been abnormally dry in the last few years, especially 2011, various acute shortages have been cropping up. That is a political problem; the Texas public want their officials to do something that doesn’t cost too much to make such problems go away.
Gov. Rick Perry responded to the drought problem by successfully promoting Proposition 6 in November 2013; it was a band-aid approach rather than a policy that deals with the Texas water crisis in depth. Instead, Proposition 6 is more like a $2 billion line of credit on a loan for a few reservoirs and water pipelines to take poorly regulated ground water from rural areas and transfer it to urban areas, where it can be sold at a higher price.
The same pattern of rural areas being sacrificed to the needs of urban areas can be seen in this unified appeal from County Judges who regard these water transfers as a fight for local community survival.
Next week: In “Can Austin survive the current Texas drought?, Part 2,” we will continue by taking a close look at the transportation planning being done in the Austin area, and how this planning is related to the water issue. We will conclude with a review of the best and latest climate science. How long can we afford to do little about the current trends?
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Ozymandias…
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Percy Bysshe Shelley… an ominous ode to present and future horrors.
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He needn’t worry about “getting off meat.” Before long it’ll be hard to find food of any kind for a lot of reasons: climate change effects (drought, flooding, heat), economic meltdown, diseases (of crops and vegetation, pollinators and other species, and humans), volcanic activity, and others.
Huge drought in Brazil:
http://www.npr.org/2014/02/23/280770928/drought-could-drain-more-than-brazils-coffee-crop
Brazil, a country usually known for its rainforests, has been facing a severe drought in its breadbasket region, leaving people in the cities without water and farmers in the countryside with dying crops. Global prices for coffee, in particular, have been affected. Scientists in Brazil say the worst is yet to come — yet no one in the government, it seems, is listening…. “All of us have never seen a drought that’s been so prolonged and so aggressive as this one,” Polidor says. “In 49 days, we got maybe 11 millimeters of rain.”… Juliano Jose Polidor, the corn farmer in the Brazilian countryside, doesn’t have strong political views and doesn’t know much about the debate about climate change. He says he just knows what he sees. “I think we are getting to the hour where it’s not just me who needs to be worried, but the whole world,” says Polidor. “We will have to decide what to do about what is happening.”
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/02/dollar-deep-state.html
The Dollar and the Deep State
Posted on February 24, 2014 by Charles Hugh Smith
If we consider the Fed’s policies (tapering, etc.) solely within the narrow confines of the corporatocracy or a strictly financial context, we are in effect touching the foot of the elephant and declaring the creature to be short and roundish.
I have been studying the Deep State for 40 years, before it had gained the nifty name “deep state.” What others describe as the Deep State I term the National Security State which enables the American Empire, a vast structure that incorporates hard and soft power–military, diplomatic, intelligence, finance, commercial, energy, media, higher education–in a system of global domination and influence.
[at the bottom of the article he says] I would argue that the dollar will soon be scarce, and the simple but profound laws of supply and demand will push the dollar’s value not just higher but much higher. The problem going forward for exporting nations will be the scarcity of dollars.
http://www.boston.com/news/science/2014/02/19/bumblebees-getting-stung-bad-honeybee-sickness/dENBc4AiUn1f4UzlvJrFBI/story.html
Bumblebees getting stung bad by honeybee sickness
[beside colony collapse disorder]
Wild bumblebees worldwide are in trouble, likely contracting deadly diseases from their commercialized honeybee cousins, a new study shows… “Wild populations of bumblebees appear to be in significant decline across Europe, North America, South America and also in Asia,” said study author Mark Brown of the University of London. He said his study confirmed that a major source of the decline was “the spillover of parasites and pathogens and disease” from managed honeybee hives.
and one more, among dozens I could post, this new radiation leak from a storage facility in New Mexico
https://www.radcast.org/updates-on-wipp/
Updates on WIPP
2/24 Possibilities from WIPP…http://nukeprofessional.blogspot.fr/2014/02/wipp-plutonium-leak-to-kill-at-least.html The amount in air is at least 810 TIMES BACKGROUND
2/24 They tell us this but NOT the unit of the measurement of the number! CPM?CPS?Bq? ????????
Official: “4,400,000 disintegrations of alpha radiation” including Plutonium detected at leaking U.S. nuclear site; “Highest recorded level” — Santa Fe Briefing: “Serious incident involving radiation at the WIPP site” — Gov’t “reaching out to employees who are worried” about exposure
From Majia’s Blog: Dr. Yablokov concluded “When you hear ‘no immediate danger’ then you should run away as far and as fast as you can.”
Majia Here: Dr. Yablokov’s greatest concern was for plutonium. All alpha emitters are very bad for our health when ingested/inhaled, including Uranium, Polonium, Astatine, etc.
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