Compromise

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

I think that the issue at hand in Washington is that there is a consensus there that the little people need to get screwed a little, but there is disagreement about how to screw the general populace and still retain the perquisites of power.

But what I am thinking is that there may very well be a need for the little people to get screwed.  The amount of money flying out Woodlawn is astonishing.  In 2003, before the baby boomers started coming home to roost, the amount amount paid out by the Social Security Administration was 37% of all government expenditures and 7% of GDP.

I kind of doubt that that percentage of expenditure has gone down in the last ten years.  That and a couple more wars that we lost followed by some real crap economic times and I would not at all be surprised to see the outlay at more like 45% or so.

So, we have this huge outlay for old folks and folks who can't quite deal.  I know you think that this is being harsh, and in a way you are right, but that is the demographic served by the SSA.  Now, I think taking care of old folks and the folks who wouldn't make it otherwise is a fine thing to do.  But the current system reflects what I feel is a mistaken belief that the program is an "insurance" that you buy during your working days to help in your dotage.

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah....I can already hear the flames a comin'.  "I paid for it", "Of course it is insurance, it says so right there on the label".  Yada yada yada.

Look folks, when the government takes your money by edict, it is a tax.  If you like what the government does with the money, it is a fair tax, taken for the public good, for a just and reasonable purpose.   If you don't like it, it is an unconstitutional affront to our civil liberties, taken against our will by jackbooted thugs, placed there to oppress us.   It really is your call, as these appear to be the only two applicable and acceptable modes of thought in our current political discourse.

So, we have all been paying this tax, I have had the money coming out of my meager paychecks for over forty years now.  Its a tax, the money is gone.  I have received a whole bunch of benefit for the privilege.  My Mom (84 years old with stage 6-7 Alzheimer's) is being taken care of in an excellent home with caring and professional staff.  That expense took all my SSA deductions, as well as Mom's and my two sisters and then spent some more.   Even if you factored in the "interest" on the government bonds, the money is gone, gone, gone.  We are more than even, the program has been a benefit.

Now, there are those of you who would sneer at my taking the easy way out, but, there wasn't much else to be done.  My savings wouldn't have kept here there for a single year, she in on year three.  I would have had to quit my job or had one of my boys stay home from school to take care of her.  There was only the social security option open.

Now you are probably thinking that I am being disingenuous in saying that something has to be done with the benefits.  After all, didn't I just describe how the programs saved my sanity and possibly my mothers life?

There isn't any conflict in my mind.  The program has been very good to my mother.  But the truth is the amount of money spent is merely being transferred to my sons by the magic of compound interest.

We will all die.  It would be interesting to know how much money is being spent prolonging lives like my mother's?  How much is being spent to keep fellow-citizens from starving when the economy has no further use for them?  How much is being given to comfortable bourgeois to pad their already healthy recreation accounts?  How much of their share is not being paid by the wealthy?

But I think that the first thing that has to be done is a simple statement that the programs supported by the SSA are not an insurance program.  They are a struggling and divided government's attempt to deal with complex and conflicting goals and a fractured body politic.  They are paid for by taxes and the money taken in over the last 83 years has all been spent and we are paying for the services extended by the money taken in from our paychecks every week.

I don't know is Social Security can be saved.  I think that if it cannot be saved, it may well serve as the catalyst for the process that will result, years down the line, of the Balkanization of the US.  It came into being as a means of holding together an angry nation and a broken economy.  It may well go out as failing in its goal.

Head over to Russell's

I have been in a bit of discussion over at "reflexiones finales" on farming in a non-mechanized manner

Russell started out with this:

India's rice revolution
John Vidal, The Guadian (U.K.), 16 February 2013 (hat tip: NC)

Instead of planting three-week-old rice seedlings in clumps of three or four in waterlogged fields, as rice farmers around the world traditionally do, the Darveshpura farmers carefully nurture only half as many seeds, and then transplant the young plants into fields, one by one, when much younger. Additionally, they space them at 25cm intervals in a grid pattern, keep the soil much drier and carefully weed around the plants to allow air to their roots. The premise that "less is more" was taught by Rajiv Kumar, a young Bihar state government extension worker who had been trained in turn by Anil Verma ofProfessional Assistance for Development Action, an Indian NGO which has introduced the SRI method to hundreds of villages in the past three years.

While the "green revolution" that averted Indian famine in the 1970s relied on improved crop varieties, expensive pesticides and chemical fertilisers, SRI appears to offer a long-term, sustainable future for no extra cost. With more than one in seven of the global population going hungry and demand for rice expected to outstrip supply within 20 years, it appears to offer real hope. Even a 30% increase in the yields of the world's small farmers would go a long way to alleviating poverty. 

For a better explanation of the method used, go here

There were some other comments, but the debate got me thinking.

Farming is hard work, but the methods that we use are depend of burning fossil fuels to decrease the workload and increase the yield.  Before that, farmers used many other methods to increase yield, but they all centered around a series of technologies that were pretty poorly understood at the time (composting, fertilizing, monoculture, etc.)

I highly recommend that you go here and download a full text copy of "The One Straw Revolution" by Manusobu Fukuoka. 

You will have to go out yourself and read it, you will have to decide whether there is merit (I would highly recommend the "scientific method", while it is somewhat out of style, it is pretty reliable)

I think that the old gentleman who wrote this book knew what he was talking about.  I spent some time in my Asia-travels to got to his farm and look.  I does appear to work well.  It is very hard work, but it is a lot less labor intensive than the methods used by peasant farmers in the past.  It requires no fossil fuels, no chemical fertilizers.

I would highly recommend trying the method on for size.  It does seem to work.  It does offer a lot

Exxon Hates Your Children

No Comment Required

The Epicurean Dealmaker: Table of Contents

I have always admired T.E.D., he says things that interest me in a clever and erudite manner.

The Epicurean Dealmaker: Table of Contents:

His last couple of posts intrigue me.  He questions the personal value of what he is doing here in Bloggoland, and now he comes up with another idea that intrigues.

In my case, the table of contents will allow me to go over older work, update them, and place them is some kind of whole.  I think that there are some interesting technical issues to be solved as well as refreshing my memory as to the subjects I have already beaten to death.

Gonna do a little work and make some changes

SO...

I am trying to figure out my relationship with this medium.  In a real sense, this blog is a vain affectation.  It makes an assumption that the public commons is a fair outlet for ideas.  I would have to agree that this is true.  But my numbers for folks coming to visit seem to show that either my ideas are stale or my presentation is lame.

Oh well.

The ideas presented here aren't particularly palatable.  When I sit down to think of them, even I am not fond of the conclusions reached.   That overpopulation seems to be at a tipping point.  That resource depletion is getting some firm traction.  That the environmental consequences of these first two points above are going to lubricate the decline we are entering.

What everyone here in Doomerland seems to agree on is the idea that badness happens.  Serious armed-survivalist preppers stock up beans and bullets and hope that they can outlast and outgun the opposition.   The vegan-prepper-survivalists are trying on the idea that being a agrarian peasant is an economic/environmental niche worth exploiting.

What seems obvious to me is that we are very close to a time of compression.  Barring some currently unforeseen and historically unique event, I don't think that the fall will be precipitous one, leading to the Mad Max scenario so adored by the survivalists.   The beans and bullets have a 99+ percent chance of going unused for their original purpose.  The vegans will discover just how hard and precarious the life of an agrarian really is.

The compressive decline ahead of us will be a long-drawn out affair.  The industrial age started around 200-odd years ago.  We have used up right around half of the fossil fuels and even more of the industrial resources.  I won't be a symmetrical bell curve with a 200-year tail, but will probably be asymmetric with a tail on the order of 80-100 years.   The exact term is a negatively-skewed distribution.

So, what I think is that we need to get a firm grasp on the idea of a decline that will take generations.  This in not sexy.  It has no heroes.  It will just take hard work and adaptability.  We will see the unrealistic goals and rewards of the current system be replaced (sometimes forcefully) with something different.  There will be errors made, and scrambling done.  Some lives will be happy, most won't.

In other words, we are going to be returning from Never-Neverland.

Arithmetic on the Frontier
Rudyard Kipling

A great and glorious thing it is
To learn, for seven years or so,
The Lord knows what of that and this,
Ere reckoned fit to face the foe --
The flying bullet down the Pass,
That whistles clear: "All flesh is grass."

Three hundred pounds per annum spent
On making brain and body meeter
For all the murderous intent
Comprised in "villanous saltpetre!"
And after -- ask the Yusufzaies
What comes of all our 'ologies.

A scrimmage in a Border Station --
A canter down some dark defile --
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail --
The Crammer's boast, the Squadron's pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!

No proposition Euclid wrote,
No formulae the text-books know,
Will turn the bullet from your coat,
Or ward the tulwar's downward blow
Strike hard who cares -- shoot straight who can --
The odds are on the cheaper man.

One sword-knot stolen from the camp
Will pay for all the school expenses
Of any Kurrum Valley scamp
Who knows no word of moods and tenses,
But, being blessed with perfect sight,
Picks off our messmates left and right.

With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem,
The troopships bring us one by one,
At vast expense of time and steam,
To slay Afridis where they run.
The "captives of our bow and spear"
Are cheap, alas! as we are dear.

One of my favorites

I am quite disappointed this year by the lack of complaints about football and America’s obsession with football.  The usually peak about this time.  They are remarkably thin this year.
Not that I agree, I love watching football, warts and all.  I loved playing even more. I agree that the game definitely needs to get safer. The head injury issue needs to get worked on and changes have to be made to the rules to lower injury rates.
Naw, that bit went through it’s 24 hour wash-rinse-repeat cycle during the last couple of months.  The hystericals seem to have shot their wad then and are quiet now.  That is too bad, I have really come to appreciate the over the top antics of the “Football as an American Evil” crowd.
Naw, gonna watch some football on Sunday, then the TV gets mothballed for the year

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.