g-minor
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Please visit this Guns and Butter podcast from January 31, dealing with what the writer calls an epidemic of child sexual abuse. https://gunsandbutter.org/blog/2018/01/31/americas-traffic-in-child-pornography.
Won’t the parlous state of the financial world doom the dam projects? Of course, while waiting for that doom to arrive, they can make a big mess digging and blasting, leveling forests and building access roads for dams that they’ll never have the financing to finish.
Why, since the Fed is not owned by the public but by the banks, are toxic assets on the Fed’s balance sheet taxpayer obligations? I should probably know the answer to this by now, but don’t.
I discovered TAE several years ago when it was still on Blogger (or wherever it was). Because the discussion was general and not fragmented as it is now, it was much easier to make connections and see the big picture that TAE has worked so effectively to delineate. I miss the vitality of those exchanges and the ease with which we were able to navigate.
Thank you in particular for the link to the NY Times page that, in turn, links to documents and articles demonstrating that shale gas is a bubble and a Ponzi scheme. In New York State we’ve been fighting fracking and pipelines for four exhausting and terrifying years. While it is heartening to realize that the bubble will burst and the Ponzi collapse, we can see in neighboring Pennsylvania how much grievous harm the drillers can do while waiting for the inevitable bust. So, alas, we cannot let up on our efforts to stop the atrocity of fracking.
G
Neither Freud nor Jung had a clue about how the brain works. Both were steeped in 19th Century romantic notions of individualism, invented theologies of mind and consciousness and tried to pass them off as science inflected with poetry. Psychologists are just coming around now to recognizing the physical, material facts about what goes on in our heads. Freud and Jung were just telling stories. They may have helped to make us aware of the limitations of what we call our conscious minds (sic) but they didn’t understand that our perceptions of ourselves and others don’t necessarily correspond with what is going on there, and that DNA runs the show with a single-minded agenda of its own.
Professorlocknload post=5580 wrote: Although it’s very early in the game, might be profitable in the longer run to google “DIY guillotine building.” 2018, say’s the IMF Guru, eh? Meanwhile.
Guillotines are fairly easy to throw together. It’s the tumbrils that are the problem. No one knows how to make a cart anymore, much less a wheel.
g
Nicole,
Please comment on this piece by Paul Craig Roberts.https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2012/07/19/the-libor-scandal-in-full-perspective/
Thanks.
G
Nicole: “EROEI is disastrous for shale gas, and shale oil as well for that matter. Companies that stake their future in this sector are destined to go out of business, hopefully before fracking occurs anywhere else.”
I hope and believe that you are right. We’ve been fighting the threat of hydrofracking in New York State for several years and I’m pretty burned out. But, as you suggest, they can still do a lot of damage tearing up the world before they collapse.
g
RE
“Torches first, Pitchforks second, Guillotines finish the job.”
The trouble is no one knows how to make a tumbril anymore.
g
The internal combustion engine and the flush toilet are probably the two worst legacies of the great Age of Progress now drawing rapidly to an end. I have read that Chinese farmers still maintain privies by the side of the road where travelers may make a deposit to return fertility to the land. We, by contrast, spend millions so that we can dump our feces in our drinking water and then spend millions more to clean it up again so that we can drink it. When the grid goes down, that system will threaten the life of anyone dependent upon it.
See Joseph Jenkins excellent and entertaining THE HUMANURE HANDBOOK.
G
einhverfr post=2837 wrote: Of course we still have slavery. What else do you call it when people who are in prison are let out sooner if they work for the profit of other companies while in prison? Is there another word that describes our current prison labor system in the US?
You’re right, of course. But it’s still just a relatively small segment of the population. That seems likely to change.
Metaphoric slavery, as grim and life-destroying as it may be, is not the same as steel shackles and chains. I spent my working life as a free-lancer, pretty much at liberty to do as I pleased. I never made much money and only once got into a crippling mortgage but I also never sat in a cubicle. I wasn’t rich by a very long shot but I also was not a slave. I know that I was lucky but many people of my generation were similarly lucky. I don’t see any young people – except maybe WWOOFers wandering around the world working on organic farms (and that won’t last long either) – with freedom comparable to that I enjoyed. The slavery that is coming back is forced labor, qualitatively different from debt slavery.
A few years back, I was giving talks on Peak Oil, energy descent and relocalization in our area; I would start out by asking if anyone had ever met a slave. Predictably, in by far most instances, everyone would say “No.” I would then point out how unusual that is historically, that every known high civilization, including our own quite recently, had held slaves and would go on to point out that the Emancipation Proclamation was promulgated in 1863, just four years after Colonel Drake successfully drilled an oil well in Pennsylvania. And also Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1808, just a few years after the steam engine fired by coal had begun to change the world. Fossil fuels did not cause the end of slavery, I would say, but they made it stick. At least for a time. Since then, I think that I have come to realize that a hierarchical society with an elite at the top must have a slave or serf or otherwise bonded class to create a surplus to keep the elites in the style they intend to enjoy. For 150 years, we had energy slaves instead. Now the fossil slaves are going away and soon we’ll be back to human ones.
That so many call criticism of Israel “anti-semitism” marks the success of Israeli propaganda in labeling themselves a “Jewish state.” Like El G, I am Jewish (in every quadrant of my recent genetic heritage). Also, like the estimable buzzard, I am a New York Jew who speaks both Yiddish and Hebrew and have lived and worked in Israel. Zionism is the negation of all the qualities of Jewish culture that I grew up to cherish. By the way, most of the world’s Jews do NOT live in Israel even those who claim to support it, and the line for visas at the US Embassy in Tel Aviv is around the block.
Israel has repeatedly stolen state, industrial, and military secrets from the United States (and probably enriched uranium and/or plutonium to kick start their nuclear weapons program). Israel attempted to sink one of our unarmed naval vessels in international waters (and succeeded in murdering and wounding 200 of our sailors). No one was punished. There is lots more. Nevertheless we give them billions of our tax dollars while our despicable government officials grovel before their DGOs when they come to Washington, leaping to their feet to cheer every loathsome piece of Israeli mendacity and war-mongering.
For those needing to take the cure, I strongly recommend a book by Israeli historian (Tel Aviv University) Shlomo Sand, “The Invention of the Jewish People.”
I’m afraid the sample logo attached to the article (perhaps deliberately) looks more like a logo for cheap sneakers than for the wise and compassionate school of inquiry we’ve come to value. Major upgrade required.
Everyone who thinks they own a house––even clear of all mortgage debt––is perpetually in debt to the town, county, or municipality that collects taxes for schools, roads, water, trash collection, etc. Even if you are way off the grid and don’t make use of any of those services, try not paying your taxes for a few years and you’ll discover that you didn’t own your house and land after all. You were just renting it from the man.
g
Ash,
Your series on slavery is great work. At the risk of sounding like (or being) a pedant, I’ll point out that, in your third paragraph from the end, the facts don’t “beg” the question but “raise” the question. See https://begthequestion.info/ I realize that this complaint is trivial compared to the serious issues you are raising, but it’s a usage that always bothers me.
Slavery has been part of every civilization — until the age of fossil fuels. The British started using coal to fire the industrial revolution at the end of the 18th century. They outlawed the slave trade in 1808. Colonel Drake’s first oil well in Pennsylvania was drilled in 1859. The Emancipation Proclamation came 4 years later in 1863. I don’t claim that fossil fuels ended slavery but they did make the (temporary?) end of slavery stick — at least for a while.
You can’t have a hierarchical society with rich idle rentiers at the top without some way to produce a surplus. Slavery is apparently quite handy.
