I am truly speechless

http://img.ibtimes.com/www/articles/20110829/205594_al-gore-climate-change-global-warming-skeptics.htm

Wow.

Believing differently than me makes you a bad person.

I had never thought to try that tack

The Easy Way

I have been watching the climate debate more closely of late.  Not because it especially intrigues me, but because I am coming to the conclusion that it is just a reflection of our current political circle jerk.

Dave Cohen over at Decline of the Empire is an excellent example of this lately.  The I-don't-want-to-believe-it trolls have been commenting on his blog lately and he is getting fed up with it.  Can't really blame him for that.

But, back to the dialog that is taking place at the national level.   More so than anything, our debate is degenerating into the type of demagogic crap that was the staple during the Thirty Years War.  Lutherans and Calvinists having at each other hammer and tongs, agreeing on most issues, but refusing to come to a reasonable accommodation because of intransigence over some obscure nonsense (who even knows, other than the current flavor of obtuse zealot, what transubstantiation of the host means).

The "climate deniers" are attempting to assume the role of Bellarmine.   The global warming defenders are trying on Galileo's robes but are finding them not quite right.  But the roles of distractions that both these "sides" are taking are a close enough approximation of 1632 that I can use them to illustrate a point.

Galileo was a mean-spirited prick who was wrong about as often as he was right.  Ask him about comets and you will giggle.  He viciously attacked anyone who disagreed with him.  The church and inquisition which opposed him were savagely and aggressively attempting to squelch any world view contrary to the system that allowed them to hold the reins of power.

But if you place this little bit of scientific trivia (or as I refer to it "People" magazine science) within the context of the first half of the seventeenth century, you will see it for what it is, a academic speed bump.   The same will probably be said a couple of centuries from now about the sissy-boy-slap-fest that is trying to pass itself off as a climate debate.

The world is in the middle of one of its great turnings, just like the reformation years that rocked Europe so long ago.  The Middle East are The Germanies.  France and England and the Holy Roman Empires are The US, China, and The EU.

We are entering a period of decline due to the probable lack of energy that drives our current world.  Unless someone comes up with an energy source equivalent to the concentration of free energy available in fossil fuels, the civilizations we so cherish are going to go through some profound changes.

I remember hearing a quip years ago.  Two men were discussing the sun rising in the east.  One of the men said, "do you believe how stupid men used to be?  When they saw this, they thought that the sun rotated around the earth".

The other thought about it for a while and merely answered "yeah, I wonder what it would have looked like had it been that way"?

Monastery

 "You can't help those who simply will not be helped. One problem that we've had, even in the best of times, is people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice." -- President Reagan, 1/31/84, on Good Morning America, defending his administration against charges of callousness.

I still remember the hoohooraw when when Ronnie Reagan spoke those words.

But, I think that we ought to revisit the idea and think harder about it.   The homeless will have to be dealt with, the underemployed are becoming an impressively sized voting bloc, those unable to keep up with the change being wrought upon them will fail.  Ronnie's words were spoken when only a small minority were failing, what will happen when it becomes significantly more widespread.

These words were spoken when times were as good as we had it in America.  All of the programs set by the the democratically held congress since WWII were in full force, and, by Ronnie's short-sighted, Hollywood inspired self-esteem, we had just started on spending the savings money that we had put aside for later generations (Which BTW, we have just spent the last of).

I think that we will be revisiting this issue, The NEETs, Parasite Singles, Freeters, and all the other erstwhile dysfunctions will be starting to bloom here soon.  These are descriptions of young people whose opportunities have deserted them and who have been raised to expect a lifestyle beyond what is available.

The dreams launched by marketing are of a particularly insidious sort.  They rely exclusively on on a strong current of wealth to fulfill.  Wealth is a chancy thing, more a consensual hallucination rather than a state of being.  It would appear that the system that allows the care and feeding of the marketing culture is having a spot of bother currently.  I don't see that there is any valid cure being developed.  The excess of production and growth that has been seen as normal is grinding to a halt, to be replaced by something significantly less.

I I think that folks will begin looking at themselves soon, and begin calibrating their lifestyles.  Young people will stay with parents longer.  Multi-generational homes will return to being normal.  The sad little artificial construct of the American nuclear family will revert to being something that is pitied.

There will be low wage or no wage jobs where folks can be fed and taken care of.  Group living arrangements will be crafted and attempted.  Back to the land movements will take root.  Homelessness and poverty will again raise their ugly and well-documented heads.

The society is going to change.  Are you going to waste all your energies trying to cling to a system that is doomed, or will you make the rewarding and difficult choice to begin anew?

Chacun à son goût

I am in the mood for a little ad hominem attack.   I was spending some time over at ZeroHedge and got to reading

I made the mistake of going over and reading some douchebag whining about how we are going to extinct ourselves in the next twenty years.  What a fucking retard.

Why is he so certain that the human race is going to become extinct?   Granted, we are going to go through a long overdue trimming, but extinct?  Give me a break.  This comes back to the hubris and arrogance of mankind.

Paul Ehrlich and his intellectual grandfather Thomas Malthus have gone over this in detail.  Jared Diamond has detailed the situation nicely and I really cannot say enough about the well thought out analysis of Professor Tainter.

So, I really do see that we will be going through a massive dislocation in the not to distant future.   A couple of the horsemen that have been on vacation lately will probably be showing up.  The patterns of magnetic field orientation that currently defines most of the wealth in the world will have a drastically lower value (lets consider the number zero).

So we will be reverting to mean.  It is going to leave a mark.  But extinction?  Really?

No, the folks who go around and mouth this kind of tripe are really missing the boat.  They are mistaking their personal extinction/death (very probable) with the death of the species (very improbable).  But, that is the nature of folks.  But, when you read how the article in Zerohedge is structured, you start realizing that the person doing the writing equates his loss of perceived wealth and status as being equivalent to the end of the world.

BOHICA

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Variation

I find it oddly surprising when I talk to people about taking care of their fellow man.  I have come to the conclusion that compassion, as practiced here, is an oddly selfish activity.  People only seem to be willing to lend a hand only if the person that they are helping is sufficiently similar to themselves.

Caring for others in America seems to have devolved into a cool calculation of self interest.  Tax write-offs seem to figure prominently.  Desire to maintain a tribal identity is another.  Exclusion of others from largesse is a major component.

And when we grudgingly do dole out help to others, it usually comes with lectures and entreaties to become more like us, to abandon the supposed "choices" that brought the person to their dire straits and buy into the bourgeois-dominated existence currently being defended.

People are developing strategies for living in an uncertain world.  Some have no hope of developing a workable strategy.  Others have decided that the world-view and faiths that drive us are no longer worth supporting.  There is still another group that just needs the resources to allow them a life worth living.

None of these conclusions are invalid.   These folks, won't become like "us" because we are a dying breed.  When I help someone, I am hoping that they don't become like me, but somehow, they can figure the way out of the endless maze that we all run through.

Saturday Night Listening

In a galaxy long ago

Nullius in Verba. the motto of the prestigious Royal Society in London, is usually translated as ‘on the word of no one’. When it was coined back in 1663, it was intended to distance science from the methods of the ancient universities, which relied heavily on the personal authority of the scholars. 

So, Dave Cohen over at Decline of the Empire got his shorts in a bit of a knot over the myopia of scientists.

Now, in my prior life, I was an alpha geek, in charge of a gaggle of scientists.  I finally said screw it and left for a lower paying but rational job.  Might have been one of my good decisions that was.

Anyway, after years of spending time within this subculture, I am in no way surprised by the lack of diligence in data set selection that leads them down their scholastic path as the idea of actually going out and generating a data set is an irritating byline for most scientists.  But I was mostly surprised by this statement.

  Stupidity (or obtuseness) on this scale is almost enough to convince me to dismiss all climate scientists as total idiots whom nobody should listen to about anything. I do however trust the research they do within their fields of expertise, and of course the Earth is warming due to CO₂ emissions. 

I guess that I was a bit stunned here.  When I was in back in college during the dark ages (1970's), the "climate scientists" were preaching a new ice age, complete with apocalyptic warnings.  Then they got hold of computers and the interesting work of Edward Lorenz and went to town with their spiffy computer models and came out with a completely fund-able new set of theories complete with models to certify that they weren't completely full of shit.

I had buddies who were part of the crew at NCAR who came up with the models.  Great folks who were great drinkers of Newcastle Brown Ale and lovers of the high desert.  But mostly their love was transferred to the Cray YMP in Boulder and the models swirled inside that they saw as defining the weather.

I spent time in Southern Utah, camping with these folks and listening to their descriptions of their work.  What I was always surprised at is how casually they assumed their initial data set.  It was never to be questioned, it was just to be fed into the Cray.  A digital offering to a silicon Moloch.

Where this comes around to my point of contention with Mr. Cohen.  I agree with him that global warming is real.  I will even allow that human activity is a contributor to the phenomenon.  What I don't agree is that one should trust the research that they do in their own fields, unless you are willing to check their datasets, statistical inferences, principle assumptions, and understand the bounds of validity set by these constraints.

In weather and atmospheric science, in its current guise, one must also understand the math behind the model.   Difficult stuff this, I am not at all for certain that I completely understand it, and my math chops are better than most.

But the final issue that I wish to bring up is the nature of funding.  Funding is done primary through government grants, and the only way that you get this is to pay homage to the current model.  In other words, the results generated in the current funding regimen are as suspect and potentially myopic as that generated by a candidate drug whose research is funded by the company that owns the patent of the compound being tested.

There is something there, our world appears to be getting warmer.  Is this increase an artifact of enhanced temperature monitoring systems?  Can it be unequivocally tied to CO2 increases?  Is it reversible?  How can we describe the world system that allows temperature increase?

What I fear more than anything is that we are not holding the climate scientists to a rigorous enough standard.  I think that we are putting them in the same box that we put nuclear scientists in the 50's and 60's.   We see the climate scientists as handsome young idealists, standing in front of their array of gleaming computers, showing us pretty pictures on a CRT.  Saying simply that you trust people in their fields of expertise is to allow them to control the conversation.  To allow them to pull off white-lab-coat omniscience can lead to things like the Hanford reservation, Chernobyl, and Fukishima Dai-Ichi.

A brother in another land

I am just going to publish Demetrius' latest with a minimum of comment.

He speaks of the UK, but he might as well direct the salvo at DC as well as Whitehall.

Coming from a family that marched with Cromwell, I have less sympathy than some to the plight of the British.  But I realize that the problems facing the citizens of Great Britain are the same as the issue we face here.

Enclosures are coming back, the new aristocracy are trying to bind us.

Rights And Wrongs

Whilst everyone is bleating about what went wrong nobody seems to have realised that it was never right in the first place. There never was some kind of UK or other paradise where it was all happy families raising kids to be socially mobile, or if not, at least willing workers in an ordered and secure world.

In the 1960’s the world was a difficult and dangerous place and the reality of life for the bulk of the population of the UK far from the Rock and Roll Swinging Sixties the media have foisted on history. As for debt the maximum debt loading a salaried family in a safe job might go to was only around two and one half times the main income only.

What has happened is that many of the problems that existed were bought off. Cheap oil, vastly improved transport of goods together with medical and technical advance bought us almost half a century which together with inflation, the gross debasement of fiat money and the bribery of regimes and electorates have deferred and delayed the impact of human activity on political stability.

What is worse is that in the search for reasons across the world both media and the politicians have relied on notions, theories and ideologies from both from both earlier generations, who themselves lived in changing worlds they did not fully understand and from the distant past.

We cannot go back because what was in the past cannot be recreated and the ideas we used then are now increasingly remote from present reality. Even ideas formed as recently as the 1990’s are as hopelessly wrong and dangerous in the coming situation as those of earlier periods. What do we have to build on?

The answer is not a lot. The distortion and manipulation of information and images has been an ever present in human affairs, also changes in attitude. The shifts and turns of our rulers in the past give many examples that would fit the modern world. How did Britain get into so many wars? We were told in school about the hundred years of peace between 1815 and 1914. Yet, in that time there was barely a year when British troops or seaman did not see action.

Today we have the issue of the Iraq dossiers and it is apparent that the use of modern spin, manipulation of figures, false accounting and calculated use of a media that is largely tied and subservient means that if what we know is what we are told then we really are in trouble. Because what we are told is closer to fiction than fact.

Our posturing politicians have given away most of their authority to both foreign and UK agencies severely limiting their capacity to do anything effectively. They have given away control of the money supply and credit control and creation to a group of financiers who base themselves elsewhere.

They have caved in to the demands of a narrow range of interests who have the ear of the media that means whilst on the one hand there are infinitely more laws there is little real control in what is happening on the streets amongst those elements of the population who prefer to avoid either useful work or to follow basic rules.

There have always been criminal elements in society, sometimes more so others less. There have always been fraudsters and crooks. There have always been the poor and needy and those needing help. There have always been families that were in difficulty. For a time in the UK in the mid 20th Century we seemed to manage to deal with the worst of it but then gave up and handed out money instead.

Now, in their own pursuit for wealth the politicians have tied their own hands and hope to exist on words spin and issuing fake money. In the parade of people through the law courts in the next few weeks you will not see any of the drug barons, people traffickers, fraudsters or tax evaders. You will see the shoddy end of the criminal elements that do the dirty work.

We are paying for it all and the future means we will have a lot less money to do it with. So how is the present political structure going to survive?

Oh...Do check this out

http://www.slate.com/id/2301312/

A close study

The Epicurean posted this the a while ago and I have spentsome time pondering the meaning, and thought that I would take a moment to do a little discussion on the poem from both artistic and ethical merits

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned

With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.

Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.

A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,

A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—

They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled

Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.

More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

— Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Dirge Without Music"

This is one of the most beautifully crafted poems I have ever read.  Old lady Edna had some serious chops, and she used nearly all of them here.  But in the end, the damn thing is just a haunting anthem to ones own egocentricism.

"I am not resigned".  What an odd concept, what a display of selfishness.  That  single egos ability to perceive is all important, that an individual has meaning outside of the society and planet on which they swim.

But then I went over to Jesse's and read.   I was astounded by the strain that happens betweeen these two when you stand back from them.  TED's is a simple exposition, allowing you to gleam potential meaning from a well crafted title.  One can probably make an infinite number of incorrect assumptions about the background and intent of this post.  I hope that TED never makes this clear, it would ruin the present that he gave us with posting this.

Jesse on the other hand is more forthright, a clarion call of "j'accuse" with no punches pulled.  A obituary of monumental proportions casting evil with human faces and greed as the sole earthy sin of any consequence.  Those who are attempting to set themselves as Emperor and Senate as the source of all evil, taking the earnings from those who feel that the spoils are theirs.

What these two have in common is the idea of death.  One sees it as a means of placing tyrants.  The other sees it as an injustice  to be raged against.

I very much applaud these two for bringing, at least to my mind, the ability to think about the problems that face us as a country and a world.  These problems are intimately wound with our stunted and solipsistic ethical worldview.   The idea of the ethical supremacy of the individual and the injustice of mortality goes hand in hand with our idea of death as a punishment and a leveler.

Death is none of these things.

So what are your chances of voting for this guy?

Clear-eyed thinking

I read Dmitry every time he post something.  Have been doing so for a while now, since he started writing for Mike Ruppert.  He has gone big time now, and I wish him the best.

I also read Russell on a when he writes.  Good stuff too, gotta thank him for this when I get around to it.

But when you click on the two links above, you will note a couple of articles dedicated to the concept of using sailing craft as a bug-out modality.  Hmmm...part of me likes the idea.  But in a sense, I just want to pause for a moment to talk about the way that we do things in in blogoland.

Folks who sit down like this an punch out stuff for folks to read are not stating facts for the most part.  They are formulating theories and positing potential survival strategies and/or modalities.  I really think that their theories are quite interesting, but they are just that, theories.

Theories need to be tested against the new world which we are entering.  The experiment has not been fully defined yet, and the parameters of the test are murky at best.  So, read this kind of stuff (to include the current author of course) with a great deal of skepticism and not as a template, but as a possible means to be incorporated into a future life.

The act of sitting down and writing tends to make one believe that a sudden fit of infallibility has taken the author.  All one has to do is look at the mess that one makes on their life to realize that this erstwhile infallibility may well be a very low probability event.

Mayberry, Dmitry, and others have extolled the virtues of the boat.  I kinda think that this might be a silly idea as a strategy during lean and turbulent times.  There may be some merit to it, but the more that I think about it, the more boats seem kind of silly

Laughing my butt off

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Zero

I have been reading ZeroHedge for a while now.  But I have a feeling that it is going to go the way of Mike Shedlock and the other financial porn sites.  They just get kind of stale and shrill after a little while.

Folks, the money is gone.  I would argue that it was never there in the first place.  We set up an economy based on getting rid of as many jobs as we could and then buying cheap crap from Wal-Mart.  All of the little IOU's were shuffled around for a while (a while in this case being 10-15 years) and wound up in the rich fuckers pockets.

So, we have dismantled our factories and sent the factories and their attendant jobs to China.  We lowered the interest rates to as low or lower than they have ever been before, and then went off on an incredible hallucination that a house is a store of wealth rather than the huge money suck that they are in real life.

So here we sit, with an economy built on Excel pilots and Human Resource administrators.  From the best that I can see, for every job that we have producing something of value, we have three parasitic jobs grafted onto it.  Now, the guys with the money are starting to figure out that we are well and truly fucked and are killing off even more jobs.

I cannot see an easy way out of this.  We have to take the long time and hardship necessary to bring us out of the mess.  It is going to take thirty years, cuz that is how long ago we swallowed Ronald reagan and Milton Friedman's line of bullshit and started deconstructing the edifice.

I guess that what we are doing now is beginning the process of implementing a salvage culture.  We spent the first two hundred years putting together a political/economic edifice that was the envy of the world's history.  Then Ronnie and Miltie came around and convinced us that we would be happier if we dismantled the whole thing and let them and their friends get rich.

We are pretty much half finished with the dismemberment of our society.  We have allowed the rich to create their Versailles and their corps of Intendants to protect their privilege.  We now are on the cusp of the last step of the process.

It is just a bummer that the recent building constructed are of such shoddy quality.  Their materials would not be preferred for constructing the future.  

Founding Fathers

 "A statesman is a dead politician. We need more statesmen."

Oscar Wilde

I am a huge fan of the Fourteenth Amendment.  More than any other amendment, it brought the "blessings of liberty" to the greater bulk of the American experiment.  The founding fathers were in fact a bunch of politicians who were incapable of passing a bill with meaning and teeth, so they punted the problem down the line.  Took us around eighty years, a civil war, and the violent death of four percent of the male population to complete the process.

But we have a group of people here in the USA who truly worship the founding fathers.  When I hear some f-ing loony start to spout off about the intentions on the founding fathers and what they wanted from the government of the newly formed country and how divine help was imperative to the process, I immediate start mentally planning what's for dinner tonight while I pretend to listen.

You always have some christer bozo claiming that God wanted this or that and if you read between the lines and look for the "founder's intent" you will immediately come around to their way of thinking.  I usually find that these folks are the most likely to have a set of robes in the closet and spend their spare time reading Leviticus.

Hell, for that matter, the constitution wasn't even a first effort.   If it was divinely inspired, would we have needed practice swings?   It took us eight years of wrangling to reach the compromises required for the Constitution to come into force.  That kind of time-line has committee and compromise written all over it in my mind.

So, I would consider it a kindness and a sign of maturity if we got over the puerile hero worship of the founding fathers and the idiotic channeling of their thought and got on with the hard work of compromise and self-denial necessary for a mature society to be able to govern itself.

Well, that didn't work

I have been working on a article about the debt (no it didn't go away), and this morning, when I was going over it prior to publishing, I realized that it was complete crap.

Ouch.

Well, you get this little apologia instead.  I will also throw on a little additional discussion on bloggers too-infrequent use of proof-reading and self criticism.   Now I fully realize that a too-large portion of what I have written over the past years is really not very good, but you ought to see the doozies that have gone into the wastebasket.

Too much of what is written in the cybersphere is stream of consciousnesses that really should not have made it past the mental filters of the writer.  But the immediacy of the medium allows for a more Joycian approach to writing.  But remember, Ulysses was ungodly hard to read, not all that well written, and  ultimately disappointing.  Much the same can be said of many blog posts.

I am hoping that blogging and distributed political/moral thought will continue to mature, but a first step will always be realistic self appraisal.

Get on it.

Just Sayin'

In a Nutshell

A GOVERNMENT’S credibility is founded on its commitment to honour its debts.

The Ecomomist

"Turning Japanese"

July 30, 2011

Volume 400, Number 8744

This is what the world thinks that it all comes down to.  Sometimes, when I read The Economist, I feel that I live on a different planet than the people who consider the well-written, witty, and thoughtful commentary and articles as holy writ.


You see, I believe something different.

 -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.


I can't see a word in that phrase about a credit rating.