Tags
6th Mass Extinction, ABVH, China pollution, Joel Pett, Maldistribution of Wealth, Patrick Chappatte, Post-apocalyptic Future, Post-Apocalyptic Survival, The Onion, The Power of Positive Thinking, Thomas Gregory Toles
No matter if the weekend has arrived or not, when I feel like life has become a grotesque parody of itself then it’s time for another installment of ‘Weekend Funnies for the Depressed Collapsitarian’…
Too close to the truth…
An animated GIF from graphic wizard ABVH (via Featured E-Magazine):
Years after they have destroyed main street, central banks have recently admitted that their policies benefit only the wealthy…
The inconvenient truth that GDP=CO2 Emissions…
“Chinese People will not be stopped by anything. If pollution ruins a river, we will build a new river. If pollution destroys a mountain, we will build a new mountain. At long last, the world cannot ignore our growing prosperity.”
The power of positive thinking for the cancer man can be applied to Homo Economicus and his refusal to change his ways in spite of the collapsing biosphere… “It took inner strength to ignore all those climate scientists.”
Debate: ‘Are Violent Video Games Adequately Preparing Children For The Apocalypse’…
“They are going to need the more practical skills like how to build a shelter from abandoned cars or how to get drinking water by collecting the morning dew in human skulls.”
This article from Slate backs up what I stated in my previous post… the dangers of letting wealthy philanthropists hold the purse strings to public health:
…What was it that left the world’s leading public health body so unprepared for the most serious public health crisis in a generation? According to Laurie Garrett, senior fellow for public health at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Coming Plague, the economic and political factors that led to the botched response have been building for years.
The WHO is governed by the 194-nation World Health Assembly, in which, as Garrett put it, “Vanuatu and China” have equal voting power. Throughout the early 2000s, the member states consistently failed to vote to raise their own membership dues, “so in 2013 they were paying the same dues based on per capita GDP that they were in the 1980s. The core budget, adjusted for inflation, was going steadily downhill.”
This meant that donations from rich countries and private entities like the Gates Foundation had to fill the gap. But these donors can earmark their donations for specific issues—say, HIV/AIDS or smoking prevention. As former WHO assistant director-general Jack Chow put it in 2010, this means the budget is “increasingly divvied up before it ever reaches the WHO.” Margaret Chan herself acknowledged this problem in a recent interview, saying, “My budget [is] highly earmarked, so it is driven by what I call donor interests. When there’s an event, we have money. Then after that, the money stops coming in, then all the staff you recruited to do the response, you have to terminate their contracts.”
This cash flow problem was compounded by the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent Eurozone crisis, which saw European nations redirecting their foreign aid priorities toward bailing out struggling European Union member countries like Greece and Portugal. In 2011, the WHO cut its budget by nearly $1 billion and laid off 300 staff at its Geneva headquarters. Today, its $2 billion annual spending is less than that of many U.S. hospitals.
In addition to those stark numbers, recent years have also seen a shift in public health priorities among member nations. In short, diseases of the poor like Ebola were no longer on the agenda, even among developing nations.
“There was more and more of a sense that if you’re part of the developing world, if you’ve left the ranks of the impoverished world, you no longer think that infectious diseases are part of your agenda,” says Garrett. “You become part of the rich club when you start worrying about cancer and heart disease…
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Water Crisis Seen Worsening as Sao Paulo Nears ‘Collapse’
…“If the drought continues, residents will face more dramatic water shortages in the short term,” Vicente Andreu, president of Brazil’s National Water Agency and a member of Rousseff’s Workers’ Party, told reporters in Sao Paulo. “If it doesn’t rain, we run the risk that the region will have a collapse like we’ve never seen before,” he later told state lawmakers.
The worst drought in eight decades is threatening drinking supplies in South America’s biggest metropolis…
One of Sao Paolo’s Biggest Reservoirs Is Nearly Dry
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It bring to mind the bombardment of TV and radio commercials, starting in the late 1990s, for Brazilian hardwood floors. I don’t know what happened, but I woke up the other day and realized that I no longer care anymore. Just don’t feel it.
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There were thought to be five mass extinctions in Earth history. Fossil evidence is now pointing to a sixth – and it’s not the human-made Anthropocene
THEY always get you when you’re down. Life’s biggest-ever disaster – the “great dying” 252 million years ago – was helped by another mass extinction just 8 million years before that.
If confirmed, it would mean that life in the Permian period was hit by a double whammy that made the extinction of the dinosaurs look like a tea party. This newly discovered second Permian extinction could have left ecosystems fatally vulnerable to the final knockout punch….
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Damn powerful scene X
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…A team of seven scientists from Yale’s Schools of Public Health and Medicine and the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare in Liberia developed a mathematical transmission model of the viral disease and applied it to Liberia’s most populous county, Montserrado, an area already hard hit. The researchers determined that tens of thousands of new Ebola cases — and deaths — are likely by Dec. 15 if the epidemic continues on its present course.
“Our predictions highlight the rapidly closing window of opportunity for controlling the outbreak and averting a catastrophic toll of new Ebola cases and deaths in the coming months,” said Alison Galvani, professor of epidemiology at the School of Public Health and the paper’s senior author. “Although we might still be within the midst of what will ultimately be viewed as the early phase of the current outbreak, the possibility of averting calamitous repercussions from an initially delayed and insufficient response is quickly eroding.”…
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It is said that the name “California” came from the Spanish after a Greek adopted legend about an island fortress populated by “beautiful Amazon women warriors whom were gifted in the use of golden tools and weapons.” Early European “explorers” described the place as having fog shrouded and rugged coastlines, vast mountains, deep valleys, desserts, and lakes. They dreamed and schemed about how to conquer the wilderness. Invasion and colonization of the west coast of the United States by Europeans began in earnest about 500 years ago. They did not know or care that they were preceded by at least 250 generations of people who were there first. People that had lived in relative harmony with the natural world and each other–Karok, Maidu, Cahuilleno, Mohave, Yo Semite, Paiute, Tule–were now put under the colonial guns. The wilderness that supported all life was on the road to evisceration.
There was once a vast waterbody, Lake Tulare, located in the central valley. It was the largest freshwater lake in North America outside of the Great Lakes. At one point, pre-contact with Europeans, it is thought that 70,000 human beings lived along this beautiful productive lake. Around this lake and stretching to the coast, vast groves of Giant Sequoia and Coastal Redwoods stood as sentinels that helped to balance the atmosphere and the ecosystem in ways that we are only just learning about in 2014.
Europeans were literally afraid of these trees. They were thought to be giant warriors that devoured human flesh. Perhaps these were the “Californians” of the Greek legend. No doubt these warrior stories were told to the Spanish by the indigenous people who did not welcome the white invasion. In 1833 European explorers pushing inland identified several groves in what is now called Calaveras County. Some, including one Giant Sequoia cataloged by john Muir were 3,500+ years old. There were thousands of groves throughout the Sierra Nevada. By 1855 a few years after the gold rush, carnival men came to the Calaveras grove and cut the biggest trees and carted them to cities for exhibition. This lead to more destruction, extraction for commercial use, logging. By 1915 most of the mature trees had been logged. Today there are only 60 or so small groves of Sequoia left in California.
By 1930, Tulare Lake had been completely drained to feed the growing agricultural industry of the Central Valley.
Today we have new bad news from California. There are daily stories about drought, frack poisoned aquifers, crazy schemes, and the vanishing rarity that has become fresh water. Because modern humans have done so much to exploit and conquer the natural world, the state of California’s fresh water resources, it’s economy and the health of its people is in free fall…
…
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…The larger point of the article was that Wall Street has been having this effect on American business for many, many years: pushing companies to maximize short-term shareholder value at the expense of what has made our economy great: our ability to turn a profit by creating new value, not simply by distributing wealth. Mukunda says that Wall Street keeps growing in size as a proportion of our GDP–while the rest of creative economy shrinks.
The push to get the most profit from the least investment in assets doesn’t simply hinder innovation. Throughout the economy, it draws investment away from creative new ventures–quality engineering for example–and into the whirlpool of financial engineering. As he puts it, our economy is becoming just as financialized as 14th century Spain, 18th century Netherlands, and Great Britain during the past two centuries. “The financial tail is wagging the economic dog. When private sector credit reaches 80% to 100% of GDP, it inhibits growth and increases volatility. In the U.S., in 2012, private-sector credit was 183.8% of GDP.”…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-a-georgescu/real-values-vs-shareholde_b_5995322.html
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The elephant is in the room, overpopulation. What to do about the elephant. Feed it? Let it grow into one-hundred more elephants as the elephant dung piles up in the room? I’m sure many would like to see the elephant go away, especially when it can no longer do useful work or becomes a burden upon the great cancerous plantation. But humans are just one sub-component of the cancer. Will they also put limitations upon their short-term profit generating technologies whose products are so readily consumed by the elephant? You decide.
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/10/ebola-2.html
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Could not stop if we wanted to and we don’t want to. It’s fun to pretend we/they know what they/we are doing and are in control.
Myths of the American Mind: Scientism
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Ebola’s Miocene Neogene Roots
The research shows that filoviruses — a family to which Ebola and its similarly lethal relative, Marburg, belong — are at least 16-23 million years old.
Filoviruses likely existed in the Miocene Epoch, and at that time, the evolutionary lines leading to Ebola and Marburg had already diverged, the study concludes.
The research was published in the journal PeerJ in September. It adds to scientists’ developing knowledge about known filoviruses, which experts once believed came into being some 10,000 years ago, coinciding with the rise of agriculture. The new study pushes back the family’s age to the time when great apes arose.
“Filoviruses are far more ancient than previously thought,” says lead researcher Derek Taylor, PhD, a University at Buffalo professor of biological sciences. “These things have been interacting with mammals for a long time, several million years.”
According to the PeerJ article, knowing more about Ebola and Marburg’s comparative evolution could “affect design of vaccines and programs that identify emerging pathogens.”
The research does not address the age of the modern-day Ebolavirus. Instead, it shows that Ebola and Marburg are each members of ancient evolutionary lines, and that these two viruses last shared a common ancestor sometime prior to 16-23 million years ago.
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The Apocalypse Is Finally Bigger Than Football
…That horror fiction about the end times has supplanted the closest thing we’ve got to Roman bloodsport as our premier choice for spectator entertainment is, at the very least, an interesting signal in shifting American cultural tastes. At most, it’s symbolic of a deepening pessimism and nihilism felt by a rich (but unequal) and increasingly nervous society. Either way, the Walking Dead staggering past the NFL in viewership is a loaded milestone.
Imagine the Romans, still enamored by the live-action thrills provided by gladiators, filling the Coliseum instead with a production of the epic poem Aeneid—but only Book 6, where the hero Aeneas goes to the Underworld to hear grim prophecies of a violent near-future…
So what gives? How is this show shattering records? It could be that we’re drawn to the zombie.
“We are more interested in the zombie at times when as a culture we feel disempowered,’ Sarah Juliet Lauro, an assistant professor at Clemson University whose Twitter handle is @ZombieScholar, told the Associated Press last year.
“And the facts are there that, when we are experiencing economic crises, the vast population is feeling disempowered,” she continued. “Either playing dead themselves or watching a show like Walking Dead provides a great variety of outlets for people.”
If Lauro is right, TWD‘s booming popularity may be a sign of society-wide discontent—her research indicates that the more helpless and desperate non-zombie humans feel, the more we turn to zombies to channel our frustration…
…”I think this all started at the convergence of the turn of the new millennium,” Lauro wrote me in an email, “an economic downturn that suggested capitalism might not be working as well as we thought, a terrorist attack in the US that seemed to lead to a war that had NOTHING to do with that attack, and an increasing awareness of the damage done to the planet, ie, climate change. There has been the feeling that we are headed for an uncertain and bleak future, and since 2003, the zombie’s popularity has been on the rise.”…
…We stagger out from the advertisement-fueled spectacle into a world of lower wages, greater austerity, fewer public services, and less opportunity. Since 2009, 95 percent of the economic gains have gone to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, and struggling citizens around the country are feeling it. On top of it all, apocalyptic current events are adding to the despair, and possibly fueling zombie dominance.
“With Ebola and ISIS, they represent fears of the unknown and evil,” Glenn Stutzky, the anthropologist behind Michigan State University’s popular zombie survival class, told Business Insider…
…The media critic Douglas Rushkoff believes our infatuation with apocalyptica is a symptom of what he calls “present shock”—an inability or unwillingness to look to the long term to solve more distant problems. The Marxist scholar Frederic Jameson, meanwhile, is credited with popularizing the notion that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism…
Interesting, then, that it may be the pitfalls of capitalism that are driving us to imagine the end of the world in the first place—and to revel in it, weekly—effectively preventing us from dreaming up more productive ideas about where the future is heading.
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Brilliant essay…
…In light of the great popularity of shows like The Walking Dead, films like World War Z and the proliferation of books like Feed and First Days (both of which, by the way, explicitly tie zombie outbreaks to the Ebola/Marburg family of viruses) we might be tempted to think that the current zombie craze is a twentieth-century invention, made particularly salient in the twenty-first century by the postmodern threat of roving, mindless gangs of internet trolls. But the zombie’s story is in fact tied to the very colonizing impulse behind Ingram’s and Limbaugh’s bogeymen. The development of the new world, and indeed the founding of the United States itself, was enabled by slavery’s demonic desire to turn individual people into hordes of indistinguishable bodies.
It was the curse of slavery that first spawned the monster we’ve come to know as the zombie—a body split off from the mind of its owner, subject to powers beyond its control. As Amy Wilentz has argued, the zombie is simply the “logical offspring of New World slavery.” For modern Americans deeply invested in the idea of a postracial society, zombies evoke the fear that this past—a past that perhaps we have not thoroughly atoned for—will not stay in the ground.
In the nineteenth century, when slavery still sought to turn millions of African Americans into the walking dead, guilty whites cast around for a way to bury the effects of this crime. In 1816 Presbyterian minister Robert Finley was terrified of the evil that would arise if the past weren’t buried. Even once slavery was abolished, Finley warned, the traumatic memories would refuse to be put to rest, eventually contaminating the nation. “The evil therefore increases every year,” Finley warned, “and the gloomy picture grows darker continually, so that the question is often and anxiously asked—What will be the end of all this?” To disrupt the memory of seeking to reduce millions of human beings to mere bodies deprived of rights or voice, organizers devised a plan. They would make the descendants of slavery’s curse simply disappear. Reverend Finley created the African Colonization Society, an organization that gathered support from senators, several presidents, slaveholders and abolitionists alike. Even Abraham Lincoln was intrigued with the idea of colonization as a way to put slavery to rest.
The colony the American Colonization Society created and sought to populate with the undead memories of slavery was none other than the nation of Liberia. In doing so, organizers sought to emulate the work Britain had done years earlier, when they founded a nearby African nation created explicitly to receive the descendants of slavery—Sierra Leone. These acts of colonization, and those of other European powers, would result in slavery’s crimes being reanimated in different forms. Colonizers largely saw Africa as a pool of resources to be mined, and Africans largely as laboring bodies designed to extract those resources.
Now Sierra Leone and Liberia are ground zero for the Ebola virus, which health officials tell us, continues to replicate at an exponential rate. Here in the United States, doctors insist that our superior infrastructure will protect us. But it is a dangerous fiction to think that we can continue to reap the rewards of cheap labor and resources while keeping the poverty and misery required to generate them quarantined in the bodies of those we’ve already written off as dead.
When Thomas Eric Duncan was hospitalized for Ebola in Dallas, he dispelled the fantasy that the United States could somehow remain immune to this virus. Not surprisingly, the horror fictions began replicating at a still more frantic pace. Tellingly, many of these terrifying fantasies conjure images of slavery—the government will take away our freedom of movement; our bodies will be subject to the appetites of rapacious others; if you run, they will catch you. The current cure proposed by many frightened Americans reanimates the logic of the African Colonization Society: we should put what we fear at a distance. Borders should be closed; flights should be cancelled. Take the problem and bury it somewhere far, far away…
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Most people’s bodies are already embalmed with tissue preserving food from the Frankenstein kitchen of industrial technology. Their minds simply want to resonate with their bodies by being immersed in zombie fantasy while popping pharmaceutical soma by the handful. These aren’t people, they’re components prepared by the millions to interact effectively and efficiently with technology in a headlong rush towards personal and ecosystem death. How can one feel alive and vital when employed by a nefarious tumor bent upon putting the biosphere and all of its inhabitants onto a cold slab at the planetary morgue. I have a feeling that many of the zombie fans have little self-respect, and why should they?
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I just got home from the big grocery warehouse where I spent 45 min dodging hoards of 300lb humanoma’s with shopping carts full of high fructose franken food saturated in Bisphenol A. Most of them are one handed drivers; with the smart phone in the other yaking away and not paying attention to all the people they are bumping into. I no longer try to avoid them. No self respect, yet completely self absorbed, and no common courtesy either. Fuck em all!
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The truth about evil
Our leaders talk a great deal about vanquishing the forces of evil. But their rhetoric reveals a failure to accept that cruelty and conflict are basic human traits
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2014/oct/21/-sp-the-truth-about-evil-john-gray
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The Disruption Machine
What the gospel of innovation gets wrong.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine?currentPage=all
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“Today I run a venture capital firm and back the next generation of innovators who are, as I was throughout my earlier career, dead-focused on eating your lunch,” Linkner writes. His job appears to be to convince a generation of people who want to do good and do well to learn, instead, remorselessness. Forget rules, obligations, your conscience, loyalty, a sense of the commonweal. If you start a business and it succeeds, Linkner advises, sell it and take the cash. Don’t look back. Never pause. Disrupt or be disrupted.
— sounds like a morally rudderless system and all that’s wrong with the world.
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Even the head of the Fed is forced to admit the system is rotten…
Democracy Lite: All Form and No Substance
…
These days, almost everybody with a finger on America’s pulse seems to recognize the threat this inequality poses, except those running for public office. The latest to enunciate that angst: Federal Reserve Board chair Janet Yellen.
“The extent of and continuing increase in inequality in the United States,” Yellen told an October 17 Fed conference in Boston, “greatly concern me.”
Societies grow more unequal, the Fed chief went on, when incomes for the rich rise faster than the incomes of everyone else. Societies grow unequal even faster when incomes for the rich rise and incomes for everyone else stagnate.
“Unfortunately,” Yellen points out, this latter situation essentially defines the United States over “the past several decades.”
The 62 million households in America’s least affluent half, new Fed stats show, averaged only $11,000 in net worth last year, 50 percent less than bottom-half families averaged after inflation in 1989. Over those same years, top 5 percent household average net worth nearly doubled — to $6.8 million…
…America’s “pace of new business creation,” the Fed chair details, “has gradually declined” as inequality in the United States has increased. This “slowdown in business formation” may be jeopardizing “a significant source of economic opportunity” for families “below the very top in income and wealth.”
Yellen finds the same dynamic operating within education. Wealthy families shower their children with ever more advantages at the same time poorer families have a “harder time affording college.”
Our “inequality of outcomes,” Yellen concludes, seems to be nurturing a profound “inequality of opportunity.”
In a real democracy, Yellen’s basic charge — that the rising wealth of America’s rich appears to be choking off opportunity for America’s hard-pressed — would be setting off political fireworks. In that real democracy, incumbents would now be squirming to explain why they’ve allowed the gap between the rich and the rest of us to widen on their watch. Challengers would be proudly presenting five-point plans for ending America’s ridiculously top-heavy distribution of income and wealth.
None of this has taken place. Yellen’s challenge to the nation’s political order sank out of sight in a single news cycle, buried under relentless barrages of brain-numbing 30-second campaign ads that keep potential voters alternatingly confused, angry, and uninterested.
This campaign advertising has clearly been election 2014’s biggest story. Campaign spending on current congressional races, the Center for Responsive Politics estimated last week, will total $4 billion, over double the 1998 total.
The bulk of these billions are coming from America’s wealthy. In 1982, the top 0.01 percent of the voting age population accounted for less than 10 percent of all federal political contributions. In the 2012 elections, political scientists calculated last year, top 0.01 percenters contributed over 40 percent.
Court decisions over the past four years have essentially eliminated the few contribution restrictions put in place after the Watergate scandal 40 years ago.
Restrictions still formally on the books do limit how much wealthy donors can give directly to a single candidate to $5,200 per election cycle. But donors in 2014 are “double dipping,” the Brennan Center for Social Justice reported last week, via a new twist on super PACs called a “buddy group.”
“Buddy” groups devote all their resources to the election of a specific candidate. They can accept unlimited donations from individuals and corporations.
The biggest double dipper so far in 2014: Robert Mercer, the co-CEO of a $15 billion New York hedge fund. Mercer gave Iowa Republican Senate hopeful Joni Ernst $5,200, the legal limit, the Brennan Center notes, then pumped another $350,000 into a new buddy group dedicated to Ernst’s election.
Two other Ernst buddies, hedge fund billionaires Paul Singer and Julian Robertson, ponied up about another $500,000.
To remain “competitive” in today’s political environment, candidates today need plenty of buddies like Mercer, Singer, and Robertson. They court these fantastically rich obsessively. They dare not give them cause for irritation.
So don’t expect our billionaire-bankrolled candidates to target — or even discuss — the ongoing concentration of America’s wealth. And don’t expect America’s voters to concentrate on these candidates. Only 15 percent of voters, note Pew Research pollsters, are paying any serious attention to this fall’s campaigning.
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Care to work feudally for the wealthy on their vast tracks of doomstead farms?
Revolution in 5 years?
World-wide extinction through global pandemic?
…Aside from Alec Baldwin’s throbbing discomfort at Brand’s pesky invasions of his suave aura, the fascinating thing here is Baldwin’s revelation that “wealthy and extremely wealthy people in the U.S. are buying tracts of land in the northeastern United States — especially way up north, and into Canada — in response to their fears about climate change.” Baldwin quotes an anonymous but prominent entertainment business friend of his as predicting, “We’re all going to be growing our own food in 15 years.” Baldwin says that there are “a lot of people” he knows who are “buying, like, 6,000 acres of abandoned timber land in Maine.”
In this liberal elite, “eat local” version of the coming apocalypse, Baldwin tells how these landowners will have people come “and work, feudally, on a farm.”…
http://markcz.com/russell-brand-alec-baldwin/
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“Aside from Alec Baldwin’s throbbing discomfort at Brand’s pesky invasions of his suave aura..” I just don’t see that. They seemed more like buddies. Big ego for sure, but no one has done more to mock Baldwin’s “suave aura” then Baldwin himself. Remember him on SNL doing Canteen Boy and the Scoutmaster skit? Also, I would not classify Brand as a liberal elite. Newly rich for sure but he essentially came from the wrong side of the tracks and he is far too radical for the liberal elite, who really wish to maintain the status quo. Gail Z had a great post the other week on the true nature of some of the most prominent and hypocritical liberal/Hollywood elite environmentalists. I give Baldwin and Brand, Stacy and Max kudos for talking about the issues like realists and adults. The years of living dangerously was a fucking joke. Tomas (Globalization) Friedman? Tough guy Harrison Ford gonna have a stern talking to the Indonesian palm oil and forestry officials – theater all the way.
The Endocene
http://witsendnj.blogspot.ca/2014/10/the-endocene.html
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=597_1316828459
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Here’s part one of that group discussing corporations and the demise of the worker…
“Wealthy people have put it up in neon: ‘Anyone who works hard is a chump, an idiot. ’There’s no respect for workers, for union labor,” Baldwin said.
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…
An organization which profits from the state, worldwide, as Google does, and then pays nearly no taxes, as the top corporations of the USA do, including Google, is a criminal organization.
(Normal people and small businesses do pay taxes, and, if they do not, they are treated like criminals, and go to jail.)
“Don’t be evil”, Google’s order is just a way to make people impotent: “Don’t be evil, we will do it for you!”
The owners of Google own personal jumbo jets. One can argue that they are leeches on civilization, as all of other owners and CEOs also are, per the nature of the tax-free money they make, and allow their giant corporations to make, and their influence on political leaders, whom they induce to perpetuate the system which makes them fat, well fed leeches.
Leeches are brainless, because they don’t need a brain. And those brainless creatures are fatally weakening civilization.
It’s because of the fact those people use the state, for example the fundamental scientific research financed by the state, but are not contributing to it proportionally to the profits they make from it, that the fundamental research budgets are falling everywhere (and especially in the USA and the EU).
This is not just a matter of lost opportunity, injustice, and the masses increasingly walloping in lack of education, lack of health, employment, and gathering misery. It’s also a matter of refusing to finance research on many lethal infectious diseases: Ebola is a prominent example now. But many diseases, which would be perfectly curable if the research was financed, are perking up. Not just tuberculosis. Research on general antibiotic resistance, worldwide, would be flushed with money, if just one billionaire paid taxes as much as they used to in the 1950s… In the USA. (I’m serious, I checked the numbers, and the science; thousands of antibiotics in the wild could be developed for a few tens of millions of dollars.)
A lot of the “austerity” drive is entirely synonymous with little people paying Google’s, and other enormous corporations’ taxes. And not just with their pocket books, but also with their lives.
Google & Other Free Riders: Civilization Pays For Them
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Just got around to reading this steaming pile of fetid shit:
…the private sector lawyer and ex-IRS attorney explained that since 1998, IRS restructuring has focused on bringing in “outside people.” This led to the employment of an extra layer of executives who were previously “partners from big accounting firms.” Citing active IRS criminal agents, the ex-IRS attorney said: “Almost every large firm or corporation has a person inside the IRS. It’s a revolving door, with the top two or three management layers all from big accounting and law firms, and this is why they won’t work big billion-dollar cases criminally. Private bar attorneys are, in effect, controlling the IRS. It’s a type of corruption – that’s the word used by one IRS agent I’m in touch with whose case was shut down by higher ups without cause.”…
Whistleblowers: IRS Officials Behind ‘Fraudulent’ Multi-Billion Dollar Corporate Tax Giveaways
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…How does such a large, well-oiled and—in the US at least—profitable company manage to erase its entire profit for tax purposes? With the help of very good, very expensive lawyers. According to the Evening Standard, citing figures from eMarketer, Facebook made some £371 million in revenues in the UK last year, but booked most of those sales in Ireland, where corporate tax rates are among the lowest in Europe.
Large companies can use a complicated structure known as the “double-Irish” to move cash around various countries until the effective tax rate comes close to zero.
The actions of companies such as Facebook, Google, and Apple, among others, have attracted the ire of both local and European regulators and politicians. The European Commission has recently made noises about investigating the tax dealings of Apple and Amazon, among others, and Ireland has promised to phase out its loopholes (though not everyone believes it). In the meantime, however, residents of Britain—and much of Europe—can pat themselves on the back and feel wryly smug about contributing more to their country’s operations than some of the biggest companies in the world…
Facebook declined to comment.
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It seems likely that these corporate raptors, including the many octopus arms of government, will squeeze the remaining wealth from the middle class as the carcinoma struggles to maintain metabolism within its hodgepodge and deteriorating infrastructure. There are no fundamental changes occurring that would alter this outcome of starvation and then collapse, followed by appropriation of personal wealth. Homeowners will be required to stay connected to utilities or pay a penalty just to maintain a living arrangement that no longer makes economic sense. The eventual outcome is full “organ system” failure and metabolic death, but only after all of the fat has been drained from the system to make sure everyone has access to the essentials of life or at least can survive the heat waves. Everyone has to hold hands when jumping off the cliff. If you have resources, they will be taken from you to support others. These others will say, “It’s just until times get better.”, but things won’t get better and wealth will not be reconstituted from a planet whose resource gradients have been fully plundered.
It is also likely that anti-hoarding laws with searches of private residences will become common. Your fate may be determined by a population of sports and religion neanderthals that like to solve problems with a .308 and/or a petition to an almighty God. One thing you can be certain of, corporate, financial and government people will steal your resources through subterfuge or overt manipulation of law and regulation to get resources to build their own life rafts.
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That reminds me of Dimity Orlov’s suggestion about flying under the radar as much as is possible given ones circumstances.
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I wish I were someplace without the need for a radar, but the corrupt institutions will use the radar they’ve built to make sure you comply with their wishes. “Obamacare” is a case in point where one of the main infrastructures of the cancer is to be supported by mandatory coverage and much higher premiums for those able to pay, ones that have official employment. All to be tracked by the IRS. The middle class will be bled dry by the hospitaloma amongst other -oma’s of their own creation. Eventually we will be chipped, monitored by GPS and completely defanged by those that have the most to lose from the volatile well-armed commoners. Although I’m sure this is their vision, it will be problematic to implement.
If we were to have a chance, GDP growth and population growth had to stop twenty or thirty years ago and an orderly retreat and abandonment of marginal areas into high density ones. No metastasis into China and the “developing” world. We needed to downsize with ample energy resources to maintain the ever contracting growth until it could reach a sustainable limit. But to switch metaphors, no one believes the tsunami is coming until the waters recede, and then it’s too late. It’s too late now.
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Not too long ago I would have suggested that someone with your expertise could immigrate into Canada (it’s not easy) where it would be a gentler collapse, but now I am not so sure. We have changed so much in less than 10 years that all bets are off. I cringed a few weeks ago when Harper did his tough guy act regarding ISIS. I was painting my moms living room while she was watching him on TV and I told her this won’t turn out well. The blow back was faster then I ever imagined. The knee jerk power grab was not. I have no doubt that TPTB will try everything you said and more, but I think that complete control is too complex, energy intensive and expensive to run indefinitely and competently on a paper economy. 70% of the security state is for profit corporations. Who is watching their employees? Maybe there are other Edward Snowden types who are greedy instead of conscionable. Then there are the militia types, like Timothy McVeigh, who never disappeared; just went underground. Radical Muslims are still an ever present threat and we have yet to see any serious Eco-terrorists, but I think we might as the hopelessness increases. Given that there are hundreds of thousands or millions of web pages and a pile of books, think tank and military reports stating how easy it would be to take down the poorly maintained electrical grid and other infrastructure weak points, it is only a matter of time before there is a serious attempt. Of course 40 years of band-aid infrastructure maintenance, incompetence, bureaucratic grid lock and ever more destructive climate change consequences might be enough all on it’s own.
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I imagine all nations dominated by corrupt central banks will be the same, including Canada. Right now we’re in the final doubling of population and GDP and ……………..we’re not going to get there. You just have to wonder what the hell they’re trying to do with their spying, an expanding prison system, loss of rights, militarization of police. It’s amateur hour at system breakdown. Just like an overweight person can’t stop eating and a smoker can’t stop smoking, our capitalist power addicts will continue to expand their wealth in competition with each other until the economy and environment have collapsed. Eventually government will not be able to borrow enough money/resources to fund their overly bloated and complex sub-systems. Just as soon as people figure out there won’t be any further growth to make good on that promised 8% return. Right now, lenders are confident of a 2% annual return over ten years on “risk free” paper. In reality I would expect a 5% per annum loss of capital. When the music stops and the “players” decide to bail out of paper and grab a chair of resources, there should be a sudden hyperinflation as prices are bid up on everything, but this too shall pass. Citizens will be unable to afford food or energy and perhaps this is when the citizens are given their helicopter drop of cash. If not, there will be a sudden and nasty revolution and everyone’s chair gets tossed into the bonfire. Surely those with all the resources will not force the poor to sell what remains of their trivial assets for a loaf of bread, surely not.
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A long editorial from the head of AlterNet…
…At this point, it is a basic tenet of American politics that corporate power rules the roost. Nothing significant that will become law in America if corporate power, profits, global competitive advantage, military might, national security and privatization are in any significant way threatened. And while I personally understand, the motivation in a situation of dire straits, I am weary of what is often knee-jerk optimism among some progressive cheerleaders, about how things are going to change: something better is right around the corner; the pendulum is going to swing back, what goes around comes around, etc. People, it is not going to happen. Every indicator signals that things are going to get worse, perhaps much worse.
Another favorite line that many smart people utter, almost everyday out of some kind of unmoored hope is: “if only the American people knew how bad these things are, like children’s hunger, the wage gap or how rich the .001 percent is, they would get angry and do something about it.” Well, no. First, most people know how bad things are—they don’t need to have the exact statistic to understand it. They live it every day.
The bigger problem is that people don’t know what to do. They are overwhelmed on the Internet, asked to sign dozens of petitions a week, give money to a myriad of uncoordinated, stand alone causes. But the truth is, the political system is blocked in almost every way, as never before…
…Some months ago, I wrote an article: ” The 4 Plagues: Getting a Handle on the Coming Apocalypse,” in which I provided an analysis that there are four especially powerful and pernicious overarching economic and political mechanisms operating in our country that are fundamentally responsible for the situation we are in: They are privatization, financialization, militarization and criminalization, which together are producing a steadily creeping authoritarianism—a new authoritarianism—to fit our times. Let’s call them the Four Plagues, or if we wish, “The Four Horsemen of Our Apocalypse,” from the Book of Revelations in the New Testament…
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https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-budget-101/revenues/
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“… Here, evolution had hit on the sweetest of solutions. Such perceptions were guaranteed to produce a faith-dependent species that believed itself to be thoroughly separate from the rest of the animal kingdom, but followed its genetic instructions to the letter—and left more offspring as a consequence. Here was a gene-driven animal just like any other, yet one that believed itself to be under special guidance—guidance that was not merely ‘spiritual’, but in most instances ‘divine’. Here was a wonderfully practical insanity, an invincible, hereditary madness that eventually enabled this under-endowed ‘paragon of animals’ to devour the planet like a ripe fruit.” (The Spirit in the Gene, 1999)
http://regmorrison.edublogs.org/articles/
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Oscar Wilde wrote the obituary of capitalism a long time ago:
“They know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
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H/T Joe Bish at Population Media Center…
See: http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/environment/humans-undecided-on-total-destruction-of-nature-versus-having-cool-stuff-2014093091200
HUMANITY is conflicted over whether it is worth decimating the planet to maintain the supply of desirable consumer goods.
50 per cent of species have disappeared in the last 40 years, prompting debate over whether animals are better than phones and burgers.
Office worker Mary Fisher said: “Many animals have appealing faces but if you get close to them they would probably bite you.
“By comparison my new phone is really good plus you can look at pictures of animals on it because it has the internet.
“In conclusion I think we should use the planet’s natural resources to make sleek things to go in shops, and to hell with pandas and garter snakes.”
Father-of-two Stephen Malley said: “Animals generally don’t live very long anyway, whereas stuff lasts forever. Or at least until they bring out newer, slightly cooler stuff and you have to throw the old stuff away.”
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