http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49335.htm
The League of Assad-Loving Conspiracy Theorists
So the global capitalist ruling classes’ War on Dissent is now in full swing. With their new and improved official narrative, “Democracy versus the Putin-Nazis,” successfully implanted in the public consciousness, the corporatocracy have been focusing their efforts on delegitimizing any and all forms of deviation from their utterly absurd and increasingly paranoid version of reality.
The Democratic Party is suing Russia, the Trump campaign, and Wikileaks (seriously … they’ve filed an actual lawsuit in an actual court of law an everything) for launching “an all-out assault on democracy” by publishing the DNC’s emails, “an act of unprecedented treachery,” according to Party Chairman Tom Perez. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, having already spent the last six years in a room in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid being arrested by the British authorities, extradited to the United States, and imprisoned for the remainder of his natural life, has been cut off from the outside world in order to prevent him from further “interfering” with democracy by expressing his opinions.
In Syria, where the “international community” has been battling the “global terrorist threat” by supporting moderate jihadist militias intent on overthrowing the government and establishing a fundamentalist theocracy, the corporate media have been hard at work sanctifying the official story of the “chemical weapons attack” in Douma. According to this story, Bashar al-Assad, an uncooperative brutal dictator whom the corporatocracy has been trying to replace with a more cooperative brutal dictator, dropped a lot of chlorine gas bombs (and possibly sarin, the deadly nerve agent), onto a house full of innocent babies. He did this on the eve of victory over those moderate jihadist militias the “international community” has been supporting in their eight-year attempt to take over his country, slaughter him and his entire family, mount their severed heads on spikes, implement nationwide Sharia law, and then go out hunting homosexuals and heretics to gruesomely behead on YouTube. The evacuation of these freedom fighters was already being negotiated, but Assad didn’t want to miss his last chance to sadistically gas a lot of women and children and have the Western corporate media broadcast his war crimes throughout the world, or something more or less along those lines.
This gratuitous baby-gassing massacre could not be allowed to go unpunished, so Emmanuel Macron and other senior members of the “international community” hauled Trump in off a golf course somewhere (or wrestled him away from the Gorilla Channel) and ordered him to order a completely pointless one hundred fifty million dollar series of “retaliatory” missile strikes on assorted uninhabited buildings containing zero chemical weapons and of absolutely no strategic value. The corporate media and their paid menagerie of military experts and other talking heads took to the airwaves to celebrate this demonstration of international “resolve,” as did investors in Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics.
The celebrations were short-lived, however, as the corporate media needed to immediately turn their attention to aggressively countering the malicious disinformation campaign being waged by the infamous International Putin-Nazi Propaganda Network (i.e., anyone capable of critical thinking). Reports by journalists actually in Syria, like Robert Fisk of The Independent, casting doubt on the official story needed to be strenuously ignored, ridiculed, and delegitimized. Fisk, a respected, award-winning journalist who has covered the Middle East for over four decades, had clearly been duped by his Putin-Nazi minders into publishing pro-Assad propaganda. Just as clearly, any actual Syrians contradicting the official story (which the corporate media had scrupulously fact-checked with the US military and intelligence agencies) had been intimidated into doing so by Putin-Nazi-Assadist death squads.
But Fisk and the Syrians are small potatoes compared to the discord-sowing threat posed by the International League of Assad-Loving Twitter Conspiracy Theorists, a decentralized network of “anti-Western,” “pro-Assad,” extremist traitors led by people like Sarah Abdallah, a shadowy figure whose current whereabouts the BBC is still trying to pinpoint (and presumably report to MI6), and Vanessa Beeley, an independent journalist who writes about Syria for an “extreme right” website, speaks to “fringe groups,” and has appeared on RT, which the BBC is at pains to remind us is a “state-owned” media organization.
This nefarious network of dissension-sowers is also responsible for the “4000 percent increase” in Putin-Nazi propaganda in the wake of the Poisoned Porridge Attack that “Russia” carried out in Salisbury in March, in which operatives allegedly smeared the doorknob of a former Russian intelligence officer and his daughter with oatmeal laced with Novichok, “the deadliest nerve agent ever devised,” instead of, well, you know, just shooting the guy, or throwing him out of an upper-floor window. Despite the potency of this lethal nerve agent, which, for some reason, “can only be made in Russia,” both victims are expected to completely recover. Tragically, their cat and guinea pigs, having also managed to survive the attack, were slowly starved to death by the police, presumably out of an abundance of caution.
In any event, according to the diligent, authoritative investigative journalists at The Guardian, following this brazen porridge attack, “automated bots” “based in Russia,” like @Partisangirl and @Ian56789, spread Putin-Nazi disinformation to millions of unknowing Twitter users in an attempt to “undermine the international system” (whatever that’s supposed to mean). As it turns out, @Partisangirl is just a human being and not a robot at all, and @Ian56789 is just a feisty British pensioner who is tired of being routinely lied to by the government and the corporate media … unless, of course, he’s a sleeper agent just posing as a feisty pensioner, which he hasn’t been able to conclusively disprove to the satisfaction of the corporate media. (Watch Ian being interrogated by a Sky News Russian Bot-Hunting Team and judge his loyalties for yourself!)
These are just a few examples of how the global capitalist ruling classes and their mouthpieces in the corporate media have been generating an atmosphere of mindless hysteria and paranoia in the service of drawing “a line in the sand” between neoliberalism (i.e., global capitalism) and any and all forms of dissent therefrom. They’ve been at this, relentlessly, for almost two years now, since they recognized they were being confronted with a bona fide widespread “populist” insurgency against the hegemony of global capitalism, not just in the Greater Middle East, but right in the heart of the Western empire.
I’ve been writing about this since 2016, so I’m not going to try to rehash all that here. The short version is, Western societies are being divided into two opposing camps … two extremely broad ideological camps, both of which encompass the traditional political division into left and right. Let’s call camp number one “the Normals” (i.e., those who support and conform to the values and ideology of global capitalism, regardless of whether they identify as conservatives, liberals, neoliberals, neoconservatives, or anything else). Let’s call camp number two “the Extremists” (i.e., those opposing global capitalism, or not conforming to its ideology, regardless of whether they identify as socialists, communists, anarchists, fascists, anti-fascists, jihadists, or whatever).
While, of course, real political conflict still takes place within each of these two broad camps, the global capitalist ruling classes are less concerned with the “left/right” equation than they are with “Normal/Extremist” equation. This is the battle they are fighting currently. Short some sort of miraculous event, it is a battle they are going to win. They are going to win it by demonizing anyone opposing global capitalism as one or another form of “extremist” … an Islamic terrorist, an Antifa terrorist, a white supremacist, a Black identity extremist, an anti-Semite, a conspiracy theorist, an Assad apologist, a Russian bot, a Putin-Nazi propagandist … or whatever. It doesn’t really matter which labels they use. The point is, anyone not conforming to the global capitalist version of reality is an enemy of all that is normal and good.
In an atmosphere of mass hysteria and paranoia (like the one we’re living in at the moment), the authorities’ narratives do not have to make sense, or stand up to any type of real scrutiny. Their primary purpose is not to deceive, but rather, to demarcate an ideological territory of acceptable belief, expression, and emotion to which “normal” people are expected to conform. Beyond the boundaries of that territory lies the outer darkness of “abnormality” and “extremism,” which no “normal” person wants anything to do with. To avoid being cast into this outer darkness, people will conform to the most absurd and paranoid nonsense you can possibly imagine. The global capitalist ruling classes know this, which is why they don’t care if you disprove their narratives on Twitter or some “disreputable” website they’ve rendered virtually invisible anyway. They are not debating the facts or the truth … they are marking the boundaries of that “normal” territory, and herding frightened people into it.
This article in Haaretz by Alexander Reid Ross, a lecturer at Portland State University who has been publishing (or attempting to publish) a series of rather paranoid pieces smearing people he disagrees with as neo-Strasserist sleeper agents, provides an extreme but clear example of what Western governments and the corporate media have been doing, albeit on a much subtler level. Read the piece through if you can possibly stand it. You will be told how people like Michael Savage, Rania Khalek, Alex Jones, Breitbart’s entire UK office, Cenk Ugyur, Max Blumenthal, Caitlin Johnstone, Glenn Greenwald, The Nation‘s Stephen F. Cohen, Tucker Carlson, Vanessa Beeley (again), various British fascists, Jeremy Corbyn, and that modern-day Rasputin, Lyndon LaRouche, are all parts of the insidious Putin-Nazi plot to … well, I’m not sure, exactly, but I’m pretty sure it has something to do with killing Jews and gassing babies....
Monday, April 30, 2018
SC164-6
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49336.htm
Damascus - the Sarajevo of 21st Century?
We can only hope that Damascus escapes the fate of being the Sarajevo of the 21st Century, as US historian Daniel Lazare warned in a recent media interview.
Sarajevo is synonymous with the trigger that ignited World War I in 1914, which led to over 10 million deaths. It saw the demonic birth of modern wars of mass destruction.
Lazare contends that the American, French and British air strikes on April 14 are just the “first step in a far more aggressive US military campaign against Syria”.
He added: “The US cannot leave Syria, it will never leave Syria, greater US military aggression is to come… Damascus is the Sarajevo of the 21st Century.”
History rarely repeats itself exactly. But history certainly can rhyme, so to speak, meaning that repetition of approximate patterns are discernible.
Exactly a century after the very first world-wide, industrial-scale war ended in 1918, there is a real risk of a similar conflagration erupting in Syria. Only, if this were to happen, the danger of escalation is even greater, given that potential combatants have nuclear weapons.
It is not inevitable that history repeats, or even rhymes. It is not inevitable that Syria’s seven-year war will explode into an international war. But nevertheless the danger is proximate.
As with Sarajevo in 1914, the burgeoning configuration of rival powers is present. All it would take is for one spark to ignite the powder keg of forces.
One such spark was the US, French and British air strikes against Syria earlier this month. Syria and its allies, Russia and Iran, denounced the military attack as an aggression, a violation of international law owing to the alleged pretext of revenge for a chemical weapons incident on April 7 near Damascus was patently fraudulent.
The tragedy of the looming conflict in Syria is that few politicians or citizens would want an all-out war to eventuate, knowing that the consequences could be so utterly horrific.
There is every reason to believe that US and Russian military commands are maintaining close communications to avoid any accidental clash in Syria, and thus avoid a confrontation.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in a lengthy interview with Russian media, said that Moscow had warned Washington about “red lines” in Syria, which he said the American side abided by when it conducted the air strikes earlier this month. There were no casualties and the minimal extent of damage suggest that the air strikes were more for show than for any real military purpose.
Lavrov also said that he was confident the present American and Russian leaderships would not allow an escalation of conflict in Syria.
The foreign minister said: “Speaking about the risk of a military confrontation, I feel absolutely confident in assuming that the militaries will not allow this, and of course neither will President Putin nor President Trump. They are leaders, after all, elected by their people and responsible for their peace.”
Nonetheless, getting back to the Sarajevo analogy, the fiendishly perplexing thing is that the configuration of forces is such that the logic of war can over-ride what leaders say with rationality. It is probably fair to say that European leaders back in 1914 did not want nor foresee how events would unravel in an uncontrollable and catastrophic way.
In Syria today, we have American, French and British forces operating on the ground and in the air. A US aircraft-carrier battle group has now arrived in the Mediterranean within striking distance from Syria. All of these NATO forces, including Turkey, it should be said, are illegally threatening Syria.
There seems little doubt that the recent build-up of NATO military power threatening Syria is a result of their proxy terror groups having been defeated after a seven-year war. That strategic defeat can be attributed to Russia and Iran’s intervention on the side of its Syrian ally following a legal request for help from Damascus.
US President Trump has lately been talking about withdrawing American forces from Syria. That could be idle bluster from Trump given that the Pentagon seems determined to do just the opposite. Also, if Trump manages to draw down some US troop levels in Syria, he has stated a desire to replace those forces with military units from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab regimes, as well as possibly contracting private mercenaries under the charge of his friend Erik Prince, the founder of infamous Blackwater USA.
Then we have French President Emmanuel Macron this week urging Trump to maintain US military presence in Syria, warning that the Western states cannot afford to let Iran gain influence, despite the fact that Iranian forces are legally present in Syria under request from Damascus, and despite the fact that Iran, along with Russia, helped defeat the Western-backed covert war for regime change using terrorist proxies. The sheer arrogance of Macron!
Adding to the combustible mix is Saudi Arabia and Israel who have said they are willing to join in any future US-led air strikes on Syria.
It seems clear that the Saudis and Israelis are itching to start a war with Iran which they obsessively view as their nemesis.
Almost a week before the April 14 US-led air strikes, a far more dangerous incident occurred on April 8, when Israeli air-launched missiles hit the T-4 military airbase in central Syria. Among the dead were seven Iranian advisors. Again, it was another spark jumping at the powder keg.
Iran’s national security chief Ali Shamkhani this week warned of “consequences and retaliatory actions” for what was an outrageous act of war by Israel.
In response to this legitimate statement of Iranian self-defense, Israel’s Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman had the chutzpah to say: “Israel doesn’t war but if Iran attacks Tel Aviv we will hit Tehran.”
Apart from Lieberman’s arrogant irrationality, what his statement implies is that a false-flag incident is begging in order to give Israel a pretext for more aggression against Syria and Iran.
The danger in Syria is not just the accumulation of military forces but the dynamic of many moving parts. An incident involving Israel and Iran could be the flashpoint that explodes with impact on the concentric forces aligned.
Politicians and military leaders in the US and Russia may have no intention of all-out war. They may even genuinely abhor such a scenario.
But that is why the Sarajevo analogy invoked by Daniel Lazare holds. Disastrous consequences can follow ineluctably from the circumstances, regardless of better intentions.
This is why it is imperative that all military forces in Syria must stand down and let the country pursue a self-determined political process, as several UN resolutions have mandated.
The legal and moral onus is first and foremost on the US, France and Britain to stand down their military forces, and to stop interfering in Syria. They, after all, are illegally present.
Ominously, however, the NATO allies do not seem willing to comply with international law. They are recklessly piling up the powder keg. And to their shame, the United Nations and the European Union, are cowardly complicit in acquiescing to the belligerence of Washington and its allies. The UN and EU should be explicitly demanding the NATO powers to desist from their illegal activities towards Syria. But no. Cowardly silence.
In that regard, Damascus, fearfully, looks increasingly like Sarajevo in 1914.
Against that, we might recall that the Syrian city is also synonymous with “conversion” and “repentance” – as goes the story of Saul the Jewish mass murderer of early Christians who then “saw the light” of divine righteousness to turn away from iniquity to become peace-loving St Paul.
However, given the arrogant, deluded mass-murderers among the US-led NATO alliance, such a timely conversion seems unlikely.
Damascus - the Sarajevo of 21st Century?
We can only hope that Damascus escapes the fate of being the Sarajevo of the 21st Century, as US historian Daniel Lazare warned in a recent media interview.
Sarajevo is synonymous with the trigger that ignited World War I in 1914, which led to over 10 million deaths. It saw the demonic birth of modern wars of mass destruction.
Lazare contends that the American, French and British air strikes on April 14 are just the “first step in a far more aggressive US military campaign against Syria”.
He added: “The US cannot leave Syria, it will never leave Syria, greater US military aggression is to come… Damascus is the Sarajevo of the 21st Century.”
History rarely repeats itself exactly. But history certainly can rhyme, so to speak, meaning that repetition of approximate patterns are discernible.
Exactly a century after the very first world-wide, industrial-scale war ended in 1918, there is a real risk of a similar conflagration erupting in Syria. Only, if this were to happen, the danger of escalation is even greater, given that potential combatants have nuclear weapons.
It is not inevitable that history repeats, or even rhymes. It is not inevitable that Syria’s seven-year war will explode into an international war. But nevertheless the danger is proximate.
As with Sarajevo in 1914, the burgeoning configuration of rival powers is present. All it would take is for one spark to ignite the powder keg of forces.
One such spark was the US, French and British air strikes against Syria earlier this month. Syria and its allies, Russia and Iran, denounced the military attack as an aggression, a violation of international law owing to the alleged pretext of revenge for a chemical weapons incident on April 7 near Damascus was patently fraudulent.
The tragedy of the looming conflict in Syria is that few politicians or citizens would want an all-out war to eventuate, knowing that the consequences could be so utterly horrific.
There is every reason to believe that US and Russian military commands are maintaining close communications to avoid any accidental clash in Syria, and thus avoid a confrontation.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in a lengthy interview with Russian media, said that Moscow had warned Washington about “red lines” in Syria, which he said the American side abided by when it conducted the air strikes earlier this month. There were no casualties and the minimal extent of damage suggest that the air strikes were more for show than for any real military purpose.
Lavrov also said that he was confident the present American and Russian leaderships would not allow an escalation of conflict in Syria.
The foreign minister said: “Speaking about the risk of a military confrontation, I feel absolutely confident in assuming that the militaries will not allow this, and of course neither will President Putin nor President Trump. They are leaders, after all, elected by their people and responsible for their peace.”
Nonetheless, getting back to the Sarajevo analogy, the fiendishly perplexing thing is that the configuration of forces is such that the logic of war can over-ride what leaders say with rationality. It is probably fair to say that European leaders back in 1914 did not want nor foresee how events would unravel in an uncontrollable and catastrophic way.
In Syria today, we have American, French and British forces operating on the ground and in the air. A US aircraft-carrier battle group has now arrived in the Mediterranean within striking distance from Syria. All of these NATO forces, including Turkey, it should be said, are illegally threatening Syria.
There seems little doubt that the recent build-up of NATO military power threatening Syria is a result of their proxy terror groups having been defeated after a seven-year war. That strategic defeat can be attributed to Russia and Iran’s intervention on the side of its Syrian ally following a legal request for help from Damascus.
US President Trump has lately been talking about withdrawing American forces from Syria. That could be idle bluster from Trump given that the Pentagon seems determined to do just the opposite. Also, if Trump manages to draw down some US troop levels in Syria, he has stated a desire to replace those forces with military units from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab regimes, as well as possibly contracting private mercenaries under the charge of his friend Erik Prince, the founder of infamous Blackwater USA.
Then we have French President Emmanuel Macron this week urging Trump to maintain US military presence in Syria, warning that the Western states cannot afford to let Iran gain influence, despite the fact that Iranian forces are legally present in Syria under request from Damascus, and despite the fact that Iran, along with Russia, helped defeat the Western-backed covert war for regime change using terrorist proxies. The sheer arrogance of Macron!
Adding to the combustible mix is Saudi Arabia and Israel who have said they are willing to join in any future US-led air strikes on Syria.
It seems clear that the Saudis and Israelis are itching to start a war with Iran which they obsessively view as their nemesis.
Almost a week before the April 14 US-led air strikes, a far more dangerous incident occurred on April 8, when Israeli air-launched missiles hit the T-4 military airbase in central Syria. Among the dead were seven Iranian advisors. Again, it was another spark jumping at the powder keg.
Iran’s national security chief Ali Shamkhani this week warned of “consequences and retaliatory actions” for what was an outrageous act of war by Israel.
In response to this legitimate statement of Iranian self-defense, Israel’s Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman had the chutzpah to say: “Israel doesn’t war but if Iran attacks Tel Aviv we will hit Tehran.”
Apart from Lieberman’s arrogant irrationality, what his statement implies is that a false-flag incident is begging in order to give Israel a pretext for more aggression against Syria and Iran.
The danger in Syria is not just the accumulation of military forces but the dynamic of many moving parts. An incident involving Israel and Iran could be the flashpoint that explodes with impact on the concentric forces aligned.
Politicians and military leaders in the US and Russia may have no intention of all-out war. They may even genuinely abhor such a scenario.
But that is why the Sarajevo analogy invoked by Daniel Lazare holds. Disastrous consequences can follow ineluctably from the circumstances, regardless of better intentions.
This is why it is imperative that all military forces in Syria must stand down and let the country pursue a self-determined political process, as several UN resolutions have mandated.
The legal and moral onus is first and foremost on the US, France and Britain to stand down their military forces, and to stop interfering in Syria. They, after all, are illegally present.
Ominously, however, the NATO allies do not seem willing to comply with international law. They are recklessly piling up the powder keg. And to their shame, the United Nations and the European Union, are cowardly complicit in acquiescing to the belligerence of Washington and its allies. The UN and EU should be explicitly demanding the NATO powers to desist from their illegal activities towards Syria. But no. Cowardly silence.
In that regard, Damascus, fearfully, looks increasingly like Sarajevo in 1914.
Against that, we might recall that the Syrian city is also synonymous with “conversion” and “repentance” – as goes the story of Saul the Jewish mass murderer of early Christians who then “saw the light” of divine righteousness to turn away from iniquity to become peace-loving St Paul.
However, given the arrogant, deluded mass-murderers among the US-led NATO alliance, such a timely conversion seems unlikely.
SC164-5
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/26/were-doomed-mayer-hillman-on-the-climate-reality-no-one-else-will-dare-mention
'We're doomed': Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will dare mention
The 86-year-old social scientist says accepting the impending end of most life on Earth might be the very thing needed to help us prolong it
“We’re doomed,” says Mayer Hillman with such a beaming smile that it takes a moment for the words to sink in. “The outcome is death, and it’s the end of most life on the planet because we’re so dependent on the burning of fossil fuels. There are no means of reversing the process which is melting the polar ice caps. And very few appear to be prepared to say so.”
Hillman, an 86-year-old social scientist and senior fellow emeritus of the Policy Studies Institute, does say so. His bleak forecast of the consequence of runaway climate change, he says without fanfare, is his “last will and testament”. His last intervention in public life. “I’m not going to write anymore because there’s nothing more that can be said,” he says when I first hear him speak to a stunned audience at the University of East Anglia late last year.
From Malthus to the Millennium Bug, apocalyptic thinking has a poor track record. But when it issues from Hillman, it may be worth paying attention. Over nearly 60 years, his research has used factual data to challenge policymakers’ conventional wisdom. In 1972, he criticised out-of-town shopping centres more than 20 years before the government changed planning rules to stop their spread. In 1980, he recommended halting the closure of branch line railways – only now are some closed lines reopening. In 1984, he proposed energy ratings for houses – finally adopted as government policy in 2007. And, more than 40 years ago, he presciently challenged society’s pursuit of economic growth.
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When we meet at his converted coach house in London, his classic Dawes racer still parked hopefully in the hallway (a stroke and a triple heart bypass mean he is – currently – forbidden from cycling), Hillman is anxious we are not side-tracked by his best-known research, which challenged the supremacy of the car.
“With doom ahead, making a case for cycling as the primary mode of transport is almost irrelevant,” he says. “We’ve got to stop burning fossil fuels. So many aspects of life depend on fossil fuels, except for music and love and education and happiness. These things, which hardly use fossil fuels, are what we must focus on.”
While the focus of Hillman’s thinking for the last quarter-century has been on climate change, he is best known for his work on road safety. He spotted the damaging impact of the car on the freedoms and safety of those without one – most significantly, children – decades ago. Some of his policy prescriptions have become commonplace – such as 20mph speed limits – but we’ve failed to curb the car’s crushing of children’s liberty. In 1971, 80% of British seven- and eight-year-old children went to school on their own; today it’s virtually unthinkable that a seven-year-old would walk to school without an adult. As Hillman has pointed out, we’ve removed children from danger rather than removing danger from children – and filled roads with polluting cars on school runs. He calculated that escorting children took 900m adult hours in 1990, costing the economy £20bn each year. It will be even more expensive today.
Our society’s failure to comprehend the true cost of cars has informed Hillman’s view on the difficulty of combatting climate change. But he insists that I must not present his thinking on climate change as “an opinion”. The data is clear; the climate is warming exponentially. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that the world on its current course will warm by 3C by 2100. Recent revised climate modelling suggested a best estimate of 2.8C but scientists struggle to predict the full impact of the feedbacks from future events such as methane being released by the melting of the permafrost.
Hillman believes society has failed to challenge the supremacy of the car.
Hillman believes society has failed to challenge the supremacy of the car. Photograph: Lenscap / Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Stock Photo
Hillman is amazed that our thinking rarely stretches beyond 2100. “This is what I find so extraordinary when scientists warn that the temperature could rise to 5C or 8C. What, and stop there? What legacies are we leaving for future generations? In the early 21st century, we did as good as nothing in response to climate change. Our children and grandchildren are going to be extraordinarily critical.”
Global emissions were static in 2016 but the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was confirmed as beyond 400 parts per million, the highest level for at least three million years (when sea levels were up to 20m higher than now). Concentrations can only drop if we emit no carbon dioxide whatsoever, says Hillman. “Even if the world went zero-carbon today that would not save us because we’ve gone past the point of no return.”
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Although Hillman has not flown for more than 20 years as part of a personal commitment to reducing carbon emissions, he is now scornful of individual action which he describes as “as good as futile”. By the same logic, says Hillman, national action is also irrelevant “because Britain’s contribution is minute. Even if the government were to go to zero carbon it would make almost no difference.”
Instead, says Hillman, the world’s population must globally move to zero emissions across agriculture, air travel, shipping, heating homes – every aspect of our economy – and reduce our human population too. Can it be done without a collapse of civilisation? “I don’t think so,” says Hillman. “Can you see everyone in a democracy volunteering to give up flying? Can you see the majority of the population becoming vegan? Can you see the majority agreeing to restrict the size of their families?”
Hillman doubts that human ingenuity can find a fix and says there is no evidence that greenhouse gases can be safely buried. But if we adapt to a future with less – focusing on Hillman’s love and music – it might be good for us. “And who is ‘we’?” asks Hillman with a typically impish smile. “Wealthy people will be better able to adapt but the world’s population will head to regions of the planet such as northern Europe which will be temporarily spared the extreme effects of climate change. How are these regions going to respond? We see it now. Migrants will be prevented from arriving. We will let them drown.”
A small band of artists and writers, such as Paul Kingsnorth’s Dark Mountain project, have embraced the idea that “civilisation” will soon end in environmental catastrophe but only a few scientists – usually working beyond the patronage of funding bodies, and nearing the end of their own lives – have suggested as much. Is Hillman’s view a consequence of old age, and ill health? “I was saying these sorts of things 30 years ago when I was hale and hearty,” he says.
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Hillman accuses all kinds of leaders – from religious leaders to scientists to politicians – of failing to honestly discuss what we must do to move to zero-carbon emissions. “I don’t think they can because society isn’t organised to enable them to do so. Political parties’ focus is on jobs and GDP, depending on the burning of fossil fuels.”
Without hope, goes the truism, we will give up. And yet optimism about the future is wishful thinking, says Hillman. He believes that accepting that our civilisation is doomed could make humanity rather like an individual who recognises he is terminally ill. Such people rarely go on a disastrous binge; instead, they do all they can to prolong their lives.
Can civilisation prolong its life until the end of this century? “It depends on what we are prepared to do.” He fears it will be a long time before we take proportionate action to stop climatic calamity. “Standing in the way is capitalism. Can you imagine the global airline industry being dismantled when hundreds of new runways are being built right now all over the world? It’s almost as if we’re deliberately attempting to defy nature. We’re doing the reverse of what we should be doing, with everybody’s silent acquiescence, and nobody’s batting an eyelid.”
'We're doomed': Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will dare mention
The 86-year-old social scientist says accepting the impending end of most life on Earth might be the very thing needed to help us prolong it
“We’re doomed,” says Mayer Hillman with such a beaming smile that it takes a moment for the words to sink in. “The outcome is death, and it’s the end of most life on the planet because we’re so dependent on the burning of fossil fuels. There are no means of reversing the process which is melting the polar ice caps. And very few appear to be prepared to say so.”
Hillman, an 86-year-old social scientist and senior fellow emeritus of the Policy Studies Institute, does say so. His bleak forecast of the consequence of runaway climate change, he says without fanfare, is his “last will and testament”. His last intervention in public life. “I’m not going to write anymore because there’s nothing more that can be said,” he says when I first hear him speak to a stunned audience at the University of East Anglia late last year.
From Malthus to the Millennium Bug, apocalyptic thinking has a poor track record. But when it issues from Hillman, it may be worth paying attention. Over nearly 60 years, his research has used factual data to challenge policymakers’ conventional wisdom. In 1972, he criticised out-of-town shopping centres more than 20 years before the government changed planning rules to stop their spread. In 1980, he recommended halting the closure of branch line railways – only now are some closed lines reopening. In 1984, he proposed energy ratings for houses – finally adopted as government policy in 2007. And, more than 40 years ago, he presciently challenged society’s pursuit of economic growth.
Sign up to the Green Light email to get the planet's most important stories
Read more
When we meet at his converted coach house in London, his classic Dawes racer still parked hopefully in the hallway (a stroke and a triple heart bypass mean he is – currently – forbidden from cycling), Hillman is anxious we are not side-tracked by his best-known research, which challenged the supremacy of the car.
“With doom ahead, making a case for cycling as the primary mode of transport is almost irrelevant,” he says. “We’ve got to stop burning fossil fuels. So many aspects of life depend on fossil fuels, except for music and love and education and happiness. These things, which hardly use fossil fuels, are what we must focus on.”
While the focus of Hillman’s thinking for the last quarter-century has been on climate change, he is best known for his work on road safety. He spotted the damaging impact of the car on the freedoms and safety of those without one – most significantly, children – decades ago. Some of his policy prescriptions have become commonplace – such as 20mph speed limits – but we’ve failed to curb the car’s crushing of children’s liberty. In 1971, 80% of British seven- and eight-year-old children went to school on their own; today it’s virtually unthinkable that a seven-year-old would walk to school without an adult. As Hillman has pointed out, we’ve removed children from danger rather than removing danger from children – and filled roads with polluting cars on school runs. He calculated that escorting children took 900m adult hours in 1990, costing the economy £20bn each year. It will be even more expensive today.
Our society’s failure to comprehend the true cost of cars has informed Hillman’s view on the difficulty of combatting climate change. But he insists that I must not present his thinking on climate change as “an opinion”. The data is clear; the climate is warming exponentially. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that the world on its current course will warm by 3C by 2100. Recent revised climate modelling suggested a best estimate of 2.8C but scientists struggle to predict the full impact of the feedbacks from future events such as methane being released by the melting of the permafrost.
Hillman believes society has failed to challenge the supremacy of the car.
Hillman believes society has failed to challenge the supremacy of the car. Photograph: Lenscap / Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Stock Photo
Hillman is amazed that our thinking rarely stretches beyond 2100. “This is what I find so extraordinary when scientists warn that the temperature could rise to 5C or 8C. What, and stop there? What legacies are we leaving for future generations? In the early 21st century, we did as good as nothing in response to climate change. Our children and grandchildren are going to be extraordinarily critical.”
Global emissions were static in 2016 but the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was confirmed as beyond 400 parts per million, the highest level for at least three million years (when sea levels were up to 20m higher than now). Concentrations can only drop if we emit no carbon dioxide whatsoever, says Hillman. “Even if the world went zero-carbon today that would not save us because we’ve gone past the point of no return.”
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Although Hillman has not flown for more than 20 years as part of a personal commitment to reducing carbon emissions, he is now scornful of individual action which he describes as “as good as futile”. By the same logic, says Hillman, national action is also irrelevant “because Britain’s contribution is minute. Even if the government were to go to zero carbon it would make almost no difference.”
Instead, says Hillman, the world’s population must globally move to zero emissions across agriculture, air travel, shipping, heating homes – every aspect of our economy – and reduce our human population too. Can it be done without a collapse of civilisation? “I don’t think so,” says Hillman. “Can you see everyone in a democracy volunteering to give up flying? Can you see the majority of the population becoming vegan? Can you see the majority agreeing to restrict the size of their families?”
Hillman doubts that human ingenuity can find a fix and says there is no evidence that greenhouse gases can be safely buried. But if we adapt to a future with less – focusing on Hillman’s love and music – it might be good for us. “And who is ‘we’?” asks Hillman with a typically impish smile. “Wealthy people will be better able to adapt but the world’s population will head to regions of the planet such as northern Europe which will be temporarily spared the extreme effects of climate change. How are these regions going to respond? We see it now. Migrants will be prevented from arriving. We will let them drown.”
A small band of artists and writers, such as Paul Kingsnorth’s Dark Mountain project, have embraced the idea that “civilisation” will soon end in environmental catastrophe but only a few scientists – usually working beyond the patronage of funding bodies, and nearing the end of their own lives – have suggested as much. Is Hillman’s view a consequence of old age, and ill health? “I was saying these sorts of things 30 years ago when I was hale and hearty,” he says.
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Hillman accuses all kinds of leaders – from religious leaders to scientists to politicians – of failing to honestly discuss what we must do to move to zero-carbon emissions. “I don’t think they can because society isn’t organised to enable them to do so. Political parties’ focus is on jobs and GDP, depending on the burning of fossil fuels.”
Without hope, goes the truism, we will give up. And yet optimism about the future is wishful thinking, says Hillman. He believes that accepting that our civilisation is doomed could make humanity rather like an individual who recognises he is terminally ill. Such people rarely go on a disastrous binge; instead, they do all they can to prolong their lives.
Can civilisation prolong its life until the end of this century? “It depends on what we are prepared to do.” He fears it will be a long time before we take proportionate action to stop climatic calamity. “Standing in the way is capitalism. Can you imagine the global airline industry being dismantled when hundreds of new runways are being built right now all over the world? It’s almost as if we’re deliberately attempting to defy nature. We’re doing the reverse of what we should be doing, with everybody’s silent acquiescence, and nobody’s batting an eyelid.”
SC164-4
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/9192/
That Collapse You Ordered…?
I had a fellow on my latest podcast, released Sunday, who insists that the world population will crash 90-plus percent from the current 7.6 billion to 600 million by the end of this century. Jack Alpert heads an outfit called the Stanford Knowledge Integration Lab (SKIL) which he started at Stanford University in 1978 and now runs as a private research foundation. Alpert is primarily an engineer.
At 600 million, the living standard in the USA would be on a level with the post-Roman peasantry of Fifth century Europe, but without the charm, since many of the planet’s linked systems — soils, oceans, climate, mineral resources — will be in much greater disarray than was the case 1,500 years ago. Anyway, that state-of-life may be a way-station to something more dire. Alpert’s optimal case would be a world human population of 50 million, deployed in three “city-states,” in the Pacific Northwest, the Uruguay / Paraguay border region, and China, that could support something close to today’s living standards for a tiny population, along with science and advanced technology, run on hydropower. The rest of world, he says, would just go back to nature, or what’s left of it. Alpert’s project aims to engineer a path to that optimal outcome.
I hadn’t encountered quite such an extreme view of the future before, except for some fictional exercises like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. (Alpert, too, sees cannibalism as one likely byproduct of the journey ahead.) Obviously, my own venture into the fictionalized future of the World Made by Hand books depicted a much kinder and gentler re-set to life at the circa-1800 level of living, at least in the USA. Apparently, I’m a sentimental softie.
Both of us are at odds with the more generic techno-optimists who are waiting patiently for miracle rescue remedies like cold fusion while enjoying re-runs of The Big Bang Theory. (Alpert doesn’t completely rule out as-yet-undeveloped energy sources, though he acknowledges that they’re a low-percentage prospect.) We do agree with basic premise that the energy supply is mainly what supports the way we live now, and that it shows every evidence of entering a deep and destabilizing decline that will halt the activities necessary to keep our networks of dynamic systems running.
A question of interest to many readers is how soon or how rapid the unraveling of these systems might be. When civilizations crumble, it tends to fast-track. The Roman empire seems to be an exception, but in many ways it was far more resilient than ours, being a sort of advanced Flintstones economy, with even its giant-scale activities (e.g. building the Coliseum) being accomplished by human-powered work. In any case, the outfit really fell apart steadily after the reign of emperor Marcus Aurelius (180 AD).
The Romans had their own version of a financialized economy: they simply devalued their coins by mixing in less and less silver at the mint, so they could pretend to pay for the same luxuries they had grown accustomed to as resources stretched thin. Our financialized economy — like everything else we do — operates at levels of complexity so baffling that even its supposed managers at the central banks are flying blind through fogs of debt, deception, and moral hazard. When that vessel of pretense slams into a mountain top, the effects are likely to be quick and lethal to the economies on the ground below.
In our time, the most recent crash of a major socioeconomic system was the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990-91. Of course, it happened against the backdrop of a global system that was still revving pretty well outside the USSR, and that softened the blow. Ultimately, the Russians still had plenty of oil to sell, which allowed them to re-set well above the Fifth Century peasant level of existence. At least for now. The Soviet Union collapsed because it was a thoroughly dishonest system that ran on pretense and coercion. Apparently, the US Intel Community completely missed the signs that political collapse was underway.
They seem to be pretty clueless about the fate of the USA these days, too. If you consider the preoccupations of two very recent Intel chiefs — John Brennan of CIA and James Clapper, DNI — who now inveigh full-time on CNN as avatars of the Deep State against the wicked Golden Golem of Greatness. Personally, I expect our collapse to be as sudden and unexpected as the USSR’s, but probably bloodier because there’s simply more stuff just lying around to fight over. Of course, I expect the collapse to express itself first in banking, finance, and markets — being so deeply faith-based and so subject to simple failures of faith. But it will become political and social soon enough, maybe all-at once. And when it happens in the USA, it will spread through the financial systems the whole world round.
That Collapse You Ordered…?
I had a fellow on my latest podcast, released Sunday, who insists that the world population will crash 90-plus percent from the current 7.6 billion to 600 million by the end of this century. Jack Alpert heads an outfit called the Stanford Knowledge Integration Lab (SKIL) which he started at Stanford University in 1978 and now runs as a private research foundation. Alpert is primarily an engineer.
At 600 million, the living standard in the USA would be on a level with the post-Roman peasantry of Fifth century Europe, but without the charm, since many of the planet’s linked systems — soils, oceans, climate, mineral resources — will be in much greater disarray than was the case 1,500 years ago. Anyway, that state-of-life may be a way-station to something more dire. Alpert’s optimal case would be a world human population of 50 million, deployed in three “city-states,” in the Pacific Northwest, the Uruguay / Paraguay border region, and China, that could support something close to today’s living standards for a tiny population, along with science and advanced technology, run on hydropower. The rest of world, he says, would just go back to nature, or what’s left of it. Alpert’s project aims to engineer a path to that optimal outcome.
I hadn’t encountered quite such an extreme view of the future before, except for some fictional exercises like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. (Alpert, too, sees cannibalism as one likely byproduct of the journey ahead.) Obviously, my own venture into the fictionalized future of the World Made by Hand books depicted a much kinder and gentler re-set to life at the circa-1800 level of living, at least in the USA. Apparently, I’m a sentimental softie.
Both of us are at odds with the more generic techno-optimists who are waiting patiently for miracle rescue remedies like cold fusion while enjoying re-runs of The Big Bang Theory. (Alpert doesn’t completely rule out as-yet-undeveloped energy sources, though he acknowledges that they’re a low-percentage prospect.) We do agree with basic premise that the energy supply is mainly what supports the way we live now, and that it shows every evidence of entering a deep and destabilizing decline that will halt the activities necessary to keep our networks of dynamic systems running.
A question of interest to many readers is how soon or how rapid the unraveling of these systems might be. When civilizations crumble, it tends to fast-track. The Roman empire seems to be an exception, but in many ways it was far more resilient than ours, being a sort of advanced Flintstones economy, with even its giant-scale activities (e.g. building the Coliseum) being accomplished by human-powered work. In any case, the outfit really fell apart steadily after the reign of emperor Marcus Aurelius (180 AD).
The Romans had their own version of a financialized economy: they simply devalued their coins by mixing in less and less silver at the mint, so they could pretend to pay for the same luxuries they had grown accustomed to as resources stretched thin. Our financialized economy — like everything else we do — operates at levels of complexity so baffling that even its supposed managers at the central banks are flying blind through fogs of debt, deception, and moral hazard. When that vessel of pretense slams into a mountain top, the effects are likely to be quick and lethal to the economies on the ground below.
In our time, the most recent crash of a major socioeconomic system was the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990-91. Of course, it happened against the backdrop of a global system that was still revving pretty well outside the USSR, and that softened the blow. Ultimately, the Russians still had plenty of oil to sell, which allowed them to re-set well above the Fifth Century peasant level of existence. At least for now. The Soviet Union collapsed because it was a thoroughly dishonest system that ran on pretense and coercion. Apparently, the US Intel Community completely missed the signs that political collapse was underway.
They seem to be pretty clueless about the fate of the USA these days, too. If you consider the preoccupations of two very recent Intel chiefs — John Brennan of CIA and James Clapper, DNI — who now inveigh full-time on CNN as avatars of the Deep State against the wicked Golden Golem of Greatness. Personally, I expect our collapse to be as sudden and unexpected as the USSR’s, but probably bloodier because there’s simply more stuff just lying around to fight over. Of course, I expect the collapse to express itself first in banking, finance, and markets — being so deeply faith-based and so subject to simple failures of faith. But it will become political and social soon enough, maybe all-at once. And when it happens in the USA, it will spread through the financial systems the whole world round.
Saturday, April 28, 2018
SC164-3
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49318.htm
The U.S. Militarily Is America’s Worst Enemy
A few thoughts on our disastrous trillion-dollar military:
It is unnecessary. It does not defend the United States. The last time it did so was in 1945. The United States has no military enemies. No nation has anything even close to the forces necessary to invade America, and probably none the desire. A fifth of the budget would suffice for any real needs.
“Our boys” are not noble warriors protecting democracy, rescuing maidens, and righting wrongs. They are, like all soldiers, obedient and amoral killers. Pilots bombing Iraq or Syria know they are killing civilians. They do not care. If ordered to bomb Switzerland, they would do it. This is the nature of all armies. Glamorizing this most reprehensible trades is just a means of usefully stimulating the pack instinct which we often call patriotism.
The militarily is America’s worst enemy. It does enormous damage to the United States while providing almost no benefit. Start with the war on Vietnam that cost hugely in money and lives, ours and their, with no benefit. Iraq: high cost, no benefit. Afghanistan: High cost, no benefit. Syria: High cost, no benefit.
The costs in lives and money do not include the staggering cost of weapons that do nothing for America or Americans. Do you, the reader, believe that you are safer because of the F-35? Do a dozen aircraft carriers improve the lives of your children? Will the B-21, an unbelievably expensive new thermonuclear bomber, make your streets safer? Then add the bleeding of engineering talent better spent on advancing America’s economic competitiveness. The country has many crying needs, falls behind China, but money and talent go to the military.
We cannot escape from the soldiers. The armed forces have embedded themselves so deeply into the country that they have almost become the country. America is little more than a funding mechanism for what clumsily may be called the military-industrial-intelligence-media-Israeli complex. Some of these entities belong to the military (NSA). Some depend on it (Lockheed-Martin). Some use it to their own ends (Israel), but the military is the central infection from which the other symptoms flow. Congress? A storefront, a subcommittee of the Knesset or, as P. J. O’Rourke put it, a parliament of whores. Factories, jobs, contracts, towns depend on military spending. If the Second Marine Division folded, Jacksonville NC would dry up and blow away. So would dozens of other towns. Without military spending, California’s economy would crash. Universities depend on military research funding.
The military has achieved its current autonomy by degrees, unnoticed. The Pentagon learned much in Vietnam, not about fighting wars, which it still cannot do well, but about managing its real enemy, the public. The media, which savaged the war on Vietnam, are now firmly controlled by the corporations that own them. Thus we do not see photos of the horrors committed by American aircraft bombing cities. While the existence of phenomenally expensive weapons like the B-21 is not quite suppressed, coverage is so slight that most Americans have never heard of it. This the Complex learned from the F-35 debacle. And of course Congress, thoroughly bought and wanting jobs in its districts, allows no serious opposition to anything military. Neither Congress nor the media point out the extent to which military expenditure dominates the economy, draining resources from civilian needs.
Why does the military not win wars? In part because winning is not in the interest of the Pentagon and those who feed on it. Wars generate profitable contracts for all manner of supplies and equipment. Either winning or losing ends the gravy train. For example, the war on Afghanistan of almost two decades has become an entitlement program for the arms industry, accomplishing nothing, killing countless peasants, and lacking purpose other than maintaining an unneeded empire and funneling money to the Complex.
How did the Complex free itself from civilian control? The crucial step in depriving the public of influence was the neutering of the constitutional requirement that wars be declared by Congress. The military thus became the private army of the President and those who control him. Then came the All Volunteer Army, which ended inconvenience to or mutilation of the children of people of importance, leaving the body bags to be filled by deplorable from Memphis or Appalachia or Mexico. America’s wars then became air wars and finally drone wars, reducing casualties to very few. The public, both ignorant and uninvolved, became acquiescent.
As I write, we wait to see whether Trump, and those behind him, will put America deeper into the Mid-East and perhaps war with Russia. If he does, we will read about it the next day in the newspapers. It will be expensive, dangerous, and of no benefit to anyone but the arms industry and Israel.
Despite the asphyxiating economic presence, the military keeps aloof from America. This too serves the purposes of the Complex, further preventing attention by the public to what is not its business. In the days of conscription there was a familiarity with the armed services. Young men from most social classes wore the uniform however ruefully and told of their experiences. Not now. The career military have always tended to keep to themselves, to socialize with each other as the police do. Now the isolation is almost hermetic. You can spend years in Washington or New York and never meet a colonel. Military society with its authoritarianism, its uniforms and its uniform government-issue outlook is not compatible with civil society. To the cultivated, military officers seem simple-minded, conformist and…well, weird.
Add it all up and you see that the citizenry has no say–none–over the Complex, which is autonomous and out of control. If the Complex wants war with Russia or China, we will have-war with Russia or China. Ask people whether they would prefer a naval base in Qatar–which most have never heard of, either the base or the country–or decent heath care. Then ask them which they have.
The military destroys America and there is nothing–nothing at all–that you can do about it.
Further, the Complex drives foreign policy, and in directions of no benefit to America or Americans. For example, the contrived fury against Russia. Why this? Russia presents no danger to America or anyone else. The Complex makes foreign policy for its own ends, not ours.
A rising Asia is challenging the America military Empire. The tide runs against the Complex. North Korea faced Washington down and became a nuclear power. The Crimea went back irrevocably to Russia. East Ukraine does the same. Iran got its treaty and becomes part of the world order. In the South China Sea, China ignores the US, which once was supreme in all the seas. The war against Afghanistan heads for its third decade and the war on Syria seems to have failed. Other things go badly for the Empire. The dollar is under siege as reserve currency. China grows economically, advances rapidly in technology and, doubtless terrifying to Washington, tries to integrate Asia and Europe into a vast economic bloc. The Complex beats the war drums as its fingers loosen on the world’s collective throat.
Washington desperately needs to stop the rollback of American power, stop the erosion of the dollar, block the economic integration of Eurasia and Latin America, keep Russia from trading amicably with Europe. It will do anything to maintain its grip. All of its remote wars in far-off savage lands, of no importance to America or Americans, are to this purpose. A militarized America threatens Russia, threatens China, threatens Iran, threatens North Korea, threatens Venezuela, expands NATO, on and on.
America has been hijacked.
The U.S. Militarily Is America’s Worst Enemy
A few thoughts on our disastrous trillion-dollar military:
It is unnecessary. It does not defend the United States. The last time it did so was in 1945. The United States has no military enemies. No nation has anything even close to the forces necessary to invade America, and probably none the desire. A fifth of the budget would suffice for any real needs.
“Our boys” are not noble warriors protecting democracy, rescuing maidens, and righting wrongs. They are, like all soldiers, obedient and amoral killers. Pilots bombing Iraq or Syria know they are killing civilians. They do not care. If ordered to bomb Switzerland, they would do it. This is the nature of all armies. Glamorizing this most reprehensible trades is just a means of usefully stimulating the pack instinct which we often call patriotism.
The militarily is America’s worst enemy. It does enormous damage to the United States while providing almost no benefit. Start with the war on Vietnam that cost hugely in money and lives, ours and their, with no benefit. Iraq: high cost, no benefit. Afghanistan: High cost, no benefit. Syria: High cost, no benefit.
The costs in lives and money do not include the staggering cost of weapons that do nothing for America or Americans. Do you, the reader, believe that you are safer because of the F-35? Do a dozen aircraft carriers improve the lives of your children? Will the B-21, an unbelievably expensive new thermonuclear bomber, make your streets safer? Then add the bleeding of engineering talent better spent on advancing America’s economic competitiveness. The country has many crying needs, falls behind China, but money and talent go to the military.
We cannot escape from the soldiers. The armed forces have embedded themselves so deeply into the country that they have almost become the country. America is little more than a funding mechanism for what clumsily may be called the military-industrial-intelligence-media-Israeli complex. Some of these entities belong to the military (NSA). Some depend on it (Lockheed-Martin). Some use it to their own ends (Israel), but the military is the central infection from which the other symptoms flow. Congress? A storefront, a subcommittee of the Knesset or, as P. J. O’Rourke put it, a parliament of whores. Factories, jobs, contracts, towns depend on military spending. If the Second Marine Division folded, Jacksonville NC would dry up and blow away. So would dozens of other towns. Without military spending, California’s economy would crash. Universities depend on military research funding.
The military has achieved its current autonomy by degrees, unnoticed. The Pentagon learned much in Vietnam, not about fighting wars, which it still cannot do well, but about managing its real enemy, the public. The media, which savaged the war on Vietnam, are now firmly controlled by the corporations that own them. Thus we do not see photos of the horrors committed by American aircraft bombing cities. While the existence of phenomenally expensive weapons like the B-21 is not quite suppressed, coverage is so slight that most Americans have never heard of it. This the Complex learned from the F-35 debacle. And of course Congress, thoroughly bought and wanting jobs in its districts, allows no serious opposition to anything military. Neither Congress nor the media point out the extent to which military expenditure dominates the economy, draining resources from civilian needs.
Why does the military not win wars? In part because winning is not in the interest of the Pentagon and those who feed on it. Wars generate profitable contracts for all manner of supplies and equipment. Either winning or losing ends the gravy train. For example, the war on Afghanistan of almost two decades has become an entitlement program for the arms industry, accomplishing nothing, killing countless peasants, and lacking purpose other than maintaining an unneeded empire and funneling money to the Complex.
How did the Complex free itself from civilian control? The crucial step in depriving the public of influence was the neutering of the constitutional requirement that wars be declared by Congress. The military thus became the private army of the President and those who control him. Then came the All Volunteer Army, which ended inconvenience to or mutilation of the children of people of importance, leaving the body bags to be filled by deplorable from Memphis or Appalachia or Mexico. America’s wars then became air wars and finally drone wars, reducing casualties to very few. The public, both ignorant and uninvolved, became acquiescent.
As I write, we wait to see whether Trump, and those behind him, will put America deeper into the Mid-East and perhaps war with Russia. If he does, we will read about it the next day in the newspapers. It will be expensive, dangerous, and of no benefit to anyone but the arms industry and Israel.
Despite the asphyxiating economic presence, the military keeps aloof from America. This too serves the purposes of the Complex, further preventing attention by the public to what is not its business. In the days of conscription there was a familiarity with the armed services. Young men from most social classes wore the uniform however ruefully and told of their experiences. Not now. The career military have always tended to keep to themselves, to socialize with each other as the police do. Now the isolation is almost hermetic. You can spend years in Washington or New York and never meet a colonel. Military society with its authoritarianism, its uniforms and its uniform government-issue outlook is not compatible with civil society. To the cultivated, military officers seem simple-minded, conformist and…well, weird.
Add it all up and you see that the citizenry has no say–none–over the Complex, which is autonomous and out of control. If the Complex wants war with Russia or China, we will have-war with Russia or China. Ask people whether they would prefer a naval base in Qatar–which most have never heard of, either the base or the country–or decent heath care. Then ask them which they have.
The military destroys America and there is nothing–nothing at all–that you can do about it.
Further, the Complex drives foreign policy, and in directions of no benefit to America or Americans. For example, the contrived fury against Russia. Why this? Russia presents no danger to America or anyone else. The Complex makes foreign policy for its own ends, not ours.
A rising Asia is challenging the America military Empire. The tide runs against the Complex. North Korea faced Washington down and became a nuclear power. The Crimea went back irrevocably to Russia. East Ukraine does the same. Iran got its treaty and becomes part of the world order. In the South China Sea, China ignores the US, which once was supreme in all the seas. The war against Afghanistan heads for its third decade and the war on Syria seems to have failed. Other things go badly for the Empire. The dollar is under siege as reserve currency. China grows economically, advances rapidly in technology and, doubtless terrifying to Washington, tries to integrate Asia and Europe into a vast economic bloc. The Complex beats the war drums as its fingers loosen on the world’s collective throat.
Washington desperately needs to stop the rollback of American power, stop the erosion of the dollar, block the economic integration of Eurasia and Latin America, keep Russia from trading amicably with Europe. It will do anything to maintain its grip. All of its remote wars in far-off savage lands, of no importance to America or Americans, are to this purpose. A militarized America threatens Russia, threatens China, threatens Iran, threatens North Korea, threatens Venezuela, expands NATO, on and on.
America has been hijacked.
SC164-2
https://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/113979/end-our-empire-approaches
The End Of Our Empire Approaches
History is clear on where we're headed
Do you have the nagging sense that our empire is in decline?
If so, don't be embarrassed by it. Historically speaking, we’re in very good company. Far larger and longer-lived empires than ours have come and gone over the millennia.
This was hit home for me on a recent trip. I scored a major "dad win" by taking my youngest daughter, Grace, to England for her 18th birthday (we live in Massachusetts, USA).
All on her own, Grace developed an abiding love of mythology at a very young age: Greek, Roman, Norse, Native American, Aztec…you name it. She’s read the Iliad four times, a different version each time, as each has the biases of the translator subtly woven throughout.
Naturally, her dream mini-vacation involved going to the British Museum where the Rosetta stone lies, along with Viking horde treasures and every possible Roman, Greek and Egyptian artifact one could hope to see.
The British empire came of age at the perfect time to muscle in and “retrieve” the cultural treasures of many different countries. Such are the spoils of empire.
Who knows, perhaps one day we’ll see sliced off segments of the Palace of Westminster on display in Cairo’s main square. History ebbs and it flows. Back and forth. Victors and losers swapping places over and over again.
If the British Museum reveals anything it’s just that. The long sweep of human history shows us that the more things change, the more things stay the same.
The treasures on display at the British Museum also show us that every race and culture has revered beauty. The most intricate and delicate and objectively beautiful jewelry and adornments were worn by kings and queens, priestesses, nobles, and warlords alike.
Sutton Hoo
Consider the find of the Sutton Hoo burial mound. An eminently important and revered individual (possibly Raedwald) was buried sometime around the year 740, with an enormous ship 89 feet in length serving as his burial chamber.
Just imagine how many people it took to dig a hole in the ground that held the ship to its gunnels, and then bring forward enough earth to cover the whole affair in a gigantic mound of earth more than ten feet high in the middle. As a gardener, I can tell you that dirt is heavy stuff that really resists being moved by hand. Hundreds of people must have labored for a very long time to create this burial mound.
Whoever this person was, he was revered enough to be buried with an astonishing collection of wealth. And, perhaps more amazingly, none of it was looted.
Here’s the sword belt, made of an intricate lattice of pure gold and polished garnet:
Isn’t that a beautiful work of art?
Again, nobody came back and looted this afterwards. Maybe they killed the workers who built the gravesite, but surely folks still knew a very rich ruler had been buried in the area. And yet nobody looted the site. To me, it's hard not see that as a sign of how much the man buried there was respected by his kinsmen.
Here’s a close up of the dragons head from that sword belt:
If you’ve ever worked with garnet, you know just how devilishly hard it is (a 7.5 on a scale of 10) and how much work it must have taken to polish up even one of those tiny panels, let alone all of them, and into such careful shapes.
Similarly, these shoulder clasps meant to secure an article of clothing (like a cape or cloak) are also magnificent:
Again, the detail and workmanship are impressive. But what struck me most was how these works of art are so … beautiful. And from a time of early medieval history referred to ‘the dark ages’ and popularly described as a period of bleak survival.
If they were, somebody still had the resources to churn out works of extraordinary precision and beauty. That much is clear.
The rest of the artifacts are similarly extraordinary -- especially the helmet, shields, and coinage. Just take a look at this purse lid:
Taken together, I see a culture where reverence mattered. Sutton Hoo's buried leader was revered enough that his tomb was not looted afterwards, promptly or otherwise. The items buried display a reverence for his authority as well as for beauty.
These burial artifacts were by no means trivial items. Each one could have supported a family for many generations at a time when resources were scarce, only obtainable through the hard labor of many.
And yet they were left untouched. Who among today's leaders would be honored enough as a leader that their tomb would not be looted for massive personal gain? Where can you see that our culture reveres beauty to the same degree, being willing to place so much collective effort into its creation?
The Taranto Scepter
Everywhere else in the British Museum were similar displays of honoring the feminine -- the women and the goddesses of the world. Many of the Egyptian displays caught my eye, as did the Greek, but one piece stood out so much that I came back to it three times, so amazed was I by the beauty of it and the message I took from it.
It came from “The Tomb of the Taranto Priestess” and dated from 350 – 340 BC. Since kings did not rule Taranto during that period, it is believed to have been the property of a priestess.
First, her scepter is truly extraordinary:
The entire scepter is perhaps 18 inches in length and capped in extraordinary gold adornment. But what really caught my eye is the gold mesh you see running down the shaft (lost to history, thought to have been bone?). It consists of extremely fine gold wire wrapped in even finer gold wire, and is woven into a meshwork of little diamond shapes with tiny circles at their corners. Each of these circles contained a tiny gem or enameled treasure of some sort (most, again, lost to history).
Here’s a close up:
The gold wire used is finer than hair. This scepter speaks of power and delicacy in equal balance, one reinforcing the other. Only the lightest of touch could hold the scepter without breaking strands of gold that fine. That made me think of the woman who wielded it with such a delicate touch.
Again, this person was revered to such an extent that an object of such immense value and beauty was entombed with her, and not robbed at a later time by someone who knew what the tomb contained.
Power, honor, reverence, and beauty. All attributes that show up again and again all throughout history.
The entire British Museum is packed to the rafters with such expressions. I came away both elated to have gotten back in touch with these better expressions of humanity, but also saddened because I can't locate their equivalent in today’s world.
One missing element from today? Reverence for the goddess, for the feminine. I cannot think of a single western homage paid to the feminine. No temples to the goddesses and no elevation of feminine attributes.
This is important to note, not because we wish to bash the masculine, but because anything out of balance requires rebalancing. In fact, re-elevating the feminine will actually bring honor and meaning back to the masculine.
Our world is caught up entirely in money, and power, and wars, and force. We revere power over rather than power within.
So the questions I’d like to leave you with are these.
Where do you have beauty in your life? Do you consciously manifest it?
What do you revere?
How honorable are you?
Do you instill a sense of loyalty in those around you? Who would rob your grave and how quickly after you passed?
Who do you honor, and how? Also, why?
How important is it for you to be surrounded by people you can trust, and whose opinions you trust?
Where and how do you respect, honor and encourage the feminine in yourself (whether you are male or female), in others, and especially in nature?
Finally, are you ready for the massive changes that are coming?
Our Empire Of Debt
The British museum is a testament to the fact that empires have been rising and falling for thousands of years. The common elements of every empire include its own appreciation for works of extreme beauty and human craftsmanship, along with strict hierarchy. They all expressed a strong connection to the divine, however they felt it, each with their own mythologies and attendant religions to make sense of it all…and help cement the rulers place(s) at the top, of course.
Each empire had a mythology by which it self-organized and people bought into that belief system. Looking back they seem like such obvious mental traps it’s easy to scoff and wonder how people could have been so blinkered.
Here’s the thing about hierarchical societies in every era…in every single one there were always a very few haves and a whole lot of have nots. How were the masses kept in line? Why did the vast bulk of humanity in every empire live in relative poverty and misery, never lifting a finger in revolt except under very rare circumstances?
The connection to yourself is this; each society has a set of reasons in place that explain to the people on the lower levels why they belong there. In some prior cultures the explanation was that authority was invested the royal blood line. You either had it or you didn’t.
In other societies, the rulers were said to be closer to the gods, if not descended directly from them. To go against the rulers meant you were assaulting or dishonoring the very gods you prayed to and on which you utterly depended.
While the mythologies in place “explaining” the hierarchy differed, the results did not. They always resulted in a few at the top and an expanding pyramid of population and entitlement laid out below them.
The middle management in this story, those that had relative advantage were the necessary keepers of the systems in each culture and each system. They had more to lose than to gain through revolt and so they stayed true to the system through their entire lives.
The people on the very bottom, despite having a vast numerical advantage, had the limiting belief that they had no power. So revolts almost never happened. Systems of hierarchy persisted until the empire had run its course, almost always failing because it ran out of resources to maintain itself and its growing complexity.
The lessons of history are absolute; nothing lasts. Everything changes, especially who’s in charge.
So what are our explanations today that keep us all in line? What keeps us from revolt? To what do we bow our daily collective heads in fealty to?
The answer is Money.
What we call “money” today was a wicked genius invention that popped up right around the same moment in history when humans were working out other keen, life-altering inventions such as clocks, and printing presses.
“None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.”
~ Goethe
A person in debt is a person controlled. But they think it was their own decision. Hence the Goethe quote above. A nation in debt is a nation controlled. The debt trap is especially insidious, and it relies on the illusion of free will combined with the full weight of ‘the law.’
By attaching a stated rate of interest to a loan, a person’s future output was yours if you were the holder of that note. What a stroke of pure (evil) genius! Set the rate high enough and the term long enough and you can get all of your money paid back plus another 100% of that amount or more, every bit of which was actually the future productive output (i.e. time) of the borrower.
Conjure up a promissory note out of thin air and then you get to skim the true productive output of that person, regardless of outcome. Whether they succeeded or failed in the endeavor, you still won. If they paid you back, the win was obvious. If they failed you often had collateral on the back end protecting your “investment.” No matter what, you won.
And even if that wasn't the case? Well, you lost the amount of effort on your end that it took to draft up the note. In other words, nothing really.
I’ve yet to find this laid out in any museum even though the introduction of debt-based money was arguably the most course-altering invention of the past thousand years. It transformed millions of human slaves kept in check by threat of power and physical coercion (if not death) into billions of humans perfectly willing to hand over their labor to a very few elites at the top who did little to no work themselves.
Before this transformative invention money was always a very concrete thing – you either had a stash of silver or gold or you didn’t. Afterwards money became abstract. You could loan someone something you never had, written on a slip of paper, and the belief invested in that idea was sufficient to enslave that person until that debt was repaid. “Your” money might never be seen or handled by you at all, which is true for most people today. It exists as digits on a statement or computer screen. Yours, but utterly intangible. A powerful force, never actually seen or handled. In other words, a shared idea. A mythology imbued with tremendous power by a culture that served to enforce the current system of hierarchy.
There is a vast empire now spanning the globe but the mystery of it all is that it’s not based on or in any one country. It is an empire of debt. Those issuing the debt are harvesting the output of entire nations, no different in final effect than the Romans enforcing the practice of tithing from extant countries in AD 100.
We now live in a world of, by and for bankers, and other financial elites. Where once it was your royal lineage, or direct connection to the sun god Ra that assured your place at the top, today it's your proximity to the temples of money.
But what happens when the economic pie is no longer expanding, yet the keepers of the system seem unable to turn off their own desires to grab more, more and yet more from that same pie?
That is where we find ourselves today. The economic oxygen is being sucked from the middle and lower classes and the social and political pressures are building.
Meanwhile more and more claims (currency and debts) are being piled on top of this stagnant economic pie thereby increasing the pressure on a creaking system. Someday that all gives way rather spectacularly and ends very badly. History says it ends with a lot of social anarchy and quite possibly another world war.
In Part 2: What History Tells Us Will Come Next, we provide a detailed analysis of how late-stage empires always collapse as the elites exhaust the resources of the masses. We are seeing clear signs of that today.
As we progress from here, the disparity between the haves and have-nots is only going to intensify, with debt (and our debt-based money system) being used as the primary weapon for controlling an increasingly dispossessed public.
Are you prepared?
The End Of Our Empire Approaches
History is clear on where we're headed
Do you have the nagging sense that our empire is in decline?
If so, don't be embarrassed by it. Historically speaking, we’re in very good company. Far larger and longer-lived empires than ours have come and gone over the millennia.
This was hit home for me on a recent trip. I scored a major "dad win" by taking my youngest daughter, Grace, to England for her 18th birthday (we live in Massachusetts, USA).
All on her own, Grace developed an abiding love of mythology at a very young age: Greek, Roman, Norse, Native American, Aztec…you name it. She’s read the Iliad four times, a different version each time, as each has the biases of the translator subtly woven throughout.
Naturally, her dream mini-vacation involved going to the British Museum where the Rosetta stone lies, along with Viking horde treasures and every possible Roman, Greek and Egyptian artifact one could hope to see.
The British empire came of age at the perfect time to muscle in and “retrieve” the cultural treasures of many different countries. Such are the spoils of empire.
Who knows, perhaps one day we’ll see sliced off segments of the Palace of Westminster on display in Cairo’s main square. History ebbs and it flows. Back and forth. Victors and losers swapping places over and over again.
If the British Museum reveals anything it’s just that. The long sweep of human history shows us that the more things change, the more things stay the same.
The treasures on display at the British Museum also show us that every race and culture has revered beauty. The most intricate and delicate and objectively beautiful jewelry and adornments were worn by kings and queens, priestesses, nobles, and warlords alike.
Sutton Hoo
Consider the find of the Sutton Hoo burial mound. An eminently important and revered individual (possibly Raedwald) was buried sometime around the year 740, with an enormous ship 89 feet in length serving as his burial chamber.
Just imagine how many people it took to dig a hole in the ground that held the ship to its gunnels, and then bring forward enough earth to cover the whole affair in a gigantic mound of earth more than ten feet high in the middle. As a gardener, I can tell you that dirt is heavy stuff that really resists being moved by hand. Hundreds of people must have labored for a very long time to create this burial mound.
Whoever this person was, he was revered enough to be buried with an astonishing collection of wealth. And, perhaps more amazingly, none of it was looted.
Here’s the sword belt, made of an intricate lattice of pure gold and polished garnet:
Isn’t that a beautiful work of art?
Again, nobody came back and looted this afterwards. Maybe they killed the workers who built the gravesite, but surely folks still knew a very rich ruler had been buried in the area. And yet nobody looted the site. To me, it's hard not see that as a sign of how much the man buried there was respected by his kinsmen.
Here’s a close up of the dragons head from that sword belt:
If you’ve ever worked with garnet, you know just how devilishly hard it is (a 7.5 on a scale of 10) and how much work it must have taken to polish up even one of those tiny panels, let alone all of them, and into such careful shapes.
Similarly, these shoulder clasps meant to secure an article of clothing (like a cape or cloak) are also magnificent:
Again, the detail and workmanship are impressive. But what struck me most was how these works of art are so … beautiful. And from a time of early medieval history referred to ‘the dark ages’ and popularly described as a period of bleak survival.
If they were, somebody still had the resources to churn out works of extraordinary precision and beauty. That much is clear.
The rest of the artifacts are similarly extraordinary -- especially the helmet, shields, and coinage. Just take a look at this purse lid:
Taken together, I see a culture where reverence mattered. Sutton Hoo's buried leader was revered enough that his tomb was not looted afterwards, promptly or otherwise. The items buried display a reverence for his authority as well as for beauty.
These burial artifacts were by no means trivial items. Each one could have supported a family for many generations at a time when resources were scarce, only obtainable through the hard labor of many.
And yet they were left untouched. Who among today's leaders would be honored enough as a leader that their tomb would not be looted for massive personal gain? Where can you see that our culture reveres beauty to the same degree, being willing to place so much collective effort into its creation?
The Taranto Scepter
Everywhere else in the British Museum were similar displays of honoring the feminine -- the women and the goddesses of the world. Many of the Egyptian displays caught my eye, as did the Greek, but one piece stood out so much that I came back to it three times, so amazed was I by the beauty of it and the message I took from it.
It came from “The Tomb of the Taranto Priestess” and dated from 350 – 340 BC. Since kings did not rule Taranto during that period, it is believed to have been the property of a priestess.
First, her scepter is truly extraordinary:
The entire scepter is perhaps 18 inches in length and capped in extraordinary gold adornment. But what really caught my eye is the gold mesh you see running down the shaft (lost to history, thought to have been bone?). It consists of extremely fine gold wire wrapped in even finer gold wire, and is woven into a meshwork of little diamond shapes with tiny circles at their corners. Each of these circles contained a tiny gem or enameled treasure of some sort (most, again, lost to history).
Here’s a close up:
The gold wire used is finer than hair. This scepter speaks of power and delicacy in equal balance, one reinforcing the other. Only the lightest of touch could hold the scepter without breaking strands of gold that fine. That made me think of the woman who wielded it with such a delicate touch.
Again, this person was revered to such an extent that an object of such immense value and beauty was entombed with her, and not robbed at a later time by someone who knew what the tomb contained.
Power, honor, reverence, and beauty. All attributes that show up again and again all throughout history.
The entire British Museum is packed to the rafters with such expressions. I came away both elated to have gotten back in touch with these better expressions of humanity, but also saddened because I can't locate their equivalent in today’s world.
One missing element from today? Reverence for the goddess, for the feminine. I cannot think of a single western homage paid to the feminine. No temples to the goddesses and no elevation of feminine attributes.
This is important to note, not because we wish to bash the masculine, but because anything out of balance requires rebalancing. In fact, re-elevating the feminine will actually bring honor and meaning back to the masculine.
Our world is caught up entirely in money, and power, and wars, and force. We revere power over rather than power within.
So the questions I’d like to leave you with are these.
Where do you have beauty in your life? Do you consciously manifest it?
What do you revere?
How honorable are you?
Do you instill a sense of loyalty in those around you? Who would rob your grave and how quickly after you passed?
Who do you honor, and how? Also, why?
How important is it for you to be surrounded by people you can trust, and whose opinions you trust?
Where and how do you respect, honor and encourage the feminine in yourself (whether you are male or female), in others, and especially in nature?
Finally, are you ready for the massive changes that are coming?
Our Empire Of Debt
The British museum is a testament to the fact that empires have been rising and falling for thousands of years. The common elements of every empire include its own appreciation for works of extreme beauty and human craftsmanship, along with strict hierarchy. They all expressed a strong connection to the divine, however they felt it, each with their own mythologies and attendant religions to make sense of it all…and help cement the rulers place(s) at the top, of course.
Each empire had a mythology by which it self-organized and people bought into that belief system. Looking back they seem like such obvious mental traps it’s easy to scoff and wonder how people could have been so blinkered.
Here’s the thing about hierarchical societies in every era…in every single one there were always a very few haves and a whole lot of have nots. How were the masses kept in line? Why did the vast bulk of humanity in every empire live in relative poverty and misery, never lifting a finger in revolt except under very rare circumstances?
The connection to yourself is this; each society has a set of reasons in place that explain to the people on the lower levels why they belong there. In some prior cultures the explanation was that authority was invested the royal blood line. You either had it or you didn’t.
In other societies, the rulers were said to be closer to the gods, if not descended directly from them. To go against the rulers meant you were assaulting or dishonoring the very gods you prayed to and on which you utterly depended.
While the mythologies in place “explaining” the hierarchy differed, the results did not. They always resulted in a few at the top and an expanding pyramid of population and entitlement laid out below them.
The middle management in this story, those that had relative advantage were the necessary keepers of the systems in each culture and each system. They had more to lose than to gain through revolt and so they stayed true to the system through their entire lives.
The people on the very bottom, despite having a vast numerical advantage, had the limiting belief that they had no power. So revolts almost never happened. Systems of hierarchy persisted until the empire had run its course, almost always failing because it ran out of resources to maintain itself and its growing complexity.
The lessons of history are absolute; nothing lasts. Everything changes, especially who’s in charge.
So what are our explanations today that keep us all in line? What keeps us from revolt? To what do we bow our daily collective heads in fealty to?
The answer is Money.
What we call “money” today was a wicked genius invention that popped up right around the same moment in history when humans were working out other keen, life-altering inventions such as clocks, and printing presses.
“None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.”
~ Goethe
A person in debt is a person controlled. But they think it was their own decision. Hence the Goethe quote above. A nation in debt is a nation controlled. The debt trap is especially insidious, and it relies on the illusion of free will combined with the full weight of ‘the law.’
By attaching a stated rate of interest to a loan, a person’s future output was yours if you were the holder of that note. What a stroke of pure (evil) genius! Set the rate high enough and the term long enough and you can get all of your money paid back plus another 100% of that amount or more, every bit of which was actually the future productive output (i.e. time) of the borrower.
Conjure up a promissory note out of thin air and then you get to skim the true productive output of that person, regardless of outcome. Whether they succeeded or failed in the endeavor, you still won. If they paid you back, the win was obvious. If they failed you often had collateral on the back end protecting your “investment.” No matter what, you won.
And even if that wasn't the case? Well, you lost the amount of effort on your end that it took to draft up the note. In other words, nothing really.
I’ve yet to find this laid out in any museum even though the introduction of debt-based money was arguably the most course-altering invention of the past thousand years. It transformed millions of human slaves kept in check by threat of power and physical coercion (if not death) into billions of humans perfectly willing to hand over their labor to a very few elites at the top who did little to no work themselves.
Before this transformative invention money was always a very concrete thing – you either had a stash of silver or gold or you didn’t. Afterwards money became abstract. You could loan someone something you never had, written on a slip of paper, and the belief invested in that idea was sufficient to enslave that person until that debt was repaid. “Your” money might never be seen or handled by you at all, which is true for most people today. It exists as digits on a statement or computer screen. Yours, but utterly intangible. A powerful force, never actually seen or handled. In other words, a shared idea. A mythology imbued with tremendous power by a culture that served to enforce the current system of hierarchy.
There is a vast empire now spanning the globe but the mystery of it all is that it’s not based on or in any one country. It is an empire of debt. Those issuing the debt are harvesting the output of entire nations, no different in final effect than the Romans enforcing the practice of tithing from extant countries in AD 100.
We now live in a world of, by and for bankers, and other financial elites. Where once it was your royal lineage, or direct connection to the sun god Ra that assured your place at the top, today it's your proximity to the temples of money.
But what happens when the economic pie is no longer expanding, yet the keepers of the system seem unable to turn off their own desires to grab more, more and yet more from that same pie?
That is where we find ourselves today. The economic oxygen is being sucked from the middle and lower classes and the social and political pressures are building.
Meanwhile more and more claims (currency and debts) are being piled on top of this stagnant economic pie thereby increasing the pressure on a creaking system. Someday that all gives way rather spectacularly and ends very badly. History says it ends with a lot of social anarchy and quite possibly another world war.
In Part 2: What History Tells Us Will Come Next, we provide a detailed analysis of how late-stage empires always collapse as the elites exhaust the resources of the masses. We are seeing clear signs of that today.
As we progress from here, the disparity between the haves and have-nots is only going to intensify, with debt (and our debt-based money system) being used as the primary weapon for controlling an increasingly dispossessed public.
Are you prepared?
Wednesday, April 25, 2018
SC164-1
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49284.htm
Carnage Unleashed: DoD & Authorization For Use Of Military Force
As Congress pretends to restrain the already vast powers to wage war acceded to the executive branch we see further dereliction of duty resulting in shameful sorrows of empire and untold suffering abroad. A draft bill touted as reigning in the AUMF (authorization for use of military force) passed shortly after 9/11 in fact gives the executive branch an even greater blank check to wage war. In part, it allows the President to proclaim new enemies against whom any amount of force may be used, requiring two-thirds of Congress to reject that determination.
The Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2018 which was released (pdf) one week ago in essence “takes Congress’s constitutional power to declare war, in which the president can only act when provided congressional authorization, and inverts it, by giving the president the ability to act unless a supermajority of Congress stops them.
The proposed bill is bipartisan, sponsored by 3 Democrats and 3 Republicans, showing that the dereliction of constitutional duty is systemic to Congress. The military and executive thus essentially oversee themselves, an obviously perilous dynamic. In 1961, President Eisenhower warned of the growing and unwarranted influence of the military industrial complex. Today, American people should see death on their doorstep, given the global slaughter wrought in their name.
Endless war is the destruction of civil society. Yet, like the 2001 & 2002 AUMF’s, the 2018 proposed bill has no time limit. Thus, America’s longest wars continue and new wars are waged at the behest of war profiteers with apparent ease. Presidents fight wars if they are permitted. In 2016 the Congressional Research Service found that Bush and Obama used AUMF to justify the use of military force 37 times in 14 countries (pdf). The decision to go to war is the most consequential decision a government can make. Today, that decision is made in the shadows, with little public scrutiny or debate.
Martin Luther King wrote 50 years ago (in 1968), “We must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.” War today is illegitimate and unjustifiable whether applying the principles of Just War Doctrine or moral philosophy (Kantian, Rawlsian, or utilitarian). The architects of the so-called global war on terror have sought to redefine war and the legal basis for fighting war. It is an obvious sham. We must do everything possible to resist this sordid agenda.
Christopher Anders of the ACLU predicts that the AUMF of 2018 will “amp up war everywhere.” The war machine fueled by myopic greed and profit is built upon a fear factory of lies. We must ask ourselves: would we be so readily placated if there was a draft/military conscription? What does this reveal? What are we doing to stop senseless wars fought in our name? If we do nothing do we have blood on our hands? What should we be doing? What will we do?
Carnage Unleashed: DoD & Authorization For Use Of Military Force
As Congress pretends to restrain the already vast powers to wage war acceded to the executive branch we see further dereliction of duty resulting in shameful sorrows of empire and untold suffering abroad. A draft bill touted as reigning in the AUMF (authorization for use of military force) passed shortly after 9/11 in fact gives the executive branch an even greater blank check to wage war. In part, it allows the President to proclaim new enemies against whom any amount of force may be used, requiring two-thirds of Congress to reject that determination.
The Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2018 which was released (pdf) one week ago in essence “takes Congress’s constitutional power to declare war, in which the president can only act when provided congressional authorization, and inverts it, by giving the president the ability to act unless a supermajority of Congress stops them.
The proposed bill is bipartisan, sponsored by 3 Democrats and 3 Republicans, showing that the dereliction of constitutional duty is systemic to Congress. The military and executive thus essentially oversee themselves, an obviously perilous dynamic. In 1961, President Eisenhower warned of the growing and unwarranted influence of the military industrial complex. Today, American people should see death on their doorstep, given the global slaughter wrought in their name.
Endless war is the destruction of civil society. Yet, like the 2001 & 2002 AUMF’s, the 2018 proposed bill has no time limit. Thus, America’s longest wars continue and new wars are waged at the behest of war profiteers with apparent ease. Presidents fight wars if they are permitted. In 2016 the Congressional Research Service found that Bush and Obama used AUMF to justify the use of military force 37 times in 14 countries (pdf). The decision to go to war is the most consequential decision a government can make. Today, that decision is made in the shadows, with little public scrutiny or debate.
Martin Luther King wrote 50 years ago (in 1968), “We must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.” War today is illegitimate and unjustifiable whether applying the principles of Just War Doctrine or moral philosophy (Kantian, Rawlsian, or utilitarian). The architects of the so-called global war on terror have sought to redefine war and the legal basis for fighting war. It is an obvious sham. We must do everything possible to resist this sordid agenda.
Christopher Anders of the ACLU predicts that the AUMF of 2018 will “amp up war everywhere.” The war machine fueled by myopic greed and profit is built upon a fear factory of lies. We must ask ourselves: would we be so readily placated if there was a draft/military conscription? What does this reveal? What are we doing to stop senseless wars fought in our name? If we do nothing do we have blood on our hands? What should we be doing? What will we do?
SC163-15
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49293.htm
Where Is The Shame?
Now that the Trump, May, and Macron regimes have proven beyond all doubt that they are lawless war criminal regimes, what is next?
Will the Russian president and foreign minister continue to speak of “our Western partners” and seek common ground with proven lawless war criminals? What would that common ground be?
How can other governments accept the US, UK, and French governments that intentionally lied about a Russian chemical attack on the Skripals and about a Syrian chemical attack on Douma, risking a third world war, and then themselves attacking Syria on the basis of a transparent lie unsupported by any evidence? How exactly do you conduct diplomatic relations with war criminals?
You don’t. You put them on trial. Why aren’t Trump, May, and Macron on trial?
The reason is that the world has been conditioned, like Pavlov’s dogs, to expect and accept the West’s war crimes as ordinary common features of life. The West’s crimes are protected by precedents established by decades of failing to hold the West accountable. The West has squatters rights in committing unaccountable war crimes.
Stymied in the effort to overthrow Syria, Netanyahu is now focusing the Trump regime on renewing Washington’s conflict with Iran. Will Washington’s vassals continue to provide cover for Washington’s crimes, or are some of the Europeans beginning to understand that the risks they assume for Washington exceed the money that Washington pays them?
Where will Russia stand if Washington renews its assault on Iran?
Despite the air attacks carried out on its Syrian ally by the US, NATO, and Israel, the Russian government still has not found the decisiveness to sell Syria its S-300 air defense system. Syria intercepted 70% of the US missiles in the last attack using obsolete Soviet-era air defense systems. The S-300 would allow Syria to protect itself from air attack and thus reduce the chance of war resulting from Israeli and US attacks on Syria.
Russian indecisiveness combined with the rest of the world’s toleration of ongoing US war crimes suggests that more provocations will be orchestrated, that more lawless attacks will take place, and that eventually a fatal conflict will be brewed.
Think about it. The British are caught in the Skripal lie. Washington, the British, and the French are caught in the Douma chemical attack lie, and there are no consequences for those governments who orchestrated hoaxes and then used the hoaxes to justify their war crime.
How can it be that the American people are undisturbed by their government’s 17 years of wars based entirely on blatant lies? How can it be that the American people and the Evangelical churches are unmoved by the millions of innocent peoples in seven countries who have been murdered, maimed, orphaned, and displaced by the profit-driven US military/security complex and by the neoconservative ideology in service to Israel?
How can it be that the US media is as effective a propaganda ministry for Washington as the German press was for the Nazis?
How can it be that the European, Canadian, and Australian governments and the citizens of these countries are not ashamed of their participation in these never-ending crimes?
Where is India’s voice? China’s? South America’s?
Why is the world silent in the face of massive, long-term, ongoing war crimes?
Why does the Russian government think it can have a partnership with a war criminal regime? Why would Russia want such a shameful and demeaning association?
Where is Russia’s counterpart to NATO?
Where is there any determination to put a halt to the West’s criminality?
Why is the world content with Washington’s path to world war?
Where Is The Shame?
Now that the Trump, May, and Macron regimes have proven beyond all doubt that they are lawless war criminal regimes, what is next?
Will the Russian president and foreign minister continue to speak of “our Western partners” and seek common ground with proven lawless war criminals? What would that common ground be?
How can other governments accept the US, UK, and French governments that intentionally lied about a Russian chemical attack on the Skripals and about a Syrian chemical attack on Douma, risking a third world war, and then themselves attacking Syria on the basis of a transparent lie unsupported by any evidence? How exactly do you conduct diplomatic relations with war criminals?
You don’t. You put them on trial. Why aren’t Trump, May, and Macron on trial?
The reason is that the world has been conditioned, like Pavlov’s dogs, to expect and accept the West’s war crimes as ordinary common features of life. The West’s crimes are protected by precedents established by decades of failing to hold the West accountable. The West has squatters rights in committing unaccountable war crimes.
Stymied in the effort to overthrow Syria, Netanyahu is now focusing the Trump regime on renewing Washington’s conflict with Iran. Will Washington’s vassals continue to provide cover for Washington’s crimes, or are some of the Europeans beginning to understand that the risks they assume for Washington exceed the money that Washington pays them?
Where will Russia stand if Washington renews its assault on Iran?
Despite the air attacks carried out on its Syrian ally by the US, NATO, and Israel, the Russian government still has not found the decisiveness to sell Syria its S-300 air defense system. Syria intercepted 70% of the US missiles in the last attack using obsolete Soviet-era air defense systems. The S-300 would allow Syria to protect itself from air attack and thus reduce the chance of war resulting from Israeli and US attacks on Syria.
Russian indecisiveness combined with the rest of the world’s toleration of ongoing US war crimes suggests that more provocations will be orchestrated, that more lawless attacks will take place, and that eventually a fatal conflict will be brewed.
Think about it. The British are caught in the Skripal lie. Washington, the British, and the French are caught in the Douma chemical attack lie, and there are no consequences for those governments who orchestrated hoaxes and then used the hoaxes to justify their war crime.
How can it be that the American people are undisturbed by their government’s 17 years of wars based entirely on blatant lies? How can it be that the American people and the Evangelical churches are unmoved by the millions of innocent peoples in seven countries who have been murdered, maimed, orphaned, and displaced by the profit-driven US military/security complex and by the neoconservative ideology in service to Israel?
How can it be that the US media is as effective a propaganda ministry for Washington as the German press was for the Nazis?
How can it be that the European, Canadian, and Australian governments and the citizens of these countries are not ashamed of their participation in these never-ending crimes?
Where is India’s voice? China’s? South America’s?
Why is the world silent in the face of massive, long-term, ongoing war crimes?
Why does the Russian government think it can have a partnership with a war criminal regime? Why would Russia want such a shameful and demeaning association?
Where is Russia’s counterpart to NATO?
Where is there any determination to put a halt to the West’s criminality?
Why is the world content with Washington’s path to world war?
Monday, April 23, 2018
SC163-14
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/chaco-canyon-chaco-earth/
Chaco Canyon, Chaco Earth
CHACO CULTURE NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK, N.M.—A bitter wind whipped down the 10-mile-long Chaco Canyon, kicking up swirls of dust among the thorny greasewood and sagebrush bushes. I ducked behind one of the towering sandstone walls in the three-acre ruin, or Great House, known as Pueblo Bonito, to escape the gusts. I was in the section of the 800-room complex where burials took place. Treasure hunters and archaeologists have uncovered in these ruins and tombs delicate white-and-black painted ceramics, flutes, ceremonial sticks, tiny copper bells, inlaid bone, macaw and parrot skeletons, cylindrical jars with the residue of chocolate that would have been imported from Mexico, shells and intricate turquoise jewelry and sculptures. From this vast, bureaucratic and ceremonial complex, the Anasazi—a Navajo word meaning ancient ones or possibly ancient enemies—dominated the Southwest from about the year 850 until the society collapsed in about 1150.
The Chaco ruin, 6,200 feet above sea level, is one of the largest and most spectacular archeological sites in North America. It is an impressive array of 15 interconnected complexes, each of which once had four-to-five-story stone buildings with hundreds of rooms each. Seven-hundred-pound wooden beams, many 16 feet long, were used in the roofs. Huge circular, ceremonial kivas—religious centers dug into the earth, with low masonry benches around the base of the room to accommodate hundreds of worshippers—dot the ruins. It rivals the temples and places built by the Aztecs and the Mayans.
Radiating from Chaco is a massive 400-mile network of roads, some 30 feet wide and still visible in the haunting desert landscape, along with dams, canals and reservoirs to collect and store rainwater. The study of astronomy, as with the Aztec and the Maya, was advanced. Petroglyphs and pictographs on the canyon walls often record astrological and solar events. One pictograph shows a hand, a crescent moon and a 10-pointed star that is believed to depict a 1054 supernova, and one of the petroglyphs appears to represent a solar eclipse that occurred in 1097.
A few thousand priests and ruling elites, along their retainers and administrators, lived in the Great Houses or palaces. They oversaw the trade routes that stretched to the California coast and into Central America. They maintained the elaborate network of lighthouses whose signal fires provided rapid communication. They built the roads, the long flights of stairs carved into the rock formations, the bridges, the wooden ladders to scale the towering cliffs, and the astronomical observatories that meticulously charted the solar observations to determine the equinoxes and solstices for planting and harvesting and for the annual religious festivals when thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, would gather. The buildings in the complexes were oriented to solstitial or cardinal points, a difference the anthropologist Stephen H. Lekson believes denoted not only competing cosmologies but competing political ideologies.
“Chaco was the political capital of a well-defined region that encompassed most of the Four Corners country, with more than 150 outlying Great Houses scattered over an area about the size of Ireland,” Lekson writes.
But this complex society, like all complex societies, proved fragile and impermanent. It fell into precipitous decline after nearly three centuries. The dense forests of oak, piñon and ponderosa pines and juniper that surrounded the canyon were razed for construction and fuel. The soil eroded. Game was hunted to near-extinction. The diet shifted in the final years from deer and turkey to rabbits and finally mice. Headless mice in the late period have been found by archaeologists in human coprolites—preserved dry feces. The Anasazi’s open society, one where violence was apparently rare, where the people moved unhindered over the network of well-maintained roads, where warfare was apparently absent, where the houses of the rich and powerful were not walled off, where the population shared in the spoils of empire, was replaced with the equivalent of gated, fortified compounds for the elites and misery, hunger, insecurity and tyranny for the commoners. Dwellings began to be built in the cliffs, along with hilltop fortresses, although these residences were not close to the fields and water supply. Defensive walls were constructed along with moats and towers. The large, public religious ceremonies that once united the culture and gave it cohesion fractured, and tiny, warring religious cults took over, the archaeologist Lynne Sebastian notes.
Lekson, a professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado in Boulder, believes the Anasazi rulers during the decline increasingly resorted to savage violence and terror, including the public executions of dissidents and rebels. He finds evidence, much of it documented in Steven A. LeBlanc’s book “Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest,” that “Chaco death squads” were sent out across the empire. LeBlanc writes that at Yucca House, a Chaco Great House near Mesa Verde, as many as 90 people were killed and tossed into a kiva and at least 25 showed signs of mutilation.
“Chacoan violence, concentrated and brutal, appears to represent government terror: the enforcement of Chaco’s rule by institutionalized force,” Lekson writes in the article “Chaco Death Squads” in Archeology magazine. “Violence was public, intended to appall and subdue the populace. Chacoan death squads (my term, not LeBlanc’s) executed and mutilated those judged to be threats to Chacoan power, those who broke the rules.”
The anthropologist Christy G. Turner, who specialized in osteology, the study of human bones, in his book “Man Corn” cited “cannibalism and human sacrifice as conspicuous elements of terrorism.” In short, as Lekson writes, “the death squad killed you, cut you up, and then ate you in front of your relatives and neighbors.” The term “man corn” comes from the Nahuatl word “tlacatlaolli,” which Turner defined as a “sacred meal of sacrificed human meat, cooked with corn.” Debra Martin goes on to argue in a paper titled “Violence Against Women in the La Plata River Valley, A.D. 1000-1300” (located on the periphery of the Chacoan empire) that there is evidence of battered women who were perhaps slaves.
The Anasazi elites, no longer willing or able to provide social services or competent governance and plagued by shortages of natural resources, kept extracting unsustainable tribute. They resorted to harsher and harsher forms of repression. By the end, they were hated. The civilization suffered a severe drought in the year 1130. It was the final blow. The impressive structures would lie abandoned until they were discovered by the nomadic Navajos some 600 years later. The Navajos did not reoccupy the buildings, many of which contained skeletal remains, because they believed them to be filled with evil spirits.
“Parts of Chacoan society were already in deep trouble after 1050 as health and living conditions progressively eroded in the southern districts’ open farming communities,” David E. Stuart writes in his book “Anasazi America.” “The small farmers in the south had first created reliable surpluses to be stored in the great houses. Ultimately, it was the increasingly terrible living conditions of those farmers, the people who grew the corn, that had made Chacoan society so fatally vulnerable. The farmers simply got too little back from their efforts to carry on. Thus, great-house society emphasized other trade partners and supported new, lower-cost suppliers on its northern tier. This final trade network likely was focused on the continued well-being of the elites rather than the general welfare of its regional society.”
As the economic and social situation deteriorated, the elites accelerated the building of roads and Great Houses. They held more elaborate rituals and built more kivas. This is typical of decaying societies. The great Mayan city of Tikal was constructed over a period of 1,500 years, but its most impressive temples and towers were erected during its final century. These grandiose projects and spectacles were meant to project power and immortality. They exacerbated, however, the suffering of the impoverished farmers and workers and the decline of diminishing natural resources.
“At the bitter end of the Chacoan era, many elites remained in their great houses, probably trying to hold on to the past, rather like Scarlett O’Hara trying to hold on to Tara in Gone with the Wind,” Stuart writes. “But the farmers who had brought in the corn harvests were long departed, like the slaves who had supported Tara before the Civil War. Chacoan society collapsed, the framing pillar of its once great productivity shattered. The beleaguered Chacoan farmers had buried their babies one last time. Then they abandoned Chaco Canyon and most of its outlying great houses.”
“Prosperity, social integration, altruism, and generosity go hand-in-hand,” Stuart adds. “Poverty, social conflict, judgmental cynicism, and savagery do, too.”
Collapse, as Joseph A. Tainter points out, is “a recurrent feature of human societies.” Complex societies create centralized bureaucratic structures that exploit resources until exhaustion and then prove unable to adapt to scarcity. They create more sophisticated mechanisms to extract depleted resources, evidenced in our own time by the decision of the Trump administration to open up the lands around the Chaco Culture National Historical Park to fracking. In the end, the technologies and organization that make the rise of complex societies possible become the mechanisms that destroy them.
The fate of the Anasazi replicates the fate of all complex societies. The collapse came within one or two decades after the peak. As Jared Diamond writes in “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” the trajectories of complex societies “are unlike the usual course of individual human lives, which decline in a prolonged senescence. The reason is simple: maximum population, wealth, resource consumption, and waste production mean maximum environmental impact, approaching the limit where impact outstrips resources.”
“Civilization is an experiment, a very recent way of life in the human career, and it has a habit of walking into what I am calling progress traps,” Ronald Wright writes in “A Short History of Progress.” “A small village on good land beside a river is a good idea; but when the village grows into a city and paves over the good land, it becomes a bad idea. While prevention might have been easy, a cure may be impossible: a city isn’t easily moved. This human inability to foresee—or watch for—long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by millions of years when we lived hand to mouth by hunting and gathering. It may also be little more than a mix of inertia, greed, and foolishness encouraged by the shape of the social pyramid. The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo; they continue to prosper in darkening times long after the environment and general population begin to suffer.”
We in 2018 are beset with signs of impending collapse. The droughts, wildfires, flooding, soaring temperatures, crop failures, poisoning of the soil, air and water, and social breakdown from global warming are leaving huge segments of the world’s poor without adequate food, water and security. Desperate migrants are fleeing the global south. Crisis cults carry out nihilistic acts of terrorism, often in the name of religious beliefs. Our predatory elites, who have retreated to their own versions of Anasazi Great Houses, with access to private security, private education, private medicine, private transportation, private sources of water and food and luxury items that are unavailable to the wider population, have walled out reality. Their hubris and myopia, as well as blind obedience to an ideology—global capitalism—that benefits them but accelerates social and environmental destruction, mean they have only bought a little more time before they succumb like the rest of us.
The poet V. B. Price, surveying the Chaco ruins in his poem “Time’s Common Sense,” understands the urgent message these stones impart. He writes, in part:
At Chaco I know I am not alone
I know I have heard even Homer
Weaving the tides of his stories,
And Sappho singing lullabies alone in the night,
Heard the footdrums in Rinconada
Like ancient surf through the stone.
This is the place
Where the past remains.
Utterly changed,
the landscape
is the same.
The future happens so fast,
It’s too fast to dread.
And now
the future is as good
as already over again.
There is one crucial difference between the Anasazi and our complex society. The collapse of past civilizations like the Anasazi’s was localized. There were always new lands to conquer, new natural resources to plunder and new peoples to subjugate. Our age is different. There is no new world left.
We can no longer live on the capital of the natural world and instead must learn to make do with the interest. This means the end to reliance on fossil fuels and the animal agriculture industry. It means adopting a simplicity that rejects the ethos of capitalism and the hedonism and gluttony that define the consumer society. It means a communal society in which inequality and income disparity are not extreme. If we continue to live as if the future does not matter, our society, like that of the Anasazi, will fracture and die. We will vanish from the earth in an act of global suicide.
The human species faces its greatest existential crisis. Yet, our elites replicate the imbecility, arrogance and greed of past elites. They hoard wealth. They shut us out from circles of power. They use brutal forms of repression to maintain control. They exhaust and poison the ecosystem. The longer the corporate elites rule, the longer we fail to revolt, the less chance we have to endure as a species. Settled or civilized life is less than 10,000 years old. Our peculiar human social construction is but a nanosecond to the universe. It may prove to be a brief and fatal experiment. Perhaps, as Franz Kafka wrote, “There is hope; though not for us.”
Chaco Canyon, Chaco Earth
CHACO CULTURE NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK, N.M.—A bitter wind whipped down the 10-mile-long Chaco Canyon, kicking up swirls of dust among the thorny greasewood and sagebrush bushes. I ducked behind one of the towering sandstone walls in the three-acre ruin, or Great House, known as Pueblo Bonito, to escape the gusts. I was in the section of the 800-room complex where burials took place. Treasure hunters and archaeologists have uncovered in these ruins and tombs delicate white-and-black painted ceramics, flutes, ceremonial sticks, tiny copper bells, inlaid bone, macaw and parrot skeletons, cylindrical jars with the residue of chocolate that would have been imported from Mexico, shells and intricate turquoise jewelry and sculptures. From this vast, bureaucratic and ceremonial complex, the Anasazi—a Navajo word meaning ancient ones or possibly ancient enemies—dominated the Southwest from about the year 850 until the society collapsed in about 1150.
The Chaco ruin, 6,200 feet above sea level, is one of the largest and most spectacular archeological sites in North America. It is an impressive array of 15 interconnected complexes, each of which once had four-to-five-story stone buildings with hundreds of rooms each. Seven-hundred-pound wooden beams, many 16 feet long, were used in the roofs. Huge circular, ceremonial kivas—religious centers dug into the earth, with low masonry benches around the base of the room to accommodate hundreds of worshippers—dot the ruins. It rivals the temples and places built by the Aztecs and the Mayans.
Radiating from Chaco is a massive 400-mile network of roads, some 30 feet wide and still visible in the haunting desert landscape, along with dams, canals and reservoirs to collect and store rainwater. The study of astronomy, as with the Aztec and the Maya, was advanced. Petroglyphs and pictographs on the canyon walls often record astrological and solar events. One pictograph shows a hand, a crescent moon and a 10-pointed star that is believed to depict a 1054 supernova, and one of the petroglyphs appears to represent a solar eclipse that occurred in 1097.
A few thousand priests and ruling elites, along their retainers and administrators, lived in the Great Houses or palaces. They oversaw the trade routes that stretched to the California coast and into Central America. They maintained the elaborate network of lighthouses whose signal fires provided rapid communication. They built the roads, the long flights of stairs carved into the rock formations, the bridges, the wooden ladders to scale the towering cliffs, and the astronomical observatories that meticulously charted the solar observations to determine the equinoxes and solstices for planting and harvesting and for the annual religious festivals when thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, would gather. The buildings in the complexes were oriented to solstitial or cardinal points, a difference the anthropologist Stephen H. Lekson believes denoted not only competing cosmologies but competing political ideologies.
“Chaco was the political capital of a well-defined region that encompassed most of the Four Corners country, with more than 150 outlying Great Houses scattered over an area about the size of Ireland,” Lekson writes.
But this complex society, like all complex societies, proved fragile and impermanent. It fell into precipitous decline after nearly three centuries. The dense forests of oak, piñon and ponderosa pines and juniper that surrounded the canyon were razed for construction and fuel. The soil eroded. Game was hunted to near-extinction. The diet shifted in the final years from deer and turkey to rabbits and finally mice. Headless mice in the late period have been found by archaeologists in human coprolites—preserved dry feces. The Anasazi’s open society, one where violence was apparently rare, where the people moved unhindered over the network of well-maintained roads, where warfare was apparently absent, where the houses of the rich and powerful were not walled off, where the population shared in the spoils of empire, was replaced with the equivalent of gated, fortified compounds for the elites and misery, hunger, insecurity and tyranny for the commoners. Dwellings began to be built in the cliffs, along with hilltop fortresses, although these residences were not close to the fields and water supply. Defensive walls were constructed along with moats and towers. The large, public religious ceremonies that once united the culture and gave it cohesion fractured, and tiny, warring religious cults took over, the archaeologist Lynne Sebastian notes.
Lekson, a professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado in Boulder, believes the Anasazi rulers during the decline increasingly resorted to savage violence and terror, including the public executions of dissidents and rebels. He finds evidence, much of it documented in Steven A. LeBlanc’s book “Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest,” that “Chaco death squads” were sent out across the empire. LeBlanc writes that at Yucca House, a Chaco Great House near Mesa Verde, as many as 90 people were killed and tossed into a kiva and at least 25 showed signs of mutilation.
“Chacoan violence, concentrated and brutal, appears to represent government terror: the enforcement of Chaco’s rule by institutionalized force,” Lekson writes in the article “Chaco Death Squads” in Archeology magazine. “Violence was public, intended to appall and subdue the populace. Chacoan death squads (my term, not LeBlanc’s) executed and mutilated those judged to be threats to Chacoan power, those who broke the rules.”
The anthropologist Christy G. Turner, who specialized in osteology, the study of human bones, in his book “Man Corn” cited “cannibalism and human sacrifice as conspicuous elements of terrorism.” In short, as Lekson writes, “the death squad killed you, cut you up, and then ate you in front of your relatives and neighbors.” The term “man corn” comes from the Nahuatl word “tlacatlaolli,” which Turner defined as a “sacred meal of sacrificed human meat, cooked with corn.” Debra Martin goes on to argue in a paper titled “Violence Against Women in the La Plata River Valley, A.D. 1000-1300” (located on the periphery of the Chacoan empire) that there is evidence of battered women who were perhaps slaves.
The Anasazi elites, no longer willing or able to provide social services or competent governance and plagued by shortages of natural resources, kept extracting unsustainable tribute. They resorted to harsher and harsher forms of repression. By the end, they were hated. The civilization suffered a severe drought in the year 1130. It was the final blow. The impressive structures would lie abandoned until they were discovered by the nomadic Navajos some 600 years later. The Navajos did not reoccupy the buildings, many of which contained skeletal remains, because they believed them to be filled with evil spirits.
“Parts of Chacoan society were already in deep trouble after 1050 as health and living conditions progressively eroded in the southern districts’ open farming communities,” David E. Stuart writes in his book “Anasazi America.” “The small farmers in the south had first created reliable surpluses to be stored in the great houses. Ultimately, it was the increasingly terrible living conditions of those farmers, the people who grew the corn, that had made Chacoan society so fatally vulnerable. The farmers simply got too little back from their efforts to carry on. Thus, great-house society emphasized other trade partners and supported new, lower-cost suppliers on its northern tier. This final trade network likely was focused on the continued well-being of the elites rather than the general welfare of its regional society.”
As the economic and social situation deteriorated, the elites accelerated the building of roads and Great Houses. They held more elaborate rituals and built more kivas. This is typical of decaying societies. The great Mayan city of Tikal was constructed over a period of 1,500 years, but its most impressive temples and towers were erected during its final century. These grandiose projects and spectacles were meant to project power and immortality. They exacerbated, however, the suffering of the impoverished farmers and workers and the decline of diminishing natural resources.
“At the bitter end of the Chacoan era, many elites remained in their great houses, probably trying to hold on to the past, rather like Scarlett O’Hara trying to hold on to Tara in Gone with the Wind,” Stuart writes. “But the farmers who had brought in the corn harvests were long departed, like the slaves who had supported Tara before the Civil War. Chacoan society collapsed, the framing pillar of its once great productivity shattered. The beleaguered Chacoan farmers had buried their babies one last time. Then they abandoned Chaco Canyon and most of its outlying great houses.”
“Prosperity, social integration, altruism, and generosity go hand-in-hand,” Stuart adds. “Poverty, social conflict, judgmental cynicism, and savagery do, too.”
Collapse, as Joseph A. Tainter points out, is “a recurrent feature of human societies.” Complex societies create centralized bureaucratic structures that exploit resources until exhaustion and then prove unable to adapt to scarcity. They create more sophisticated mechanisms to extract depleted resources, evidenced in our own time by the decision of the Trump administration to open up the lands around the Chaco Culture National Historical Park to fracking. In the end, the technologies and organization that make the rise of complex societies possible become the mechanisms that destroy them.
The fate of the Anasazi replicates the fate of all complex societies. The collapse came within one or two decades after the peak. As Jared Diamond writes in “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” the trajectories of complex societies “are unlike the usual course of individual human lives, which decline in a prolonged senescence. The reason is simple: maximum population, wealth, resource consumption, and waste production mean maximum environmental impact, approaching the limit where impact outstrips resources.”
“Civilization is an experiment, a very recent way of life in the human career, and it has a habit of walking into what I am calling progress traps,” Ronald Wright writes in “A Short History of Progress.” “A small village on good land beside a river is a good idea; but when the village grows into a city and paves over the good land, it becomes a bad idea. While prevention might have been easy, a cure may be impossible: a city isn’t easily moved. This human inability to foresee—or watch for—long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by millions of years when we lived hand to mouth by hunting and gathering. It may also be little more than a mix of inertia, greed, and foolishness encouraged by the shape of the social pyramid. The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo; they continue to prosper in darkening times long after the environment and general population begin to suffer.”
We in 2018 are beset with signs of impending collapse. The droughts, wildfires, flooding, soaring temperatures, crop failures, poisoning of the soil, air and water, and social breakdown from global warming are leaving huge segments of the world’s poor without adequate food, water and security. Desperate migrants are fleeing the global south. Crisis cults carry out nihilistic acts of terrorism, often in the name of religious beliefs. Our predatory elites, who have retreated to their own versions of Anasazi Great Houses, with access to private security, private education, private medicine, private transportation, private sources of water and food and luxury items that are unavailable to the wider population, have walled out reality. Their hubris and myopia, as well as blind obedience to an ideology—global capitalism—that benefits them but accelerates social and environmental destruction, mean they have only bought a little more time before they succumb like the rest of us.
The poet V. B. Price, surveying the Chaco ruins in his poem “Time’s Common Sense,” understands the urgent message these stones impart. He writes, in part:
At Chaco I know I am not alone
I know I have heard even Homer
Weaving the tides of his stories,
And Sappho singing lullabies alone in the night,
Heard the footdrums in Rinconada
Like ancient surf through the stone.
This is the place
Where the past remains.
Utterly changed,
the landscape
is the same.
The future happens so fast,
It’s too fast to dread.
And now
the future is as good
as already over again.
There is one crucial difference between the Anasazi and our complex society. The collapse of past civilizations like the Anasazi’s was localized. There were always new lands to conquer, new natural resources to plunder and new peoples to subjugate. Our age is different. There is no new world left.
We can no longer live on the capital of the natural world and instead must learn to make do with the interest. This means the end to reliance on fossil fuels and the animal agriculture industry. It means adopting a simplicity that rejects the ethos of capitalism and the hedonism and gluttony that define the consumer society. It means a communal society in which inequality and income disparity are not extreme. If we continue to live as if the future does not matter, our society, like that of the Anasazi, will fracture and die. We will vanish from the earth in an act of global suicide.
The human species faces its greatest existential crisis. Yet, our elites replicate the imbecility, arrogance and greed of past elites. They hoard wealth. They shut us out from circles of power. They use brutal forms of repression to maintain control. They exhaust and poison the ecosystem. The longer the corporate elites rule, the longer we fail to revolt, the less chance we have to endure as a species. Settled or civilized life is less than 10,000 years old. Our peculiar human social construction is but a nanosecond to the universe. It may prove to be a brief and fatal experiment. Perhaps, as Franz Kafka wrote, “There is hope; though not for us.”
SC163-13
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/stop-and-assess/
Stop and Assess
America has become Alzheimer Nation. Nothing is remembered for more than a few minutes. The news media, which used to function as a sort of collective brain, is a memory hole that events are shoved down and extinguished in. An attack in Syria, you ask? What was that about? Facebook stole your…what? Four lives snuffed out in a… a what? Something about waffles? Trump said… what? Let’s pause today and make an assessment of where things stand in this country as Winter finally coils into Spring.
As you might expect, a nation overrun with lawyers has litigated itself into a cul-de-sac of charges, arrests, suits, countersuits, and allegations that will rack up billable hours until the Rockies tumble. The best outcome may be that half the lawyers in this land will put the other half in jail, and then, finally, there will be space for the rest of us to re-connect with reality.
What does that reality consist of? Troublingly, an economy that can’t go on as we would like it to: a machine that spews out ever more stuff for ever more people. We really have reached limits for an industrial economy based on cheap, potent energy supplies. The energy, oil especially, isn’t cheap anymore. The fantasy that we can easily replace it with wind turbines, solar panels, and as-yet-unseen science projects is going to leave a lot of people not just disappointed but bereft, floundering, and probably dead, unless we make some pretty severe readjustments in daily life.
We’ve been papering this problem over by borrowing so much money from the future to cover costs today that eventually it will lose its meaning as money — that is, faith that it is worth anything. That’s what happens when money is just a representation of debt that can’t be paid back. This habit of heedless borrowing has enabled the country to pretend that it is functioning effectively. Lately, this game of pretend has sent the financial corps into a rapture of jubilation. The market speed bumps of February are behind us and the road ahead looks like the highway to Vegas at dawn on a summer’s day.
Tesla is the perfect metaphor for where the US economy is at: a company stuffed with debt plus government subsidies, unable to deliver the wished-for miracle product — affordable electric cars — whirling around the drain into bankruptcy. Tesla has been feeding one of the chief fantasies of the day: that we can banish climate problems caused by excessive CO2, while giving a new lease on life to the (actually) futureless suburban living arrangement that we foolishly invested so much of our earlier capital building. In other words, pounding sand down a rat hole.
Because none of that is going to happen. The true message of income inequality is that the nation as a whole is becoming incrementally impoverished and eventually even the massive “wealth” of the one-percenters will prove to be fictitious, as the things it is represented in — stocks, bonds, currencies, Manhattan apartments — hemorrhage their supposed value. The very wealthy will be a lot less wealthy while everybody else is in a life-and-death struggle to remain fed, housed, and warm. And, of course, that only increases the chance that some violent social revolution will take away even that remaining residue of wealth, and destroy the people who held it.
What lies ahead is contraction. Of everything. Activity, population. The industrial economy is not going to be replaced by a super high tech utopia, because that wished-for utopia needs an industrial economy underneath to support it. This is true, by the way, for all the other “advanced” nations. China has a few more years of dependable oil supply left and then they will discover that they can no longer manufacture solar panels or perhaps not even run the magnificent electronic surveillance system they are so artfully building. Their political system will prove to be at least as fragile as our own.
The time may even come when the young people, of the USA especially, have to put aside their boundary-smashing frolics of the day and adjust the pre-cooked expectations they’ve been handed to the actual contraction at hand, and what it means for making a life under severely different conditions. It means, better learn how to do something really practical and not necessarily high tech. Better figure out a part of the country that will be safe to live in. Better plan on hunkering down there when the people stuck in the less favorable places make a real mess of things.
Stop and Assess
America has become Alzheimer Nation. Nothing is remembered for more than a few minutes. The news media, which used to function as a sort of collective brain, is a memory hole that events are shoved down and extinguished in. An attack in Syria, you ask? What was that about? Facebook stole your…what? Four lives snuffed out in a… a what? Something about waffles? Trump said… what? Let’s pause today and make an assessment of where things stand in this country as Winter finally coils into Spring.
As you might expect, a nation overrun with lawyers has litigated itself into a cul-de-sac of charges, arrests, suits, countersuits, and allegations that will rack up billable hours until the Rockies tumble. The best outcome may be that half the lawyers in this land will put the other half in jail, and then, finally, there will be space for the rest of us to re-connect with reality.
What does that reality consist of? Troublingly, an economy that can’t go on as we would like it to: a machine that spews out ever more stuff for ever more people. We really have reached limits for an industrial economy based on cheap, potent energy supplies. The energy, oil especially, isn’t cheap anymore. The fantasy that we can easily replace it with wind turbines, solar panels, and as-yet-unseen science projects is going to leave a lot of people not just disappointed but bereft, floundering, and probably dead, unless we make some pretty severe readjustments in daily life.
We’ve been papering this problem over by borrowing so much money from the future to cover costs today that eventually it will lose its meaning as money — that is, faith that it is worth anything. That’s what happens when money is just a representation of debt that can’t be paid back. This habit of heedless borrowing has enabled the country to pretend that it is functioning effectively. Lately, this game of pretend has sent the financial corps into a rapture of jubilation. The market speed bumps of February are behind us and the road ahead looks like the highway to Vegas at dawn on a summer’s day.
Tesla is the perfect metaphor for where the US economy is at: a company stuffed with debt plus government subsidies, unable to deliver the wished-for miracle product — affordable electric cars — whirling around the drain into bankruptcy. Tesla has been feeding one of the chief fantasies of the day: that we can banish climate problems caused by excessive CO2, while giving a new lease on life to the (actually) futureless suburban living arrangement that we foolishly invested so much of our earlier capital building. In other words, pounding sand down a rat hole.
Because none of that is going to happen. The true message of income inequality is that the nation as a whole is becoming incrementally impoverished and eventually even the massive “wealth” of the one-percenters will prove to be fictitious, as the things it is represented in — stocks, bonds, currencies, Manhattan apartments — hemorrhage their supposed value. The very wealthy will be a lot less wealthy while everybody else is in a life-and-death struggle to remain fed, housed, and warm. And, of course, that only increases the chance that some violent social revolution will take away even that remaining residue of wealth, and destroy the people who held it.
What lies ahead is contraction. Of everything. Activity, population. The industrial economy is not going to be replaced by a super high tech utopia, because that wished-for utopia needs an industrial economy underneath to support it. This is true, by the way, for all the other “advanced” nations. China has a few more years of dependable oil supply left and then they will discover that they can no longer manufacture solar panels or perhaps not even run the magnificent electronic surveillance system they are so artfully building. Their political system will prove to be at least as fragile as our own.
The time may even come when the young people, of the USA especially, have to put aside their boundary-smashing frolics of the day and adjust the pre-cooked expectations they’ve been handed to the actual contraction at hand, and what it means for making a life under severely different conditions. It means, better learn how to do something really practical and not necessarily high tech. Better figure out a part of the country that will be safe to live in. Better plan on hunkering down there when the people stuck in the less favorable places make a real mess of things.
Saturday, April 21, 2018
SC163-12
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2018/04/heat-storm.html
Heat Storm
Arctic sea ice extent has been at a record low for the time of year for most of 2018, as illustrated by above image. In 2012, extent went below 3.4 million km². The question is what minimum 2018 extent will be.
Arctic sea ice could disappear altogether in 2018. Have a look at the progressive loss of sea ice volume depicted in the image on the right, from an earlier post. Zero sea ice volume by 2018 is within the margins of the trend line contained in the data going back to 1979.
What drives volume decline is the combination of extent loss and especially thickness loss. Sea ice thickness has declined particularly where the ice once was at its thickest, i.e. north of Greenland and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.
The combination image below shows the decline of the thicker sea ice, by comparing sea ice thickness on April 15 (run April 14) for the years 2015 through to 2018, showing that sea ice this year is entering the melting season with little or no thick sea ice left north of Greenland and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago to cope with the influx of warmer water.
The image below shows how much Bering Strait sea ice is at a historic low and the associated International Arctic Research Center post describes that this is caused by higher ocean temperatures and frequent storms.
The influx of warm water from the Atlantic Ocean and from the Pacific Ocean is melting the sea ice from below, while sunlight is melting the sea ice from above. Furthermore, warm water from rivers that end in the Arctic Ocean also contribute to melting of the sea ice, and there are numerous feedbacks that can dramatically speed up melting.
Disappearance of the sea ice means that the buffer that until now has consumed huge amounts of heat, will be gone and that heat that previously went into melting the sea ice, will instead warm up the Arctic.
Sea ice can be expected to continue its downward spiral, given the continued rise of the temperature of the sea surface in the North Atlantic Ocean and the North Pacific Ocean, as illustrated by the image below.
The sea surface is not necessarily the place where the water is at its warmest. This is illustrated by the image below, showing subsurface ocean heat in the area most relevant to El Niño/La Niña events.
Indeed, while we're currently still in a La Niña period, it looks like a new El Niño will arrive this summer, as illustrated by the forecast plumes on the right.
This could result in a heat storm in which heat waves could decimate the sea ice, while storms could push the remaining sea ice out of the Arctic Ocean.
This danger is further illustrated by the trend line in the image below, a trend that is contained in NASA LOTI data up to March 2018, adjusted by +0.79°C to better reflect the rise from preindustrial and surface air temperatures, and to better include Arctic temperatures.
The temperature rise in the Arctic is causing decline of the sea ice extent as well as the extent of the snow cover on land.
The image on the right shows the progressive decline of the spring snow cover on land in the Northern Hemisphere.
A recent study shows that the amount of water melt from the glaciers on Mt. Hunter, Alaska, is now 60 times greater than it was before 1850.
Heat waves combined with strong rainfall due to storms could devastate the snow cover in 2018.
Decline of the snow and ice cover in the Arctic comes with a huge loss in albedo, which means that huge amounts of sunlight that were previously reflected back into space instead get absorbed by the Arctic.
The Buffer has gone, feedback #14 on the Feedbacks page
A rapid rise in temperatures in the Arctic will also accelerate changes to jet stream, which can cause huge amounts of heat from the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean to enter the Arctic Ocean, further speeding up the temperature rise and threatening to destabilize methane hydrates in sediments under the Arctic Ocean.
The methane will initially be felt most strongly in the Arctic, further speeding up the temperature rise that is already accelerating due to the loss of the snow and ice cover in the Arctic, which makes that less sunlight is reflected back into space and instead adds to warming up the Arctic.
All this shouldn't come unexpected. In the video below, Guy McPherson warns that a rapid temperature rise will affect agriculture across the globe, threatening to cause a collapse of industrial civilization, in turn resulting in an abrupt halt of the sulfates that are currently co-emitted as a result of burning fuel, which will further add to a temperature rise that is already threatening to cause people across the globe to perish at massive scale, due to heatstroke, dehydration and famine, if not perish due to nuclear radiation and further toxic effects of war, as people fight over who controls the last habitable places on Earth.
Heat Storm
Arctic sea ice extent has been at a record low for the time of year for most of 2018, as illustrated by above image. In 2012, extent went below 3.4 million km². The question is what minimum 2018 extent will be.
Arctic sea ice could disappear altogether in 2018. Have a look at the progressive loss of sea ice volume depicted in the image on the right, from an earlier post. Zero sea ice volume by 2018 is within the margins of the trend line contained in the data going back to 1979.
What drives volume decline is the combination of extent loss and especially thickness loss. Sea ice thickness has declined particularly where the ice once was at its thickest, i.e. north of Greenland and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.
The combination image below shows the decline of the thicker sea ice, by comparing sea ice thickness on April 15 (run April 14) for the years 2015 through to 2018, showing that sea ice this year is entering the melting season with little or no thick sea ice left north of Greenland and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago to cope with the influx of warmer water.
The image below shows how much Bering Strait sea ice is at a historic low and the associated International Arctic Research Center post describes that this is caused by higher ocean temperatures and frequent storms.
The influx of warm water from the Atlantic Ocean and from the Pacific Ocean is melting the sea ice from below, while sunlight is melting the sea ice from above. Furthermore, warm water from rivers that end in the Arctic Ocean also contribute to melting of the sea ice, and there are numerous feedbacks that can dramatically speed up melting.
Disappearance of the sea ice means that the buffer that until now has consumed huge amounts of heat, will be gone and that heat that previously went into melting the sea ice, will instead warm up the Arctic.
Sea ice can be expected to continue its downward spiral, given the continued rise of the temperature of the sea surface in the North Atlantic Ocean and the North Pacific Ocean, as illustrated by the image below.
The sea surface is not necessarily the place where the water is at its warmest. This is illustrated by the image below, showing subsurface ocean heat in the area most relevant to El Niño/La Niña events.
Indeed, while we're currently still in a La Niña period, it looks like a new El Niño will arrive this summer, as illustrated by the forecast plumes on the right.
This could result in a heat storm in which heat waves could decimate the sea ice, while storms could push the remaining sea ice out of the Arctic Ocean.
This danger is further illustrated by the trend line in the image below, a trend that is contained in NASA LOTI data up to March 2018, adjusted by +0.79°C to better reflect the rise from preindustrial and surface air temperatures, and to better include Arctic temperatures.
The temperature rise in the Arctic is causing decline of the sea ice extent as well as the extent of the snow cover on land.
The image on the right shows the progressive decline of the spring snow cover on land in the Northern Hemisphere.
A recent study shows that the amount of water melt from the glaciers on Mt. Hunter, Alaska, is now 60 times greater than it was before 1850.
Heat waves combined with strong rainfall due to storms could devastate the snow cover in 2018.
Decline of the snow and ice cover in the Arctic comes with a huge loss in albedo, which means that huge amounts of sunlight that were previously reflected back into space instead get absorbed by the Arctic.
The Buffer has gone, feedback #14 on the Feedbacks page
A rapid rise in temperatures in the Arctic will also accelerate changes to jet stream, which can cause huge amounts of heat from the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean to enter the Arctic Ocean, further speeding up the temperature rise and threatening to destabilize methane hydrates in sediments under the Arctic Ocean.
The methane will initially be felt most strongly in the Arctic, further speeding up the temperature rise that is already accelerating due to the loss of the snow and ice cover in the Arctic, which makes that less sunlight is reflected back into space and instead adds to warming up the Arctic.
All this shouldn't come unexpected. In the video below, Guy McPherson warns that a rapid temperature rise will affect agriculture across the globe, threatening to cause a collapse of industrial civilization, in turn resulting in an abrupt halt of the sulfates that are currently co-emitted as a result of burning fuel, which will further add to a temperature rise that is already threatening to cause people across the globe to perish at massive scale, due to heatstroke, dehydration and famine, if not perish due to nuclear radiation and further toxic effects of war, as people fight over who controls the last habitable places on Earth.
Friday, April 20, 2018
SC163-11
https://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/113961/economy-cooked
The Economy Is Cooked
The growth cycle has peaked
Hours ago, Eurpean Central Bank chief Mario Dragho conceded: "The growth cycle may have peaked"
Of course, those paying attention to the data already knew this. Our politicians and central planers have been peddling to us the fantasy that the global economy is strengthening, finally ready to fire on all cylinders after nearly ten years of dependence on monetary stimulus.
That just ain't so.
The Federal Reserve of Atlanta's GDPNow measure, which gives a forecast of Q1 2018's expected GDP, is currently coming in at 2.0%, down from the much more vigorous 5.4% growth predicted as recently as early February:
Generating this growth, meager as it is, has required a tremendous amount of new debt. So much more so that the US will soon have a worse debt-to-GDP ratio than perennial fiscal basket-case Italy:
U.S. Debt Load Seen Worse Than Italy's by 2023, IMF Predicts (Bloomberg)
In five years, the U.S. government is forecast to have a bleaker debt profile than Italy, the perennial poor man of the Group of Seven industrial nations.
The U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio is projected widen to 116.9 percent by 2023 while Italy’s is seen narrowing to 116.6 percent, according to the latest data from the International Monetary Fund. The U.S. will also place ahead of both Mozambique and Burundi in terms of the weight of its fiscal burden.
The numbers put renewed focus on the U.S. deteriorating budget after the enactment in December of $1.5 trillion in tax cuts, and the passage more recently of $300 billion in new spending. President Donald Trump’s administration argues that the tax overhaul combined with deregulation will help the economy accelerate, which in turn will generate enough extra revenue to avoid any fiscal fallout.
Officials with the Federal Reserve and Congressional Budget Office are skeptical about those expectations, as they forecast long-term economic growth will fall short of expansion rates needed to fund tax cuts. The central bank’s most recent forecasts show a median estimate of 2.7 percent for this year’s expansion slowing to 2 percent in 2020, while the CBO sees GDP growth slowing from 3.3 percent this year to 1.8 percent in 2020.
Looking back across the past 50 years, we can clearly see that the 2008 Great Financial Crisis was a turning point. That was the moment where our addiction to exponentially increasing our debts began to have real consequences.
The chart below clearly shows that, since then, we've been in an era of diminishing returns in exchanging debt for growth:
What can ride to the rescue at this point? Not much.
Our 'recovery' since 2008 is now one of the longest on record; another recession will occur sooner or later (Fannie Mae head economist Doug Duncan thinks one will likely arrive by next year).
Rising interest rates will only accelerate the advance of a recession. And interest rates are indeed on the rise, with 10-year Treasury yields having nearly doubled since July 2016:
10-YEAR TREASURY YIELD (%)
And with the arrival of recession, what will our leadership do? The only thing it knows how: print, borrow and deficit spend in attempt to boost 'growth'. Except the debt will be even more expensive this time, and it's ability to generate incremental growth per unit of new debt even weaker.
The Bigger Predicament
But sadly, as prodigious as it will be, our growing pile of debt isn't going to be the primary limiter of growth in the coming decades.
Instead, it will be Energy.
Oil prices are on the rise again, as the world is waking up to the fact that annual demand will exceed supply for decades to come and that the US shale 'miracle' will be a short-lived mirage. All while new oil field discoveries are the worst since World War 2.
With increasingly expensive energy -- and increasing global competition for it -- the economy will find itself increasingly constrained. We will be faced with a future of doing less.
This is not fear-mongering; it's science. Specifically, our destiny is in the hands of the Laws of Thermodynamics. Without a surfeit of new, plentiful, BTU-dense and affordable energy sources (which we simply don't see on the horizon), economic growth cannot be sustained.
One of the best explanations I've read on this is the report my fellow Peak Prosperity co-founder, Chris Martenson, wrote upon finishing the book version of The Crash Course. It remains to this day one of his most seminal warnings of the global predicament we a species face on this finite planet.
In Part 2: Energy Is The Non-Negotiable Element Defining Our Future, we re-publish this report in full, which is even more relevant and important to heed today then when Chris wrote it eight years ago -- as our economy specifically, and humanity in general, are totally unprepared for a future of even slightly less energy.
Everything is tuned to grow exponentially. There is no "plan B".
We have no models yet for how to manage in a world of de-growth, so we will blindly slam into this crisis head-on. But as painful as they will be, the economic woes at that time will be the least of our worries....
The Economy Is Cooked
The growth cycle has peaked
Hours ago, Eurpean Central Bank chief Mario Dragho conceded: "The growth cycle may have peaked"
Of course, those paying attention to the data already knew this. Our politicians and central planers have been peddling to us the fantasy that the global economy is strengthening, finally ready to fire on all cylinders after nearly ten years of dependence on monetary stimulus.
That just ain't so.
The Federal Reserve of Atlanta's GDPNow measure, which gives a forecast of Q1 2018's expected GDP, is currently coming in at 2.0%, down from the much more vigorous 5.4% growth predicted as recently as early February:
Generating this growth, meager as it is, has required a tremendous amount of new debt. So much more so that the US will soon have a worse debt-to-GDP ratio than perennial fiscal basket-case Italy:
U.S. Debt Load Seen Worse Than Italy's by 2023, IMF Predicts (Bloomberg)
In five years, the U.S. government is forecast to have a bleaker debt profile than Italy, the perennial poor man of the Group of Seven industrial nations.
The U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio is projected widen to 116.9 percent by 2023 while Italy’s is seen narrowing to 116.6 percent, according to the latest data from the International Monetary Fund. The U.S. will also place ahead of both Mozambique and Burundi in terms of the weight of its fiscal burden.
The numbers put renewed focus on the U.S. deteriorating budget after the enactment in December of $1.5 trillion in tax cuts, and the passage more recently of $300 billion in new spending. President Donald Trump’s administration argues that the tax overhaul combined with deregulation will help the economy accelerate, which in turn will generate enough extra revenue to avoid any fiscal fallout.
Officials with the Federal Reserve and Congressional Budget Office are skeptical about those expectations, as they forecast long-term economic growth will fall short of expansion rates needed to fund tax cuts. The central bank’s most recent forecasts show a median estimate of 2.7 percent for this year’s expansion slowing to 2 percent in 2020, while the CBO sees GDP growth slowing from 3.3 percent this year to 1.8 percent in 2020.
Looking back across the past 50 years, we can clearly see that the 2008 Great Financial Crisis was a turning point. That was the moment where our addiction to exponentially increasing our debts began to have real consequences.
The chart below clearly shows that, since then, we've been in an era of diminishing returns in exchanging debt for growth:
What can ride to the rescue at this point? Not much.
Our 'recovery' since 2008 is now one of the longest on record; another recession will occur sooner or later (Fannie Mae head economist Doug Duncan thinks one will likely arrive by next year).
Rising interest rates will only accelerate the advance of a recession. And interest rates are indeed on the rise, with 10-year Treasury yields having nearly doubled since July 2016:
10-YEAR TREASURY YIELD (%)
And with the arrival of recession, what will our leadership do? The only thing it knows how: print, borrow and deficit spend in attempt to boost 'growth'. Except the debt will be even more expensive this time, and it's ability to generate incremental growth per unit of new debt even weaker.
The Bigger Predicament
But sadly, as prodigious as it will be, our growing pile of debt isn't going to be the primary limiter of growth in the coming decades.
Instead, it will be Energy.
Oil prices are on the rise again, as the world is waking up to the fact that annual demand will exceed supply for decades to come and that the US shale 'miracle' will be a short-lived mirage. All while new oil field discoveries are the worst since World War 2.
With increasingly expensive energy -- and increasing global competition for it -- the economy will find itself increasingly constrained. We will be faced with a future of doing less.
This is not fear-mongering; it's science. Specifically, our destiny is in the hands of the Laws of Thermodynamics. Without a surfeit of new, plentiful, BTU-dense and affordable energy sources (which we simply don't see on the horizon), economic growth cannot be sustained.
One of the best explanations I've read on this is the report my fellow Peak Prosperity co-founder, Chris Martenson, wrote upon finishing the book version of The Crash Course. It remains to this day one of his most seminal warnings of the global predicament we a species face on this finite planet.
In Part 2: Energy Is The Non-Negotiable Element Defining Our Future, we re-publish this report in full, which is even more relevant and important to heed today then when Chris wrote it eight years ago -- as our economy specifically, and humanity in general, are totally unprepared for a future of even slightly less energy.
Everything is tuned to grow exponentially. There is no "plan B".
We have no models yet for how to manage in a world of de-growth, so we will blindly slam into this crisis head-on. But as painful as they will be, the economic woes at that time will be the least of our worries....
Wednesday, April 18, 2018
SC163-10
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49240.htm
How US Has Virtually Destroyed UN
Under President Donald Trump, the US has basically eliminated the only real international authority the UN used to have. Here is how this was done:
The equivalent, in international law, to a domestic-law crime involving murder, rape, and theft, is an international invasion that’s purely for aggressive purposes and not at all authentically a defensive act against an authentic foreign threat that was coming from the invaded foreign country. Consequently, for the US Government now to have removed the UN from any authority over international invasions, is, in domestic-law equivalency, like removing a national government from authority regarding murders, rapes, and thefts, which occur inside that nation. Such a ‘government’ is no government at all. But, tragically, this is what has happened; and, so, we are now careening into World War III, in this international “Wild West” world, which we live in (and may soon die in, as things thus head into WW III).
The US Government no longer even nominally cares whether or not the UN authorizes its invasions; but, as recently as 2003, it used to, even if only nominally, care. The US has thus effectively discarded the UN altogether, whenever violating the UN is the only way to impose its will against a given target-country.
In late 2002 and early 2003, US President George W. Bush nominally expressed a desire for the UN to authorize an invasion of Iraq, but failed to receive that authorization and then did the invasion anyway, along with only UK, Australia, and Poland, joining the US-led gang, in this destruction of Iraq.
At a press conference on 6 March 2003, just 14 days before he ordered the UN weapons-inspectors to leave Iraq so that he could invade Iraq on March 20th (as he did), Bush said:
Elizabeth.
Q Thank you, Mr. President. As you said, the Security Council faces a vote next week on a resolution implicitly authorizing an attack on Iraq. Will you call for a vote on that resolution, even if you aren't sure you have the vote?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, first, I don't think -- it basically says that he's in defiance of 1441. That's what the resolution says. And it's hard to believe anybody is saying he isn't in defiance of 1441, because 1441 said he must disarm. And, yes, we'll call for a vote.
Q No matter what?
THE PRESIDENT: No matter what the whip count is, we're calling for the vote. We want to see people stand up and say what their opinion is about Saddam Hussein and the utility of the United Nations Security Council. And so, you bet. It's time for people to show their cards, to let the world know where they stand when it comes to Saddam.
Mark Knoller.
Q Mr. President, are you worried that the United States might be viewed as defiant of the United Nations if you went ahead with military action without specific and explicit authorization from the UN?
THE PRESIDENT: No, I'm not worried about that. As a matter of fact, it's hard to say the United States is defiant about the United Nations, when I was the person that took the issue to the United Nations, September the 12th, 2002. We've been working with the United Nations. We've been working through the United Nations.
Subsequent US Presidents haven’t been even that respectful of the UN’s authority; and current US President Donald Trump is blatantly dismissive of it, so that he’s not even requesting UN authorization for his invasions.
Thus, the lesson that the US Government learned from the Iraq invasion isn’t that the US Government should never again lie about what the evidence actually shows, in order to invade a country, but instead that the US Government should simply ignore the UN whenever the evidence doesn’t persuade other Governments that an invasion would be authentically defensive instead of purely an act of international aggression.
What might turn out to have been “The Most Important UN Security Council Vote Ever” was the 10 April 2018 UN Security Council’s failure to require the US and its allies to provide evidence to prove that Syria’s Government had gassed its own people in Douma on April 7th as the US and its allies alleged, before the US and its allies could, with even just possible legal justification, launch massive bombing of Syria as supposed punishment for the gas-attack that they were alleging. The question of whether or not the UN would authorize the American invasion wasn’t even being raised; the question was only whether the alleged gas-attack needed to be independently verified before an invasion might possibly legally be launched — and no proposal was passed. Unlike in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US never tried to win UN authorization to invade Syria in 2018, but simply invaded, casually ignoring all laws, and even denying the need for evidence to back up its allegations against Syria.
A UN like this is, might as well be no UN at all, just a talking-forum — and that’s what now exists: it’s a forum merely for the constituent Governments to present their respective propagandas to the world, but no longer actually to negotiate anything, since the UN has no military, and now the US Government has become effectively whatever the US military (including its armaments corporations such as General Dynamics) want it to be — and, “To hell with the UN!” The way now to buy the US Government has become to buy those corporations’ weapons, and then the US Government will ally itself with that country. This is purely transactional, in the interests of America’s armaments-firms, not in the interests of the invading public, and certainly destructive of the interests of the invaded public, no matter how profitable it may be for the owners of those armaments-firms. (One can talk instead about “Wall Street,” but they’re mainly the sellers of stock in America’s armaments-firms and associated products and services; so, they are middle-men who represent the interests of the aristocracy, not really themselves necessarily principals — people who are within the aristocracy.)
President Trump came into office promising a rebirth of American manufacturing, but, so far, the vast majority of his boost to US manufacturing has been only to the US weapons-manufacturers — actually by far the largest international arms-sale in world history. On 21 May 2017, I headlined it "US $350 Billion Arms-Sale to Sauds Cements US-Jihadist Alliance” and reported that the day before, “US President Donald Trump and the Saud family inked an all-time record-high $350 billion ten-year arms-deal that not only will cement-in the Saud family’s position as the world’s largest foreign purchasers of US-produced weaponry, but will make the Saud family, and America’s ruling families, become, in effect, one aristocracy over both nations, because neither side will be able to violate the will of the other. As the years roll on, their mutual dependency will deepen, each and every year.” That, sadly, has turned out to be true — and not only regarding America’s carrying the Sauds’ water (doing their bidding) in both Yemen and Syria, but in other ways as well.
On 21 March 2018, CNBC bannered “Trump wants Saudi Arabia to buy more American-made weapons. Here are the ones the Saudis want”, and reported what Trump had just negotiated with Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman al-Saud, which was a step-up in that $350 billion sale, to $400 billion. CNBC associated the Sauds’ arms-purchases with ‘investments’ in the US, so as to mislead their audience to think favorably of these sales, but if these sales were actually investments in anything, it was in the ability of the Saud family to join even more fully with America’s aristocracy so as for them jointly to impose their will upon any country where they both want “regime-change” — control by themselves, instead of by that invaded country's local aristocracy. (Then, the US Government issues economic sanctions against Russia for ‘interfering in our democracy’. But the Sauds, and their allies, Israel’s aristocracy, actually do precisely that, routinely, and very effectively!) So: CNBC said: “During the Oval Office talks, Trump touted a creation of 40,000 American jobs due to Saudi military sales. The president used several maps and charts of Saudi acquisitions to further make his point. The crown prince, likewise, added that last year's Saudi pledge of $200 billion in investments will rise to approximately $400 billion and that a 10-year window to implement the deal was already under way.” That was a misleading statement about the amounts, too. Here is how Indian Express had headlined and reported on 18 May 2017: "Saudi Arabia to invest $200 billion in US, purchase arms worth $300 billion”: “As President Donald Trump prepares for his first overseas trip, Saudi Arabia has announced to make a whopping USD 200 billion investment in the US and intends to purchase arms worth USD 300 billion from America, a senior administration official has said.” There, too, the Saudi masters got their propagandists to refer to “investments” in relation to “purchase arms worth $300 billion,” which turned out, just two days later, on 20 May 2017, to be actually $350 billion — and which amount of arms-purchases now has risen instead to $400 billion, which will be paid, as listed in that CNBC news-report to: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Honeywell, and Raytheon. When Trump campaigned for the Presidency, he had promised to be anything but a sales-person for America’s war-machine. But, he is so, and this is fascism: socialism for the rich, and ‘survival of the fittest’ for everyone else. Trump certainly isn’t a sales-person for the poor, anywhere. He’s what his fellow-fascists call a ‘populist’, in order to insult the public that they must appeal to for votes.
American ‘productivity’ thus will increase in the production of death and destruction; but, as economists view things, that is “productivity” and added “Gross National Product,” regardless of how much it actually immiserates the world (and, so, economic theory is part of the fraud that enables all of this, essentially, corruption). Thus, economic theory is as fraudulent as is the international ’news’ that the propaganda-agencies spread to the public. It’s all a “pile of bull,” but lots of consumers are buying it, because it’s all that they know and it satisfies them — they’re not even looking for more than the myths.
Previously, the “Biggest Arms Deal in History” was between UK’s aristocracy and the Sauds, the Al-Yamamah deal, which boosted UK’s biggest weapons-maker, BAE, and in which the massive corruption became the subject of scandals and a Governmental inquiry, which Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud forced UK Prime Minister Tony Blair to close with no report being issued. And both the UK and US claim to be ‘democracies’ — and both Governments accuse Russia of ‘interfering’ in their ‘democracy’!
If the reader wants to know why a web-search for the title of this article “How US Has Virtually Destroyed UN” probably turns up no mainstream ‘news’media in the US-allied world, and even very few “alternative news” sites, then the reason isn’t that they weren’t offered the article, because they all routinely receive the submission of each of my articles but routinely turn them down. The reason is instead that the most important truths are prohibited from publication in the US-allied world — it’s a world dominated by lies. After all: we invaded and destroyed Iraq for no real defensive reason, and our Government has never apologized for that, much less been held accountable, at all, for it. And now, because of the US Government, the UN isn’t even really a debating-forum, any more. It’s just a propaganda-forum, now.
How US Has Virtually Destroyed UN
Under President Donald Trump, the US has basically eliminated the only real international authority the UN used to have. Here is how this was done:
The equivalent, in international law, to a domestic-law crime involving murder, rape, and theft, is an international invasion that’s purely for aggressive purposes and not at all authentically a defensive act against an authentic foreign threat that was coming from the invaded foreign country. Consequently, for the US Government now to have removed the UN from any authority over international invasions, is, in domestic-law equivalency, like removing a national government from authority regarding murders, rapes, and thefts, which occur inside that nation. Such a ‘government’ is no government at all. But, tragically, this is what has happened; and, so, we are now careening into World War III, in this international “Wild West” world, which we live in (and may soon die in, as things thus head into WW III).
The US Government no longer even nominally cares whether or not the UN authorizes its invasions; but, as recently as 2003, it used to, even if only nominally, care. The US has thus effectively discarded the UN altogether, whenever violating the UN is the only way to impose its will against a given target-country.
In late 2002 and early 2003, US President George W. Bush nominally expressed a desire for the UN to authorize an invasion of Iraq, but failed to receive that authorization and then did the invasion anyway, along with only UK, Australia, and Poland, joining the US-led gang, in this destruction of Iraq.
At a press conference on 6 March 2003, just 14 days before he ordered the UN weapons-inspectors to leave Iraq so that he could invade Iraq on March 20th (as he did), Bush said:
Elizabeth.
Q Thank you, Mr. President. As you said, the Security Council faces a vote next week on a resolution implicitly authorizing an attack on Iraq. Will you call for a vote on that resolution, even if you aren't sure you have the vote?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, first, I don't think -- it basically says that he's in defiance of 1441. That's what the resolution says. And it's hard to believe anybody is saying he isn't in defiance of 1441, because 1441 said he must disarm. And, yes, we'll call for a vote.
Q No matter what?
THE PRESIDENT: No matter what the whip count is, we're calling for the vote. We want to see people stand up and say what their opinion is about Saddam Hussein and the utility of the United Nations Security Council. And so, you bet. It's time for people to show their cards, to let the world know where they stand when it comes to Saddam.
Mark Knoller.
Q Mr. President, are you worried that the United States might be viewed as defiant of the United Nations if you went ahead with military action without specific and explicit authorization from the UN?
THE PRESIDENT: No, I'm not worried about that. As a matter of fact, it's hard to say the United States is defiant about the United Nations, when I was the person that took the issue to the United Nations, September the 12th, 2002. We've been working with the United Nations. We've been working through the United Nations.
Subsequent US Presidents haven’t been even that respectful of the UN’s authority; and current US President Donald Trump is blatantly dismissive of it, so that he’s not even requesting UN authorization for his invasions.
Thus, the lesson that the US Government learned from the Iraq invasion isn’t that the US Government should never again lie about what the evidence actually shows, in order to invade a country, but instead that the US Government should simply ignore the UN whenever the evidence doesn’t persuade other Governments that an invasion would be authentically defensive instead of purely an act of international aggression.
What might turn out to have been “The Most Important UN Security Council Vote Ever” was the 10 April 2018 UN Security Council’s failure to require the US and its allies to provide evidence to prove that Syria’s Government had gassed its own people in Douma on April 7th as the US and its allies alleged, before the US and its allies could, with even just possible legal justification, launch massive bombing of Syria as supposed punishment for the gas-attack that they were alleging. The question of whether or not the UN would authorize the American invasion wasn’t even being raised; the question was only whether the alleged gas-attack needed to be independently verified before an invasion might possibly legally be launched — and no proposal was passed. Unlike in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US never tried to win UN authorization to invade Syria in 2018, but simply invaded, casually ignoring all laws, and even denying the need for evidence to back up its allegations against Syria.
A UN like this is, might as well be no UN at all, just a talking-forum — and that’s what now exists: it’s a forum merely for the constituent Governments to present their respective propagandas to the world, but no longer actually to negotiate anything, since the UN has no military, and now the US Government has become effectively whatever the US military (including its armaments corporations such as General Dynamics) want it to be — and, “To hell with the UN!” The way now to buy the US Government has become to buy those corporations’ weapons, and then the US Government will ally itself with that country. This is purely transactional, in the interests of America’s armaments-firms, not in the interests of the invading public, and certainly destructive of the interests of the invaded public, no matter how profitable it may be for the owners of those armaments-firms. (One can talk instead about “Wall Street,” but they’re mainly the sellers of stock in America’s armaments-firms and associated products and services; so, they are middle-men who represent the interests of the aristocracy, not really themselves necessarily principals — people who are within the aristocracy.)
President Trump came into office promising a rebirth of American manufacturing, but, so far, the vast majority of his boost to US manufacturing has been only to the US weapons-manufacturers — actually by far the largest international arms-sale in world history. On 21 May 2017, I headlined it "US $350 Billion Arms-Sale to Sauds Cements US-Jihadist Alliance” and reported that the day before, “US President Donald Trump and the Saud family inked an all-time record-high $350 billion ten-year arms-deal that not only will cement-in the Saud family’s position as the world’s largest foreign purchasers of US-produced weaponry, but will make the Saud family, and America’s ruling families, become, in effect, one aristocracy over both nations, because neither side will be able to violate the will of the other. As the years roll on, their mutual dependency will deepen, each and every year.” That, sadly, has turned out to be true — and not only regarding America’s carrying the Sauds’ water (doing their bidding) in both Yemen and Syria, but in other ways as well.
On 21 March 2018, CNBC bannered “Trump wants Saudi Arabia to buy more American-made weapons. Here are the ones the Saudis want”, and reported what Trump had just negotiated with Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman al-Saud, which was a step-up in that $350 billion sale, to $400 billion. CNBC associated the Sauds’ arms-purchases with ‘investments’ in the US, so as to mislead their audience to think favorably of these sales, but if these sales were actually investments in anything, it was in the ability of the Saud family to join even more fully with America’s aristocracy so as for them jointly to impose their will upon any country where they both want “regime-change” — control by themselves, instead of by that invaded country's local aristocracy. (Then, the US Government issues economic sanctions against Russia for ‘interfering in our democracy’. But the Sauds, and their allies, Israel’s aristocracy, actually do precisely that, routinely, and very effectively!) So: CNBC said: “During the Oval Office talks, Trump touted a creation of 40,000 American jobs due to Saudi military sales. The president used several maps and charts of Saudi acquisitions to further make his point. The crown prince, likewise, added that last year's Saudi pledge of $200 billion in investments will rise to approximately $400 billion and that a 10-year window to implement the deal was already under way.” That was a misleading statement about the amounts, too. Here is how Indian Express had headlined and reported on 18 May 2017: "Saudi Arabia to invest $200 billion in US, purchase arms worth $300 billion”: “As President Donald Trump prepares for his first overseas trip, Saudi Arabia has announced to make a whopping USD 200 billion investment in the US and intends to purchase arms worth USD 300 billion from America, a senior administration official has said.” There, too, the Saudi masters got their propagandists to refer to “investments” in relation to “purchase arms worth $300 billion,” which turned out, just two days later, on 20 May 2017, to be actually $350 billion — and which amount of arms-purchases now has risen instead to $400 billion, which will be paid, as listed in that CNBC news-report to: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Honeywell, and Raytheon. When Trump campaigned for the Presidency, he had promised to be anything but a sales-person for America’s war-machine. But, he is so, and this is fascism: socialism for the rich, and ‘survival of the fittest’ for everyone else. Trump certainly isn’t a sales-person for the poor, anywhere. He’s what his fellow-fascists call a ‘populist’, in order to insult the public that they must appeal to for votes.
American ‘productivity’ thus will increase in the production of death and destruction; but, as economists view things, that is “productivity” and added “Gross National Product,” regardless of how much it actually immiserates the world (and, so, economic theory is part of the fraud that enables all of this, essentially, corruption). Thus, economic theory is as fraudulent as is the international ’news’ that the propaganda-agencies spread to the public. It’s all a “pile of bull,” but lots of consumers are buying it, because it’s all that they know and it satisfies them — they’re not even looking for more than the myths.
Previously, the “Biggest Arms Deal in History” was between UK’s aristocracy and the Sauds, the Al-Yamamah deal, which boosted UK’s biggest weapons-maker, BAE, and in which the massive corruption became the subject of scandals and a Governmental inquiry, which Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud forced UK Prime Minister Tony Blair to close with no report being issued. And both the UK and US claim to be ‘democracies’ — and both Governments accuse Russia of ‘interfering’ in their ‘democracy’!
If the reader wants to know why a web-search for the title of this article “How US Has Virtually Destroyed UN” probably turns up no mainstream ‘news’media in the US-allied world, and even very few “alternative news” sites, then the reason isn’t that they weren’t offered the article, because they all routinely receive the submission of each of my articles but routinely turn them down. The reason is instead that the most important truths are prohibited from publication in the US-allied world — it’s a world dominated by lies. After all: we invaded and destroyed Iraq for no real defensive reason, and our Government has never apologized for that, much less been held accountable, at all, for it. And now, because of the US Government, the UN isn’t even really a debating-forum, any more. It’s just a propaganda-forum, now.
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