Farruggio for President 2012 …solutions to save our nation
Off the keyboard of Phillip Farruggio
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I don’t intend to list countless measures that, as President, I would take. No, rather, in this world of one minute sound bites and KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid) I have a streamlined platform that covers the really pertinent and key issues of our day:
· Cut the military spending drastically to save our states, their cities and our prestige as a nation. The 25% Solution Movement has a simple and novel approach to this: Congress cuts military spending 25% by an ‘Up and Down ‘vote, since this spending is considered Discretionary … As President I will use my bully pulpit to go directly to the American public, urging everyone to A) get out and continually demonstrate for this, and B) let their congressional representatives know that they will not vote for anyone who refuses to support this! Period!
· Use the added revenues from the above action ($ 170 billion a year) to send to all 50 states to help with their budget deficits .This would then allow the states to send money to the cities for the same purpose. No need to lay off police, firefighters, teachers etc or to close libraries and schools. You get my drift?
· End the occupations of Iraq & Afghanistan and send the troops home… ASAP! This would save us over $ 100 billion a year and stop the killing of our troops and the innocent civilians that they kill. It would also allow the UN, along with the Middle Eastern nations, to help stabilize those two countries.
· Flat Surtax of 50% on all personal income over and above one million dollars per year. Let’s leave the federal tax rates as is and begin taxing the millionaires and mega millionaires. If we are truly a nation entrenched in the Judeo- Christian traditions and precepts, are we not supposed to be ‘Our brother’s keeper ‘? Cannot a person who earns millions in income, whether it is from salary, bonus, interest, commissions, or inheritance, afford to live quite well on 50% of those millions? Did you know that 50% of working Americans earn less than $ 27,000 a year? How can a single mother or father raise a child or two on that meager amount? Do the math and see how taking half from a very wealthy person is perhaps the most spiritual thing we can do as a nation.
· Return the corporate tax rates to what they were in our recent past. Honor small business by instituting payroll tax forgiveness for up to the first $ 20,000 of wages, for both the employee and employer. This would return up to $ 1500 a year to each worker, tax free. The small business owner would have saved up to $ 1500 for each employee. I would cap this plan at a maximum of 100 employees. This plan would discourage‘off the books ‘hiring and give small businesses more capital to stay competitive, if they choose.
· Jumpstart a movement to get private money outof electoral politics… federal, state and local. Not an easy thing to accomplish, due to the 1976 Supreme Court ruling of Buckley vs. Valeo. That ruling stated that ‘Money is free speech ‘. How do we get around such an unfair interpretation without going insane and waiting 20 years for constitutional amendments? Well, as President, I would challenge you, the voters, who elect the moneyed interests time and time again. I would urge that you only support candidates who agree to limit acceptance of campaign donations to $ 100 per person. On top of that, we must not support any candidate who accepts PAC money at all. Period!
· I would push for Congress to open up Medicare for any American who wishes to buy in. Why even hassle with the private health insurers? Just charge a FICA like fee to any American who wants to be covered in the same manner as our senior citizens. Once the rates for this alternative are known by the private insurers, you can rest assure that their rates and deductibles will come down. Duh….free market enterprise anyone?
· Uncle Sam should A) negotiate to buy the bad‘ paper ‘ mortgages from the banks for tremendous discounts and B) then restructure the mortgages to allow the homeowner to stay in the foreclosed home, instead of having to either abandon or become a tenant of the bank. How about this: Why not have our federal government jumpstart community nonprofitmortgage banks? Imagine if your city, town or county opened, with federal loan guarantees, a nonprofit mortgage bank, charging only overhead costs? Translated: a current mortgage of let us say 5% from a for profit bank would now be perhaps 2% from a nonprofit community one. More home ownership, fewer renters and economic stimulus for the construction industry.
· Windfall profits tax on Big Oil and Big Pharma. How can it be that the prices at the pumps and on medicines spiral upwards while our nation is in a depression, both financially and psychologically? We would use the added revenues to create more solar energy use and wind farms. Portugal is getting more dependent upon wind for energy use. Why can’t we? As far as medicines, let’s use the revenue increases from a windfall tax on Big Pharma to jumpstart an alternative care movement. We need more Americans to be able to get acupuncture and chiropractic treatment, massage therapy, psychological counseling to name a few such alternatives to established Western Medicine. Let’s be blunt: For too long our nation leads the world in the‘drug and cut ‘mindset of medicine.
I could go on and on. For now, this is my platform. If you agree with even 2/3 of it, then voice your support. You know and I know that I cannot win election, but… the word will get out that we have viable options to what this current Two Party / Tea Party has been offering.
PA Farruggio
January, 2012
{Philip A Farruggio is son and grandson of Brooklyn, NYC longshoremen. He is a free lance columnist (usually found on the fine Dandelion Salad site), an environmental products sales rep and an activist. Since 2010, Philip is a spokesperson for the 25% Solution Movement to Save Our Cities by cutting military spending 25%. Philip can be reached at paf1222@bellsouth.net }
Black Friday
Off the keyboard of William Hunter Duncan
Published on Off the Grid in Minneapolis on Novemebr 23.. 21012
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I biked the mile to the bus stop this morning, twenty degrees outside and a thirty mile-an-hour headwind, blowing snow, at six am, to discover that this post-Thanksgiving Day Friday, Black Friday, is considered a Metro Transit holiday. No bus waiting. Hmm. At first I imagined, I would bike the five miles to big bank, which I can do, even under the conditions, comfortably enough. I imagined sitting down at my computer station, firing off an email to my immediate management and the temp people, informing them precisely what I had done and what I think about that. Except for much of the journey would be on the shoulder of a four lane 55mph speed limit everybody driving 60, it snowed and rained last night, the roads are slippery, and a bike helmet, which I couldn’t find this morning anyway in a very symbolic Hmmmm, isn’t going to protect me from a 2000+ lbs projectile moving at six or eight times the speed I am, bearing down on me from behind. By the time I got half way home, which is on the way to big bank from the bus station, I was like, that’s fucking crazy. No WAY am I biking that, and no way am I putting someone else out, on a day that just about everybody thinks is a holiday (judging by the lack of automobile traffic as I write this), so I can go and FORECLOSE ON HOUSES FOR UBER_BANK_LEVIATHAN-KRAKEN. LOL.
So I got home, and called the automated overseer computer lady at big bank, and spoke the words, “William Duncan, Kodi {manager}, 7am MONDAY,” in reference to the time I would be returning to work. I left a voicemail with my contact at the temp agency, and sent an email to the top two managers in my department. It’s a liberty, what I’ve done, relative to my station. Still, I don’t expect any push back. If I even hear about it, I’ll be surprised, though it is strictly speaking, grounds for me to be dis-invited, to work for big bank.
It’s not like I’m going shopping. Nor am I going to sit around smoke pot get drunk chow left-over Thanksgiving dinner watch Tee-Vee. It’s not even very comfortable in my house, when it’s this cold, with the wind blowing hard. Mostly, aside from drinking coffee writing blog posts researching, I will be working, insulating the house, which is a drafty sieve. Lots of work to do, here. Might get a buzz on too, eventually. 
If I lose the job, which is a possibility, I’ll just tell the temp agency, listen, if big bank doesn’t take me back, I’ll write an op-ed in the straightest, most conventional clear easy to understand language I can muster, for one of the local MSM newsprint outlets, about the arrangement as it stands, in its full absurdity. I mean really, there are people expected to work the second shift starting at 3:30 pm, Monday, Christmas Eve Day, FORECLOSING ON HOUSES! Maybe they want to, but it’s also like a threat of economic dissolution otherwise, and really when you are a “butt’s in seats in the morgue, or the meat-house,” a day off is also one less day of pay, when we are making about $7 LESS than the average American wage. Which is kind a of low grade terror, this sort of economic hegemony exercised with such ruthless, numerical logic. Which then calls into question the whole War on Terror, when, if you dare not participate in the making of dollars in the imperial way prescribed, you are fucked. Get with the fucking program?
It’s not like I’m a weak performer, either. My numbers are solid, in their metric. 100% accuracy, in my last review. There is a threshold one must reach, in sheer numbers, before one is eligible for overtime, which I crossed some time ago, though I have not partaken of the so-called fruit (nor have I striven to do more, necessarily.) They can fire me, but if they do, I’m going to do what I can to return the favor.
Meanwhile, the bulk of America shops. I was at my sister’s yesterday, consuming tee-vee programming. Whether it was that or the industrial food she fed me, I can’t say was the cause of my ill stomach. It was more like soul sadness, in the presence of such grotesqurie’, as was splashed across my cerebral cortex, with such cynical abandon. In my last post, I said I am not a “moral” man. Do not mistake that for moral relativity, which Americans display with monstrous pride. On one Newz program, a woman was interviewed about her attack plan, shopping today. She advocated teamwork, with everyone with a plan of operation, “otherwise you won’t get everything you need.” She bought seven flat-screen tv’s Black Friday 2011, most of which remain in the boxes. She was presented as an ideal of normality by the network, which she is, in America. We scoff at the savages, those responsible in the past for human sacrifice to placate the gods. By how many orders of magnitude worse, all those who have died that we might be free to shop – what is being done to the earth, to fulfill our “needs”?
My sister said she had been made to feel guilty for doing damage to the “environment”, because she had ordered some product on-line, instead of in a store. The rationale, that those things ordered online travel more miles, than they would if they were housed in a centralized retail box. I laughed and asked her how long she thought 7 billion people could continue buying the resources of the earth transformed into consumer product to be thrown away as garbage, esp. when we are adding 200,000 people a day, globally? I didn’t ask, but I’m guessing, she bought the turkey at Sam’s Club, and most everything else for dinner besides. She gets it, the madness of it, she just can’t imagine any other way, or won’t.
I recognize too, the slippery slope I am on, justifying my work at big bank at all, in any way. Perhaps after Black Friday 2012, I will no longer have to.
This is what my lightning bug niece and I did Thanksgiving. It’s hard to see her wings, but they are there. The bike, a gift from RE, head Admin at the Doomstead Diner
Motown Memories
Off the keyboard of Newzhound Joe
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The Diner’s most prolific Newz Aggregator Newzhound Joe debuts here with his first Diner Article, Motown Memories. Detroit is often held up as the Canary in the Coal Mine for Industrial Cities from Berlin to Moscow to Beijing to Tokyo. The rest here from Joe…
RE
Since I’ve travelled to the Detroit area many times over the years, I thought I’d share some of my experiences there. Some of this involves “restaurant talk” because much of my travel in the area is about getting to different restaurants while visiting the mother-in-law. There’s been some “fatty talk” in the commentary recently. Just for the record, I like to eat a big dinner – but I’m not a “fatty”. 
Mother-in-law lives in Grosse Ile which is about 25 miles South of Detroit. A favorite place of mine to eat dinner is R.P. McMurphy’s in Wyandotte. It’s home is a 1890′s red brick building and is described as “turn-of-the-century saloon”.
RP’s has a very good NY Strip and Prime Rib at very affordable prices. Next door is a Merrill Lynch office. Here’s a picture of the bull sculpture in front of the office:
It was constructed by manipulating water heater cores. It’s ironic to me that the bull sculpture is completely hollow.
Down the street from RP’s is Frank’s Restaurant & Pizzeria. This is the best pizza place in the area.
On some of these trips, we used to drive a little further north and eat at the Auburn Cafe located in River Rouge. They serve up a pretty good “family style” Greek meal. I’d guess the abandoned Packard Plant is about 10-15 miles from this restaurant. The landscape really changes once you cross from Wyandotte into River Rouge – it gets very “industrial”. The population of River Rouge peaked around 1950 with over 20,000 people. It currently has under 8,000 inhabitats. From the map below, the railroad action (gray lines) picks up north of Wyandotte. This is also where you notice some really large abandoned plants off West Jefferson Street (east side). It really looks apocalyptically post-industrial to me.
The landscape probably gets even more “industrially toxic” (or “post-industrially toxic”) a little further NE of Auburn Cafe. This is where Zug Island is located. The reason I say “probably gets even more industrially toxic in Zug Island, is because the island is off-limits to the public for the most part (cameras are prohibited on the premises). It was once a robust hub for steelmaking & processing. Notice the gray RR lines in the image below:
Probably a good thing I never made it to Zug Island – from Wikipedia:
On some trips we would drive through Detroit to get to Canada via the Ambassador Bridge. Much of the drive from Grosse Ile to the Ambassador Bridge is one depressing sight after another of urban decay. After crossing the bridge, we travel through Windsor, Ontario and then south to Colchester where Uncle Phil has a vacation home. Once you get out of Windsor, the landscape changes to something very different. It almost looks Amish. Lot’s of farming and very rural. Speaking of Amish, I shared a house with four Mennonite guys for a year back in the college days. I think there are alot of similarities between the two groups. It was really different for me – maybe I’ll tell ya about it sometime.
Occupy Sandy Aids Storm Victims
Off the keyboard of Anthony Cartalucci
Published on Land Destroyer on November 26, 2012
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We are not helpless observers. If we don’t like what we see everyday when we read the news, now is the time to commit our intellect and our own two hands to building the future we would rather see – not merely pawning off this great responsibly to “elected representatives” who habitually defy our will and purposefully work against our best interests. The following article was written as one of the first exclusive entries for LocalOrg. If you have solutions or success stories you would like to see researched and covered, e-mail me at cartalucci@gmail.com.
November 26, 2012 (LocalOrg) – Local people know best what’s going on on a local level. Federal agencies busy appropriating budgets and following protocol will never be able to compete against competent, well-organized local networks.
When Hurricane Sandy swept New York City earlier this month, people waited for Red Cross and FEMA to respond, seemingly under the impression that the right and responsibility to react to a disaster laid solely in the hands of the state. When it became clear that the urgent response needed was never coming, people who were already organized as part of ongoing anti-corporate and banking protests used their infrastructure to begin relieving affected people.
The Black Agenda Report’s article, “The Hurricane and the Failed State,” notes that:
So-called advanced nations are never so advanced that they can stand up to the forces of nature. New York and New Jersey are just the latest examples of seemingly safe and “developed” places which were laid low by a change in the weather. Then again, things outside of human control can expose what was already present but kept hidden. Hurricane Sandy showed us that our society is in reality, not advanced at all.
After the hurricane struck the east coast, it was clear that the United States is nothing more than a failed state with a big military and a strong currency. There is nothing in place to help the masses of citizens in times of crisis. That is because the system isn’t meant to help them. It is meant to help certain individuals and corporations, and everyone else is on their own.
The article continued:
The charitable organization most people were directed to was the Red Cross. That same Red Cross did nothing after receiving millions of dollars in donations during hurricane Katrina, yet is still forced down Americans’ throats as the only solution in every catastrophe. The borough president of Staten Island, righteously angry about Red Cross inaction, used the occasion of a press conference to tell the public to stop giving them money.
While the Red Cross collected more than $23 million dollars during a celebrity telethon but did nothing with the money, Occupy Sandy had no money yet managed to provide food, clothing and medical care to the hardest hit neighborhoods. The Occupy teams pumped water from damaged homes and even gave direction to the National Guard and FEMA teams. The least effective group got all the cash, but Occupy did the real work without help from the public or private sector.
The article concludes by stating:
The new lessons are the same as the old. Activism without acquiescence to political power can succeed in bringing about tremendous change. There will always be catastrophes but we should not expect a failed system to save us from them.
The conclusion is particularly meaningful and should remind us all that ultimately we ourselves are the only ones who truly have our own best interests at heart – and the interests of our friends, families, and neighbors.
If ever a sentiment has been qualified by a real world example, the community response marshaled by the underfunded, underrated Occupy Sandy movement – working in the shadow of multi-million dollar federal agencies and international organizations – is it. Occupy Sandy’s advantage was that despite the little resources they had, their intentions were genuine, their purpose was both urgent and personal, and the stakes were a community they themselves must live in and the benefits of getting it back up and running again as quickly as possible.
Whatever one may blame Hurricane Sandy on, or what the political beliefs are of Occupy Sandy may be, when the moment of truth came, they put politics aside, and successfully utilized pragmatism to solve urgent and overwhelming problems.
Whatever your organization may be, coming up with your own local contingency plans, as well as studying the successes of movements like Occupy Sandy, should become a priority. Because whatever the constant din of reassuring federal propaganda may have you believe, from New Orleans to New York, the real message is clear – get a plan, get a program, and do it yourself or it won’t get done.
Hungry For The Holidays
Off the keyboard of Michael Snyder
Published on Economic Collapse on November 26, 2012
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20 Facts About Hunger In America That Will Blow Your Mind
All over America there are millions of people that will be missing meals and going hungry this holiday season. Even as much of the country indulges in the yearly ritual of unbridled consumerism that we refer to as “the holiday season”, more families in the United States than ever before will be dealing with not having enough food to eat. Food stamp use is at an all-time high. Demand at food banks is at an all-time high. They keep telling us that we are in an “economic recovery” and yet the middle class continues to shrink and the number of Americans living in poverty just continues to grow. We are witnessing unprecedented hunger in America, and this especially seems tragic during the holidays. Much of the country is partying as if the good times will never stop, but families that are living from one meal to the next are facing a completely different reality. How do you tell your children that there isn’t going to be any food to eat for dinner? How do you explain to them that other families have plenty to eat but you don’t? Sadly, many food banks are overstretched at this point. All over the nation, food pantries have actually had to turn people away because of the overwhelming demand. And more Americans used food stamps to buy their Thanksgiving dinners this year than ever before. This is a problem that is not going away any time soon, and when the next major economic downturn strikes the problem of hunger in America is going to get even worse.
For many Americans, hunger has become a way of life. Families that don’t have enough money are often faced with some absolutely heartbreaking choices. Just check out what one Maine official that works with the Emergency Food Assistance Program recently had to say…
“One in six people in Maine don’t know where their next meal is coming from, or skip a meal so their kids can eat, or have to choose between paying for prescriptions and food, or fuel for your car and food,” Hall said. “What’s amazing is that food is always the first thing to go from your budget. It’s staggering, the choices people have to make.”
Food banks all over the country try their best to do what they can, especially during the holidays, but it is often not enough. In fact, some food banks ran out of turkeys well in advance of Thanksgiving this year…
Three days in advance of Thanksgiving, the Pear Street Cupboard and Café in Framingham, Massachusetts, is out of turkeys. According to organizers, “requests for help are up 400 percent over last year.”
But it isn’t just during the holidays that food banks are having problems keeping up with demand. The truth is that many food banks find themselves out of food and having to turn away hungry families all throughout the year. The following is from a recent Reuters article…
Overall, food pantries and soup kitchens reported a 5 percent spike in demand in 2012, according to the survey. More than half of providers said they were forced to turn away clients, reduce portion sizes, or limit their hours.
In Staten Island, all of the agencies that respond to hunger reported not having enough food to meet demand, while in the Bronx that was true for 80 percent of agencies. In Queens and Brooklyn, more than 60 percent of agencies did not have enough food to meet the needs of the populations they serve.
If you are able, please support your local food bank. The needs are great and they are only going to get greater.
The following are 20 facts about hunger in America that will blow your mind…
#1 According to one calculation, the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of “Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.”
#2 In October 2008, 30.8 million Americans were on food stamps. By August 2012 that number had risen to 47.1 million Americans.
#3 Right now, one out of every seven Americans is on food stamps and one out of every four American children is on food stamps.
#4 It is projected that half of all American children will be on food stamps at least once before they turn 18 years of age.
#5 According to new numbers that were just released by the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of Americans living in poverty increased to a new all-time record high of 49.7 million last year.
#6 The number of Americans living in poverty has increased by about 6 million over the past four years.
#7 Today, about one out of every four workers in the United States brings home wages that are at or below the federal poverty level.
#8 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the poverty rate for children living in the United States is about 22 percent.
#9 Overall, approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be either “low income” or impoverished.
#10 In the United States today, close to 100 million Americans are considered to be either “poor” or “near poor”.
#11 One university study estimates that child poverty costs the U.S. economy 500 billion dollars each year.
#12 Households that are led by a single mother have a 31.6 percent poverty rate.
#13 In 2010, 42 percent of all single mothers in the United States were on food stamps.
#14 According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, 36.4 percent of all children in Philadelphia are living in poverty, 40.1 percent of all children in Atlanta are living in poverty, 52.6 percent of all children in Cleveland are living in poverty and 53.6 percent of all children in Detroit are living in poverty.
#15 Since 2007, the number of children living in poverty in the state of California has increased by 30 percent.
#16 Family homelessness in the Washington D.C. region (one of the wealthiest regions in the entire country) has risen 23 percent since the last recession began.
#17 There are 314 counties in the United States where at least 30 percent of the children are facing food insecurity.
#18 More than 20 million U.S. children rely on school meal programs to keep from going hungry.
#19 Right now, more than 100 million Americans are enrolled in at least one welfare program run by the federal government. And that does not even count Social Security or Medicare.
#20 According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, approximately 40 percent of all food in America “is routinely thrown away by consumers at home, discarded or unserved at restaurants or left unharvested on farms.”
The Question Concerning Technology
Off the keyboard of Morris Berman
Published on Dark Ages America on November 22, 2012
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Dear Wafers and Other Friends:
How do we know what we know?
Comment on this article in the Spirituality and mysticism section of the Diner Forum.
We often place things here at the Doomstead Diner into discussion based on fact, experience or belief. How do we know what we know? Why do we gather here in the shimmering blue light of this digital campfire?
“When you observe the world you see people, you see houses, you see the sky, you see tangible objects; but when you observe yourself within, you see moving images–a world of images, generally known as fantasies. Yet these fantasies are facts. You see, it is a fact that the man has such and such a fantasy, and it is such a tangible fact, for instance, that when a man has a certain fantasy, another man may lose his life, or a bridge is built–these houses were all fantasies. Everything you do here, all of the houses, everything, was fantasy to begin with, and fantasy has a proper reality. That is not to be forgotten; fantasy is not nothing. It is, of course, not a tangible object, but it is a fact, nevertheless. It is, you see, a form of energy, despite the fact that we can’t measure it. It is a manifestation of something, and that is a reality. That is just a reality. As for instance, the peace treaty of Versailles, or something like that. It is no more–you can’t show it, but it has been a fact. And so psychical events are facts, are realities; and when you observe the stream of images within, you observe an aspect of the world, of the world within.” – Carl Jung.
How do we know what we know? Why do we think we know what we know? These are the questions I have been wrestling with, on and off, for the last month. Regular Diners will recall RE’s “Orkin Man” wherein he advances the premise that predatory capitalism is so far gone and the organs of justice so utterly corrupt, that the only thing we can do to ensure justice is to employ the good works of the Orkin man to exterminate the Illuminati like so many bugs. My response, running to many thousands of words, was to assert that there is a reason that the good book says, ”Vengeance is Mine,” is that for any individual to assert the godlike power of life and death over others was to invoke a kind of madness, well documented in both fact and fiction.
I used Pol Pot as an example, citing his well-publicized attempts to remake Cambodian society according to his own vision, and in the process, causing the deaths of many thousands of Cambodians. Or so I thought. Later on, Re: posted an article by one Israel Shamir (http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-history-of-cambodia-pol-pot-revisited/5308998), which asserted that, on a recent visit to Cambodia, Shamir had the opportunity to speak with many ordinary Cambodians who remembered Pol Pot with fondness.
A much quoted American professor, RJ Rummel, wrote that “out of a 1970 population of probably near 7,100,000 …almost 3,300,000 men, women, and children were murdered …most of these… were murdered by the communist Khmer Rouge”. Every second person was killed, according to his estimate.
However, Cambodia’s population was not halved but more than doubled since 1970, despite alleged multiple genocides. Apparently, the genocidaires were inept, or their achievements have been greatly exaggerated.
The Pol Pot the Cambodians remember was not a tyrant, but a great patriot and nationalist, a lover of native culture and native way of life. . . He felt compassion for the ordinary village people who were ripped off on a daily basis by the city folk, the comprador parasites. He built an army to defend the countryside from these power-wielding robbers. Pol Pot, a monkish man of simple needs, did not seek wealth, fame or power for himself. He had one great ambition: to terminate the failing colonial capitalism in Cambodia, return to village tradition, and from there, to build a new country from scratch.
His vision was very different from the Soviet one. The Soviets built their industry by bleeding the peasantry; Pol Pot wanted to rebuild the village first, and only afterwards build industry to meet the villagers’ needs. . . But what he hated most was acquisitiveness, greed, the desire to own things. St Francis and Leo Tolstoy would have understood him.
The Cambodians I spoke to pooh-poohed the dreadful stories of Communist Holocaust as a western invention. They reminded me of what went on: their brief history of troubles began in 1970, when the Americans chased away their legitimate ruler, Prince Sihanouk, and replaced him with their proxy military dictator Lon Nol. Lon Nol’s middle name was Corruption, and his followers stole everything they could, transferred their ill-gotten gains abroad then moved to the US. On top of this came US bombing raids. The peasants ran to the forest guerrillas of Khmer Rouge, which was led by a few Sorbonne graduates, and eventually succeeded in kicking out Lon Nol and his American supporters.
In 1975, Pol Pot took over the country, devastated by a US bombing campaign of Dresden ferocity, and saved it, they say. Indeed, the US planes dropped more bombs on this poor country than they had on the Nazi Germany, and spread their mines all over the rest of it. If the Cambodians are pressed to name their great destroyer (and they are not keen about burrowing back into the past), it is Professor Henry Kissinger they name, not Comrade Pol Pot.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-history-of-cambodia-pol-pot-revisited/5308998
***
This is, of course, the story very different from that retailed in our public prints and official histories. My immediate reaction was, that it would not be the first time that the agencies of government employed various media propaganda points of view at odds with facts. So then I attempted to look up what I could find about Israel Shamir. That too was a murky journey with no determinate conclusion. Apparently he is also known by the names Jöran Jermas, and Adam Ermash, is a Swedish writer and journalist by way of Siberia and Israel, looks very middle-eastern, and travels between Moscow and Stockholm.
One Norman Finkelstein is quoted by Tablet magazine as saying of Shamir, “He has invented his entire personal history. Nothing he says about himself is true.” So how do we know what we know? History is indeed written by the winners. Or by those scribbling on their behalf. Hell, how do we know anything?
***
A Diner Epistemology
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge, “How do we acquire it?”, “What do we know?”, “How do we know it?”.
Now to blow decades of accumulated dust from old memories. I recall being greatly struck by studying Plato’s dialogues as a freshman and sophomore in college. Of particular note was the study of Plato’s Forms. (http://www.niu.edu/~jdye/forms.html ) Main takeaways seemed to be that Opinions are not a good source of truth, or beauty. There must be some a priori standard with which we are acquainted– Knowledge of ‘the beautiful itself’ is a prerequisite for knowing whether ‘A is beautiful’ or ‘B is beautiful’ are true statements. Nor can we know whether that or any other statement is true unless we understood what such a statement means. What then is the status of the vast majority of our assertions which we make before we have established a clear understanding of the terms they contain? Plato would say that they must only be opinions, since they clearly cannot be instances of knowledge.
Because they are the patterns or ideal models to which we compare individual things or actions in order to determine how beautiful, just, or whatever, they are, he also refers to them as ‘Forms’ or ‘Ideas.’ For this reason, Plato’s view has been called idealism. Evidence of the senses, in Plato’s view, is not entirely to be trusted. But if that which is sensible is not most real, but only the forms are “real,” then what is? Plato asserts that sensible objects could not possibly be real; they could at best be “copies” or “images” of underlying realities which can be thought about but which cannot be perceived. In short, what we usually call “the real world” is not that at all, but is rather just a world of appearance or seeming. This of course summons what we know today about quantum mechanics and particle physics (in my case is a thimbleful). Yet the echoes of Plato remain in today’s science reporting: the presence of the observer affects the outcome of the experiment; that all of what we experience as “matter” is actually energy fields separated by a vast space; that out thoughts, being energy, create a version of reality.
As I write these lines, millions of neurons fire in my brain; thoughts emerge and are expressed as words, typed herein. Something is in charge, an entity we loosely call “mind.” Cognitive neuroscience teaches us that our perception of the world is organized within different regions of the brain. What we call reality results from the integrated sum of countless stimuli collected through five senses. Cognition, the awareness of being here now, is a fabrication of countless chemical reactions flowing through myriad synaptic connections between my neurons.
So by one definition, we are a self-sustaining electrochemical network enacted across a web of biological cells.
“The theater of the self happens in the brain and the brain is an assembly of interacting neurons firing nonstop like a Christmas tree.” However our perception of reality, that upon which we base our sense of self, is severely incomplete.
Only the Forms really exist, according to Plato. Forms are the “causes”or archetypes of whatever we discern by our senses. This was brought to light for me in one of the most durable images from my education, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
Plato’s allegory of the cave is concerned with different stages of knowledge. I could recount my limited understanding of this, but in sniffing around, I found this guy, who does it better, and with more irreverence, than I could possibly summon:
http://www.philosophybro.com/2010/12/platos-allegory-of-cave-summary.html
Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave”: A Summary
Socrates: “Why do people think philosophy is bullshit? Let me put it this way – imagine you’re in a cave, all chained up so you can’t turn your body at all, and all you get to look at is this one wall. Some assholes behind you are making shadow puppets using the light from a fire and making echo noises and that’s all you or anyone else chained up has seen or heard all your life. Sounds terrible, right? Except it’s all you’ve ever known, shadows and echoes, and that’s your whole world – there’s no way you could know that, really, you’re watching a slightly-improved M. Night Shyamalan film.
“In fact, you get pretty good at understanding how the patterns in the show work, and everyone else chained up is like, ‘Holy shit bro, how did you know that that tree was going to fall on that guy?’ and you’re like, ‘It’s because I fucking pay attention and I’m smart as shit.’ You’re the smartest of the chained, and they all revere you.”
Glaucon: “But Socrates, a tree didn’t really hit a guy. It’s all shadows.”
Socrates: “No shit, Glaucon, but you don’t know that. You think the shadows are real things. Everyone does. Now shut up and let me finish.
“So eventually, someone comes and unchains you and drags you out of the cave. At first you’d say, ‘Seriously, what the fuck is going on?!’ Well, actually, at first you’d say, ‘HOLY SHIT MY EYES’ and you’d want to go back to the safe, familiar shadows. But even once your eyes worked you wouldn’t believe them, because everything you ever thought was real is gone. You’d look at a tree, and say ‘That’s not a tree. I know trees. And you, sir, are no tree. THAT DOWN THERE is a tree.’ But you’re wrong. Down there is a shadow of a tree.
“Slowly, as your eyes got better, you’d see more and more shit. Eventually, you’d see the sun, and realize that it’s the source of all light. You can’t see shit without the sun. And eventually, you’d figure it out. Something would click in your brain: ‘oh, shit, that IS a tree. Fuck me. So… nothing in the cave was real? I feel like such an asshole.’ But it’s not your fault, so don’t be so hard on yourself.
“Finally you’d want to go down and tell everyone about everything you’ve discovered. Except, and here’s the hilarious part, they think you’ve gone fucking crazy. You’d say, ‘Guys, real trees are green!’ and they’d say, ‘What the fuck is green? THAT is a tree over there.’ And you’d squint and look at the wall, but you know you’re fucked because now you’re used to having sunlight, and now you can’t see shit. So they’d laugh at you, and agree that wherever it was that you went, no one should go there because it turns people into dickheads.
“Philosophy, same thing. The soul ascends and apprehends the forms, the nature of everything, and eventually the very Idea of Good that gives light to everything else. And then the philosopher has to go back to the cave and try to explain it to people who don’t even know what Green is, to say nothing of the Good. But the philosopher didn’t make up the Good, it was always there, and the only way to really make sense of it is to uncover it for yourself. You can’t force knowledge into a dumbass any more than you can force sight into a blind man.
“So if you want to learn, be prepared for a difficult journey, and be prepared to make some mistakes. That’s okay, it’s all part of the process. True knowledge must be obtained the hard way, and some people just don’t want to see the light.”
Had someone taught philosophy in this manner when I was an undergrad, I might have pursued a different career.
***
All of us deal with others who do not want to see the light. To confront the reality of the evidence of our lives. It does not take great leaps of inference to imagine what happens when cheap oil runs out. When the conduits stop flowing. When the grid goes dark. Those of us who like to have faith in our fellow citizens need look only to the spectacle of Black Friday near–riots to see what others will do in the pursuit of low low prices and black Friday deals. What, indeed, will people do when the shelves at their beloved Walmart are empty?
***
Last month I went walkabout from the Diner for a bit. Some of the disagreements here weighed on me heavily. Found myself also dealing with family illnesses and frailties of one sort or another. It is a matter of personal choice about how we handle disagreements here, or anywhere. It is often governed by how we feel, as as Plato might have observed, that ain’t good enough. At the end of the day, we all have to address the question of “Why are we here?” I like to think that, as we confront the very existential issues of collapse, we are as the many blind men, gathered around an elephant.
Once upon a time, there lived six blind men in a village. One day the villagers told them, “Hey, there is an elephant in the village today.” They had no idea what an elephant is. They decided, “Even though we would not be able to see it, let us go and feel it anyway.”
All of them went where the elephant was. Everyone of them touched the elephant.
”Hey, the elephant is a pillar,” said the first man who touched his leg.
”Oh, no! it is like a rope,” said the second man who touched the tail.
“Oh, no! it is like a thick branch of a tree,” said the third man who touched the trunk of the elephant.
“It is like a big hand fan” said the fourth man who touched the ear of the elephant.
”It is like a huge wall,” said the fifth man who touched the belly of the elephant.
“It is like a solid pipe,” Said the sixth man who touched the tusk of the elephant.
They began to argue about the elephant and everyone of them insisted that he was right. It looked like they were getting agitated. A wise man was passing by and he saw this. He stopped and asked them, “What is the matter?”
They said, “We cannot agree to what the elephant is like.” Each one of them told what he thought the elephant was like. The wise man calmly explained to them, “All of you are right. The reason every one of you is telling it differently because each one of you touched the different part of the elephant. So, actually the elephant has all those features what you all said.”
“Oh!” everyone said. There was no more fight. They felt happy that they were all right.
The moral of the story is that there may be some truth to what another says, even when we find it disagreeable, even when we do not agree with their premises.
All of us have different perspectives about what “collapse”, or “doom” will look like. By which vector it will ensue. Whether it will be “lite” or “full” or “uber” in character and completeness.
What brings me here each day, and makes me a willing participant, if not as indefatigable as I once was, is RE’s motto, “Save as many as you can.” Not every post leverages that. But I have to think that this site, as a body of work, ranging from spirituality to survivalism to economics to psychopathology, edges us to a better sense of well being as a result of our work as a group. If you show up every day and read, and participate, you end up knowing things you may not have known before. And of all the tools that protect us against the Great Uncertainty looming, knowledge shared is probably the best vector to enable us to “Save as many as you can.”
Perhaps what we do here is like pointillism. A Seurat painting, or one of those photos made up of thousands of images.
We all contribute, according to our lights, experiences, expertise, even outrageous opinions.
We’re told that Solomon sought wisdom above all else. So perhaps we seek wisdom here, discounting the immediate, distrusting all mainstream media accounts, and trying to win for some version of reality from the different points of light that accumulate here. After all, what is the “wisdom” conferred from experience aside from the aggregated lessons of life for which we have already paid retail?
Sources:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-history-of-cambodia-pol-pot-revisited/5308998
http://www.doomsteaddiner.org/forum/index.php?topic=984.msg10428#msg10428
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality
http://www.philosophybro.com/2010/12/platos-allegory-of-cave-summary.html
http://www.niu.edu/~jdye/forms.html
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/11/09/142128705/can-our-brains-tell-us-what-is-real
Japan Inc: Land of the Setting Sun
Off the keyboard of RE
Discuss this article at the Economics Table inside the Diner
A couple of weeks ago, the main Industrial Economies on the Collapse Radar were the PIIGS, and the main currency teetering on the brink of collapse was the Euro. Not so this week.
Now the focus of the MSM has drifted over to Japan, where a New Goobermint is on the verge of putting the Printing Press on overdrive. 20 years running here Japan has been mired in deflation, and in their infinite wisdom numerous MSEs are calling for Japan to Print Yen as fast as they can to keep Japan Inc. from hitting the D-Wall. Not Depression, DEFAULT.
In the post-WWII years right through the early 1980′s, Japan was the “Miracle Economy”. DEVASTATED and utterly broken after the dropping of Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima & Nagasaki, those Plucky, Hard-Working Japs CAME BACK by the 1970s to be the main producer of cool electronic gadgets from companies like Sony and Panasonic. Panasonic being the Brand name of Matsushita Electric here in the FSoA back in the 80s, you don’t see it much today.
The Nips took the Transistor Radio ball and ran with it. They had cheap labor a-plenty, and Investment Capital flowed into Japan to create a whole new class of Toys everybody just HAD to have. This before the years of Industrial Robots, the Japanese took their large population and turned them into Human Factory Robots, soldering together tiny components to make smaller and better Radios and then TVs than anybody here in America produced.
One of my most prized possessions of this era was a Panasonic Pop-Up 5″ BW TV I kept in my locker at the Lab to watch Late Night TV during the many dead hours of my shift. Eventually I replaced this with a Sony 5″ Color TV. 5″ was the maximum size of a TV I could squeeze ito my locker. Today, with Flat Screen LCD TVs, Iprobably could drop a 20″LCD Color TV /DVD player in the same locker, but they had not been invented yet.
For someone who grew up when TVs were encased in huge pieces of furniture to house all the tubes, such ‘portable TVs were an absolute MARVEL! The TV would even run on 8 “D” size Batteries, for maybe an hour or two anyhow and they were not Rechargeable in those days. If you had such a bad TV Jones you wanted to watch on the go somewhere, it would cost you a good $2 1980s dollars to flick it on for a while. Then after that the “safe” disposal of the batteries, which I never really figured out how was done anywhere. All my Used Batteries just went in the Trash with everything else.
Those crafty Nips followed up the Transistor Radios and Small TVs with a Steve Jobs type device, the WALKMAN! The early Walkmans took Cassette Tape Players and made them Portable, so you no longer had to be inside your McMansion to listen to music off the Victrola on Vinyl, now you could go JOGGING and still Bop to the Tunes of your favorite Rock Stars.
Of course we are all familiar now with the succession of devices you can carry on your person, for a while they morphed into Portable CD Players, then the MP3s and I-phones hit the market. Nowadays of course, you can carry in your pocket an All-in-One device that functions as your Phone, your TV, your Map and your Chauffer. OK, it doesn’t drive your car YET, but according to Google it WILL someday!
Along with making cool electronics, Japan Inc. got into the Bizness BIG TIME of competing wth Detroit for Making Carz. You didn’t see too many (if any) Jap Carz on the roadz in the FSofA in the 1960s when Detroit was producing the Muscle Carz like the Little GTO or Ford Mustang, but all of a sudden in the 1970s the HOTTEST Sportscar on the market showed up, the Datsun 240Z.
The Japs are producing this vehicle smack dab in the middle of the Oil Embargo, while here in Amerika the Carz Companies are on Life Support trying to figure out how to downsize their vehicles and make them more affordable for people to drive, how does that one happen? Clearly SOMEBODY is pitching enormous amounts of DEBT out to Japan to build HOT Carz, because they sure did not build up those factories on Savings they had from the period of 1945-1970. SOMEBODY in charge of issuing out Debt figured since the Japs did such a good job making cheap electronic devices, they could ALSO make good Carz cheap too! DEFINITELY cheaper than those Auto Factories in Detroit infested with Nasty UNIONS demanding a decent Wage and Pension to carry them through their years after their serviceability to the Company as a Production Line Drone.
So, inside 20 years or so from about 1970 to 1990, the Nip Auto Industry grew like a CANCER, and by 1990 the Carz that Toyota and Nissan were producing were BETTER than the ones coming off the production line in Detroit. The Nips became the Beneficiaries of the Credit Machine, and Detroit got Triaged OFF the Credit line. Result in 1990 is that Detroit looks like this:
Detroit Packard Plant. The largest abandoned factory plant in the World.
The Credit/Debt Machine marches around the world, always looking for new places with either Cheap Labor or Cheap Resources, preferably both but not always available. The Post-WWII Japs got pegged as a great source of cheap labor, and they already had some ndustrial Infrastructure available there to build on, since not EVERY Big Shity in Japan got Nuked, only Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Note that NEITHER of those Shities were the manufacturing centers that Tokyo and Osaka were. If you truly were out to destroy the enemy’ fighting capacity, why would you drop your ONLY two A-Bombs on dipshit towns like this and not drop them on the places building the Planes and the Boats?
Japan became the NEW Manufacturing Center for Asia in the post-WWII era, and credit flowed freely toward it for many years to build up this infrastructure on a couple of very small islands really. The islands themselves did not have that much in the way of resources, but they DID have a large and basically conplacent population of Slaves who would do as they were told and live with it. They evolved over tine into the Salarymen, and the Feudal Structure of Japan Inc never reallychanged. What did change was that in the intervening years the population of Japan EXPLODED. The population inside Japan at the end of WWII was about 70M today it is about 140M. About doubled in 40years.. Those islands cannot support this population, no way no how even with the best in Hydroponics IMHO.
Anyhow, despite what I think are fairly obvious limitations in terms of size, Japan Inc was the beneficiary of an enormous amount of credit which went into building their Electronics Industry, Autmotoive Industry and the Nuclear Plants necessarry to supply the megawatts of ower necessary to run those industries. MASSIVE amount of debt accumulated from the Get-Go here, and in the 1980s Japan was sthe Bubble of ALL TIME. The Nikkei shot up to the MOON, and the real estate the Imperial Palace sat on was worth ore than ALL of CA real estate. LOL. This demonstrates the logic of the “free market” in action.
Japan represents a great example of just how long you can keep a Big Economic Bubble Inflated here, and they appear to be tottering badly at the moment. Frankly, in the aftermath of Fuk-U-Shima it surprises me they have lasted as long as they have, but really this is the result of TPTB who will not let ANY Debt Structure collapse in action. The Yen has served as a Go-To Carry Trade Currency for YEARS here, and the “Big Boys” aka the TBTF Banks and Illuminti hold a LOT of Yen. Ya can;t let that currency drop off the map, it would destroy just about anyone who holds some of it, and that is about everybody invested in th Industrial Paradigm.
Thing is for the Nipponese right now, they are getting SUFFOCATED. If they can’t devalue theiryen and make their export products cheaper, they can;t COMPETE with the chinese and others who now have similar industrial infrastructure. They have a MOUNTAIN of debt they accumulated over the last 40 or so years, mostly held internally but still “valued” by the BIS. The BIS Valuation is what makes Yen worth anything at all on International Markets. So you now get a new Goobermint promisingto Print to Infintity if necessary to devalue yen to match or beat the devaluing dollar and euro. Who can prit faster and does it really matter?
Short answer, no it does not matter. All these currencies are proxies for energy and they can devalue against each other to try to be “competitive” in the Oil Product Market, but they can’t make the Oil ay cheaper as an input.. The more they devalue the currency, the more the oil costs them. Ya cannot win this game as long as you play it and Japan Inc. is about Outta Cards now.
Like Greece but on MUCH bigger scale though, TPTB CANNOT let Japan Inc. FAIL. Everything possible on the numerical level will be done to prevent that failure for so long as is possible. If any of these Lynchpin Currencies FAIL, the whole SYSTEM fails. It remains an open question as to which one will fail first, but right now I think Smart Money is on the Yen. I personally will short the Yen now as part of my Hypocrisy in action.
The Nips are TOAST.
RE
Japan=Detroit
Off the keyboard of Steve from Virginia
Published on Economic Undertow on November 22,2012
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When you wish upon a star … the auto industry … you don’t get a pony you get Detroit. This is the lesson the world is in the process of learning right this minute.
Kyle Bass speaking about debt. Like most analysts, Bass blames Japan’s fix on excessive debt …
“Thematically, the bottom line is … the total credit-market debt to GDP globally is 350%, it’s $200 trillion dollars worth of debt … against global GDP of roughly $62 trillion … “
Nobody bothers to ask why there is so much debt in the first place. The question is a finance analyst taboo … something not discussed, like underwear with dollar-signs printed on it.
The reason for the silence is that industrialization is unable to retire its debts. If machines could pay for themselves and ‘earn’ a profit they would be doing so already and there would be no debts at all. That machines cannot pay their own way is self-evident.
The debts taken on to make the ‘machine idea’ work are impossible to retire because they are too large. @ $200 trillion and 350% — plus additional hundreds of trillions in non-tendered liabilities — even if the world’s industries were to function magically ‘properly’ the debt burden is out of reach. What is available to service and retire debt is the modest marginal increase in GDP year-over-year: this increase itself is borrowed!
Debts cannot be serviced — much less retired — with the economies at death’s door: future GDP growth is theoretical.
Repayment is a fairy tale … it is also the cudgel of creditor repression. If there was the merest prospect of growth, economies would not bother with debt repayment but would take on even more … Not only does industry require debt but the waste-based industrial economy will always and under every circumstance increase its debts until it is physically incapable of doing so.
More Kyle Bass:
“So … this is a debt super-cycle that is coming to an end. It’s coming to an end at different end-points for different countries … A lot has happened in Japan in the last 12 months, in fact, in the last two months we believe they crossed that proverbial Rubicon … we think that you’ve seen 20 years … of conjecture regarding Japan’s eventual demise and now we see a point where in the last couple of months what you see a continued deterioration in their balance of trade. It’s actually running at about negative- $100 billion on-the-dollar … a hundred-billion dollars, or close to ten-trillion yen … and we think given this resurgence of Chinese nationalism over the Senkaku crisis … you are going to see that (trade imbalance) move another … one-and-a-half or two percentage of GDP … or another $100 billion dollars. To put that into perspective, what that means is we could see full current-account negativity in Japan in October (actually, November)… that’s something nobody is ready for … We think about it: we have a secular decline in the population happening, you have a balance of trade literally being re-written and falling off a cliff … and their GDP is tracking negative 3.5, negative 4 percent.
In other words, Detroit.
Japan has reached the point where it cannot borrow any more because it has already borrowed as much as it possibly can. As long as Japan borrows the (borrowing) cost is manageable. Debt is a treadmill, once on you can never step off or slow down. Japan will learn that as the borrowing slows the real cost ramps. Repayment does not work because doing so increases the worth of the money used to repay. Returns on Japan’s industries are not an issue: they never did matter because they never existed. What matters is the narrative of ‘progress’ and ‘innovation’ which for Japan has soured: the narrative is collateral. The country has become hopelessly old-fashioned … passé and unworthy of credit. Japan tries on new narratives but the only ‘innovation’ in the cupboard is more quantitative easing (QE).
Like the Motor City, Japan hitched its fortunes to the automobile industry. The car business has succeeded by more efficiently devouring its own capital basis. Since the ‘peak oil’ low in 1998, the incredible basis has been repriced, there is a scarcity premium added. It does not matter whether capital is officially recognized as scarce or not! What matters is the market price of capital relative to other goods. Resource capital is now too pricey to waste. The waste-based enterprise is stranded by its capital costs and there is nothing the establishment can do about it!
In Japan and elsewhere, the strategy to ‘manage’ debt has been to always add more of it until the cost becomes prohibitive ridiculous. Instead of debt, labor costs are cut by eliminating jobs … even though labor costs have little to do with the debt and are not the cause of it. Businesses borrow to pay executives and business owners, not labor which is expendable.
Michael Hudson suggests that the burden of taxation has been swapped for interest payments/economic rents to financiers. Instead of flowing toward governments- then cycling back toward the public, funds flow toward banks and to tycoons. The consequence is not taxation without representation, there is taxation without the means to pay the taxes: a strategy of pauperization that leaves the labor force dependent on meager handouts and indebted to both business and government.
– Detroit is a ‘company town’ dependent upon a single industry. It gained net cash flow from outside the city/the rest of the world. Japan is a ‘company country’ dependent upon manufacturing of so-called ‘high value’ goods including automobiles.
– Japan requires export trade income — net cash flow from the rest of the world — in order to service debts and subsidize their industries. The government can borrow from the central bank but for only a short time. Then it must either stop borrowing or pay higher prices on international credit markets and subject itself to credit embargo. Detroit obviously cannot borrow from its central bank because it does not have one. It is already subject to credit embargo.
– Detroit and Japan ‘play the resource spread’: buying resources then repackaging a portion of these into costlier forms so as to subsidize their own consumption. The increase in input costs has made spread(s) impossible to finance as the needed debt is too costly.
– Detroit is almost 90% African-American, Japan is 90% Japanese. Both cultures are rigidly resistant to changes in the status-quo. In Detroit, difficulties are blamed on Negroes rather than automobiles. Time will tell whom the Japanese will blame their difficulties on … certainly not the automobiles, which are the real culprit.
– Aging Detroit’s population is entering retirement, workers have few assets outside of real estate (personal homes). Japan’s population is nearing retirement, workers are converting non-monetary assets into currency by selling Japanese bonds, that is, they are not lending as much.
– Both Detroit and Japan have little in the way of native resources, both seek to exhaust the resources of others. Detroit has exhausted available resources and Japan is on the way to doing so.
– Both economies feature smokestack-manufacturing industries that have migrated to China and other low-wage countries … associated wage arbitrage has reduced discretionary incomes of both Detroit- and Japanese workers.
– Managements of both places are inept and cruel, beset with cronyism and corruption … leading to catastrophic consequences. It is hard to say which place is more ruined. Neither ‘systems’ allow imagination or risk, any persons exhibiting imaginative tendencies are excluded. Conventional managers are allowed to fail conventionally until they are unable to do so by the extent of their failures.
– Legacy obligations are carried forward with increasing amounts of new debt required to service and retire (roll-over) the older maturing debts. Japan’s lending capacity is entirely consumed meeting the burdens of existing debt. Detroit has almost no capacity to borrow at all and is dependent upon begging.
– Japan’s so-called ‘Bubble Economy’ was a hedge against rising energy costs … a hedge that was unraveled by increased energy costs. Hedge versus expedient: Detroit’s success was the reason for Japan’s economic strategy in the first place. The auto industry’s destroys the capital the industry requires over the longer term. It has also foreclosed the future, destroying capital that was-and is needed for actual productive enterprises … that have not be imagined yet! Motown’s strategy has been to deploy successive expedients .. good for the moment and costly afterward.
– Monetary policy — in the form of multiple rounds of bond-buying/quantitative easing and super-low interest rates — has failed/is irrelevant. The desire has been to create monetary/currency inflation: Japan is mired in deflation! The end-game for Japan is identical to the end-game in deflationary Detroit: ruin.
Figure 1: Japan’s crude oil consumption: the failure at Fukushima and the resulting shutdown of the country’s nuclear park left an expensive energy deficit that the country must close by importing petroleum and liquified natural gas. Every yen diverted to the petroleum suppliers is a yen extracted from other sectors of the Japanese economy … including debt service.
The world is not in danger of becoming Japanese with its 20-year deflation. Instead, the danger is Japan becoming Detroit, (James Howard Kunstler):
Finally, I have one flat-out prediction, one I have made before but deserves repeating: Japan will be the first society to consciously opt out of being an advanced industrial economy. They have no other apparent choice really, having next-to-zero oil, gas, or coal reserves of their own, and having lost faith in nuclear power. They will be the first country to enter a world made by hand. They were very good at it before about 1850 and had a pre-industrial culture of high artistry and grace – though, granted, all the defects of human psychology.
Japan is trapped. It must maintain enough of a functioning industrial economy to support its fleet of crumbling nuclear reactors for an indeterminable period of time, perhaps centuries. Imagine Detroit with reactors.
Industrialization is supposed to bring more goods at lower costs to customers who have to work less in order to enjoy more. From cradle to grave, modernity promises more of everything for everyone.
Goods are not enjoyable or useful. For example: the promised mobility has degenerated in a set of unremarkable yet rigid rules. It is the traveling in drainage canals from noplace to noplace, from one slum to another slum in pursuit of … low quality, unsatisfactory goods!
The systemic costs of ‘goods’ are unaffordable to the system. The customers discover they cannot work because they are unemployed or they find the work is too hateful to bear. There is no enjoyment utility: the ever-multiplying poor struggle to survive while the rich increasingly and for good reason fear the poor.
Meanwhile, waste — which is the real product of modernity — overwhelms the natural life-support system for rich and poor alike. Modernity cannibalizes the capital the system needs to run. The waste products and the loss of capital — and their associated increase in costs — is why modernity is failing. The problems discussed by Kyle Bass and other analysts are all symptoms of extinguished capital.
The managers desperately seek solutions that don’t change anything because of the perceived costs of change. What they miss right under their noses is to resist change is to become Detroit … or worse. Changes are inevitable, they will occur as a result of intent or as a result of system breakdown … which in turn forecloses the possibilities of creative alternatives. It is best to seize the day … to assign costs where they belong and start making the hard choices about what we need to give up … so what remains can be made available to ourselves and our offspring. What is needed isn’t anything extraordinary, only restraint.
The establishment has nothing left, they are scraping the bottom of the ‘solution’ barrel. Everything is offered but energy conservation and doing with less. This is total nonsense … the end of it is at hand. There isn’t enough room on Planet Earth for unlimited humans + cars + associated ‘other goods’. Something has to go, otherwise, the world = Detroit.
The Great Escape Part II: Adjusted for Inflation
Off the keyboard of Jason Heppenstall
Published on 22 Billion Energy Slaves on November 23, 2012
Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner
As I write these words I am flying in the belly of a giant metal bird over the duned sands of the Sahara Desert. No, I’m not dreaming or hallucinating, I’m sitting on board a huge plane and making my way from Amsterdam to Kenya, where I will be spending the next couple of weeks. Below me stretches out the seemingly infinite expanse of Libya.
Thanksgiving Memories
Off the keyboard of RE
Discuss this article at the Kitchen Sink inside the Diner
Initially my Title for this article was “Thanksgiving Memories in the Age of Oil“, but I elected to simplifty it down to Thanksgiving Memories to make the Permalink more simple, and besides it is obvious my memories of the Thanksgiving Holiday are all Oil Age memories.
If you care to believe all the legends told about the FIRST Thanksgiving, obviously they don’t match up with the Food Fest of the ones engaged in during the Age of Oil. A few Starving Folks in the Plymouth Colony get together with some Natives who actually HAVE some food, they eat a decent meal all are Thankful for as Winter sets in, but nevertheless as Winter Progresses there in Plymouth numerous people go to the Great Beyond due to Starvation issues. Not as many as the first Winter, but quite a few, then refilled with more escaping Eurotrash the following spring. No record really of how many Natives also went to the Great Beyond, but we do know the Plymouth folks got absolutely devastated in Numbers until the colony finally got established some and built up to around 7000 or so over time.
Regardless of, or perhaps BECAUSE of the huge percentage Die Off of original colonists at Plymouth, “Thanksgiving” ended up being one of our BIG FSofA Holidays, matched in significance only by Christmas and perhaps the 4th of July Independence Day celebration. In both the cases of Christmas and Thanksgiving, over the course of the Age of Oil, both have morphed into celebrations of Conspicuous Consumption on an Ungodly scale. In the case of Christmas, all about gobs of TOYS for young’uns and adults alike, “will I get my I-phone or my Porche in the Driveway with a big Bow on it?” Other Holidays like Halloween and Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day have also been heavily commercialized in the Age of Oil, but still the Majors of Thanksgiving and Christmas dominate here.
Thanksgiving in the Age of Oil isn’t about Presents of Toys like Christmas, it is about EATING a LOT of Food! How much can you stuff yourself with as you go to 2 or 3 different Relatives houses to have 2PM Meal at Aunt Sadie’s McMansion, a 4PM meal at Granma’s House and a 6PM meal at the Boss’ Mansion served up Buffett style? It doesn’t end just Thursday Night either, somebody you couldn’t make it over to on Thursday holds a Friday banquet, you vomit it all up Saturday and Sunday Morning your Church puts out ANOTHER Buffet for you to stuff your face with!
The Homeless and Impoverished are not left hanging on Thanksgiving either.. Every Salvation Army Post serves up Turkey Slices and Canned Corn and Cranberry Sauce on Thanksgiving. Plenty-o-food for EVERYBODY on Thanksgiving, FREE of Charge here in the Land of Good & Plenty! If you just have a couple of friends still employed, they will Invite you over for Thanksgiving, even co-workers you barely know will invite you over to Consume Mass Quantities of Food with them! In fact being a Hermit like myself who because of the work I do I know lots of people, I get dozens of people who feel sorry for the fact I don’t have family to Conspicuously Consume food with and who ALL invite me over! LOL. Politlely declining these invitations first because a Turkey Microwaveable is about enough for me and second because hanging with a bunch of Family I don’t really know from Adam is not great fun is quite difficult to do. LOL. I do usually get roped into at least two of these face-stuffing fests though with somebody.
The Mass Consumption of Food on Thanksgiving first hit me after we returned from Brazil in the late 60s, but didn’t REALLY hit home until my Mom got the HOUSE as part of the Divorce Settlement with Dad the Pigman. MOST of my relatives at this time lived in Rented Apartments, rather small places that couldn’t accomodate the WHOLE family. MY HOUSE had a big Living Room and Dining Room, and we came back from Brazil with some amazing Furniture, including a Hand Carved Jacaranda (Brazilian Hardwood) table that was 8′ long and 3′ wide. You could lay out a pretty massive Buffett on this table.
Everybody brought over a Dish of some sort to contribute to the Buffet, each of which usually could serve about 8 peoople. since they toted along some Kids and others who did not bring a dish, usually it ended up with about 4X as much as anybody could possibly eat, even the Biggest Pigs, and there were a few amazing ones in the Family. LOL. So AFTER the Big Meal, the next big challenge was distributing out the Leftovers to everybody, and this in t he days before you had GLAD Containers in every size range. Mainly you wrapped up the stuff in Foil or Wax Paper, or loaded stuff onto the original Plate or Bowl the person brought with them to the Food Fest.
The Mass Consumers in my family did not just bring over Food of course, they brought over plenty-o-Wine,Beer and Hard Liquor also, and there were a good number of the folks who considered this a great opportunity to get totally shit-faced DRUNK. Most famous among them was my Uncle Jessie, a WWII hero who pulled half a dozen men out of a burning Tank and had his hands burned up pretty bad and lived after that the rest of his life on Disability, Drinking and Gambling on Horses at the OTB Betting parlors in Brooklyn. Fortunately Jessie was a pretty Jovial Drunk, and usually did not cause too much problems other than figuring out where to put him when he finally passed out.
As “Hosts” for the Thanksgiving Food Consumption Fest, our Contibution to the Buffet was the TURKEY! So it was always a BIG ONE in those days, 20 pounders at least. My Mom was a SPECTACULARLY bad cook, so after the first year when the Turkey was WAY over-done, I took over the Turkey cooking job, monitoring the oven and experimeting with different basting techniques to end up with a nice JUICY Turkey at the end of it. I was about 11 or 12 I guess when I first took on this job, it was my first major Cooking Assignment. The first year actually came out OK, a DEFINITE improvement over the DISASTER Turkey my mom cooked the year before, but it still took another couple of years to get this right.
The other BIG Part of the turkey Job was the CARVING, and this I took EXCEPTIONAL PRIDE in doing well. Unlike the dude in the above photo, No Electric Carving Knife at the time in the RE household, but we did have some pretty good steel Cutlery we 
came back from Brazil with. Not sure if it was forged in Brasil,but it was some mighty good steel and lasted right up until Mom went to the Great Beyond . I think my sister has the knives in her kitchen now.
The first year I wasn’t too good with the carving, but I practiced on Chickens during the following year and by the third year my Turkey Platters looked pretty much like the one at the left here.
The Huge Family Feasts with ALL the relatives (Mom’s side Only, not Dad the Pigman’s) lasted probably right though my marriage, after that one of mom’s sisters died, the other went into a Nursing Home and their kids stopped coming and started doing their own Thanksgivings.
I remember one of the Turkey Day dinners with the Ex very well, we lived up in Larchmont sharing a house with a couple of other 20-somethings, and hadda drive down the Bronx River Parkway to the Whitestone Bridge to get over to Queens. Our car was a 1970s era Volkswagen Beetle, plenty-o-rust and a super stiff clutch. There was a massive Traffic Jam on the highway, stop and go starting a good 5 miles away from the bridge. My leg started cramping up so bad from clutching after an hour I hadda let the ex drive.
Once the big family Dinners died off and after my divorce was when I went out OTR as a long haul Trucker, and most Thanksgivings I was able to get off the road and hang with family, though I recall at least one I missed where I had T-G Dinner at a Truckstop. I think it was the Flying J, which had the best Buffets , although Petro had some good ones also.
It was during that time Mom retired and joined my Sister out in Springfield, and for another decade or so my sister did the Big Dinner at her McMansion there, with assorted Friends & Misfits she gathered up over her years living there, along with my Nephew and later his wife and kids.
During this period, she was responsible for the Turkey Cooking, but any years I did make it back to Springfield I always still got the Carving Job. Since I was no longer Cooking, I felt responsible for bringing SOME Mass Quantity Food to the Table as my contribution, so I started Reserving and buying the fabulously expensive (forHam) Honey Baked Hams from the HBH store. You don’t even have to Carve these yourself, they have a machine that does a cool Spiral Cut around the Hambone. I would always buy the BIGGEST one, cost like $60-70 I recall at the time. No idea what they run now.
My Brother-in-Law the Tool & Die man always got a Turkey from the Job, that was the Big Benny of his Non-Union Job as Mr. Fixit of every Tool & Die Machine known to man and designer of innumerable Molds over the years. He designed the original Pizza Hut pizza pans. He is actually still employed in this Bizness, even though so much manufacturing has left the shores of the FSofA. The company he works for now got the contract to make fittings for the building going up on the old WTC site, so likely will stay in Biz until he retires. No pension though, always a Non-Union job and I don’t think he ever started a 401K. So his Pension is Social Security, for as long as it lasts. My sister has been employed by the State of Missouri and has a State Pension due her along with SS, again for as long as that lasts. Then they were the benficiaries of Inheritance also from my BIL’s side and my Mom, though she did not get showered with Grandpa’s Booze Bucks, he was old school and handed it all off Patrilinearly to me, skipping my Dad because he couldn’t stand him. LOL.
Since moving to Alaska, I haven’t made it back for a Turkey Day to Springfield, most of my trips back there have been over the Chrstmas-New Years holiday, at least while Mom was still alive. I won’t be making it back there this year though during Christmas.
So the last few years I have mostly been the Old Hermit who some family feels sorry for and invites over for Dinner. Also have had to do work related Buffets, though not this year since I broke off with the fellow I originally came up here to work with and now am involved in another similar start-up. Not nearly as developed though so we are not yet doing the big Biz Buffet thing with the clientele. I make small talk usually, though there are quite a few Doomers here now so in the last couple of years Doom is up for discussion. The guy I am visiting with tomorrow is now CONVINCED Doom is Imminent because Obama-sama got re-elected. LOL. He HATES Obama.
Anyhow, the various pictures I yanked up off Google here are very representative of almost all the T-G Gluttony Extravaganzas I have attended over the last half-century here in the Land of Good & Plenty. Nobody I ever knew anywhere in the FSofA went Hungry on Thankgsgiving, though I am sure in Appalachia and other enclaves of Poverty some likely did. At the same time, all through those years, millions of people have gone Hungry in other places, while probably at least 25% if not more of the food consumed in these dinners ends up in the trash or in the compost pile for some gardener types who actually do their own composting.
My biggest pet peeve all through the years with the Waste was the Carcass after Carving, along with the bag of Giblets stuffed into the abdominal cavity of the nicely plucked and eviscerated Butterball Turkey. Almost nobody uses this stuff here in the FSofA, it goes straight into the garbage once all the nice Meat is carved off the bones. However, no matter HOW good a carving job you do, there is tons of good food left on the bones, and INSIDE the bones too.
When I was in Brazil, our Cook never threw out this stuff, she took all the bones and stuff left on our plates and threw it all in a Huge Pot which she simmerred for a few hours after we ate and made Soup to take home to her family in the Favelas. My Grandma also who DID face Starvation during the Great Depression could never let Chicken Bones go to waste, she also made Chicken Soup out of leftover chicken bones and giblets. I picked up this habit during my years Turkey cooking, and actually got to the point where I would ask friends and neighbors to save their Carcasses, which I would collect up on Friday and Boil and make several gallons of Turkey Broth to make Turkey soup with. I would then strain the broth, put it into containers and freeze it, and each week make a new batch of Turkey Soup, with fresh Carrots and Celery, Basil, Parsley, Dill and Rosemary and then add sometimes Dumplings, sometimes Wanton and sometimes Matzoh Balls to finish out the soup.
It remains to be seen how long this Festival of Gluttony continues on here in the FSofA. Back in 2008, I figured that one was the LAST one, but here we are in 2012 heading into another one tomorrow. At this point, despite the Fiscal Cliff and the Eurotrash going down the toilet and the Drought which took down the Corn Harvest by some inexactly known amount, I suspect another Face Stuffing next year too. I don’t know exactly when this will end, I only know it will end in the not too distant future.
Meanwhile, those of us who go out tomorrow and munch down on plate fulls of Turkey, Honey Baked Ham, Prime Rib, Sweet Potatoes, Stuffing, Green Bean Casseroles, Cranberry Sauce, Bottles of CA Mondavi Vineyards Wine, Bottles of Sam Adams Boston Lager and Bottles of 12 Year Old Single Malt Glenlivet Scotch Whisky can all say we are fellow Travellers on the Hypocrisy Tain with William Hunter Duncan. Even the Impoverished here attending Salvation Army dinners ride that train with us, because what all of us are doing is consuming WAY more of the resources of the earth then we really need to, and way more than is our Fair Share also. What goes into the trash tomorrow night probably could feed double to triple the population of the FSofA, near 1B people I am sure. Thousands of children will die tomorrow of Manutrition, millions more will go Hungry tomorrow. Not because the Food is not available, it most surely is right now. It occurs because the distribtuion system of the wealth of the world is so vastly skewed, and because taking back the control of this earth from those who sewed it up early is so hard to do.
All very hard to digest of course, but as you digest your Turkey Dinner tomorrow, remember it and live with it. It is part of your Complicity, part of your Hypocrisy in living in the Land of Good & Plenty as a Beneficiary of the Age of Oil.
RE
Hypocrisy
Off the keyboard of William Hunter Duncan
Published on Off the Grid in Minneapolis on November 20, 2012
Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner
Last winter, living without a working furnace or income, I was ready to fix up this house and sell it. I was going to sell it, and go to dance in the wheat fields of England, to call down a sign, or call out the ones who do it. From there, to the Big Island of Hawaii, to walk around it, up to Dec 21. From there, wherever, perhaps deep in the amazon, in search of Ayahuasca and Strophoria cubensis.
Spring came, and I fell in love with the garden again, and I planted fruit trees. I started the work on the house, which went well up to a point, when I lost any energy for it, after a series of arguments with my father, who shares the mortgage on the house, and has been paying on it the last four years. I walked away from the house, longtime readers, and readers of my books, will recall, during the fall of 2008. I was hardly aware of the financial collapse, as I was in love, and recovering from Lyme disease. I lived with that woman and her kids, in Northern California and Wisconsin, the following two years, when we broke off the relationship and I returned to this house, which had been unoccupied all that time. That is when I started this blog, and expanded the garden. By mid-summer this year, it was clear to me that the house was not saleable to anyone but a speculator at a house-flipper price in a depressed market; and the garden had become like an enchanted place.
I couldn’t go another winter without taking on the mortgage payment, and the Halloween store I managed in the fall of 2010 and 2011, had been sold to a buyer out-of-state, so I had to go looking for a job, which I haven’t had, a nine-to-five or simulacrum, in four years, other than the Halloween store. I applied for about thirty jobs, went to one interview that didn’t go well, skipped a dead-end one. The third interview, I almost skipped; which turned out to be serendipitous, and I am not one to ignore serendipity. They were vague, and somewhat cagey about the job, it being a high-class temp agency, but I would be working for a big bank, which I knew would make my father happy, and I could get there by bus after a one mile bike ride, in about 50 minutes after leaving my house. Not owning a car, and not wanting one, that was a positive (some people at big bank bus two hours each way.) It occurred to me though, the evening after the interview, restless in bed, that I might have been hired to foreclose on houses.
There was a three week gap between the time I was hired, and the start date. During that time, every single person I talked to about my concern, to a one, said, “it’s a job.” Not one person shared my concern, and while some of the people I spoke with are conventional, the majority are not. I was surprised. But then I am dubious about the vast majority of jobs. No one seemed very perturbed by the fact that I would be making less than I had been by the hour, working for my friend Organic Bob moving dirt around and landscaping, less than half I was making at that corporate job I had at the Behemoth in 2008, and only 25% what I was making during the housing boom, remodeling houses.
The DREAM JOB I had been angling for, I failed to be interviewed for, despite that I had a friend advocating for me inside. This, I chalk up to the fact that I failed to pursue the Masters and Doctorate I was being pushed to pursue by my Teachers, back in 2000, but I saw that I would be a fifth-tier Doctor with $150,000 in debt at 40, and besides, I felt the call of the wild. Too wild now, for a scholastic job writing and editing articles about solutions to environmental problems, evidently. So I took the one job I was offered, at big bank.
My concern was confirmed as accurate, day one, within ninety minutes. The trainer said the loans we would be working on were in default, that no one was living in those houses, that we would not be foreclosing on people. I liked him, and still do, but I suspected then and suspect now there is no reason to believe at all, that there aren’t people in the houses on the loans we are foreclosing on. For myself, since then, every weekday but Veteran’s Day, I awoke at five am to foreclose on houses for eight hours, to return home just under twelve hours later. The work has since proven to be more like prison work, than any job I’ve had, and I’ve worked in a foundry, and on 0-180 degree Fahrenheit flat roofs, roofing. My work now is to audit hundreds of on-line mortgage documents each day, most for loans that should never have been issued.
Still, the job has been a blessing in some ways. I’m paying the mortgage again, and I’m able to put money into the house, and the various projects around the garden I’ve long imagined, but had no resources or means to bring into being. The job may be set up like prison work, but there are no petty tyrants, none I have to deal with anyway. In fact, the people I work for directly are very reasonable, and the people I work with are like most people, mostly good. I’ve been able to listen to about 200 hours of old Terence Mckenna recordings. The job has also been a strong lesson in how wrong the housing bubble was for America, and how much fault does rest in average Americans, taking out loans that could only be paid off if the economy were to grow by 5%+ every year for the next several decades, and maybe not even then, with the systematic downward thrust of average wages, and decreasing good-paying jobs, climate change, resource constraints, et al. That, and a clear picture of how un-enlightened big bank is, as if the work I do is fit for humans. We are called “butts in seats, in the meat locker, or the morgue,” I hear, trickling down from above. That may not sound like a blessing, those last two lines, but ever have I tried to pull back the veil of the ruling paradigm. 
Not everyone is enamored of my work there. This is what one reader had to say, on the thread dedicated to this blog, in the Doomstead Diner, for members of the forum:
“Sorry, but IMHO working for one of the four big wall street banks is one of the most morally degrading things you can do at this time. Helping them instead of working to put them out of business? Being complicit with them is being complicit with what is wrong at the core. Anything but that. What is this called, ” cognitive dissonance”? What is the use of saying or doing anything if you are going to do that?”
Another had this to say:
“you’re a dime-a-dozen sellout but you’re a first-rate poser. you’re a stain on this place.”
My role at big bank is one rung on a ladder as long as a DNA strand, though unlike DNA, those at each rung are largely ignorant of every other. It is a perfectly bureaucratic structure, big bank, though it ostensibly be a “private” business. It should also be said, big bank isn’t “private”, as it is sustained by free money from the Federal Reserve, which is socializing loses and privatizing the gains, at least until they destroy the dollar. The structure exists as it does, to provide plausible deny-ability for it’s employees, giving them only the most scant responsibility for what is going on – just like every hierarchical Institution everywhere. Were we ever in contact with the actual “borrowers” whose loans we audit, the system wouldn’t work, because that would be humanizing the work. As is, it is almost devoid, the process, of anything even resembling “humanity.” And as you might imagine, most people working there show a singular lack of awareness about any of the deeper realities I try to elucidate in this blog.
Which, speaking of a lack of humanity, would the commenter’s quoted above, feel free to walk into my department and declare such things before the throng? Of the 70+ people working in my department, about 20% are white. Predominant are people of African and Asian origin, first or second generation, and African-Americans. I am struck by the number of pictures of young children on computer screen-savers and backgrounds. Is it merely my knowledge that makes me a hypocrite, a sell-out and first rate poser? If so, what are these others, in their work-a-day ignorance in service to their families, in their culpability to the American dream made possible by vile imperialism?
When I was working as a manager of a Halloween store, I commented at length in this blog, and in my second book, on cheap Chinese crap, and the un-sustainability of crass American consumerism. When I was asked if I wanted to work in a Halloween store, by an old college friend, I said without hesitation, “fuck no!” At the time, I had just returned to Minneapolis, after Wisconsin, I had $80 and no job prospects of any kind. Immediately after that, I thought, he just offered me a job, I haven’t seen him in five years, and I’ve been waiting for a sign. Working there, aside from being fun, and exhausting, made me not one whit more enamored of consumerism, not one whit less honest about what I think about it’s prospects. Indeed, I have come to think of consumerism as a death-cult.
I am not a “moral” man. “Morality”, such as it’s practitioners hold forth righteously upon, is generally a construct over-laid reality, per-suppossing humans are inherently evil otherwise, or mere animals who would immediately proceed to consume each other, without said righteous tight asses lording over us. Whereas, I believe humans to a one, are profound, divine, innately good beings, inherently corrupted by degrees, by the cultural paradigms, morals, ideologies, dogmas, pollutants, programs and pogroms, designed to control life, for the benefit of the few at the expense of ALL. Not being a “moral” man, I am not restrained by absolutist rigidity, which both commenters above show in spades, IMHO, even though theirs is a minority opinion culturally, about things generally. Nuance, being a thing of truer understanding.
As for me having a “truer” understanding, I have also come to believe, that not a one of us on earth has anything like a “true” understanding, of what this life is really all about, though there are no shortage of people who claim to, be they hiding behind a gun, or bizness or gov or Religion or ideology or money or plain ol’ vitriol. Here is some of my response, on the Diner.
I guestimate that of all the loans I’ve seen, about 80% of them were loans in excess of $300,000. I wade through the wreckage of greed mostly. How do I justify it? I am trying to do right by my house, which I like to say I bought twelve minutes before the market collapsed, and I’m still around really only because my niece and nephew live only a mile away. My entire life top to bottom is paradox, and you are free to make of me any kind of villain you like.
~~~~~~~~
IMHO, I am exactly where I need to be, to accomplish the things I imagine. Think of it as an alchemical transmutation, wading through the economic wreckage as I am, reporting on my experience, to bring beauty and love into being? 
You might have some faith in me. I’m not asking much. 
~~~~~~~~
I would be a hypocrite if I did not document publicly, the things I do, and what I think about that, for free. I have two books available for free on my website, www.WilliamHunterDuncan.com. Also a novel I was working on until I was offered my current employment. I’ve written in my blog and one of my books, about planting marijuana on Federal, State and County land, here in the Twin Cities. I aim to live and write with integrity. I am the peace pirate Sir Vis, in service to the Goddess, former manager of the coolest Halloween store in the Midwest, who now finds himself under a mortgage ostensibly owned by the same big bank he now astoundingly finds himself working for, wading through the wreckage of the housing market. Meanwhile, learning skills that will be useful when big bank and the others like them fall. Which they will, as inevitably as the sun will rise tomorrow. Probably not tonight, but soon, very likely.
What possesses you to play the role [the commenter of the second comment listed] you do here, I don’t know. We share a great deal, in our view of the world. You are on the right track about something though. Now is not a time for fearfulness. Terence Mckenna said, when asked what to do in the face of teotwawki, “flood the world with ART.” Which is what I think about my writing, my garden, the things I build, and my life generally. And why I keep telling myself to follow through with the plan I see, to put together a band. Because what could be more important at the end of the world, than a joyful sound?
Thus I make no claims about the “morality” of what I do. Indeed, as to the actual work at big bank, there is nothing particularly honorable, interesting, or empowering about it. It is merely where I find myself, at this time, making the best of it, not to waste the opportunity.
And you, dear readers, are free to trust me, or make whatever judgement you like, however harsh. Though I don’t recommend harsh moral rigidity as a way of being. Rather, I would have you embrace the mystery, of this very curious life, joyously, wherever you find yourself.
Doomsteading Protect & Defend Issues
Off the keyboard of RE
Discuss this article at the Doomsteading Table inside the Diner
One of the Big Questions faced by Doomers is what Paradigm is best to pursue once you have grasped that Industrial Civilization is undergoing its Final Collapse Phase? Do you try to Shelter-in-Place, or do you try to Bugout to a more Remote Location? If you do Bugout, what sort of challenges might you face?
Diner Water Weasel brought up some of these questions inside the Diner a few days ago, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to look at the Bugout paradigm, and the difficulties you can face trying to run a Remote Doomstead on the Security Level.
First, Water Weasel’s post regarding the Doomstead his Dad has set up in Missouri. My initial response follows, then I will elaborate some for this article after that.
Regarding Doomsteads, I have a question for all y’all. My father lives in suburban Columbia, Missouri but also has 100 acres of mostly woods about a 20 minute drive away. He sort of shares this vision of bugging out, but his plan is to just go to his place in the woods and hunker down. Problem is, he hasn’t really prepared to do so at all. The property has a nice house, and a pond/small lake, but not really any food, water, fuel, garden, firewood or anything. He’s on good terms with the neighbors (e.g., lets them hunt his place if he’s not there), but he’s clearly not a local and has only owned the place for maybe 8 years.
So my question is, should I leave him to his fantasies, or should I try to convince him that A) he’d be better off building an alliance with his suburban neighbors and forgetting about bugging out, or B) if his plan is to bug out to the place in the woods, he needs to take it seriously and stock it properly BEFORE it’s needed.
I kind of lean toward option A. I worry about him (and his wife and potentially two daughters in their young twenties (my half sisters)) out there in the woods when a truckload of bad boys decide they want to stay there for a few days too. He’s ex-Navy, but no soldier (medical corp) and I’m not sure the women even know how to shoot.
So, should I try to convince him to bug in? What to do you think?
OK, back at the Cabin with a couple of cases of Writing Fuel.
I think your Dad has a decent situation with both of these, assuming he is debt free on them.
He doesn’t really have to pre-supply the doomstead with food, long as he has a trailer for his Bugout Machine. Even a cheap 15′ flatbed trailer will do.
He should get 3-4 55 gallon drums to put long lasting dried foods in, rice and dried legumes and beef jerky in vacuum sealed bags. Also spare Ammo, a spare Gun and spare tools in each drum. He can keep these in the Garage in his Town Home until TSHTF and its looking real bad.
He definitely should NOT head to the Doomstead with just himself and the Women Folk. There should be a Plan with all his close friends and relatives to converge on the Doomstead when TSHTF. Minimum I would say would be 4 Adult Males, better 6 to 10 in this group.
When the Bugout Day comes, the first thing is to Bury all but one of the 55 gal drums in locations around the property marked off with a GPS, and also with “Pirate Maps” on a MicroSD memory card and also on hard copy also buried in watertight containers at easily found locations.
He should also stock up on Seeds for Wild Edible Plants to establish colonies of these plants around the property the first spring after TSHTF.
Round the Clock Watch should be set up, and all the Windows on Ground Level should have Wood Shutters Constructed from 2x4s and old Phone Books should be saved to pad the inside of these shutters in real bad situations. Phone Books are quite bullet proof to all but very high powered rifles. There should be slots in the shutters to shoot from and clear Fire lines 360 around the Doomstead. It would be good to have at least one Big Dog trained to bark as soon as he smells or hears anything.
He is probably better off in town until things REALLY get bad, but when partially bad he should start to make regular trips to the Doomstead to get with the Locals around there to establish a Doom Community. People will obviously be talking once this gets rolling, and if they know he is well prepped and planned and has others with GUNS on his property, it is unlikely his Doomstead will be attacked first. If he also gets into a Mutual Protection Group with his closest neighbors, this will increase Security exponentially.
In the MPG, each Doomsteader has either FRS Walkie Talkies or CB or Marine VHF Radios, each with an assigned Channel. If somebody’s doomstead is under attack from Zombies, other members of the MPG are Honor Bound to go to that Doomers Aid, ride in like the Cavalry so to speak. Regular exercises should be practiced, Shooting Blinds set up, etc. If everybody has at least one well trained Dog, this also will help to flush out any Zombies on foot skulking around the Doomstead under attack. Some High Tech Gear is nice if you can afford it, Light Amplified or Infrared Night Scopes and so forth.
With this sort of plan, the only danger is from the Police/National Guard/Military who will have bigger well organized and well armed groups. Hopefully you can cut a deal with such Rogue Militias if/when they show up.
If you are going the Doomstead route out in the mid-range Boonies, you are very vulnerable once the Police protection scheme breaks down and you can’t just call 911 for help. I only favor mid-range Doomsteads with a decent size group of people to Protect & Defend the Doomstead. Going to such a place with just yourself wife and kids is asking for a Home Invasion and all the horrible outcomes that can come from that.
RE
In setting up Doomsteads, most folks don’t really think through the great depth of the Security Problem once the State and its Protection Mechanisms for Private Property go into Failure Mode. If you HAVE something somebody else WANTS, like FOOD for instance, they are not likely to show all that much respect for the piece of paper from a defunct Goobermint that shows you “own” a piece of property. People who advocate for “Anarcho-Capitalism” and a Stateless Society with non-existent Goobermint live in a fantay world, such a society really cannot exist at all while ALSO maintaining Private Property. To begin with, “money” has to have agreed upon valuations, which it really cannot have in absence of Goobermints. That however is somewhat off-topic and tangential to this article, which is basically focused on the security issues you have once the general Social structures of Police and Law break down in your Neighborhood.
Because of all the issues with Protecting & Defending a Doomstead, its not one of my “Favored Paradigms” for negotiating the spin down. Doomsteads essentially extend out the Ownership Paradigm over a plot of land, so once you set one of these places up you get HUGE liabilities in terms of Protecting & Defending it. If you can assemble up enough like minded people who can all GET ALONG well enough to make such a Mini-Community work, more power to you, but the fact is of course such small, insular communities all have their own sets of issues, which often do not end well. Nasty Example Extraordinaire there would be the Doomer Community Jim Jones set up in “Jonestown” in Nicaragua of course.
Another fairly popular paradigm amongst Doomers is the Sailboat paradim. This is the one Dmitri Orlov is following for the most part. The Sail paradigm has the advantage of Mobility and no Ownership Obligations over a plot of Land (Taxes), but the Security Problems are HORRENDOUS. Once moored in any location, if you are not actually on board such boats are very vulnerable to Theft, not just of what you hve aboard but the whole BOAT itself. Anybody can break a few locks, hoist the sails and head for Tristan da Cunha in your boat if you are ashore drinking Retsina at the local Greek Taverna. You can’t secure these vessels, no way, no how. On the open sea, you are vulnerable to power boats that still GOT some gas to ooerate and can move around a whole lot faster than you can. You ALSO cannot actually STORE all that much on a sailboat of typical 35-45′ range and still have room to LIVE on the boat. Maybe 6 months worth if you jam up all the lockers with dried foods in Vaccum Sealed bags, but that is about the best you can do there. If you don’t have a Vacant Pitcairn Island Destination on your charts, you are gonna get screwed about anywhere you go with your boat full-o-preps. make port ANWHERE,, “Customs” Officials will board the boat and confiscate your Guns & Ammo, while asking for a “docking fee” of any Gold you got aboard the vessel. If you can hold onto the Food you got aboard you will be lucky if the locals are hurting for food.
Anyhow, for these reasons I tend to be against trying to Doomstead overall as an Individual or small Family Group, either with the Fixed Doomstead or the mobile type like the Sailboat, although that one is slightly preferable since it can in theory be moved from one already gone bad location to another slightly less bad. It also provides you the means to GTFO of Dodge free of Traffic Jams or the need for Gas.
The Solution to the Security Problem in both cases is the same,in the case of a fixed Doomstead as mentioned it is “staffing” the Doomstead with enough people to make an adequate defense, and the parallel idea with the Sail Paradigm is to work in Flotillas of several boats, 10-20 of them would be a decent number to work with there. When docked or moored, members of the flotilla keep watch on other members boats while they are off getting supplies and so forth. When out at Sea, you are much less vulnerable to Pirates even in Power Boats by the virtue of Numbers. Unlikely at least to begin with you will have large Pirate floatillas organized up. The problem still exists of being set upon by Customs Authorities in Populated Ports, but here only 2 or 3 of the boats go and make port while the rest stay offshore. You divest of your Guns and Gold and so forth to the offshore boats, then sail in with some Trade Goods and attempt to Cut a Deal with the “Authorities”. A risky proposition since they might decide to just shoot you and take your boat, but if they perceive that you have some friends with MORE stuff to trade, then you can convince them it is better to be FRIENDS and leave you alive than shoot you for your boat.
The scenarios I paint here may seem “far out” Wild West “Shoot ‘em Up” and far off into the future here in the Land of Good & Plenty, and they may be so. However, if you project out a general failure of the Monetary System and centralized control of Goobermints, then really Somalia provides the Canary in the Coal Mine for that one. Pirates there are not just taking out Yachties, they are taking out Super Tankers. Home Invasions are already fairly common, and they sure won;’ be any LESS common in a Monetary System Failure. Whatever paradigm you choose to follow on the Doomsteading Level, you have to take seriously the Security Issues and how to deal with them. You sure won’t be able to rely on Da Goobermint or the Police to rescue you, they may in fact be your most dangerous enemies.
RE
The Dynamics of a Dysfunctional Relationship.
The Dynamics of a Dysfunctional Relationship.
Much has been written about personal relationships that are destructive. Because such relationships often revolve around family life, with relatively few individuals involved, the dynamics at play are fairly obvious once one looks at such interactions objectively.
Currently the majority of families in western society are patriarchal in nature. When such patriarchal families become destructive it is often the patriarch that becomes the abuser. There are a number of known solutions to surviving and growing out of such destructive relationships.
Each and every human being is a member of the human race (family). Because the number of individuals involved in the ‘human’ family is in the billions the dynamics of interaction at work are far more difficult to comprehend. It is obvious because of the quality of life of many humans that the overall human family is also dysfunctional in nature.
I suggest that although the numbers involved in the human race are much larger than in individual human families, the dynamics that define the relationships between individuals are identical in both instances, except for in scope.
Abuses heaped on single individuals within families are identical to those heaped on whole races, societies, nations, regions, and groups within the human race.
If the dynamics are identical at both both scopes, individual family and human race, are the solutions also identical, except for in scope? I believe so.
With this hope I will explore the nature of the known problems and solutions applying to individual dysfunctional families and then extrapolate these ideas and apply them to the human race as a whole. Perhaps this exercise will shed some light on how we as races, societies, nations, regions, groups, and individuals can protect our selves within the dynamics that motivate the human race.
Dysfunctional family
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysfunctional_familyA dysfunctional family is a family in which conflict, misbehavior, and often child neglect or abuse on the part of individual parents occur continually and regularly, leading other members to accommodate such actions. Children sometimes grow up in such families with the understanding that such an arrangement is normal. Dysfunctional families are primarily a result of co-dependent adults, and may also be affected by addictions, such as substance abuse (alcohol, drugs, etc.), or sometimes an untreated mental illness.[1] Dysfunctional parents may emulate or are sometimes over-correcting from their own dysfunctional parents. In some cases, a “child-like” parent will allow the dominant parent to abuse their children.[1]
Examples
Dysfunctional family members have common features and behavior patterns as a result of their experiences within the family structure. This tends to reinforce the dysfunctional behavior, either through enabling or perpetuation. The family unit can be affected by a variety of factors.[4]Common features
Near universal
These features occur in most dysfunctional families:Lack of empathy, understanding, and sensitivity towards certain family members, while expressing extreme empathy towards one or more members (or even pets) who have real or perceived “special needs”. In other words, one family member continuously receives far more than he or she deserves, while another is marginalized.
Denial (refusal to acknowledge abusive behavior, possibly believing that the situation is normal or even beneficial; also known as the “elephant in the room.”)
Inadequate or missing boundaries for self (e.g., tolerating inappropriate treatment from others, failing to express what is acceptable and unacceptable treatment, tolerance of physical, emotional or sexual abuse.)
Disrespect of others’ boundaries (e.g. physical contact that other person dislikes; breaking important promises without just cause; purposefully violating a boundary another person has expressed)
Extremes in conflict (either too much fighting or insufficient peaceful arguing between family members)
Unequal or unfair treatment of one or more family members due to their birth order, gender, age, family role (mother, etc.), abilities, race, caste, etc. (may include frequent appeasement of one member at the expense of others, or an uneven enforcement of rules)
Tongue in Cheek …
Abusive Father Can’t Wait To See The Art He’s Inspiring His Kids To Create
CODY, WY—Describing the years of psychological torment he has inflicted upon his two children James, 14, and Amber, 9, local tax attorney Ted Sheehan told reporters Thursday he couldn’t wait to see what kind of art his abuse would inspire them to create when they grow up.
The 37-year-old father said he could only imagine how his son and daughter’s unstable upbringing might manifest itself in future writings, paintings, or music, given the way he routinely ridicules their achievements, yells at their mother in drunken fits of rage, and threatens the family with physical violence.
“My constant petty bullying alone ought to be worth a couple novels or screenplays—maybe even a solo museum exhibit,” said Sheehan, noting that even when his children do get a break from his verbal abuse, they still suffer from total emotional abandonment. “We’re not talking here about your ordinary, everyday withholding of approval, either. Most of the time, I’m actively undermining and belittling them. Definitely stuff that could be channeled into unique art emblematic of the isolated, tortured nature of human existence.”
“After 18 years of life in that kind of menacing environment, you could easily be looking at the next Jackson Pollock and Sylvia Plath,” he added. (continued…)
An abusive personality is a character flaw often based in insecurity.
Beware Insecure Men
By: Pamela Mooman http://www.life123.com/relationships/communication/understanding-men/beware-insecure-men.shtmlInsecure men can wreak havoc in any relationship; recognizing signs of insecurity and then being strong enough to deal with the situation can save wasted years and many tears in the long run.
Insecurity can manifest itself in many ways, but a couple of personality types are the most common and recognizable.
Openly Insecure Men
This type of personality can drain patience and strength from others, especially a girlfriend or life partner. Here are some traits that openly insecure men may exhibit:Constantly clamoring for praise and reassurance
An inability to make decisions
Inappropriate social behavior and conversation
Overly polite to the point of annoyance due to fear of offending
Poor posture to the point of actually walking bent over
Occasional violent outbursts that are inappropriate in relation to triggers
Heavy drinking, alcoholism, or drug addictionNarcissistic Men
This personality type can overwhelm and batter another, causing intense psychic pain and sometimes physical pain, as well. Despite the strong-arm tactics, however, this personality type is often born from an intense sense of insecurity. The narcissism, where the man is focused only on his pleasure and desires, develops to hide that insecurity. Here are some traits that narcissists may exhibit:Verbally insulting and abusive
Physically and/or sexually abusive
An inability to see or validate another’s point of view
Affections that run hot and cold, depending on the narcissist’s mood and needs
ManipulativeDealing with Insecure Men
Unfortunately, no one can change and grow unless they desire to themselves. Here are some tactics to try to deal with insecure men:
Talk openly with the man; point out habits that are annoying, troublesome, or painful, and then give him a chance to speak openly about his feelings, if he is willing.
If one-on-one communication is not possible, see if he is willing to try couples counseling.
If he is not, ask him if he will consider individual counseling or therapy.Sometimes there is nothing to do but walk away from undeniable insecurity or narcissism. Whether it means simply breaking up, or it means a divorce and all of the complications that can bring, be aware that the insecure man must first want to grow for himself and let go of painful habits and old beliefs that no longer serve him.
This is where strength comes in for life partners or those dating insecure men. The trial comes whether the man is willing to help himself in order to save his relationship, or if he is not, then having to make the decision to turn away from his harmful behavior.
A sense of power over others is as addictive as any substance that allows one to escape physical reality. Substance ‘abuse’ is often the result of finding one’s reality unacceptable. Power ‘abuse’ is often the result of finding one’s self unacceptable. The adulation, forced or otherwise, of others reassures the power addict of their own worth. Like other drugs ‘power’ is addictive and constant use requires ever larger doses to attain the same level of high.
Power really does corrupt as scientists claim it’s as addictive as cocaine
By Daily Mail ReporterRead more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2136547/Power-really-does-corrupt-scientists-claim-addictive-cocaine.html#ixzz2CbtA83c3
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on FacebookMore than a hundred years after noted historian Baron John Acton coined the phrase ‘power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ scientists claim the saying is biologically true.
The feeling of power has been found to have a similar effect on the brain to cocaine by increasing the levels of testosterone and its by-product 3-androstanediol in both men and women.
This in turn leads to raised levels of dopamine, the brain’s reward system called the nucleus accumbens, which can be very addictive.
The Cycle of Addiction
http://www.youthaddiction.com/English/CycleAddiction.htmlThe life cycle of addiction begins with a problem, discomfort or some form of emotional or physical pain a person is experiencing. They find this very difficult to deal with.
We start off with an individual who, like most people in our society, is basically good. This person encounters a problem or discomfort that they do not know how to resolve or cannot confront. This could include problems such as difficulty “fitting in” as a child or teenager, anxiety due to peer pressure or work expectations, identity problems or divorce as an adult. It can also include physical discomfort, such as an injury or chronic pain.
The person experiencing the discomfort has a real problem. He feels his present situation is unendurable, yet sees no good solution to the problem. Everyone has experienced this in life to a greater or lesser degree. The difference between an addict and the non-addict is that the addict chooses drugs or alcohol as a solution to the unwanted problem or discomfort.
This person tries drugs or alcohol. The drugs APPEAR to solve his problem. He feels better. Because he now SEEMS better able to deal with life, the drugs become valuable to him. The person looks on drugs or alcohol as a cure for unwanted feelings. The painkilling effects of drugs or alcohol become a solution to their discomfort.
Inadvertently the drug or alcohol now becomes valuable because it helped them feel better. This release is the main reason a person uses drugs or drinks a second or third time. It is just a matter of time before he becomes fully addicted and loses the ability to control his drug use.
Drug addiction, then, results from excessive or continued use of physiologically habit-forming drugs in an attempt to resolve the underlying symptoms of discomfort or unhappiness.
The Addiction Progresses.
Analogous to an adolescent child in his first love affair, the use of drugs or alcohol becomes obsessive. The addicted person is trapped. Whatever problem he was initially trying to solve by using drugs or alcohol fades from memory. At this point, all he can think about is getting and using drugs. He loses the ability to control his usage and disregards the horrible consequences of his actions.
Alcohol And Drug Tolerance
In addition to the mental stress created by his unethical behavior, the addict’s body has also adapted to the presence of the drugs. He will experience an overwhelming obsession with getting and using his drugs, and will do anything to avoid the pain of withdrawing from them. This is when the newly-created addict begins to experience drug cravings.
He now seeks drugs both for the reward of the “pleasure” they give him, and also to avoid the mental and physical horrors of withdrawal. Ironically, the addict’s ability to get “high” from the alcohol or drug gradually decreases as his body adapts to the presence of foreign chemicals. He must take more and more, not just to get an effect but often just to function at all.
At this point, the addict is stuck in a vicious dwindling spiral. The drugs he abuses have changed him both physically and mentally. He has crossed an invisible and intangible line. He is now a drug addict or alcoholic.
How to assess an abusive relationship.
Are you attracted to abusive men? Here are the top 10 signs of an abusive man.
http://www.authorsden.com/categories/article_top.asp?catid=57&id=28889
Abusive men are often survivors of abuse themselves. Signs of an abusive man can range from emotional, verbal, physical, or sexual abuse. Frequently an emotionally abusive man is also a verbally abusive man or a combination of all abuse types. A sign of an abusive man can usually be found after a few dates if you pay attention, ask a lot of questions and do some investigating into his past.
Abusive relationships are characterized by control games, violence, jealousy and withholding sex and emotional contact. An emotionally abusive man is harder to pin-point and a skilled, abusive man can easily make you think you aren’t good enough or that everything is your fault. It is just as difficult to recover from emotional abuse as it is from physical abuse. Emotional abuse causes low self-esteem and depression. An abusive man may tell you he loves you or that he will change, so you won’t leave. However, the more times you take him back, the more control he will gain. Empty promises become the norm. Make sure you pay attention to his actions and not merely his words. As the old saying goes, “actions speak louder than words.”
Abusive relationships are never abusive in the beginning. If they were, women would dump the abusive men immediately in search of a good man.According to the American Psychological Association Force on Violence and Family, over 4 million American women experience a serious assault by a partner each year! Who can forget when heavy-weight champ Mike Tyson was convicted of raping Desiree Washington and sentenced to six years in prison. Tyson served three years before being released on parole. Thereafter, he married Robin Givens but they divorced on Valentine’s Day only a year later because Givens claimed Tyson abused her. Abusive behavior touches all ranges of society.
We have broken down the top 10 signs of an abusive man. If your partner exhibits one or more of these signs, it may be time to reevaluate your relationship and seek help or get out.
1. Jealousy & Possessiveness
– Becomes jealous over your family, friends, co-workers. Tries to isolate you. Views his woman and children as his property instead of as unique individuals. Accuses you of cheating or flirting with other men without cause. Always asks where you’ve been and with whom in an accusatory manner.
2. Control
– He is overly demanding of your time and must be the center of your attention. He controls finances, the car, and the activities you partake in. Becomes angry if woman begins showing signs of independence or strength.
3. Superiority – He is always right, has to win or be in charge. He always justifies his actions so he can be “right” by blaming you or others. A verbally abusive man will talk down to you or call you names in order to make himself feel better. The goal of an abusive man is to make you feel weak so they can feel powerful. Abusers are frequently insecure and this power makes them feel better about themselves.
4. Manipulates
– Tells you you’re crazy or stupid so the blame is turned on you. Tries to make you think that it’s your fault he is abusive. Says he can’t help being abusive so you feel sorry for him and you keep trying to “help” him. Tells others you are unstable.
5. Mood Swings – His mood switches from aggressive and abusive to apologetic and loving after the abuse has occurred.
6. Actions don’t match words
– He breaks promises, says he loves you and then abuses you.
7. Punishes you
– An emotionally abusive man may withhold sex, emotional intimacy, or plays the “silent game” as punishment when he doesn’t get his way. He verbally abuses you by frequently criticizing you.
8. Unwilling to seek help – An abusive man doesn’t think there is anything wrong with him so why should he seek help? Does not acknowledge his faults or blames it on his childhood or outside circumstances.
9. Disrespects women
– Shows no respect towards his mother, sisters, or any women in his life. Thinks women are stupid and worthless.
10. Has a history of abusing women and/or animals or was abused himself
– Batterers repeat their patterns and seek out women who are submissive and can be controlled. Abusive behavior can be a generational dysfunction and abused men have a great chance of becoming abusers. Men who abuse animals are much more likely to abuse women also.
If you continue to stay in an abusive relationship because you think he will change and start treating you well, think again. An abusive man does not change without long-term therapy. Group counseling sessions are particularly helpful in helping abusive men recognize their abusive patterns.
Type A personality types seem to be more prone to abusive behavior due to their aggressive nature. Drugs and alcohol can create or further escalate an abusive relationship. Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous are excellent programs for an addict. The abuser’s partner should also seek help for their codependent behavior at Codependents Anonymous. If the abusive man is not willing to seek help, then you must take action by protecting yourself and any children involved by leaving. By staying in an abusive relationship you are condoning it. If you are scared you won’t be able to survive because of finances, pick up the phone book and start calling shelters. Try calling family, friends and associates and ask them if they can help or know of ways to help.
Once you leave, the abuser may cry and beg for forgiveness but don’t go back until you have spoken to his counselor and he has completed long-term therapy successfully. Be prepared for the abuse to increase after you leave because the abuser has lost control. The Bureau of Justice Statistics states that on the average, more than three women are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends every day so please be careful. If you partner is not willing to seek help for his abusive behavior, your only option is to leave.
Written by
Abuse Expert, Stephany Alexander, B.A., Author, Women’s Speaker
Credentials: Stephany Alexander is the founder of www.WomanSavers.com, one of the most popular women’s sites on the net (top 5%) receiving millions of hits per month.
The overwhelming consensus of those knowledgeable about abusive relationships is that the only option to stop the abuse within such relationships is to leave them. There is minimal chance that an abusive partner will change. Here’s some thoughts to help assess the possibility of change allowing you to stay in such a relationship.
Help for abused and battered women: Making the decision to leave
http://www.helpguide.org/mental/domestic_violence_abuse_help_treatment_prevention.htmAs you face the decision to either end the abusive relationship or try to save it, keep the following things in mind:
If you’re hoping your abusive partner will change… The abuse will probably happen again. Abusers have deep emotional and psychological problems. While change is not impossible, it isn’t quick or easy. And change can only happen once your abuser takes full responsibility for his behavior, seeks professional treatment, and stops blaming you, his unhappy childhood, stress, work, his drinking, or his temper.If you believe you can help your abuser… It’s only natural that you want to help your partner. You may think you’re the only one who understands him or that it’s your responsibility to fix his problems. But the truth is that by staying and accepting repeated abuse, you’re reinforcing and enabling the abusive behavior. Instead of helping your abuser, you’re perpetuating the problem.
If your partner has promised to stop the abuse… When facing consequences, abusers often plead for another chance, beg for forgiveness, and promise to change. They may even mean what they say in the moment, but their true goal is to stay in control and keep you from leaving. But most of the time, they quickly return to their abusive behavior once they’ve been forgiven and they’re no longer worried that you’ll leave.
If your partner is in counseling or a program for batterers… Even if your partner is in counseling, there is no guarantee that he’ll change. Many abusers who go through counseling continue to be violent, abusive, and controlling. If your partner has stopped minimizing the problem or making excuses, that’s a good sign. But you still need to make your decision based on who he is now, not the man you hope he will become.
If you’re worried about what will happen if you leave… You may be afraid of what your abusive partner will do, where you’ll go, or how you’ll support yourself or your children. But don’t let fear of the unknown keep you in a dangerous, unhealthy situation.
Signs that your abuser is NOT changing:
* He minimizes the abuse or denies how serious it really was.
* He continues to blame others for his behavior.
* He claims that you’re the one who is abusive.
* He pressures you to go to couple’s counseling.
* He tells you that you owe him another chance.
* You have to push him to stay in treatment.
* He says that he can’t change unless you stay with him and support him.
* He tries to get sympathy from you, your children, or your family and friends.
* He expects something from you in exchange for getting help.
* He pressures you to make decisions about the relationship.
APPLYING THE ABOVE IDEAS TO THE LARGER FOCUS OF THE HUMAN RACE
Our leaders, be they social, political, commercial, or hidden behind the curtain, are the equivalent of the powerful partner in our common societal relationship. We the masses are the preyed upon partner. Using the analysis above, are there signs the leadership class is mostly abusive in nature? My answer to this question is, “yes, overwhelmingly so”.
How can this be? These people seem so sure of themselves and live lives of luxury and freedom(?) beyond our dreams. Why would they be abusive towards others?
With the access to information that the internet made possible it has become obvious a very small group of families in the leadership class have over many generations managed to consolidate the vast majority of worldly power and wealth to themselves. They have managed to do this by forcibly indoctrinating their young to carry on their legacy. If the founders of this legacy where abusive to their kin then their abusive traits would be forwarded through each subsequent generation.
Imagine the pressure on you from your parents and peers if you were the heir to a legacy created by those obsessed with wealth and power. The societal pressures we the masses feel are nothing compared to the pressures the children of the elite of our society feel. They may have untold wealth and luxury but they live in a meat grinder where they do as they are told or are destroyed.
Personally there isn’t enough money in the world for me to desire to be in their shoes.
With the multi-generational abuse they have been subjected to and the undeniable power and wealth they have collected, the chances of the leadership class changing their own ways are remote if not nil.
The vast majority of humans are still in denial that they are in an abusive relationship with their leaders.
The truth movement on the internet has gotten to the point of realizing they are being abused by their leaders.
The truth movement is still mostly in denial that the only viable option to surviving such a relationship is to leave it.
The truth movement is kidding itself that change within the relationship is possible.
Part of the truth movement is convinced it can overpower the abusive partner. This might be possible but what does meeting violence with violence (whether verbal or physical) accomplish? Do you then only become the dominant partner in an abusive relationship? Is that any better than being the victim?
Escaping this relationship.
The societal infrastructure and economy we live within is the home we cohabit with our abusive partner which they control. As long as we remain within it we remain under their thumb. As long as we cooperate with them in maintaining this home we enable our continued abuse.
For most of us stepping outside this home appears to be an insurmountable problem and our abusive partner keeps reinforcing that idea at every opportunity.
The hard truth is that regardless of how difficult this step is, it is the only direction to survival without abuse. The situation is do or die regardless of the cost involved. We either continue to put up with abuse or we do what is necessary to remove ourselves from the abusive situation.
There is a lengthy bit of documentation, which there is not room to include here, that demonstrates clearly that abuse based on addiction continuously escalates and becomes more destructive in nature. It takes more and more of a substance to reach the same high because our body builds a tolerance to an often used substance.
The abuse we are currently seeing from our leaders is the result of their addiction to power and is not set in scope. It will continue to escalate and become worse over time. Most uncontrolled addicts continuously escalate their addiction until it finally kills them. They will generally take those that enabled them down with them.
Escaping ‘their’ house is not just a physical process, it is also spiritual in nature (combined and balanced emotional and logical realization).
After we accept that we are in an unsolvable abusive relationship the next step is to prepare to step out of it.
After we are prepared we make the step of leaving keeping in mind the information from above.
Once you leave, the abuser may cry and beg for forgiveness but don’t go back until you have spoken to his counselor and he has completed long-term therapy successfully. Be prepared for the abuse to increase after you leave because the abuser has lost control. The Bureau of Justice Statistics states that on the average, more than three women are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends every day so please be careful. If you partner is not willing to seek help for his abusive behavior, your only option is to leave.
Speaking from personal experience…. The problem of finding an alternative lifestyle appears more formidable than it actually is. With determination and perseverance it is still possible to find happiness and survivability outside of the abuser’s house. Looking back after a period you will shake your head in wonder at how limited the reality you used to live in was.
A really important point to consider – Our common human house is much more complex than the average family. You are not the only abused person in the greater relationship. There are billions being abused just like you are. The abuser is dependent on the combined efforts of all those they abuse to keep them in their position of power. As abused individuals we can do little to help each other and escaping our self will not greatly inconvenience the abuser. However until we help ourselves we cannot help others and each and everyone of us that says enough is enough and steps out of abuse is another chink in the armor of the abuser. Eventually as more people escape abuse it will become easier for them to effectively help those still caught in the clutches of abuse.
Forgiveness – is often mentioned as an essential component of becoming well once again after surviving abuse. A great thought I came across today on the internet. “You are not forgiving their actions, you are forgiving their debt.” This allows you to move on in your life without being held back by your past experiences.
Waste Based Society V: The fallacy of cutting waste
Off the keyboard of Monsta666
Discuss this article at the Energy Table inside the Diner
A prevailing viewpoint we often encounter in the mainstream media is the view that our current society is very wasteful with its use of resources and if we were more efficient then we can live an equitable life with a tiny fraction of resources consumed. This view is so prominent that it is quite commonly supported even in the doom blogosphere. However this belief that we can transition to an efficient waste free society without large scale economic and social implications is a wrong one.
While the first statement is correct; we do indeed live in a wasteful society what follows next is not so achievable under our current economic system. What people need to understand when making such statements of cutting “waste” is that all people employed produce either goods or services. If we wish to cut on wasteful production then we must cut the total amount of goods/services produced and since labour is involved in this said production then in effect by cutting on waste we are also cutting on jobs. After all, one man’s waste is another man’s job. That extra hot dog the average overweight American consumes (and does not need) is providing a job to some J6P albeit a poor paying job. While this is just one example it can extend too many occupations in our society.
Now cutting on jobs may be a necessary evil to saving the planet/future generations but one should fully consider the implications such actions would entail on the global economy. We live in an economy that requires infinite growth and one of the big drivers of this growth comes from our monetary system that is all debt based. To service this ever expanding debt load we must increase production even if this production is not needed. Indeed this need to continually expand production has caused the long-standing issue of overproduction.
As the industrial revolution took hold in the western economies and many industrial factories were built (using debt) it soon became apparent that more goods were being produced than what J6P needed or could even afford. To overcome this problem of overproduction the industry of advertising grew in earnest to generate new demand for unneeded items. It is should be noted that it is important these unneeded goods were sold because many of these new factories were built using credit so they needed to be fully utilised to pay back the debt WITH interest.
This dynamic of increasing production has created further issues however even with the aid of a large advertisement industry as demand for products has struggled to keep up with supply. The reason for this struggling demand comes from the fact that real income of households needs to rise in tandem with the increasing amount of goods produced. This issue of slow growth in real incomes became quite acute during the 1970’s oil crisis as this period marked the time that the average incomes in the US no longer rose significantly in real terms and have made up a smaller percent of total US GDP.
To compensate for this development a range of actions were deployed the two most notable being globalisation and easier access to credit. Globalisation allowed goods to be produced at a lower price as the main manufacturing bases were moved to cheaper regions were the cost of capital and labour was lower so the prices of goods sold would be lower and this would serve to prop up demand. The process of globalisation also had the benefit of increasing the numbers of potential consumers so while there was no longer great returns in the western world more countries were sucked into the debt machine and the costs could be spread over a wider base.
Obtaining credit was also made easier so J6P could still keep buying his cars and maintain his American lifestyle even though his wage was not going up and the cost of items were rising faster than his wages. Other more insidious methods to maintaining demand included such things as planned obsolesce. By having items designed to break after a set period of time J6P could no longer buy durable goods such as washing machine that would last for 20 years as they were designed to breakdown within a planned timeframe usually shortly after the warranty period. All these measures while effective, at least for a time, do not solve this problem of overproduction. It merely postpones the day of reckoning and due to the nature of credit expanding over time the problem is actually compounded (literally) when it is delayed.
What I have stated thus far maybe already widely known to people but it is important to realise the dynamic of why all this overproduction is necessary because in essence since nearly all major capital investments are financed by credit there is always a need to expand production to cover the interest on the loans. By cutting the waste in society what happens is all the capital currently being deployed will be underutilised and the loans this capital were backed by will no longer be honoured. This is likely to lead to large scale defaults and large unemployment.
The most notable example of capital investment that serves as the basic platform that makes most of our economic activities viable is that of basic infrastructure. This form of capital investment is most susceptible to the issues described above as nearly all major public works cannot be supported on their own merits and must therefore require finance to be sustained. This issue has been discussed previously in the diner and if you are interested in learning more about this subject please refer to the Large Public Works Projects series here, here and here.
Like most capital investments, major public infrastructure projects are financed by debt. Not only is ever increasing expansion credit a needed condition but as an extension to this fact is that the number of service users using the said infrastructure needs to increase or if the number of users do not increase then the average usage per customer has to rise. This increase of the amount of service user’s makes the infrastructure more viable as economies of scale can be achieved meaning the cost per unit production declines but more important is the fact the cost per user decreases.
This need for greater infrastructure usage does generate much wasteful economic activities and much is said about reducing such wasteful activities. After all how many articles have you read about reducing the amount of wasted water or electricity per customer? The issue with reducing demand is that while it can be a positive thing on an individual level on a more macro level it will lead to a more negative outcome as it would mean a drop in aggregate demand.
Since the infrastructure is financed by debt a decrease in aggregate demand would mean the overheads can no longer be covered and the price per user will have to rise. This last point is important because when it comes to covering costs “wasteful” activities cannot be discounted as unneeded. For example much of the telecommunications infrastructure achieves its low price because certain users using it frivolously for unneeded economic activities such as the child playing on a XBOX 360 using gigabytes of bandwidth. This unneeded activity allows the small business round the corner to enjoy cheaper prices. If you removed the wasteful user in this case then the costs imposed on the needed users would rise and their economic activities are less likely to remain viable. This is the big issue, as prices rise the user base will decline leading to more users being unable to afford using the infrastructure. If this process were to continue then the infrastructure would suffer tremendously as the same expensive overheads would still need to be paid but with fewer users. Even if such structures could remain intact they would begin suffering from diseconomies of scale; that is the costs per unit production would rise as the number of users decline. In short if the number of users decline sufficiently it is likely the whole project will lead to some kind of death spiral.
While the issue is most acute in basic infrastructure works the dynamic remains largely the same for any good produced; the wasteful demand cannot be dismissed as disregarding that demand not only leads to direct unemployment (people responsible for that production are laid off), it also means the cost borne on the remaining users who demand the product rises as the total costs are spread over fewer users. This then results in even less people who can afford buying the goods/services at this new higher price leading to even higher prices as there are even less users to support the cost of overheads. Thus this process leads to a destructive feedback loop developing that is likely to result in dire outcomes.
If we want to reduce wasteful activities we need to recognise a reduction in waste will lead to mass unemployment and large scale defaults since many assets are backed by the debt which would no longer be met if the factories were only working at low utilisation rates. Another important point to consider is that since much of the upper class hold assets in these factories a large scale default is going to hurt them disproportionately hard so it seems unlikely such reductions would be tolerated even if the lower classes could recognise the issue which is unlikely since their jobs depend on these wasteful activities.
An argument often made to make such investments more viable is to increase the efficiency of such capital so the cost per unit output is less even if the number of users or usage per user remains the same. Therefore as a result of this the reduced costs will be passed onto the consumer. While there are definite merits to this approach, which should be pursued, it must be noted that none of these actions will provide an ultimate solution to the problems faced.
The issue with greater efficiency in resource consumption actually lies in its perceived strength that is the lower cost in using the said item. For example if we can provide an infrastructure that produces electrical energy 5% more efficiently the cost per user will decrease. This decrease in costs will result in demand rising negating some of the efficiency gains made. This effect is known as a rebound effect and any increase in efficiencies will cause some kind of rebound effect. As a result of this one must be wary of any claims that suggest that all efficiency gains will result in the same reduction in total usage. It may still bring total demand down but it will always be more marginal than hoped on account of the rebound effect.
Indeed in some cases increase in efficiencies can actually result in greater resource consumption and these occurrences are known as the Jevons paradox. This issue of rebound effect and possible Jevons paradox is not a new topic; it was first in early 1865 and was covered in Jevons book: The Coal Question. It should be noted however this effect only applies if demand is highly elastic where demand rises disproportionally to price decreases. Thus this paradox is more likely to occur in competitive markets were small price differences can lead to significant gains in market share or the amount of users consuming the said commodity. This final point of expanding user bases should be considered in an expanding world of globalisation.
Inelastic Demand resulting in only the rebound effect
Elastic Demand Resulting in Jevon’s Paradox
There are also further issues with increase efficiencies and this issue of increasing efficiencies, like many other things, suffers from diminishing returns. That is over time the returns per unit investment declines and there will come a point that further gains will become prohibitively expensive and even if such expensive gains were pursued the return would be smaller. In other words there will be a limit to how much efficiency can be gained before it reaches some hard limits either from an economic standpoint (which is likely to come first) or a thermodynamic limit. After all it is impossible for us to have 100% efficiency!
The final issue, and one that is perhaps most pressing, is that most cases made for pursuing wide scale adoption of efficiency gains requires extensive use of credit. It is likely going forward that credit will become increasingly constrained so the amount of available credit necessary to fund aggressive efficiency projects will not be available. Without widespread credit the chances of rapid increase in efficiencies being developed are considerably less. This issue of a lack credit is often avoided or implicitly assumed by strong advocates of making things more efficient but it is an assumption that is likely to prove false.
In short while increasing efficiencies can buy some time and keep capital investments particularly basic infrastructure projects viable for a longer period of time there are limits to this process and increased efficiency cannot provide the ultimate solution. At some point efficiency gains will cease occurring in any meaningful level and due to the required need for further credit expansion those issues will have to addressed at some point even if efficiencies could be maximised which is unlikely considering that further credit is likely to become more limited going forward.
The other solution of outright demand destruction as commonly suggested will lead to very negative outcomes as explained above to the investments in question and more generally the global economy. What needs to be recognised is our current economic and monetary systems are not suitable for dealing with declines in demand or credit. They only function well in world of expanding demand and credit as this is how the system was designed for. If we wish to cut all waste then we need to devise a system that can operate under the condition of perpetual demand destruction.
EUROBLOWN: Killing time is an oxymoron
Off the keyboard of John Ward
Published on The Slog on November 15, 2012
Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Table inside the Diner
While Greece dangles on a piece of string, Spain is let off the leash.
Olli Rein in Spain normally involves acute pain, but not on this occasion. Last night, the EU’s economy prefect announced that Spain will need no further austerity measures until the end of next year. This despite the fact that the country will miss its deficit targets- in much the same way that the Moon has so far managed to miss the Earth during its daily round-trips over the last 400 billion years.
This is, opined the London FT last night, ‘the clearest sign yet Brussels is backing away from an austerity-focused crisis response’. Rein’s approval is in truth based on nothing more than blind faith in the structural reforms proposed by Spain two months ago…none of which have as yet been enacted or even drafted.
Applying the same criteria to Greece, Athens could justifiably press for a total debt write-off, $600bn in Frankfurt gold, and the head of Herman van Rompuy. But times have changed in the eurozone. The eurozone plan now, in fact, is to kill time completely, by staying in an eternal present. The ideas of Eckhart Tolle have been adopted in toto: the future does not exist, there is only an Eternal Now.
Five days spent down among the unpleasant lowlife of British culture have not taken my eye off the eurozone ball, because the euroball never moves. It is involved in a game of Zen football in which the players are unreal: they dummy, they feint, and they swivel but – having no physical form – they do not affect the stationary nature of the ball. In Zen eurofootball, the ball lands where you want it to, in your head. On the ground, it moveth not.
This is increasingly referred to as Brussels, Berlin and Frankfurt ‘killing time’, and I have no doubt the eunatics love that thought, because it suggests they can, rather like Italian scientists after a little too much Campari, transcend the rules of e=mc2.
But you can’t kill time: Einstein knew that, and old Albrecht was never wrong. In the 3D world, killing time is an oxymoron.
Talking of morons, real-life footballers are often referred to as ‘playing for time’, or ‘wasting time’, when they’re 1-0 up with a minute to go. But the difference here is that, at the referee’s whistle, the game is over. In the eurozone, the idea is that the game should never be over, because the problem can never be solved.
In one sense, ever since late 2009 the eurozone has been wasting time. Forgiveness of debt at that stage, with a small bondholder haircut subsidised by the long-suffering taxpayer, would’ve come out at $450bn all up. Anyone who thinks we’re within three noughts of that today is disturbingly unclear about the direction in which Time travels.
The Greek economy contracted by 7.2% in the third quarter just gone, according to data published by ELSTAT two days ago. This might suggest that time is running out, as at this rate, Greece will have no economy at all beyond guns and petrol-bombs by August 2017. I have it on good authority that in that month, things will start to pick up, but that authority has a history of mental illness and is called Christine Lagarde, so don’t bank on it coming to pass.
Mario Draghi’s shtick with Time is to try and make it appear to stand still by reducing all progress on every issue to 0%. Being an intelligent man who obviously understands relativity theory, his is only a slightly sprained form of sanity. Thus last week he relaxed the collateral conditions for the Bank of Greece, but then on August 2, he’d already reduced the amount of repo-able T-Bills the BoG can get from the ECB by €3.5 billion – or roughly 50%. So now Athens has half the money but twice as well collateralised.
It’s what we bankers call ‘a trade off’. Or ‘killing time’. We’ve had Zirp, now comes Zip – Zero Infinite Progress. It’s an ultimate expression of limitless lack of potential from the same stable that brought you friendly fire and negative forward movement going forward.
Liberal Austrian newspaper Der Kurier wrote yesterday that ‘The help from the donor countries is half-hearted and ultimately will only postpone Greece’s bankruptcy rather than averting it’, a timeless observation that should’ve been put into action a long time ago. But the concept of anything from the eurozone being half-hearted is seen by some as a massive increase on cold-hearted.
Unfortunately, back here in real life again, half a heart doesn’t work. The thing with your heart is that you need all of it, or you die in very short order. Another favourite Einstein observation was that if you halve the distance between the mouse and the hole for infinity, the mouse never gets there. But mainly, the mouse never gets there because the cat isn’t working on this principle of movement, and thus eats him. There is a very good parallel for the EU in this one.
Another thing about time is you can’t fool all the people during all of it. David Cameron has his own personal Collider working flat out to try and disprove the famous Abe Lincoln remark, but it looks doomed to failure. After Olli Rehn’s complete capitulation last night, the eurozone’s mantra about treating Greece and Spain equally is finally consigned to the pit. Only the ever-lowering pendulum is left, dropping inexorably until it slices right through the eurozone’s bollocks.
I wonder what my many Greek friends, sources and readers will make of this. Most Spaniards (probably including Mariano Rajoy) will draw the lesson that standing firm coupled with going on strike is an excellent way to get bullies out of one’s face. It’s the standing and firm parts of the strategy that seem to be lacking in the Greek political class. That and, well, honesty, decency, consistency, calm, courage, and a calorie-controlled diet.
Happy Etc…
Off the keyboard of Steve from Virginia
Published on Economic Undertow on November 15, 2012
Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner
Christmas comes early to the world’s children in the form of unlimited supplies of fracked shale oil and gas for all. So says Fatih Birol and company over at the International Energy Agency:
The tide turns for US energy flows! Energy developments in the United States are profound and their effect will be felt well beyond North America – and the energy sector. The recent rebound in US oil and gas production, driven by upstream technologies that are unlocking light tight oil and shale gas resources, is spurring economic activity – with less expensive gas and electricity prices giving industry a competitive edge – and steadily changing the role of North America …
Etc.
The world is in the middle of three intertwined crises right now: a finance crisis, a petroleum energy crisis and a climate crisis. A characteristic these three crises share is that all of them are denied … or the truth is massaged by the establishment or those who claim to speak for it. Promoters of finance recovery regularly assure continued growth regardless of circumstances, climate cheerleaders downplay the effects of fossil fuel waste gases in the atmosphere while fuel supply experts find lakes of crude oil wherever they choose to look.
The finance-recovery promoters are diverse and include the Federal Reserve, the IMF and the European Commission.
Figure 1: Economic reality = structural unemployment. The purchasing power of workers declines: this graphs the duration of unemployment. Happily, as people reach the end of unemployment benefits they drop off the list of available workers, unemployment looks better than it really is!
Without income from gainful employment, there are diminished earnings for industries both in the US and elsewhere. Happily, industrial firms can earn by speculating in finance markets: making and selling real goods is unnecessary.
Behind the curtain, actions are more eloquent than (soothing) words. There are ongoing monetary easing programs in the US and elsewhere, elsewhere and elsewhere. If conditions are as pleasant as the cheerleaders insist, there is no need for stimulus. Right?
Meanwhile, the climate crisis is denied:
There is an entire cadre of shills — subsidized by the energy industry — who regularly appear across the breadth of the media-sphere as well as before Congressional committees where they are ‘warmly’ received. There is little strategic space between the climate denial creatures and the extinct smoking-tobacco-is-good-for-you versions. The idea is to sow uncertainty among the public so that the businesses tycoons can continue to make money. ‘Success’ for the one-percenters comes first … everything else is secondary.
Comes now the petroleum shortage deniers, who like the others, are ‘experts’ with impressive-appearing credentials fronting similarly-situated organizations. The international media — dependent as it is on car advertising — eagerly grasps the good news with both hands and runs with it. The public is happy to be reassured that there is nothing really wrong with fuel supply.
If there fuel supply conditions are as favorable as the experts insist, reassurance is unnecessary … right? Here is more from the New York Times:
The United States will overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s leading oil producer by about 2017 and will become a net oil exporter by 2030, the International Energy Agency said Monday. (Gasp!) That increased oil production, combined with new American policies to improve energy efficiency, means that the United States will become “all but self-sufficient” …
Etc … Here is more Birol from the Financial Times:
Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, the western countries’ oil watchdog, says Europe spent €32bn to import oil in March. This month, the bill is on track to be €27bn. In the US, oil imports cost $33.5bn in March, and will be $27.5bn in June, he says. Emerging economies, particularly China, Indonesia and India, should see fiscal burdens fall as lower subsidies are required.
Everyone has heard it all before, over and over and over and over. Here is more spam from Leonardo Maugeri at MIT:
Oil: The Next Revolution THE UNPRECEDENTED UPSURGE OF OIL PRODUCTION CAPACITY AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE WORLD
Contrary to what most people believe, oil supply capacity is growing worldwide at such an unprecedented level that it might outpace consumption. This could lead to a glut of overproduction and a steep dip in oil prices.
Based on original, bottom-up, field-by-field analysis of most oil exploration and development projects in the world, this paper suggests that an unrestricted, additional production (the level of production targeted by each single project, according to its schedule, unadjusted for risk) of more than 49 million barrels per day of oil (crude oil and natural gas liquids, or NGLs) is targeted for 2020, the equivalent of more than half the current world production …
Etc.
“Will overtake Saudi Arabia” … “will become a net oil exporter” … “might outpace consumption” … all these weasel words: “could lead to a glut”, perhaps tomorrow … and perhaps not! With industrialists the utopia is always set to arrive tomorrow provided access to capital is “unrestricted”! Keep in mind, if what Maugeri and Birol were saying was true, the effect would be obvious and there would be no need for anyone to say anything! Fuel prices would decline alongside economic expansion. Fleets of new machines would be deployed to waste the newly extracted fuel. This is not happening, the shills are simply lying.
Public relations campaigns have no effect on real outcomes. The countries suffering financial distress continue to falter, despite the best worst efforts of the European establishment. The finance crisis has continually deepened since it appeared in 2007. More countries are afflicted with the passage of time. There are no signs that any conventional economic policy efforts will solve anything: it says here that they won’t.
Climate conditions have also deteriorated. What has undermined the climate deniers hasn’t been picky arguments of scientists, rather it is repeat bouts of severe weather and the burdensome costs to the insurance industry. The scientists are now in the happy position of being able to say, “I told you so!” … even as their houses are washed away by floods and hurricanes.
Petroleum extraction and consumption are bounded by costs. The shills never mention the current cost of fuel relative to the years’ past cost … or to what customers can afford. It is the change in price relative to what customers can support over the past ten years that is ‘wracking’ the world’s economies! This ‘real’ price has changed because the supply rate has not kept pace with demand. What is underway is fuel rationing by price and access to credit.
The shills assume – and some non-shills as well – the world’s economies will continue to function as-per-normal in the background with the customers simply stumping up out of spare change whatever amounts the petroleum industry demands. The shills fail to acknowledge that high fuel prices — as well as high credit costs — bankrupt firms and press upon individuals. Fuel rationing by price and access to credit isn’t just a collection of meaningless sounds, it is a dynamic which has smashing effect. Without the bankruptcies … the rationing process would not work! There would rise in its place some other baleful process to ration fuel … as indeed there will be when the credit system finally breaks down. When credit ceases to meter access to markets, there will be permanent physical shortages, allocation will be made by police means.
The effects of aggregated costs aren’t restricted to the lowest rungs of the economic ladder: national governments and large finance entities such as multinational banks are impacted. Costs matter.
Whatever the Europeans pay for fuel right now is too much. Every bit of that €27bn mentioned in the Financial Times article is borrowed … and each month’s €27bn thereafter … month after month, year after year. This is the reason Europe is broke! High cost per-barrel crude oil has destroyed the European economies. There is no organic return on the use of the oil, most transportation usage is simply waste for ‘convenience’. Filling the ‘Waste Gap’ between what crude costs and the zero it returns requires a modest debt-subsidy at €20 per barrel. The lower price is destructive over long periods, the current higher price destroys that much faster.
America’s $27 billion for its monthly fuel is also borrowed: like the Europeans, the claims these loans represent are added to the tens of trillions of outstanding claims. These obligations cannot be repaid by the use of the petroleum or they would have been paid already! Rather than organic earnings the wasting process is offered as collateral for endless rounds of new loans.
Up until a decade- or so ago the ‘waste-collateral-loan’ cycle has been virtuous. Credit extended against the wasting process was sufficient to bring large volumes of fuel to consumers. Both fuel costs and real credit costs were affordably low. When the higher real cost of credit is added to the current cost of fuel the economies’ fuel waste infrastructure is stranded. Suburbs, toll-roads, autos, airports, vacation ‘villas’ … banks and government benefits … are unaffordable luxuries. Even when the customers can afford to buy fuel … they cannot buy a new house or a new car. The industries that provide these goods are worn down then broken: this is the effect of fuel rationing by limiting access to affordable credit.
Adding more high-cost fuels is pointless because the low-return, credit-dependent economy can only pay for it if cuts are made elsewhere … this is why there is an economic crisis in the first place! Fuel and credit inputs cost too much for an economy whose wasteful infrastructure provides minuscule organic returns.
Figure 2: Despite the hoopla there is no sign of any net increase in world petroleum extraction. Maybe cost has something to do with this (Stuart Staniford). Add to the hard numbers the periodic appearance of shortages here and there in the country indicates a breakdown.
Here is something else the ‘smart people’ don’t talk about (from an article in May), the credit demands of consumption versus the credit demands of the petroleum industry.
Figure 3: Compare the bolt in demand in this chart to the missing output on the Staniford chart. Every day in this world millions more people want a car:
(Net export guru) Jeffrey Brown does not include demand on his chart because it cannot be measured with certainty, however it exists everywhere in the world there is a TV set and paper money. Prior to 2002, extraction was able to remain comfortably ahead of demand (for the most part). Excess became spare capacity or was shipped into inventories. The outcome was the plunge in fuel prices to $12 per barrel and less in 1998. Since 2005, the rate of extraction world-wide has stalled while demand in China, India and elsewhere has exploded. High-cost technology and new oilfields have not been able to push supply even as depletion from existing fields accelerates with the drillers falling farther behind.
Consumption is a matter of infrastructure: oil drilling infrastructure cannot lift crude as fast as auto factories, house builders and banks can create consumption … or demand that is impossible to satisfy. Debt-dependent drillers with high-cost plays must compete with consumption for a shrinking pool of lendable funds. Consumption must borrow otherwise it cannot service its debts. By doing so consumption crowds out the drillers. When consumption is unable to borrow, the effects cripple drillers as well as the rest of the economy. Right now drillers can fund themselves … what happens tomorrow?
The petro-shills have gotten ahead of themselves. It is too early to determine how much crude oil- and crude-like substances will be made available in the future in a margin-challenged enterprise. Success depends upon costs and what the customers are able to pay. So far, the best-efforts of the drillers work against the drillers themselves! The flood of product depresses prices at the wellhead where the market price of the product is uncomfortably close to the cost of extracting it. A reason for this is the rapid decline in the rate of flow for individual wells. A sequence of repeat wells is needed to maintain the flow rate.
Is Shale Oil Production from Bakken Headed for a Run with “The Red Queen”? Rune LikvernIn this post I present the results from an in-depth time series analysis from wells producing crude oil (and small volumes of natural gas) from the Bakken – Bakken, Sanish, Three Forks and Bakken/Three Forks Pools – formation in North Dakota. The analysis uses actual production data from the North Dakota Industrial Commission as of July 2012 from what was found to be a representative selection of wells from operating companies and areas.
MAJOR FINDINGS FROM THE STUDY
Findings from this in-depth study of time series for production from some individual wells:
– Presently the estimated breakeven price for the “average” well in the Bakken formation in North Dakota is $80 – $90/Bbl In plain language this means that presently the commercial profitability for new wells is barely positive.
– The “average” well now yields around 85 000 Bbls during the first 12 months of production and then experiences a year over year decline of 40% (+/-) 2%
– The recent trend for newer “average” wells is one of a perceptible decline in well productivity (lower yields)
– As of 2007 and also as of recent months, the total production of shale oil from Bakken, has shown exceptional growth and the (relatively high) specific average productivity (expressed as Bbls/day/well) has been sustained by starting up flow from an accelerating number of new wells
– Now and based upon present observed trends for principally well productivity and crude oil futures (WTI), it is challenging to find support for the idea that total production of shale oil from the Bakken formation will move much above present levels of 0.6 – 0.7 Mb/d on an annual basis.
Of course, like other industrial enterprises the drillers can borrow — against fictional collateral represented by their ‘reserves’ — but not forever.
Meanwhile, high costs and modest returns, rapid decline rates and the absence of distribution infrastructure are adversely effecting the shale gas efforts. See Chris Nelder for a detailed critique of the shale gas industry. According to Art Berman the enterprise is another credit-driven speculative bubble.
“Money is pouring in” from investors even though shale gas is “inherently unprofitable,” an analyst from PNC Wealth Management, an investment company, wrote to a contractor in a February e-mail. “Reminds you of dot-coms.”
There is nothing new about the establishment’s self-deluding nonsense. On October 15, 1929 …. exactly nine days prior to the great stock market crash on ‘Black Thursday’, National City Bank (Citibank) boss Charles Mitchell remarked:
… the ‘industrial condition of the United States is absolutely sound,” that too much attention was being paid to brokers’ loans, and that “nothing can arrest the upward movement.” … he enlarged on the point: “The markets generally are now in a healthy condition … values have a sound basis in the general prosperity of our country.” That same evening Professor Irving Fisher made his historic announcement about the permanently high plateau andadded, “I expect to see the stock market a good deal higher than it is today within a few months.” [1]
In 1929 much of the world’s business was invested to some degree in the stock market, certainly Mitchell and Fisher were both very wealthy men by way of stock investments. Today, moderns are equally-invested in the waste-based economy. There is a herd, there are few that will run against it … to do so is unprofitable.
When the stock market collapsed much of the world’s finance capital was destroyed because it was used to support prices as ‘call money’, to leverage stock holdings. Right now, the world’s finance capital is used to leverage fuel waste activities. Birol, Monckton and others are doing now what Fisher and Mitchell were doing in 1929.
There was a sense of panic in the air starting in 1928, increasingly so during the last surging runup to the October crash. The upward movements in the tape were fabulous, hard to believe. Market participants understood they “had a wolf by the ears and dared not let him go”. The establishment was cornered: any effort to relieve the speculative pressures — by constraining call money or cracking down on speculators — would trigger the market collapse that the establishment was desperate to avoid. No one wanted the blame: as it was, the inevitable consequence of the speculation was the crash occurring anyway.
The same dynamic is in effect now. Any official pronouncement of petroleum shortage would cause the finance markets across the world to implode. The ‘Planet Earth Inc.’ business experiment teeters at the edge of economic abyss. In Greece, Portugal, Ireland and other previously-prosperous states, depression is a real fact on the ground. Both ordinary and extraordinary monetary and fiscal remedies have been applied repeatedly to no effect. Credit, banking and money are blamed but the disaster continues to unwind as if credit, banking and money are peripheral to it.
Modernity has made an economic virtue of waste, while the hegemonic tendency of modern ‘culture’ disallows the consideration of any alternatives: we moderns are constrained by fashion sense run amok. Meanwhile, our destiny is bound to be determined by circumstances that our waste has set in motion. One way or the other our fossil fuel consumption is to be brought to an end, whether this ending is profitable to us or not. Only that part is under question: are we humans clever and disciplined enough to CHOOSE … to earn the return on conservation. The overall outcome is not in doubt, we will conserve regardless of consequences or as result of them.
– ‘The Great Crash’ John Kenneth Galbraith pp.99 (Houghtin-Mifflin)
Secession
Off the keyboard of RE
Discuss this article at the Geopolitics Table inside the Diner
About a month ago I wrote an article based on the Secessionary Movements in Spain by the Catalans and in the UK by the Scots called Panarchy & The One to The Many-The Final Countdown. In that article right at the beginning I made the comment that Secesssionary Movements like this had not yet gained much traction here in the FSofA, but of course that was a month ago and things are moving faster all the time in this spin down. My Lead for the article ran this way:
Although Secessionary Movements still appear to be a bit far off into the future here in the FSofA, this aspect of the Collapse has already hit over in Eurotrashland, most notably right now in Spain where the Catalans are making a lot of noise about splitting off from the Castillian control of Spain to form their own “new” country.
A month later, Secessionary talk is all over the MSM and the Whitehouse.gov website, in the form of Petitions filed by 19 different states to seceed from the FSofA. In Texas, where becoming part of the Union was always a contentious idea to begin with, said Petition has ALREADY exceeded the 25,000 Signatures “required” for an Official Response from Obama-sama
From the Statesman.com website:
American-Statesman Staff
A petition calling for Texas to secede from the United States, created on a White House website designed to foster citizen involvement, became a minor Internet sensation this week as it grew by thousands, then tens of thousands, of signatures before spawning a counterprotest movement on the site.
Secession, the Texas petition said, would protect “the original ideas and beliefs of our founding fathers which are no longer being reflected by the federal government” and defend Texans from “blatant abuses to their rights” from the Transportation Security Administration and other agencies.
Petitions that receive 25,000 signatures within a month are forwarded to administration policy experts for an official response. The Texas petition, created Friday on the White House’s “We the People” site by an Arlington user identified only as “Micah H,” passed that threshold Monday and kept going, surging past 83,000 by Tuesday evening.
There is a certain amount of “Gaming” going on here with these Petitions, at least two in a couple of different states were created by the same User, who 
clearly cannot be living in BOTH states at the same time. Also, I don’t think there is any restriction on the website of a user who lives in say CA signing the petition for TX Secession.
Nevertheless, the Rules are clear here, and regardless who signs the Petition or where they live (could even be a Towel Head living in Tehran, actually), as long as said Petition gets 25K Signators inside a month, the White House is supposed to issue an “Official” response to it. It certainly will be interesting to see exactly how Obama-sama’s Handlers and Speechwriters concoct a response to this, but overall you already know what the “official” line is, which is that Secession is Unconstitutional, Illegal and not in the “Best Interests” of the Amerikan Peoples.
Not going to try in this article to analyze 19 different states and their Secession petitions, I’ll just focus here on Texas, since that State is probably the most Secession Oriented here to begin with, plus it is Big Enough with its own set of Resources to in THEORY, POSSIBLY function as an Independent State.
Over on my old Haunt The Burning Platform, Jim Quinn recently dropped on an article asking the question Is Secession Possible, and said article has received commentary from BOTH sides of this question, some saying Secession is Unthinkable and Impossible, and others projecting out scenarios they consider possible and even more important, worthwhile as reasons to pursue Secession as a paradigm here. Long time Commenter on TBP, Hope at Zero Kelvin dropped on the following scenario:
Here’s how Texas secedes:
1) All tax revenues due the federal government are diverted to the newly made Bank of Texas. The BOT has a 1 dollar capital rule and is backed by gold. All Medicare/SS/Medicaid rate schedules stay the same and are paid out from the BOT, not DC. The Univ of Texas gets their gold back from the HSBC toot sweet.
2) Texas raises a Militia of Texans, men & women, probably can get at least 1 million out of a population fo 22M. These work with the National Guard and Airforce in securing the oil/gas refineries and pipelines, the Strategic Oil Reserve, NASA, the Port of Houston, the nuclear plant, the electrical grid,and the major interstates. Martial law would have to be declared in the Blue counties to keep our FSA population in line.
3) No EBT cards will be honored and no Section 8 housing will have water/power within 48 hours of the declaration. Buses to a job site or to one of the borders will be provided for these people. Looters/rioters will be shot on sight.
4) All electrical transmission, all oil/gas pipelines are shut off at the western border of Texas, northern borders of OK/LA and the eastern border of LA. Service will only resume when new contracts are forged.
5) The commanders of Ft. Hood, Sam Houston and Bliss are given the option to join with the Texans or be escorted to the border. Since about 50% or more of the troops at these bases come from Texas, they face either cooperating or mutiny. Either way it neutralizes them as a threat.
6) The souther border will be sealed. Anyone attempting to cross illegally will be shot on sight. Illegal aliens will be given the chance to pay $20K and get a path to citizen ship (only for non-criminals) OR repatriate back to whereever they came from after liquidating all their property here an handing over 50% of the proceeds to the Bank of Texas.
7) In the event the Port of Houston or Galveston are blockaded, Texas will send all exports through Mexico, forcing the fed.gov to blockade even another sovereign country.
All federal properties in the Republic of Texas become our property, the workers are given a choice to stay and work as non-union civilian employees or be bused to the border (same treatment as the illegal aliens).
This is just off the top of my head, mind you, but I think I am on the right path.
Pretty clearly, if this set of actons is undertaken, Texas ends up at WAR with the rest of the FSofA that does NOT undertake Secession at the same time. It really only has a moderate chance of success if it occurs in TANDEM with numerous other States seceeding with them , so that no Coordinated Response from the still functional FSofA Military could be organized up. If Texas is set upon by Military Units formed up from all the rest of the States in the Union, they are of course TOAST. So such an action has to wait until numeorus states all are looking to do this at the SAME TIME.
In time, that is likely to occur, much as it did for the Soviet Union. As with most of these questions, it is about TIMELINES, how long does it take for each of these Individual States to become so unravelled and receiving no real Benefit from the Union that they will say NO MORE, and attempt the very difficult and dangerous road to Secession?
The difficulties any individual location faces in trying to break off from a greater Union are IMMENSE. Really, the Battle here is on the Economic Level, not the Military one. You can play all sorts of “War Games” projecting out how Secessionary Militias battle against Big Hardware from NATO, but you CANNOT make good predictions on how long the Militias have enough Ammo for their Ar-15s nor can you predict how long the Abrams Tanks will have GAS to keep rolling around the battlefield or the Apache Helicopter Gunships will have fuel to fly. In a protracted battle along these lines, infrastructure for refining fuel will be destroyed, transport ships of all kinds will be scuttled, ammo of all sorts and calibers will become scarce, it just deteriorates to Mano-a-Mano eventually.
It is a War that cannot be won by either side really, so the real problems are the Economic ones for Secessionary states to handle once such a One-to-the-Many Secession Movement gains real Steam here. Can you really call it a “Secession” though, when the reality is that the Union simply collapses as a result of its Conduits becoming dysfunctional or non-functional?
Besides the numerous infrastructure and distribution problems any given State or Region will have resultant either from Secession or Civil War, the major economic problem all face is how to replace the currency of the Dollar? Obviously, if TX Seceeds from the Union, no Retired Texans will be able to collect their Social Security from the FSofA. In all likelihood, any Texan with an account on the NYSE will have all of it Confiscated on account of Treason. Whatever portion of the Gold in Fort Knox and in the Basement Safe of the NYFRB that is NOT Tungsten and might belong to Texas obviously will not be handed over to Texas after they Seceed. They can kiss any Gold they don’t have inside Texas borders goodbye.
So, this basically leasves them with trying to establish a currency based on the Oil they have left, which might last just Texans a while but not if they start exporting it as a Trade good. Not sure what other Trade goods Texas makes at a competitive price with what the Mejicanos across the border make, so then you work your way into being a self-contained, independent and self-sufficient economy. Given the Drought problems Texas has experienced lately, as a self-sufficient economy for Food & Water, it is not real clear exactly how many people Texas has carrying capacity for by itself, even if it was allowed to Seceed.
Far from being “impossible” though as numerous commenters on the TBP Blog maintain, even if there is no “legal” means to effect a Secession by Petitions, eventually Da Federal Goobermint is going to be so dysfunctional that States or Regions will eventually start drifting off and the Power Vacuum gets filled by more Local Power Brokers and Warlords. Eventually when the Dollar Fails, various Military Bases and Commanders will declare Martial Law in their localities, and form Defacto Military Dictatorships of these Regions. Factions within the Military will vie for control, and there will be disputes between regions over shared resources like the water supply. Eventually gas will become unavailable for the military to move around, and then these larger Regional groupings will go through another round of One-to-the-Many fracturing.
The Secessionary movements we are reading about here NOW are the political manifestation of people realizing that the large Nation-States they are a part of have ceased to function. There is however no real “legal” means to Seceed from such Unions, just as the EU has no mechanism in place for countries like Greece and Spain to exit and reinstitute their own currencies. The Consolidation phase of Civilization has been underway since the beginnings of Agriculture, and always seen by the Illuminati as a One Way Street to a One World Order. Sadly for them, they were wrong. This is about as close as they got, and now that the Energy necessary to hold together such a complex system is diminishing in availabilility, this Consolidation Phase is coming to an end.
What will follow is anybody’s guess, but I GUARANTEE that it won’t be large Nation States, and the FSofA will pass into the Dustbin of History. Industrial Civilization will go the way of the Dinosaur also, and then it will be the job of whoever is left at the end of this Final Countdown to build a Better Tomorrow.
RE
IEA Oil Forecast Unrealistically High; Misses Diminishing Returns
Off the keyboard of Gail Tverberg
Published on Our Finite World on November 13, 2012
Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasboard inside the Diner
The International Energy Agency (IEA) provides unrealistically high oil forecasts in its new 2012 World Energy Outlook (WEO). It claims, among other things, that the United States will become the world’s largest oil producer by 2020, and will become a net oil exporter by 2030.
Figure 1. Author’s interpretation of IEA Forecast of Future US Oil Production under “New Policies” Scenario, based on information provided in IEA’s 2012 World Energy Outlook.
Figure 1 shows that this increase comes solely from the expected rise in tight oil production and natural gas liquids. The idea that we will become an exporter in later years occurs despite falling production, because “demand” will drop so much.
The oil price forecasts underlying these and other forecasts in the report are approximately as follows:
Figure 2. Author’s interpretation of future average world oil prices, as provided by IEA in their 2012 WEO report. (Forecast provided by IEA is more “concave downward”.) Historical amounts are based on BP 2012 Statistical Review of World Energy amounts.
One reason the WEO 2012 estimates are unreasonable is because the oil prices shown are unrealistically low relative to the production amounts forecast in the report. This seems to occur because the IEA misses the problem of diminishing returns. As the easy-to-produce oil becomes more depleted, and we need to move to more difficult reservoirs, the cost of extraction increases.
In fact, there is evidence that the “tight” oil referenced in Exhibit 1 is already starting to reach production limits, at current prices. The only way these production limits might be reasonably overcome is with higher oil prices–much higher than the IEA is assuming in any of its forecasts.
Higher oil prices cause a huge problem because of their impact on the world economy. The IEA in fact mentions that current high oil prices are already acting as a brake on the global economy in its first slide for the press. Higher oil prices also mean that investment costs required to reach target production levels will be even higher than forecast by the IEA, adding another impediment to reaching its forecast production levels.
If higher prices put the economies of oil importing nations into recession, then oil prices will drop lower, reducing the incentive to invest in new oil production infrastructure. In fact, we could find ourselves reaching “peak oil” because of an economic dilemma: while there seems to be plenty of oil available, the cost of extracting it may be reaching a point where it is more expensive than consumers can afford. As a result, some oil that we know about, and have been counting as reserves, will have to be left in the ground.
The IMF has recently done modeling that is relevant to this issue in a working paper called “Oil and the World Economy: Some Possible Futures.” This analysis may provide some insight as to what the real situation will be.
The Problem of Diminishing Returns
One issue that the IEA has not properly modeled is the issue of declining resource quality, leading to diminishing returns and a rising “real” (inflation adjusted) cost of production. This situation is often described as reflecting declining Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI).
The reason diminishing returns are a problem is because when a producer decides to extract oil, or gas or coal, the producer looks for the cheapest, easiest to extract, resource first. It is only when this resource is mostly depleted that the producer will seek locations where more expensive, harder to extract resource is available. Thus, over time, the inflation adjusted cost of extracting a resource tends to increase.
Figure 3. Author’s illustration of impacts of declining resource quality.
In terms of the triangle shown, producers tend to start at the top, with the “best” of the resource, and work their way toward the bottom. One result of this approach is that the cost per unit of production tends to rise, even as there are technology advances and efficiency gains, because the quality of the resource is declining.
Reserves tend to increase over time with this approach, because as producers work their way down the triangle in the diagram, they always see an increasing quantity of lower quality resources. The new reserves are increasingly expensive to extract, in inflation adjusted terms. There is no flashing light that says, “Above this price, customers won’t be able to afford to purchase this resource any more,” though. As a result, the increasingly low quality reserves get added to reported amounts, even though in some cases, the cost of products made with these reserves (say gasoline or diesel) will send economies into recession.
It should be noted that the issue of diminishing returns exists for almost any kind of resource. It exists for uranium extraction, since there is always more available, just harder to reach, or in lower concentration. Diminishing returns exists for gold, copper, and for nearly any other kind of metal. This means we often need more oil for metal extraction and processing, as we dig deeper or find ore that is mixed with a higher proportion of waste product.
The problem of diminishing returns also seems to hold for renewables. The first biofuel developed was ethanol from corn, since the process of making alcohol from corn has been known for ages. Newer approaches, such as ethanol from biomass and biofuel from algae, tend to be much more expensive. As a result, when we add new biofuel production, it is likely to be more expensive, and thus harder for the customer to afford. If we want it, we will need increasingly high subsidies.
Wind energy is also subject to diminishing returns. Onshore wind was developed first, and it is far less expensive than offshore wind, which was developed later. Early units of wind added to an electric grid do not disturb the electric grid to too great an extent. Later units of wind energy add increasingly large costs: long distance transmission lines, electrical storage, and other balancing–something that is generally overlooked in making early cost analyses.
Diminishing returns seem even to happen for energy efficiency. We have been working on energy efficiency a very long time. We have a tendency to pick the low-hanging fruit first. Later expenditure for efficiency may be less cost-effective.
Why Light Tight Oil Won’t Increase as in Figure 1
Tight oil, also referred to as “shale oil,” is supposed to be the United States’ oil savior, if we believe the IEA. The Bakken and Eagle Ford plays are the best known examples.
Rune Likvern of The Oil Drum has shown that drilling wells in the Bakken already seems to be reaching diminishing returns. The choicest locations appear to have been drilled first, and the locations being drilled now give poorer yields. He has also shown that the average well in the Bakken now requires a price of $80 to $90 barrel, which is close to the recent selling price. If increased production is desired, the price of oil will need to start increasing (and keep increasing) to provide the incentive needed to drill wells in less-choice location.
There are other issues as well. If there is a need to drill an increasing number of wells just to stay even, or an even larger number, to increase the amount of oil produced, we start to reach limits on many kinds: number of rigs available, number of workers available, miles driven for water to be used for fracking. Perhaps the issue that will limit production first, though, is limits on debt available to producers. Rune Likvern has also shown that cash flows from tight oil extraction tend to run “in the red,” so an increasing amount of debt financing is needed as operations ramp up. At some point, companies hit their credit limit and have to stop adding new wells until cash flow catches up.
Evidence Regarding Rate of Growth of Oil Extraction Costs
Bernstein Research recently published information showing that the marginal cost of oil production was $92 barrel in 2011 for non-OPEC, non Former Soviet Union oil producers at the 90th percentile of production. This cost is increasing at 14% per year (or about 12% a year in inflation adjusted terms). Even at the median marginal cost level, costs appear to be increasing at a compound annual growth rate of 9% (or about 7% in inflation adjusted terms). See also this FTAlphaville post.
If we take the $92 barrel cost in 2011 at the 90th percentile of production and increase it by 7% a year (arguably we should be using 12% per year), the real cost will be $169 barrel in 2020, and $467 a barrel in 2035. These are far in excess of the IEA oil price estimates shown on Figure 2. There is no reason to believe that Bakken and other tight oil production costs would be substantially cheaper.
Other Issues That Appear Not to be Handled Well by IEA WEO 2012
There are three other issues that the IEA has not handled well, in my opinion.
1. Rising Real Need for Fuels of Some Sort
WEO 2012 shows falling “demand” for fuel. Demand, as economists define demand, has to do with how much customers can afford. It is quite possible that demand will fall because people can’t afford the fuel.
It seems to me would be better to start by analyzing how the real need for fuels is changing. Once this is determined, adjustments can be made to reflect other ways the same benefits can be provided, assuming this is possible.
Regarding the real need for fuel, if we look at species that are in some ways similar to humans, such as chimpanzees and gorillas, we find that these animals have no need for fuels, because they live in the way that they are biologically adapted: There are only a relatively small number of them (less than 1,000,000 per species) living in territory which is restricted to their biological adaptation. They do not need their food cooked, or spears or other tools to keep away predators, or shelter from the elements.
Humans don’t live in the way that we are biologically adapted. Because there are so many of us, we need to grow our own food, and gather water from natural sources. Because we do not have big heavy jaws because there is little easy-to-chew food available, we need to cook much of our food. Because we live in diverse areas of the world, we need shelter and adaptive clothing. As humans move to cities, we have even greater needs. We need antibiotics and immunizations to prevent epidemics. We need fuel for commuting, unless we sleep on the floor of the factory where we work. We need fossil fuel for cooking, because traditional fuels such as dung or twigs are not available in sufficient quantities in urban areas.
Another need for fuel, besides directly responding to human needs, is to offset the continued degradation (entropy) of built infrastructure. As the number of humans expands, so do the miles of roads, the number of bridges, the miles of pipelines, the number of homes and schools, and many other kinds infrastructure. All of this infrastructure wears out. Roads need to be repaired almost every year, especially in cold climates. Electrical transmission lines need to be put back in place after every major storm.
Population is also, of course, rising. When we put these issues together (rising fuel need with urbanization, rising population, and increasing entropy), it is clear that the services humans need from fuels will continue to rise, whether or not “demand” as economists measure it appears to rise.
Most of these fuel services will need to come from fossil fuels, rather than renewables, for two reasons: (1) This is the way our infrastructure now is built, and it is expensive and time-consuming to change it. (2) Biological sources are quite limited compared to the needs of 7 billion humans. According to Chew in The Recurring Dark Ages, deforestation started to occur in multiple locations 6,000 years ago, when the world population was about 20 million people.
2. Substitution for Oil
The IEA seems to err in the direction of assuming that substitution can be made more quickly than it really can be. In general, whenever substitution is done, new devices need to be created that use the new fuel, or new plants need to be developed that transform one type of fuel to another type of fuel. Doing either of these things will temporarily add to demand for fossil fuels. There is also a cost involved.
Only the heavier portion of natural gas liquids can be added directly to gasoline supply. Most natural gas liquids are used for other purposes, such as making plastics, or propane for home heating, or making liquid petroleum gas (LPG). LPG is used for cooking in some parts of the world and for operating vehicles that have been designed to use it.
The IEA seems to assume that efficiency gain can have a big impact on the need for oil. The issue it seems to lose sight of is that efficiency gains are a two-edged sword. When a device is made more efficient, the usual effect is that it can be operated more cheaply. This means that more people can afford it, and demand may increase. In the early days, electricity was very expensive. As its cost came down with efficiency gains, its use went up dramatically.
Putting All of These Issues Together
It is very clear to me that the IEA oil estimates way too high, unless prices are much higher. Of course, prices can’t really be much higher, or the economy will go into recession. As a result, production both for the US and the rest of the world is likely to be much lower than forecast by the IEA.
It would be useful to have a better estimate of exactly where the world is headed. One way this might be done is by adapting the indications of a new IMF working paper called Oil and the World Economy: Some Possible Futures. The working paper considers some unknown time, between now and 2020, when the rate of increase in oil supply is assumed to decrease by 1%. While it is not stated in the report, it appears to me that this is similar to what actually happened about 2005, when the rate of oil production increase dropped from 1.3%” annual increase to 0.1%, a 1.2% decrease. (Figure 4, below).
Figure 4. World crude oil production (including condensate) based primarily on US Energy Information Administration data, with trend lines fitted by the author.I have a few observations regarding such an adaption:
(a) The model could be adjusted to consider the fact that a drop in the trend rate of about 1.2% actually took place in 2005, rather than simply assuming that a 1% decrease will happen at some unspecified point in the future. It appears to me that shift in the oil extraction trend line underlies many of the world’s problems in the last several years.
(b) The treatment in the model of diminishing returns should be adjusted. It is my understanding that this is currently handled assuming a 2% annual increase in real costs of production. The model could be adjusted to reflect a more realistic (higher) annual cost in oil production, and indirectly, required selling price.
(c) The authors of the IMF report suggest building a more resource-based model, and I would agree that this would be helpful. There are many interlinkages that the current model cannot adequately capture. A more resource-driven model, especially one that considers balance sheets of world governments, would appear to be better.
My View of What is Happening Now
As noted above, world crude oil production seems to have hit a plateau, starting about 2005. This is working its way through the economy with varying effects over time. The major effect at this point of time seems to be on the finances of governments that import oil, although it started earlier, with different aspects more apparent.
In general, what happens as we reach a situation of diminishing returns, and thus rising real oil prices, seems to be as follows:
As the price of oil rises, the price of food and commuting tend to rise. Both of these are considered essential by most consumers, so consumers cut back in discretionary spending, to have sufficient funds for the essentials. This leads to layoffs in discretionary industries, such as vacation travel and restaurant eating. The rise in laid off workers leads to an increase in debt defaults, and problems for banks. Housing and commercial real estate prices tend to fall, because of reduced demand, further adding to debt default problems.
Governments of oil importers get drawn into this in many ways: (1) Their revenues are reduced, because they receive less tax revenue from people who are laid off from work and from businesses with fewer sales. (2) They are asked to prop up failing banks, and to stimulate the economy. (3) They are also asked to pay workers who have been laid off from work. The net of all of this is that the governments of many oil importers find themselves with huge budget deficits, and declining ability to fix these deficits. This pattern is precisely what we are seeing today in many of Eurozone countries, the United States, Japan.
The statements about rising oil production in the US are just a distraction. Diminishing returns mean that US oil production will never increase very much. Oil costs will remain high, and this will be the real issue disturbing economies around the world.
Work, Life, Contemplation and Change
Off the keyboard of William Hunter Duncan
Published on Off the Grid in Minneapolis on November 11, 2012
Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner
Winter arrives tonight here in Minnesota, in a hard way. Temperatures are expected to fall throughout the day, below freezing, with temperatures remaining below freezing through tomorrow, as low as 18 degrees. That will be a test of how well my oil filled electric radiators heat the house. I have two, one in the kitchen and another in the bathroom, heating the bedroom also, which is less than half the house. My furnace is broken and I have neither the money nor the inclination to fix it. I would certainly like to rip out all those forced-air steel vents in the basement, I’ve hit my head on a hundred times. I could buy a nice woodstove from a friend for $200, and install it myself for about $250-300, but the stove is not catalytic, which means it isn’t designed to burn off most of the particulate, which is not a solution in the city; also as I do not have access to a wood lot. Though I could arrange with a tree trimming crew, to have more than enough wood dropped in my driveway, for free. A catalytic wood heater connected to a radiant water system which I would rarely use because the house itself would be solar radiant, would be ideal.
Back into the 40′s and 50′s next week, so no worries. Heating half the house with two oil heaters, cost about $40 last month. If I tried to heat the whole house, which is in mid-repair and a heat sieve, it would cost me $200+. Assuming winter comes, even the climate being uncertain. My neighbor across the alley, a good Christian who I have never known to question authority in any meaningful way, remarked to me about it yesterday, unprovoked, in evident concern, while I was working on my new driveway. Much of the aggressiveness I have endured from the city, the last several years, about my garden, I suspect has arisen from complaints from him. The lack of attention I have received from the city in the last year, has coincided with his evolution in thinking about my garden, in part as a direct result of his awareness of radical changes in weather patterns. He is a hunter, fisherman and gardener.
My new driveway is made of antique Purrington pavers, 9 lbs each, originally, likely, paving stones for a road, here in Minneapolis, which were removed at some point to my sisters driveway, before it was hers. She has never parked on the driveway, which she has only ever used to grow soil on, by neglect. You couldn’t see them; there was an inch of soil and weeds covering them. I asked her if I could buy them; she gave them to me. I stacked them up, rented a truck and paid my friend Jamie, a musician who lives in a rundown trailer you couldn’t move if you wanted to, $80, to help me transport the 5 tons. He only wanted $40. I bought him a snack and dinner too. I’ll have six cubic yards of class five crushed limestone dropped on my sisters driveway this week. She can grow weeds on that just as well. My father is furious, but he hasn’t been proud of anything I’ve done, since I was MVP of my high school baseball team. Except that time I shot that eight point buck. He doesn’t know either that I’ve painted my upper body green, put on faux animal pants, and danced with those horns publicly. Perhaps he will reconsider about the pavers, when he sees the driveway, the patio, and the front sidewalk to the street.
The white pine table for the patio, three feet across.
Otherwise, since I started the work on the hoop house, greenhouse, with the white pine dropped in my driveway and the work on the driveway and patio, more of my neighbors have stopped by and spoken with me in a friendly way than ever before.
My father is happy to have me working at big bank. I am happy too, insofar as the work I’ve been doing here at the house would not have happened, if not for that job. I am also astounded, at how many people in the department I work in, are eager for overtime. It is the debt they hold, I suppose. I value my time more than money. The department head, in advocating for people to work overtime so that it would not have to be imposed, said approximately, “What are you going to do otherwise? I’m just going to go home and sit in front of the television,” and many and maybe most nodded in agreement. No one seems much perturbed that we are foreclosing on houses.
I sit in my awkward corner at big bank, dancing sometimes to the global sounds on my iPod, wanting to sing, most days listening to Terence Mckenna on youtube, contemplating TEOTWAWKI. The election was encouraging to me, insofar as I was anticipating a potential hard Right turn. When you write things like the Benghazi incident is likely related to covert CIA operations having to do with Syria and al Qaida, and that Broadwell is CIA if I ever saw one, and not a bad way at all to excuse yourself from the drug money gorged, para-military, al Qaida affiliated cesspool the CIA has become, General; well, I have the sense that the GOP LOVES government when it comes to cracking down on alternative media, mindful as I am that the Obama administration has been ruthless in regard to whisleblowers, among many other things. I hadn’t anticipated a repudiation of the Republican message, with the election, such as that message has become. (The reader might be advised to not take my prognostications TOO seriously.)
Thinking such things about the world as I do, I tend to keep to myself at big bank. The work encourages it. Besides, I’m a minority white guy, and bald besides. And I’m shy. People don’t engage me much either. I’d much prefer to wear a hat and bandana, but that is against the rules. It get’s cold where I sit, and it would soften the bald nearing middle-age white guy thing. I intended to wear the orange afro and the wacky jacket, Halloween, but when I woke that day it barely occurred to me, and I couldn’t have cared less at the time, really. Though I did puff before I left the house, and closed my eyes and let go into the music on the bus. Peace pirate, Sir Vis, yet.
TEOTWAWKI. Terence Mckenna was much responsible for the mythology around Dec 21, 2012, having come to the conclusion through work with the Chinese I Ching, and a mathematical computer program he devised, that the end of time would occur that day, coming to this conclusion separate from any knowledge of the Mayan prediction. He wavered on his prediction, suggesting it could mean anything, from the destruction of the entire planet; the transformation of the entire universe; transforming ourselves somehow technologically, such that we would expand into hyperspace; to the invention of time travel; to his death merely, and we could all laugh that we believed him. Like Moses he would not see the promised land, as he died in 2000, from a deadly tumor in his brain, in the frontal cortex associated with the “third” eye. A curious end, for a mystic, particularly one so loved. In a cruel irony, his entire collection of rare books and manuscripts, and personal notes, were lost in a fire. The organization entrusted with them, Esalen, had seen fit to store them in an otherwise unoccupied office, off-site, next to a Quiznos, where the fire started – seven years after his death.
It’s interesting to me, how little I hear anymore about the Dec 21, 2012 Apocalypse meme. I had expected it to be more prominent a part of the dialogue, but it is not much at all, after all the hubub years ago. This, even as uncertainty has ramped up exponentially, with the economy, the fiscal cliff, Sandy, Benghazi, Syria, Iran, $100 barrels of oil, Fukushima, drought in the crop lands, and clear evidence for anyone who is conscious of the weather that a cycle has been broken. Even the most sanguine supporter of all things AMERICA, believes CHANGE is upon us, though notions of the how and the why are as diverse as there are people.
Terence imagined much more of a spiralling effect than we have seen. He imagined a kind of exponential condensing of Time, at which end-point we would emerge into a kind of psychedelic hyper-dimensional awareness. The kind of technological progress he imagined though doesn’t seem to have come to pass; more it seems to me, we are seeing the global industrial machine grinding to a halt, and many of our techno-dreams with it, because of oil constraints, weather, population growth and too much debt. I don’t think Terence was wrong, necessarily, and his psychedelic research and reporting on it has been invaluable to me, to sort things out; I just think maybe his psychedelic dimensional travels caused him to underestimate the staying power of the material universe, maybe.
I do however believe the Mayans were about dead on with their long count calender, which 5,126 year cycle happens to coincide with the rise of the written Word, the Logos transcribed; and the rise of agriculture about 5,126 year before that. Those two, ag and the written word, are without peer in their effect on Homo sapien. The Logos written, the Word, leading to a paradigm of control, which now seems to be both aggravated in it’s desire, and slipping out of possible.
Notice that the definition of apocalypse is a lifting of the veil. What veil? The veil of authority. Consider the Catholic Church, or the Boy Scouts, or Lance Armstrong, the Federal Reserve, Wall Street and the Federal Government. The stories these entities and institutions, and everything relating to them, have rested upon, are everywhere revealed to be a fraud. A fraud for what purpose? A fraud to control resources, to control nature, to maintain power and influence, to maintain BAU. A fraud feeding at the foundation of everything life depends on.
I intuit we are closing in on some kind of bifurcation point, after which normal will be turned upside down, metaphorically. What that is going to look like, I have all kinds of ideas. Anything from a comet strike, to a solar wiping-out of the global electrical grid, to a collapse of the global financial markets, to a series of nuclear strikes, to an organic or inorganic destruction of a series of off-shore oil wells, to the collapse of the Saudi royal family, to mass starvation, and on and on and on, unto a widespread collapse in belief in the current paradigm.
The Mayans don’t have the corner on cycles though. There is also the 26,000 year cycle of the rotation of the axis, the cycle of precession of the equinox. We are now in the Aeon of the zodiacal house of Pisces, the fish, associated by some with Christos. It will be another 200 years before the cycle of Aquarius, the water bearer, begins. Which I take to mean it will be another 200 years before a true healing of the waters will begin. With all the nuclear and poisons and off-shore oil wells around, how polluted we allow the waters to become remains to be seen. Perhaps enough, that there will be no human to witness the healing of the waters.
My hope is, though, the thing ultimately revealed, is that Homo sapien is a vastly more profound being than any control freak has ever lead us to believe. And the Sun and Gaia would not have spent billions of years bringing us into being in order to let us perish of our control issues.
Cycles upon cycles upon cycles of time. Change eternal. To illutrate, my black-cap raspberry vines, sans leaves:
