Secrets of the Rich

February 19th, 2013

– Another brilliant piece by George Monbiot of the UK’s Guardian.   I just cannot applaud him enough.

– dennis

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Billionaires are hiding behind a network of “independent” groups, who manipulate politics on their behalf.

Conspiracies against the public don’t get much uglier than this. As the Guardian revealed last week, two secretive organisations working for US billionaires have spent $118m to ensure that no action is taken to prevent manmade climate change(1). While inflicting untold suffering on the world’s people, their funders have used these opaque structures to ensure that their identities are never exposed.

The two organisations – the Donors’ Trust and the Donors’ Capital Fund – were set up as political funding channels for people handing over $1m or more. They have financed 102 organisations which either dismiss climate science or downplay the need to take action. The large number of recipients creates the impression that there are many independent voices challenging climate science. These groups, working through the media, mobilising gullible voters and lobbying politicians, helped to derail Obama’s cap and trade bill and the climate talks at Copenhagen. Now they’re seeking to prevent the US president from trying again(2).

This covers only part of the funding. In total, between 2002 and 2010 the two identity-laundering groups paid $311m to 480 organisations(3), most of which take positions of interest to the ultra-rich and the corporations they run: less tax, less regulation, a smaller public sector. Around a quarter of the money received by the rightwing opinion swarm comes from the two foundations(4). If this funding were not effective, it wouldn’t exist: the ultra-rich didn’t get that way by throwing their money around randomly. The organisations they support are those which advance their interests.

A small number of the funders have been exposed by researchers trawling through tax records. They include the billionaire Koch brothers (paying into the two groups through their Knowledge and Progress Fund) and the DeVos family (the billionaire owners of Amway)(5). More significantly, we now know a little more about the recipients. Many describe themselves as free market or conservative think tanks.

Among them are the American Enterprise Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Hudson Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Reason Foundation, Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, Mont Pelerin Society and the Discovery Institute(6). All of them pose as learned societies, earnestly trying to determine the best interests of the public. The exposure of this funding reinforces the claim by David Frum, formerly a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, that such groups “increasingly function as public-relations agencies”(7).

One name in particular jumped out at me: American Friends of the IEA. The Institute of Economic Affairs is a British group which, like all the others, calls itself a free market thinktank. Scarcely a day goes by on which its staff are not interviewed in the broadcast media, promoting the dreary old billionaires’ agenda: less tax for the rich, less help for the poor, less spending by the state, less regulation for business. In the first 13 days of February, its people were on the BBC ten times(8).

Never have I heard its claim to be an independent thinktank challenged by the BBC. When, in 2007, I called the institute a business lobby group, its then director-general responded, in a letter to the Guardian, that “we are independent of all business interests”(9). Oh yes?

The database, published by the Canadian site desmogblog.com, shows that American Friends of the IEA has received (up to 2010) $215,000 from the two secretive funds(10). When I spoke to the IEA’s fundraising manager, she confirmed that the sole purpose of American Friends is to raise money for the organisation in London(11). She agreed that the IEA has never disclosed the Donors’ Trust money it has received. She denied that the institute is a sockpuppet organisation: purporting to be independent while working for some very powerful US interests.

Would the BBC allow someone from Bell Pottinger to discuss an issue of concern to its sponsors without revealing the sponsors’ identity? No. So what’s the difference? What distinguishes an acknowledged public relations company taking money from a corporation or a billionaire from a so-called thinktank, funded by the same source to promote the same agenda?

The IEA is registered with the Charity Commission as an educational charity(12). The same goes for Nigel Lawson’s climate misinformation campaign (the Global Warming Policy Foundation(13)) and a host of other dubious “thinktanks”. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it is outrageous that the Charity Commission allows organisations which engage in political lobbying and refuse to reveal their major funders to claim charitable status(14).

This is the new political frontier. Corporations and their owners have learnt not to show their hands. They tend to avoid the media, aware that they will damage their brands by being seen to promote the brutal agenda that furthers their interests. So they have learnt from the tobacco companies: stay hidden and pay other people to do it for you(15).

They need a network of independent-looking organisations which can produce plausible arguments in defence of their positions. Once the arguments have been developed, projecting them is easy. Most of the media are owned by billionaires, who are happy to promote the work of people funded by the same class(16). One of the few outlets they don’t own – the BBC – has been disgracefully incurious about the identity of those to whom it gives a platform.

By these means the ultra-rich come to dominate the political conversation, without declaring themselves(17,18). Those they employ are clever and well-trained. They have money their opponents can only dream of. They are skilled at rechannelling the public anger which might otherwise have been directed at their funders: the people who have tanked the economy, who use the living planet as their dustbin, who won’t pay their taxes and who demand that the poor must pay for the mistakes of the rich. Anger, thanks to the work of these hired hands, is instead aimed at the victims or opponents of the billionaires: people on benefits, the trade unions, Greenpeace, the American Civil Liberties Union.

The answer, as ever, is transparency. As the so-called thinktanks come to play an ever more important role in politics, we need to know who they are working for. Any group – whether the Institute of Economic Affairs or Friends of the Earth – which attempts to influence public life should declare all donations greater than £1000. We’ve had a glimpse of who’s paying. Now we need to see the rest of the story.

– To the original and its references:  

How to implement Globals in Objective-C – Updated

February 18th, 2013

– Oh, the embarrassment of premature technical wisdom ejaculation.

– Since I wrote all the stuff, below, I’ve had a big rethink about Globals and realized that the method of implementing them that I’d adopted was seriouly lame.

– I went back and thought through how I’d done it before in the Microsoft Win32 OOP world and I reasoned my way through to doing the same thing here, and, it is sooooo much simpler and way faster.  That’s what I get for cook-booking off someone else’s code without understanding it.

– It still baffles me, when you go searching for it, why the information out there about how to implement Globals in Objective-C is such a dog’s breakfast.

– But, I know how to do it now and I’m going to write it up here and maybe that will aid someone else on a search to answer the same question.

– So, below, you will find my new method and code and the old stuff is gone.

-dennis

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Create a class, UtlGen.  In it we put general utility methods that we can call from anywhere.

Create a file, globals.h, where we can declare our globals variables.  In it I have the following line:

UtlGen * g_pUtl;

This creates a pointer to an instance of the UtlGen class.

I want this pointer to be (globally) visible from anywhere in my program so I need to place it outside of any blocks.  I’d also like to put in a place that makes sense to other programmers.  To me, there are two obvious choices.  One is in the main.m file and the other is in the AppDelegate.m file.  Main.m is the first place where execution begin and the AppDelegate.m is the second.   I select the AppDelegate.m file because I think folks don’t generally expect you to mess with the main.m file.

Near the top of the AppDelegate.m file, I import the global.h file like so:

#import “myprogramAppDelegate.h”
#import “global.h”   <— global variables live here.
@implementation myprogramAppDelegate

We also instantiate and release the UtlGen object in the AppDelegate. module.   The very first method called in AppDelegate.m is:

-(BOOL) application( … and so on …

Inside this method, we add the line:

g_pUtl = [[UtlGen alloc] init]; 

This is how we instantiate the UtlGen object and assign its pointer to the global variable, g_pUtl.

In the -(void) dealloc method of the AppDelegate module, we add the following line:

[UtlGen release];

And that’s how we release the object’s memory when the app shuts down.

In the myprogram-Prefix.pch file, I place the following line in with the other imports:

#import “UtlGen.h”

This file contains the precompiled definitions that are visible to all modules.  Importing UtlGen.h here means that the methods (and their prototypes) available in the UtlGen object will be visible everywhere.

Now, we are ready to use any of the methods in the UtlGen object from any module.

Let’s use a hypothetical method called ‘twiceMe’ in the UtlGen object.

In the application, we have a class, someClass, which is implemented in the someClass.m file.  In this file is the implementation of a method, ‘doMath’.  In the doMath method, we will call the twiceMe method of the UtlGen object to double the value of an integer we pass to it.

In the someClass.m file we do this:

@implementation someClass
extern UtlGen * g_pUtl;

-(void) doMath
{
int n = [g_pUtl twiceMe:2];

The extern tells the compiler that the g_pUtl variable has been defined elsewhere (over in AppDelegate, remember?).  In doMath, we call the twiceMe property of the UtlGen object and pass it a ‘2’ and it returns a ‘4’ to us which we place into ‘n’.

That’s it.

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A Tale of Two Internets

February 15th, 2013

– I worked for a company up until a year ago that was heavily involved in e-Commerce.  They are a great group of people and I doubt that any of them would see themselves as adding to the world’s inequalities.  

– But as they say, “No single rain drop see itself as responsible for the flood.

– But they, like all such e-Commerce facilitators, are striving to develop the technology to ‘read’ the customer more and more.  And the quote, below, shows where some of this is going.  And it might not be pretty.

– dennis

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“For the past decade, e-commerce sites have altered prices based on your Web habits and personal attributes. What is your geography and your past buying history? How did you arrive at the e-commerce site? What time of day are you visiting? An entire literature has emerged on the ethics, legality and economic promise of pricing optimization. And the field is advancing quickly: last September, Google received a patent on technology that lets a company dynamically price electronic content. For instance, it can push the base price of an e-book up if it determines you are more likely to buy that particular item than an average user; conversely, it can adjust the price down as an incentive if you are judged less likely to purchase. And you won’t even know you are paying more than others for the exact same item.”

– To the original article in Scientific American:

How Newegg crushed the “shopping cart” patent and saved online retail

February 12th, 2013

Patent trolls.  The mere thought gives me a bad taste in my mouth.  

“Soverain… wanted nothing less than to extract a patent tax from the entire retail sector.”

– These type of folks just latch on like leeches and use the legal system to extract money from other folks who’ve done the hard work.   Good on Newegg for whacking their pee-pee.

– Dennis

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Anyone who visited Soverain Software’s website could be forgiven for believing it’s a real company. There are separate pages for “products,” “services,” and “solutions.”  There’s the “About Us” page. There are phone numbers and e-mail addresses for sales and tech support. There’s even a login page for customers.

It’s all a sham. Court records show Soverain hasn’t made a sale—ever. The various voice mailboxes were all set up by Katherine Wolanyk, the former Latham & Watkins attorney who is a co-founder and partial owner of Soverain. And the impressive list of big corporate customers on its webpage? Those are deals struck with another company, more than a decade ago. That was OpenMarket, a software company that created these patents before going out of business in 2001. It sold its assets to a venture capital fund called divine interVentures, which in turn sold the OpenMarket patents to Soverain Software in 2003.

“Thank you for calling Soverain technical support,” says Wolanyk, if you press option 2. “If you are a current customer and have a tech support question, please call us at  1-888-884-4432 or e-mail us at support@soverain.com.” That number, like the “customer support” number on Soverain’scontact page, has been disconnected.

Soverain isn’t in the e-commerce business; it’s in the higher-margin business of filing patent lawsuits against e-commerce companies. And it has been quite successful until now. The company’s plan to extract a patent tax of about one percent of revenue from a huge swath of online retailers was snuffed out last week by Newegg and its lawyers, who won an appeal ruling [PDF] that invalidates the three patents Soverain used to spark a vast patent war.

The ruling effectively shuts down dozens of the lawsuits Soverain filed last year against Nordstrom’s, Macy’s, Home Depot, RadioShack, Kohl’s, and many others (see our chart on page 2). All of them did nothing more than provide shoppers with basic online checkout technology. Soverain used two patents, numbers 5,715,314 and 5,909,492, to claim ownership of the “shopping carts” commonly used in online stores. In some cases, it wielded a third patent, No. 7,272,639.

Soverain will lose the $2.5 million it stood to gain from Newegg, as well as two much bigger verdicts it won against Victoria’s Secret and Avon. Those two companies were ordered to pay a total of almost $18 million, plus a “running royalty” of about one percent, after a 2011 trial. The ruling in the Newegg case is a total wipeout for a patent troll that had squeezed many millions from online retailers, was backed by big-firm lawyers, and was determined to collect hundreds of millions more.

For Newegg’s Chief Legal Officer Lee Cheng, it’s a huge validation of the strategy the company decided to pursue back in 2007: not to settle with patent trolls. Ever.

“We basically took a look at this situation and said, ‘This is bullshit,'” said Cheng in an interview with Ars. “We saw that if we paid off this patent holder, we’d have to pay off every patent holder this same amount. This is the first case we took all the way to trial. And now, nobody has to pay Soverain jack squat for these patents.”

– To the original article on ARSTECHNICA and for more on this story:

Anonymous Hacks US Government Site, Threatens Supreme ‘Warheads’

February 12th, 2013

– This YouTube video makes for interesting viewing and it sets out a number of  grievances Anonymous has with the U.S. government’s escalating abuses of the rights of U.S. citizens.   It’s well worth a watch.

– Will it cause the U.S. government to change its ways?   I doubt it.  Most of the people involved on the U.S. government side are simple people doing their jobs who haven’t the courage or the imagination to see that the jobs they are increasingly doing are not in defense of the principles upon which the U.S. was founded but rather in defense of those powerful forces who are in the processing of capturing the U.S. system for their own gains.

– dennis

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The hacktivist group Anonymous hacked the U.S. federal sentencing website early Saturday, [January 26th, 2013] using the page to make a brazen and boisterous declaration of “war” on the U.S. government.

The group claims mysterious code-based “warheads,” named for each of the Supreme Court Justices, are about to be deployed.

As of midnight Pacific time, the front page of Ussc.gov — the Federal agency that establishes sentencing policies and practices for the Federal courts — is filled with a long screed in green on black, together with this YouTube video:  ➡

 – research thanks to Mashable

A Choice For Corporate America: Are You With America Or The Cayman Islands

February 12th, 2013

By Senator Bernie Sanders
February 9, 2013

When the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior on Wall Street drove this country into the deepest recession since the 1930s, the largest financial institutions in the United States took every advantage of being American. They just loved their country – and the willingness of the American people to provide them with the largest bailout in world history. In 2008, Congress approved a $700 billion gift to Wall Street. Another $16 trillion in virtually zero interest loans and other financial assistance came from the Federal Reserve. America. What a great country.

But just two years later, as soon as these giant financial institutions started making record-breaking profits again, they suddenly lost their love for their native country. At a time when the nation was suffering from a huge deficit, largely created by the recession that Wall Street caused, the major financial institutions did everything they could to avoid paying American taxes by establishing shell corporations in the Cayman Islands and other tax havens.

In 2010, Bank of America set up more than 200 subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands (which has a corporate tax rate of 0.0 percent) to avoid paying U.S. taxes. It worked. Not only did Bank of America pay nothing in federal income taxes, but it received a rebate from the IRS worth $1.9 billion that year. They are not alone. In 2010, JP Morgan Chase operated 83 subsidiaries incorporated in offshore tax havens to avoid paying some $4.9 billion in U.S. taxes. That same year Goldman Sachs operated 39 subsidiaries in offshore tax havens to avoid an estimated $3.3 billion in U.S. taxes. Citigroup has paid no federal income taxes for the last four years after receiving a total of $2.5 trillion in financial assistance from the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis.

On and on it goes. Wall Street banks and large companies love America when they need corporate welfare. But when it comes to paying American taxes or American wages, they want nothing to do with this country. That has got to change.

Offshore tax abuse is not just limited to Wall Street. Each and every year corporations and the wealthy are avoiding more than $100 billion in U.S. taxes by sheltering their income offshore.

Pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly and Pfizer have fought to make it illegal for the American people to buy cheaper prescription drugs from Canada and Europe. But, during tax season, Eli Lilly and Pfizer shift drug patents and profits to the Netherlands and other offshore tax havens to avoid paying U.S. taxes.

Apple wants all of the advantages of being an American company, but it doesn’t want to pay American taxes or American wages. It creates the iPad, the iPhone, the iPod, and iTunes in the United States, but manufactures most of its products in China so it doesn’t have to pay American wages. Then it shifts most of its profits to Ireland, Luxembourg, the British Virgin Islands and other tax havens to avoid paying U.S. taxes. Without such maneuvers, Apple’s federal tax bill in the United States would have been $2.4 billion higher in 2011.

Offshore tax schemes have become so absurd that one five-story office building in the Cayman Islands is now the “home” to more than 18,000 corporations.

This tax avoidance does not just reduce the revenue that we need to pay for education, healthcare, roads, and environmental protection, it is also costing us millions of American jobs. Today, companies are using these same tax schemes to lower their tax bills by shipping American jobs and factories abroad. These tax breaks have contributed to the loss of more than 5 million U.S. manufacturing jobs and the closure of more than 56,000 factories since 2000. That also has got to change.

At a time when we have a $16.5 trillion national debt; at a time when roughly one-quarter of the largest corporations in America are paying no federal income taxes; and at a time when corporate profits are at an all-time high; it is past time for Wall Street and corporate America to pay their fair share.

That’s what the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act (S.250) that I have introduced with Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) is all about.

This legislation will stop profitable Wall Street banks and corporations from sheltering profits in the Cayman Islands and other tax havens to avoid paying U.S. taxes. It will also stop rewarding companies that ship jobs and factories overseas with tax breaks. The Joint Committee on Taxation has estimated in the past that the provisions in this bill will raise more than $590 billion in revenue over the next decade.

As Congress debates deficit reduction, it is clear that we must raise significant new revenue. At 15.8 percent of GDP, federal revenue is at almost the lowest point in 60 years. Our Republican colleagues want to balance the budget on the backs of the elderly, the sick, the children, the veterans and the most vulnerable by making massive cuts. At a time when the middle class already is disappearing, that is not only a grossly immoral position, it is bad economics.

We have a much better idea. Wall Street and the largest corporations in the country must begin to pay their fair share of taxes. They must not be able to continue hiding their profits offshore and shipping American jobs overseas to avoid taxes.

Here’s the simple truth. You can’t be an American company only when you want a massive bailout from the American people. You have also got to be an American company, and pay your fair share of taxes, as we struggle with the deficit and adequate funding for the needs of the American people. If Wall Street and corporate America don’t agree, the next time they need a bailout let them go to the Cayman Islands, let them go to Bermuda, let them go to the Bahamas and let them ask those countries for corporate welfare.

 

Engineers Solve a Biological Mystery and Boost Artificial Intelligence

February 4th, 2013

Jan. 29, 2013 — By simulating 25,000 generations of evolution within computers, Cornell University engineering and robotics researchers have discovered why biological networks tend to be organized as modules — a finding that will lead to a deeper understanding of the evolution of complexity

The new insight also will help evolve artificial intelligence, so robot brains can acquire the grace and cunning of animals.

From brains to gene regulatory networks, many biological entities are organized into modules — dense clusters of interconnected parts within a complex network. For decades biologists have wanted to know why humans, bacteria and other organisms evolved in a modular fashion. Like engineers, nature builds things modularly by building and combining distinct parts, but that does not explain how such modularity evolved in the first place. Renowned biologists Richard Dawkins, Günter P. Wagner, and the late Stephen Jay Gould identified the question of modularity as central to the debate over “the evolution of complexity.”

For years, the prevailing assumption was simply that modules evolved because entities that were modular could respond to change more quickly, and therefore had an adaptive advantage over their non-modular competitors. But that may not be enough to explain the origin of the phenomena.

The team discovered that evolution produces modules not because they produce more adaptable designs, but because modular designs have fewer and shorter network connections, which are costly to build and maintain. As it turned out, it was enough to include a “cost of wiring” to make evolution favor modular architectures.

– More…

– Research thanks to Alan T.

Personal – 28 January 2013

January 27th, 2013

– I correspond with a lot of folks in a Yahoo Group called Expats-in-New-Zealand.  These are wanna-be immigrants to New Zealand, folks who’ve just arrived and folks who’ve been here for years – all in a big discussion about what it is like to be an immigrant to New Zealand.   Most of the folks are Americans though many other countries are represented as well.   FYI, of all the folks who immigrate to NZ, only about 3% are Americans.

– Below, is a piece I recently wrote and posted on the Yahoo group summing up my experiences in NZ.  It was in response to a flurry of such pieces in which folks were discussing what they liked and what they didn’t like about New Zealand and about how much the experience has been as they expected and how much of it has been a surprise.

– Not everyone who immigrates, stays.   I’ve heard that as many as 30% of folks return to where they came from for various reasons.  It is, after all, not always greener on the other side of the fence.

– In any case, these were my thoughts and I thought I’d share them here on Samadhisoft as well.

– Cheers

-Dennis

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All,

My New Zealand immigrant story.

I secured, with my then wife, a resident’s visa in 2006 and finally moved here permanently (sans wife) in 2009.  It’s a long story about the wife but the simplest explanation is that she changed her mind and I did not.  I will, however, be forever grateful to her because I would have never secured the right to immigrate here without her as she was younger and better educated.

Be all of that as it may, I’ve been here permanently since 2009 in Christchurch.

My story is different than a lot of folks, I suspect.  When the residence visa was granted us in 2006, I was 58; already past the use-by date of 55.  When I shifted here permanently in 2009, I was 62.  Now I’m 65 and I’ve got Social Security from the USA and a Gold Card here in NZ.

On the good side, I free-held a nice apartment then in Christchurch.  On the bad side, I was ending a 20 year marriage that I thought was going to be for life.

But I had, and still have, good friends here.  People, other American immigrants, that I’d met through this group in 2006.  Friendships that have endured all this time and become central in my life.

Then came the Christchurch earthquakes and I lost the apartment and all the patterns of my life were tossed in the air – just as I was beginning to feel some daylight following the ending of my marriage.

But, life has a way of smiling upon fools.  A Kiwi lady I’d been dating prior to the quake took me in as a temporary measure and we are both living together still today and it has become a wonderful relationship and the emotional center of my new life.

I’ve always liked people and I find it fairly easy to meet and get to know new folks.  So, my circles have grown.   My original US expat friends are still my core group.  Colette, my partner, has introduced me into her extended family and friends.  I’ve met people through meditation groups, through a men’s group, through open mike poetry readings, and through motorcycle riding.  I worked as a programmer for nearly two years with a Kiwi high tech company, SLI Systems.   I met many Kiwis there as well as other immigrants like myself.

My younger son has come over and has a work permit, works in Christchurch and now lives with a beautiful Kiwi women on a farm not far outside of the city.

So, with some rough patches, my new life here has worked out well for me.  But, as I said, my story is a bit different.

Most of the people who come here from the US are more into the central part of their life and careers.  Their careers are mid-stream, they have children and mortgages and they are still building their finances.

I came nearer the end of my life and career – though my health is still excellent.   My finances, between what the apartment was worth and what I get from the US Social Security, mean that I can live simply but well without having to work anymore.  My partnership with Colette has also helped in that.   She owns her house free-hold and is near the end of her career with the New Zealand Ministry of Justice and, by sharing our finances, we are both empowered.

It’s been with some sadness that I’ve watched others come to New Zealand and then depart again for a variety of reasons.   But, I don’t think there are mistakes.   Just events we experience and learn from.  A couple with the last name of Rice left because they found a glass ceiling over their heads at the University.  Another couple, Mike and Cara left because Mike couldn’t find a pathway to use his considerable artistic talents.  There have been others and each story is different.

Today, it’s Curtis and Amy from Wellington who are heading home.

I’ve dealt with the fact that I have many people I still cherish back in the USA by resolving to go home once a year for a month or two and to see all of them.   And, for the last two years, I’ve done this and will continue to.  I drive all up and down the west coast sleeping on couches and sharing stories of where we are now, in our lives.   Those bonds, build of a lifetime’s love, are too important to me to let them wither with distance and inattention.

As a fact, I deeply love the US and its people.   But, just as certainly, I detest the politics, the corporations and the politics with a passion.  It is, in my mind, an empire in collapse from within riven by the greed of those who are looting her.  But, like all such things in history, when you are in the middle of living it, it is very difficult to see clearly.

I’m here, probably, for good.   I never say never because, as I’ve found so clearly in my own life, life can turn on a dime.   But, for right now, that’s what I’m thinking.

Colette and I have made plans to go and see some of this amazing world while it’s still intact and while we can.  And as I said, I can get by without working if I’m careful.   Colette will be able to maintain well if she works on contract work for about six months of the year and then she’ll be free to play the other six.   So, our plan is to spend three to four months a year each year in a different foreign city.  Perhaps, two cities a year.   This year, we’re spending four months here in Wellington while things wrap up for her with her government job (she’s been made redundant).   Then, in June, we’re off for  month in the US while I visit my peeps.

And then, for July, August and September, we’ll be in Paris living frugally in a small apartment.   Shopping each day in the local markets, walking the city, seeing the many museums and just generally ‘being there’ as a way of seeing directly what it’s like to live there.

After that, we’re back to Christchurch.  The next year?   We’re not sure yet.   Montreal, Canada, Vancouver, Canada, Florianopolis, Brazil have all been discussed.   Maybe even Cuba?  In 2014, I’ll have my NZ citizenship which I’ve been waiting patiently to acquire.

Life has been good here in NZ though I do have my gripes.   Why does Steinlager cost $15 a six pack here and $6 in the US and Britain?   There are many economic anomalies like that which makes me suspect that under all their good-natured Kiwi masks, their lie some skanky good-old-boy networks here cornering markets and suppressing the sorts of competition that keep prices low.  No proof, of course – just suspicions.  Book prices?   Give me a break!

And then there’s John Key and the Nationals wanting to always put business interests to the top of the pile and to disassemble the social nets.   Sell the asserts, trim the education programs and sign onto free trade agreements with economic sharks like the US – putting NZ freedoms and self-determination at risk.  Don’t get me started.

But, the one thing to say about NZ is that it’s better here than in the US.   Just today, I read that in the US in the next few days, a law is coming into effect that will make it illegal for folks to break the ties that make their cell phones dependent on one network.   After that, if you have a phone (that you own outright) that is tied to the AT&T network, for example, you will not be able to liberate it without breaking the law.   Isn’t that sweet – for the networks and the phone manufacturers?

I want to mention one other thing before I end this long piece.

Part of the reason I’m here is that I love NZ.  Another part is that I detest the US’s politics and economics, as I said.

But there’s still a third reason and that has to do with the fact that I think the world’s getting unstable; environmentally and politically.  There are a lot of meters creeping up into the red zone.  But they are moving so slowly that it is easy to get used to the rising sounds of impending political and environmental doom and gloom and to just take them all for granted.

But I believe, at some point not too far (5 years .. 20 years?), the wheels are going to come off and there’s going to be a major global reset and many millions are going to die.  Quite some time ago, when I first became aware of all this, I decided that very probably one of the best places one could find themselves and their families would be right here in NZ.  The low population, the high food production, the physical isolation, and the strong infrastructure all tell me that if chaos begins, New Zealand may be able to hold the remnants of civilization together while the rest crumbles.

Something else to think about if you are thinking of where you might want to end up.

Thanks for reading my story.

Cheers,

Dennis Gallagher

2006 Seattle -> Christchurch

Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?

January 21st, 2013

– From the Royal Society…

– This is long and detailed so I’m just going to give the abstract and a link.  

– It’s serious and it’s been with us for some years now; this impending end of the world song they are singing.

– Too bad most of us are not listening.  If you are listening, it’s time to think about where you and your loved ones should be when the wheels come off.

– dennis

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Abstract

Environmental problems have contributed to numerous collapses of civilizations in the past. Now, for the first time, a global collapse appears likely. Overpopulation, overconsumption by the rich and poor choices of technologies are major drivers; dramatic cultural change provides the main hope of averting calamity.

– Follow this to the article:  

A Wee Comparison of Civil Liberties in the United States of America

January 21st, 2013

– I’ve, of course, been deeply aware of the debate in the US over gun control.   I see good arguments on both sides so I’ve stayed out of the dogfight.

– The truth is for me, even though it sounds a bit anarchist, that we all need to take responsibility for ourselves in the last analysis.  Yes, I’d like it if the Rule of Law functioned well.  And I’d like it if all of our laws were applied fairly and humanely.

– But, I’m also a keen observer of history and human beings and I don’t think things will always work so optimally.

– So, when push comes to shove, if the law fails me, I will do what I need to to make up the shortfall.  Hence, I can see some point to the US’s Second Amendment.

– The article, below  is interesting because it shows how badly eroded human rights are becoming in the US and it also shows how the current gun control laws there are a lot more about bark than bite.

– dennis

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Compare and contrast. Here is how seriously we take civil liberties when the subject can beplausibly labeled terrorism:

[New rules] allow the little-known National Counterterrorism Center to examine the government files of U.S. citizens for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them. That is a departure from past practice, which barred the agency from storing information about ordinary Americans unless a person was a terror suspect or related to an investigation.

Now, NCTC can copy entire government databases—flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and many others. The agency has new authority to keep data about
innocent U.S. citizens for up to five years,
 and to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior. Previously, both were prohibited.

And here is how seriously we take civil liberties when gun ownership is involved in any way, shape, or form:

Under current laws the bureau is prohibited from creating a federal registry of gun transactions….When law enforcement officers recover a gun and serial number, workers at the bureau’s National Tracing Center here — a windowless warehouse-style building on a narrow road outside town — begin making their way through a series of phone calls, asking first the manufacturer, then the wholesaler and finally the dealer to search their files to identify the buyer of the firearm.

….The Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986, for example, prohibits A.T.F. agents from making more than one unannounced inspection per year of licensed gun dealers. The law also reduced the falsification of records by dealers to a misdemeanor….The most recent Tiahrt amendment, adopted in 2010…requires that records of background checks of gun buyers be destroyed within 24 hours of approval. Advocates of tighter regulation say this makes it harder to identify dealers who falsify records or buyers who make “straw” purchases for others.

So that’s where we are. The federal government can swoop up enormous databases, keep them for years, and data mine them to its heart’s content if it has even the slightest suspicion of terrorist activity. Objections? None to speak of, despite the fact that terrorism claims only a handful of American lives per year. But information related to guns? That couldn’t be more different. Background checks are destroyed within 24 hours, serial numbers of firearms aren’t kept in a central database at all, and gun dealers can barely even be monitored. All this despite the fact that we record more than 10,000 gun-related homicides every year.

Compare and contrast.

– To the original article: