Oddness in the Galleries

All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.

Now, this may show my lack of sophistication, but the recent noises made by the  Republican leadership in the House of Representatives seems to fly in the face of the constytooshun that they so love to defend.

Now, maybe I am splitting hairs, but I think that a budget bill has a lot to do with revenues as well as spending.  Many completely rational people try to make these two aspects come within spitting distance of each other.   Now the Republicans in the House are trying to score some strange political points by punting the spending bill over to the Senate.

Again, maybe my reading of the text of Article One, Section Seven is mistaken, but it says flat out that all bills defining how much money we can take in is the sole responsibility of the House.  The Senate can concur and/or propose amendments, but the heavy lifting has to be done by the house.

The Republican leadership has taken the position that taxes cannot be raised.  That means we are constrained to the amount of money we can take in.

There is an outdated "Solve the Deficit" game that is available at the New York Times.

You see, we pay too few taxes for what we expect from government.  Add to this the fact that there are too many people for too few jobs and you have a recipe for an ongoing problem balancing revenues and expenditures.  Throw in a couple of unnecessary wars, a shitpot of corruption, and interest on past debt not getting any smaller and what you have is a recipe for the cold times.

So, the Republican fucktards in the House of Representatives think that they can score some political points by blaming the Senate for not passing a budget.  The truth is, both parties have completely lost track with their responsibilities and have devolved into a fairly useless debating society.

Or, why the smog?

Beijing in 2003

I spent a ton of time over in China in the early 00's.  My passport has two add-on visa packs and a buttload of customs stamps from the Beijing airport.  I think that I have lived there for about a year all told.

So the recent "revelation" that China has an air pollution problem is almost comical to me.  Hell, up top  is a picture that I took out of my hotel window back in 2003.  This was taken on a not so clear day in November.  The buildings that you barely see in the background are less than a quarter mile away.

We, as a country. like sneering at China.  The current round of sneering comes at the expense of the pollution that a newly industrialized country is enduring.  We are so over that here in the US.  Well we should be, the jobs that currently employ Chinese used to be the jobs that caused smogs like this in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles in 1948

We have fresh air because the high-pollution heavy industry isn't located here in the US anymore.  So the smog in Beijing is there because of all the crap that we buy from them.  A major chunk of the pollution is the price China pays for selling us salad shooters.

Another big part is the huge differential between the rich and the poor in this erstwhile "Communist" country.  The rich live in houses that Martha Stewart would approve of.  The poor live in ramshackle, Soviet-era concrete blockhouses or ancient hutongs (though, by the time I left they had been tearing up the hutongs to make way for more skyscrapers) None of which were well heated.   This being said, the poor folk, which constitute around 85% of Chinese use little coal fired heaters burning pressed coal blocks that look like this:

So, the smog produced by actually having a manufacturing policy and wealth distribution that is bad, but might be more equitable than ours, we have pollution.  Stop sneering.

Axes to Grind

Lately I have been noting a certain amount of angst in the doomer blogosphere.  I have regular reads, but as a group they are starting to pall.  It is one thing to sit down and write about how fucked we are as a people/culture/economy, it is another thing altogether to begin sniping at the world for not having come around to your point of view yet.

CKM, Dave Cohen, Mish Shedlock, the menagerie over at Zerohedge, and any number of of the "world is falling down folks" have been getting downright snotty about the state of the human race in regards to the way that it does not meet up with their white-middle class sensibilities.

One of the uncomfortable things about hanging out in the same arena as doomie-types is their anger when Armageddon doesn't show up in a timely manner.  They also have a moralistic streak a mile wide, usually deeply rooted in their middle American upbringing (the culture which is the most responsible for the problems we are facing).

Dave inveighs against the internet and is nasty just about everything.  Good luck to anyone who leaves a comment on that blog.  CKM has been getting all snippety lately and pissy about social security and how the everything is a plot to keep old folks from taking out more than they put in and not being thanked for their efforts.  Zerohedge is becoming a loony bin for every commie-plot-exposing brownshirt out there.  Mish is just a fucker who can't understand why the little people won't work for $5.00/hr.

What all these guys seem to channel is the angst of failed, aging white folk.  The world that they thought was their oyster is being exposed as the world it has always been:  Semi-Hobbesian and uncaring about one's perceived perquisites.

The world is a great place, it just doesn't see any need to follow the social media requirements of doofuses.

Obviously I am redoing my blogroll.

I love this kind of stuff

Bill Moyers does take the time to go after things.  You might not agree with his politics, but he does do his homework well.

Meddling

 You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it! Is that clear? You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU... WILL... ATONE! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. 

There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world... in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel. 

Good Music

I do enjoy other folks sharing music that they have found.  Some folks have even gone so far as to make the action a routine part of their blogging habit.  I am not at all sure about the practice, I find that the more that a person tries to be a doomer,right-wing, semi-survivalist, the bansksters are evil, the world is going to shit Jeremiah, the less that music appear to be one's forte.

That being said, and with the caveat that I have tried to perform this very act in the past, here I go with my music recommendations.  I am not trying to set down a decent soundtrack for Der Untergang des Abendlandes.  That is not a task that many are up to.

Instead, I am trying to only use this somewhat-less-than-bully pulpit to let you know about new stuff that I like on the rare occasions that occurs.

Try this guy, his name is Samuel Yirga,  it is definitely worth listening.

A Different Sort of Metal

I really like watching Max Keiser.  The doofus really makes me laugh and think.  Outside of Jon Stewart, I can't think of a comedian who has a better grasp on world and national affairs.

The nature of the gold and silver markets and the frozen wealth that they represent are a mystery.  The idea that a peice of metal represents the labor and flow of the economy and that one can capture the richness that the world offers is an odd one.

But ever since the Athenians started stamping out their owls, such has been the nature of the world.  The world also has any number of object lessons as to the overall usefulness of the metal as a symbol.   Midas maintains his name through the millenia.  Crassus really did get was was coming to him.

The gold that is being transported around is not there to assist in the betterment of the people who theoretically own it (read here, the American People, the German People, etc, etc, etc), but rather, to make sure that a moneyed elite maintain their grip on the levers of power.

The gold that is locked (or not, depending on your opinion about the tungsten rumors) up in the vaults in London and New York do not mean anything to the likes of you and I, it is ante in a bigger game that you and I cannot play.   It really is part of the arsenal of the game of thrones.

MetalHeads

Following on my prior post, I want to spend some time on the idea of the technologies used in cleaning up the toxic messes left by industry and us consumers.

Metals are nasty things, there are some soils out there that are scary contaminated with lead or arsenic from lazy and/or primitive manufacturing technologies.  But, as in the last posting, the use of these technologies is sadly absent.  I really find the article written for the New York Times back in 1992 to be sadly instructive.  While the technology is there, it just hasn't been deployed at the level needed to fix the problems.  Again, I would posit that the effect that the work has on a corporation's bottom line is much more important than the effect the technology has on the soil.

But what I find most interesting is the little blurb written innocuously at the bottom of this 2005 report by the USDA Agricultural Research Service.

In 2000, a patent was filed by the University of Maryland on the use of alpine pennycress for the phytoextraction of cadmium from soil, and a patent has been granted in Australia. No other similar technologies currently exist for remediation of cadmium contaminated soils using plants.

So, now you begin to see the problem in a bigger picture.  The University of Maryland own the rights to one's use of Pennycress to clean up cadmium.  And if you think for a minute that the University of Maryland isn't dialed into the corporate structure of Dow and the likes, I have a bridge for you.

So, the first obstacle to this is the reluctance of corporations to clean up after themselves, the second obstacle is that the current structure of power will make sure that one pays for the privilege of cleaning up the mess.  That is going to make it tough, but it is surmountable.

My biggest concern is the issue of extracting the metals and returning a safe plant residue into the ecosystem.  A great deal of the time, the sites being cleaned up are slag heaps.  Residue from a prior attempt to glean the metals from a different source.  If the metals are to be removed from the soil, they have to be safely taken from the plant matter prior to recycling the biomass back into the process.

I have run into a dead end trying to find a process that will do this.  Maybe someone is out there who can help.  My only clue is this little graph in an article from China discussing the washing of soils to reduce cadmium and phenanthrene.  I am thinking that this will be the way to process the contaminated plants for return to the system (ain't chelation grand).

Taken from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0269749108003254

CH3XXX

Try going over to the Archdruid and read his post on what he sees as the necessary technologies for the future.  Now as usual he writes well and his points are well taken.  But in a rare moment of conflict, I find myself in disagreement with the laundry list of technologies that he espouses.

His first wish is bioremediation.   All well and good, but it is a complete technology.  Whe really do know what we need to know.  I was the chief chemist for a bioremediation firm back in the early 90's.  We did fine work are were easily able to clean up sites contaminated with organics.  All this technology takes is time.  Even the most refractory sites can be cleaned of organics by just treating them like a big garden and plowing and fertilizing the hell out of them.  Hell, we even proved that you can get rid of organics in groundwater by injecting nutrients and amino acids into the aquifer.  All the bugs need is some thing to go with the contaminants and they will be happy to suck the stuff up.

But this is necessarily a slow process, for what you are doing is creating a system of controlled evolution that forces the bugs to eat the nasties that you have put there.  The Archdruid seems to think that the technology isn't there or there isn't a complete set of tools to do the job.  The truth is, we have everything we need to fix the organic contamination process.

No, the issue with cleaning up sites contaminated with organics is there, what is not available is the ability to make the people who made the mess clean up after themselves.  Folks who are willing to fuck up the planet are notorious for being unwilling to reverse the damage.

Nope, I think that, when the time comes, and the fossil-fuel industries start grinding down and the world begins to change, the organics will be comfortably accelerated in the cases where it is useful and will self-clean over the course of a couple of centuries in the cases where it isn't.

Now, this little post only applies to organics contamination.  Metals or radioactive contamination is another deal altogether.  I will work on a post to address the problems there.

A Man of Parts

"Show me a hero, and I will write you a tragedy."

F. Scott Fitzgerald

OK.  Those of you who have read this screed for a while are aware of my unabashed distaste for the "sport" of cycling.  So you may find it odd that I am weighing in on the recent "revelations" that Lance Armstrong doped during his run being the king shit of the bicycle world.

I really can't say as I care any more than I cared about Paul Hornung or Pete Rose's gambling.  I care about the steroid abuse in baseball an equivalent amount.  Adderall use in the NFL interests me equally.

That is to say, not at all.

"I don’t think he was ever happy unless some one was in love with him, responding to him like filings to a magnet, helping him to explain himself, promising him something. What it was I do not know. Perhaps they promised that there would always be women in the world who would spend their brightest, freshest, rarest hours to nurse and protect that superiority he cherished in his heart."

 F. Scott Fitzgerald

Professional athletes are one of the oddest parts of our culture.  Sports is of such a trivial importance to our society, yet the mass media uses the National Enquirer culture to force feed the foibles of a bunch of pandered children as part of the appeal of the game.

Lance Armstrong did some pretty amazing things, even taking into consideration his notable inattention to the rules of the game.   The sport of bicycling is known as a cess-pit of rule bending, skating the line, and absolute cheating.  I really can't think of a dirtier sport.  I have heard that the agency that runs the Tour de France is having difficulty locating a participant who is not under investigation to award the prizes vacated by Mr. Armstrong.

You see, even with the doping, Lance has to be up there with one of the great ones of the sport.  If a cheater beats all of the rest of the cheaters, then, by definition, he is the best in the sport.

But Lance is a different critter.  I have never been a big fan of our adulation of the "cancer survivor", as if scrambling not to die somehow puts you above the herd.  So his "beating" cancer doesn't really hold any special pull for me.

So he went out and created a PR firm to harvest guilt-gelt harvesting machine.  It did great work for the business model that he isolated;  The perpetual motion money making machine that is the search for the cure for cancer.

Leigh Cowart over at NSFW banged the description of cancer right down on it head. (please splurge the subscription fee so that these folks can keep going, this is a great news service)

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. There’s no cure for cancer. There could never be, and will never be a cure for cancer. See, cancer isn’t a thing. It’s not a fightable foe, like a bacterial infection or George Foreman. It’s not an simple environmental agent that you can remove from your surroundings like Agent Orange or Aunt Tilda. The reason you cannot cure cancer is because cancer isn’t one disease. Or a hundred diseases. Or a thousand diseases. 

Cancer is millions of diseases. Cancer can become other diseases within the same cancer patient. Cancer is the varied and seemingly innumerable ways in which the abnormal cells in the human body can exhibit uncontrolled growth. And it’s changing all the time.

 So Little Lancie, a serial cheater, scrambles like hell to get rid of testicular cancer (an act which I hold in no contempt, seems like a damn fine idea), and sets himself up as a demigod for the masses and scrapes in buttloads of money for cancer research and his own lifestyle.  Sounds like quite the deal.

But now the Oprah crowd and its hangers on are finding out that Lance was an asshole during his run at greatness.   Wow, who would have thought it.

But our umbrage and outrage about Mr. Armstrong's behavior strike me as kind of disingenuous.  Maybe it is the contempt which I hold the world view that Ms Winfrey espouses, but more than that I think that it is our desire as a culture to have the folks who are willing to do anything to achieve the transient greatness of this life be "just ordinary Joes",  to be just like us.

Ms. Winfrey is the sounding board for the folks who have shoveled aside everything for the pursuit of fame.  It is a closely scripted, tightly controlled facade where the rich and powerful can pretend that they are "plain folk" for the edification of the masses and the increase in bottom lines of self-serving elites.

No, we can't blame the folks like Armstrong for their single minded drive.  They are different than us.  They will cheat to get what they want, because what they want is beyond the reach of the "ordinary Joe" we so wish them to be.

The blame lies with us, the noble unwashed masses who desire more than anything to retain the thought that we are just as good as the single minded automatons that have sacrificed everything to achieve their goal.  When we find out that such as these are different than us, have differing motivations, different interpretations of the rules, it ruins our fantasy that excellence is a path that we could have chosen, but one we just didn't tread.

The Barn Door

Consider for a moment the following website:

http://defensedistributed.com/

I am always surprised and saddened by the lack of sophistication on both sides in the "Gun Debate".

It is kind of scary.

Gun control is an extraordinarily difficult subject, it is resistant to any attempt to simplify the issue and the noisiest folks in the debates are usually those with the least to contribute.  Somehow gun control has become a touchstone, an article of faith in the holy war between the defenders guns and those who wish to see them gone.

Pandora's box is open.  The guns that are out there can't be called back.  I am not interested in a civil war, so the thought that the government will go out and confiscate firearms is not one that I will ever support.  But the truth of the matter is that there are too many guns out there.

I think that the folks who have guns aren't going to be giving them up without a struggle.  I don't think that the problem of guns in the hands of criminals will suddenly disappear with the passage of a few laws.  Crazy folks will still get access to guns that they shouldn't have.

The folks that think that passing a couple of laws and implementing some executive orders will solve the problem are deluded.  Folks that think free and simple access to guns will solve the problem are deluded.

The horses are running away, closing the barn door may seem foolish, but there might be a horse or two left in there, we might want to keep them there.

Multiples

Now

Then

So, Russell comments on my post from the fifteenth.

45% of the 1.6 million Afghanistan/Iraq veterans are claiming compensation for injuries, versus 21% of Gulf War vets. They are also claiming far more injuries (10+) than earlier vets - although that may be an effort to make a lot of "minor" injuries add up to enough to count as disability.

I get thinking.  The bare stats that Russell cites seems to be a critique of the current crop of discharged vets, a subtle slam that they are trying to "milk" the system to a greater degree than the vets of the past.

OK, this is the longest time period that troops have ever been deployed.  The nature of the Army is different, no longer a draftee army doing a single tour and then back to the world, but a volunteer army doing multiple deployments under a single enlistment.

So more folks are asking for disabilities?  Yes, I would imagine that it is true and fair.

Every time you go to see the elephant, you start from zero and go into another, discrete probability space where you can get fucked up.  Each discrete tour adds to the overall possibility you will get fucked up.  Training fucks you up.  The military uses people like a person with a cold uses kleenex.

So, we have been abusing the hell out of these kids and then are surprised when they come back damaged.  I remember one of the reasons we stayed in that shithole Iraq as long as we did is the oh-so-moral "you break it, you buy it" rule.

So why is that not the case with veterans?

Dave's on a Downer

I really like Dave Cohen over at Decline of the Empire.  He does write a mean criticism of modern civilization,  but as is the tendency of most folks who dabble in the realm of truth, he does tend to get a little gloomy when he presents the hard numbers (but, who doesn't)

World population milestones (USCB estimates)

Population (in billions)	1		2		3		4		5		6		7		8		9
Year	1804		1927		1960		1974		1987		1999		2012		2027		2046
Years elapsed between milestones	––		123		33		14		13		12		13		15		19

Now, even with my empathy meter for Dave's depression set on high, I still can't quite get to the point where "humanity is fucked".  Because, truth be told, the astronomic numbers for growth of population and CO2 just doesn't seem to be an issue to me because I doubt that they will ever be achieved.

You have to consider the issues in tandem, along with resource depletion, and loss of arable land/fertility.  The greater bulk of humanity is not going to be offered an opportunity to replace itself in the near future.  This simple fact is due to we will soon be approaching hard limits to the ability to feed new population.  The green revolution is petering out and the ability to conjure food out of petroleum will be limited along with the supply of petroleum.   The warming of planet earth due to the waste products of the now-getting-limited petroleum will start to whittle away at the arable land, further decreasing the carrying capacity of the planet.

When the scenario outlined in the previous paragraph (I am referring to this as the "that's going to leave a mark" scenario) starts getting traction, there will be a continuing set of adjustments to population.  Malnutrition will have infant and child mortality skyrocketing.  Malnutrition will also start limiting the birth rate in countries where the birth rate is out of control.   Wars will begin to get access to resources (read here: food), diseases like attacking weakened prey.  The population will decrease.  It will suck.

Population by continent

Continent name	Density (inhabitants/km2)	Population (2011)	Most populous country	Most populous city
Asia	86.7	4,140,336,501	China (1,341,403,687)	Tokyo (35,676,000)
Africa	32.7	994,527,534	Nigeria (152,217,341)	Cairo (19,439,541)
Europe	70	738,523,843	Russia (143,300,000; approx. 110 million in Europe)	Moscow (14,837,510)
North America	22.9	528,720,588	United States (313,485,438)	Mexico City/Metro Area(8,851,080 / 21,163,226)
South America	21.4	385,742,554	Brazil (190,732,694)	São Paulo (19,672,582)
Australia/Oceania	4.25	36,102,071	Australia (22,612,355)	Sydney (4,575,532)
Antarctica	0.0003 (varies)	4,490 (non-permanent, varies)[18]	N/A[note 1]	McMurdo Station (955)[19]

The truth of the matter here is that Professor Ehrlich has always been right.  Population biology will hold to human populations as well as rabbit populations.  Technology won't make a silk purse out of the sow's ear.

But, in my patented "that's going to leave a mark" scenario, the population of good old planet earth will take a tumble.  My guess is that in around 2200 CE the earth will be looking at an principally agrarian human population of around 750 million souls.  All of whom will refer to the period of time from 1900 to 2025 as "Those Fucking Idiots".

But among those 750 million souls will be philosophers, whores, farmers, carpenters, singers, thieves, politicians, religious fanatics, doubting Thomas's. and clowns.

No, the human race will be just fine, hell, we may even learn something from this.

What do they do?

Courtesy of the Demotivators

So, over at the Zerohedge site when I came across this little gem.   It was a cross post Submitted by Jim Quinn from The Burning Platform.

A true rant about the lazy bastards who suck off of social security and how the system is already broke. Well, I will certainly agree that the money is gone.  CongressCritters stole it a long time ago to pay for their pet projects.

Hmmm.  So what is trying to be said here?

This is the quote which really intrigued me.

Just because the scumbags on Wall Street and in the rest of corporate America commit fraud on a massive scale does not mean we should look the other way when lowlifes in our community do the same thing on a smaller scale. 

Wow.

Everyone is trying to pay no attention whatsoever to the fact that the world has changed a lot lately.  A person who goes on SSDI is now a "lowlife".  Now, even if the person is capable of working, just what job is available to them?  I haven't seen a huge increase in the job creation numbers lately.  Truth be told, job creation doesn't even appear to keeping up with population growth.

So what we are developing is a class of non-working poor who still wish to eat and have a warm place to shit.   The jobs that they once held are gone to China and the inexorable push of robotics and computerization.  In other words, in the words of Bruce:

"Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain't coming back

to your hometown"

So, what I am wondering is what do we do?  SSDI is being used in a manner it was not being designed for:  the long term support of effectively unemployable persons.  Some folks squeak about this, but the truth be told, the folks that are applying are usually without any other options.

Being older, under-educated, slow, and unemployable in a compressive collapse is a pretty shitty place to be.  The folks that I know who are going this route are any number of combinations of the above.

Over and over again, I keep asking what do we do with folks who don't have the intelligence or tools to compete in a job market that is being shrink to fits the needs of shareholders?   Hell, the government even allows companies to deduct the cost of buying the robots being used to kick people out the door.  You don't have to look far to find a story about the jobs that used to be.

What do we do?

Hiding the facts behind graphs

The Daily Kos is one of my everyday reads.  Not because I agree with their views, but because they best represent the current thoughts of the liberal hoi polloi.  They do have the occasional well thought out articles  which force me to modify and burnish my world view.  But for the most part, they have the same role and one-sided world view that the right-wing sites do, it is just a mirror image.

So, when this graph came up on their site as a means of convincing me that we should immediately start hiring more government employees, I got a big giggle when the following chart came to the surface as a piece of evidence for more cops and government employees.

OK, so following the 1981 recession, the public sector employment went up to 103% of the starting point.  The next point that the cherry picked is the 1991 recession when it went up to 103% of the starting point of that recession.  The 2001 recession was brutal with the poor guvmint workers in that they only gained up to 101% of their recession starting point.

So lets do some basic math.  

100 x 1.03 x 1.03 x 1.01 = 1.07.  

That means that recessions usually cause the number of government employees to go up.  The last three recessions have netted a nice little 7% increase in total government employment in the period 1981 to 2007.

The folks over at the KOS are whining because since 2007, the guvmint employess (or as I call the The Daily Kos' "Base") has actually gone down 2%.  So, back to math.  

100 x 1.03 x 1.03 x 1.01 x 0.98 =1.05

So even the the rapacious and draconian cuts in government employment since 2007 (2%!!!!!) leaves us with a 5% increase in total government employment in the ten or so years of the thirty-two tear period that this graph digests.  

So what does the whole picture look like?

So, what I see is in 1981, the number of government employees was around 15 million, in 2008 it was around 22.5 million.  The implication from the Daily Kos article is that they only grew around 7%, when in fact, they grew around 50%.  

Big difference there.  The take home lesson of this little morality play is that when you see someone cherry pick from a time frame and then start presenting little games like percentage lost/gain, you can be utterly assured that they are trying to hide the real data.

Savings and Loans

In a way, part of me wants to get pissed off now that the FedGuv is replacing the bonds in the government retirement accounts with IOU's from the treasury.  If you don't already know about this, it is part of the “extraordinary measures” of the Washington charade.

Treasury is reducing the amount of debt held by a federal employees retirement fund, known as the G-fund.  What they don't say is the reduction is made by replacing the short term government bonds kept there by a hand-printed IOU from Timmy Geithner.

At first, when this last happened during the previous installment of the Washington debt-crisis-follies,  they looted the G-fund and replaced it when the check came in.  So I sat down and though about it for a while.  I drank a glass of wine and watched the sun go down and came to the not-very-earth-shattering conclusion that they are just changing the form of the IOU.

Bonds are IOU's.  Nothing more nothing less.  When the clowns in the House of Representatives go to grandstanding about not paying the bills (read here, raising the debt limit) all they are doing is making themselves look like asses.  If Timmy and Barry want to give them more rope by replacing on IOU in an account with another IOU, what the hell is the problem.

I figure that my retirement fund has no better than a 50/50 chance of getting to the promised land anyway.  At least this way I can derive some comedy points by watching the clowns shoot themselves in the foot.

Is it just me

Or could it be that this scene in the finest film ever made is an excellent metaphor for the "Fiscal Cliff" negotiations now beginning in Washington DC.

Now, the trouble that I am having is distinguishing who is playing who.  Simplicity in metaphor would be Obama playing the sheriff and the congruscritters playing the town.  But, truth be told, the Washington rolls may well be reversed.  Who is holding who hostage?  Is Cleavon little actually using Boehner as a role model?  Time will tell the cast in this Opera Buffa.

It is a great scene.  Washington DC's ham-handed cover of it may leave a lot to be desired

Critical Point Point

Inflection Point Courtesy Wikipedia

In calculus, a critical point of a function of a real variable is any value in the domain where either the function is not differentiable or its derivative is 0.  The value of the function at a critical point is a critical value of the function. These definitions admit generalizations to functions of several variables, differentiable maps between Rm and Rn, and differentiable maps between differentiable manifolds.

 From Wikipedia

The Critical Point

It is what we are all trying to see.  It is the holy grail of the blogosphere.

For some reason, all of here in the odd little subculture of Doomerland we are obsessed with the idea of nailing down the Year, Date, Hour, and Minute of the process.  But I am thinking that this is a bit of an affectation on our part.  A way to show that, by God, we have been right all along.

But in truth, the point which we are so desperately looking for is not nearly as important as the shape of the curve.

Except in the simplest cases, one cannot expect observation alone to reveal the effect of the use of an aspect of economics. One cannot assume, just because one can observe economics being used in an economic process, that the process is thereby altered significantly. It might be that the use of economics is epiphenomenal—an empty gloss on a process that would have had essentially the same outcomes without it,

Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera

Evolving as a goal

So, there was an article in Der Spiegel recently with an interview by Dennis Meadows, one the authors of  "The Limits to Growth".  Now, those of you who have the poor time management skills needed to make the  effort to regularly read this blog will be fully aware of my abiding respect for this work.  That being said, this isn't a work about how my opinion has changed, but rather, a set of observations on the way that the author and the blogosphere view the world.

The interviewer posits the standard set of questions to Dr. Meadows.  They are all well pitched softballs about the usual suspects:  Human ingenuity, the unexpected advent of a "imagine the profits that would accrue to the inventor of a new, clean and limitless source of energy." scenario.   They are all just ways or trying to make the interviewee look like a gloomy Gus, which in this age of mandatory "power of positive thinking" is the same as painting him a nut.

But there is one quote that stood out in my mind.

Meadows: The problem that faces our societies is that we have developed industries and policies that were appropriate at a certain moment, but now start to reduce human welfare, like for example the oil and car industry. Their political and financial power is so great and they can prevent change. It is my expectation that they will succeed. This means that we are going to evolve through crisis, not through proactive change.

 Now, I can see nothing wrong with this statement.  Homo Sapiens has always evolved in exactly the fashion described.  It is the way of the world, it is no big deal.  We have to reduce the population of the world by quite a significant amount.  What is happening now is that we are trying to definehttp://theautomaticearth.com/Earth/quote-of-the-year-and-the-next.html the method to be used in the cull.  Our problems lie in the arenas of energy use, resource depletion, and overpopulation.  We tend to fixate on a secondary characteristic of financial crisis, but in truth, that is merely an epiphenomenon secondary to the big three.

So imagine my pleasant surprise when Raúl Meijer over at the Automatic Earth took a look at the same article.  He did steal my end piece by getting there first and anticipating my conclusions, and then he had the gall to write them down in a more polished and erudite manner than I possibly could.

We evolve the way Stephen Jay Gould described evolution: through punctuated equilibrium. That is, we pass through bottlenecks, forced upon us by the circumstances of nature, only in the case of the present global issues we are nature itself. And there's nothing we can do about it. If we don't manage to understand this dynamic, and very soon, those bottlenecks will become awfully narrow passages, with room for ever fewer of us to pass through. 

As individuals we need to drastically reduce our dependence on the runaway big systems, banking, the grid, transport etc., that we ourselves built like so many sorcerers apprentices, because as societies we can't fix the runaway problems with those systems, and they are certain to drag us down with them if we let them.

 So here is the nub of the matter.  We are going to be going through a evolutionary bottleneck in the not-too-distant future.  Perhaps I will live to participate, perhaps not.   But if you spend some time reading the works of Darwin and Wallace it seems to me that if Homo Sapiens is going to survive or evolve, it is going to be necessary to adapt quickly and in groups.  That being said, it becomes apparent to me that surrounding oneself with the accouterments of the society that is already failing (read here:  Band-aids, Beans, and Bullets) would not give one any adaptational or evolutionary advantage.

The standard preppers fare is a way to defend a lifestyle that is being killed by reality.  A defensive position will always be overrun.  Especially when the opponent is something as implacable as natural selection.  What is needed is not a physical redoubt, but a mental attitude capable of adapting to change.

Finally:  I found this graph and it made me giggle.  I thought that I would share with you.  A hearty call out to the Sub-Dude

The Robots, a bit of a ramble

The above clip is about Apples manufacturing process.  It is the thing that started off this ramble.   Don't blame me, blame Apple computer.

Notice how few people you see in the clip.  When you read the information available to us flesh and blood, you will be struck by the small number of people who will be employed by the making of these little marvels.

So, on a personal note, as I sit every day in my FedGuv cubicle, doing work for eight hours, I feel at the end of the day that I have done my bit and was part of the process of getting the mission completed.

That will be going away soon.  The new computer system that will be coming on line will make four of the six people who prepare the paperwork every day extraneous.  This is at a single VA.

No going back on this decision, nor am I certain that going back would be the right thing.  But the truth of the matter is, that decisions like this are removing jobs for people in this country.  When you add the moving of manufacture to foreign countries,  the increasingly disposable nature and inability to repair things, you are looking at an continuing loss of jobs here in the USA.

The jobs that most of us hold are really not all that important; they can, as in my personal instance, be easily replaced by a not-all-that-sophisticated computer program sold by General Electric or Oracle.  But the issue that is becoming increasingly important to the country and to millions of folks caught in the same middle class trap that I inhabit is simple.

What will I do to survive when this is gone?  The dogma espoused by the free-market types is that I will get up on my shanks mares and go out and find a new job with the new businesses constantly being pushed out of the ground by the saintly forces of "creative destruction" and the "invisible hand".

But, increasingly, businesses are coming to the conclusion that a simple purchase of capital equipment to replace the workers that used to do the jobs is vastly preferable to dealing with the vagaries of the workers.

Wow.

The state of the job market can be shown easily (Hat Tip to John Williams over at ShadowStats)

Now, I am not saying that Williams has the complete right of matter, he is not the all-seeing Eye of Providence, but I would tend to trust his take on things over the politically-motivated pablum over at BLS.   So the idea of just up and finding a new job with an unemployment rate of >20% is not really in the cards.

This doesn't even consider the hard reality of my 60 years on the planet.   More than a third of unemployed older workers have been out of work for more than a year, and 55 percent (1.1 million) have been unempoyed for more than six months, up from 23 percent in 2007.  Older workers are great once you have them, but the truth is, they have a lot of problems that employers just don't want to deal with.

So, you are looking at options.  The options don't seem to be there.  Education is out, going to school at sixty to learn a new profession isn't a decent option, you will never earn enough to pay for the schooling itself.  That is just a straight dumb-ass move.

Moving to a new city where jobs are plentiful.  This mythical creature doesn't appear to exist.

So more and more, we are being cast loose in a society that really has no use for us.  The industrial base is being converted to a non-human format, and the wealth that once went to workers is now being distributed around the other wealthy.  The workers that remain are becoming increasingly susceptible to
the recursive processes described above.

I really can't see where this is going.  The flow of money to the already wealthy has to stop when the customer base that is systematically being destroyed by automation and outsourcing is finished.  When than happens, the pendulum will start swing the other way.  But who knows when that will occur.

Just so you guys know, I still haven't completely worked out my schedule for writing.  I need to sit down in the afternoon more and in the morning, less.

Right now I am working on a bit about robotics and automation.  But it is coming out slower than I anticipated.  As soon as it is ready I will trot it out.

I am wondering just how the games in Washington DC will conclude.  Currently it is the usual twaddle about "my friend on the other side of the aisle", and declarations about what the American People want (usually in parallel with the most recent large donation to their campaign fund.

The debt ceiling "crisis" is getting lubed up for use.  Timmy and Barry are out sacking the FedGuv Retirement plan for spare nickels.  It is amazing how people seem to forget that this is money (and I use that term in the loosest possible sense) that is going for bills that we have already run up.  So really we are talking about not paying the bills that we have already occurred (you know, like Illinois).

So, it is back to business as usual.  The folks in the front of the bus are trying like hell to prevent the power and perquisites that they hold from slipping away.  But they, like King Canute, cannot prevent the world from doing what it will.  The sand that is beneath their feet is being washed away by the tide.

Let's see how many more proclamations they can issue before the sand washes away from under thir feet.

Predictions?

Should I do any?  Is it a useful exercise or is it just a different way to gaze into my navel?

If any of you have any ideas on this give me a shout, otherwise, I may throw some out on Saturday when I have more time to chat and think (I'll also go and see the Hobbit).

As for the news for the past couple of days, I have never seen so much self-congratulation as group of people celebrate not really solving a totally unnecessary crisis that they created themselves.

Opening Windows

Getting close to winter here.  Been cold the past couple of days so the house gets closed up and the furnace goes on.  I am a true cheapskate, with the thermostat at 60 and sweaters on all the time.  Blankets stay in the living room and baking is done to prepare food and to heat the house.

Whenever I get the chance though, the windows go open and the stink of an old man and two teenage boys is flushed out.  Since it is sunny and around 37, the clear air outside is being exchanged for the aforementioned stink.

I am trying to start out the year writing and hope to continue throughout the year.  It does mellow me out and allows me to work through the issues and questions going through my brain.  I even notice a certain improvement in my disposition and better clarity in my thoughts when I write them down.  For some odd reason, writing what I am thinking down allows me to be less a reactionary dumbass and offers increased validity to my arguments.

Now that doesn't mean that what I post here is all that great, it just means that it is better than my thoughts and arguments without having it here.

Welcome to the New Year

First, a comment from the only country in the West with a security apparatus more intrusive than ours.

From The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

We will get fooled again (come to think of it, we have)