Tags
"Renewable" Energies, '1 C Max', Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Alternative Energy Fetishes, Biofuels, Fossil Fuel Extenders, Green Illusions, Military Industrial Complex, Ozzie Zehner, Peak Oil, Resource Wars, Solar Energy, Techno-Fundamentalism, The Fertile Ground Institute, The Resource Curse, War for Profit, Wind Turbines
I’ve become rather jaded at the stream of ever-worsening environmental reports these days. Surely if we had some sort of techno-fix to halt the cascade of biospheric tipping points we have breached, we would have deployed them by now. Nevertheless, the carrot of a civilization-saving technological breakthrough is forever dangled before our eyes. By all accounts, we appear hellbent on doing everything humanly possible to maintain and perpetuate industrial civilization by deploying “earth-friendly” renewable energy technologies which, in the end, turn out to be nothing more than “reconstituted fossil fuels”.
The role that fossil fuels play in the creation, maintenance and support of alternative energy technologies is not discussed or analyzed at all by those peddling it to the masses who live with the hope of a “green” economy and carbon-neutral civilization. From the massive mining operations and manufacturing processes necessary to extract the rare earth metals essential in constructing wind turbines, solar panels, and electric car batteries to their daily maintenance, de-activation, and final discardment, the amount of fossil fuel energy embedded in the entire life cycle of such alternative energy technologies renders moot their benefits when compared to what is actually more effective in solving our energy and climate conundrum —reducing our consumption through energy efficiency improvements and waste reduction programs. Alternative energy technologies cannot replace our dependence on fossil fuels and are, in the final analysis, diverting us from coming to grips with a way-of-life that cannot go on for much longer. We have a consumption crisis.
Here is an excerpt from a must-see talk by engineer and energy analyst Ozzie Zehner, author of Green Illusions:
“Common knowledge presumes that we have a choice between fossil fuels and green energy, but alternative energy technologies rely on fossil fuels through every stage of their life cycle. Most importantly, alternative energy financing relies ultimately on the kind of economic growth that fossil fuels provide. Alternative energy technologies rely on fossil fuels for raw material extraction, for fabrication, for installation and maintenance, for back-up, as well as decommissioning and disposal. And at this point, there’s even a larger question: where will we get the energy to build the next generation of wind power and solar cells? Wind is renewable, but turbines are not. Alternative energy technologies rely on fossil fuels and are, in essence, a product of fossil fuels. They thrive within economic systems that are themselves reliant on fossil fuels.
Now, I’m no fan of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are finite and dirty, but we use them for five principal reasons. Fossil fuels are dense. Their energy is storable, portable, fungible (which means they can be easily traded), and they are transformable into other products like pesticides, fertilizers, and plastics.
Now, these qualities cannot be measured in kilowatts, so what happens when we spend our precious fossil fuels on building alternative energy. Well then we get energy that is not dense, but diffuse. It’s not easily storable. It’s not portable. It’s not fungible. And it is non-tranformable.
Now to increase the quality of the energy, we then have to spend more fossil fuels to build batteries, to build back-up power plants, and other infrastructure. And of course this is incredibly expensive. Ultimately that expense represents the hidden fossil fuels behind the scene.
There’s an impression that clean energy can supply a growing population of high consumers. There’s an impression that alternative energy can displace fossil fuel use, but the evidence doesn’t show that.
As Ozzie Zehner states, fossil fuels are finite and dirty. If you look at the headlines, the geopolitical wrangling and wars that takes place over the extraction of fossil fuels are another nasty and destabilizing side-effect of our dependency on fossil fuels. America’s global network of bases and its military industrial complex are yet another hidden cost of our fossil fuel addiction. Does President Obama tell the people of America the real underlying reason for why we are again bombing Iraq?
The US military intervention, despite its “humanitarian” propaganda, is nevertheless part of clear political objectives that are to protect American diplomatic personnel stationed in Erbil (which is also home to a CIA base) and large multinational companies in the hydrocarbon/oil sector such as Mobil, Chevron, Exxon and Total exploiting the oil production in the region and having already invested more than $10 billion there, but the primary purpose above all is to keep the Iraqi regime ally, inherited from the American invasion. The United States did not intervene when Mosul fell and other regions and more than 200 000 refugees were on the road in the direction of Iraqi Kurdistan, but only when IS was threatening to conquer the Kurdish areas of the North and the capital Baghdad in the South. – link
Here we are once again back at war because we need that black goo lying beneath the ground that those lunatic terrorists are running around on. And it also doesn’t help that America has become a warfare state with the corporations and the über rich benefitting every time we crank up our war machine.
Among many others who have written about this subject, here are two people from The Fertile Ground Institute who have also looked into alternative energy technologies and come away with the same conclusion as Ozzie Zehner:
I agree with commenter ‘C 1 Max’ whose many thoughtful comments at Robert Scribbler’s site were summarily deleted.
As long as we ignore the limitations of technology and the unsustainable nature of our economic system, the battle is lost for mankind. The grave we are digging for ourselves will only get deeper and deeper, spurred on by our alternative energy fetishes and temples to technology.
Tom said:
Taken to its logical conclusion:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/22/artificial-intelligence-oxford_n_5689858.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592
Artificial Intelligence May Doom The Human Race Within A Century, Oxford Professor Says
An Oxford philosophy professor who has studied existential threats ranging from nuclear war to superbugs says the biggest danger of all may be superintelligence.
Superintelligence is any intellect that outperforms human intellect in every field, and Nick Bostrom thinks its most likely form will be a machine — artificial intelligence.
There are two ways artificial intelligence could go, Bostrom argues. It could greatly improve our lives and solve the world’s problems, such as disease, hunger and even pain. Or, it could take over and possibly kill all or many humans. As it stands, the catastrophic scenario is more likely, according to Bostrom, who has a background in physics, computational neuroscience and mathematical logic.
“Superintelligence could become extremely powerful and be able to shape the future according to its preferences,” Bostrom told me. “If humanity was sane and had our act together globally, the sensible course of action would be to postpone development of superintelligence until we figure out how to do so safely.”
Bostrom, the founding director of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, lays out his concerns in his new book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.
[there’s more – I think this professor is office bound or he’d surely notice there are a few other problems he’s not examining.]
Your essay examines the faulty economics that promotes “green” ways of providing energy and only wanted to note here that it’s the same faulty economics that discounted the environmental degradation inherent in industrial civilization – especially in writing off the inherent pollution and waste.
Enjoying the links – thanks xraymike.
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xraymike79 said:
“If humanity was sane and had our act together globally…”
Ha, ha, ha!
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Apneaman said:
“…the sensible course of action would be to postpone development of superintelligence until we figure out how to do so safely.”
Other than the cost, have we ever said this (technology) is a bad idea so lets not do it?
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the Heretick said:
If you stop and think about it, the super-intelligence is here, it is the surveillance state.
From traffic cameras to surveillance cameras, from Echelon to spy satellites, the sun never sets on the surveillance state.
The problem is that this super-intelligence is in the service of the same group of people who keep the war machine humming along for the benefit of the global 1% and the multi-national corps. they own.
Data fusion, baby, Total Information Awareness.
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xraymike79 said:
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the Heretick said:
Good link, generated some good searches. Here’s a link for you.
https://www.urbanshield.org/
What the hell, if I was going to be on a list, I would already be on it. But hey, what do TPTB care about small fry?
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xraymike79 said:
After my Israel/Palestine post, I earned a spot on the list.
Did you notice I’m being shunned by Facebook?
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Apneaman said:
This was the last comment I submitted on the last thread, it belongs here.
Paul Chefurka on green/techno denial and heroism.
“There is a more subtle form, one that is endemic among the white hats of the green movement. They are the ones who tirelessly work from the moral high ground – to change policies, to develop and promote green technology, to encourage sustainability. They resolutely refuse to countenance any thoughts of our predicament being inextricable. Tireless work, even in a lost cause, tends to keep one insulated from the deeper, darker realizations, and lets one keep fighting the good fight. Heroism has always been an intrinsic part of our story: “Quitters never win and winners never quit!”
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xraymike79 said:
Yes, I liked that comment and it describes Robert Scribbler, aka “Fantasy Scribe”, to a ‘T’.
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mike k said:
We are indeed a sorry bunch. We continue to take the low road at every occasion. Without wisdom and a higher ideal to serve, we stumble blindly to our doom. It’s really hard at times to summon up some compassion for our disgusting performance….
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xraymike79 said:
Just following our primitive instincts of protecting high value resources for the tribe of Wall Street investors and consumer capitalism.
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Mel Strawn said:
This comment feels to me like walking into the colosseum just after the tigers have been let loose–but… My take: It would be useful to have a ‘total carbon footprint’ cost analysis of all types of renewable energy systems/technologies; this in order to compare with our business-as-usual carbon footprint including its extraneous costs not now figured into our current economic model. It would then, assuming we find them not so different and the ‘green’, renewable energy costs in carbon emissions negating its ameliorating promise, be time (past time!) to envision and act on ways-of-life reduction of energy use/emissions , to get with the paradigm shift we need. That shift, among a million other details, could at least try to imagine a different than GDP/$ measure of human well-being and a way of cooperating in a common, resource-limited world instead of competing for status and ever more gaudy bobbles and guns.
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xraymike79 said:
That sounds too rational and sentient for what the mass of humanity have devolved into. Too much green washing and PR propaganda going on.
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xraymike79 said:
Here is a brilliant website hosting a compilation of the Doomosphere written by Gail Zawacki. I accept the criticism on Capitalism which, in the end, was simply a more efficient method for killing ourselves off.
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Apneaman said:
Gail. You Da Bomb!
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Apneaman said:
Tedious? Hell no! I never get bored with yelling, hating on, judging and mocking capitalism. Why, it’s just like ®Red Bull™…it give me wings.
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witsendnj said:
Highest praise most humbly accepted, I’m glad you don’t resent the snark, and thank you xraymike for this and all your great illuminating posts.
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Systemic Disorder said:
True, capitalism is “simply a more efficient method for killing ourselves off,” but humanity didn’t have the ability destroy itself or the planet before capitalism begat industrial civilization. Considering the overwhelming amount of cheerleading for capitalism in the corporate media and rising belief in the chimera of “green capitalism,” we can’t stress the critiques of capitalism too much!
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xraymike79 said:
I’m not giving up my attack on capitalism, the very system guiding us off the cliff.
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Systemic Disorder said:
And very much needed attacks.
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witsendnj said:
You should more properly then be attacking fossil fuels. It is the use of fossil fuels that has accelerated growth and is causing a global collapse. The economic system is irrelevant and it is in service to what technology is available. Humans have been in overshoot and collapse multiple times…what has changed is the scale, not the pattern of behavior. See: http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2014/08/19/341573332/lessons-from-the-last-time-civilization-collapsed?uidt=1408793147#commentBlock?provider=Facebook
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James said:
Not only the scale but the development of the technological complex adaptive system is far beyond what occurred at an earlier time. The energy flow and complexity is immense, the tools perverse in their application, and the damage is awesome. Having themselves evolved over billions of years and believing in the steadfastness of ecological relationships and that somehow life is as resilient as the orbit of the earth about the sun, humans will go insane to discover they have destroyed the basis of their own lives in exchange for an orgy of pleasure that lasts less than a second in life’s long day. And yet their greatest worry is about money, how much they make and how much they lose and the cancer eats more, converting natural environment into malignant cellular structure that has as much future as a metastasizing melanoma inside the human system. Grow, grow , grow, ………dead.
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Systemic Disorder said:
Cause and effect are not so simple. Modern industrial civilization would not be possible without fossil fuels, but the exploitation of fossil fuels came into use to sustain and accelerate industrial development, which needs reliable energy inputs. Capitalism needs those inputs because it is a system that requires continual growth despite the finite space and resources of Earth. If a new technology allowed, say, solar energy to be used on the same scale as fossil fuels, and capitalism continued, the same problem of infinite growth on a finite planet would exist.
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James said:
IMO, capitalism is not an organizational form that appeared de novo, but one which has some basic human behavioral antecedents which will always have us pushing against limits to growth. Technological industrialism has just set the limit at systemic death.
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WrenchMonkey said:
For most of human evolution the laws of Nature set the limits to growth, as, inevitably, they always will. Humans did not – could not – push against those limits to any significant degree prior to the Neolithic “revolution” and the onset of the disease we have come to think of as civilisation.
It was the abandonment of the forager/gatherer/hunter culture that lead to the spawning of this “civilisation” and, ultimately, to our current unsustainable and irredeemable culture of domination. It’s my humble opinion that humans stopped evolving around 10 – 15 thousand years ago.
Creating large stationary population centers, which probably began with the construction of monolithic structures for group “worship“, enabled the development of patriarchal hierarchies, which allowed the pathological minority to gain personal power, eventually becoming dominant over the social power of the majority. It was the social power of small, tribal, forager cultures that kept essential psychopaths, Kunlangeta, in check for hundreds of thousands of years.
Essential psychopaths make up no more than around 6% of any given population and they are male by a wide majority. When a tribe or “society” consists of a very small number of individuals it’s quite likely there will be no sociopaths present. If there are, they will stand out like the proverbial sore thumb making them easy to eliminate.
Once civilisation began to “industrialise” – and sedentary farming was a primary impetus for industrialisation – it became, ipso facto, expansionistic, like a cancer. With that growth, for the first time, it became possible for the pathological to hide in the resultant hierarchies, seek each other out – a skill at which they excel – form cliques and cabals and rise to power.
Capitalism, economics, militarism, classism, global warming/climate change and all the myriad “issues” confronting us today are merely symptoms of a disease – our much vaunted civilisation – which will, if not stopped very soon, result in its own collapse at the very least, mass ecocide and, possibly, even near-term human extinction.
As long as pathological psychoses are part of the human condition, it will be impossible to build functional societies or cultures wherein populations can exceed 150 as the extreme maximum. Even that many in a group would be pushing it.
Just my opinion
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James said:
Agree. And our linear path across the stage is almost over. Our most damaging trait is the nearly universal sociopathic willingness to deceive others for personal gain or to at least set the economic trap so that others, seemingly of their own will, impale themselves upon the carefully baited financial hook.
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WrenchMonkey said:
I concur.
Even those who are not clinically pathological themselves have become “infected” by Life-long exposure to the dominator culture of the pathocracy created and maintained by essential psychopaths.
Radical “individualism“, “enlightened self-interest” and various related ideologies have destroyed the unity that is required for the long-term survival of a social species such as Homo sapiens.
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WrenchMonkey said:
Actually I think that it was the Neolithic “Revolution” that begat industrial civilisation. It’s my opinion that humans actually stopped evolving at that point. They began seeing themselves as separate from Nature and superior to all other Life on Earth.
We abandoned foraging/gathering/hunting and started building monumental structures for ceremonial “worship”. This led to permanent settlements, which spawned “agriculture” and that was the beginning of “industrial” civilisation. Do a search on Gobekli Tepe when you have a chance. Interesting stuff when you read between the lines.
Personally I have serious doubts that any civilisation using “technology” much beyond that of the stone age could be sustained indefinitely on a single planet.
Just my opinion
Consummatum est
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david higham said:
There are sound arguments to support the case that the only long term sustainable societies were hunter gatherers.I have stated these arguments on past posts here
and at nature bats last.
‘Too smart for our own good’ by Craig Dilworth’s includes most of them.Also if you haven’t read it,A short history of progress discusses this too.
It seems to me that the turning point that began the long trip to the inescapable progress trap that we are now in was when we learnt how to smelt metals.
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WrenchMonkey said:
After a few years researching ponerology, psychopathy and a bit of anthropology I’ve reached what seem to me to be some basically self-evident conclusions regarding what happened with the Neolithic “revolution”
I think the arguments to which you refer are beyond sound; possibly irrefutable in my opinion.
Thanks for the tip regarding Dilworth. I’ll definitely make an effort to add his work to my digital library.
You might already be familiar with Derek Jensen’s “Endgame”. The three volumes make up quite a treasure trove.
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jonjost said:
I recall when the first communications satellites were put in place, and people marveled at the seeming efficiency – how that little sphere replaced so many towers etc. And so it is with technology as each phase introduces greater efficiency, greater this and that – and always the real cost is discounted and ignored. The real cost being EVERYTHING up until that point, which should be tacked on as one of the debits. But never is. Essentially each wonder (say the fotos in the NYTiimes last week of transparent under sea animals) or the visions of the Hubble telescope or the satellite circling a meteor, which lets us looks deeper, farther, more exactly into our world, is a dig deeper into the hole of our own demise as a species (taking many others with us.) The Greeks (and others) had it right: hubris will do us in. Like good exploitative corporations who make a big profit on a big mess and then off-shore the clean-up to the public, so we behave socially. Ignore the debit column, consume on….
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Lidia17 said:
jonjost, absolutely, when you Look Deeply you have to tally up, on the satellite side, all the expense of the military infrastructure and the infrastructure of the higher universities and laboratories that made the research possible, all those little cogs driving back and forth to Los Alamos or Sandia or wherever, their cars, their houses, their children’s plastic playsets…
Solar, nuclear and wind are all net-negative.. they can’t *not* be. They can be moderately helpful and transformative in small contexts, but overall you still have to support the furnishing of components, particularly metals, that these objects are made of. A wooden windmill or waterwheel would certainly be close to ‘sustainable’, but even there you are trading one form of energy for another: energy to build the windmill, grow and gather the fiber crops to weave the sails, etc. traded for the energy it would take for that same cohort of people to just get together and grind the grain directly with a mortar and pestle. Or just boil/steam the grain and eat it whole, would be another option!
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Pat Driscoll said:
I was driving along I84 near Pendleton OR when a truck pulled onto the freeway hauling one huge wind turbine blade. That thing had a diameter as wide as the cab and took two trailers to haul. The precision manufacturing and materials involved in making this monster boggle the mind. Hard to image these being produced in any “sustainable” fashion.
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xraymike79 said:
Speaking of perhaps one of most hazardous technologies hatched from the mind of man:
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xraymike79 said:
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Apneaman said:
“I accept the criticism on Capitalism which, in the end, was simply a more efficient method for killing ourselves off.”
It also left generations of empty, lonely people in it’s wake. Cruelest cut of all.
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Jessica Davidson said:
Reblogged this on Agenda: Awakening! and commented:
In case we all get too excited about see through solar panels, here’s a timely reminder of the truth about green energy…
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Robert Callaghan said:
Green Energy Illusions.
► Solar Panels.
Prof. Jian Shuisheng of the Jiatong-University estimates the production of just 6 solar panels requires one ton of coal. This works out to about 660 lbs of coal per square yard of solar panel. This is because the silicon has to be baked at 2,000°F. One company cut down 5 acres of woodland to install solar panels to manufacture plastic bags.
The manufacture of solar panels lets off some of the deadliest greenhouse gases known to humankind. These include hexafluoroethane (12,000 times stronger than CO2), nitrogen trifluoride (17,000 times stronger than C02), and sulfur hexafluoride (23,000 times stronger than C02). Solar manufacturing plants produce 500 tons of hazardous sludge each per year. This sludge is never included in the solar industry carbon footprint data. Chinese solar waste disposal firms have been witnessed dumping this waste behind school yards.
Five kilograms of hydrogen chloride per square meter of solar panel is used to liquefy the metallic silicon. Silicon carbide is used to cut the silicon into wafers. Cadmium telluride panels, or emerging thin film technologies, utilize untested nanomaterials that pose a threat to the environment and workers during the manufacturing and recycling stage.
Dust, humidity, haze, and even heat dramatically affect solar panel output. Solar panels lose up to 1% of their efficiency each year lasting some 20 – 30 years, after which they become toxic waste, containing things like cadmium and other heavy metals. While the cost of the silicon wafers are dropping, they only make up 20% of the installed costs.
► Wind Turbines.
The manufacture of 5, one-megawatt, wind turbines produces 1 ton of radioactive residue and 75 tons of hazardous waste water used to extract and process the needed neodymium. Neodymium is a rare earth mineral. Rare earth minerals are not rare, but they are found in very low concentrations. Neodymium is extracted from crushed rocks using sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide. Then it is processed using solvents, heating and vacuum techniques that require plenty of coal power. Vast unregulated tailings ponds of poisonous water have destroyed whole villages in China.
There are 16 other rare elements. All with the same story.
There is no known replacement for neodymium. During its mining, metals such as arsenic, barium, copper, aluminum, lead and beryllium are released into the air and water, and are toxic to human health. Neodymium is only one of many rare-earth metals that our smart phones and green energy systems need.
Wind turbines only produce 25% of their rated power output over 90% of the time. This means that fossil fuel plants have to burn fuel on standby in case the wind suddenly drops. Since this power is intermittent, we would need at least ten times as much solar-wind power to displace one unit of fossil fuel power.
It is possible to build wind turbines without rare earth elements, but doing so increases the complexity, decreases reliability, and jacks the generator weight up, which in turn means all the support structures have to be more massive, all of which results in higher cost.
► Rechargeable Batteries.
The rechargeable lithium ion batteries we use in everything from the Tesla Electric Car, and Prius Plug-In Car, down to our smart phones, all rely on one critical component―graphite. Graphite is one of the main causes of the terrible air pollution in China. It comes from airborne particles given off by mining operations and washes down from the sky with the rain. Graphite particles foul the air and water; they also damage crops and human lung tissue. This type of smog has gotten so bad that China has shut down several of their graphite mines, creating a shortage and higher prices. Even the mining operations for the newer liquid metal or molten salt batteries for 100% “green” energy would poison the biosphere.
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Donald Campbell said:
Interesting statements on problems in the clean energy sector. A precise reference to Jian Shuisheng’s publication would be helpful.
Perhaps in the field of Ecological Economics we might find some guidelines, but even here our philosophical disagreements seem insurmountable. See: http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/past-issues/issue-2/the-rise-and-fall-of-ecological-economics. Do I hear “pie-in-the-sky” being said?
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Lidia17 said:
I talked to some ecological economists from the Gund Institute and the Donella Meadows Institute last year after a presentation. They have their heads in the sand, as well. Never said One Single Word one about population!!! Claimed that they had to “work within” the system, using language that politicians and other economists could understand in order to maintain credibility, which led to them talking endlessly about the “value of ecosystem services”, like the Earth was a prostitute, and what we were dickering over was merely price. I spoke up and asked how it even made any sense to measure these things in dollars, given the fictitious and unstable nature of dollars, anyway, to measure any real kind of worth [which was supposedly the reason for them having set up these Institutes!]. I felt they were incoherent.
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Lidia17 said:
Donald, thanks for that link. Quite entertaining.
I really wonder who or what is behind that “Breakthrough” org…
This is their mission:
“We are progressives who believe in the potential of human development, technology, and evolution to improve human lives and create a beautiful world.”
I agree with some of their comments about the ecological economists (see my comment above, which I wrote before looking at the Breakthrough piece), but they appear Vastly More Wrong-Headed and Tendentious.
They use the word “neo-Malthusians” a lot, disparagingly, which makes them seem pro-population-growth. I would not be surprised if they have some kind of religious backing. They accept a simplisitic de-bunking of not just Malthus but the “neo-Malthusians” without noting that large new fossil resources came online (North Sea, Ålaska’s North Slope). Those did temporarily change the near-term energy projections of, for example, The Limits to Growth, without, however, invalidating the underlying descriptions of the process underway, just as fossil-fuel exploitation in general moved the goalposts for Malthus’ original assertions.
They seem paradoxically creationist in harping on the fact that species “just show up”, deliberately confusing the fact of random mutations leading to fitness with some kind of concept that fitness cannot be measured or opined upon, or that it is somehow irrelevant. That because we can’t control all the pieces we should just throw up our hands and admit the game has no rules, so why bother trying to save anything that could be called an “ecosystem” (another concept they seem to take pains to ‘de-bunk’) …
I feel I must cite the piece’s conclusion: “The scientistic and self-referential controversies in which ecological economists engage drain away the moral power that once sustained environmentalism. This moral power may return if environmentalists employ science not to prescribe goals to society but to help society to achieve goals it already has. ”
An honest and serious inquirer would not use the word “scientistic”. This smells of Ken Ham in a more sophisticated guise. Invoking “moral power” is equally suspect in addressing our current predicament, since morality has little to do with it. Society’s goals are quite clearly to grow and self-perpetuate, which—it is becoming clearer by the day—is not going to be possible in the way people hope, because of material constraints.
All the shining “Breakthrough” faces remind me of the slick Christian marketing of new non-denominational churches, so I can’t help but have the feeling there is some link there under the surface. Maybe they share the same ad agency?
This gets even more hilarious!
Here’s another bit from their mission page:
“We are the authors of reassessments of progressive assumptions, from “The Death of Environmentalism,” which argued for transcending a nature-based politics to “Where Good Technologies Come From,” which demonstrates the critical role government has played in the development of technologies from the railroad to the iPhone.”
Transcending nature-based politics? WTF?
There’s a little poster or bit of cover art that shows “Where Good Technologies Come From” and it’s apparently through the intervention of Saint George (Washington), Saint Abraham (Lincoln), Saint Dwight (Eisenhower), Saint John (Kennedy) and Saint Richard (Nixon).
Bwa -ha -ha ha ha ha (me laughing hysterically)!
Someone big is behind this, maybe the Koch brothers?
ANyway, I wrote all this out, but the first and only commenter sees through them, too, and really said it all better than I could.. more succinctly anyway.
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Lidia17 said:
Basically, these are paid concern trolls.
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xraymike79 said:
From RationalWiki...
Denialism of overpopulation is common within fundamentalist Christianity, as well as the Catholic Church, who see any discussion of the issue as a violation of the Biblical commandment to “be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth.”[2]
There are also various conspiracy theories that overpopulation is a cover issue for a plot to reduce the human population through genocide; this conspiracy theory is sometimes advanced, for example, by AIDS conspiracy theorists (who actually believe AIDS was created in a CIA lab to depopulate Africa), as well as perennial wingnut/moonbat candidate Lyndon LaRouche.[3] The most common and popular form of overpopulation denialism these days, however, comes from the influence of laissez-faire economists, such as the Wall Street Journal, and the late Julian Simon (who is popular among libertarians).[4] This form of denialism teaches there are “no limits to growth,” and is associated with the view that economic growth can and should continue indefinitely, and that continued economic growth depends on a perpetually growing human population. It is also closely tied to excessive optimism over globalization and technology, as well as economic deregulation. These views are collectively sometimes referred to as “cornucopian” – in that they believe there is an endless supply of matter to support an ever-growing population and economy. It denies the fact that at some point, the consumption demand will run up against natural limits in supply.
Another form of denialism comes from those on the other extreme of the issue, who believe carrying capacity is set in stone and deny that the carrying capacity can be increased due to science and advances in technology increasing food output, and from easier access to energy; see the “failed predictions” section below.
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Lidia17 said:
Indeed. See also McKibben, big-time Christian funded by the Rockefellers… Lying to the people that 350 is an achievable CO2 target..
More hysterical laughter!
I really wonder what it is like when these people all get in a room together… Brrrrr (shivering).
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Lidia17 said:
Rockefeller and Pritzker.
“The Breakthrough Institute is a special project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors,”
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xraymike79 said:
Thanks for your insightful comments on this post.
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Robert Callaghan said:
► 10,000 years ago humans and our livestock occupied just 0.01% of all the land-air vertebrate biomass on earth.
► Now humans and our livestock occupy 97% of all land-air vertebrate biomass.
► Humans and our livestock now consume over 50% of earth’s annual green biomass production.
► 50% of All Vertebrate Species will be gone by 2040.
► 90% of Big Ocean Fish gone since 1950.
► 50% of Great Barrier Reef gone since 1985.
► 50% of Fresh Water Fish gone since 1987.
► 30% of Marine Birds gone since 1995.
► 28% of Land Animals gone since 1970.
► 28% of All Marine Animals gone since 1970.
► 50% of Human Sperm gone since 1950.
► Extinctions are 1000 times faster than normal.
► Ocean acidification doubles by 2050.
► Ocean acidification triples by 2100.
► 90% of Lions gone since 1993.
► 93 Elephants killed every single day.
► 2-3 Rhinos killed every single day.
► Bees die from malnutrition lacking bio-diverse pollen sources.
► We are on track to lock in 6°C earth temp rise in just 13 years.
► Mass Extinction becomes unstoppable and irreversible in 40 years.
► Permian mass extinction of 95% of life took 60,000 years 250 million years ago.
► Dinosaurs mass extinction took 33,000 years after asteroid impact.
► Anthropogenic mass extinction will take 300 years max.
► This mass extinction is 100 times faster than anything before us.
► 1 million people born every 4½ days.
► It takes 10 times as much “green” energy to displace 1 unit of fossil energy.
► Efficiency and conservation only causes more growth within current system.
► Antarctic meltdown now irreversible and unstoppable.
► Arctic methane burst is irreversible and unstoppable within current system.
► World Bank says we have 5-10 years before we fight for food and water.
► We combine bacterial DNA with our food plants.
► We put massive amounts of pesticides and herbicides into our food.
► We add nano metals and particles to our food.
► We add man-made, computer designed, synthetic DNA to our food.
► We add thousands of different chemicals to our food.
► We are eating stuff that never existed on earth before.
► We are turning into mutants because of our food.
► We are wiping out all life on earth because of our food.
► Long after the mass extinction, our mutant food plants will live on.
► 2 million children were killed in the Congo for our conflict minerals.
► 1 million children were killed in Iraq for our cheap oil.
► Asian child slaves fish in empty oceans for our seafood dinners.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28463036
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david higham said:
Having just read’Stung’,it seems to me that it won’t be long before you can give some horrific statistics for the percentage of biomass in the sea that is now jellyfish.(Getting larger every year.)
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Robert Callaghan said:
This subject is near and dear to my heart, thank you for your work.
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James said:
The gambler in the capitalist casino is always betting double or nothing. Growth in wealth/population must double, or nothing. While windmills and solar cells are a sideshow, the next big gamble may be thorium with almighty fusion promising easy street. It’s the “nothing” part that bothers me, when the technological bet doesn’t pay and the house of cards collapses. I think it would be wise for each individual to reevaluate the odds as Ozzie Zehner has done with solar cells, because bets are being made every day with your money and the technological jackpot is one in a million. I would rather walk from the casino now, because we know that eventually everyone’s luck runs out and as a society we’ll be broke while the casino owners exit for a high altitude hacienda near that giant southern ice cube, Antarctica. What would happen if an exponentially growing cancer hit “another” jackpot of energy and all of the humans could suddenly make great strides in their consumption? Death by another thousand cuts on the web of life. Thank “God” that we’re no longer biological organisms, but rather technological accessories with a long and bright future ahead of us within the protective shell of our master.
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david higham said:
Yes.Is there any government that is not calling for more economic growth?To even consider doing otherwise would bring swift political oblivion,as the parade of deluded economists and avaricious ecologically ignorant business clowns herd us all down desolation row.
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Tom said:
Ok – I finished watching the first talk and came away thinking that the professor nailed the green programs as wishful thinking, but then he goes on thinking we can continue as a functioning society somehow by conserving the energy we still have. I think this too is an illusion.
Everything about modern society is a problem – too many people (already) need too much energy; indoor plumbing requires infrastructure and maintenance that is unsustainable, as is commuting to phony jobs that only continue business as usual which is all wrong and killing the planet in the process of “accumulating wealth.”
Food production and distribution, modern medicine, our ideas about useful work, the electrical grid and everything attached to it – they’re all just problems that have no solution. Humanity, it turns out, was a bad idea that has run its course and is looking at the end of the road. We’ll continue doing what we’re doing until we can’t because there is no solution – not political, not economic, not militarily or agriculturally. None of it can last in a world polluted beyond our ability to clean it up.
I just read that the giant Pacific garbage gyre is now visible from California.
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xraymike79 said:
Be sure to read and watch this as well:
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Tom said:
Some more reports to be jaded about:
http://enenews.com/new-study-finds-west-coast-radiation-dose-fukushima-500-govt-estimate-release-japan-disaster-exceeded-chernobyl-map
New study finds radiation dose for US West Coast from Fukushima over 500% of recent gov’t estimate — Release from Japan disaster could exceed Chernobyl (MAP)
http://enenews.com/report-one-bad-fukushima-be-gaining-traction-worst-case-nuclear-pollution-history-physician-global-contamination-wide-swaths-biosphere-video
Report: “No one wants you to know how bad Fukushima might still be… gaining traction as the worst case of nuclear pollution in history” — Physician: “This is a global contamination of wide swaths of the biosphere” (VIDEO)
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xraymike79 said:
Thirteen years after the attacks of September 11, and with much said and written about ISIS and the gruesome beheading of James Foley, America continues to misunderstand the roots of Islamic terrorism. We also fail to acknowledge that as long as we remain addicted to cheap oil we will be locked in a war in the Middle East.
You won’t hear Middle East oil mentioned on the cable news airwaves. You will hear “clash of civilizations,”” religiously motivated terrorism,” and any number of similar phrases that are meant to distract and divert us from facing the central dispute between us and the Muslim world: we are addicted to the oil beneath their feet, and we intend to dominate the land they stand on.
The Muslim world isn’t as ignorant as Christian crusaders, the military industrial complex and the vast know-nothing right wing would have you believe. After all, what uncivilized, stupid people could produce algebra, geometry and our concept of the rule of law? The Muslim world is smart enough to figure out that America has invested all of the past 70 years into dominating control of Middle East oil supplies. We have propped despotic regimes and brutal dictators, overthrown democratically elected governments and waged three wars in two decades on Muslim soil. All while we fund and are complicit in Israel’s illegal occupation and theft of Palestinian land.
ISIS is the product of our own imagination and self-serving meddling. After we removed Saddam and his Sunni quasi-government, ISIS was the response by those Sunnis blocked from enjoying economic participation in Iraq.
It’s time to face reality and the monster in the mirror: we are not trying to end global terror, nor are we trying to promote Western secular democracy in the Middle East. Our motivations and desires are no secret. We do everything to ensure that we, and our allies, particularly Japan, have a reliable supply to the region’s liquid gold.
With a total of 44 U.S. military bases in the Middle East and the Central Asia, we have the Muslim world completely surrounded. From Turkey to Saudi Arabia, from Uzbekistan to Kyrgyzstan, our bases serve as a constant reminder to Muslims that we control their economic future and we are here to stay. And with an economic future that looks bleak for Muslims, the embers for Muslim rage are stoked.
“Terrorism is not a supply-limited phenomenon where there are just a few hundred around the world willing to do it because they are religious fanatics. It is a demand-driven phenomenon. That is, it is driven by the presence of foreign forces on the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. The operation in Iraq has stimulated suicide terrorism and has given suicide terrorism a new lease of life,” writes Robert Pape in Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.
The U.S. State Department has announced that Westerners, mostly British Muslims, are being drawn to ISIS. Media outlets everywhere ask why. The answer is clear. The UK has the greatest concentration of Muslims among Western democracies. Muslims were pulled from former British colonies during the 1940s to provide cheap labor for the reconstruction of Britain in the aftermath of the second world war. The textile and steel mills in the north of England were filled with Muslim migrants from Asia and Africa.
Industrial collapse turned these mills into dust heaps, and today Muslim urban ghettos in the UK now resemble the socio-economic conditions of predominately black urban ghettos in America. For British Muslims, high unemployment is the norm, as is racial discrimination and anti-immigrant violence. For many, economic and social oppression at home looks a whole lot like the social and economic oppression that is occurring in Muslim countries abroad. The collapse of liberal democracies in the face of unfettered capitalism has failed minorities everywhere in the West.
Socio-economic insecurity is at the heart of all self-proclaimed religiously motivated extremism. Where social justice prevails, and the state meets the economic needs of its people, hyper-religious ideologies lack appeal.
French political scholar Oliver Roy argues, “This notion of a globalized Islam is not the product of any specific ‘Islamist’ organization but a broad sociological trend that has developed across Europe as a result of racism, migration, and globalization.” In Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq, Muslims have been oppressed and had war waged upon them. “In principle—all the struggles for Muslims around the world were to be regarded as equally important” in this global ummah, Roy writes. This is why we now find Western Muslims in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Afghanistan.
In returning to the Middle East, and its oil, our posture and actions promise to become even more aggressive, as oil reserves inevitably diminish. In an in-depth look into Saudi oil production over the past 40 years, Matthew R. Simmons warns in his book Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy that Saudi oil production is a far cry from the boastful claims long made by the kingdom regarding the robustness of its oilfields. According to Simmons, Saudi oil production peaked at 10 million barrels a day in 1981. Today it is 8 to 9 million barrels and falling. No super giant oil fields have been found in the region since the 1950s.
The very reason U.S. military bases, which are the size of small cities, exist in Saudi Arabia is to ensure our access to this diminishing supply. The oppressive Saudi regime wants us there to ensure neighboring countries don’t eye their oil. The central and founding charter of Al Qaeda was to remove our bases from the Holy Land. It was no coincidence that 17 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudis.
“We can have peace when we shut down our bases, stay the hand of the Israelis to create a Palestinian state, and go home, or we can have long, costly, and ultimately futile regional war. We cannot have both,” warns Chris Hedges. With our addiction to Middle East oil supplies, we can expect the latter, which means 2001 was the start of our endless war with the Muslim world.
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xraymike79 said:
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xraymike79 said:
From Generation Alpha today:
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mike k said:
Without the cartoons, the coffee served here would be too bitter to drink….
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xraymike79 said:
Coffee of Doom
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mike k said:
Yummy! The skull and xbones looks made of sweet cream….or am I dreaming…?
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Apneaman said:
Make mine a venti with a shot of dys-presso.
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david higham said:
Looks like a sure sign of supernatural intervention to me.Time to start a cult.
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david higham said:
I’m warming to the cult idea.Next step is a name.’Baby Doomers’? Possibly.Could be too demographically limiting.
‘Followers of the sacred coffee cup’?Now we’re getting somewhere.Definitely tops Bertrand Russell’s ‘Tea Pot in the Sky’ .
Now, what beverage will we drink at our ritual sacrifice festivities?
Mmm.That’s a hard one.
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Pingback: Agenda 21 – Saturday – 8_23_2014 | Headline News
xraymike79 said:
Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.”
― Wendell Berry
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Lidia17 said:
Mike, you forgot to note that he thinks he going to go meet Jesus when all this is over.
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jonjost said:
I was near Fukushima 6 months after the tsunami and made a film on a small island in the bay before Sendai (The Narcissus Flowers of Katsura-shima – http://www.jon-jost.com/work/narcissus.html) and visited the area around there, including a quasi abandoned hot spring resort near Fukushima. A mess to say the least.
Meantime our real ecological problems are social/political/psychological: what we collectively need to do is be much fewer, live far more simply, consume 85% less, and so on. You never hear our economists, our politicians, our academics say “we have been pigging out, and show the curve of our consumption (or that the USA as 5% of the pop. consumes 25% of global resources, which explains pretty much oour warring habits). You don’t hear it because they simply cannot (and do not want to) conceive of it. So our younger people will waltz to their own oblivion texting, playing a video-game or enthralled with whatever celebrity idiocy comes next. It is already too late, and there is not a reason in the (political) world to have any thought our collective human insanity will be checked. We are an ill-designed species and most likely we will escort ourselves off the planet with our own behaviors.
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xraymike79 said:
Everyone has their delusions, don’t they.
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stuartbramhall said:
I find it extremely gratifying that so many young Americans under 35 are rejecting car ownership in favor of car sharing and public and active transport. Surely this is a major reason gas usage in the US has plummeted by 75%: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-05-30/us-gasoline-consumption-plummets-nearly-75
And why unsold cars are piling up in car graveyards: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-05-16/where-worlds-unsold-cars-go-die
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xraymike79 said:
I prefer transit by rail like in Europe if I’m going long distances. No such system exists in America and Amtrak is very expensive with very few routes. That’s just how the auto industry wanted it.
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Miep said:
I don’t know why Robert is so censorial about criticism of high-tech alternative energy sources. I guess he finds it defeatist, but ignoring the realities of what it takes to build and maintain this stuff will not end well, and is even racist, considering where the rare earth mines tend to be located.
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david higham said:
A very good essay.Thanks Mike.I made a similar comment at the current mahb post,pointing out that divesting in fossil fuel companies is not a solution to the climate disruption problem,and that building solar panels and wind turbines requires fossil fuels for the mining of the requisite minerals and manufacturing.
You mentioned that you were feeling rather jaded by the situation.Aldo Leopold said that one of the perils of an ecological education is that one lives in a world of wounds.One shudders to think what he would have to say about the current situation.Tragedy does not even come close.
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david higham said:
Thinking more about my comment at mahb and above,because I can see no way to avoid a collapse of this system,it would be better if it ended now rather than later,but we will have to see how it unfolds.I still think that a hunter gatherer system is the only long term sustainable system,but even the couple of remaining hunter gatherer tribes will not be able to survive when the effects of the coming climate become manifest.
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xraymike79 said:
LOL. American Empire on the prowl…
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Apneaman said:
http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/
Amazing photos of the Damage Done
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Apneaman said:
Materials: 48,000 pounds of minerals Per Person/Per Year in USA.
3.7 Million pounds of minerals metals and fuels per lifetime.
http://energyskeptic.com/2012/materials-48000-pounds-of-minerals-per-personper-year-in-usa/
Even with everyone one on board this cannot be “Greened”
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James said:
For fear of damnation the church requires you to tithe. For fear of incarceration the government requires your taxes. For participation in the economy the bank requires that you pay interest on loans conjured from thin air or endure economic disqualification. For fear of death, the hospital and medical insurance racket takes a pound of flesh. For fear of not meeting the above demands, the “education” industry takes a front end cut in collusion with banking and government. Freedom and democracy? just tell them to shut the f%*k up. It’s about time you got over your fears.
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xraymike79 said:
MOSCOW, August 23 (RIA Novosti) – The three molten cores at Fukushima plant, each weighing a hundred tons, are so radioactive, that no one can approach them, including robots, which melt down immediately, Dr. Helen Caldicott, the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize nominee, physician and anti-nuclear advocate, states in an interview to Radio VR:
“And no one ever will, and the contamination will go on for hundreds of years,” Ms. Caldicott cites top physicists as saying.
Initially, TEPCO, the Japanese power provider wanted to erect an ice wall around the perimeter of the Fukushima complex, as ground water underneath the reactor is absorbing radiation and then flowing into the ocean.
An ice wall is a silly idea given the circumstances, remarks the expert, as it would have to last at least a hundred years. Moreover, you would have to have electricity running all the time to keep the ground frozen, explains Ms. Caldicott.
Surprisingly enough, TEPCO is not consulting with anyone, says the expert, neither with Russia, after it survived the Chernobyl catastrophe, nor Bechtel, a US major engineering company. It is, conversely, “saving money, using paper coming from homeless shelters”, and the Japanese mafia Yakuza is hiring people to do this work.
The expert stresses they are witnessing an absolute catastrophe: 300-400 tons of radioactive water pour daily into the Pacific, and this has been going on for over three years now contaminating the ocean and its ecology.
Radiation cannot be diluted, as many isotopes, namely strontium, are concentrated in food chains, in algae for instance. The contamination then passes on to bigger fish typically caught on the east coast from Fukushima. Radiation in the ocean and its ecology has been detected as far away as the America West Coast. TEPCO has stated more than once, the expert says, that they know radioactive water is seeping into the ocean, however, they keep assuring that it is not at levels high enough to cause a significant threat.
Another VR expert, Thomas Drolet, who is Chairman, CEO and President at GreenWell Renewable Power Corporation, sounds less pessimistic, stating the radiation can essentially be done away with as time passes:
“As a technician and nuclear reactor engineer I can say that they will eventually succeed.”
Conditions on the site are difficult, though, he adds. Two big problems arose from the very start: for one thing, there’s water that originated in the reactor, which flowed through the damaged fill and went to the lower levels. Secondly, there is the ground water that naturally flows from higher elevations to the west, through the ground system, picks up radioactivity around the basement areas of the damaged reactors and flows on to the sea and to the bottom parts of the damaged reactors, Mr. Drolet says.
“The way it can eventually be solved is that of removing the water that is in the basement areas of the turbine building (and they are working on unit 2 right now) and getting it pumped out,” points out Mr. Drolet citing sophisticated filtration systems now being employed. “They can absorb the radiation and hold it.”
Engineer brigades are currently aiming to block a particular pass so that work could be done inside the building to get the contaminated water sucked out.
Still, the complex radiation fields make the surrounding environment hard enough to handle, with people at all times wearing thick suits to protect them from “external radiation inhalation”. This further complicates specialists’ day to day life on the site. Mr. Drolet clearly differentiates between the site as is and the exclusion zone, comprised of small towns and roads lying nearby, within 18 kilometers from the place. The latter can be cleaned up in the next several years, the expert argues. The work consists in finding hot spots in terms of increased radiation, taking off the top layer of the soil, in other words, “taking down some of the radioactivity near the surface and on the surface” and rehabilitating that exclusion zone.
The reactor itself is by far “the most difficult issue,” Mr, Drolet states. Each of the three damaged reactors has two main areas of broken fuel: in the spent fuel base, which is up high, and the reactor core. “Slowly and identically they have to remove that fuel, some of it damaged, some of it whole”, using the robotic equipment to a great extent, and move it off site to the repository. Only once the excessive fuel is removed can they move to what the expert calls “nitty gritty of decommissioning” of the reactors themselves, which might span for another decade, before the engineers could turn the site to the so-called brown field condition. As compared to the green field condition, it means the area is safe, clean and cannot be reused, the expert concludes.
A 9.0 magnitude earthquake swept across the Japanese coast in March 2011, triggering a devastating tsunami and killing more than 15,000 people and injured 6,000. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant consequently faced meltdowns at three reactors heavily damaged in the tsunami, which led to masses of contaminated water pouring into the ocean.
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Apneaman said:
“Ms. Caldicott cites top physicists as saying.”. Is it just me? I can’t find the names of the “top physicists” any where in the article. Maybe it’s just sloppy writing, or I’m missing it? Whenever I read any article and the experts are not named that usually gets my suspicions up.
“Don’t worry folks. We have top men working on it”
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xraymike79 said:
I’ll ask her on Twitter. Part of the problem with articles from Russia is the translation.
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Lidia17 said:
I just got back from a “Permaculture Gathering” here yesterday:
http://www.dacres.org/
Plenty of interesting stuff, but green tech still lurks around the edges. Missed one presentation about home energy self-sufficiency for a better offering, but as you might imagine solar panels were part of the mix (according to this one presenter, anyway).
I was also taken aback at the use of some high-tech organizational tools: EventBrite, and most ominously a thing called “Sched” (may it never darken my screen again). I spent the better part of an hour futzing with “Sched”, trying to get a downloaded schedule that I could read on my iPod without having to be connected to Wifi or some other constant streaming real-time data input. I had to register (twice) and change my password once before I could get anywhere. The web app kept switching “modes” on me. I downloaded the “Sched” app to my iPod, but it only seemed to work via wifi (so why not just use the browser version? Not sure what the point of all these “apps” are.) I kept losing the page with the subscription link for iCal (which you can’t link to via the mobile device but only from your desktop, or on the web version..). When I did subscribe, the events were all pushed ahead 3 hours, though the event and I were both in the Eastern Standard Time zone. They could have just had a PDF up of the schedule on their website, but noooo..!
So this is just the Nth demonstration lending fuel contrary to the crackpot idea that technology is going to somehow “simplify” anything, “save energy” or make anything “more efficient”.
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Apneaman said:
Remember when they said computer technology would make your life better/easier and more efficient? I’m pretty sure I’m in the red when I add up all the time wasted talking to customer no service, reading help files, twiddling my thumbs while rebooting 50,000 times, uninstalling/reinstalling software, looking online for fixes, trouble shooting hardware, going through boxes of salvaged parts and driving to and from stores to get parts. All that so I could learn and read online. Back in the day my main worry was getting the books back to the library by the due date.
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xraymike79 said:
An Apple computer was the last computer I ever bought.
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Tom said:
Oh yeah Apneaman – i’m with you on that. I can’t afford a new one so I keep screwing around with this ol’ Dell I have, but it’s all hit or miss and I get frustrated easily. Best thing I ever did though was purchase Kaspersky “protection” – after losing drives to to virus invasion (I got ’em back but had to pay to get the viruses wiped ’cause that’s beyond me). Haven’t had any trouble since – knock on my wooden head.
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xraymike79 said:
Pingback:
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xraymike79 said:
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xraymike79 said:
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david higham said:
Joanna and I recently joined a local small (8-10 people generally) bushwalking group.I thought that that subset of our species would have a greater appreciation of the natural world and reluctance to further the devastation of it.Probably that is true for most in the group,but last week ,after walking in to a fairly remote beautiful waterfall,two fellows spent their time there rhapsodising over what a great spot it would be for a dam,how the water storage was needed for more agriculture to feed our growing population,etc.
There will never be an end to our madness until the species ceases to exist.I mentioned in the last post about the population projections for Australia.
The aboriginal Australians have been here for 50,000 years and left the environment in excellent condition.
Our rapacious civilisation has been here for 230 years with catastrophic impact.The main agricultural areas are in southern Australia.Many areas there are experiencing problems with salinity and soil degradation and erosion.Most of Australia’s soils are low fertility with thin topsoil.Southern Australia will be experiencing declining rainfall over the coming decades.A rational response would be to stop immigration and attempt a decline in the population,both of this country and the planet,but would anyone expect a rational response ?
Instead, there are increasing calls by politicians and agricultural organizations to develop(read devestate) northern Australia.So it goes.
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xraymike79 said:
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david higham said:
I saw that map a few weeks ago and wondered why you didn’t have it on the last post.
Relentless land grab.
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xraymike79 said:
In the previous post I stated:
“…not only does Israel now occupy 80% of the area of historic Palestine, but it – via the water company Mekarot – also takes 80% of the water resources from the 20% of the land that is left to the Palestinians…”
I did not want to have to authenticate that map.
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xraymike79 said:
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xraymike79 said:
The planet’s two largest ice sheets – in Greenland and Antarctica – are now being depleted at an astonishing rate of 120 cubic miles each year. That is the discovery made by scientists using data from CryoSat-2, the European probe that has been measuring the thickness of Earth’s ice sheets and glaciers since it was launched by the European Space Agency in 2010.
Even more alarming, the rate of loss of ice from the two regions has more than doubled since 2009, revealing the dramatic impact thatclimate change is beginning to have on our world.
…
The discovery of these losses of ice is particularly striking and represents yet another blow to claims by some climate-change deniers, who argue that the rapid loss of ice in the Arctic currently being observed is being matched by a corresponding increase in Antarctica. CryoSat’s measurements show that Antarctica – although considerably colder than the Arctic because of its much higher average elevation – is not gaining ice at all. Indeed, it is – overall – losing considerable volumes, and in the case of West Antarctica is doing so at an alarming rate.;
This point was stressed by Mark Drinkwater, the European Space Agency’s CryoSat mission scientist. “These results offer a critical new perspective on the recent impact of climate change on large ice sheets. This is particularly evident in parts of the Antarctic peninsula, where some of the more remarkable features add testimony on the impact of sustained peninsula warming at rates several times the global average.”
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xraymike79 said:
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xraymike79 said:
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xraymike79 said:
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xraymike79 said:
Comment from reader:
In light of New Mexico’s social measures (highest teen pregnancy rate, near lowest child wellness) it is absurd to even have a discussion on reviving a Soviet Era activity that is an evolutionary dead-end. As the article points out, there is a glut of plutonium pits stored at Pantex. Storing what translates into 1-4 lbs. of plutonium in a non-conforming building on fragile volcanic soils on a seismically vulnerable mesa when it takes just one inhaled plutonium particle to cause lung cancer is insane and idiotic…
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xraymike79 said:
Bunker Mentalities, Security, and Time
Everyone, I think you’re going to see more of the bunker mentality in global politics in the future, of which the to-do in Gaza and the to-do in Ferguson, Missouri are mere instances.
So what’s it all about?
It’s about racism, to be sure — but there’s also an even wider mentality to be engaged here, which I hope to explore in this diary.Masaccio’s piece, frontpaged at Firedoglake, has an interesting point: it’s about domination, domination of the few over the many. The piece quotes from Michel Foucault’s classic “Discipline and Punish” and then discusses the topical matter of who gets to discipline and punish and who gets to be disciplined and punished:
– and —
So arming cops to the point at which they shoot people down and arrest journalists in an air of total impunity has reached the level of scandal in America today. What is our glorious Congress, of the low opinion poll approval ratings, doing about all this? Well, some of them are going on AIPAC junkets in Israel, where they’ll probably find out if it’s kewl with the Israelis if they send US troops to Iraq or something like that. Yeah, Israel, that’s the ticket. Everyone’s favorite small-nation-sized bunker, with the requisite bunker mentality to boot. And doubling down on Iraq. Very kewl.
One of the primary conservative efforts in this era of last-gasp capitalism is the general effort to feed the bunker mentality among those with power, specifically money-power and weapon-power. In what used to be called the “society of the spectacle,” our elites cling to spectacular forms of what they think is “security” — wall off the masses, and stockpile weapons and ammunition. (It should be added here that, as regards our Congress, the Israelis are ahead of the game in the category of wall-building.)
As technology races ever forward, you better be sure you have your copies of the newest weapons, and to be sure to use them, too! This is no doubt the reigning attitude at the Pentagon, and at other places where “security” is the fetish of participants in the bunker mentality.
As I have suggested before, this is a conservative age, and one hallmark of a conservative age is the redundant reinforcement of hegemonic power out of a fear of the future. It doesn’t matter, then, that the next war in Africa will generate a bunch of blowback — there’s money involved, so Americans carry on with the existing obsessions — guns, money, power.
Never mind that such an approach doesn’t make its participants more secure — just look at the lives of those who are the victims of “security.” You wouldn’t want to be one of them, would you? The real future is sacrificed in bunker mentality concepts of “security,” in the sense in which George W. Bush said “History, I don’t know, we’ll all be dead” when asked by Bob Woodward about his place in history. Participants in the bunker mentality, then, have a problem with time.
The most curious combination of “security” and bunker mentality futurism has got to be the Pentagon’s strategies for climate change. Compound disaster through climate change is a significant medium-term concern, and ultimate solutions to climate change are also medium- and long-term. However, all of the scientifically-informed prognostications suggest that we begin action (which means “stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere at a rate of 2.3 parts per million per year) soon. Climate change has thus attracted the Pentagon’s attention as prompting a need for short-term action, while at the same time exposing the utter confusion about the future to be expected from participants in the bunker mentality.
It’s been public knowledge since 2004 that they’ve had a plan for climate change. Here’s the plan, in brief, as the editors of the Monthly Review explained it:
There really isn’t that much of a difference between “security,” as such, and kissing the collective ass goodbye. Later, from 2010:
It doesn’t say much. But when climate change offers the possibility of ending civilization, the idea that they are just going to “factor it in” should give one pause. Also, from “DeSmogBlog,” in March of this year:
Now there’s some hardcore logic for you! Climate change will increase the threat around the world, so the Pentagon’s “creative” response is to conquer the Arctic so that the oil beneath its ocean floors can be pumped for Pentagon use. Seize the world!
The problem of the bunker mentality
The problem of the bunker mentality is ultimately a problem with time. “Security” is ultimately a problem of the long run, but participants in the bunker mentality are narrowly focused upon a counter-productive grasping of the world for the sake of immediate sensations of total control. It doesn’t work, of course, because participants in the bunker mentality are themselves “out of control.” Their security is insecurity.
Ultimately, it can be said that elites in DC, at the Pentagon, and on Wall Street live in a world of commodities, in which purchase and possession are the moves that work. The thing about all that high-tech weaponry is that, as a cultural phenomenon, it’s significantly a matter of commerce, of buying and selling.
The late Teresa Brennan’s Exhausting Modernity: Grounds for a New Economy is a ponderous work of high theory, connecting Marx, Freud, and the world-situation. But there’s a passage in this book which can really connect readers to the psychology of commodities:
We can’t be surprised, then, if the elite definition of “security” is channeled through desires for domination and control through immediate gratification, even against the global threat posed by climate change. We are talking, here, about possessors of money living in a world of commodities. How long can it take, after all, to bomb Iraq?
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xraymike79 said:
The Oiliness of Everything. Invisible Oil and Energy Payback Time
by Alice Friedemann, August 23, 2014.
http://energyskeptic.com/2014/invisible-oil-and-energy-payback-time/
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xraymike79 said:
“…Bary is the son of an Egyptian-born militant who is awaiting trial on terrorism charges in Manhattan, due to his alleged involvement in the bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
Before leaving the family home to fight in Syria, Bary was an aspiring rapper known as L Jinny whose music was played on one of Britain’s most popular radio stations, BBC Radio 1…”
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mike k said:
Some meaningful insights into the deterioration of modern consciousness:
“Limited political horizons have given birth to the emergence of the spectacle of terrorism and violence as a new form of politics, sordid entertainment, and a disimagination machine–which raises serious questions, which include: how fear and anxiety can be marketed; how terrorism can be used to recruit people in support of authoritarian causes; how the theater of violence is being produced in a vast array of pedagogical sites created by the old and new media; how the state uses mediated images of violence to justify its monopoly of power over the means of coercion, and how the spectacle of terrorism works and manifests itself in an age of enormous injustices, deep insecurities, disembodied social relations, fragmented communities, and a growing militarization of everyday life. Totalitarian politics, militaristic violence, and a life-draining atomization not only inform each other, they have become the most important elements of power as a mediating force in shaping identities, desires, and social relations.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/08/25/beyond-the-spectacle-of-neoliberal-misery-and-violence-in-the-age-of-terrorism/
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witsendnj said:
It’s a-coming.
Wild fires, dying lakes,
landslides, hurricanes,
apocalypse in store
like nothing ever seen before.
It’s a-coming.
Third-generation refugees,
street mob burning effigies,
revolution, civil war
like nothing ever seen before.
It’s a-coming.
Pale-horse rider come,
blistered by the morning sun,
tell about what he can see,
crystal ball of mercury.
It’s a-coming. It’s gonna come.
Jungle slashed and jungle burned,
the monkeys and the painted birds
climb the vines, the limbs and leaves,
the lungs that let the whole world breathe.
It’s a-coming.
All the ones that failed to thrive,
starved out and buried alive,
something evil, something free,
calamity.
It’s gonna come.
Space Race, the old Cold War,
atom bomb was gonna settle the score.
You wait and see. It’s a long time coming
but it’s a-coming. It’s gonna come.
Third-generation refugees,
street mob burning effigies,
revolution, civil war
like nothing ever seen before.
Like nothing ever seen before.
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xraymike79 said:
We need to compile a playlist for the Doomosphere.
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witsendnj said:
It is started as a page linked at the top. Any and all suggestions welcome! The two “Earth Fail Warnings” are themselves youtube lists compiled by Catman. http://doomfordummies.blogspot.com/p/apocalyptic-music.html
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Apneaman said:
Gail. I think, “Money (That’s What I Want)” preferably the Beatles version, although I secretly like that freaky assed Flying Lizards version too, needs to go on the Doom Tunes Playlist. The love of it is the root of all evil according to the holy ones.
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david higham said:
Gail,
I went to your doom for dummies site but wasn’t able to post a comment. Well done.
I didn’ know that David Suzuki had 4+ children.Incredible.Spends a large part of his life explaining biology and writing books lamenting the human impact on Earth,then that.At least Paul and Anne Ehrlich walked the talk.One child.
A minor point about your site you might like to fix.It’s John Gray of ‘Straw Dogs’,not Grey.
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witsendnj said:
Ah thanks! Corrections much appreciated. I have to add more to it too.
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xraymike79 said:
Definitely looks like they’ve got him. The eyes, the body size and habitus, the voice –it all matches. And then there’s his family history. I tried to find a head shot of him in one of his awful music videos that closely matched a pic from the execution video and came up with this:
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xraymike79 said:
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xraymike79 said:
For those interested, for $8.99 you can download Green Illusions here:
http://www.scribd.com/mobile/doc/201302795
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xraymike79 said:
Pingback:
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xraymike79 said:
From Daily Climate:
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xraymike79 said:
New York Times: ISIL Funded by Gulf, Infiltration Facilitated by Turkey
The so-called ‘Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant terrorist organization, also dubbed as ISIL, is receiving funds from donors in Kuwait and Qatar, the U.S.-based New York Times newspaper said in its editorial on Monday.
The daily underlined that the Saudi Arabia has sent weapons to the Syrian opposition without worrying about whether some of them will reach the hands of the terrorist organization, adding to the role played by Turkey to allow the organization to pass elements and weapons.
The daily stressed that all that “must be stopped,” stating that “necessary response to ISIL cannot be waged by the United States alone, without the involvement of Muslim countries, noting that the answer to terrorism should be of “wider scope and longer time.”
For his part, analyst of security affairs in CNN news network and former agent of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Robert Baer, said that Saudi Arabia bore part of the responsibility for the growing phenomenon of takfiri organizations, not because of funding them by Gulf countries only, but because of this ideology carried by several movements in the Kingdom; which disbelieves other Islamic sects.
“ISIL is self-funded currently, but it has a lot of money delivered from Gulf,” Baer said.
I like Robert Baer. He’s very matter-of-fact in his commentary and analysis. The other day on CNN he said something to the effect of…
“ISIS is headed for the Gulf States where most of the world’s oil is located. I don’t like to talk of things in terms of oil, but we better get practical about this.”
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xraymike79 said:
One senior White House official told the Washington Post that the administration’s review, which will take place together with a series of congressional hearings, will assess “whether state and local law enforcement are provided with the necessary training and guidance; and whether the federal government is sufficiently auditing the use of equipment obtained through federal programs and funding.”
Attorney General Eric Holder wrote in a statement provided to the New York Times, “It makes sense to take a look at whether military-style equipment is being acquired for the right purposes and whether there is proper training on when and how to deploy it.”
The premise of Holder’s remark is that there is a “right” purpose for the police to be militarized, and thus that the program is entirely legitimate. The concern is that local police departments may be insufficiently trained as to “when and how” to deploy the billions of dollars in military assets that they have been given.
In the aftermath of the Ferguson protests, the police forces involved were publicly criticized by military veterans and even Pentagon officials for what they called unprofessional conduct from a military standpoint. “These guys are idiots—riding around on the top of armored trucks looking like rednecks on a country drive, pointing their weapons at unarmed Americans,” one Pentagon official anonymously told the Christian Science Monitor. “Our troops would never do that stuff, even in a war zone,” he said. Notably, one St. Louis police officer was disciplined after he was caught on video pointing an assault rifle at journalists, proclaiming, “I will f*****g kill you.”
The aim of the Obama administration’s review—beyond being a public relations exercise—will be to cut down on such unprofessional displays and make the use of domestic military police more systematic, widespread and regular. In this it will be similar to the administration’s reviews of its domestic spying programs, each of which has only resulted in the extension of illegal spying by the US intelligence agencies.
Far from acting as a restraining influence on local police departments, the federal government has been the most active facilitator of police militarization. In June, the American Civil Liberties Union released a report entitled “War comes home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing,” which concluded that “the federal government has justified and encouraged the militarization of local law enforcement.”
The ACLU’s report documents the way in which the federal government has actively facilitated the militarization of local police forces, “in large part through federal programs that have armed state and local law enforcement agencies with the weapons and tactics of war.”
The Defense Department’s 1033 Program is the largest such scheme, operating under the motto, “from warfighter to crimefighter.” This program has transferred more than $4.3 billion in property from the military to local police departments, including nearly half a billion last year. Local police have been provided with combat uniforms, night-vision goggles, belt-fed machine guns, military helicopters, armored vehicles and assault rifles, some of which were on display in the streets of Ferguson this month.
The military program provided law enforcement with $1 million of military hardware in 1990, $324 million in 1995, and nearly $450 million in 2013. The ACLU report notes that the federal government “requires agencies that receive 1033 equipment to use it within one year of receipt, so there can be no doubt that participation in this program creates an incentive for law enforcement agencies to use military equipment.”
Earlier this year, the Pentagon provided the New York Times with a database of military assets transferred to local police departments since 2006, which the Times published online last week. The statistics are staggering. Police in the Detroit Metropolitan Area, for example, have been given enough assault rifles by the Defense Department to arm a midsize battalion. This does not include rifles purchased by local police departments.
Los Angeles County has been given enough rifles for three battalions. The county has received 3,408 assault rifles, 1,696 pieces of body armor, 15 helicopters and seven armored vehicles. Meanwhile, every county in Connecticut except one, which has the highest per capita income in the country, got an armored vehicle from the Defense Department. More than six hundred such vehicles have been dispensed to local police departments.
Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill, who chairs the Senate Subcommittee on Financial & Contracting Oversight, will lead one of the congressional inquiries into the programs. McCaskill, according to the Times, “agreed that the military equipment had proved valuable,” but that the “government should be able to find a way to ensure officer safety and keep streets safe more strategically.”
Representative Hank Johnson, a Georgia Democrat, told the Times that he would support requiring police to certify that they were trained to use the military hardware they were provided.
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Apneaman said:
James. This made me think of you.
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James said:
I’ve never “texted” but that was a nice summary of dopamine. My reward comes with the search for new knowledge and all I’m rewarded with are bits and pieces that in their assemblage reward me with a model of terminal societal cancer. Because of its depressing nature, I must either self-administer morphine or continue searching, which only leads back to a more robust cancer model. Each day is a new opportunity to find something at odds with my conclusions and each day the net comes back empty. I should have pursued technical knowledge more vigorously, at least it can be more readily employed in exponential growth la la land to garner more green dopamine/opioid tickets to be exchanged for the pleasure of choice. So now that I’ve put flesh on the bones of this cancer model, I suppose I must finish it, and then what fun shall I have?
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xraymike79 said:
Iraqi Christians Weigh Taking Up Arms Against the Islamic State
If you want to survive, you must be pragmatic:
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witsendnj said:
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xraymike79 said:
Perfect.
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david higham said:
The New York Review of Books currently has an article by Tim Flannery on the Great Barrier Reef ( recommended). The end of the article does not say directly,but the clear
implication is that if Australia did not export coal,the reef would be saved from further
devastation.Is this correct?
Regarding the Abbott Point development,if it did go ahead it is clearly preferable that the dredged deposits be put inland than at sea near the reef.If they are placed near the reef,the effects will be on a small section of the reef.
Two hundred and thirty years ago,the reef was in pristine condition.Now half of it is dead.The main current reason for the continuing destruction is ocean acidification and heating.Another major reason is sedimentation and increased nutrient load from
the streams and rivers along the Queensland coast,from agriculture and the many towns and cities along that coast.These are all increasing in size and due to their sewage systems emptying into the coastal waters,are all doing their bit to convert cyclic nutrient systems into linear ones.The proliferation of the other reef devestator,the Crown of Thorns starfish,is probably due to this increased sediment and nutrient load altering the reef ecosystem.
I sometimes have a problem with a comment disappearing on this tablet,I will post this,then continue.
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David Higham said:
Regarding the coal exports,unfortunately coal is not a scarce commodity.If the steel mills and electricity generators could not obtain coal from Australia, they would obtain it from another supplier.
The reason the reef is dying is our collective use of fossil fuels.Directly,by the emitted CO2 decreasing the alkalinity of the ocean water and the heating of the atmosphere
and ocean.Our industrial agricultural system,which increases the nitrogen and phosphorous and sediment load of the rivers ,which causes coral reef death and ocean dead zones through eutrophication,is only possible by the use of fossil fuel.
That agricultural system supports our grossly inflated ,’Bubble ‘ population.
We are living in a bubble which will burst this century.
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david higham said:
A correction to my 3.43 pm comment .Regarding the Abbott Point port dredging,.I should have typed ‘comparatively small’,meaning compared to the total reef area.
Great video,Gail.
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xraymike79 said:
Iraqi soldier comes across a dead soldier, figures out it’s his father.
His father was an operations commander who died fighting against ISIS… heart breaking.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=16b_1409267907
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xraymike79 said:
“Let me read you something from this week’s New Yorker”, she said. “‘If you listen to Carter’s Oval Office addresses on inflation, energy, and the nation’s crisis of confidence, the level of honesty is shocking, and deflating. No President has ever spoken that way since. The lesson he taught all his successors was not to tell the American people hard truths’.”
“He was a pretty remarkable guy”, said Rafe. “Confessing the whole world’s sins to the whole world. No one wants to hear bad news unless they think there’s something that they can do about it, fix it quickly and easily, or unless it has no personal impact on them, like a shooting or a hurricane, so they feel better about themselves relative to the fallen and the miserable. Hence Reagan and the Entertainment News that now passes for information dissemination in the mainstream media. Hence what prevails on Facebook and Twitter — reposts of meaningless but clever-sounding witticisms, and the latest celebrity misconduct.”
http://howtosavetheworld.ca/2014/08/28/flywheel/
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James said:
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They demand illusions, and cannot do without them. They constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real; they are almost as strongly influenced by what is untrue as by what is true. They have an evident tendency not to distinguish between the two.”
Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and The Analysis of The Ego
Our education system is meant to churn out millions of products per year, each equipped with the ability to fulfill their systemic function working with information and tools. Whatever else they need to know is provided by the religious or governmental ponzis that conveniently fabricate a reality that results in the flow of money and power upwards to themselves. Everyone is immersed in that contrived reality and each knows that it is true because most others in the herd believe the same. The slaves continue to toil in their suicide machine with illusions of escaping while their productivity, which would fund their escape, is siphoned away and upwards. So few will escape their enslavement, but those not fully discouraged try by all means, as they’ve seen a few escape before them. The few that do escape are examples that make the others work even harder for their moment free of the chains and shackles. Most will die in debt and have a tombstone placed upon their graves inscribed “Useful Servant – SS# – RIP”, as the royalty they served sip brandy and smoke cigars on private jets, looking down upon their carefully controlled and managed plantations.
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Apneaman said:
What about the rest of us James?; We few, we Un-happy few, we band of brooders. How come a few of us never fit into the herd? Most of the others I’ve met never seemed to want to. I have noticed that in other herd animals the ones who stray, who prefer the periphery, tend to get special attention from predators. Of course our predators are within the herd and they too like to keep an eye on the wanderers, but for an entirely different reason. If you could plug yourself into the matrix, would you? Once in awhile I say yes, but overall I don’t think so. I have been like this for almost half a century and the one time I was seriously depressed was over within a week of having my sleep apnea treated.
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jonjost said:
A few things – I don’t think one learns or is trained to be an “outsider” though I suppose in a negative sense that can happen (having spent some prison time for refusal to comply with Selective Service I think I saw that a brutalized upbringing in lower economic classes can train you to behave criminally). But I think real outsiders are in effect born – it is a class that makes for artists, original thinkers, and such and I think it is hard-wired. It can be suppressed (say maybe Gary Gilmore is an example – a would-be artist mentality trapped in straight-laced Utah), or it can be warped or it can be encouraged and developed. But whatever it is, it’s just there, ready to be tapped for better or worse. Frequently such people are unhappy, perhaps a little chemically determined, but I suspect mostly owing to social things – being an outcast and the pressures it imposes. But, say, while I agree with most the conclusions/views Mike presents, I am not “unhappy” and feel to be so, whatever the gruesome evidence all around us, is to be counter-productive. Whatever “hurt” one has, be it personal, social, political – feeling bad only compounds the matter.
And no, if you are one of these souls, nope, you can’t plug yourself into the matrix – just can’t be done. Or else you are not really such an outsider. All people, whatever they say, do exactly what they want to do. 9-5er for a pension (once upon a time!) complaining that isn’t what they want(ed) to do are lying to themselves and to anyone they confide such thoughts in: every one of us are what we do and within our perspective of choices, we do exactly what we want to do.
http://www.jonjost.wordpress.com
http://www.cinemaelectronica.wordpress.com
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James said:
I would like to shake people of their absurd beliefs, but I wouldn’t know what to do with the pile of dust lying on the floor afterward. With most people, remove the beliefs and life’s narratives and there’s not much remaining. The matrix of lies and deceits supports them emotionally and with substance. I find no commonality with the working man, nor with the well-off, all of which seem to occupy some cross-hatched area of the normal curve of ignorance, deceit and greed. Humans, generally and in their more aggravated periods of collective insanity, are a dangerous lot. The only palliative I can imagine is isolation away from the hopelessly warped minds, the unthinking and obedient sycophants and toadies mindlessly seeing to their masters needs. I’ll be watching this circus from a comfortable distance when the big top goes up in flames.
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WrenchMonkey said:
“I’ll be watching this circus from a comfortable distance when the big top goes up in flames.”
An enviable position, if it’s even possible to attain. The “big top“, for the first time in human history, thanks to our wondrous technological “civilisation“, actually now covers the entire planet. Do you have a spacecraft stashed somewhere?
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xraymike79 said:
8-18-2014
Reality Check: Germany Does Not Get Half of its Energy from Solar Panels
…And if you want to think that half of Germany’s electricity comes from something green you will be disappointed. 46% of generation comes from coal. And just over half of coal powered electricity in Germany comes from burning lignite, perhaps the most polluting way to generate electricity on the planet.
These statistics, then, make it clear that the “solar revolution” that has supposedly occurred in Germany is not worth the name, and is mostly just a combination of hype and wishful thinking. I can make this even clearer by comparing the growth of solar in Germany with that of more old fashioned forms of electricity generation…
…An even more sobering comparison, given Germany’s much trumped green credentials, is with the growth of coal power plants this decade. At the end of last year Germany had a total of 36 gigawatts of installed solar capacity, and this produced 28.3 terawatt hours of electricity. However, between 2011 and 2015 Germany is opening 10.7 gigawatts of new coal power plant capacity. The consulting company Poyry projects that these new coal power plants will have average capacity factors of 80%. If so, they will have a combined average annual output of 75 terawatt hours. In other words, in five years Germany is opening coal capacity which will have an annual output of more than double that from all of its solar panels. However, this comparison is perhaps too generous. Solar panels typically last twenty to twenty five years, but coal power plants easily last twice that long.
What we are seeing in Germany, then, is much more of a coal lock-in than a solar revolution…
…The new German government has put in place a long-term target of having between 2.5 and 3.5 gigawatts of solar panels installed each year. If we take the higher figure, and assume that 3.5 gigawatts is installed each year, it will take Germany almost ninety years to reach 50% solar electricity. This however is an underestimate. Solar panels must be replaced every twenty or twenty fives years, and 50% solar energy in Germany would require massive advances in energy storage techniques. Germany, then, is around a century away from getting half of its electricity from solar panels.
Does this look like a revolution?
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WrenchMonkey said:
The delusion of techno-utopians would be funny if it wasn’t so not-funny.
It doesn’t really matter how “green” the power source is if it requires “industry” and the use of non-renewable resources.
Fossil fuels can’t simply be replaced with solar power or any or all of the “renewables”. At the very most it would only delay the inevitable collapse of “civilisation” by a few years and even that’s a very optimistic assumption. It’s more likely that switching to “green” energy would be seen as a plausible excuse for increasing our rate of consumption.
The current system is murdering the planet with ecocidal exploitation of resources using energy generated by fossil fuels. The techno-utopians, who insist that “green” energy will save us, are merely advocating using different weapons to commit the same crime.
Unless the human race of the future is envisioned as a species that survives by traveling through space, using up planet after planet in an orgy of intergalactic consumption, there is no rational argument for “saving” industrial civilisation. Our unnatural way of Life cannot be sustained by any finite landbase, up to and including an entire planet.
Techno-utopians, just like most of humanity, are so acculturated, indoctrinated to the anthropocentric attitude of entitlement and the abusive nature of industrial civilisation, that they cannot see it for what it is. It’s not unlike a violently abusive husband/father who keeps beating his wife and children and insisting that it’s their fault for making him do it.
It’s really quite simple: we can have our ecocidal civilisation, with all its accoutrements, comforts and luxuries OR we can have a planet that will support large, complex Life forms, such as Homo sapiens. Those who actually “believe” we can have it both ways are simply delusional. Let them enjoy having their green industrial cake and eating it too.
Just my opinion
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James said:
The real biological wealth that took billions of years to create is being destroyed so that a bunch of apes can “rule the world” with their wealth generating cancerous infrastructure. Can’t they see that it only creates wealth for a very short period of exponential growth before ending in death? No. They can’t and they’re quite satisfied with believing anything else. Why follow the rules and laws of the most immoral and damaging entity – cancer? Because you’re in it and under compulsion to support the growth, “drill baby drill”, “support our troops” and so on and so forth. To resist is unpatriotic and downright strange and dangerous to the malignant herd. The world of business has marching orders and upon their banner is written, “Give me growth or give me Death.” They’re going to get both.
So, trying to turn the ship of state away from the rocks is no longer, and perhaps never was, an option. The ship of state has no options, it’s involved in a death struggle from which no one walks away, except for a few misfits that escaped from various tumors into the interstitial fluid to spend their remaining days not in the productive support of exponential growth, or the ridiculous goal of owning a big piece of the tumor in a terminally ill system, but rather in celebrating the fullest awareness possible before inevitable darkness once again quenches the light.
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WrenchMonkey said:
Thank you James! Well said and spot on. You are seeing the “The Big Picture”.
Your conflation of our dominator culture with “cancer” is very apt. It’s something I do very frequently.
It’s very sad that so many people are so preoccupied with the manifold “issues” confronting us today that they fail to see and address their source: industrial civilisation.
Acculturation to the compartmentalised nature of industrialised civilisation makes it extremely difficult for its individual members to comprehend its inherently mortiferous nature. The forest cannot be seen for the trees as it were. People just don’t see the big picture. They are consumed with their own pet issues, their specialised functions and their own self-interest. They are incapable of taking a holistic viewpoint.
Industrialised civilisation is a cancer and it’s killing the world that makes it possible for us exist. A cancer cannot be convinced to stop its spread by entreaty or appeal to reason. A disease is not cured by putting band-aids on the symptoms. To be rid of the disease, its source must be eradicated. The source of the disease that’s destroying our world is industrial civilisation. The end of civilisation as we know it is the only “cure”.
Just my opinion
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david higham said:
The ultimate reason is Homo sapiens and our intelligence that allowed us to learn how to smelt metals and all the other steps that led to an industrial civilisation.
Ernst Mayr stated that intelligence is a lethal mutation.This century or perhaps the next few decades will be proving him correct.The overwhelming tragedy is the devastation of ecosystems and extinction of other species we have incurred on our journey.
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WrenchMonkey said:
I’ve just downloaded digital versions of several of Mayr’s works including “What Evolution Is” and “The Growth of Ecological Thought”.
Let’s see if he can convince me that Homo sapiens is utterly irredeemable.
Problem is, I have so much reading to do that if I started today and dedicated the rest of my Life to nothing else I probably couldn’t get it all done before I die. Nevertheless, I’ll certainly make every effort to get through as much as I can.
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xraymike79 said:
Working on a new post. I can now say I consider myself an anarchist.
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James said:
It’s a bit of a conundrum. A true anarchist would bristle at any authority determining the size of their family or the number of wives and yet it is the growth in human population that spurs exponential growth. In order to avoid starvation and mayhem at the margins, economic growth is sought to both employ new workers and pursue profits. Economies of scale production techniques are employed to more effectively enslave and eat the ecosystem. Large business entities require command and control just as a human body requires a brain. The goal of the “brain/management” is almost invariably more profit and more growth which, by design, is shared unequally. Anarchy or extreme control is on its way. It seems that extreme control is being organized now, but it is expensive and will fail as resources and energy simply become unavailable to hold the organization together. New, mini-pyramids will likely form under the sway of new charismatic and ruthless leaders and I would expect that as they run short of resources and energy and neighboring flush organizations decline to share, warfare will ensue. The United States has been rather successful in setting-up the petrodollar system to tax the world which results in 5% of the world’s population getting 25% of the world’s consumption, but there simply isn’t enough to go around now and militaristic bullying will not maintain our advantage.
Once the contraction begins and the people at the margins get edgy (ISIS) and no one steps in to share, there will likely be continuous warfare at various scales, at least until most of us expire from lethal extremes of heat. You don’t know of any deserted islands somewhere near the Antarctic do you?
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WrenchMonkey said:
I don’t think simple anarchy would be sufficient to save our species as long as we insist upon clinging to our industrialised “civilisation”. I think maybe anarcho-primitivism might be a better ism in this case.
Just my opinion
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xraymike79 said:
What do eco-anarchists propose instead of capitalism?
In place of capitalism, eco-anarchists favour ecologically responsible forms of libertarian socialism (see section I), with an economy based on the principles of complementarity with nature; decentralisation of large-scale industries, reskilling of workers, and a return to more artisan-like modes of production; the use of environment-friendly technologies, energy sources, and products; the use of recycled raw materials and renewable resources; and worker-controlled enterprises responsive to the wishes of local community assemblies and labour councils in which decisions are made by direct democracy. (See, e.g. Murray Bookchin, Toward and Ecological Society and Remaking Society). Such an economy would be “steady-state,” meaning that the rate of resource depletion would equal the rate of renewal and that it would not be subject to disastrous collapses in the absence of quantitative growth or stimulation by military spending. – link
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jonjost said:
I’ve been an anarchist for 50+ years. Philosophically. The trouble with anarchism as a theory or practice is that it involves humans. Anarchy as a working system requires of people that they be self-responsible, aware, even intelligent. Humans in general do not like to be self-responsible; they prefer leaders, being told what to do. They prefer not seeing their own individual or collective behavior. They prefer it so much that they follow dictators like a Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot; or they follow so-called “democrats” towards insane behaviors (say, like MAD), or Capitalism which on its face appeals to the worst qualities of human psychology (greed, jealousy, power-tripping) and begets, naturally, the results we see all around us. Any thinking person can see that a steady-state, minimalist culture that provided sufficient food, housing, clothing could also provide sufficient “happiness” (I lived 5 years in a no running water, no electricity abandoned cabin in N Montana), which, after all, is kind of what life offers as a best-case scenario. Capitalism and consumerism offers its illusion in the form of endless things and endless unhappiness, never mind destroying its own environment in order to do so. But the lure of that house by the sea and lap pool and luscious babes and hot cars and private jets is just too too powerful, never mind the end-game scenario of death, communal and catastrophic, by pursuing that path. When the time comes, probably soon, when the fight gets on for the last resources, surely it will get nasty, refugees will flood the livable areas of the globe, the big powers will reach for their nukes (if the “civilian nukes” like Fukshima haven’t already don the job), and…. and apropo James, a few posts earlier, there will be no “at a safe distance” viewing points. Unless like some into deep illusions, you plan some astral travel.
The human species is essentially an evolutionary error – far to smart/clever/technically savvy, but burdened with those basic animal instincts which delete “wisdom” under stress. Sadly, but that’s the way it is.
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xraymike79 said:
Wise words. Nothing to add.
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WrenchMonkey said:
Pretty much with you until the last paragraph:
“The human species is essentially an evolutionary error…”
And you may be right on that point as well but, at this point, I haven’t quite reached that as a final conclusion. I do think the human species made a fundamental evolutionary error (Neolithic “revolution“,) but I’m not so sure it is one.
Just my opinion
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Donald Campbell said:
One might assume that all events are derived from the processes and developments of Nature. Man, being one of these developments, if our understanding of universal evolutionary history is somewhat correct, is no less an experiment than a bacterium. Each of these experiments reaches a point of extinction, changing into another form of energy. An error? No, it’s just
natural change. Our general failure to comprehend Nature will probably lead to our extinction, the death of our evolutionary tree…a natural development that man unwittingly promoted.
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WrenchMonkey said:
While I agree that extinction is inevitable, I’m not so certain about how imminent it might be.
I also agree that humans are an issue of Nature but not so much regarding our failure to comprehend it. We were not always so ignorant in this regard. All of the “progress” we have made has come at the cost of an equal and probably greater loss of wisdom.
Following your reasoning to its logical conclusion, every form of Life is an evolutionary error. All will ultimately pass into oblivion. Just natural change. Homo sapiens is probably the only species, however, that will knowingly commit evolutionary suicide.
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witsendnj said:
The idea that progress is bad and primitivism is good ignores the benefits of progress, of which there are many, and exactly what terror primitive people lived in, and still do. Without science, primitive people were very superstitious and did a lot of nasty things like burn people they thought harbored evil spirits, etc. They also fetishized possessions and objects, imbuing them with power they don’t have. It is true that progress brings ecocide in its wake. But romanticizing what it was like to live before “civilization” is just a comforting fantasy. Watch this – it’s awesome! Gives a good picture of what tribalism really is. http://www.vice.com/en_uk/the-vice-guide-to-travel/blood-sacrifice-in-sumba-full-length
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WrenchMonkey said:
“The idea that progress is bad and primitivism is good ignores the benefits of progress, of which there are many, and exactly what terror primitive people lived in, and still do.”
The end result of human “progress” will be the premature extinction of the species. Any concept of “terror” is entirely subjective and its degree and impact, or lack thereof, can only be appreciated by the members of the culture in question. Millions in the modern “civilised” world are subjected to very real terror every day, much if not most of which is made possible only through the technological wonders of our ostensible “progress”.
“Without science, primitive people were very superstitious and did a lot of nasty things like burn people they thought harbored evil spirits, etc. They also fetishized possessions and objects, imbuing them with power they don’t have.”
Firstly this statement attempts to paint a picture with a brush that is far too broad. There have been many “primitive” cultures that were quite egalitarian and lived sustainably and in relative Peace for very long periods. For starters, have a look at “The Chalice And The Blade” by Riane Eisler.
Discussions of things that are highly subjective can be problematic, even between people who are essentially in agreement. Individuals often define things just a bit differently and, though the differences may be basically inconsequential, perceive or create obstacles that hinder communication.
I suppose if a bunch of hunter/gatherer tribes were confined to a small, limited landmass they would end up selfishly competing for the resources. Or, maybe they could work together and find ways to stabilise the population and create a self-sustaining, self-regulating ecosystem that would support them indefinitely, barring some catastrophic event like sustained drought, earthquake or volcanic eruption or invasion and colonisation by a greedy, materialistic, self-aggrandising “civilisation”.
The island of Mannahatta, the original name for Manhattan, was home to the Lenape for at least five thousand years before it was “discovered” by europeans. For five millennia it supported those indigenous people and provided all their needs for survival simply because they chose to live in cooperation with each other and Nature. After a mere 500 years or so of occupation by civilised europeans, the island is a sterile, non-productive, concrete wasteland.
I certainly don’t have the answers. I do, however, have the firm conviction that humans are very social animals and must work together to survive. It then becomes a simple question of how large a group is capable of sustaining such a culture. A tribe? A village? A town, state, country, continent, the whole species? As far as I have been able to determine, the extreme maximum is 150 members.
“It is true that progress brings ecocide in its wake. But romanticizing what it was like to live before “civilization” is just a comforting fantasy.”
As is clinging to a delusional vision of a techno-utopia wherein all problems are solved through the magic of science. The only scenario I can envision for the indefinite perpetuation of our industrialised civilisation would require a massive commitment to and very rapid advancement of our technology, specifically as it relates to interstellar travel. It would be necessary for us to become a species of space-faring techno-locusts, travelling the universe and stripping the resources of every planet, comet and asteroid we encounter in order to maintain our existence. Think of the alien race in the movie “Independence Day”.
Just my opinion
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xraymike79 said:
I wish I had a way to rate comments. This one is stellar.
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WrenchMonkey said:
Thanks XRAY. I appreciate it most sincerely.
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witsendnj said:
I hope you don’t imagine I “cling to a delusional vision of a techno-utopia”? What part of “progress brings ecocide in its wake” did you think I might imagine to be utopic? Or is that just a straw man argument, since I never implied any such thing? All I said was, romanticizing tribal life is a mistake – living in primitive circumstances isn’t a picnic, and it doesn’t provide any answers. The Lenape got along within their group but regularly warred with their neighbors, particularly the Iroquois. In THEIR OWN WORDS: http://nativeamericannetroots.net/diary/873
In more general terms, I would say that a significant percentage of those who are self-designated civilization haters are simply uninformed about other cultures, prehistory and particularly, archaeology – and, like a fish cannot see the water it swims in, tend actually to be privileged white (mostly) guys who cannot see their own privilege. They take for granted that civilization has so far (until collapse) meant for them that they are never actually starving, that they live in a place where infant mortality is at historical low levels, that they can shit in a toilet and flush everything away while posting comments from their iphone about how bad technology is.
People who live in poverty WANT electricity, they want running water, they want fossil fuel energy because that’s the ONLY way to provide reliable light and heat, food and transportation.
And there lies the conundrum. Fossil fuel energy is toxic and so are its derivatives, so-called “clean” energy.
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xraymike79 said:
You’re not talking about the U.S. are you?
U.S. has highest first-day infant mortality out of industrialized world …
“A new report reveals that the United States has the highest first-day infant death rate out of all the industrialized countries in the world.
About 11,300 newborns die within 24 hours of their birth in the U.S. each year, 50 percent more first-day deaths than all other industrialized countries combined, the report’s authors stated.”…
Hmmm, must have something to do with our For-Profit health care system.
Oh, and you’re bringing up a straw man argument yourself when you call people “civilization haters”. This is the very same argument used by climate change deniers who refuse to accept the reality of ACD. Why would you fall into that mindset? Technology has to be measured by the precautionary principle if you want to have even a pot to piss in. Whatever civilization abides by that rule is the one I’m for.
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witsendnj said:
No, I’m not talking about the US vs. the rest of the INDUSTRIALIZED world, I’m talking about modern survival rates vs. primitive survival rates (isn’t that obvious?)…that and the life-extending surgeries and drugs is a large part of the overpopulation problem. Unfortunately I can’t think of a morally acceptable way to fix that since so many people are already squeamish about abortion and positively hysterical about suicide, although if everyone over 50 agreed to check out it would certainly lighten the burden on the planet. http://www.ipss.go.jp/seminar/j/seminar14/program/john.pdf
Go to the chart titled: Historical Mortality Levels
Prehistory – 200-300 dead babies per 1,000 live births
France 1950 (for example) – 50 dead babies per 1,000 live births
Japan 2007 – ❤
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xraymike79 said:
So you’ve resigned yourself to the belief that the current set of living arrangements cannot be changed, thus all should be content within the sarcophagus that has been constructed for us as we hurtle headlong into extinction.
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witsendnj said:
I wouldn’t use the word “resigned”, I would say though I have accepted that as there are no negative feedbacks of significance, and the major amplifying feedbacks are underway already and irreversible, we are definitely headed towards extinction. We might be able to slow down a bit from “hurtling” but all indications (historical and current behavior) are that we won’t. In fact, we seem to be doing everything possible to accelerate it. I also wouldn’t say a sarcophagus has “been constructed for us” since we have all constructed it ourselves, unless you want to go all cosmic and blame a deity or the 2nd law of thermodynamics or biological imperatives. I tend towards the latter.
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xraymike79 said:
As I said in this essay…
“The things we know that should be done to save ourselves are only philosophical narratives running in our head, never to see the light of day.”
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witsendnj said:
That is poetic, I like it. There is a lot of palaver about false solutions, but very rarely do people talk about what really must happen. Even the doomiest doomers rarely go there. People are governed by irrational beliefs. Consider just this (can’t be blamed on western civ!) Devout Hindus regard cremation as an essential rite that frees the soul from the body, enabling its journey to the next level. But with India’s Hindu population of about 800 million ensuring a massive number of open-air cremations, there is a growing awareness that this adherence to religious orthodoxy carries a toll for the temporal world.
It takes a lot of wood to burn a body: The demand for funeral pyres strips the country of more than 50 million trees annually, according to some estimates.
http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-ashes3sep03-story.html#page=1
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WrenchMonkey said:
Thanks for the link. I’ve bookmarked it and will try to find time to read it all. There are lots of links and “section 1” is an entire page of them. Looks like I’ll need to find a lot of time to research it.
Whatever “ism” a society happens to fall into, there are certain natural laws that must be followed. For example, If any “communities” become too large, if population is allowed to increase beyond a very small number, all is ultimately lost.
Here’s a link. It’s an old site that is apparently not being maintained any more but it’s still a great source.
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xraymike79 said:
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WrenchMonkey said:
Divide and Conquer. Perhaps the oldest trick in the book of the essential psychopath (oligarchs, plutocrats, totalitarians, kings, dictators, that which we call a ruling class, by any other name, would would stink as rank.)
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xraymike79 said:
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xraymike79 said:
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xraymike79 said:
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xraymike79 said:
Video of Zhanaozen massacre that Tony Blair took $11 million to help cover up:
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xraymike79 said:
“What clearly renders “appropriate” technology increasingly attractive today is not any popular celebration of its achievements of promise; rather, is is a growing fear that we are irretrievably committing ourselves to destructive systems of mass production and widespread problems of environmental pollution. The artistic messiahs of a technocratic society are gone. Humanity now seems to feel that technology has ensnared it; it has the mien of a victim rather than a beneficiary.”
– Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom p. 303
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witsendnj said:
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xraymike79 said:
Yes nearly all are addicted to Petrolify™, but the list of side effects and dangers are too long to list. Perhaps the most common is ‘delusions of grandeur’.
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witsendnj said:
Cheap energy is intoxicating. When I was reading up on the Dustbowl I saw an old film of a farmer in the midwest, plowing with one of the first tractors. He looked ecstatic. Imagine experiencing the switch from hard labor behind a mule to that effortless endeavor, to conquer nature so easily. Although, the myth of Icarus was warning of hubris long before we had access to oil.
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xraymike79 said:
Another reason why nation states will not power down. It would mean certain death by technologically superior forces.
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WrenchMonkey said:
@ witsendnj
“I hope you don’t imagine I “cling to a delusional vision of a techno-utopia”? What part of “progress brings ecocide in its wake” did you think I might imagine to be utopic? Or is that just a straw man argument, since I never implied any such thing?”
Don’t get your knickers in a twist witsendnj. It wasn’t my intention to single you out with that comment. I was generalising with regard to those who insist that our salvation will be achieved through technology. They apparently “believe” our problems can be fixed with more of what caused them. A form of technological “faith healing”?
“All I said was, romanticizing tribal life is a mistake – living in primitive circumstances isn’t a picnic, and it doesn’t provide any answers. The Lenape got along within their group but regularly warred with their neighbors, particularly the Iroquois.”
Romantacising? Not what I’m doing at all. Let’s coin a word to describe what I’m trying to do: “pragmatitising”.
1) Industrial civilisation is unsustainable and irredeemable.
2) Its members, rulers and ruled alike, will not voluntarily enact the changes needed to transform it to a culture that is rational, sustainable and natural.
3) Therefore, it will collapse.
4) The longer the collapse of civilisation is delayed, or the longer we wait to deconstruct it voluntarily and rationally, the greater the suffering and death for any Life that survives through and after the breakdown.
Since we know the worst is coming, we should be preparing for it rather than hiding in denial and normalcy bias. All I’m advocating is that, since the collapse is inevitable, we should do whatever we can to make the transition to a non-industrial civilisation a bit less catastrophic.
I do not share your apparent conviction that our species is absolutely and inescapably condemned to near-term extinction. I rather think it likely that there will be some survivors after the crash and that there may still be time to soften the landing just a bit. I’m convinced that we must go back before we can go forward. We stopped evolving somewhere during the Neolithic. We need resume the process. That is my honest and well informed conclusion derived from 68 years of existence, more than 50 of real-time observation, exhaustive research, independent study and just a pinch of common sense.
The link you provide is of interest but the site that has no information whatsoever regarding the Lenape of Mannahatta. Nor does it offer any particular timeline. Apples and oranges as far as I can see. Have a look at this PDF document, which is a bit more location and time specific.
Here is a little more Lenape history “in their own words”.
Another PDF document .
This will add a little more to the understanding of what it means to transition from “primitive” to “civilised”.
“As an obsessive chronicler of natural history, Sanderson also turns to letters and diaries written in the 1600s by early Dutch settlers, and he uses them to flesh out Mannahatta’s flora and fauna. Some of these accounts make the island sound like an ecological Eden with “multitudes of wolves, wild cats … flying squirrels – beavers in great numbers, minks, otters, bears.” One writer complained that birds “fill the woods so that men can scarcely go through them for the whistling, the noise, and the chattering. But many wild species were not destined to hang around long after the first Europeans arrived. Wolves were driven out of Upper Manhattan in the 1720s. American chestnut trees, passenger pigeons, black bears and river otters were evicted as well. Peaks and crags – which gave Mannahatta its name (it means “island of many hills”) – were not immune to the destructive forces of the new settlers. One phantom hill – called Verlettenberg by the Dutch – existed close to where the statue of a bronze bull now stands near Wall Street.”
I don’t have the book but plan to acquire it.
There were more ecological communities per acre than Yellowstone, more native plant species per acre than Yosemite—30 kinds of orchids, for instance. There were also 230 types of birds, nearly 80 kinds of fish, plus bears, wolves, beavers, otters, and numerous others.
Let me remind you that the Lenape lived sustainably amid all this abundance for over five thousand years without ever exceeding the carrying capacity of the landbase, but it took “civilisation” less than 500 to utterly destroy it.
“In more general terms, I would say that a significant percentage of those who are self-designated civilization haters are simply uninformed about other cultures, prehistory and particularly, archaeology – and, like a fish cannot see the water it swims in, tend actually to be privileged white (mostly) guys who cannot see their own privilege. They take for granted that civilization has so far (until collapse) meant for them that they are never actually starving, that they live in a place where infant mortality is at historical low levels, that they can shit in a toilet and flush everything away while posting comments from their iphone about how bad technology is.”
I don’t consider myself a “civilisation hater”. I am simply a realist, pragmatic and partial to empirical evidence. It seems to me that you are as critical of industrialised (a very significant distinction) civilisation as I. You are also, evidently, equally critical of the alternative: a deindustrialised, natural, “wild” civilisation. That alternative doesn’t necessarily mean being reduced to slovenly, brutish, filthy, knuckle-dragging troglodytes wallowing in their own shit and dying before reaching middle age. That is your assumption and it’s not really supported by archaeology or forensic anthropology. Once again, I recommend “The Chalice And The Blade” by Riane Eisler. An excerpt follows:
“Writing before the excavations of the 1960s and 70s, and before Gimbutas systematically organized both the old and new data using the latest carbon and endrochronology dating techniques, the European prehistorian V. Gordon Childe describes the same general pattern. Childe characterizes the culture of early Europeans as “peaceful” and “democratic,” with no hint of “chiefs concentrating the communities’ wealth.” But then he notes how all this gradually changed, as warfare, and particularly the use of metal weapons, is introduced.” (page 51) (emphasis added)
“People who live in poverty WANT electricity, they want running water, they want fossil fuel energy because that’s the ONLY way to provide reliable light and heat, food and transportation. And there lies the conundrum. Fossil fuel energy is toxic and so are its derivatives, so-called “clean” energy.”
It seems to me that your narrative is a product of acculturation to the dominant culture of civilisation. Natural, wild, “primitive” people did not and do not necessarily live in poverty. They didn’t and couldn’t care less about electricity or any of the bells and whistles of civilisation until such time as they were exposed to it, contaminated by it and exploited by the civilised. Until and unless they are infected by the cancer of civilisation they live completely unaffected by the absence of such nonessentials. You and I however – and nearly everyone who is a product of industrial civilisation – are completely dependent upon them.
You seem convinced there is no alternative to total near-term extinction. You may be right but I’m not so sure. When civilisation crashes, it’s true the death toll will be staggering. But I still think there’s a chance of survival for Homo sapiens sapiens.
It’s seems clear that we agree there’s a “perfect storm” (of our own devise) headed our way. It also seems we agree upon what’s created that storm. That we disagree upon some details regarding the consequences and possible responses isn’t really very significant in my opinion. It is not incumbent upon either of us to “convert the other. I think we can simply agree to disagree without rancour. I certainly know that I can.
One last bit of information for your consideration.
PSYCHOPATHY: THE CAUSE OF EVIL
“Inherited and acquired psychological disorders and ignorance of their existence and nature are the primal causes of evil. The magic number of 6% seems to represent the number of humans who either carry the genes responsible for biological evil or who acquire such disorders in the course of their lifetime. This small percent is responsible for the vast majority of human misery and crime, and for infecting others with their flawed view of the world.
I hope you fare well on your journey, whatever path it may take.
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