Archive for the ‘CrashBlogging’ Category

Prognosis

Tuesday, March 8th, 2022

If we attempt to divorce ourselves from our human points-of-view and look on dispassionately, it can be seen that 99%+ of existence is simply working its way towards what is called the ‘heat-death’ of existence. Which can also be expressed as the end-game of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

But there is a much, much smaller part of existence which is moving the other way. I.e. towards amassing greater complexity and concentration of energy and organization. I’m referring to life. Life can arises in goldilocks zones of excess energy through processes we don’t fully understand. But, arise it does. Life on Earth is the proof.

Indeed, I once expressed this in a cryptic bit of writing a few years ago:

Energy evaporates down gradients and little creatures arise in the backwash.

So, do we and the backwash arising of life have a purpose? If so, I cannot see it implied anywhere. But, in spite of that, it is a truly amazing thing that natural processes within existence should be able to create and evolve bits of itself (us) which are aware of itself.

Are we, the pinnacle creatures on this planet, likely to be the pinnacle creatures throughout existence? Given the size of existence, that seems an extremely dubious notion.

I like your idea about what a next intelligent species might be like:

Maybe the next intelligent species won’t even care about tech. They’ll just float around, eat fish, sing songs, have sex, and raise their babies, happy to be alive on this planet.

There’s nothing impossible about it. All it requires is the manifested intent of the new species be to live within the limits of the biosphere around it.

We humans could do that now and live on this planet for many hundreds of thousands of years more. Evolving our intelligence up and up and patiently enjoying our lives and seeing what awaits us.

But I strongly doubt we will change and follow that path. I think we are taking the current biosphere into a big reset. After that, life will slowly build again and maybe those who come after will outgrow this inherent self-destructiveness that we seem to have.

The state of the U.S

Thursday, July 23rd, 2020
A letter to my son who lives in the U.S.  Basically, it is a statement of how I think things got to where they are now in the States.

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I feel your pain, my son. There is a lot of terrible stuff going on in the world and in the U.S. just now.
 
I don’t think Hillary is or was the answer. I don’t think Democrats, as they are now in the U.S., are the answer. From my POV, Democrats and Republicans are basically the same.
 
The fights between these two parties are to see who is going to run the U.S. They are not fights between good and evil. They are fights between two corrupt groups; each of whom wants to control and benefit from the wealth of the richest country in the world.
 
People think of the U.S. as a democracy. But, it hasn’t been a democracy for some time. Laws like those that give corporations the same rights as citizens and laws that remove any limits of how much rich people and corporations can donate to political parties are plain evidence that the votes of the rich and of the corporations clearly weigh far more than the votes of the average man. One has to be in serious denial to not see this.
 
All I can say for Hillary is that if she had been elected, I expect that the looting of American would have gone on quietly; as it has been for the last four or five administrations. Most of the presidents who have been elected in recent decades in the U.S. have been quiet figureheads put into place to give the semblance of presidential leadership while the gathering and looting of the national wealth continued by the party in power at that moment.
 
The middle and lower classes in the U.S. have been getting poorer for decades now. It began in the mid-70’s. And since then, the wealthy have been getting more and more of the pie.
 
And as the rich get richer, they spend more on donations to political parties and candidates. And, not amazingly, those parties and candidate vote in laws that benefit their donors. Wealth is essentially ‘buying’ the American democracy.
 
This is not a function of the Democrats or the Republicans. They are both pushed up against the same trough to get what they can.
To see why America is getting poorer and more unstable, we only have to look to see why it was getting wealthier up until the 70’s and why it began to get poorer after that time.
 
And the answer is that then corporations realized that rather than manufacturing things in America, with its well paid workers and strong unions, they could make the same things in the far east in China and cut way down on manufacturing costs. And that, in turn, made their profit margins go way up.
 
So, from the POV of the big corporations and the wealthy, this was a no-brainer, a win-win. They shifted manufacturing to the far east and began making way more money.
 
But no one, seemingly, thought about what effect this would have on America in general. America had been a manufacturing powerhouse all through the 50’s and 60’s. America made things. America manufactured wealth. We made excellent things, we sold excellent things – and life was good.
 
But when manufacturing went overseas, the American dollars, that would have been spent on America workers, and which would have then circulated around inside of the America economy, went overseas to pay for the manufacturing and a lot of cheaply made shit came back.
 
The net effect was that America began to bleed money towards China at the same time that American corporations began to make higher profits from having lower manufacturing costs. But overall the net was that America was losing money and getting poorer. And the money being lost was coming from the middle and lower classes and the profits from lower manufacturing costs was accruing to the wealthy.
 
For awhile the middle and lower classes were happier. They now had places like Walmart where they could buy stuff cheaper and that gave them the impression that life was getting better. But it was an illusion.
 
Union busting began in earnest after that because with manufacturing gone overseas, the unions had little power to negotiate for American workers. And the corporations were happy to bust the unions because that meant they could pay their U.S. workers even less which lead to more profits for them.
 
One particularly nasty side effect of this gutting of American industry by sending manufacturing overseas was that all this money that was going to China, allowed China to build up and ENORMOUS balance of trade with the U.S. They were putting money into their banks hand-over-fist. And that, my son, is how they went from being a third-world military power to a first-world military power in a few decades. And America paid for it. American corporate greed for lower manufacturing costs has trashed the middle and lower American classes and made China a world power. And all of that happened right under our noses.
 
You won’t see this discussed much in the U.S. when folks are analyzing what’s going wrong. Why? Because both parties, Democrat and Republican, are complicit in the entire business.
 
Once big money realized that they could buy votes to get the laws they wanted, they began doing so and they ended up owning the souls of most politicians. And as they got more and more of the laws they wanted, they ended up controlling the American political system better and better. And the rich don’t care of America is being gutted during all of this. They are walking away richer and that is all they care about. It is simple human nature.
 
You are probably wondering what this long essay has to do with rioters, Black Lives Matter, COVID-19 and Trump?
 
Well, it is necessary to understand how we got to where we are now
American is a failing empire. And has been for decades now.
Wealth is bleeding out because the country is not longer a net wealth creator. And, of the residual wealth (which is still a hell of a lot) that remains, much is being looted year by year in unreasonable corporate profits, massive bonuses for corporate bigwigs, off-shore tax avoidance schemes, and tax-relief schemes for the wealthy that are enacted by the political parties that those same wealthy folks helped put into power with their donations.
 
There’s no other way to say it. The country is owned by the rich and it being looted by the rich. The much cherished ideas of one-man-one-vote and equality for all are increasingly just mirages.
 
But these things don’t happen overnight. They take decades to slowly unfold.
 
But, before we get into the heart of things, do you know how the U.S. government finances itself from year to year?
 
Each year, the U.S. sells bonds. These bonds don’t payback a huge amount when they mature but they do have one attractive property. They ALWAYS pay back what they promised and they have NEVER failed to do so.
 
The U.S. is still regarded as the wealthiest nation in the world and the U.S. dollar is the de-facto reference currency of the world.
 
These factors mean that buying U.S. bonds is one of the safest things a rich individual or a foreign government can do with their excess wealth. Every year, the U.S. sells U.S. bonds and folks ALWAYS buy them.
 
The U.S. sells bonds each year to the generate the money it uses to run the country next year. Each year, as the size of the national budget goes up, the U.S. sells more bonds to cover it.
 
Does this sound familiar? In banking terms it is called “kiting checks”. The U.S. is essentially paying for the increasing costs of running the country by selling bonds to stay ahead.
 
But, here’s the rub. They can’t do this forever.
 
And given that the U.S. has been bleeding money for decades and getting poorer, the country is getting to be like a big cardboard store-front. There’s not as much real wealth standing behind the cardboard as they’re used to be. And there’s less every year.
 
There is going to come a big, final show-stopper event when the U.S. finally can’t pay back on the bonds it sells. It is going to be a major world-shaking default.
 
The entire world of finance knows about this. They have known for years. And all it will take to bring the U.S. to a full stop is for entities to stop buying U.S. bonds. If they stop, then the U.S. won’t have enough money to run and it won’t have enough money to pay back on the bonds it sold previously and BOOM – big toast.
 
It hasn’t happened yet because if the U.S. defaulted then a lot of countries like China, which holds large amounts of U.S. bonds, would also get badly hurt – because they would not get payed back on their bonds.
 
But everyone knows that things cannot go on like this. The U.S. is standing on financial sand that is seeping away from under its feet. China and the others are buying less and less U.S. bonds each year to minimize their exposure to the problem. China and Russia are trying to rework in the international financial system to make their currencies the de-facto reference currencies so they can get away from the U.S. dollar and make themselves more powerful.
 
So, year by year the U.S. is in a worse and worse financial position. As I said, the U.S. is a failing empire and the irony is that it took out its own ‘greed-gun’ and shot itself in the foot when it chose to sent its manufacturing overseas.
 
Meanwhile, the rich-listers and the multi-national corporations in the U.S. are locking up the political system by buying the politicians left and right to pass the laws to benefit themselves. Why? So they can loot what they can of the remaining U.S. wealth.
 
Son, don’t forget that these folks are wealthy enough that borders don’t mean squat to them. They can buy their way into most countries if they are wealthy enough. So, if the U.S. crumbles into anarchy, they will just move away.
 
So how does all of this backstory relate to what’s going on now? Well, several unusual things have happened all at once in recent years.
First, the normal pattern of voting in one party or the other to continue to the looting has been broken.
 
The American public can sense that the American empire is failing. They may not be able to articulate, it as I have, but they clearly know that they are getting poorer and things are not right. Hence, they were not happy to just put in another figurehead president, like Hillary, to continue with business as usual (make that looting as usual). And in a major surprise, they elected Donald Trump.
 
A billionaire, a businessman, a reality TV host and a serious narcissist. People were tired of more of the same and they wanted big change and he promised it – in big bold letters.
 
But, as a billionaire, was he really the one we should trust to reverse things back to the America that we remember when the country was getting richer and things were good? No matter if electing him was logical or not. The American public wanted a change and he was it.
 
The second factor was the Covid-19 virus. Who could have predicted that? It has come out of left field to body-slam the world.
 
And then the third factor was triggered when George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis.
 
The first and third factors reveal a deep and growing instability in the way things are being run in the U.S.
 
If things had been handled better and the U.S. had not beggared itself by sending its manufacturing offshore and if the rich hadn’t essentially ‘bought’ the house and senate votes, then I strongly doubt that conditions would have been right to elect someone like Donald Trump. He would have just remaining a self-impressed wealthy showman with a trophy wife.
 
And if the U.S. had really tried to embrace its minorities and had not just kept sweeping the racism problem back under the rug each time it arose, then things like Minneapolis probably would not have happened. And, if they did, they would not have been part of a large pattern that has been ignored over and over again.
 
But factor two, the Covid-19 virus has been the real show-stopper. It has pushed our fragile systems, globally, right to the edge relentlessly and it has pointed up a very deep truth that everyone, especially our politicians, needs to learn.
 
And that is that the virus is part of a reality that doesn’t care what we think, what we believe or what we hope. Like gravity, it just happens and we have no choice about it – none. We either work with it ‘as it is’ or we deny how it is – at our own expense.
 
Donald Trump and many other leaders believe that the world and reality are shaped by their charisma, their leadership and the force of their personalities. When those sorts of beliefs come up against the virus, they are not going to win – it isn’t going to happen. Anyone who doesn’t realize that we have to work around the virus ‘as it is’ – is simply is simply in denial of reality.
 
Reality doesn’t care what we think. Gravity doesn’t ask our permission to do what it does and neither does something like this virus. It is programmed by evolution to do one thing and no matter how many speeches are given that ‘it will go away’ and no matter how many meetings are held trying to balance of the health costs vs. the costs to our economies, it will still just do just what it does because it doesn’t care. It doesn’t even know we are here. It doesn’t know anything. It just does what it does.
 
People like Trump and all those who resist face-masks and social distancing are just walking into the whirling blades of this thing with nothing but denial and bravado in hand.
 
So, what’s a person to make of all of this?
 
Damned if I have a good answer, Son. But I do think it settles the mind and gives some sense of clarity about what’s going on if you have the larger backstory and can see a bit of how things got to where they are.
 
Trump thinks he’s destined to be a great world-changing leader. I think he’s got a bit of Mussolini in him. But he is clearly a product of his times.
 
The U.S. is coming unraveled. And at such times strong leaders emerge and their natural response is to clamp down and to try to hold things together. But Trump’s also got an election coming up and he wants badly to win it. So, he’s playing the cards he’s got. And Law and Order is a big card just now and it clearly appeals to his base.
 
Regarding Portland: Portland belongs to the folks that live there. If they have a democratic governor and mayor, it is because they elected them. And if those leaders choose to deal with the demonstrators as they have been, then that’s their right. And if the locals don’t like it, then they can vote it more law and order oriented governors and mayors. Isn’t that the American way?
 
There’s no place in that equation for outside Federal interference – except that it represents a way for Trump to play the Law and Order card loudly to rally his base and create the impression that he’s saving the world from liberal anarchy.
 
Sending federal soldiers to ‘democrat’ cities? Really?
 
He’s attempting to manufacture a bogus war between liberal and conservatives for his own purposes. And I suspect it has to do with getting re-elected though that is looking less and less likely. And if he cannot win the election, how about he just blows by it by creating a small civil war so he can claim that the nation is in such turmoil that an election is not possible?
 
All this also serves as a way to distract from the fact that for all of his bluster, Trump’s handled the Covid-19 situation abysmally.
 
Yesterday’s headline said that Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. have no
w exceed 140,000 but Trump claims things are getting better.
 
The U.S. is a failing empire and these sorts of things happen in failing empires.
 
If you are on the inside of the empire and your entire life, family and livelihood depend on stability and predictability and things are falling apart all around you, then I can see how easy it is to get caught up in the good-guy, bad-guy, liberal, conservative rhetoric.
 
It is a game that is currently driven by one man’s desire to dominate the situation and retain the presidency and he will do whatever it takes to it it – even if he pulls the country down around everyone’s ears.

Your asked if I have better suggestions?
  • If he would just back off and govern for the good of the people.
  • If he would stop with all the conservative against liberal agitation.
  • If he would start doing whatever it takes for the U.S. to beat the virus as New Zealand has.
  • If he would start rolling back all the laws that benefit the rich against the poor and middle classes.
  • If he would block the loopholes that allow the wealthy to avoid taxes and hide their money offshore.
  • If he would work to bring manufacturing back into the country.
  • If he would stop unlimited campaign financing so that the elected representatives represent the voters who elected them rather than those who donated massive amounts of money too their campaigns.
  • If he would revoke the law that says corporations have the same rights as people.
  • If he would establish universal health care like every other major nation the the world.
  • If he would see to it that the primary ethic of the U.S.’s national government is to maximize the quality of life for all of its citizens.
All of this is possible and it has been done in other countries.
 
How’s that for a list of suggestions about what might be done?
 
But, of course, none of what we say here will matter. You can believe what you want and I can say what I believe and in the end, forces much larger than you or I will control how it all plays out.
 
So, what to do?

Well, anger doesn’t help. It just clouds our judgment. Getting a clear idea of how things got to where they are improves our ability to predict where they might go next and that has good survival value. But becoming part of one hostile faction or the other doesn’t lead to clarity. It just leads to anger and blaming again.
 
In truth, I wish I could transport all of you down here to New Zealand.  Both of your skill sets would work very well for you here.  It is a small place but it is run reasonably and there is good opportunity here.
 
Love you, son
 

Has the Cyberwar begun quietly?

Saturday, August 17th, 2019

There have been a number of stories over recent months that do not add up to much by themselves.  But together, they may represent the emerging tip of a future iceberg of major import.

Nation states are well aware of the fact that crippling each other’s infrastructure through Internet-based attacks is a much cheaper way to inflict damage on an enemy at a distance that any sort of physical attack; with the probable exception of nuclear weapons.

Can you take down their electricity grid?  Can you take down or destroy the turbines in their electricity generating stations?  Can you cause the major router stations in their Internet to shut down?  Can you cause the traffic lights in many of their major cities to malfunction?  Can you mess with the systems that coordinate the comings and goings of trains that have to time-share their tracks?  Can you cause the GPS signals over their country to become unreliable?  Can you cause a melt-down the just-in-time inventory systems that control the resupply of their major market chains?  Can you cause fires and destruction in their oil refineries and oil pipelines by interfering in their many interlinked control systems?  Can you interfere and confuse their military control and communication systems?  Can you shut down the ATMs and banking systems of their larger banks?

Think water pumping stations and sewage works.  Think petrol stations.

The list goes on and on.  And, whether you believe it or not, our vulnerabilities are high and the stakes are far higher still.  And most high tech nation-states have had highly competent and professional teams quietly working on such things for years

This following link will take you to all the articles on my Samadhisoft Blog that are about Cyber Warfare.  Follow it if you want to read earlier background material, i.e., about things that have preceded the more recent events that I’m going to talk about here today.  Take a good browse – there is a lot there.

But, coming back into the present – consider the following things which have occurred recently.

Playing with GPS

A few months ago, I began noting articles about how the Norwegians were complaining that GPS in their area was not working correctly.

See: This and This and and This and This.

Then, some months after that, I saw very similar similar complaints being made by the Israelis:

See: This and This and This and This

Interesting, eh?

Playing with Airline Systems

More recently, a major British Airline (BA) has had not one but two major IT meltdowns within a week.   And both times, chaos ensued. 

See: July 31st and August 7th.

And Stock Markets

Here are two stories about a stock market meltdown in Britain: Story1 – Aug 17th. and Story2 – Aug 17th.

So, do these events I’m citing make a pattern, do they indicate something?

Maybe and maybe not.  Maybe they are just chance events.  Or, maybe they represent ‘proof-of-concept’ exercises by various cyber players.

If Russia, or some other player, wanted to test out their ability to throw the global GPS system off by running a few tests like this, then what we’ve seen here makes sense.

And considering Iran’s current disagreements with Britain over the oil tanker that the UK seized in Gibraltar and over sanctions against Iran in general, then maybe Iran is just flexing its cyber-muscles a bit in the UK’s cyber space?  Say an airline system hack here a stock market disabling crash there?

This has all been going on, quietly, for some time.  Consider this article from 2013 in which U.S. power stations were found to be infected.  

Consider as well this article from 2010 which discusses how the U.S. destroyed many of the Uranium-enriching centrifuges that Iran was using to prepare nuclear materials. 

Do you think it is just a coincidence that Russia and Iran have taken active steps to be able to isolate their entire national Internet systems by throwing a few switches?  See this.

Does all this seem far fetched to you?  It doesn’t to me. 

In fact, I am certain that most major technically capable nations-states have long since infiltrated the infrastructures of the other nation-states that it considers to be potential enemies.

So, if a war breaks out, we can fully expect that every embedded bit of malware in our nation’s infrastructure will trigger and most of them will cause a lot of essential things to break or shut down.  The only consolation will be that if our cyber-warriors are good as well, the enemy will likely suffer similar consequences.

And, just as certainly, folks on each side are working intensely to detect and disable all the infiltrated malware that they can  even while they are trying to work out how to hide our stuff ever more cleverly.  It is truly a major clandestine cat-and-mouse game

So, will it be limited to big ticket items?  No, I don’t think so.  Remember the “Internet of things”?  Abbreviated as IoT?

Here’s a story that will make you squirm.  The IoT includes such innocuous things as Baby Monitors:  Read this.

Our houses are becoming full of IoT things:  refrigerators, smart TVs, garage door openers, heating systems, our fancy mobiles, heart pacemakers and multi-line phones.  And the list goes on.  And we assume, when we buy such things, that the manufacturer has done their research and given us devices that do not leave us vulnerable.  Do you really think that’s true?  As they tread the fine line between (1) giving us equipment that has been strongly researched to protect us and (2) maximizing their profits, where do you think they will walk?

Any guesses why the U.S. and several other countries are so adamantly opposed to allowing Chinese manufactured Huawei equipment to be allowed to underpin their next-generation 5G mobile systems?

Given that I’ve spent a lifetime working in IT, I am pretty certain that most folks have very little idea how the router that brings the Internet into their house even works.  Much less knowing what to do to change its passwords and check that they are protected.  And that’s just the household router.  How do you know that your IoT devices are not hackable?  How do you even know if the new widget you just bought “is” an IoT device?

The road signs are flashing, “Fun times ahead”!

My business card says on it that I am a “Futurist”.  Of course, no one appoints anyone as a futurist so the appointments are self-done. And you, dear reader, have no way to know if I am wearing a tin-foil conspiracy hat here or pumping out gospel quality news of the future.  

I get that.  Ask around.  Look around.  And see what you see.  The future is going to belong to all of us.

 

South by South-South

Saturday, August 25th, 2018

I write, occasionally, for the Sky Valley Chronicle in Washington State in the United States; where I used to live up until 10 years ago.  Here’s an article I just wrote for them.

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Amid the clatter of many dozen keyboards, the constant smell of coffee and a steady influx of reports arriving from the Chronicle’s bevy of international correspondents, I have, I believe, the honor of being the Chronicle’s southern-most correspondent. That is unless they’ve hired someone to cover Antarctica and they’ve failed to tell me.

I’m a former resident of Monroe, Washington, and the Sky Valley area; where I lived for 20 years. But in 2009, I moved to New Zealand and settled there in the city of Christchurch on the country’s South Island.

New Zealand is out in the midst of the South Pacific Ocean 1000 miles east and south of Australia. It could easily be considered the world’s most remote advanced western democracy. The country’s two major islands, called the North Island and the South Island, are together about the size of Colorado.

You’ve heard of the place and you say Baaaaaaa? Yes, you are right. There are about seven sheep here for every person.

The country makes its way, financially, with tourism, agriculture and forestry. But, remote or not, it has all the same high technology attributes that the other advanced nations have.

Occasionally, in the years since I left western Washington, I’ve written pieces for the Chronicle discussing my New Zealand travels and also some of the other places I’ve visited to in the 10 years since I left.

In this story, I want to share a trip with you that I took recently right here on New Zealand’s South Island. You might say this was a trip to the “South of the South” because I went right down the southern end of the South Island. This trip was partly for fun and tourism and partly because I’m thinking abut the future and where I might want to own land for my family. I’ll share a few of those thoughts as we go along.

But first, let’s get you oriented.

New Zealand is a long country that stretches basically north and south. If you laid the entire country alongside the U.S.’s west coast, at the same latitudes, the southernmost, or coldest, part of New Zealand would fall about where Astoria, Washington is. And the northernmost, or warmest, part would be about where Los Angeles is.

Where I live in Christchurch on the South Island falls at about where Eugene, Oregon, is.

This country is a place of incredible beauty and low population. About 4.5 million people live here.

When you think about the weather, try not to let the fact that the southernmost end of the South Island falls about where Astoria is fool you. The weather here is quite different from Astoria – or anyplace along the U.S.’s west coast.

You see, New Zealand sits in what is called the Great Southern Ocean. If you look at a globe or a world map, you’ll see that once you get south of the world’s major land masses, there’s a huge sweep of ocean that goes right around the southern part of the world. This is the Great Southern Ocean. Other than the southern tip of South America, there’s nothing else down here at these southern latitudes; except little New Zealand. And without significant land masses to block the southern weather systems, they sweep powerfully around the world from west to east unimpeded. These southern waters are some of the wildest oceans on the planet.

So the weather in New Zealand, especially in its more southerly parts, can change three times a day quite easily as the systems come roaring in from the west. It can be hard country with huge rains; similar to what happens along the Pacific Northwest’s coast. And snow is not at all uncommon, which might seem like an odd idea when you think of an island in the South Pacific. But you have to remember just how far south we are and how unrestrained the Great Southern Ocean’s weather systems are.

There are some tremendous mountains here as well. These are the Southern Alps. They are relatively new ranges so they are still freshly risen, sharp-edged and jagged. Great ranges of them rise along the South Island’s entire west coast from north to south. Among them, Mount Cook and twenty other peaks rise to above 10,000 feet.

But, farther south along this island’s western coast, there’s a very special country to be found. It is a country with mountains, thousands of square miles of virgin forests and deep fiords like those in Norway. And all of this sits pristinly within an enormous national park that occupies the entire southwestern corner of the island. This park, the Fiordland National Park, comprises over 8% of the South Island’s total area. And, except for one road in the northeastern corner of the park from Te Anau (tay-ah-no) to Milford Sound, there simply are no roads at all. If you want to get into the inner spaces of this vast park, it is going to require hiking, a helicopter or a float plane. Or you’ll have to come around by sea and into one of the deep fiords. This area is truly one of the world’s better kept secrets.

The occasion for this trip was my birthday. That, and the fact that I hadn’t yet seen this part of my adopted country. I’d been wanting to go down and see the area for some time – and this year was the year we went.

We? Yes, that would be myself and my Kiwi partner, Colette, with whom I’ve been living here in Christchurch for these last eight years.

We flew from Christchurch to Queenstown and then got a rental car at the Airport. From there, we drove to Te Anau, a town of about 2,000 folks.  Follow this link for information about Te Anau.

This was in August which, in the northern hemisphere. would be high tourist season. But we are in the southern hemisphere and August here is like February in the U.S.

So, the town was quiet. About half the restaurants and hotels were closed for the season. But that all suited us fine. We are not into big crowds of people. But all the extreme beauty of Te Anau and its lake remained; and it was spectacular. Our holiday apartment was just beside the lake and the downtown area was only a 10 minute walk away. Mountains topped with snow stood around us in all directions.

Something that’s different about hotel rooms here in New Zealand is that they nearly all come equipped with kitchens and everything you might need if you want to stay in and cook.

Te Anau is truly at the end of the world down in the “South of the South”. Beyond it there is only the one road out to Milford Sound. And that road is a one-way-in and one-way-out affair with an interesting and rough-hewn tunnel that bores under the Southern Alps at one point.

We were enjoying all this beauty and reveling in having so much of it to ourselves. But I was also looking at the land around me and thinking about the future; as I mentioned earlier.

But, let’s backup a bit.

I came to New Zealand ten years ago for several reasons. Some of them had to do with the politics and the finances in the U.S. which I felt were really going downhill. And as much as I loved, and still love, the United States and its people, these things were really annoying me. And I also came because I’d seen New Zealand a few years before and I’d liked the smallness of it and the slower pace. No place is perfect and New Zealand is no exception; but it seemed better here. And last, but not least, I was already thinking then that the world was getting more and more unstable every year. And the idea of being far away from the crowds and tensions in the northern hemisphere was attractive.

So, if a person was looking for how to get out of harm’s way, I think by moving down to New Zealand, I’ve probably made a good start at it. But now that I’ve been here awhile, I find myself thinking about what’s next. About how things might change here in the future, how I can protect my decendants and about how we could all benefit from the coming changes.

So, I’ve been thinking about land down here. Land down in the South of the South. And our trip to Te Anau and Milford was my way of putting another piece into that puzzle.

The southernmost part of New Zealand’s South Island is, as I said, a largely unpopulated area. It’s remote from the cities and it is cold. But, I’m attracted to it because don’t think it is always going to stay that way.

On an trip a few years ago, I visited another area here in the deep south. It’s over on the southeastern corner of the South Island and it’s an area called “The Catlins”.  Follow this link for information about the Catlins.

It’s another beautiful and remote area. Perhaps, it’s not as extreme as Te Anau and the Fiordland area for beauty and high mountains, but it’s intriguing just the same. Only 1200 people live there and it has hills, mountains, forests, rivers, harbors and land that is fertile and seas that teeming with life in this remote corner of the world.

A lot of people are saying that the world is heading towards some hard times. But really, not a lot has happened so far and things seem relatively intact. But I beleive things are beginning to change now slowly. And greater changes are gathering all around us. I recently read an article with a map that showed what the world might look like if the temperature rises another few degrees. And it was not a pretty sight.

But is all this actually going to happen? Yes, personally, I think so.

Consider that the world has a lot of problems. Problems that are building their way steadily towards critical. Just give a thought to religious fundamentalism, over population, resource depletion, pollution, growing wealth inequality, increasing political polarization, nuclear proliferation, food and fresh water shortages, pandemics, refugee migrations, the breakdown of the weaker nations like Somalia, species extinctions, and this little list is no where near exhausted – it goes on and on.

A few of these problems may sort themselves out. But I find it really hard to believe that all of them will come right. And for the ones that don’t come right, the clock is ticking until one or more of them go critical and the wheels start to come off.

If such a thing happens, do you think anyone really going to want to find themselves living in downtown Los Angeles or Seattle? I don’t think so.

But the truth is that people can pretend impending disaster isn’t real – if they don’t feel that they have any real options.

Here’s a quote by Tolstoy from War and Peace that gives some insight into this:

With the enemy’s approach to Moscow, the Moscovites’ view of their situation did not grow more serious but on the contrary became even more frivolous, as always happens with people who see a great danger approaching.

At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger, since it is not in man’s power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant.

Of course, many of us hope that things will hold together for the rest of our lives. And maybe they will.

But, I find myself thinking, what about our kids and their kids? What are they going to do in this future world? A world that is looking more and more dangerous.

Thoughts like these were, in part, on my mind when I moved down to New Zealand ten years ago. But, New Zealand wasn’t my only option back then for getting out of harm’s way. And in fact, if I’d have stayed in the U.S., I would have still had some good possibilities available to me. If you are following my line of thought about all of this, some of these thoughts might be of interest to you.

If I was still living in the Pacific Northwest now, I’d be seriously looking towards the Alaska Panhandle area. It has all of the following advantages:

The panhandle is remote with low population. It’s in the U.S. so you’ve got every right to move there. It’s cold; but that’s OK because things are going to get warmer. It’s got mountains and wildlife so you’ve got water, hunting possibilities and building supplies close by. It’s by the ocean which is a food source and it keeps the temperature swings a bit mellower than further inland. It is well worth a look.

But now that I’m here, it’s the South of the South that I’m considering.

You see, if the climate predictions of increasing warmth hold true and the world does get warmer, a lot of things are going to change. The primary bread-basket growing areas in the U.S., places like California’s Central Valley and the U.S.’s midwest, are going to start migrating north. That will probably spell the end for California’s growing capabilities and what’s working well now in the U.S.’s midwest will begin to shift towards the Canadian plains.

The same things will occur here in the southern hemisphere but just reversed. And that has made me realize that the southern South Island, that now seems so cold, remote and sparsely populated, is going to come into its own as the shift gets moving. And I’m thinking this is worth considering before the land rush begins.

We’ve got another problem here in New Zealand that most people, even in this country, haven’t thought a lot about. You see, New Zealand and Australia have a long-standing agreement that allows folks from either country to freely move to the other one.

This hasn’t been much of a problem so far but temperatures in Australia are already ramping up and they are facing ever more severe droughts. Even at the best of times, Australian agriculture has been a marginal business and things are getting worse.

If you look at Australia on the map, with its 20 million people, the vast majority of them are gathered along the coasts because nearly all of the country’s interior is simply a desert wasteland. As temperatures rise, our little clean and green New Zealand is going to start to look pretty good to a lot of Australians. And this makes me wonder how many of the 20 million can come over to a small country of 4.5 million before New Zealand is overrun. Again, it is another reason to think ahead and to get moving ahead of events.

For the moment, I am strongly favoring the Catlins. I’d like to buy a large piece of land there and just sit on it as a future-proofing investment. At the moment, the place is too remote and cold for many people to be interested. But, as I said, I’ve got a lot of reasons for thinking that will change.

So, did you know that some of the wealthier people in the U.S. are already seeing the future I’m taking about and they are coming down here now to New Zealand to establish “Bolt Holes”? Yep, they are buying land in New Zealand as an insurance policy so they’ll have a place to run to if the wheels start coming off up north.

Peter Thiel, the American Billionaire and one of the founders of PayPal, essentially bought his way into a New Zealand citizenship recently.

And here’s another story about Americans coming down.

A lot of wealthy folks are beginning to smell the coffee and they are planning where they want to be, if things get bad.

I feel quite lucky in that I am already here and I’m a New Zealand citizen now. So I’ve done a large part of what I can do to get out of harm’s way. But buying land down in the Catlins for my kin would hopefully give them a shot at a good future because they would own land in an area that can only get better as the climate warms..

But, my American readers, what are your options? Moving to the other side of the planet to a place like New Zealand is only going to work for you if you are young (you cannot get in after 55), educated (they have a points systems that favors those with college degrees) and you are wealthy enough to be able to absorb to cost and turmoil of shifting half way around the world.

You might console yourself by thinking that having two weeks of food and water stashed out in your garage as a hedge is going to sort things out for you. But, I don’t think so.

Think about what you are going to do. Think about water and food, if everything should go to hell. Buy some remote land and build a strong cabin that can be securely locked up. Stash some stuff there or nearby. This might be the best insurance policy you could ever buy for you and those who come after you. Some day your descendants may give thanks for your forethought.

If I was still living in Western Washington, I’d be looking towards the Alaska Panhandle.

Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems

Tuesday, January 2nd, 2018

Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?

Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007?8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?

So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.

Never mind structural unemployment: if you don’t have a job it’s because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you’re feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it’s your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.

Among the results, as Paul Verhaeghe documents in his book What About Me? are epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, loneliness, performance anxiety and social phobia. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Britain, in which neoliberal ideology has been most rigorously applied, is the loneliness capital of Europe. We are all neoliberals now.

***

The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria, they saw social democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the gradual development of Britain’s welfare state, as manifestations of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism.

U.S. sees first case of bacteria resistant to all antibiotics

Friday, May 27th, 2016
  • This story has been on its way for a very long time.  I recall the possibility being discussed when I was in University studying Microbiology in the 1970’s.  We are our own worst enemies.  We don’t use antibiotics intelligently and this is the result – bugs that become immune to the best weapons we have against them.

dennis

  • Update on this story here.  It’s not as bad as it first sounded.  Thx Alan T. for the research.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

U.S. health officials on Thursday reported the first case in the country of a patient with an infection resistant to all known antibiotics, and expressed grave concern that the superbug could pose serious danger for routine infections if it spreads.

“We risk being in a post-antibiotic world,” said Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, referring to the urinary tract infection of a 49-year-old Pennsylvania woman who had not traveled within the prior five months.

Frieden, speaking at a National Press Club luncheon in Washington, D.C., said the infection was not controlled even by colistin, an antibiotic that is reserved for use against “nightmare bacteria.”

The infection was reported Thursday in a study appearing in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology. It said the superbug itself had first been infected with a tiny piece of DNA called a plasmid, which passed along a gene called mcr-1 that confers resistance to colistin.

“(This) heralds the emergence of truly pan-drug resistant bacteria,” said the study, which was conducted by the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of mcr-1 in the USA.”

The study said continued surveillance to determine the true frequency of the gene in the United States is critical.

“It is dangerous and we would assume it can be spread quickly, even in a hospital environment if it is not well contained,” said Dr. Gail Cassell, a microbiologist and senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School.

But she said the potential speed of its spread will not be known until more is learned about how the Pennsylvania patient was infected, and how present the colistin-resistant superbug is in the United States and globally.

The colistin-resistant gene was found last year in people and pigs in China. That discovery followed a different superbug gene that emerged in India in 2010.

In the meantime, Cassell said people can best protect themselves from the superbug and from other bacteria resistant to antibiotics by thoroughly washing their hands, washing fruits and vegetables thoroughly and preparing foods appropriately.

She said experts have warned since the 1990s that especially bad superbugs could be on the horizon, but few drugmakers have attempted to develop drugs against them.

“The medicine cabinet is threadbare because not enough has been done.”

  • To the original article:  

The Zombie Doctrine

Sunday, April 17th, 2016

Crisis after crisis is being caused by a failed ideology. But it cannot be stopped without a coherent alternative.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 16th April 2016

It’s as if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?

Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007-8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?

So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions, that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counter-productive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.

Never mind structural unemployment: if you don’t have a job it’s because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you’re feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it’s your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.

Among the results, as Paul Verhaeghe documents in his book What About Me? are epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, loneliness, performance anxiety and social phobia. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Britain, in which neoliberal ideology has been most rigorously applied, is the loneliness capital of Europe. We are all neoliberals now.

+++

The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria, they saw social democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the gradual development of Britain’s welfare state, as manifestations of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism.

In The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, Hayek argued that government planning, by crushing individualism, would lead inexorably to totalitarian control. Like Mises’s book BureaucracyThe Road to Serfdom was widely read. It came to the attention of some very wealthy people, who saw in the philosophy an opportunity to free themselves from regulation and tax. When, in 1947, Hayek founded the first organisation that would spread the doctrine of neoliberalism – the Mont Pelerin Society – it was supported financially by millionaires and their foundations.

With their help, he began to create what Daniel Stedman Jones describes in Masters of the Universe as “a kind of neoliberal International”: a transatlantic network of academics, businessmen, journalists and activists. The movement’s rich backers funded a series of think tanks which would refine and promote the ideology. Among them were the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute. They also financed academic positions and departments, particularly at the universities of Chicago and Virginia.

As it evolved, neoliberalism became more strident. Hayek’s view that governments should regulate competition to prevent monopolies from forming gave way, among American apostles such as Milton Friedman, to the belief that monopoly power could be seen as a reward for efficiency.

Something else happened during this transition: the movement lost its name. In 1951, Milton Friedman was happy to describe himself as a neoliberal. But soon after that, the term began to disappear. Stranger still, even as the ideology became crisper and the movement more coherent, the lost name was not replaced by any common alternative.

At first, despite its lavish funding, neoliberalism remained at the margins. The post-war consensus was almost universal: John Maynard Keynes’s economic prescriptions were widely applied, full employment and the relief of poverty were common goals in the US and much of western Europe, top rates of tax were high and governments sought social outcomes without embarassment, developing new public services and safety nets.

But in the 1970s, when Keynesian policies began to fall apart and economic crises struck on both sides of the Atlantic, neoliberal ideas began to enter the mainstream. As Milton Friedman remarked, “when the time came that you had to change … there was an alternative ready there to be picked up.” With the help of sympathetic journalists and political advisers, elements of neoliberalism, especially its prescriptions for monetary policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter’s administration in the United States and Jim Callaghan’s government in Britain.

After Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took power, the rest of the package soon followed: massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services. Through the IMF, the World Bank, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organisation, neoliberal policies were imposed – often without democratic consent – on much of the world. Most remarkable was its adoption among parties that once belonged to the left: Labour and the Democrats, for example. As Daniel Stedman Jones notes, “it is hard to think of another utopia to have been as fully realised.”

+++

It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice and freedom should have been promoted with the slogan “there is no alternative”. But, as Friedrich Hayek remarked on a visit to Pinochet’s Chile – one of the first nations in which the programme was comprehensively applied – “my personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism.” The freedom neoliberalism offers, which sounds so beguiling when expressed in general terms, turns out to mean freedom for the pike, not for the minnows.

Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty.

As Naomi Klein documents in The Shock Doctrine, neoliberal theorists advocated the use of crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted: for example, in the aftermath of Pinochet’s coup, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina, which Milton Friedman described as “an opportunity to radically reform the educational system” in New Orleans.

Where neoliberal policies cannot be imposed domestically, they are imposed internationally, through trade treaties incorporating “investor-state dispute settlement”: offshore tribunals in which corporations can press for the removal of social and environmental protections. When parliaments have voted to restrict sales of cigarettes, protect water supplies from mining companies, freeze energy bills or prevent pharmaceutical firms from ripping off the state, corporations have sued, often successfully. Democracy is reduced to theatre.

Another paradox of neoliberalism is that universal competition relies upon universal quantification and comparison. The result is that workers, job-seekers and public services of every kind are subject to a pettifogging, stifling regime of assessment and monitoring, designed to identify the winners and punish the losers. The doctrine that, Ludwig von Mises proposed, would free us from the bureaucratic nightmare of central planning has instead created one.

Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it rapidly became one. Economic growth has been markedly slower in the neoliberal era (since 1980 in Britain and the US) than it was in the preceding decades; but not for the very rich. Inequality in the distribution of both income and wealth, after 60 years of decline, rose rapidly in this era, due to the smashing of trade unions, tax reductions, rising rents, privatisation and deregulation.

The privatisation or marketisation of public services – such as energy, water, trains, health, education, roads and prisons – has enabled corporations to set up tollbooths in front of essential assets and charge rent, either to citizens or to government, for their use. Rent is another term for unearned income. When you pay an inflated price for a train ticket, only part of the fare compensates the operators for the money they spend on fuel, wages, rolling stock and other outlays. The rest reflects the fact that they have you over a barrel.

Those who own and run the UK’s privatised or semi-privatised services make stupendous fortunes by investing little and charging much. In Russia and India, oligarchs acquired state assets through firesales. In Mexico, Carlos Slim was granted control of almost all landline and mobile phone services and soon became the world’s richest man.

Financialisation, as Andrew Sayer points out in Why We Can’t Afford the Rich, has had similar impacts. “Like rent,” he argues, “interest is … unearned income that accrues without any effort.” As the poor become poorer and the rich become richer, the rich acquire increasing control over another crucial asset: money. Interest payments, overwhelmingly, are a transfer of money from the poor to the rich. As property prices and the withdrawal of state funding load people with debt (think of the switch from student grants to student loans), the banks and their executives clean up.

Sayer argues that the past four decades have been characterised by a transfer of wealth not only from the poor to the rich, but within the ranks of the wealthy: from those who make their money by producing new goods or services to those who make their money by controlling existing assets and harvesting rent, interest or capital gains. Earned income has been supplanted by unearned income.

Neoliberal policies are everywhere beset by market failures. Not only are the banks too big to fail, but so are the corporations now charged with delivering public services. As Tony Judt pointed out in Ill Fares the Land, Friedrich Hayek forgot that vital national services cannot be allowed to collapse, which means that competition cannot run its course. Business takes the profits, the state keeps the risk.

The greater the failure, the more extreme the ideology becomes. Governments use neoliberal crises as both excuse and opportunity to cut taxes, privatise remaining public services, rip holes in the social safety net, deregulate corporations and re-regulate citizens. The self-hating state now sinks its teeth into every organ of the public sector.

Perhaps the most dangerous impact of neoliberalism is not the economic crises it has caused, but the political crisis. As the domain of the state is reduced, our ability to change the course of our lives through voting also contracts. Instead, neoliberal theory asserts, people can exercise choice through spending. But some have more to spend than others: in the great consumer or shareholder democracy, votes are not equally distributed. The result is a disempowerment of the poor and middle. As parties of the right and former left adopt similar neoliberal policies, disempowerment turns to disenfranchisement. Large numbers of people have been shed from politics.

Chris Hedges remarks that “fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the politically inactive, the “losers” who feel, often correctly, they have no voice or role to play in the political establishment.” When political debate no longer speaks to us, people become responsive instead to slogans, symbols and sensation. To the admirers of Donald Trump, for example, facts and arguments appear irrelevant.

Tony Judt pointed out that when the thick mesh of interactions between people and the state has been reduced to nothing but authority and obedience, the only remaining force that binds us is state power. The totalitarianism Hayek feared is more likely to emerge when governments, having lost the moral authority that arises from the delivery of public services, are reduced to “cajoling, threatening and ultimately coercing people to obey them”.

+++

Like communism, neoliberalism is the God that failed. But the zombie doctrine staggers on, and one of the reasons is its anonymity. Or rather, a cluster of anonymities.

The invisible doctrine of the invisible hand is promoted by invisible backers. Slowly, very slowly, we have begun to discover the names of a few of them. We find that the Institute of Economic Affairs, which has argued forcefully in the media against the further regulation of the tobacco industry, has been secretly funded by British American Tobacco since 1963. We discover that Charles and David Koch, two of the richest men in the world, founded the institute that set up the Tea Party movement. We find that Charles Koch, in establishing one of his think tanks, noted that “in order to avoid undesirable criticism, how the organization is controlled and directed should not be widely advertised.”

The words used by neoliberalism often conceal more than they elucidate. “The market” sounds like a natural system that might bear upon us equally, like gravity or atmospheric pressure. But it is fraught with power relations. What “the market wants” tends to mean what corporations and their bosses want. “Investment”, as Andrew Sayer notes, means two quite different things. One is the funding of productive and socially useful activities, the other is the purchase of existing assets to milk them for rent, interest, dividends and capital gains. Using the same word for different activities “camouflages the sources of wealth”, leading us to confuse wealth extraction with wealth creation.

A century ago, the nouveau riche were disparaged by those who had inherited their money. Entrepreneurs sought social acceptance by passing themselves off as rentiers. Today, the relationship has been reversed: the rentiers and inheritors style themselves entrepreneurs. They claim to have earned their unearned income.

These anonymities and confusions mesh with the namelessness and placelessness of modern capitalism: the franchise model which ensures that workers do not know for whom they toil; the companies registered through a network of offshore secrecy regimes so complex that even the police cannot discover the beneficial owners; the tax arrangements that bamboozle governments; the financial products no one understands.

The anonymity of neoliberalism is fiercely guarded. Those who are influenced by Hayek, Mises and Friedman tend to reject the term, maintaining – with some justice – that it is used today only pejoratively. But they offer us no substitute. Some describe themselves as classical liberals or libertarians, but these descriptions are both misleading and curiously self-effacing, as they suggest that there is nothing novel about The Road to SerfdomBureaucracy or Friedman’s classic work, Capitalism and Freedom.

+++

For all that, there is something admirable about the neoliberal project, at least in its early stages. It was a distinctive, innovative philosophy promoted by a coherent network of thinkers and activists with a clear plan of action. It was patient and persistent. The Road to Serfdom became the path to power.

Neoliberalism’s triumph also reflects the failure of the left. When laissez-faire economics led to catastrophe in 1929, Keynes devised a comprehensive economic theoryto replace it. When Keynesian demand management hit the buffers in the 1970s, there was “an alternative ready there to be picked up.” But when neoliberalism fell apart in 2008 there was … nothing. This is why the zombie walks. The left and centre have produced no new general framework of economic thought for 80 years.

Every invocation of Lord Keynes is an admission of failure. To propose Keynesian solutions to the crises of the 21st-century is to ignore three obvious problems. It is hard to mobilise people around old ideas; the flaws exposed in the 1970s have not gone away; and, most importantly, they have nothing to say about our gravest predicament: the environmental crisis. Keynesianism works by stimulating consumer demand to promote economic growth. Consumer demand and economic growth are the motors of environmental destruction.

What the history of both Keynesianism and neoliberalism show is that it’s not enough to oppose a broken system. A coherent alternative has to be proposed. For Labour, the Democrats and the wider left, the central task should be to develop an economic Apollo programme, a conscious attempt to design a new system, tailored to the demands of the 21st Century.

George Monbiot’s new book, How Did We Get into This Mess?, Is published this month by Verso.

NASA claims: Dozens of advanced ancient civilizations collapsed before us

Wednesday, April 6th, 2016

Is it possible that just like many other advanced civilizations in the past, ours too is heading towards an impending collapse? Is the collapse of society imminent? These are some of the questions a study from NASA aims at answering. The study, partly sponsored by the Goddard Space Flight Center suggests that civilizations as we know it could come to an abrupt end in the coming decades due to a number of factors.

If we look back in history, 3000 – 5000 years, we will find a historical record that clearly shows us how advanced and complex civilizations were just as susceptible to collapse as we are today. This ongoing pattern has led researchers to question the future existence of society and civilization as we know.

If we were to look back further back in time, over 10,000 years, we would encounter evidence of advanced civilizations that possibly predate the Pre-Inca, Olmec, and Ancient Egyptian civilization, not to mention other advanced ancient civilizations in ancient Mesopotamia.

It is difficult to overlook the repeating patterns identified by scholars in most of these civilizations and the NASA funded study is clear evidence of the path ancient civilizations on EArth have taken for thousands of years. This is considered by many people as a sign that clearly states that ancient civilizations have reset a number of times.

These factors have kept on repeating themselves and have been the culprit for ancient civilizations before us.  In the report, applied mathematician Safa Motesharri and his “Human and Nature Dynamical” model claims that “the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history.”

“The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent.”

The study came to the conclusion that there are two key social features that contributed to the collapse of every single advanced civilization from the past: “the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity”; and “the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or “Commoners”) [poor]” These social phenomena have played “a central role in the character or in the process of the collapse,” in all such cases over “the last five thousand years.”

Even though our civilizations is at a very advanced technological stage, this does not necessarily mean that we are saved from imminent chaos. In the study we find that “Technological change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends to raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policy effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use.”

One of the best examples of advanced ancient civilizations disappearing can be found in Mesoamerica.

If we take a look at the ancient Maya who were an extremely advanced ancient civilization we find that several factors played a crucial role for this once great empire to crumble eventually. While most researchers would agree that Deforestation, Famine and Drought where some of the key components in the failure of the ancient Maya, we find a similar pattern in other civilizations, not only I the Americas, but around the globe.

Motesharrei and his colleagues conclude that under conditions “closely reflecting the reality of the world today… we find that collapse is difficult to avoid.” In the first of these scenarios, civilization:

“…. appears to be on a sustainable path for quite a long time, but even using an optimal depletion rate and starting with a very small number of Elites, the Elites eventually consume too much, resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society. It is important to note that this Type-L collapse is due to an inequality-induced famine that causes a loss of workers, rather than a collapse of Nature.”

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About the Panama Papers

Wednesday, April 6th, 2016

In a second article I am publishing today on Samadhisoft (see: NASA Claims: Dozens of advanced ancient civilizations collapsed before us), you can find the following quote:

The study came to the conclusion that there are two key social features that contributed to the collapse of every single advanced civilization from the past: “the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity”; and “the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or “Commoners”) [poor]” These social phenomena have played “a central role in the character or in the process of the collapse,” in all such cases over “the last five thousand years.”

After reading this quote, consider that the gathering of massive amounts of wealth by the few, as illustrated by the leaks revealed in this article, is highly indicative of the probable demise of our own civilizations as analyzed and discussed in the other article.

Can you see why people want change – profound change – now?  And why they are unwilling to endure more of the same, more of the status quo?  

dennis

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Over a year ago, an anonymous source contacted the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) and submitted encrypted internal documents from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm that sells anonymous offshore companies around the world. These shell companies enable their owners to cover up their business dealings, no matter how shady.

In the months that followed, the number of documents continued to grow far beyond the original leak. Ultimately, SZ acquired about 2.6 terabytes of data, making the leak the biggest that journalists had ever worked with. The source wanted neither financial compensation nor anything else in return, apart from a few security measures.

The data provides rare insights into a world that can only exist in the shadows. It proves how a global industry led by major banks, legal firms, and asset management companies secretly manages the estates of the world’s rich and famous: from politicians, Fifa officials, fraudsters and drug smugglers, to celebrities and professional athletes.

A group effort

The Süddeutsche Zeitung decided to analyze the data in cooperation with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). ICIJ had already coordinated the research for past projects that SZ was also involved in, among them Offshore Leaks, Lux Leaks, and Swiss Leaks. Panama Papers is the biggest-ever international cooperation of its kind. In the past 12 months, around 400 journalists from more than 100 media organizations in over 80 countries have taken part in researching the documents. These have included teams from the Guardian and the BBC in England, Le Monde in France, and La Nación in Argentina. In Germany, SZ journalists have cooperated with their colleagues from two public broadcasters, NDR and WDR. Journalists from the Swiss Sonntagszeitung and the Austrian weekly Falter have also worked on the project, as have their colleagues at ORF, Austria’s national public broadcaster. The international team initially met in Washington, Munich, Lillehammer and London to map out the research approach.

Making of The data

The Panama Papers include approximately 11.5 million documents – more than the combined total of the Wikileaks Cablegate, Offshore Leaks, Lux Leaks, and Swiss Leaks. The data primarily comprises e-mails, pdf files, photo files, and excerpts of an internal Mossack Fonseca database. It covers a period spanning from the 1970s to the spring of 2016.

Moreover, the journalists crosschecked a large number of documents, including passport copies. About two years ago, a whistleblower had already sold internal Mossack Fonseca data to the German authorities, but the dataset was much older and smaller in scope: while it addressed a few hundred offshore companies, the Panama Papers provide data on some 214,000 companies. In the wake of the data purchase, last year investigators searched the homes and offices of about 100 people. The Commerzbank was also raided. As a consequence of their business dealings with Mossack Fonseca, Commerzbank, HSH Nordbank, and Hypovereinsbank agreed to pay fines of around 20 million euros, respectively. Since then, other countries have also acquired data from the initial smaller leak, among them the United States, the UK, and Iceland.

The system

The leaked data is structured as follows: Mossack Fonseca created a folder for each shell firm. Each folder contains e-mails, contracts, transcripts, and scanned documents. In some instances, there are several thousand pages of documentation. First, the data had to be systematically indexed to make searching through this sea of information possible. To this end, the Süddeutsche Zeitung used Nuix, the same program that international investigators work with. Süddeutsche Zeitung and ICIJ uploaded millions of documents onto high-performance computers. They applied optical character recognition (OCR) to transform data into machine-readable and easy to search files. The process turned images – such as scanned IDs and signed contracts – into searchable text. This was an important step: it enabled journalists to comb through as large a portion of the leak as possible using a simple search mask similar to Google.The journalists compiled lists of important politicians, international criminals, and well-known professional athletes, among others. The digital processing made it possible to then search the leak for the names on these lists. The “party donations scandal” list contained 130 names, and the UN sanctions list more than 600. In just a few minutes, the powerful search algorithm compared the lists with the 11.5 million documents.

The research

For each name found, a detailed research process was initiated that posed the following questions: what is this person’s role in the network of companies? Where does the money come from? Where is it going? Is this structure legal?Generally speaking, owning an offshore company is not illegal in itself. In fact, establishing an offshore company can be seen as a logical step for a broad range of business transactions. However, a look through the Panama Papers very quickly reveals that concealing the identities of the true company owners was the primary aim in the vast majority of cases. From the outset, the journalists had their work cut out for them. The providers of offshore companies – among them banks, lawyers, and investment advisors – often keep their clients’ names secret and use proxies. In turn, the proxies’ tracks then lead to heads of state, important officials, and millionaires. Over the course of the international project, journalists cooperated with one another to investigate thousands of leads: they examined evidence, studied contracts, and spoke with experts.

Among others, Mossack Fonsecas’ clients include criminals and members of various Mafia groups. The documents also expose bribery scandals and corrupt heads of state and government. The alleged offshore companies of twelve current and former heads of state make up one of the most spectacular parts of the leak, as do the links to other leaders, and to their families, closest advisors, and friends. The Panamanian law firm also counts almost 200 other politicians from around the globe among its clients, including a number of ministers.

The company

The company at the center of all these stories is Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian provider of offshore companies with dozens of offices all over the world. It sells its shell firms in cities such as Zurich, London, and Hong Kong – in some instances at bargain prices. Clients can buy an anonymous company for as little as USD 1,000. However, at this price it is just an empty shell. For an extra fee, Mossack Fonseca provides a sham director and, if desired, conceals the company’s true shareholder. The result is an offshore company whose true purpose and ownership structure is indecipherable from the outside. Mossack Fonseca has founded, sold, and managed thousands of companies. The documents provide a detailed view of how Mossack Fonseca routinely accepts to engage in business activities that potentially violate sanctions, in addition to aiding and abetting tax evasion and money laundering.

About Süddeutsche Zeitung

Headquartered in Munich, Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) is one of Germany’s leading newspapers. SZ has a total readership of 4.4 million for its print and online media. Its investigative journalism team counts five people, three of which are members of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The Süddeutsche Zeitunghas won a number of prestigious awards for its research work. Its team has cooperated with other media organizations on a number of projects, including Offshore Leaks, Swiss Leaks, and Lux Leaks, which ICIJ coordinated. At the beginning of 2015, an anonymous source began sending the Süddeutsche Zeitung data from Mossack Fonseca, a provider of offshore companies. This marked the beginning of the Panama Papers project.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung, in cooperation with the International Consortium for Investigative Journalists, sent Mossfon several written requests for comment. In response Mossfon sent two general statements, which can be viewed here.

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Scientists Warn of Perilous Climate Shift Within Decades, Not Centuries

Saturday, April 2nd, 2016

Sure, we’ve got enough time to agonize over Cruz or Trump, over Hillary or Bernie.  Plenty of time.  What’s that you say, “Nature Bats Last”?

dennis

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The nations of the world agreed years ago to try to limit global warming to a level they hoped would prove somewhat tolerable. But leading climate scientists warned on Tuesday that permitting a warming of that magnitude would actually be quite dangerous.

The likely consequences would include killer storms stronger than any in modern times, the disintegration of large parts of the polar ice sheets and a rise of the sea sufficient to begin drowning the world’s coastal cities before the end of this century, the scientists declared.

“We’re in danger of handing young people a situation that’s out of their control,” said James E. Hansen, the retired NASA climate scientist who led the new research. The findings were released Tuesday morning by a European science journal, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

A draft version of the paper was released last year, and it provoked a roiling debateamong climate scientists. The main conclusions have not changed, and that debate seems likely to be replayed in the coming weeks.

The basic claim of the paper is that by burning fossil fuels at a prodigious pace and pouring heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, humanity is about to provoke an abrupt climate shift.

Specifically, the authors believe that fresh water pouring into the oceans from melting land ice will set off a feedback loop that will cause parts of the great ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica to disintegrate rapidly.

That claim has intrigued some experts who say the paper may help explain puzzling episodes in Earth’s past when geological evidence suggests the climate underwent drastic shifts. Yet many other scientists are unconvinced by some of the specific assertions the authors are making.

“Some of the claims in this paper are indeed extraordinary,” said Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. “They conflict with the mainstream understanding of climate change to the point where the standard of proof is quite high.”

Despite any reservations they might have about the new paper, virtually all climate scientists agree with Dr. Hansen’s group that society is not moving fast enough to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, posing grave risks. An agreement reached late last year in Paris seeks to cut emissions, but it is not remotely ambitious enough to limit global warming to the degree Dr. Hansen regards as necessary.

Among Dr. Hansen’s colleagues, some of the discomfiture about the new paper stems from his dual roles as a publishing climate scientist and, in recent years, as a political activist. He has been arrested at rallies, and he has joined with a group of young people who sued the federal government over what they said was its failure to limit global warming.

Dr. Hansen argues that society is in such grave peril that he feels morally compelled to go beyond the normal role played by a scientist and to sound a clear warning.

That stance has made him a hero to college students fighting climate change, but some fellow scientists fear he has opened himself to the charge that he is skewing his scientific research for political purposes.

In 2009, nations agreed to try to limit the planetary warming to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 degrees Celsius, above the preindustrial level. The Earth has already warmed by about half that amount. The climate appears to be destabilizing, virtually all land ice on the planet has started to melt, and the oceans are rising at an accelerating pace.

The paper, written by Dr. Hansen and 18 other authors, dwells on the last time Earth warmed naturally, about 120,000 years ago, when the temperature reached a level estimated to have been only slightly higher than today. Large chunks of the polar ice disintegrated then, and scientists have established that the sea level rose 20 to 30 feet.

Climate scientists agree that humanity is about to cause an equal or greater rise in sea level, but they have tended to assume that such a large increase would take centuries, at least. The new paper argues that it could happen far more rapidly, with the worst case being several feet of sea-level rise over the next 50 years, followed by increases so precipitous that they would force humanity to beat a hasty retreat from the coasts.

“That would mean loss of all coastal cities, most of the world’s large cities and all their history,” Dr. Hansen said in a video statement that accompanied the new paper.

The paper identifies a specific mechanism that the scientists say they believe could help cause such an abrupt climate shift.

Their idea is that the initial melting of the great ice sheets will put a cap of relatively fresh water on the ocean surfaces near Antarctica and Greenland. That, they think, will slow or even shut down the system of ocean currents that redistributes heat around the planet and allows some of it to escape into space. Warmth will then accumulate in the deeper parts of the ocean, the scientists think, speeding the melting of parts of the ice sheets that sit below sea level.

In addition, a wider temperature difference between the tropics and the poles will encourage powerful storms, the researchers contend. The paper cites evidence, much of it contested, that immense storms happened during the warm period 120,000 years ago.

For instance, the paper says such storms might have thrown giant boulders onto coastal ridges in the Bahamas, though other experts think a tsunami might have been responsible.

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