https://srsroccoreport.com/the-amazing-amount-of-solar-power-needed-to-run-the-u-s-transportation-sector/
The Amazing Amount Of Solar Power Needed To Run The U.S. Transportation Sector
The U.S. Solar PV Industry will never be able to grow large enough to power the transportation industry. Why? Because the amount of energy needed is well beyond the forcasted growth of U.S. solar power generation. And, it’s even worse than that. Industry analysts are making their forecasts based on rising fossil fuel production… the critical energy necessary to manufacture and build solar power plants.
There seems to be this notion by Americans, that in the future, they will just plug in their electric cars and drive to their heart’s desire. It seems as if no one takes the time to do a bit of simple math. While U.S. solar power generation has increased significantly over the past several years, it is still a fraction of the total energy supplied.
For example, U.S. fossil fuel production (coal, natural gas, and oil) still supplies 88 times more energy than solar PV power. However, if we just focus on the U.S. solar power generation versus the transportation sector, it only amounts to 2.6% of the total:
According to the EIA, the U.S. Energy Information Agency, total U.S. solar power generation in 2017 was 0.77 Quadrillion BTU’s versus 29.5 Quad BTU’s consumed by the entire domestic transportation sector… cars, buses, trucks, and trains. To give you an idea of how much 1 Quad BTU equals, it represents the energy in 170 million barrels of oil. Thus, the U.S. transportation sector consumes 29.5 times that amount or roughly 5 billion barrels of oil per year.
For the U.S. Solar Power Industry to increase in size to equal the same energy that is consumed by the transportation sector, it would need to grow by over 33 times. Now, I am just making some simple calculations here, but even with the optimistic projects in this renewable energy industry, solar would still only represent about 15% of the present transportation energy consumption by 2035:
The forecast for U.S. solar power generation growth is to increase from 44 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) in 2017 to 245 kWh by 2035:
So, if we multiply the present 0.77 Quad BTU’s of solar power generation (in the first chart) by six, it would equal roughly 4.6 Quad BTU’s by 2035. Thus, 4.6 Quad BTU’s versus the 29.5 Quad BTU’s consumed by the transportation sector would only be 15%.
Now, we must remember, not all of this solar power would be used to charge electric cars. The majority of future solar power generation would be used to supply electricity for residential, commercial and industrial sectors of the market.
I wanted to provide this information to show how inconceivable it is for the United States to be able to switch over to renewable energy such as solar to power our economy. For example, the U.S. consumed 78 Quadrillion BTU’s of fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, and oil) in 2017. Present solar power generation only represents 1% of this total.
I believe once U.S. shale oil production peaks and declines in the next few years, we will not have the necessary energy to ramp up solar power generation in the future. Americans better prepare for a much different world tomorrow. And NO, it will not be like the cartoon show, the Jetsons.
Sunday, September 30, 2018
Saturday, September 29, 2018
SC174-8
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50344.htm
Security, Safety, Security! – Dictatorship by Democracy
The other day, checking in at a European airport for an international flight – within about an hour it took to deposit my luggage, going through airport security, the metal detectors, body screening machines, the automatic passport reading procedure, waiting at the gate and finally boarding – I have heard or read the words security and safety, honestly speaking, more than a hundred times. There are now countless primitive videos – in fact, insultingly primitive videos – that show you the precise procedures to follow to keep you safe and secure. All you have to do is follow them to keep your life safe and in secure hands. It is a constant indoctrination that we are in danger and that the democracy around us keeps us safe.
Some paper in my shirt pocket and a handkerchief I didn’t remove from my pocket – had to go through a special ‘dust reader’; my hands were also ‘dusted off’ and the special tissue used for it also went through the ‘reader’- only then, when indeed the result was negative, was I free to collect my things – and get redressed. I wondered aloud how many valuable items, like cell phones, laptops, cameras and-so-on – ‘disappear’ – or get ‘lost’ in the hassle, and I could not shut up making my comments about the nonsense – the George Bush invented 9/11 endless war on terror, that itself was based on a false flag, i.e. the self-imposed 9/11 – and that prompted this forced submission to an ever-more degrading and harassing security procedure. About three security agents descended on me – this time politely, I must say, assuring me that all this was for my own safety. Naturally. How could it be different. We want you to be safe and secure, Sir. Bingo. It’s difficult to protest against so much protective kindness.
Does anybody have an idea on what this security and safety industry – the machines and apparatuses, and ever newly invented security gadgets – cost? – And the profit they bring to the war and security industry – and their shareholders, many of whom are former high-ranking US and other western government officials? – The airport security business alone is estimated at between US$ 25 and 30 billion per year.
What can I say. These airport security employees have jobs; they have been trained to use these billions-worth devices to intimidate and harass people into fear, into obeying, into blindly – no questions asked, following the dictate of democracy. Most of these security agents don’t know much about what they are doing. They have a noble job: protecting the world from terrorists, a job that keeps them proudly off an ever-growing mass of unemployed, or underemployed, lowly-paid workers. Free thinking is not allowed, lest you are pushed out into the cold, to join the ranks of beggars, of the socially unfit, who depend on government handouts.
Once on the plane – I couldn’t believe my eyes. There was a flight attendant by the name of “security and safety”. Well that was her title, instead of a real name. Lovely, I thought. It doesn’t stop. Security and safety brainwashing permeate every fiber 24/7 of our lives.
Security and safety über alles! – Heil to the neocons, heil to the neonazis that have taken over the reins of our every-day life. And I’m not talking about the political parties of the extreme ‘right’ in France or Germany, they are just puppets for the invisible elite, for those ‘deepstaters’ that pull the strings behind the Trumps, Macrons, Merkels and Mays of this world. – Of course, it’s all for your security, my security, at best, for national security – not theirs, the ones who impose these nonsensical rules, rules that serve strictly for no other purpose than to oppress the common citizen, to brainwash the populace into believing that they are under a constant threat of attack.
---
Back to the airport. At the hand baggage x-ray control, where everybody has to put their cosmetics in a transparent plastic bag, pull out their laptops, tablets and cameras, and are being told what items are not allowed on board, ridiculous stuff, absolutely hilariously ridiculous – if it wasn’t that serious – and all for your own safety, naturally – I was being pushed aside for a service man who delivered a case of bananas to the restaurant in the waiting hall. His bananas had to be cleared by the x-ray machine. Imagine! – They could be objects of terror, maybe even weapons of mass destruction – WMDs.
The real WMDs that kill millions on an every-day basis, in Yemen, in Syria, in Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan – and the list goes on – nobody talks about. They have become common staple of our “secure” and “safe” world. The UN during the ongoing Annual Meeting in New York, declared Yemen a country governed by terror – yes, the Yemenis, who are starved to death like no other nation in recent history, with – also according to the same UN – 5 million children at high risk of death by famine. Not the Saudis, or the United States of America, or the UK, the French, the Spaniards, who feed the Saudis with war planes and bombs, with real weapons of mass destructions – are the terror nations. No, its Yemen. What world have we ended up with?
We are governed by a bunch of criminals and crooks, who benefit from our ignorance and mentally challenged brains. In the submissive west, the utterly brainwashed and by now almost brainless populace is reminded that we are screened for security purposes, for our own security. Every time the screws of security are tightened a little more, the arms are twisted a bit further, just a tiny bit – never forget, its only for our security and safety. By the time, my dear fellow citizens, we realize that our arms are broken and our skulls and brains smashed beyond repair, it’s too late.
As we are reminded by our masters that keep us secure and safe, we are also reminded that we are living in the only democracy that exists on the planet, namely western style democracy. Never mind, this democracy is often, most often in fact, imposed to the rest of the world by sledgehammer, or even by WMDs. We, of course, don’t know that; we are made believe, that all those countries that are being ‘regime-changed’, or destroyed for the sake of democracy are being destroyed for the betterment of their citizens living conditions. That’s what we are made believe. There is no other set of nations – with a thousand years of horrific history of exploitation, killing, raping, looting, lying – than the west. And the west, to this day, continues lying and manipulating peoples’ minds in a more sophisticated way than even Goebbels could have dreamed of.
Can you imagine – the “Peru Six”, the neocons – very close to neonazis – of the Americas – (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, Perú and Canada), of course all in the pockets of Washington – have had the unbelievable audacity to file a lawsuit at the International Court of Justice of The Hague against Venezuela for torturing and oppressing her people to the point that 2 million had to leave the country. This is such a flagrant multiple lie – it is actually a crime against humanity, against the only – yes, the very only real democracy left in the west, Venezuela – to make one’s stomach churn.
The maximum 500,000 to 700,000 Venezuelans, who, according to UNHCR and the International Organization of Migration, have migrated to neighboring countries, because of the foreign imposed - yes totally foreign imposed, by sanctions of the US and the EU – plus shamefully neutral Switzerland – horrendous economic conditions of the country. The Maduro Government is struggling to reverse that situation by de-linking Venezuela’s economy from the dollar economy, by creating new alliances with the east, in particular China and Russia. And as there are signs that the wheel may be turning favorably for Venezuela, some of the migrants are already returning.
But can you imagine what these six Latin American Washington bootlickers do to the reputation of Venezuela? And they may actually be welcome in The Hague, especially after John Bolton, Trump’s neocon “Security Adviser” – again Heil-Heil Security! – has warned the judges of this once-upon-a-time noble-intentioned international court, to beware and behave, and never pursue (war) crimes committed by the United States and Israel, meaning in clear text – obey and do what is in the interest of the exceptional nation(s), or else. So, the ICJ may actually be compelled to consider the malicious and totally fake and deceitful complaint of the Peru Six seriously.
And all that under the name of democracy.
Wake up, dear co-citizens! – Its high time. We are living in an abject Security Dictatorship, called Democracy. It imposes an ever-increasing militarization, becomes an ever more brutal police state – or better, an association of brutal police states, to be sure, that if and when you wake up, your awakening will be smashed with visceral power of a legalized, totally legitimate Security Dictatorship. If we don’t act now – and acting starts at these dreadful, humiliating and harassing security stupidities we accept everyday at airports around the world – we will be fried for good. Stand up folks! Stand up for your rights and against the day-in-day-out brainwashing of keeping you secure. Let’s take back our security sovereignty – we and only we, as citizens, colleagues and comrades, are responsible for our own security. Let not security and safety be imposed by criminal, warmongering, children-killing Security Democracies – namely our western governments.
Security, Safety, Security! – Dictatorship by Democracy
The other day, checking in at a European airport for an international flight – within about an hour it took to deposit my luggage, going through airport security, the metal detectors, body screening machines, the automatic passport reading procedure, waiting at the gate and finally boarding – I have heard or read the words security and safety, honestly speaking, more than a hundred times. There are now countless primitive videos – in fact, insultingly primitive videos – that show you the precise procedures to follow to keep you safe and secure. All you have to do is follow them to keep your life safe and in secure hands. It is a constant indoctrination that we are in danger and that the democracy around us keeps us safe.
Some paper in my shirt pocket and a handkerchief I didn’t remove from my pocket – had to go through a special ‘dust reader’; my hands were also ‘dusted off’ and the special tissue used for it also went through the ‘reader’- only then, when indeed the result was negative, was I free to collect my things – and get redressed. I wondered aloud how many valuable items, like cell phones, laptops, cameras and-so-on – ‘disappear’ – or get ‘lost’ in the hassle, and I could not shut up making my comments about the nonsense – the George Bush invented 9/11 endless war on terror, that itself was based on a false flag, i.e. the self-imposed 9/11 – and that prompted this forced submission to an ever-more degrading and harassing security procedure. About three security agents descended on me – this time politely, I must say, assuring me that all this was for my own safety. Naturally. How could it be different. We want you to be safe and secure, Sir. Bingo. It’s difficult to protest against so much protective kindness.
Does anybody have an idea on what this security and safety industry – the machines and apparatuses, and ever newly invented security gadgets – cost? – And the profit they bring to the war and security industry – and their shareholders, many of whom are former high-ranking US and other western government officials? – The airport security business alone is estimated at between US$ 25 and 30 billion per year.
What can I say. These airport security employees have jobs; they have been trained to use these billions-worth devices to intimidate and harass people into fear, into obeying, into blindly – no questions asked, following the dictate of democracy. Most of these security agents don’t know much about what they are doing. They have a noble job: protecting the world from terrorists, a job that keeps them proudly off an ever-growing mass of unemployed, or underemployed, lowly-paid workers. Free thinking is not allowed, lest you are pushed out into the cold, to join the ranks of beggars, of the socially unfit, who depend on government handouts.
Once on the plane – I couldn’t believe my eyes. There was a flight attendant by the name of “security and safety”. Well that was her title, instead of a real name. Lovely, I thought. It doesn’t stop. Security and safety brainwashing permeate every fiber 24/7 of our lives.
Security and safety über alles! – Heil to the neocons, heil to the neonazis that have taken over the reins of our every-day life. And I’m not talking about the political parties of the extreme ‘right’ in France or Germany, they are just puppets for the invisible elite, for those ‘deepstaters’ that pull the strings behind the Trumps, Macrons, Merkels and Mays of this world. – Of course, it’s all for your security, my security, at best, for national security – not theirs, the ones who impose these nonsensical rules, rules that serve strictly for no other purpose than to oppress the common citizen, to brainwash the populace into believing that they are under a constant threat of attack.
---
Back to the airport. At the hand baggage x-ray control, where everybody has to put their cosmetics in a transparent plastic bag, pull out their laptops, tablets and cameras, and are being told what items are not allowed on board, ridiculous stuff, absolutely hilariously ridiculous – if it wasn’t that serious – and all for your own safety, naturally – I was being pushed aside for a service man who delivered a case of bananas to the restaurant in the waiting hall. His bananas had to be cleared by the x-ray machine. Imagine! – They could be objects of terror, maybe even weapons of mass destruction – WMDs.
The real WMDs that kill millions on an every-day basis, in Yemen, in Syria, in Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan – and the list goes on – nobody talks about. They have become common staple of our “secure” and “safe” world. The UN during the ongoing Annual Meeting in New York, declared Yemen a country governed by terror – yes, the Yemenis, who are starved to death like no other nation in recent history, with – also according to the same UN – 5 million children at high risk of death by famine. Not the Saudis, or the United States of America, or the UK, the French, the Spaniards, who feed the Saudis with war planes and bombs, with real weapons of mass destructions – are the terror nations. No, its Yemen. What world have we ended up with?
We are governed by a bunch of criminals and crooks, who benefit from our ignorance and mentally challenged brains. In the submissive west, the utterly brainwashed and by now almost brainless populace is reminded that we are screened for security purposes, for our own security. Every time the screws of security are tightened a little more, the arms are twisted a bit further, just a tiny bit – never forget, its only for our security and safety. By the time, my dear fellow citizens, we realize that our arms are broken and our skulls and brains smashed beyond repair, it’s too late.
As we are reminded by our masters that keep us secure and safe, we are also reminded that we are living in the only democracy that exists on the planet, namely western style democracy. Never mind, this democracy is often, most often in fact, imposed to the rest of the world by sledgehammer, or even by WMDs. We, of course, don’t know that; we are made believe, that all those countries that are being ‘regime-changed’, or destroyed for the sake of democracy are being destroyed for the betterment of their citizens living conditions. That’s what we are made believe. There is no other set of nations – with a thousand years of horrific history of exploitation, killing, raping, looting, lying – than the west. And the west, to this day, continues lying and manipulating peoples’ minds in a more sophisticated way than even Goebbels could have dreamed of.
Can you imagine – the “Peru Six”, the neocons – very close to neonazis – of the Americas – (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, Perú and Canada), of course all in the pockets of Washington – have had the unbelievable audacity to file a lawsuit at the International Court of Justice of The Hague against Venezuela for torturing and oppressing her people to the point that 2 million had to leave the country. This is such a flagrant multiple lie – it is actually a crime against humanity, against the only – yes, the very only real democracy left in the west, Venezuela – to make one’s stomach churn.
The maximum 500,000 to 700,000 Venezuelans, who, according to UNHCR and the International Organization of Migration, have migrated to neighboring countries, because of the foreign imposed - yes totally foreign imposed, by sanctions of the US and the EU – plus shamefully neutral Switzerland – horrendous economic conditions of the country. The Maduro Government is struggling to reverse that situation by de-linking Venezuela’s economy from the dollar economy, by creating new alliances with the east, in particular China and Russia. And as there are signs that the wheel may be turning favorably for Venezuela, some of the migrants are already returning.
But can you imagine what these six Latin American Washington bootlickers do to the reputation of Venezuela? And they may actually be welcome in The Hague, especially after John Bolton, Trump’s neocon “Security Adviser” – again Heil-Heil Security! – has warned the judges of this once-upon-a-time noble-intentioned international court, to beware and behave, and never pursue (war) crimes committed by the United States and Israel, meaning in clear text – obey and do what is in the interest of the exceptional nation(s), or else. So, the ICJ may actually be compelled to consider the malicious and totally fake and deceitful complaint of the Peru Six seriously.
And all that under the name of democracy.
Wake up, dear co-citizens! – Its high time. We are living in an abject Security Dictatorship, called Democracy. It imposes an ever-increasing militarization, becomes an ever more brutal police state – or better, an association of brutal police states, to be sure, that if and when you wake up, your awakening will be smashed with visceral power of a legalized, totally legitimate Security Dictatorship. If we don’t act now – and acting starts at these dreadful, humiliating and harassing security stupidities we accept everyday at airports around the world – we will be fried for good. Stand up folks! Stand up for your rights and against the day-in-day-out brainwashing of keeping you secure. Let’s take back our security sovereignty – we and only we, as citizens, colleagues and comrades, are responsible for our own security. Let not security and safety be imposed by criminal, warmongering, children-killing Security Democracies – namely our western governments.
SC174-7
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50345.htm
Trump Addresses UN – The World Laughs
For years, US presidents have regaled the UN General Assembly with rosy and ridiculous rhetoric about America allegedly doing great things for world peace.
Notwithstanding such criminal barbarities as the US genocidal wars in Vietnam, Iraq and elsewhere, the UN has tended to be a silent forum while American leaders indulged in fantasies about their nation’s “virtuous greatness”. That silence was either from fear or bamboozlement by American phony rhetoric.
This year, however, the assembly burst out in laughter at President Trump’s vain claims of greatness. It’s about time too. American claims have always been wildly overblown. This year’s disbelieving reaction among delegates was not only appropriate. It also shows that the world openly views US claims as ridiculously disconnected from reality.
The rampant contradictions articulated by President Trump in his address to the 73rd United Nations General Assembly are too many to condense here.
He called for the world to “choose peace and freedom over domination” – that from a leader of a nation that has waged scores of wars in flagrant violation of international law during the seven decades since the UN was established following the Second World War.
Trump claimed the US has defeated terrorists in Syria and Iraq, when in reality American illegal wars, covert and overt, have unleashed these same terrorist as proxies for its regime-change machinations.
There were so many other absurd contradictions in American self-righteousness as enunciated by Trump. But perhaps the most glaring was this: Trump was calling on the nations of the world to join in America’s campaign of aggression against Iran over the latter’s alleged “sponsorship of terrorism” – when it is the US that is the biggest sponsor of terrorism.
Trump’s unilateral abrogation of the international nuclear accord with Iran earlier this year is a brazen violation of international law. Yet, this American president demands that all nations indulge his government’s transgression against an international treaty to satisfy Washington’s obsession for regime change in Tehran.
American conduct of illegal wars and regime change in the Middle East and beyond has undermined international law and gravely incited tensions.
The spectacle of President Trump bullying the world to comply with US rogue-state behavior with regard to Iran is a contradiction too far – and no wonder the world is confounded by Washington’s absurd arrogance.
How can anyone have the slightest respect for American self-proclaimed leadership when it is in fact a rogue state that has no respect for international law and rules?
That has always been the case, despite florid, vainglorious rhetoric about American probity. But under Trump the contradiction between rhetoric and reality of American munificence and misconduct has become too stark to ignore. The only appropriate response is to laugh.
Trump extols the principle of “sovereignty” of nations. Yet, in his threats delivered at the UN this week, Trump has no respect for sovereignty of nations that do not kowtow to Washington’s diktat.
This American president has open contempt for multilateral accords, the Iran deal in particular. It is the US which has shown bad faith and criminal disregard towards the 2015 nuclear accord ratified by the UN. This violation of the accord is leading to tensions and instability in the Middle East, as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov pointed out to the UN Security Council this week.
Still, Trump tries to make a virtue of this American vice, and what’s more, to lay down ultimatums to the rest of the world to acquiesce to American bullying, or else face retribution with punitive sanctions.
The American leader is a leader in the most nefarious sense. Leading the world into lawlessness and certain conflict that accompanies such lawlessness.
Trump’s platitudes about “sovereignty” are nothing other than a license for American rogue-state conduct unfettered by international law and global accountability. In reality, American power is degenerating into an embrace of the kind of fascistic licentiousness that prevailed in the 1930s which led to world war.
It surely is a sign of the times when an American president stands up in front of the world and gratuitously exults in his nation’s contempt for global law, order and peace. All delivered with smug self-righteousness. No wonder the world is laughing. The disconnect from reality is too much to bear.
But it is no laughing matter. America is accusing everyone of malfeasance – Russia and China in particular – when the barefaced reality is that Washington is the scourge of world peace. America’s trashing of international order is only matched by its trashing of reason and any possible dialogue to uphold international order.
America claims to have led the establishment of the United Nations out of ashes of the Second World War in 1945. That war and its fascist protagonists were the outgrowth of a failing capitalist system. The system is failing again and producing the same conditions for nation-state-led rivalry and war.
History seems to be coming back to that same point. Trump’s ridiculous and reckless ultimatums delivered to the world this week at the UN shows how the causes of war have never been solved. American rhetoric is breaking down from its preposterous pretense of being a law-abiding “leader of the free world” to reveal, ominously, the same fascistic tendency for war.
We may indeed chuckle at Trump’s clownish claims. But the deadly serious issue is how to prevent this rogue state from inciting another world war.
As the great German playwright Bertolt Brecht once wrote: “War is a bastard, but the bitch that bore him is on heat again.”
America’s complete disregard for international order and compliance, as expressed by President Trump this week at the UN, is the evidence of war on the horizon once again due to capitalist chaos in the world order. US failure as the world’s foremost capitalist power is manifest in Trump’s bullying and boorish exultation of lawlessness.
On one hand, the breakdown is hilarious, absurd, risible. On the other hand, it is gravely alarming.
Trump Addresses UN – The World Laughs
For years, US presidents have regaled the UN General Assembly with rosy and ridiculous rhetoric about America allegedly doing great things for world peace.
Notwithstanding such criminal barbarities as the US genocidal wars in Vietnam, Iraq and elsewhere, the UN has tended to be a silent forum while American leaders indulged in fantasies about their nation’s “virtuous greatness”. That silence was either from fear or bamboozlement by American phony rhetoric.
This year, however, the assembly burst out in laughter at President Trump’s vain claims of greatness. It’s about time too. American claims have always been wildly overblown. This year’s disbelieving reaction among delegates was not only appropriate. It also shows that the world openly views US claims as ridiculously disconnected from reality.
The rampant contradictions articulated by President Trump in his address to the 73rd United Nations General Assembly are too many to condense here.
He called for the world to “choose peace and freedom over domination” – that from a leader of a nation that has waged scores of wars in flagrant violation of international law during the seven decades since the UN was established following the Second World War.
Trump claimed the US has defeated terrorists in Syria and Iraq, when in reality American illegal wars, covert and overt, have unleashed these same terrorist as proxies for its regime-change machinations.
There were so many other absurd contradictions in American self-righteousness as enunciated by Trump. But perhaps the most glaring was this: Trump was calling on the nations of the world to join in America’s campaign of aggression against Iran over the latter’s alleged “sponsorship of terrorism” – when it is the US that is the biggest sponsor of terrorism.
Trump’s unilateral abrogation of the international nuclear accord with Iran earlier this year is a brazen violation of international law. Yet, this American president demands that all nations indulge his government’s transgression against an international treaty to satisfy Washington’s obsession for regime change in Tehran.
American conduct of illegal wars and regime change in the Middle East and beyond has undermined international law and gravely incited tensions.
The spectacle of President Trump bullying the world to comply with US rogue-state behavior with regard to Iran is a contradiction too far – and no wonder the world is confounded by Washington’s absurd arrogance.
How can anyone have the slightest respect for American self-proclaimed leadership when it is in fact a rogue state that has no respect for international law and rules?
That has always been the case, despite florid, vainglorious rhetoric about American probity. But under Trump the contradiction between rhetoric and reality of American munificence and misconduct has become too stark to ignore. The only appropriate response is to laugh.
Trump extols the principle of “sovereignty” of nations. Yet, in his threats delivered at the UN this week, Trump has no respect for sovereignty of nations that do not kowtow to Washington’s diktat.
This American president has open contempt for multilateral accords, the Iran deal in particular. It is the US which has shown bad faith and criminal disregard towards the 2015 nuclear accord ratified by the UN. This violation of the accord is leading to tensions and instability in the Middle East, as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov pointed out to the UN Security Council this week.
Still, Trump tries to make a virtue of this American vice, and what’s more, to lay down ultimatums to the rest of the world to acquiesce to American bullying, or else face retribution with punitive sanctions.
The American leader is a leader in the most nefarious sense. Leading the world into lawlessness and certain conflict that accompanies such lawlessness.
Trump’s platitudes about “sovereignty” are nothing other than a license for American rogue-state conduct unfettered by international law and global accountability. In reality, American power is degenerating into an embrace of the kind of fascistic licentiousness that prevailed in the 1930s which led to world war.
It surely is a sign of the times when an American president stands up in front of the world and gratuitously exults in his nation’s contempt for global law, order and peace. All delivered with smug self-righteousness. No wonder the world is laughing. The disconnect from reality is too much to bear.
But it is no laughing matter. America is accusing everyone of malfeasance – Russia and China in particular – when the barefaced reality is that Washington is the scourge of world peace. America’s trashing of international order is only matched by its trashing of reason and any possible dialogue to uphold international order.
America claims to have led the establishment of the United Nations out of ashes of the Second World War in 1945. That war and its fascist protagonists were the outgrowth of a failing capitalist system. The system is failing again and producing the same conditions for nation-state-led rivalry and war.
History seems to be coming back to that same point. Trump’s ridiculous and reckless ultimatums delivered to the world this week at the UN shows how the causes of war have never been solved. American rhetoric is breaking down from its preposterous pretense of being a law-abiding “leader of the free world” to reveal, ominously, the same fascistic tendency for war.
We may indeed chuckle at Trump’s clownish claims. But the deadly serious issue is how to prevent this rogue state from inciting another world war.
As the great German playwright Bertolt Brecht once wrote: “War is a bastard, but the bitch that bore him is on heat again.”
America’s complete disregard for international order and compliance, as expressed by President Trump this week at the UN, is the evidence of war on the horizon once again due to capitalist chaos in the world order. US failure as the world’s foremost capitalist power is manifest in Trump’s bullying and boorish exultation of lawlessness.
On one hand, the breakdown is hilarious, absurd, risible. On the other hand, it is gravely alarming.
SC174-6
https://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html
How Do We Change Our Lives in a System That's Broken?
Everyone wants to change their lives for the better (or preserve what's positive), and this is relatively straightforward in a healthy system with positive incentives and a transparent, productive set of rules and feedbacks.
But what if the system is broken? How do we change our lives for the better in a dysfunctional system of unearned privilege and perverse incentives? Needless to say, it's difficult, and this is why we see a rise in inward-directed solutions.
If we can't change the external world we inhabit, then the "solution" is to nurture an inner tranquility. It's no wonder that Taoism--perhaps the ultimate inner-directed philosophy--arose during the Warring States era in China, when social unrest and conflict were endemic.
But what about real-world changes such as improving our health, fitness, resilience, work/career satisfaction, income security and psychological well-being? When it comes to affecting real-world changes in a broken system, it often feels like we're swimming against the tide: the system doesn't make positive improvements easy, despite an abundance of lip service to individual goals such as losing weight, improving our career options, etc.
There are number of reasons for this; here are a few:
1. The economy, society and systems of governance are all changing in fundamental ways. I've written a lot about these forces-- AI, robotics, globalization, financialization, the concentration of wealth and power at the top, etc. --and how we can respond positively, particularly in my books A Radically Beneficial World and Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.
The point here is that even if our system was fair and functional, the structural dynamics are generating uncertainty, instability and a diminishing number of winners and an expanding multitude of losers.
2. But we don't inhabit a fair and functional system; the status quo is dysfunctional, dominated by self-serving insiders, the Protected Class and various elites. Actual inflation (loss of purchasing power) is under-reported, and other metrics are gamed or distorted to improve the optics--that is, the perception.
Markets have been grossly distorted to reward the already-wealthy; stocks and housing are been transformed into signals of economic strength when in reality they are signals of excess and asset bubbles that increase wealth and income inequality.
3. Maximizing profit and convenience via marketing is the core of our economy now. Unfortunately, what's highly profitable and heavily marketed is often unhealthy or deleterious to our physical, mental and financial health: fast food, packaged food, social media, high-cost, low-utility higher education, medications with serious side-effects, and so on.
Accomplishing changes often requires declaring war on convenience, as convenience is the enemy of everything required to swim against the tide: discipline, sustained effort, sacrifice, etc.
So how can individuals and households manage positive changes in a destructive, perverse and broken system?
One place to start is to eliminate as much marketing as possible, and as many negative, deranging distractions as possible. This means limiting media and social media exposure to a bare minimum.
Another is to focus on value rather than convenience. This goes against the tide not just of marketing but of "progress," which is implicitly defined as an increase in convenience and a decline in drudgery, effort and discipline.
Ironically, most of life's most rewarding things are not convenient at all: fitness, real food prepared at home, acquiring skills with steep learning curves, etc. These are all terribly, horribly, irrevocably inconvenient.
Third, look outside the mainstream and status quo "solutions." Solutions outside the mainstream status quo tend to be inconvenient, wrenching and difficult, and there is very little institutional support for anything outside the mainstream. Rather, the entire weight and force of the status quo is put to bear in support of passive compliance with the approved "solutions."
For example, the approved "solution" to ill health is surgery or costly medications that haven't even been tested for interactions with other powerful medications.
The "solution" to the high cost of housing in desirable cities is to surrender the household income for the next 30 years and buy a decaying bungalow for $800,000 or more (or $1.8 million in bubble-mania neighborhoods).
These are simulacrum solutions; they only worsen the initial problem, not solve it.
As Bucky Fuller noted in his famous dictum, "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
This is as true of our individual lives as it is of systems. Rather than fight a system designed to thwart us, we need a model for our own lives that bypasses the perverse tides and obsoletes the impediments in our path.
How Do We Change Our Lives in a System That's Broken?
Everyone wants to change their lives for the better (or preserve what's positive), and this is relatively straightforward in a healthy system with positive incentives and a transparent, productive set of rules and feedbacks.
But what if the system is broken? How do we change our lives for the better in a dysfunctional system of unearned privilege and perverse incentives? Needless to say, it's difficult, and this is why we see a rise in inward-directed solutions.
If we can't change the external world we inhabit, then the "solution" is to nurture an inner tranquility. It's no wonder that Taoism--perhaps the ultimate inner-directed philosophy--arose during the Warring States era in China, when social unrest and conflict were endemic.
But what about real-world changes such as improving our health, fitness, resilience, work/career satisfaction, income security and psychological well-being? When it comes to affecting real-world changes in a broken system, it often feels like we're swimming against the tide: the system doesn't make positive improvements easy, despite an abundance of lip service to individual goals such as losing weight, improving our career options, etc.
There are number of reasons for this; here are a few:
1. The economy, society and systems of governance are all changing in fundamental ways. I've written a lot about these forces-- AI, robotics, globalization, financialization, the concentration of wealth and power at the top, etc. --and how we can respond positively, particularly in my books A Radically Beneficial World and Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.
The point here is that even if our system was fair and functional, the structural dynamics are generating uncertainty, instability and a diminishing number of winners and an expanding multitude of losers.
2. But we don't inhabit a fair and functional system; the status quo is dysfunctional, dominated by self-serving insiders, the Protected Class and various elites. Actual inflation (loss of purchasing power) is under-reported, and other metrics are gamed or distorted to improve the optics--that is, the perception.
Markets have been grossly distorted to reward the already-wealthy; stocks and housing are been transformed into signals of economic strength when in reality they are signals of excess and asset bubbles that increase wealth and income inequality.
3. Maximizing profit and convenience via marketing is the core of our economy now. Unfortunately, what's highly profitable and heavily marketed is often unhealthy or deleterious to our physical, mental and financial health: fast food, packaged food, social media, high-cost, low-utility higher education, medications with serious side-effects, and so on.
Accomplishing changes often requires declaring war on convenience, as convenience is the enemy of everything required to swim against the tide: discipline, sustained effort, sacrifice, etc.
So how can individuals and households manage positive changes in a destructive, perverse and broken system?
One place to start is to eliminate as much marketing as possible, and as many negative, deranging distractions as possible. This means limiting media and social media exposure to a bare minimum.
Another is to focus on value rather than convenience. This goes against the tide not just of marketing but of "progress," which is implicitly defined as an increase in convenience and a decline in drudgery, effort and discipline.
Ironically, most of life's most rewarding things are not convenient at all: fitness, real food prepared at home, acquiring skills with steep learning curves, etc. These are all terribly, horribly, irrevocably inconvenient.
Third, look outside the mainstream and status quo "solutions." Solutions outside the mainstream status quo tend to be inconvenient, wrenching and difficult, and there is very little institutional support for anything outside the mainstream. Rather, the entire weight and force of the status quo is put to bear in support of passive compliance with the approved "solutions."
For example, the approved "solution" to ill health is surgery or costly medications that haven't even been tested for interactions with other powerful medications.
The "solution" to the high cost of housing in desirable cities is to surrender the household income for the next 30 years and buy a decaying bungalow for $800,000 or more (or $1.8 million in bubble-mania neighborhoods).
These are simulacrum solutions; they only worsen the initial problem, not solve it.
As Bucky Fuller noted in his famous dictum, "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
This is as true of our individual lives as it is of systems. Rather than fight a system designed to thwart us, we need a model for our own lives that bypasses the perverse tides and obsoletes the impediments in our path.
Friday, September 28, 2018
SC174-5
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2018/09/29/the-enemy-of-humanity-will-never-ever-look-like-this-again/
The Enemy Of Humanity Will Never, Ever Look Like This Again
There will never, ever be another Adolf Hitler.
History doesn’t repeat itself. Human behavior patterns repeat themselves, because humans are deeply conditioned animals, but history doesn’t repeat itself. Anyone who says it does is confused about how time works.
Consumers of mainstream culture have been trained to watch out for the next Hitler the way evangelical Christians are trained to watch for the second coming of Jesus. References to Hitler are ubiquitous in movies, television, literature, and of course in political discourse, and understandably so; he is the clearest, purest example of evil in living memory. A genocidal dictator leading humanity into world war with the explicit agenda of totalitarian global domination is indeed as stark an example of an evil human being as you could possibly imagine, and serves as a philosophically unassailable “NOT THIS WAY” sign for our species. The saturation of our culture with that sign is why Godwin’s law (“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1”) is a thing; any time you want to tell a stranger that their ideas could lead in an undesirable direction, it becomes increasingly tempting to throw up the “NOT THIS WAY” symbol that Adolf Hitler has come to represent.
But history doesn’t repeat itself. No one will ever show up acting like the thing we’ve all been taught all our lives to never, ever act like and saying the things we’ve all been taught to never, ever say and be elevated by the masses the way Hitler was. It will not happen. The next enemy of humanity would have the good sense to present as completely different from the way Adolf Hitler presented in order to seize power, and, since we’ve all been trained to bristle at anything resembling him, would actually do well to present as his diametric opposite.
If you are watching out for the next powerful enemy of humanity who presents the way Adolf Hitler presented, you will be waiting the rest of your life. And you will have missed the fact that we already let the next enemy of humanity in through the front door.
Despite all the warnings that we were given in the lead-up to the 2016 election about the Nazi dystopian future America would quickly find itself in should Queen Hillary fail to be properly coronated, what we have actually seen since Trump’s election is a foreign policy that is in practice almost indistinguishable from that of his globalist predecessors, and a domestic policy which sees George W Bush campaigning for Trump’s virulently pro-establishment Supreme Court nominee. When you strip away the blind, fawning hero worship of his supporters and the shrieking, garment-rending hysteria of his opponents, instead examining the actual behavior of this administration, the sitting president looks an awful lot like a fairly conventional Republican scumbag with about as many differences from Obama as Obama had from Bush.
And, to be clear, that is a bad thing. Both Trump supporters and Trump haters get upset whenever I say that this president is not significantly different from his predecessors in any meaningful way outside of rhetoric and narrative, Trump supporters because they believe he is a populist hero and Democrats because I’m disputing the narrative that he’s Literally Hitler. But I don’t say this because I like upsetting everyone, I say it because it’s extremely important to be absolutely clear about what is happening here if we ever want to turn things around for the fate of our species. Trump’s election did not represent the arrival of a new Hitler-like monster, the monster was already here. The call is coming from inside the house.
Trump, like all US presidents, is entirely beholden to an alliance of plutocrats and secretive government agencies which comprises the “steady state” and ensures the continuation of policies and agendas throughout the coming and going of America’s official elected government. This alliance spans far outside America’s borders to any government, agency, oligarch or faction it can absorb into its blob, and the agendas and policies it protects and advances are not geared toward the interests of any nation or its people. It is an alliance of the powerful geared exclusively toward amassing more power for the powerful.
While so-called antifascists run around punching impotent racists to prevent the rise of fascism, this extremely powerful alliance of plutocrats and secretive government agencies is advancing totalitarian oppression and global domination on a scale Mussolini only dreamed of. While Democrats scream “Orange Hitler” at the top of their lungs at a passing deep state lackey, Hitler’s sitting in the driver’s seat dressed in drag.
The monster who looks like a monster is always far less dangerous than the monster who looks like a nice guy. If this isn’t obvious to you then you simply haven’t lived enough. There is an ecocidal, omnicidal Orwellian power establishment which is driving our species toward extinction via climate chaos or nuclear holocaust, which will lock us down into a pasteurized, homogenized mind control dystopia of servitude even if we manage to survive those threats. While everyone’s flailing their weapons around attacking anything that looks like it might maybe be the next Hitler, these bastards are tightening the noose further and further every day. Wake up.
The Enemy Of Humanity Will Never, Ever Look Like This Again
There will never, ever be another Adolf Hitler.
History doesn’t repeat itself. Human behavior patterns repeat themselves, because humans are deeply conditioned animals, but history doesn’t repeat itself. Anyone who says it does is confused about how time works.
Consumers of mainstream culture have been trained to watch out for the next Hitler the way evangelical Christians are trained to watch for the second coming of Jesus. References to Hitler are ubiquitous in movies, television, literature, and of course in political discourse, and understandably so; he is the clearest, purest example of evil in living memory. A genocidal dictator leading humanity into world war with the explicit agenda of totalitarian global domination is indeed as stark an example of an evil human being as you could possibly imagine, and serves as a philosophically unassailable “NOT THIS WAY” sign for our species. The saturation of our culture with that sign is why Godwin’s law (“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1”) is a thing; any time you want to tell a stranger that their ideas could lead in an undesirable direction, it becomes increasingly tempting to throw up the “NOT THIS WAY” symbol that Adolf Hitler has come to represent.
But history doesn’t repeat itself. No one will ever show up acting like the thing we’ve all been taught all our lives to never, ever act like and saying the things we’ve all been taught to never, ever say and be elevated by the masses the way Hitler was. It will not happen. The next enemy of humanity would have the good sense to present as completely different from the way Adolf Hitler presented in order to seize power, and, since we’ve all been trained to bristle at anything resembling him, would actually do well to present as his diametric opposite.
If you are watching out for the next powerful enemy of humanity who presents the way Adolf Hitler presented, you will be waiting the rest of your life. And you will have missed the fact that we already let the next enemy of humanity in through the front door.
Despite all the warnings that we were given in the lead-up to the 2016 election about the Nazi dystopian future America would quickly find itself in should Queen Hillary fail to be properly coronated, what we have actually seen since Trump’s election is a foreign policy that is in practice almost indistinguishable from that of his globalist predecessors, and a domestic policy which sees George W Bush campaigning for Trump’s virulently pro-establishment Supreme Court nominee. When you strip away the blind, fawning hero worship of his supporters and the shrieking, garment-rending hysteria of his opponents, instead examining the actual behavior of this administration, the sitting president looks an awful lot like a fairly conventional Republican scumbag with about as many differences from Obama as Obama had from Bush.
And, to be clear, that is a bad thing. Both Trump supporters and Trump haters get upset whenever I say that this president is not significantly different from his predecessors in any meaningful way outside of rhetoric and narrative, Trump supporters because they believe he is a populist hero and Democrats because I’m disputing the narrative that he’s Literally Hitler. But I don’t say this because I like upsetting everyone, I say it because it’s extremely important to be absolutely clear about what is happening here if we ever want to turn things around for the fate of our species. Trump’s election did not represent the arrival of a new Hitler-like monster, the monster was already here. The call is coming from inside the house.
Trump, like all US presidents, is entirely beholden to an alliance of plutocrats and secretive government agencies which comprises the “steady state” and ensures the continuation of policies and agendas throughout the coming and going of America’s official elected government. This alliance spans far outside America’s borders to any government, agency, oligarch or faction it can absorb into its blob, and the agendas and policies it protects and advances are not geared toward the interests of any nation or its people. It is an alliance of the powerful geared exclusively toward amassing more power for the powerful.
While so-called antifascists run around punching impotent racists to prevent the rise of fascism, this extremely powerful alliance of plutocrats and secretive government agencies is advancing totalitarian oppression and global domination on a scale Mussolini only dreamed of. While Democrats scream “Orange Hitler” at the top of their lungs at a passing deep state lackey, Hitler’s sitting in the driver’s seat dressed in drag.
The monster who looks like a monster is always far less dangerous than the monster who looks like a nice guy. If this isn’t obvious to you then you simply haven’t lived enough. There is an ecocidal, omnicidal Orwellian power establishment which is driving our species toward extinction via climate chaos or nuclear holocaust, which will lock us down into a pasteurized, homogenized mind control dystopia of servitude even if we manage to survive those threats. While everyone’s flailing their weapons around attacking anything that looks like it might maybe be the next Hitler, these bastards are tightening the noose further and further every day. Wake up.
SC174-4
https://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html
Fixing Infrastructure Isn't as Simple as Spending Another Trillion Dollars
If there's one thing Americans can still agree on, it's that America needs to spend more on infrastructure which is visibly falling apart in many places. This capital investment creates jobs and satisfies everyone's ideological requirements: investment in public infrastructure helps enterprises, local governments and residents.
Unfortunately, it isn't a simple as spending another trillion dollars. Spending money is the easy part; actually fixing what's broken isn't just a matter of spending more money.
The poster child for spending trillions on infrastructure and getting very little value is Japan, which has funneled much of its fiscal stimulus over the past 30 years into vast and largely needless infrastructure projects: bridges and roadways that are lightly used being just one example.
The reason for the this low-value-creation policy is the political power of the construction industry and the convoluted political structure which gives rural areas inordinate political power over public spending. As a result, enormously expensive and utterly needless highways and bridges litter lightly populated rural communities which have become dependent on construction jobs for what little remains of the local economy.
In other words, what's broken in Japan remains broken. Spending more on infrastructure hasn't fixed what's dragging the nation into permanent stagnation.
If you live in any of America's major urban centers (or happen to visit), you know that traffic congestion is now off the scale. From Portland to Las Vegas to Atlanta, traffic jams and crushing commutes are now the norm.
Soaring housing costs have pushed workers farther into the exurbs, lengthening commutes and choking highways constructed for a much smaller populace. The population of the U.S. is now a third of a billion people, and the vast majority of the nation's infrastructure was designed for a much smaller populace, a significant percentage of whom were expected to reside in rural counties.
Globalization has depopulated much of rural America: as the rural economy withered, people moved to urban / suburban centers, adding to the millions of new immigrant residents who typically live and work in urban cores.
If you look at charts of infrastructure needs and spending, you get a mixed bag. The heavily publicized chart of underfunded infrastructure based on data from civil engineers (hmm, no self-interest here?) suggests the U.S. has been under-investing, yet other charts show a rather steady level of spending over the decades (as a percentage of GDP) -- see charts below.
While many claim public infrastructure spending has declined sharply, this chart reflects remarkably stable spending.
And let's not forget that state and local government spending has soared far above GDP growth: local governments are spending huge sums on something, and if it isn't infrastructure, then maybe budget priorities need to be revisited.
The problem few are willing to discuss is the impossibility of changing the big picture of congestion. While bulldozing swaths of cities to lay down a new 6-lane freeway was the go-to "solution" to congestion in the 1960s, that has fallen out of favor for a variety of reasons, including the destruction of urban neighborhoods, the inordinately high costs, the legal challenges and the terribly inconvenient reality that the new freeway quickly filled with vehicles, leaving older roadways just as choked.
"Solutions" such as new underground roadways and new subway lines end up costing tens of billions of dollars and take decades to build. It took 24 years after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake to complete a new bridge span across part of the San Francisco Bay. Nobody dares speak about it, but a very good argument can be made that America has forgotten how to build large-scale projects in a timely manner, on budget and with a level of quality that doesn't demand immediate repairs.
The congestion isn't just on freeways and highways. Local streets are taking a pounding as everyone seeks alternative routes, and subway systems are overloaded. The S.F. Bay Area's BART regional (heavy-rail) transit system is spending billions of dollars repairing aging tracks and other infrastructure, and buying new cars with more room for standing commuters, reflecting the reality that riding BART is now a cattle-car experience of jostling through crowds most hours of the day and evening.
It isn't easy to add new subway lines or new highways, and so "solutions" don't really exist. This isn't what people want to hear, but when you add millions of residents and vehicles to urban areas, you get congestion that can't be solved by adding a another lane or another subway line in a decade or two.
Meanwhile, in rural America, roads are crumbling, but does it make sense to repave lightly used roads at enormous expense?
These are the discussions we need to have, but instead we're opting for the magical-thinking and oh-so-easy "fix" of everything will be fine if we just spend another trillion or two.
Fixing Infrastructure Isn't as Simple as Spending Another Trillion Dollars
If there's one thing Americans can still agree on, it's that America needs to spend more on infrastructure which is visibly falling apart in many places. This capital investment creates jobs and satisfies everyone's ideological requirements: investment in public infrastructure helps enterprises, local governments and residents.
Unfortunately, it isn't a simple as spending another trillion dollars. Spending money is the easy part; actually fixing what's broken isn't just a matter of spending more money.
The poster child for spending trillions on infrastructure and getting very little value is Japan, which has funneled much of its fiscal stimulus over the past 30 years into vast and largely needless infrastructure projects: bridges and roadways that are lightly used being just one example.
The reason for the this low-value-creation policy is the political power of the construction industry and the convoluted political structure which gives rural areas inordinate political power over public spending. As a result, enormously expensive and utterly needless highways and bridges litter lightly populated rural communities which have become dependent on construction jobs for what little remains of the local economy.
In other words, what's broken in Japan remains broken. Spending more on infrastructure hasn't fixed what's dragging the nation into permanent stagnation.
If you live in any of America's major urban centers (or happen to visit), you know that traffic congestion is now off the scale. From Portland to Las Vegas to Atlanta, traffic jams and crushing commutes are now the norm.
Soaring housing costs have pushed workers farther into the exurbs, lengthening commutes and choking highways constructed for a much smaller populace. The population of the U.S. is now a third of a billion people, and the vast majority of the nation's infrastructure was designed for a much smaller populace, a significant percentage of whom were expected to reside in rural counties.
Globalization has depopulated much of rural America: as the rural economy withered, people moved to urban / suburban centers, adding to the millions of new immigrant residents who typically live and work in urban cores.
If you look at charts of infrastructure needs and spending, you get a mixed bag. The heavily publicized chart of underfunded infrastructure based on data from civil engineers (hmm, no self-interest here?) suggests the U.S. has been under-investing, yet other charts show a rather steady level of spending over the decades (as a percentage of GDP) -- see charts below.
While many claim public infrastructure spending has declined sharply, this chart reflects remarkably stable spending.
And let's not forget that state and local government spending has soared far above GDP growth: local governments are spending huge sums on something, and if it isn't infrastructure, then maybe budget priorities need to be revisited.
The problem few are willing to discuss is the impossibility of changing the big picture of congestion. While bulldozing swaths of cities to lay down a new 6-lane freeway was the go-to "solution" to congestion in the 1960s, that has fallen out of favor for a variety of reasons, including the destruction of urban neighborhoods, the inordinately high costs, the legal challenges and the terribly inconvenient reality that the new freeway quickly filled with vehicles, leaving older roadways just as choked.
"Solutions" such as new underground roadways and new subway lines end up costing tens of billions of dollars and take decades to build. It took 24 years after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake to complete a new bridge span across part of the San Francisco Bay. Nobody dares speak about it, but a very good argument can be made that America has forgotten how to build large-scale projects in a timely manner, on budget and with a level of quality that doesn't demand immediate repairs.
The congestion isn't just on freeways and highways. Local streets are taking a pounding as everyone seeks alternative routes, and subway systems are overloaded. The S.F. Bay Area's BART regional (heavy-rail) transit system is spending billions of dollars repairing aging tracks and other infrastructure, and buying new cars with more room for standing commuters, reflecting the reality that riding BART is now a cattle-car experience of jostling through crowds most hours of the day and evening.
It isn't easy to add new subway lines or new highways, and so "solutions" don't really exist. This isn't what people want to hear, but when you add millions of residents and vehicles to urban areas, you get congestion that can't be solved by adding a another lane or another subway line in a decade or two.
Meanwhile, in rural America, roads are crumbling, but does it make sense to repave lightly used roads at enormous expense?
These are the discussions we need to have, but instead we're opting for the magical-thinking and oh-so-easy "fix" of everything will be fine if we just spend another trillion or two.
SC174-3
https://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/114404/our-delusional-economy-poised-slam-brick-wall-reality
Our Delusional Economy Is Poised To Slam Into The Brick Wall Of Reality
Will you thrive, merely survive, or fail?
While life has always been uncertain, today our choices matter more than ever. The decisions each of us make today will determine if we thrive, merely survive, or fail during the future time of upheaval ahead.
The window of opportunity to change course for humanity is all but closed. There’s simpply no more time to hope that somehow, magically, the world's entire energy complex will suddently evolve to a bountiful and sustainable new plane -- whether by market forces, by maverick billionaires like Elon Musk, or by happy accident.
As we hammer home constantly here at Peak Prosperity, energy is everything. Without it, our society simply can't function.
And it's critical to appreciate that it takes an investment of energy to migrate from energy solution to another.
Imagine you heat your house with wood, but want to switch to a forced air gas furnace. Is there energy involved in doing so? You bet there is. Besides the obvious new need for natural gas, there’s a huge amount of embodied energy in the manufacture and installation of your new furnace, all the duct work, and the delivery lines that will bring the gas to the furnace. Further, there will be electricity required to force the air from the furnace, through the ducts, and into your house.
The same is true when making transitions at the national level. What’s involved in the much larger projects of switching industrial agriculture away from the fossil fuel driven process of plowing, planting, fertilizing, irrigating, harvesting, drying or cooling, and then transporting food from the field to your table?
At each stage there’s an enormous amount of energy infrastructure that needs to be rebuilt and reconfigured to run on “something else.” Let's examine the current dream that we'll switchover to powering all of our farming needs with electricity.
The manufacture of the tractors and their thousands of components all have to be completely reconfigured to run on electricity -- from the act of mining and smeliting the metals used all the way through assembly and delivery to the farmer. At present, oil and other fossil fuel inputs are pretty much 100% of that process. The same is true for all of the other equipment and tools currently used in farming.
Could we do all this using electicity instead? Yes, of course.
Will it happen all on its own while we wait for “market forces” to do the job? Nope. Not a chance.
Why? Because it's far cheaper, faster and easier to use fossil fuels. And humans are nothing if not lazy. Give us a cheaper and easier option and we’ll take it every single time. Which is no different really from a cheetah selecting a lame or slower gazelle over a faster and stronger one. It’s just how Nature works.
Waiting for “market forces” to magically replace an already-embedded, cheaper and easier energy source is hopeless. Absent a crisis that forces us to, as a society, we’d have to proactively decide to make that transition a top national priority and become deadly serious in our pursuit of it. And if we actually were to do this, it would certainly be a painful process for a good while.
Huge job losses and dislocations would result, as whole categories of jobs become irrelevant and vast swaths of the labor force go through re-skilling. Our economy's “growth forever” model would come tumbling down because it’s been heavily subsidized by cheap surplus fossil energy. That would no longer be the case. So stocks, bonds and real estate would tumble, ruining the retirement dreams for many.
It would prove difficult to run a top-notch military (which burns through oil and other critical resources like nobody’s business), feed everyone, travel as we do, and heat and cool everything. We’d probably have to make material sacrifices across each -- or give up one or more of them entirely.
The point here is that, in the ten years I have personally been banging on the drums of logic and reason, I can honestly say that virtually no progress has been made towards developing a credible action plan for weaning the global economy off of fossil fuel. Humanity seems fully committed to its current trajectory: the cheap and easy path. At least, until something forces our hand.
Which makes us no different from any other biological organism. No different than the simplest bacterium in a petrie dish that multiplies until it has consumed its food supply, then is suddenly faced with starvation.
The outcome of our current "cheap, fast and easy" trajectory is the same as a car hurtling towards a brick wall at a very high rate of speed. It will come to a predictable, sudden, and painful end:
One of the saddest elements of this story is that we've had many chances to reform ourselves along the way. Economically, we could have (and should have) used the crisis of 2008 to allow a bunch of literally useless financial firms bite the dust. But didn't; we saved them all. And now have a Too Big To Fail system that’s even "Too Bigger" than before [sic].
Or we could have starting planning for a move away from fossil fuels back in 1957 when Admiral Hyman Rickover noted:
The earth is finite. Fossil fuels are not renewable. In this respect our energy base differs from that of all earlier civilizations. They could have maintained their energy supply by careful cultivation. We cannot. Fuel that has been burned is gone forever. Fuel is even more evanescent than metals. Metals, too, are non-renewable resources threatened with ultimate extinction, but something can be salvaged from scrap. Fuel leaves no scrap and there is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves. They were created by solar energy 500 million years ago and took eons to grow to their present volume.
I suggest that this is a good time to think soberly about our responsibilities to our descendants - those who will ring out the Fossil Fuel Age. Our greatest responsibility, as parents and as citizens, is to give America 's youngsters the best possible education.
We might even - if we wanted - give a break to these youngsters by cutting fuel and metal consumption a little here and there so as to provide a safer margin for the necessary adjustments which eventually must be made in a world without fossil fuels.
One final thought I should like to leave with you. High-energy consumption has always been a prerequisite of political power. The tendency is for political power to be concentrated in an ever-smaller number of countries. Ultimately, the nation which control - the largest energy resources will become dominant. If we give thought to the problem of energy resources, if we act wisely and in time to conserve what we have and prepare well for necessary future changes, we shall insure this dominant position for our own country.
Such amazing and easily understood insights by one of the most intelligent accomplished people in US history. And that was just a very small set of snippets from a longer speech (you can read his full speech in PeakProsperity.com's Essential Articles section).
In thes few paragraphs above, Rickover lays out that:
The Earth is finite.
Fossil fuels are not renewable.
Burn them and they are gone.
A little self-sacrifice today would go a long way in the future.
Energy output creates political power.
Therefore conserving and controlling energy are determined by political will.
Most of the world is still behaving as if these simple points are too confusing to digest. As if there were some other, more hopeful, outcome to our reckless behavior of frittering away such a valuable and non-renewable resource on such blind pursuits as expanding the world’s population to some eventual maximum, destroying topsoil and ecosystems, and selling as many SUV’s and trucks as humanly possible in any given quarter.
There’s only one outcome for any organism that grows until it slams into the limit of its energy boundary: Collapse.
Is there any evidence were in danger running into that boundary soon? Absolutely.
Important warning signs we'd expect to see in the oil space would be declining discoveries and increasingly desperate attempts to scrape the bottom of the barrel.
Both signs are upon us with vigor these days.
First, we see that oil discoveries are at their worst over the entire data series stretching back to the early 1950’s:
The white dotted line in the above chart indicates that, four years excepted, the level of discoveries has been well below consumption since 1980. And the yearly gap has been growing over that timeframe.
Consuming more of a non-renewable resource than you're finding? It doesn’t take a geologist or a math whiz to work out the implications of that story.
Next, for warning sign #2, take a look at these photos I shot on a recent trip as my plane was landing in Dallas:
Each one of those little white squares is a one to two-acre drill/production pad. The earth is scraped away, the drill rig brought in, then the fracking and finishing trucks arrive – some 1,200 truck trips in all – just to poke a single hole that will (hopefully) produce a few hundred thousand barrels of oil.
Here’s a drill pad on close look as the plane was landing, showing also an associated waste pond where the fracking fluid that blows back up the drill hole is captured for later disposal. These ponds need to be big, because millions of gallons of wastewater is produced at first, often laced with highly toxic compounds.
The above are perfectly good warning signs that we’re out of the good options. The days of gigantic deposits of easily-extractable oil are gone. Now we’ve got this stuff. It's smaller, lower quality, and requires a *lot* more energy/effort to get out of the ground.
Of course, that's not stopping us from going after it. And I’m not (necessarily) against that, as long as we admit to ourselves how extremes these measures are, and what this means for our future.
Where the Romans had their omens and auguries, the rise of oil fracking is an important portent of what lies ahead for modern society. Art Berman refers to the current shale bonanza not as a "revolution", but as a "retirement party" -- and he’s right.
What happens after someone's retirement party? Life winds down. The energy of their youth is no longer with them. The same is coming true today for America.
Conclusion
Nothing grows forever. Cancer tries, but always defeats itself in the process. Yeast parties until all the sugar in the vat is gone or it pollutes itself out of an active existence.
Can humans do better? The jury is still out on that.
But so far, the signs say that, as a group, we lack the ability to organize effectively against big, complex challenges. Especially if doing so requires us to willingly choose to live a life of less. We're simply too addicted to more.
Admiral Rickover suggested that living within our means would be a smart and honorable thing to do for future generations. But his speech represents something of a high-water mark for conscientious thinking at the government official level.
Here’s the thing: Unless there’s a very sudden and rapid change in how we are approaching the looming brick wall of resource shortages, the future is going to be quite difficult.
Most people will be caught unprepared. As a result, many of them will suffer, and possibly fail completely to continue on.
A smaller few will survive, stoically soldiering on.
But an evern smaller percentage -- those who heeded the warning signs and prepared prudently in advance -- will be positioned to thrive through the coming adversity.
Where I have lost my faith in large groups of people, I have more faith than ever in those prospects for "awake" individuals and small groups. I'm inspired by the number of people I’ve met who are taking smart, regenerative, innovative steps to align their personal actions with the big picture realities discussed above.
To those already pursuing resilience: I know it’s not easy staying focused and on track. The Powers That Be have poured considerable resources and effort into painting the illusion that "All is well". They’ve poured $trillions into the stock and bond ""markets"", in part to send a false signal of comfort, so that people will not spook and instead continue to borrow and buy. They, along with the compliant corporate-controlled media, have committed vast sins of commission and omission in the narratives that they choose promote or suppress.
Bubbles are powerful social signaling devices. Staying out them and out of harm’s way is really difficult, especially as the party rages hardest right before its end. One of the responsibilities we at Peak Prosperity take most seriously is reminding you of the dangerous seduction of asset bubbles. Don't get taken in. Don't be the "greatest fool" who capitulates and jumps in right before the crash (remember: even Isaac Newton got suckered by the South Sea Bubble).
And in Part 2: What I Am Personally Doing To Prepare Right Now, I detail what I am doing in my life right now to make good decisions in difficult times. Many of you have been asking about which specific steps I'm prioritizing these days. Well, I'm answering.
Look, someday this ridiculous era of the Everything Bubble will be over. First, it’s going to get a little bumpy -- and then, really bumpy.
When that time comes, hope your the preparations you've made in advance will be enough to see you through, and hold fast. Then hang on for as long as you can.
....
Yeast in a finite system because of the inherent nature of their physical architecture and consequent behavior will keep consuming and multiplying until they run out of food and make their system to toxic for survival because of the waste they produce. Humans are doing this too because we are organisms with the same tendencies. And regarding trying to change the running of our complex societal systems to just electricity as the energy source, its impossible and will never happen. Collapse is inevitable, and climate change will be increasingly adding to the unfolding mayhem. Just look at what is going on right now all over the world, the signs are clear to see.
Our Delusional Economy Is Poised To Slam Into The Brick Wall Of Reality
Will you thrive, merely survive, or fail?
While life has always been uncertain, today our choices matter more than ever. The decisions each of us make today will determine if we thrive, merely survive, or fail during the future time of upheaval ahead.
The window of opportunity to change course for humanity is all but closed. There’s simpply no more time to hope that somehow, magically, the world's entire energy complex will suddently evolve to a bountiful and sustainable new plane -- whether by market forces, by maverick billionaires like Elon Musk, or by happy accident.
As we hammer home constantly here at Peak Prosperity, energy is everything. Without it, our society simply can't function.
And it's critical to appreciate that it takes an investment of energy to migrate from energy solution to another.
Imagine you heat your house with wood, but want to switch to a forced air gas furnace. Is there energy involved in doing so? You bet there is. Besides the obvious new need for natural gas, there’s a huge amount of embodied energy in the manufacture and installation of your new furnace, all the duct work, and the delivery lines that will bring the gas to the furnace. Further, there will be electricity required to force the air from the furnace, through the ducts, and into your house.
The same is true when making transitions at the national level. What’s involved in the much larger projects of switching industrial agriculture away from the fossil fuel driven process of plowing, planting, fertilizing, irrigating, harvesting, drying or cooling, and then transporting food from the field to your table?
At each stage there’s an enormous amount of energy infrastructure that needs to be rebuilt and reconfigured to run on “something else.” Let's examine the current dream that we'll switchover to powering all of our farming needs with electricity.
The manufacture of the tractors and their thousands of components all have to be completely reconfigured to run on electricity -- from the act of mining and smeliting the metals used all the way through assembly and delivery to the farmer. At present, oil and other fossil fuel inputs are pretty much 100% of that process. The same is true for all of the other equipment and tools currently used in farming.
Could we do all this using electicity instead? Yes, of course.
Will it happen all on its own while we wait for “market forces” to do the job? Nope. Not a chance.
Why? Because it's far cheaper, faster and easier to use fossil fuels. And humans are nothing if not lazy. Give us a cheaper and easier option and we’ll take it every single time. Which is no different really from a cheetah selecting a lame or slower gazelle over a faster and stronger one. It’s just how Nature works.
Waiting for “market forces” to magically replace an already-embedded, cheaper and easier energy source is hopeless. Absent a crisis that forces us to, as a society, we’d have to proactively decide to make that transition a top national priority and become deadly serious in our pursuit of it. And if we actually were to do this, it would certainly be a painful process for a good while.
Huge job losses and dislocations would result, as whole categories of jobs become irrelevant and vast swaths of the labor force go through re-skilling. Our economy's “growth forever” model would come tumbling down because it’s been heavily subsidized by cheap surplus fossil energy. That would no longer be the case. So stocks, bonds and real estate would tumble, ruining the retirement dreams for many.
It would prove difficult to run a top-notch military (which burns through oil and other critical resources like nobody’s business), feed everyone, travel as we do, and heat and cool everything. We’d probably have to make material sacrifices across each -- or give up one or more of them entirely.
The point here is that, in the ten years I have personally been banging on the drums of logic and reason, I can honestly say that virtually no progress has been made towards developing a credible action plan for weaning the global economy off of fossil fuel. Humanity seems fully committed to its current trajectory: the cheap and easy path. At least, until something forces our hand.
Which makes us no different from any other biological organism. No different than the simplest bacterium in a petrie dish that multiplies until it has consumed its food supply, then is suddenly faced with starvation.
The outcome of our current "cheap, fast and easy" trajectory is the same as a car hurtling towards a brick wall at a very high rate of speed. It will come to a predictable, sudden, and painful end:
One of the saddest elements of this story is that we've had many chances to reform ourselves along the way. Economically, we could have (and should have) used the crisis of 2008 to allow a bunch of literally useless financial firms bite the dust. But didn't; we saved them all. And now have a Too Big To Fail system that’s even "Too Bigger" than before [sic].
Or we could have starting planning for a move away from fossil fuels back in 1957 when Admiral Hyman Rickover noted:
The earth is finite. Fossil fuels are not renewable. In this respect our energy base differs from that of all earlier civilizations. They could have maintained their energy supply by careful cultivation. We cannot. Fuel that has been burned is gone forever. Fuel is even more evanescent than metals. Metals, too, are non-renewable resources threatened with ultimate extinction, but something can be salvaged from scrap. Fuel leaves no scrap and there is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves. They were created by solar energy 500 million years ago and took eons to grow to their present volume.
I suggest that this is a good time to think soberly about our responsibilities to our descendants - those who will ring out the Fossil Fuel Age. Our greatest responsibility, as parents and as citizens, is to give America 's youngsters the best possible education.
We might even - if we wanted - give a break to these youngsters by cutting fuel and metal consumption a little here and there so as to provide a safer margin for the necessary adjustments which eventually must be made in a world without fossil fuels.
One final thought I should like to leave with you. High-energy consumption has always been a prerequisite of political power. The tendency is for political power to be concentrated in an ever-smaller number of countries. Ultimately, the nation which control - the largest energy resources will become dominant. If we give thought to the problem of energy resources, if we act wisely and in time to conserve what we have and prepare well for necessary future changes, we shall insure this dominant position for our own country.
Such amazing and easily understood insights by one of the most intelligent accomplished people in US history. And that was just a very small set of snippets from a longer speech (you can read his full speech in PeakProsperity.com's Essential Articles section).
In thes few paragraphs above, Rickover lays out that:
The Earth is finite.
Fossil fuels are not renewable.
Burn them and they are gone.
A little self-sacrifice today would go a long way in the future.
Energy output creates political power.
Therefore conserving and controlling energy are determined by political will.
Most of the world is still behaving as if these simple points are too confusing to digest. As if there were some other, more hopeful, outcome to our reckless behavior of frittering away such a valuable and non-renewable resource on such blind pursuits as expanding the world’s population to some eventual maximum, destroying topsoil and ecosystems, and selling as many SUV’s and trucks as humanly possible in any given quarter.
There’s only one outcome for any organism that grows until it slams into the limit of its energy boundary: Collapse.
Is there any evidence were in danger running into that boundary soon? Absolutely.
Important warning signs we'd expect to see in the oil space would be declining discoveries and increasingly desperate attempts to scrape the bottom of the barrel.
Both signs are upon us with vigor these days.
First, we see that oil discoveries are at their worst over the entire data series stretching back to the early 1950’s:
The white dotted line in the above chart indicates that, four years excepted, the level of discoveries has been well below consumption since 1980. And the yearly gap has been growing over that timeframe.
Consuming more of a non-renewable resource than you're finding? It doesn’t take a geologist or a math whiz to work out the implications of that story.
Next, for warning sign #2, take a look at these photos I shot on a recent trip as my plane was landing in Dallas:
Each one of those little white squares is a one to two-acre drill/production pad. The earth is scraped away, the drill rig brought in, then the fracking and finishing trucks arrive – some 1,200 truck trips in all – just to poke a single hole that will (hopefully) produce a few hundred thousand barrels of oil.
Here’s a drill pad on close look as the plane was landing, showing also an associated waste pond where the fracking fluid that blows back up the drill hole is captured for later disposal. These ponds need to be big, because millions of gallons of wastewater is produced at first, often laced with highly toxic compounds.
The above are perfectly good warning signs that we’re out of the good options. The days of gigantic deposits of easily-extractable oil are gone. Now we’ve got this stuff. It's smaller, lower quality, and requires a *lot* more energy/effort to get out of the ground.
Of course, that's not stopping us from going after it. And I’m not (necessarily) against that, as long as we admit to ourselves how extremes these measures are, and what this means for our future.
Where the Romans had their omens and auguries, the rise of oil fracking is an important portent of what lies ahead for modern society. Art Berman refers to the current shale bonanza not as a "revolution", but as a "retirement party" -- and he’s right.
What happens after someone's retirement party? Life winds down. The energy of their youth is no longer with them. The same is coming true today for America.
Conclusion
Nothing grows forever. Cancer tries, but always defeats itself in the process. Yeast parties until all the sugar in the vat is gone or it pollutes itself out of an active existence.
Can humans do better? The jury is still out on that.
But so far, the signs say that, as a group, we lack the ability to organize effectively against big, complex challenges. Especially if doing so requires us to willingly choose to live a life of less. We're simply too addicted to more.
Admiral Rickover suggested that living within our means would be a smart and honorable thing to do for future generations. But his speech represents something of a high-water mark for conscientious thinking at the government official level.
Here’s the thing: Unless there’s a very sudden and rapid change in how we are approaching the looming brick wall of resource shortages, the future is going to be quite difficult.
Most people will be caught unprepared. As a result, many of them will suffer, and possibly fail completely to continue on.
A smaller few will survive, stoically soldiering on.
But an evern smaller percentage -- those who heeded the warning signs and prepared prudently in advance -- will be positioned to thrive through the coming adversity.
Where I have lost my faith in large groups of people, I have more faith than ever in those prospects for "awake" individuals and small groups. I'm inspired by the number of people I’ve met who are taking smart, regenerative, innovative steps to align their personal actions with the big picture realities discussed above.
To those already pursuing resilience: I know it’s not easy staying focused and on track. The Powers That Be have poured considerable resources and effort into painting the illusion that "All is well". They’ve poured $trillions into the stock and bond ""markets"", in part to send a false signal of comfort, so that people will not spook and instead continue to borrow and buy. They, along with the compliant corporate-controlled media, have committed vast sins of commission and omission in the narratives that they choose promote or suppress.
Bubbles are powerful social signaling devices. Staying out them and out of harm’s way is really difficult, especially as the party rages hardest right before its end. One of the responsibilities we at Peak Prosperity take most seriously is reminding you of the dangerous seduction of asset bubbles. Don't get taken in. Don't be the "greatest fool" who capitulates and jumps in right before the crash (remember: even Isaac Newton got suckered by the South Sea Bubble).
And in Part 2: What I Am Personally Doing To Prepare Right Now, I detail what I am doing in my life right now to make good decisions in difficult times. Many of you have been asking about which specific steps I'm prioritizing these days. Well, I'm answering.
Look, someday this ridiculous era of the Everything Bubble will be over. First, it’s going to get a little bumpy -- and then, really bumpy.
When that time comes, hope your the preparations you've made in advance will be enough to see you through, and hold fast. Then hang on for as long as you can.
....
Yeast in a finite system because of the inherent nature of their physical architecture and consequent behavior will keep consuming and multiplying until they run out of food and make their system to toxic for survival because of the waste they produce. Humans are doing this too because we are organisms with the same tendencies. And regarding trying to change the running of our complex societal systems to just electricity as the energy source, its impossible and will never happen. Collapse is inevitable, and climate change will be increasingly adding to the unfolding mayhem. Just look at what is going on right now all over the world, the signs are clear to see.
Thursday, September 27, 2018
SC174-2
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50337.htm
The Fakest Fake News: The U.S. Government’s 9/11 Conspiracy Theory
If you want to fathom today’s world, absolutely nothing is more important than to understand the truth about the attacks of September 11, 2001. This is the definitive book on the subject.
For seventeen years we have been subjected to an onslaught of U.S. government and corporate media propaganda about 9/11 that has been used to support the “war on terror” that has resulted in millions of deaths around the world. It has been used as a pretext to attack nations throughout the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa.
It has led to a great increase in Islamophobia since Muslims were accused of being responsible for the attacks. It has led to a crackdown on civil liberties in the United States, the exponential growth of a vast and costly national security apparatus, the spreading of fear and anxiety on a great scale, and a state of permanent war that is pushing the world toward a nuclear confrontation. And much, much more.
The authors of this essential book, David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth, and all their colleagues who have contributed to this volume, have long been at the front lines trying to wake people up to the real news about 9/11. They have battled against three U.S. presidents, a vast propaganda machine “strangely” allied with well-known leftists, and a corporate mass media intent on serving deep-state interests, all of whom have used illogic, lies, and pseudo-science to conceal the terrible truth. Yet despite the establishment’s disinformation and deceptions, very many people have come to suspect that the official story of the September 11, 2001 attacks is not true.
With the publication of 9/11Unmasked: An International Review Panel Investigation, they now have a brilliant source book to use to turn their suspicions into certitudes. And for those who have never doubted the official account (or accounts would be more accurate), reading this book should shock them into reality, because it is not based on speculation, but on carefully documented and corroborated facts, exacting logic, and the scientific method.
The book is based on the establishment in 2011 of a scientific review project comprising 23 experts with a broad spectrum of expertise, including people from the fields of chemistry, structural engineering, physics, aeronautical engineering, airline crash investigation, piloting, etc. Their job was to apply systematic and disciplined analyses to the verifiable evidence about the 9/11 attacks. They used a model called the Delphi Method as a way to achieve best-evidence consensus.
This best-evidence consensus model is used in science and medicine, and the 9/11 Consensus Panel used it to examine the key claims of the official account(s). Each “Official Account” was reviewed and compared to “The Best Evidence” to reach conclusions. The authors explain it thus:
The examination of each claim received three rounds of review and feedback. According to the panel’s investigative model, members submitted their votes to the two of us moderators while remaining blind to one another. Proposed points had to receive a vote of at least 85 percent to be accepted…This model carries so much authority in medicine that medical consensus statements derived from it are often reported in the news.
They represent the highest standard of medical research and practice and may result in malpractice lawsuits if not followed.
This research process went on for many years, with the findings reported in this book. The Consensus 9/11 Panel provides evidence against the official claims in nine categories:
The Destruction of the Twin Towers
The Destruction of WTC 7
The Attack on the Pentagon
The 9/11 Flights
US Military Exercises on and before 9/11
Claims about Military and Political Leaders
Osama bin Laden and the Hijackers
Phone Calls from the 9/11 Flights
Insider Trading
Each category is introduced and then broken down into sub-sections called points, which are examined in turn. For example, the destruction of the Twin Towers has points that include, “The Claim That No One Reported Explosions in the Twin Towers,” “The Claim That the Twin Towers Were Destroyed by Airplane Impacts, Jet Fuel, and Fire,” “The Claim That There Were Widespread Infernos in the South Tower,” etc. Each point is introduced with background, the official account is presented, then the best evidence, followed by a conclusion. Within the nine categories there are 51 points examined, each meticulously documented through quotations, references, etc., all connected to 875 endnotes that the reader can follow. It is scrupulously laid out and logical, and the reader can follow it sequentially or pick out an aspect that particularly interests them.
The 9/11 Consensus Panel members describe their goal and purpose as follows:
The purpose of the 9/11 Consensus Panel is to provide the world with a clear statement, based on expert independent opinion, of some of the best evidence opposing the official narrative about 9/11.
The goal of the Consensus Panel is to provide a ready source of evidence-based research to any investigation that may be undertaken by the public, the media, academia, or any other investigative body or institution.
As a sociologist who teaches research methods and does much research, I find the Consensus Panel’s method exemplary and their findings accurate. They have unmasked a monstrous lie. It is so ironic that such serious scholars, who question and research 9/11, have been portrayed as irrational and ignorant “conspiracy theorists” by people whose thinking is magical, illogical, and pseudo-scientific in the extreme.
A review is no place to go into all the details of this book, but I will give a few examples of the acumen of the Panel’s findings.
As a grandson of a Deputy Chief of the New York Fire Department (343 firefighters died on 9/11), I find it particularly despicable that the government agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), that was charged with investigating the collapse of the Towers and Building 7, would claim that no one gave evidence of explosions in the Twin Towers, when it is documented by the fastidious researcher Graeme MacQueen, a member of The 9/11 Consensus Panel, that over 100 firefighters who were at the scene reported hearing explosions in the towers. One may follow endnote 22 to MacQueen’s research and his sources that are indisputable. There are recordings.
On a connected note, the official account claims that there were widespread infernos in the South Tower that prevented firefighters from ascending to the 78th floor. Such a claim would support the notion that the building could have collapsed as a result of fires caused by the plane crashing into the building. But as 9/11 Unmasked makes clear, radio tapes of firefighters ascending to the 78th floor and saying this was not so, prove that “there is incontrovertible evidence that the firefighter teams were communicating clearly with one another as they ascended WTC” and that there were no infernos to stop them, as they are recorded saying. They professionally went about their jobs trying to save people.
Then the South Tower collapsed and so many died. But it couldn’t have collapsed from “infernos” that didn’t exist. Only explosives could have brought it down.
A reader can thus pick up this book, check out that section, and use common sense and elementary logic to reach the same conclusion. And by reaching that conclusion and going no further in the book, the entire official story of 9/11 falls apart.
Or one can delve further, let’s say by dipping into the official claim that a domestic airline attack on the Pentagon was not expected. Opening to page 78, the reader can learn that “NBC’s Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski was warned of the Pentagon attack by an intelligence officer,” who specified the illogical spot where the attack would happen shortly before it did.
In Miklaszewski’s words, “And then he got very close to me, and, almost silent for a few seconds, he leaned in and said, ‘This attack was so well coordinated that if I were you, I would stay off the E Ring – where our NBC office was – the outer ring of the Pentagon for the rest of the day, because we’re next.’”
The authors say correctly, “The intelligence officer’s apparent foreknowledge was unaccountably specific.” For if a terrorist were going to fly a plane into Pentagon, the most likely spot would be to dive into the roof where many people might be killed, including top brass and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. To make an impossibly acrobatic maneuver to fly low into an outside wall would make no sense. And for the government to claim that this impossible maneuver was executed by the alleged hijacker Hani Hanjour, a man who according to documentation couldn’t even pilot a small plane, is absurd. But the intelligence officer knew what would happen, and the reader can learn this, and marvel.
Or the reader can start from the beginning and read straight through the book. They will learn in detail that the official version of the attacks of 9/11 is fake news at its worst. It is a story told for dunces.
Griffin and Woodworth and their colleagues simply and clearly in the most logical manner show that the emperor has no clothes, not even a mask.
Since knowing the truth about the attacks of September 11, 2001 is indispensable for understanding what is happening in today’s world, everyone should purchase and read Unmasking 9/11: An International Review Panel Investigation. Keep it next to your dictionary, and when you read or hear the latest propaganda about the 9/11 attacks, take it out and consult the work of the real experts. Their words will clarify your mind.
It is the definitive book on the defining event of the 21st century.
The Fakest Fake News: The U.S. Government’s 9/11 Conspiracy Theory
If you want to fathom today’s world, absolutely nothing is more important than to understand the truth about the attacks of September 11, 2001. This is the definitive book on the subject.
For seventeen years we have been subjected to an onslaught of U.S. government and corporate media propaganda about 9/11 that has been used to support the “war on terror” that has resulted in millions of deaths around the world. It has been used as a pretext to attack nations throughout the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa.
It has led to a great increase in Islamophobia since Muslims were accused of being responsible for the attacks. It has led to a crackdown on civil liberties in the United States, the exponential growth of a vast and costly national security apparatus, the spreading of fear and anxiety on a great scale, and a state of permanent war that is pushing the world toward a nuclear confrontation. And much, much more.
The authors of this essential book, David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth, and all their colleagues who have contributed to this volume, have long been at the front lines trying to wake people up to the real news about 9/11. They have battled against three U.S. presidents, a vast propaganda machine “strangely” allied with well-known leftists, and a corporate mass media intent on serving deep-state interests, all of whom have used illogic, lies, and pseudo-science to conceal the terrible truth. Yet despite the establishment’s disinformation and deceptions, very many people have come to suspect that the official story of the September 11, 2001 attacks is not true.
With the publication of 9/11Unmasked: An International Review Panel Investigation, they now have a brilliant source book to use to turn their suspicions into certitudes. And for those who have never doubted the official account (or accounts would be more accurate), reading this book should shock them into reality, because it is not based on speculation, but on carefully documented and corroborated facts, exacting logic, and the scientific method.
The book is based on the establishment in 2011 of a scientific review project comprising 23 experts with a broad spectrum of expertise, including people from the fields of chemistry, structural engineering, physics, aeronautical engineering, airline crash investigation, piloting, etc. Their job was to apply systematic and disciplined analyses to the verifiable evidence about the 9/11 attacks. They used a model called the Delphi Method as a way to achieve best-evidence consensus.
This best-evidence consensus model is used in science and medicine, and the 9/11 Consensus Panel used it to examine the key claims of the official account(s). Each “Official Account” was reviewed and compared to “The Best Evidence” to reach conclusions. The authors explain it thus:
The examination of each claim received three rounds of review and feedback. According to the panel’s investigative model, members submitted their votes to the two of us moderators while remaining blind to one another. Proposed points had to receive a vote of at least 85 percent to be accepted…This model carries so much authority in medicine that medical consensus statements derived from it are often reported in the news.
They represent the highest standard of medical research and practice and may result in malpractice lawsuits if not followed.
This research process went on for many years, with the findings reported in this book. The Consensus 9/11 Panel provides evidence against the official claims in nine categories:
The Destruction of the Twin Towers
The Destruction of WTC 7
The Attack on the Pentagon
The 9/11 Flights
US Military Exercises on and before 9/11
Claims about Military and Political Leaders
Osama bin Laden and the Hijackers
Phone Calls from the 9/11 Flights
Insider Trading
Each category is introduced and then broken down into sub-sections called points, which are examined in turn. For example, the destruction of the Twin Towers has points that include, “The Claim That No One Reported Explosions in the Twin Towers,” “The Claim That the Twin Towers Were Destroyed by Airplane Impacts, Jet Fuel, and Fire,” “The Claim That There Were Widespread Infernos in the South Tower,” etc. Each point is introduced with background, the official account is presented, then the best evidence, followed by a conclusion. Within the nine categories there are 51 points examined, each meticulously documented through quotations, references, etc., all connected to 875 endnotes that the reader can follow. It is scrupulously laid out and logical, and the reader can follow it sequentially or pick out an aspect that particularly interests them.
The 9/11 Consensus Panel members describe their goal and purpose as follows:
The purpose of the 9/11 Consensus Panel is to provide the world with a clear statement, based on expert independent opinion, of some of the best evidence opposing the official narrative about 9/11.
The goal of the Consensus Panel is to provide a ready source of evidence-based research to any investigation that may be undertaken by the public, the media, academia, or any other investigative body or institution.
As a sociologist who teaches research methods and does much research, I find the Consensus Panel’s method exemplary and their findings accurate. They have unmasked a monstrous lie. It is so ironic that such serious scholars, who question and research 9/11, have been portrayed as irrational and ignorant “conspiracy theorists” by people whose thinking is magical, illogical, and pseudo-scientific in the extreme.
A review is no place to go into all the details of this book, but I will give a few examples of the acumen of the Panel’s findings.
As a grandson of a Deputy Chief of the New York Fire Department (343 firefighters died on 9/11), I find it particularly despicable that the government agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), that was charged with investigating the collapse of the Towers and Building 7, would claim that no one gave evidence of explosions in the Twin Towers, when it is documented by the fastidious researcher Graeme MacQueen, a member of The 9/11 Consensus Panel, that over 100 firefighters who were at the scene reported hearing explosions in the towers. One may follow endnote 22 to MacQueen’s research and his sources that are indisputable. There are recordings.
On a connected note, the official account claims that there were widespread infernos in the South Tower that prevented firefighters from ascending to the 78th floor. Such a claim would support the notion that the building could have collapsed as a result of fires caused by the plane crashing into the building. But as 9/11 Unmasked makes clear, radio tapes of firefighters ascending to the 78th floor and saying this was not so, prove that “there is incontrovertible evidence that the firefighter teams were communicating clearly with one another as they ascended WTC” and that there were no infernos to stop them, as they are recorded saying. They professionally went about their jobs trying to save people.
Then the South Tower collapsed and so many died. But it couldn’t have collapsed from “infernos” that didn’t exist. Only explosives could have brought it down.
A reader can thus pick up this book, check out that section, and use common sense and elementary logic to reach the same conclusion. And by reaching that conclusion and going no further in the book, the entire official story of 9/11 falls apart.
Or one can delve further, let’s say by dipping into the official claim that a domestic airline attack on the Pentagon was not expected. Opening to page 78, the reader can learn that “NBC’s Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski was warned of the Pentagon attack by an intelligence officer,” who specified the illogical spot where the attack would happen shortly before it did.
In Miklaszewski’s words, “And then he got very close to me, and, almost silent for a few seconds, he leaned in and said, ‘This attack was so well coordinated that if I were you, I would stay off the E Ring – where our NBC office was – the outer ring of the Pentagon for the rest of the day, because we’re next.’”
The authors say correctly, “The intelligence officer’s apparent foreknowledge was unaccountably specific.” For if a terrorist were going to fly a plane into Pentagon, the most likely spot would be to dive into the roof where many people might be killed, including top brass and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. To make an impossibly acrobatic maneuver to fly low into an outside wall would make no sense. And for the government to claim that this impossible maneuver was executed by the alleged hijacker Hani Hanjour, a man who according to documentation couldn’t even pilot a small plane, is absurd. But the intelligence officer knew what would happen, and the reader can learn this, and marvel.
Or the reader can start from the beginning and read straight through the book. They will learn in detail that the official version of the attacks of 9/11 is fake news at its worst. It is a story told for dunces.
Griffin and Woodworth and their colleagues simply and clearly in the most logical manner show that the emperor has no clothes, not even a mask.
Since knowing the truth about the attacks of September 11, 2001 is indispensable for understanding what is happening in today’s world, everyone should purchase and read Unmasking 9/11: An International Review Panel Investigation. Keep it next to your dictionary, and when you read or hear the latest propaganda about the 9/11 attacks, take it out and consult the work of the real experts. Their words will clarify your mind.
It is the definitive book on the defining event of the 21st century.
SC174-1
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50335.htm
US Way Or No Way: Trump Treated Rest Of World as America’s Footstool at UNSC
Donald Trump chaired the UN Security Council this week to deliver a thuggish ultimatum to the world to obey American orders on Iran or face retribution for not kowtowing to Washington’s diktat.
The world’s highest forum for maintaining global security and peace was thus turned into a platform for brazen, criminal American rhetoric.
The 73rd United Nations General Assembly in New York this week was a head-spinning spectacle of American bullying and arrogance – to the point where delegates couldn’t contain their laughter at one stage over Trump’s ridiculously self-righteous speech.
In his address to the assembly, Trump repeated the hackneyed accusations against Iran as being “the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism.” Nothing new in that, but what this US president is doing is putting Iran on notice that it either capitulates or faces violent aggression.
Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton, in a separate speech in New York, warned Iran “there would be hell to pay” over Washington’s baseless accusations.
Washington reinforced its threats to impose a total embargo on Iran’s vital oil trade and cut Tehran off from the US-dominated international banking system. One could consider this to be an act of economic warfare pushing Iran towards further confrontation.
What’s more, when Trump chaired the Security Council meeting he provocatively warned other nations they face “severe consequences” if they continue to trade with Iran in defiance of US sanctions.
The day before, all the other signatories to the international nuclear accord with Iran held a meeting to reiterate their support for the 2015 agreement known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The European Union, in conjunction with Russia and China, is trying to set up a new payment mechanism which would circumvent US sanctions and banking restrictions.
Yet, here was Trump telling them, “Don’t even try it!” The president is saying that it’s the US way, or no way.
This unilateral imposition of Washington’s interests over all other nations, including its supposed allies, is the conduct of a tyrant which inevitably is inciting tensions leading to confrontation.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif correctly said the US was “abusing” the Security Council. Trump was using it as a forum to assert Washington’s dictatorial policy. The irony is that the forum is supposed to be one for maintaining global order and peace, but under American “leadership” it is used as a sounding board for US aggression.
The Security Council agenda this week was nominally about non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. Trump opened the two-hour session with a rambling recap of his address to the General Assembly the previous day in which he used the Security Council to again demonize Iran as a terrorist regime “proliferating [ballistic] missiles all across the Middle East.”
Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the Iran nuclear accord earlier this year, in May, constitutes a violation of international law, given that the JCPOA was ratified by the Security Council under Resolution 2231.
Yet, Trump tried to make a virtue of this American trashing of an international treaty by justifying it with baseless accusations against Iran. The “rogue state” epithet that Trump levels against Iran is actually more fitting for the US.
The president’s chairing of the Security Council meeting had, on a lighter note, the appearance of comic theater. At times it looked like Trump was holding a re-run of his reality TV show, The Apprentice, boasting about his imagined greatness.
Nikki Haley, the US ambassador, set the gavel in front of Trump like it was a toy for the president to bang in order to get attention from the rest. Then at some later point during the session, probably due to boredom, the president walked out with his security guards, leaving Haley to fill his seat.
All the other permanent members of the UN Security Council – France, Britain, Russia and China – one after another rejected the US position that the Iran nuclear accord was “horrible”. Each one of them said it was a viable, working agreement making the world safer from non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov reminded delegates that numerous inspections had shown Iran to be in complete compliance with the JCPOA, which meant that Trump’s withdrawal from the deal was unjustified and wrong and is increasing tensions and insecurity in the Middle East.
“The unilateral withdrawal of the US from the JCPOA is a serious threat to the international non-proliferation regime,” said Lavrov.
So, how’s that for paradox. Trump presides over the world’s top security committee with an agenda of non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. But international consensus views the US as recklessly jeopardizing security.
It is hard to disagree with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, when he said of this week’s proceedings, that the US is the one being isolated on the world stage, not Iran.
The disturbing thing is this though. Trump and his hawkish administration officials do not give a fig what the rest of the world thinks. Everyone is wrong, the US is right, is their view.
That much was made clear in the way Trump had the unabashed conceit to chair the Security Council as an opportunity to exalt American self-righteousness despite its transparent transgression of international law concerning Iran.
American rhetoric at the UN is always a feast of hubris and self-serving falsehoods. But this year, Trump presented a veritable cornucopia of absurd contradictions.
He exhorted the Security Council on how “we can replace the horrors of war ... with the beautiful promise of peace.” Just minutes before that mawkish flourish, Trump was putting the world on notice that it must follow US orders to strangulate Iran or be prepared for American punishment.
In this General Assembly speech, Trump swooned about the “sovereignty” of nations as a guiding principle in his vision for the world. Evidently however, in the real world, this US president, like his predecessors, has nothing but contempt for other nations’ sovereignty, if those nations dare to dissent from Washington’s diktat.
Another glaring contradiction is that Trump lambasts “global bureaucracy”, asserting that the US will never be held to account by international rules above its own laws. This “America First” doctrine is an embrace of lawlessness. That has always been the American way. Trump is merely making the doctrine explicit.
But while Trump wants US sovereignty to be an unbridled supreme power, he also has no hesitation in using the “global bureaucracy” of the UN and multilateralism to enforce Washington’s diktat over others. That’s wanting cake and eating it too.
America used to flatter its imperialism by claiming to be the “world’s policeman”. Under Trump, US power is apparently that of the “world’s thug”.
The contradictions in American rhetoric and reality are becoming so absurd, even polite diplomats can no longer keep a straight face.
US Way Or No Way: Trump Treated Rest Of World as America’s Footstool at UNSC
Donald Trump chaired the UN Security Council this week to deliver a thuggish ultimatum to the world to obey American orders on Iran or face retribution for not kowtowing to Washington’s diktat.
The world’s highest forum for maintaining global security and peace was thus turned into a platform for brazen, criminal American rhetoric.
The 73rd United Nations General Assembly in New York this week was a head-spinning spectacle of American bullying and arrogance – to the point where delegates couldn’t contain their laughter at one stage over Trump’s ridiculously self-righteous speech.
In his address to the assembly, Trump repeated the hackneyed accusations against Iran as being “the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism.” Nothing new in that, but what this US president is doing is putting Iran on notice that it either capitulates or faces violent aggression.
Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton, in a separate speech in New York, warned Iran “there would be hell to pay” over Washington’s baseless accusations.
Washington reinforced its threats to impose a total embargo on Iran’s vital oil trade and cut Tehran off from the US-dominated international banking system. One could consider this to be an act of economic warfare pushing Iran towards further confrontation.
What’s more, when Trump chaired the Security Council meeting he provocatively warned other nations they face “severe consequences” if they continue to trade with Iran in defiance of US sanctions.
The day before, all the other signatories to the international nuclear accord with Iran held a meeting to reiterate their support for the 2015 agreement known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The European Union, in conjunction with Russia and China, is trying to set up a new payment mechanism which would circumvent US sanctions and banking restrictions.
Yet, here was Trump telling them, “Don’t even try it!” The president is saying that it’s the US way, or no way.
This unilateral imposition of Washington’s interests over all other nations, including its supposed allies, is the conduct of a tyrant which inevitably is inciting tensions leading to confrontation.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif correctly said the US was “abusing” the Security Council. Trump was using it as a forum to assert Washington’s dictatorial policy. The irony is that the forum is supposed to be one for maintaining global order and peace, but under American “leadership” it is used as a sounding board for US aggression.
The Security Council agenda this week was nominally about non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. Trump opened the two-hour session with a rambling recap of his address to the General Assembly the previous day in which he used the Security Council to again demonize Iran as a terrorist regime “proliferating [ballistic] missiles all across the Middle East.”
Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the Iran nuclear accord earlier this year, in May, constitutes a violation of international law, given that the JCPOA was ratified by the Security Council under Resolution 2231.
Yet, Trump tried to make a virtue of this American trashing of an international treaty by justifying it with baseless accusations against Iran. The “rogue state” epithet that Trump levels against Iran is actually more fitting for the US.
The president’s chairing of the Security Council meeting had, on a lighter note, the appearance of comic theater. At times it looked like Trump was holding a re-run of his reality TV show, The Apprentice, boasting about his imagined greatness.
Nikki Haley, the US ambassador, set the gavel in front of Trump like it was a toy for the president to bang in order to get attention from the rest. Then at some later point during the session, probably due to boredom, the president walked out with his security guards, leaving Haley to fill his seat.
All the other permanent members of the UN Security Council – France, Britain, Russia and China – one after another rejected the US position that the Iran nuclear accord was “horrible”. Each one of them said it was a viable, working agreement making the world safer from non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov reminded delegates that numerous inspections had shown Iran to be in complete compliance with the JCPOA, which meant that Trump’s withdrawal from the deal was unjustified and wrong and is increasing tensions and insecurity in the Middle East.
“The unilateral withdrawal of the US from the JCPOA is a serious threat to the international non-proliferation regime,” said Lavrov.
So, how’s that for paradox. Trump presides over the world’s top security committee with an agenda of non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. But international consensus views the US as recklessly jeopardizing security.
It is hard to disagree with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, when he said of this week’s proceedings, that the US is the one being isolated on the world stage, not Iran.
The disturbing thing is this though. Trump and his hawkish administration officials do not give a fig what the rest of the world thinks. Everyone is wrong, the US is right, is their view.
That much was made clear in the way Trump had the unabashed conceit to chair the Security Council as an opportunity to exalt American self-righteousness despite its transparent transgression of international law concerning Iran.
American rhetoric at the UN is always a feast of hubris and self-serving falsehoods. But this year, Trump presented a veritable cornucopia of absurd contradictions.
He exhorted the Security Council on how “we can replace the horrors of war ... with the beautiful promise of peace.” Just minutes before that mawkish flourish, Trump was putting the world on notice that it must follow US orders to strangulate Iran or be prepared for American punishment.
In this General Assembly speech, Trump swooned about the “sovereignty” of nations as a guiding principle in his vision for the world. Evidently however, in the real world, this US president, like his predecessors, has nothing but contempt for other nations’ sovereignty, if those nations dare to dissent from Washington’s diktat.
Another glaring contradiction is that Trump lambasts “global bureaucracy”, asserting that the US will never be held to account by international rules above its own laws. This “America First” doctrine is an embrace of lawlessness. That has always been the American way. Trump is merely making the doctrine explicit.
But while Trump wants US sovereignty to be an unbridled supreme power, he also has no hesitation in using the “global bureaucracy” of the UN and multilateralism to enforce Washington’s diktat over others. That’s wanting cake and eating it too.
America used to flatter its imperialism by claiming to be the “world’s policeman”. Under Trump, US power is apparently that of the “world’s thug”.
The contradictions in American rhetoric and reality are becoming so absurd, even polite diplomats can no longer keep a straight face.
Monday, September 24, 2018
SC173-15
https://www.globalresearch.ca/hothouse-earth/5654651
Hothouse Earth
An interesting new study: “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” Will Steffen, Johan Rockström et al, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Aug. 6, 2018 lays out the pathway for Earth entering a Hothouse Climate State.
“Our planet is still in danger of becoming a ‘Hothouse’ Earth despite our current efforts to manage global warming.”
Counter-intuitively, that sounds like a breath of fresh air, meaning, get the bad news out of the way ahead of time so people can brace for it, no surprises. Assuming the Hothouse Planet happens, certain areas would be uninhabitable as global temps crank up to 4C-to-5C beyond pre-industrial. The planet would be gnarled and unattractive, a nasty place to live, no more Goldilocks climate. And, all kinds of warfare would breakout as mobs vie for tillable land.
The article’s general thesis is that, as of today, the planet retains its Goldilocks “not too hot, not too cold” swagger because of a series of natural mechanisms that “maintain a balance,” for example, carbon sinks, like the ocean or like the Amazon Rain Forest keep the balance in place. In fact, the study identifies ten tipping elements that maintain a balance for the planet, any one of which, once out of whack, would cascade into all the others, bringing on the onset of a hothouse planet.
Assuming the world exceeds the 2C pre-industrial marker set by the Paris Agreement, the study envisions a dangerous out of control spiral downwards, as planetary mechanisms crash in domino fashion, resulting in a planetary climate hothouse. Maybe that’s what happened to Venus (865F, CO2 950,000 ppm) millennia ago.
According to the PNAS article, hothouse prevention is reducing carbon emissions ASAP with countries working together towards a common goal, including decarbonization, enhancement of carbon sinks, blah-blah-blah. Stop right there! The U.S. is already out of the “deal” and furthermore it’s a pipedream to assume countries will come together globally to save the planet. Since the dawn of civilization, tribes, then empires, then nation/states have been fighting like cats and dogs locked together in a crowded teeny-weeny room.
Here’s the issue as outlined by the study: It only takes one of the mechanisms to break down and topple all of the others. Ipso facto, that presents a problem today. The “tipping elements,” of which there are ten, include: (1) thawing permafrost (2) loss of coral reefs (3) loss of Arctic summer sea ice. Those three mechanisms alone, according to some pretty smart scientists, are already goners, or very, very close to goners.
What if the “tipping elements” mentioned in the study have already “tipped” or tip way ahead of plan? Then what happens, as the world grinds away towards reduction of carbon emissions whilst on the pathway to 2C? After all, scientific models have been pretty shabby now for decades, missing nasty climate events by a country mile. Time and again, the science is behind the climatic events, not ahead, not by a long shot.
Therefore, the Planet Hothouse study poses an interesting supposition: What if climate scientists have been way too optimistic, too sanguine, too upbeat and not scaring people nearly enough?
In point of fact, there’s a strong rationale for questioning the validity of climate models. For example, frequently scientists say how “surprised” they are at “how much faster things are happening than models predicted.” This happens way too often to find comfort in science models.
After several years of repeatedly hearing apologetic scientists claim the climate system is not following their models, meaning, bad stuff is happening much faster than models predicted, it becomes increasingly obvious that climate change could be closer to an out of control beast than anybody realizes. After all, the track record is all about “surprised scientists.”
The “science is late to the party” phenomena is not necessarily the fault of scientists as climate change (crisis) is on an unprecedented pathway, not following any playbooks. Come to find out, there’s no script, only models.
For example, when questioned about collapsing ice in West Antarctica, Adrian Jenkins, glaciologist, British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge said: “It was just beyond our concept that a glacier would melt that fast.”
Really! “Beyond our concept that a glacier would melt that fast!”
Helen Amanda Fricker, glaciologist, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and her team found that from 1994 to 2012, the amount of ice disappearing from all Antarctic ice shelves, not just the ones in the Amundsen Sea, increased 12-fold, from six cubic miles to 74 cubic miles per year. That was six years ago; it’s only gotten worse. Increased 12-fold… you’ve gotta be kidding…. that’s like comparing the performance of the Wright brothers to the Apollo moon landing!
“I think it’s time for us scientists to stop being so cautious about communicating the risks.” (Helen Amanda Fricker) Oh, finally, reality hits home!
The “Mass Balance of the Antarctic Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2017,” Nature, 219-222 (2018) shows the rate of ice loss from West Antarctica increasing from 53B to 159B tonnes per year. Nobody came close to predicting that in 1992, in 2002, or in 2012. No models said that would happen at that rate.
In fact, similar to the stock market, West Antarctic ice loss is in a bull market that just won’t quit, exceeding all expectations, blowing away all predictions. Not only, but two recent studies found Antarctic melt, similar to the stock market, at a “record-breaking rate.” Therefore, warning that sea level rises could have catastrophic consequences for cities. Duh!
Consider: Antarctic ice loss has accelerated threefold in the last five years; that’s a faster rate than the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which increased from 15,000 to 25,000 over the past five years or a powerhouse 67% in a raging bull market. Still, stocks look like wimps compared to Antarctica’s 5xs faster rate of ice loss. Curiously, and maybe not so coincidentally, the faster stock markets rise, the faster ice melts.
Greenland’s surface melt doubled from 1992-2011. According to Isabella Velicogna, University of California, “Nobody expected the ice sheet to lose so much mass so quickly… Things are happening a lot faster than we expected.”
“Happening a lot faster than we expected” has become the motto of climate science. “Nobody expected it to lose mass so quickly.” These expressions, or rather exasperation retorts, are indicative of a climate crisis that is rapidly galloping ahead of the science.
Maybe the Hothouse Earth study in PNAS is on-track but too late to the party.
Which begs the million-dollar question: What if 2C hits much sooner than the models expect?
Then what?
The answer is straightforward: The world turns into a hellhole much faster than the models predicted.
Hothouse Earth
An interesting new study: “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” Will Steffen, Johan Rockström et al, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Aug. 6, 2018 lays out the pathway for Earth entering a Hothouse Climate State.
“Our planet is still in danger of becoming a ‘Hothouse’ Earth despite our current efforts to manage global warming.”
Counter-intuitively, that sounds like a breath of fresh air, meaning, get the bad news out of the way ahead of time so people can brace for it, no surprises. Assuming the Hothouse Planet happens, certain areas would be uninhabitable as global temps crank up to 4C-to-5C beyond pre-industrial. The planet would be gnarled and unattractive, a nasty place to live, no more Goldilocks climate. And, all kinds of warfare would breakout as mobs vie for tillable land.
The article’s general thesis is that, as of today, the planet retains its Goldilocks “not too hot, not too cold” swagger because of a series of natural mechanisms that “maintain a balance,” for example, carbon sinks, like the ocean or like the Amazon Rain Forest keep the balance in place. In fact, the study identifies ten tipping elements that maintain a balance for the planet, any one of which, once out of whack, would cascade into all the others, bringing on the onset of a hothouse planet.
Assuming the world exceeds the 2C pre-industrial marker set by the Paris Agreement, the study envisions a dangerous out of control spiral downwards, as planetary mechanisms crash in domino fashion, resulting in a planetary climate hothouse. Maybe that’s what happened to Venus (865F, CO2 950,000 ppm) millennia ago.
According to the PNAS article, hothouse prevention is reducing carbon emissions ASAP with countries working together towards a common goal, including decarbonization, enhancement of carbon sinks, blah-blah-blah. Stop right there! The U.S. is already out of the “deal” and furthermore it’s a pipedream to assume countries will come together globally to save the planet. Since the dawn of civilization, tribes, then empires, then nation/states have been fighting like cats and dogs locked together in a crowded teeny-weeny room.
Here’s the issue as outlined by the study: It only takes one of the mechanisms to break down and topple all of the others. Ipso facto, that presents a problem today. The “tipping elements,” of which there are ten, include: (1) thawing permafrost (2) loss of coral reefs (3) loss of Arctic summer sea ice. Those three mechanisms alone, according to some pretty smart scientists, are already goners, or very, very close to goners.
What if the “tipping elements” mentioned in the study have already “tipped” or tip way ahead of plan? Then what happens, as the world grinds away towards reduction of carbon emissions whilst on the pathway to 2C? After all, scientific models have been pretty shabby now for decades, missing nasty climate events by a country mile. Time and again, the science is behind the climatic events, not ahead, not by a long shot.
Therefore, the Planet Hothouse study poses an interesting supposition: What if climate scientists have been way too optimistic, too sanguine, too upbeat and not scaring people nearly enough?
In point of fact, there’s a strong rationale for questioning the validity of climate models. For example, frequently scientists say how “surprised” they are at “how much faster things are happening than models predicted.” This happens way too often to find comfort in science models.
After several years of repeatedly hearing apologetic scientists claim the climate system is not following their models, meaning, bad stuff is happening much faster than models predicted, it becomes increasingly obvious that climate change could be closer to an out of control beast than anybody realizes. After all, the track record is all about “surprised scientists.”
The “science is late to the party” phenomena is not necessarily the fault of scientists as climate change (crisis) is on an unprecedented pathway, not following any playbooks. Come to find out, there’s no script, only models.
For example, when questioned about collapsing ice in West Antarctica, Adrian Jenkins, glaciologist, British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge said: “It was just beyond our concept that a glacier would melt that fast.”
Really! “Beyond our concept that a glacier would melt that fast!”
Helen Amanda Fricker, glaciologist, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and her team found that from 1994 to 2012, the amount of ice disappearing from all Antarctic ice shelves, not just the ones in the Amundsen Sea, increased 12-fold, from six cubic miles to 74 cubic miles per year. That was six years ago; it’s only gotten worse. Increased 12-fold… you’ve gotta be kidding…. that’s like comparing the performance of the Wright brothers to the Apollo moon landing!
“I think it’s time for us scientists to stop being so cautious about communicating the risks.” (Helen Amanda Fricker) Oh, finally, reality hits home!
The “Mass Balance of the Antarctic Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2017,” Nature, 219-222 (2018) shows the rate of ice loss from West Antarctica increasing from 53B to 159B tonnes per year. Nobody came close to predicting that in 1992, in 2002, or in 2012. No models said that would happen at that rate.
In fact, similar to the stock market, West Antarctic ice loss is in a bull market that just won’t quit, exceeding all expectations, blowing away all predictions. Not only, but two recent studies found Antarctic melt, similar to the stock market, at a “record-breaking rate.” Therefore, warning that sea level rises could have catastrophic consequences for cities. Duh!
Consider: Antarctic ice loss has accelerated threefold in the last five years; that’s a faster rate than the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which increased from 15,000 to 25,000 over the past five years or a powerhouse 67% in a raging bull market. Still, stocks look like wimps compared to Antarctica’s 5xs faster rate of ice loss. Curiously, and maybe not so coincidentally, the faster stock markets rise, the faster ice melts.
Greenland’s surface melt doubled from 1992-2011. According to Isabella Velicogna, University of California, “Nobody expected the ice sheet to lose so much mass so quickly… Things are happening a lot faster than we expected.”
“Happening a lot faster than we expected” has become the motto of climate science. “Nobody expected it to lose mass so quickly.” These expressions, or rather exasperation retorts, are indicative of a climate crisis that is rapidly galloping ahead of the science.
Maybe the Hothouse Earth study in PNAS is on-track but too late to the party.
Which begs the million-dollar question: What if 2C hits much sooner than the models expect?
Then what?
The answer is straightforward: The world turns into a hellhole much faster than the models predicted.
SC173-14
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-gamification-of-tyranny-the-surveillance-state-america-and-china/5654844
The Gamification of Tyranny, The Surveillance State. America and Chin
It looks like we’re headed for a brave new world where all citizens are rated on their loyalty to the state and are punished for wandering from its narrative.
Call it the gamification of repression.
In China, the supposedly communist state—in fact, it is an advanced form of crony capitalist authoritarianism that Marx [and Mao] would have disapproved—is busy setting up a rating system for all citizens. According to a paper written by an academic at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, Lebanon, scores are based on professional conduct, corruption, type of products bought, peers’ own scores, and tax evasion.
The author left something out, however. This social credit system will also be used to marginalize and stigmatize those who criticize the state.
China’s nominally communist government says the system and its massive database will allow the trustworthy to roam freely under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.
In addition to scrutinizing online activity and acting on tips by snitches, the system will tap into China’s sprawling network of surveillance cameras, said to number around 200 million across the country. Facial recognition will ID individuals and follow their every move in search of behavior worthy of a low score. Those gaining a high score will be allowed access to credit facilities, cheaper public transport, and even shorter wait times for hospital services. They will also be banned from travel and decent employment.
Although the system isn’t slated to be fully rolled out until 2020, pilot projects are already being used to ensnare enemies of the state. For instance, the journalist Liu Hu received a negative score and was blacklisted for criticizing China’s political corruption. He is under house arrest, his social media accounts were shut down, and he is unable to travel. This is reminiscent of travel restrictions placed on dissidents in the Soviet Union.
If you think you’re free of this kind of tyranny because you live in America, think again.
Everybody knows the NSA and its contractors are collecting our most private and intimate information. Travel bans are enforced through no-fly lists and these are imposed on political activists as well as the innocent caught up in the surveillance system. You can lose your position at a university for thought considered unacceptable to a politically correct orthodoxy. The state intervenes when a business concern refuses to sell products to people the seller finds objectionable. In numerous ways, the state hinders, bans, and criminalizes behavior in parasitic fashion, the end result being overcrowded industrial prisons and a bounty in revenue generation through fines, assessments, penalties, and taxes.
Our social media accounts are scoured by the NSA, FBI, and the CIA for any sign of political misdeed. The state is able to monitor our behavior online in real-time. It has turned our cellphones into tracking devices. The tech giants often collaborate with the state and hand over our data without a constitutionally mandated search warrant. The data on our phones is surrendered at the border.
The latest signpost of ever encroaching corporatist-government fascism can be seen in the social media purge, which through evolution will ultimately remove all content from the internet deemed “extremist” by the state—and for the state that is everybody right or left who moves beyond permissible parameters set by the state.
Meanwhile, a huge internal security apparatus little different than what was used in the former Soviet Union is growing in size, arming itself to the teeth against the citizenry. It has deputized local law enforcement and showered it with all kinds of weapons, turning local police into armies controlled by the federal government.
Meanwhile, we are aghast at the behavior of China—or some of us are—and this is exploited to ramp up hostility toward China while buttressing Trump’s trade war. The ruling elite exploit the fear of China and Russia as part of an effort to check China’s move into a resource rich Africa and threaten Russia on its borders.
Most important is the project to derail China’s Belt and Road Initiative, aka the 21st-century Silk Road which poses a threat to neoliberal control of markets and the global economy. We are witnessing this being tested in the South China Sea and the China-Indochina Corridor as the US engages in provocative behavior against the Chinese navy.
Most believe we live in a democracy when in fact we live under a soft corporate-banker fascist police and surveillance state. I say “soft” because in the United States the government has mastered the art of control through media, not simply the corporate media, but also woven through the products of an entertainment industry that collaborates with the Pentagon and the CIA.
The state has done this for a very long time in America—from the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to the FBI’s COINTELPRO and beyond. Technology has given the state the ability to covertly destroy its political enemies, whereas previously it took a lot of footwork.
Admittedly, this isn’t in-your-face like China’s social credit system, but the end result approaches what China is after—total control of the population and the removal of all serious political opponents challenging the state’s hegemonic rule.
The Gamification of Tyranny, The Surveillance State. America and Chin
It looks like we’re headed for a brave new world where all citizens are rated on their loyalty to the state and are punished for wandering from its narrative.
Call it the gamification of repression.
In China, the supposedly communist state—in fact, it is an advanced form of crony capitalist authoritarianism that Marx [and Mao] would have disapproved—is busy setting up a rating system for all citizens. According to a paper written by an academic at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, Lebanon, scores are based on professional conduct, corruption, type of products bought, peers’ own scores, and tax evasion.
The author left something out, however. This social credit system will also be used to marginalize and stigmatize those who criticize the state.
China’s nominally communist government says the system and its massive database will allow the trustworthy to roam freely under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.
In addition to scrutinizing online activity and acting on tips by snitches, the system will tap into China’s sprawling network of surveillance cameras, said to number around 200 million across the country. Facial recognition will ID individuals and follow their every move in search of behavior worthy of a low score. Those gaining a high score will be allowed access to credit facilities, cheaper public transport, and even shorter wait times for hospital services. They will also be banned from travel and decent employment.
Although the system isn’t slated to be fully rolled out until 2020, pilot projects are already being used to ensnare enemies of the state. For instance, the journalist Liu Hu received a negative score and was blacklisted for criticizing China’s political corruption. He is under house arrest, his social media accounts were shut down, and he is unable to travel. This is reminiscent of travel restrictions placed on dissidents in the Soviet Union.
If you think you’re free of this kind of tyranny because you live in America, think again.
Everybody knows the NSA and its contractors are collecting our most private and intimate information. Travel bans are enforced through no-fly lists and these are imposed on political activists as well as the innocent caught up in the surveillance system. You can lose your position at a university for thought considered unacceptable to a politically correct orthodoxy. The state intervenes when a business concern refuses to sell products to people the seller finds objectionable. In numerous ways, the state hinders, bans, and criminalizes behavior in parasitic fashion, the end result being overcrowded industrial prisons and a bounty in revenue generation through fines, assessments, penalties, and taxes.
Our social media accounts are scoured by the NSA, FBI, and the CIA for any sign of political misdeed. The state is able to monitor our behavior online in real-time. It has turned our cellphones into tracking devices. The tech giants often collaborate with the state and hand over our data without a constitutionally mandated search warrant. The data on our phones is surrendered at the border.
The latest signpost of ever encroaching corporatist-government fascism can be seen in the social media purge, which through evolution will ultimately remove all content from the internet deemed “extremist” by the state—and for the state that is everybody right or left who moves beyond permissible parameters set by the state.
Meanwhile, a huge internal security apparatus little different than what was used in the former Soviet Union is growing in size, arming itself to the teeth against the citizenry. It has deputized local law enforcement and showered it with all kinds of weapons, turning local police into armies controlled by the federal government.
Meanwhile, we are aghast at the behavior of China—or some of us are—and this is exploited to ramp up hostility toward China while buttressing Trump’s trade war. The ruling elite exploit the fear of China and Russia as part of an effort to check China’s move into a resource rich Africa and threaten Russia on its borders.
Most important is the project to derail China’s Belt and Road Initiative, aka the 21st-century Silk Road which poses a threat to neoliberal control of markets and the global economy. We are witnessing this being tested in the South China Sea and the China-Indochina Corridor as the US engages in provocative behavior against the Chinese navy.
Most believe we live in a democracy when in fact we live under a soft corporate-banker fascist police and surveillance state. I say “soft” because in the United States the government has mastered the art of control through media, not simply the corporate media, but also woven through the products of an entertainment industry that collaborates with the Pentagon and the CIA.
The state has done this for a very long time in America—from the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to the FBI’s COINTELPRO and beyond. Technology has given the state the ability to covertly destroy its political enemies, whereas previously it took a lot of footwork.
Admittedly, this isn’t in-your-face like China’s social credit system, but the end result approaches what China is after—total control of the population and the removal of all serious political opponents challenging the state’s hegemonic rule.
SC173-13
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/american-anomie/
American Anomie
The French sociologist Emile Durkheim in his classic book “On Suicide” examined the disintegration of social bonds that drive individuals and societies to personal and collective acts of self-destruction. He found that when social bonds are strong, individuals achieve a healthy balance between individual initiative and communal solidarity, which he called a “life-sustaining equilibrium.” These individuals and communities have the lowest rates of suicide. The individuals and societies most susceptible to self-destruction, he wrote, are those for whom these bonds, this equilibrium, have been shattered.
Societies are held together by a web of social bonds that give individuals a sense of being part of a collective and engaged in a project larger than the self. This collective expresses itself through rituals, such as elections and democratic participation or an appeal to patriotism, and shared national beliefs. The bonds provide meaning, a sense of purpose, status and dignity. They offer psychological protection from impending mortality and the meaninglessness that comes with being isolated and alone. The shattering of these bonds plunges individuals into deep psychological distress that leads ultimately to acts of self-annihilation. Durkheim called this state of hopelessness and despair anomie, which he defined as “ruleless-ness.”
Ruleless-ness means the norms that govern a society and create a sense of organic solidarity no longer function. The belief, for example, that if we work hard, obey the law and get a good education we can achieve stable employment, social status and mobility along with financial security becomes a lie. The old rules, imperfect and often untrue for poor people of color, nevertheless were not a complete fiction in the United States. They offered some Americans—especially those from the white working and middle class—modest social and economic advancement.
But the capture of political and economic power by the corporate elites, along with the redirecting of all institutions toward the further consolidation of their power and wealth, has broken the social bonds that held the American society together. This rupture has unleashed a widespread malaise Durkheim would have recognized.
“When society is strongly integrated,” he wrote, “it keeps individuals in a state of dependency, holding them to be in its service and consequently not permitting them to dispose of themselves as they wish. Society is thus opposed to them escaping from their obligations towards it through death. … The bond that attaches them to their common purpose attaches them to life; and, in any case, the high goal towards which their gaze is turned alleviates the suffering that they feel from life’s troubles. Finally, in a coherent and vital community, there is a continual exchange of ideas and feelings from all to each and from each to all which is like mutual moral support, so that the individual, instead of being reduced to his resources only, participates in the collective energy and draws on it when his own is exhausted.”
The reconfiguring of American society into an oligarchy and the collapse of our democratic institutions have left most of the population disempowered. The elites, predatory by nature, have discarded all restraint. “The state of disorganization, or anomie, is thus reinforced by the fact that passions are less disciplined at the very time when they need stronger discipline,” Durkheim noted of the avarice of the rich.
“It is not for nothing that so many religions have celebrated the benefits and the moral value of poverty,” Durkheim wrote. “This is because, of all schools, it is the one that best teaches man to restrain himself. By obliging us to exercise constant discipline over ourselves, it prepares us to accept collective discipline with docility, while wealth, by exalting the individual, constantly risks awakening the spirit of rebellion that is the very fount of immortality.”
The political process, as the research by professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page underscores, no longer advances the interests of the average citizen. It has turned the consent of the governed into a cruel joke. “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.” This facade of democratic process eviscerates one of the primary social bonds in a democratic state and abolishes the vital shared belief that citizens have the power to govern themselves, that government exists to promote and protect their rights and interests.
The economic structures, like the political structures, have been reconfigured to mock the belief in a meritocracy and that hard work leads to a productive and valued role in society. American productivity, as The New York Times pointed out, has increased 77 percent since 1973 but hourly pay has grown only 12 percent. If the federal minimum wage was attached to productivity, the newspaper wrote, it would be more than $20 an hour now, not $7.25. Some 41.7 million workers, a third of the workforce, earn less than $12 an hour, and most of them do not have access to employer-sponsored health insurance. A decade after the 2008 financial meltdown, the Times wrote, the average middle class family’s net worth is more than $40,000 below what it was in 2007. The net worth of black families is down 40 percent, and for Latino families the figure has dropped 46 percent.
The economic disparity and political dysfunction have been exacerbated by the collapse of the judicial system, as Matt Taibbi writes in his book “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap.” There is aggressive criminalization of the poor while the ruling elites are protected by high-priced lawyers and non-enforcement or rewriting of laws. Amid selective enforcement of laws in the ruleless society, the high rollers on Wall Street and in wealthy enclaves are not prosecuted for possessing and ingesting illegal drugs but the poor are thrown into prison and must forfeit all their property for being caught with small amounts of the same drugs. HSBC, the world’s seventh largest bank by total assets, after admitting to laundering $800 million for Central and South American drug cartels, was slapped with largely symbolic fines and a deferred prosecution agreement, which is the legal equivalent of a get-out-of-jail-free card. The poor, meanwhile, are hounded, arrested and fined for absurdly criminalized activities such as not mowing their lawns, loitering, selling loose cigarettes, carrying open containers of alcohol or “obstructing pedestrian traffic”—which means standing on a sidewalk. These fines are used to fill state and county budget shortfalls resulting from corporations and the wealthy fixing the rules to avoid paying meaningful taxes, if they pay taxes at all. This virtual tax boycott by the rich has broken yet another social bond, the idea that everyone contributes a significant portion of his or her income to make the society function.
The elites, who sacrifice nothing for society and are not held accountable for their criminal behavior, live in what Taibbi calls a “stateless archipelago.” They are empowered to pillage the nation, amass obscene wealth and wield unchecked political and legal control. The result has been the obliteration of the primary social bonds that, however biased in favor of the white majority, held the nation together.
The shattering of these bonds has left tens of millions of Americans adrift. Society, Durkheim wrote, is no longer “sufficiently present for individuals.” Those cast aside can participate in the society, as Durkheim wrote, only “through sadness.” The self-destructive pathologies that plague the United States—opioid addiction, morbid obesity, gambling, suicide, sexual sadism, hate groups and mass shootings—rise out of this anomie. My new book, “America: The Farewell Tour,” is an examination of these pathologies and the anomie that fuels these self-destructive behaviors.
Durkheim noted that the poor have lower rates of suicide. The poor know the rules are rigged against them. James Baldwin made much the same point when he wrote that African-American men are less prone to a midlife crisis than white men because they are less susceptible to the myth of the American Dream. Most African-Americans learn very early in life that there are two sets of rules. But white Americans, because of white supremacy, are more susceptible to the myth, and therefore more infuriated when that myth is exposed as a con. This, I suspect, is why nearly all mass shooters and members of right-wing hate groups, along with a majority of supporters of Donald Trump, are white men.
Capitalism, Durkheim wrote, is antithetical to creating and sustaining the relationships that are vital to social bonds. Capitalism rewards those for whom relationships are transactional and temporary. Relationships under capitalism are mercenary. They are part of the scheme for personal self-advancement and require the oily manipulation of others. To advance in a capitalist system it is necessary to build and then discard a series of ultimately hollow relationships. These empty relationships—and you can see them on display at any business gathering—contribute to the collective anomie and disintegration of social bonds.
Capitalism may cater to a natural desire among many for self-enrichment, but you don’t want this belief system to dominate society. Capitalism rewards single-minded narcissists and often con artists devoid of empathy and incapable of remorse. It rewards those focused exclusively on personal gain and self-aggrandizement. These dedicated capitalists often lack the capacity to form meaningful bonds, seeing in other people tools for commodification and exploitation. Once a capitalist class achieves complete control, as it has in the United States, it dismantles the structures that make social bonds possible, seeing in them an impediment to profit. The more concentrated wealth becomes, as with corporate capitalism, the more damage it inflicts on society, sending jobs to overseas sweatshops and leaving American workers underemployed or unemployed.
Karl Marx saw alienation as a positive force, one that estranged workers from the means of production and moved them to question the structures of power, educate themselves about their exploitation, and revolt. But for Durkheim this alienation, or anomie, is debilitating. It is, he wrote, “a collective asthenia” that drains us of energy and will. It manifests itself in self-loathing. We may indeed understand what is happening around us, Durkheim argued, but we lack the ability to free ourselves from the despair, frustration and rage that cripple our lives.
“Our actions require an object outside of themselves,” Durkheim wrote. “It is not because we need to sustain the illusion of some impossible immortality: it is because it is implicit in our moral being and it cannot be lost, even partially, without that moral being losing its reason for existence. There is no need to demonstrate that in such a state of collapse the slightest cause for depression can easily give rise to desperate acts. When life is not worth living, everything becomes a pretext for ridding ourselves of it.”
“For individuals are too closely involved in the life of society for it to be sick without their being affected,” Durkheim added. “Its suffering inevitably becomes theirs.”
President Trump is not a product of the theft of the Podesta emails, James Comey or racism—although he and many who support him are racists—or Russian bots. Demagogues arise from failed democracies plagued by ruleless-ness and anomie. They tell an enraged population what it wants to hear and crudely, to the delight of the betrayed, ridicule the elites who sold them out.
Removing Trump from office without confronting the ruleless-ness and anomie that define the lives of tens of millions of Americans would do nothing to restore democracy. In fact, it would probably consolidate the power of a Christianized fascism that cloaks itself in a cloying piety and false morality. Vice President Mike Pence, because he is a creature of the Christian right and has ingested its protofascist ideology, would probably be worse than Trump if he gained the presidency.
The left, like most critics of Trump, personalizes our decay. It focuses myopically on Trump, who is the symptom, not the disease. It spits back the thought-terminating clichés about the Russians stealing our elections while it refuses to examine the deep wounds within the society, wounds exacerbated when the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton sold out working men and women. If we do not heal these wounds, if we do not restore the social bonds shattered by predatory corporate capitalism, when the next financial crisis arrives—and it will arrive—this collective anomie will explode. Frightening demons, harnessing these dark, self-destructive pathologies, will rise from the depths of the ruleless morass.
American Anomie
The French sociologist Emile Durkheim in his classic book “On Suicide” examined the disintegration of social bonds that drive individuals and societies to personal and collective acts of self-destruction. He found that when social bonds are strong, individuals achieve a healthy balance between individual initiative and communal solidarity, which he called a “life-sustaining equilibrium.” These individuals and communities have the lowest rates of suicide. The individuals and societies most susceptible to self-destruction, he wrote, are those for whom these bonds, this equilibrium, have been shattered.
Societies are held together by a web of social bonds that give individuals a sense of being part of a collective and engaged in a project larger than the self. This collective expresses itself through rituals, such as elections and democratic participation or an appeal to patriotism, and shared national beliefs. The bonds provide meaning, a sense of purpose, status and dignity. They offer psychological protection from impending mortality and the meaninglessness that comes with being isolated and alone. The shattering of these bonds plunges individuals into deep psychological distress that leads ultimately to acts of self-annihilation. Durkheim called this state of hopelessness and despair anomie, which he defined as “ruleless-ness.”
Ruleless-ness means the norms that govern a society and create a sense of organic solidarity no longer function. The belief, for example, that if we work hard, obey the law and get a good education we can achieve stable employment, social status and mobility along with financial security becomes a lie. The old rules, imperfect and often untrue for poor people of color, nevertheless were not a complete fiction in the United States. They offered some Americans—especially those from the white working and middle class—modest social and economic advancement.
But the capture of political and economic power by the corporate elites, along with the redirecting of all institutions toward the further consolidation of their power and wealth, has broken the social bonds that held the American society together. This rupture has unleashed a widespread malaise Durkheim would have recognized.
“When society is strongly integrated,” he wrote, “it keeps individuals in a state of dependency, holding them to be in its service and consequently not permitting them to dispose of themselves as they wish. Society is thus opposed to them escaping from their obligations towards it through death. … The bond that attaches them to their common purpose attaches them to life; and, in any case, the high goal towards which their gaze is turned alleviates the suffering that they feel from life’s troubles. Finally, in a coherent and vital community, there is a continual exchange of ideas and feelings from all to each and from each to all which is like mutual moral support, so that the individual, instead of being reduced to his resources only, participates in the collective energy and draws on it when his own is exhausted.”
The reconfiguring of American society into an oligarchy and the collapse of our democratic institutions have left most of the population disempowered. The elites, predatory by nature, have discarded all restraint. “The state of disorganization, or anomie, is thus reinforced by the fact that passions are less disciplined at the very time when they need stronger discipline,” Durkheim noted of the avarice of the rich.
“It is not for nothing that so many religions have celebrated the benefits and the moral value of poverty,” Durkheim wrote. “This is because, of all schools, it is the one that best teaches man to restrain himself. By obliging us to exercise constant discipline over ourselves, it prepares us to accept collective discipline with docility, while wealth, by exalting the individual, constantly risks awakening the spirit of rebellion that is the very fount of immortality.”
The political process, as the research by professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page underscores, no longer advances the interests of the average citizen. It has turned the consent of the governed into a cruel joke. “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.” This facade of democratic process eviscerates one of the primary social bonds in a democratic state and abolishes the vital shared belief that citizens have the power to govern themselves, that government exists to promote and protect their rights and interests.
The economic structures, like the political structures, have been reconfigured to mock the belief in a meritocracy and that hard work leads to a productive and valued role in society. American productivity, as The New York Times pointed out, has increased 77 percent since 1973 but hourly pay has grown only 12 percent. If the federal minimum wage was attached to productivity, the newspaper wrote, it would be more than $20 an hour now, not $7.25. Some 41.7 million workers, a third of the workforce, earn less than $12 an hour, and most of them do not have access to employer-sponsored health insurance. A decade after the 2008 financial meltdown, the Times wrote, the average middle class family’s net worth is more than $40,000 below what it was in 2007. The net worth of black families is down 40 percent, and for Latino families the figure has dropped 46 percent.
The economic disparity and political dysfunction have been exacerbated by the collapse of the judicial system, as Matt Taibbi writes in his book “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap.” There is aggressive criminalization of the poor while the ruling elites are protected by high-priced lawyers and non-enforcement or rewriting of laws. Amid selective enforcement of laws in the ruleless society, the high rollers on Wall Street and in wealthy enclaves are not prosecuted for possessing and ingesting illegal drugs but the poor are thrown into prison and must forfeit all their property for being caught with small amounts of the same drugs. HSBC, the world’s seventh largest bank by total assets, after admitting to laundering $800 million for Central and South American drug cartels, was slapped with largely symbolic fines and a deferred prosecution agreement, which is the legal equivalent of a get-out-of-jail-free card. The poor, meanwhile, are hounded, arrested and fined for absurdly criminalized activities such as not mowing their lawns, loitering, selling loose cigarettes, carrying open containers of alcohol or “obstructing pedestrian traffic”—which means standing on a sidewalk. These fines are used to fill state and county budget shortfalls resulting from corporations and the wealthy fixing the rules to avoid paying meaningful taxes, if they pay taxes at all. This virtual tax boycott by the rich has broken yet another social bond, the idea that everyone contributes a significant portion of his or her income to make the society function.
The elites, who sacrifice nothing for society and are not held accountable for their criminal behavior, live in what Taibbi calls a “stateless archipelago.” They are empowered to pillage the nation, amass obscene wealth and wield unchecked political and legal control. The result has been the obliteration of the primary social bonds that, however biased in favor of the white majority, held the nation together.
The shattering of these bonds has left tens of millions of Americans adrift. Society, Durkheim wrote, is no longer “sufficiently present for individuals.” Those cast aside can participate in the society, as Durkheim wrote, only “through sadness.” The self-destructive pathologies that plague the United States—opioid addiction, morbid obesity, gambling, suicide, sexual sadism, hate groups and mass shootings—rise out of this anomie. My new book, “America: The Farewell Tour,” is an examination of these pathologies and the anomie that fuels these self-destructive behaviors.
Durkheim noted that the poor have lower rates of suicide. The poor know the rules are rigged against them. James Baldwin made much the same point when he wrote that African-American men are less prone to a midlife crisis than white men because they are less susceptible to the myth of the American Dream. Most African-Americans learn very early in life that there are two sets of rules. But white Americans, because of white supremacy, are more susceptible to the myth, and therefore more infuriated when that myth is exposed as a con. This, I suspect, is why nearly all mass shooters and members of right-wing hate groups, along with a majority of supporters of Donald Trump, are white men.
Capitalism, Durkheim wrote, is antithetical to creating and sustaining the relationships that are vital to social bonds. Capitalism rewards those for whom relationships are transactional and temporary. Relationships under capitalism are mercenary. They are part of the scheme for personal self-advancement and require the oily manipulation of others. To advance in a capitalist system it is necessary to build and then discard a series of ultimately hollow relationships. These empty relationships—and you can see them on display at any business gathering—contribute to the collective anomie and disintegration of social bonds.
Capitalism may cater to a natural desire among many for self-enrichment, but you don’t want this belief system to dominate society. Capitalism rewards single-minded narcissists and often con artists devoid of empathy and incapable of remorse. It rewards those focused exclusively on personal gain and self-aggrandizement. These dedicated capitalists often lack the capacity to form meaningful bonds, seeing in other people tools for commodification and exploitation. Once a capitalist class achieves complete control, as it has in the United States, it dismantles the structures that make social bonds possible, seeing in them an impediment to profit. The more concentrated wealth becomes, as with corporate capitalism, the more damage it inflicts on society, sending jobs to overseas sweatshops and leaving American workers underemployed or unemployed.
Karl Marx saw alienation as a positive force, one that estranged workers from the means of production and moved them to question the structures of power, educate themselves about their exploitation, and revolt. But for Durkheim this alienation, or anomie, is debilitating. It is, he wrote, “a collective asthenia” that drains us of energy and will. It manifests itself in self-loathing. We may indeed understand what is happening around us, Durkheim argued, but we lack the ability to free ourselves from the despair, frustration and rage that cripple our lives.
“Our actions require an object outside of themselves,” Durkheim wrote. “It is not because we need to sustain the illusion of some impossible immortality: it is because it is implicit in our moral being and it cannot be lost, even partially, without that moral being losing its reason for existence. There is no need to demonstrate that in such a state of collapse the slightest cause for depression can easily give rise to desperate acts. When life is not worth living, everything becomes a pretext for ridding ourselves of it.”
“For individuals are too closely involved in the life of society for it to be sick without their being affected,” Durkheim added. “Its suffering inevitably becomes theirs.”
President Trump is not a product of the theft of the Podesta emails, James Comey or racism—although he and many who support him are racists—or Russian bots. Demagogues arise from failed democracies plagued by ruleless-ness and anomie. They tell an enraged population what it wants to hear and crudely, to the delight of the betrayed, ridicule the elites who sold them out.
Removing Trump from office without confronting the ruleless-ness and anomie that define the lives of tens of millions of Americans would do nothing to restore democracy. In fact, it would probably consolidate the power of a Christianized fascism that cloaks itself in a cloying piety and false morality. Vice President Mike Pence, because he is a creature of the Christian right and has ingested its protofascist ideology, would probably be worse than Trump if he gained the presidency.
The left, like most critics of Trump, personalizes our decay. It focuses myopically on Trump, who is the symptom, not the disease. It spits back the thought-terminating clichés about the Russians stealing our elections while it refuses to examine the deep wounds within the society, wounds exacerbated when the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton sold out working men and women. If we do not heal these wounds, if we do not restore the social bonds shattered by predatory corporate capitalism, when the next financial crisis arrives—and it will arrive—this collective anomie will explode. Frightening demons, harnessing these dark, self-destructive pathologies, will rise from the depths of the ruleless morass.
Sunday, September 23, 2018
SC173-12
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2018/09/22/medea-benjamin-shows-america-what-real-resistance-looks-like/
Medea Benjamin Shows America What Real Resistance Looks Like
Almost immediately after hitting publish on my last article about how the so-called “Resistance” to the Trump administration doesn’t actually resist Trump’s most pernicious agendas in any meaningful way, I saw an awesome video clip proving that there is at least one woman out there providing real opposition to Trump where it matters.
A think tank is an organization wherein highly-paid academics pour their collective brainpower into coming up with convincing arguments that it would be good and smart to do something evil and stupid. At one such think tank, the Hudson Institute, former John Bolton advisor and current Mike Pompeo lackey Brian Hook had his neocon cuddle party interrupted by CodePink activist Medea Benjamin Wednesday morning. Benjamin excoriated the Director of Policy Planning for Pompeo’s Iran Action Team, decrying the Trump administration’s crippling sanctions following its withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal.
“That is the most ridiculous thing I have seen,” Benjamin exclaimed while security staff worked to muscle her off the stage. “The world community wants to keep the Iran nuclear deal. Our allies—the Germans, the French, the British—they want to keep in this deal. The world community wants to keep the deal. Let’s talk about normal countries. Let’s talk about Saudi Arabia. Is that who our allies are? They are the biggest threat to the world community. And let’s talk—you’re hurting me. You’re actually hurting me. I want to ask: Do you think these sanctions are hurting the regime, or are they hurting the Iranian people? They’re hurting the Iranian people. You are making a case for war with Iran. How did the war with Iraq turn out? You’re doing exactly the same thing we did in the case of Iraq. We don’t want another war in the Middle East. Let’s see, how did Iraq turn out? How did Libya turn out? We have the people of Syria suffering. And how dare you bring up the issue of Yemen? It’s the Saudi bombing that is killing most people in Yemen. So let’s get real. No more war! Peace with Iran!”
The think tank ghouls chuckled and mocked her, but the damage was done and the video went viral.
As a reminder, the Trump administration has not only leveled crippling sanctions upon Iran with the goal of fomenting civil unrest, but has also escalated CIA covert operations led by Trump-appointed officials and cultivated an intimate relationship with the MEK terror cult, which is spearheading a social media propaganda campaign against the Iranian government directed at western audiences. The Trump administration’s approach to Iran is in these ways mirroring the Obama administration’s approach to Libya and Syria, and has been called a regime change policy in all but name due to the many unrealistic demands being made of the Iranian government in order to deescalate. These escalations could easily erupt into direct hot war in the future, especially with this administration being stuffed to the gills with virulent Iran hawks at the highest levels.
The Medea Benjamin video is so tasty I’ve watched it several times. It feels like it’s attuning my cells and reminding me what it takes to put up real time resistance in the stifling atmosphere of opposition by breaking through the somnolent hypnosis of tribal dynamics.
This is what it takes. But this is all it takes. Interrupt our regularly scheduled programming with a burst of truth and humanity will inevitably rouse a few more from their hypnosis, and a few more awake is a few more towards tipping point. While Democrats are holding demonstrations in support of longstanding neocon agendas against Russia and leftists are gathering to punch racist nobodies in the face, this feisty little sheila threw her body into the bright lights of the brainwashing machine and jammed it right up until they had to physically remove her.
Are we seeing the heart of the anti-war left kick back into life? I sure fucking hope so. Unlike the impotent busybox of Russiagate, this is the resistance to Trump that is real, and it will work. Attacking the Trump administration on their continuation of Bushbama’s warmongering ecocidal, omnicidal policies and refusing to fall in line with longstanding neocon agendas runs interference on the very lifeblood of the parasitic elite that seek to suck the tax dollars of working Americans into murdering humans and fattening Raytheon profit margins.
Destroying the war machine fixes everything from climate change to living standards, terrorism, famine, homelessness, mental health, slavery, plus all the horrors that war always necessarily births into the world such as rape, black markets, human trafficking, refugee crises and so on. Not to mention the butchery of humans for profit which is what war is. Putting up resistance by breaking the hypnotic effect of war propaganda works. No one actually wants war apart from a handful of powerful elites who fund these think tanks to weave lies and manipulate truth into stories that will manufacture consent for endless military bloodbaths. Simply using the truth to run interference on these lies and spin is enough.
Medea Benjamin is my hero. People are going to tell me that she and her organization haven’t been exactly 100 percent perfect on every single issue every single day, because this is the left and that’s what the left does. But I don’t care; anyone who’s willing to throw a hammer in the gears of the machine to any extent is a hero to whatever extent that they did so. Enough of us doing what Medea Benjamin did would bring the entire machine crashing down.
Medea Benjamin, thank you. I salute you.
Medea Benjamin Shows America What Real Resistance Looks Like
Almost immediately after hitting publish on my last article about how the so-called “Resistance” to the Trump administration doesn’t actually resist Trump’s most pernicious agendas in any meaningful way, I saw an awesome video clip proving that there is at least one woman out there providing real opposition to Trump where it matters.
A think tank is an organization wherein highly-paid academics pour their collective brainpower into coming up with convincing arguments that it would be good and smart to do something evil and stupid. At one such think tank, the Hudson Institute, former John Bolton advisor and current Mike Pompeo lackey Brian Hook had his neocon cuddle party interrupted by CodePink activist Medea Benjamin Wednesday morning. Benjamin excoriated the Director of Policy Planning for Pompeo’s Iran Action Team, decrying the Trump administration’s crippling sanctions following its withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal.
“That is the most ridiculous thing I have seen,” Benjamin exclaimed while security staff worked to muscle her off the stage. “The world community wants to keep the Iran nuclear deal. Our allies—the Germans, the French, the British—they want to keep in this deal. The world community wants to keep the deal. Let’s talk about normal countries. Let’s talk about Saudi Arabia. Is that who our allies are? They are the biggest threat to the world community. And let’s talk—you’re hurting me. You’re actually hurting me. I want to ask: Do you think these sanctions are hurting the regime, or are they hurting the Iranian people? They’re hurting the Iranian people. You are making a case for war with Iran. How did the war with Iraq turn out? You’re doing exactly the same thing we did in the case of Iraq. We don’t want another war in the Middle East. Let’s see, how did Iraq turn out? How did Libya turn out? We have the people of Syria suffering. And how dare you bring up the issue of Yemen? It’s the Saudi bombing that is killing most people in Yemen. So let’s get real. No more war! Peace with Iran!”
The think tank ghouls chuckled and mocked her, but the damage was done and the video went viral.
As a reminder, the Trump administration has not only leveled crippling sanctions upon Iran with the goal of fomenting civil unrest, but has also escalated CIA covert operations led by Trump-appointed officials and cultivated an intimate relationship with the MEK terror cult, which is spearheading a social media propaganda campaign against the Iranian government directed at western audiences. The Trump administration’s approach to Iran is in these ways mirroring the Obama administration’s approach to Libya and Syria, and has been called a regime change policy in all but name due to the many unrealistic demands being made of the Iranian government in order to deescalate. These escalations could easily erupt into direct hot war in the future, especially with this administration being stuffed to the gills with virulent Iran hawks at the highest levels.
The Medea Benjamin video is so tasty I’ve watched it several times. It feels like it’s attuning my cells and reminding me what it takes to put up real time resistance in the stifling atmosphere of opposition by breaking through the somnolent hypnosis of tribal dynamics.
This is what it takes. But this is all it takes. Interrupt our regularly scheduled programming with a burst of truth and humanity will inevitably rouse a few more from their hypnosis, and a few more awake is a few more towards tipping point. While Democrats are holding demonstrations in support of longstanding neocon agendas against Russia and leftists are gathering to punch racist nobodies in the face, this feisty little sheila threw her body into the bright lights of the brainwashing machine and jammed it right up until they had to physically remove her.
Are we seeing the heart of the anti-war left kick back into life? I sure fucking hope so. Unlike the impotent busybox of Russiagate, this is the resistance to Trump that is real, and it will work. Attacking the Trump administration on their continuation of Bushbama’s warmongering ecocidal, omnicidal policies and refusing to fall in line with longstanding neocon agendas runs interference on the very lifeblood of the parasitic elite that seek to suck the tax dollars of working Americans into murdering humans and fattening Raytheon profit margins.
Destroying the war machine fixes everything from climate change to living standards, terrorism, famine, homelessness, mental health, slavery, plus all the horrors that war always necessarily births into the world such as rape, black markets, human trafficking, refugee crises and so on. Not to mention the butchery of humans for profit which is what war is. Putting up resistance by breaking the hypnotic effect of war propaganda works. No one actually wants war apart from a handful of powerful elites who fund these think tanks to weave lies and manipulate truth into stories that will manufacture consent for endless military bloodbaths. Simply using the truth to run interference on these lies and spin is enough.
Medea Benjamin is my hero. People are going to tell me that she and her organization haven’t been exactly 100 percent perfect on every single issue every single day, because this is the left and that’s what the left does. But I don’t care; anyone who’s willing to throw a hammer in the gears of the machine to any extent is a hero to whatever extent that they did so. Enough of us doing what Medea Benjamin did would bring the entire machine crashing down.
Medea Benjamin, thank you. I salute you.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
