(NB 1) what’s this about Ben B?
(NB2) Even bean counting can be science. Early on with a phenomenon, you just document the observations. Later, you use things like accounting (bean counting) to try to get a handle on what is going on. Whenever you have a physical symmetry, you have a conservation (such as conservation of energy, momentum, mass, and so on) At that juncture, bean counting can help you identify what is quantified, and what is not. And yes, economics of dollars can play into the bean counting of science too… if your symmetries’ topic is that.
(SP) Speaking of the inutility that is Google, I can no longer find a link to the Congressional Testimony of the American Pediatric Association on forcing vaccines. Do you still have that?
It’s been Zeroed (maybe we can make that a new term, coin a new word, Just like Google!)
The mainstream narrative says that the economy is doing okay, not growing super fast, but solid.
Wages have been climbing, inflation might be a tad too low, and generally speaking everything is headed in the right direction, with a big Thanks(!) to the Fed for their careful and masterful stewardship.
The other narrative is that the Fed has really only shoveled money into financial markets that has mainly benefited the already rich. The Fed MBS program sought to drive up house prices and it succeeded. Inflation has been raging for people who have to rent or buy homes, and for anybody paying into or utilizing the sick-care system.
Which narrative to believe?
Well, I think it’s as simple as using one’s own eyes. Remember a recession is when your neighbor loses their job, a depression is when you also lose yours.
For the people in the video of a quick trip through downtown LA the depression is already here. Collapse has happened. It’s right there to be seen with your own eyes.
https://youtu.be/n6ZGa2ofjSs
I must admit that the Garlic Festival shooting in Gilroy California hits me pretty close to home. I grew up in South San Jose and worked near the San Jose/Gilroy border. Family often attended the Garlic Festival there.
My points:
- To quote John Mosby, the Mountain Guerrilla
Things are f*cked up. And they are going to be getting a lot more f*cked up. Here at PP we have some ideas about how and why society is moving towards a breaking point.2. The horse is out of the barn.
Weapons are widespread and available with the most violent among us guaranteed to always be armed. The only question is whether the common people will be armed also.3. The police have no duty to protect. Each of us is on our own. This is very hard for some to understand. 'The State' will not protect you and your family.
I recommend people read the case that prompted this legal ruling. It concerns a home invasion in Washington DC in 1975. Even after several calls to 911 dispatch there was an absolute failure to effectively investigate the ongoing crime scene. The victims were held prisoner, raped, beaten an abused for 14 hours. But the details of this case do not matter. The point is the ruling that the police are not responsible for a failure to protect. This is not a criticism of 'the police,' just a clarification of the logistical and legal limitations of their role during a crime. Do you understand that? Do not hide and whimper helplessly. You must protect yourself and your family.4. Do not stand in front of a stampede.
When hundreds and thousands of animals begin running together, get out of their way. We have listened to the crash course and read CM, Orlov, JHK and CHS essays. We understand that the herds will bolt at some point.5. Accurately and realistically understand the dark side of the human heart. Careful with that sweet and comforting belief that "people are good" and "that could never happen to me." If the rules of society shift to a more primitive structure, catch on to this change and adapt promptly. (The final adaptation time available might only be seconds.) Good people with kind hearts have a terrible blindness to the intentions of those who do not have the 'compassion chip" installed on their mother board. ("I refuse to believe they could ANYONE could DO that!!") This inability to understand can be fatal. Please "get it." The numbers I have heard are ~4% of the population is sociopathic (opportunistic predators, unmoved by compassion). You may not notice these people's true colors unless you meet one in a dark alley late at night. Another 1% are psychopathic (conscious predators, unmoved by compassion). These rise to the top of finance and government, intelligence agencies (and some have private islands and coordinate blackmail networks.) They launch economic and kinetic wars, and stage mass violence against their own populations and write the legislation to imprison their own peoples. They wear suits, act friendly and reasonable, behave as senior-statesmen and rational opinion leaders. Yet if their actions are examined, we may see that they are killing tens of thousands. Dealing with the psychopath is like facing a con man. The words spoken hide the real intent. (Things like "I must read all of your emails and monitor your location to protect you.")
Picture: Nicolo Machiavelli, an articulate psychopath who explained his though processes so that non-psychopaths could understand them. (Thank you, Nicolo.)
Breaking away from the classical political theory (inherited from Cicero) that sought to make virtue the condition of power, Machiavelli (1469-1527) asserted that only the appearance of virtue counts, and that the successful prince must be a “great simulator” who “manipulates and cons people’s mind.” The tyrant he most admired was Cesar Borgia, who after having appointed the cruel Ramiro d’Orco to subdue the province of Romania, had him executed with utter cruelty, thus reaping the people’s gratitude after having diverted their hatred on another. Guyénot, Laurent. JFK-9/11: 50 Years of Deep State (Kindle Locations 3113-3117).
SandPuppy wrote: I must admit that the Garlic Festival shooting in Gilroy California hits me pretty close to home.Same here. I drove by Gilroy yesterday at what must have been within minutes before the tragedy there. So close time-wise that it could have been happening as I was driving past (though I didn't notice anything at the time) Who the hell would shoot families at a garlic festival? (I suppose the better question is: Who the hell would shoot families anywhere?) This is definitely a symptom of a society falling into despair and moral collapse. It's what happens when opportunity and purpose are stripped from the populace by a power structure committed to doing "whatever it takes" to concentrate advantage into those controlling the system. Exploding homelessness, opioid addiction/deaths, consumer overindebtedness, murders & mass shootings -- all classic signs of cultural desperation. And these are still the "good times". How much more kinetic stress will the next recession add to our unstable social order? When mass layoffs return and public subsidies are cut? As much as I believe a deep recession is an essential requirement (one of many requirements, mind you) to getting our economy back to a more sustainable/healthy/fair baseline after being so badly distorted for so long, I shudder at the probable wounds (both literal and psychic) our culture will suffer going through it.
Sad to say, taking all of this with a heaping tablespoon of salt moving forward. This event in particular given the developing Jeffrey Epstein exposure and other recent events of interest.
For those interested, consider paying attention to any significant narrative shifts in the MSM narrative as the storyline develops over the next few days. Dave Collum’s review of Las Vegas is an excellent example of this (Part of the 2018 Year in Review).
Whether it is an organic event or false flag - sympathies for those directly impacted regardless.
“Former Clinton and Al Gore political consultant Naomi Wolf explains why we should be skeptical of overly theatrical news stories. Propaganda is legal.”
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot3SRk1g6mQ[/embed]
- Yippee, another hurricane! Wind and flooding = destruction but that leads to new construction and repair which counts as economic growth, increasing the national GDP!
- Building bombs is much easier than building bridges and buildings. Blowing things up in other countries has become more important to economic ‘growth’ than maintaining our own infrastructure.
So just how long is it going to be before some geniuses figure out that it would be much more efficient to just blow up our own buildings and bridges? The economy gains both by making the bombs and rebuilding the destruction caused by them… Just imagine the growth in our ‘gross’ domestic product…
Crazy pills?
*2017 Year in Review
Will user comments become editable again at some point? Just curious, thanks!
Here’s the link to the 2017 Year in Review, Las Vegas discussion.
I agree, I think that at this point the default reaction to any “mass shooting” propagandised by the media to pull at our heartstrings should be that it is fake unless otherwise proven by real evidence. I haven’t spent any time looking into the garlic shooting (apologies to the victims if it was indeed real), but I will not jump to any larger conclusions about how “society is falling apart” based on it until I do. At this point, I probably won’t bother because I have better things to do than chase down yet another “mass shooting” story.
As for the “worst mass shooting in US history” up until its time (Orlando night club), only to be exceeded soon after by the Las Vegas massacre (which was, unfortunately, a real massacre, but not perpetrated by parties that the media wants you to believe), the evidence that Orlando was a disgracefully blatant hoax is so overt that one would have to be in either of three camps to actually believe it as fact: 1) part of the evil segment of society perpetrating these hoaxes, 2) blissfully unaware of the evidence, or 3) in deep denial.
Here is some of the official news footage of the event. You’ll see at around 19 seconds in, the brave “rescuers” carrying the bloody injured with the red shoes. Where to, I’m not sure, since they are actually carrying the “victims” back TOWARDS the still active ongoing “shooting” at the Pulse nightclub. And why would people be carrying them anyways? Everyone knows that you should tend to injuries with the victims on the ground. And why is it that 50 police cars showed up, but it seems that only about 1 ambulance decided to stop by during the whole event, even though the main Orlando hospital is literally like 4 blocks down the road?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owJdEsMBVHQ
Anyways, you’ll see that at 0:29 the footage gets cut off. There were other videos on Youtube that showed longer footage, of a few seconds extra that slipped out into the media on Fox News, which show those guys putting the “victim” down on his own two feet (what a miraculous recovery!!!), take a step back, look back at the camera with a big grin because they thought it was finished rolling, and then do a little celebratory dance. Highly odd behaviour for people desperately carrying the injured back to “safety”. Unfortunately I can’t link the video to that because Youtube deleted it on grounds of violating policies on “bullying”, when all it as doing was showing footage from Fox News that slipped out onto TV that someone recorded.
Here is a still image of what happened a few seconds after the footage ends. Might not be highly convincing as an image, but if you see the actual video it is impossible to deny.
Yes, this inability to edit is quite annoying!! For those interested you’ll just have to copy and paste that image link.
“It is no measure of good health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”
J Krishnamurti.
I think both issues Krishnamurti mentions above are covered here in the thread, thanks to all contributors. One question I do have is the issue of “borrowing from the future”, which proved “the” single answer in 2008 and headlines again at the Paris Climate Summit in 2015.
CM mentions Uber and Lyft as examples of negative profit companies with soaring stock prices and I wonder whether Tesla is a similar/better example. Over a life cycle analysis EV’s do save emissions, so now everyone wants to get in one. But as they stand in the showroom, brand new and sparkling, the embodied energy comparison between EV’s and an equivalent ICE vehicle is that you have a >70% “ecological debt” in embodied emissions before you start the engine and begin driving.
Why not, I’m worth it, is the usual answer to credit card splurges, whereas my father would not buy anything unless he could pay for it. So credit broke that barrier and we have been borrowing from the future since. That evolved with the infamous Australian “businessman” Alan Bond, (who ‘relieved’ the U.S.A. of “it’s” property, yachting’s Americas Cup with the "winged keel), who calmly stated - “if you owe a bank $1 million, you have a problem, but if you owe a bank $100 million, the bank has a problem”.
I think “Greed is Good” and the dot com bubble was a precursor to all this, everyone, “sort of” knew computers were the future, and pre 2008 housing was as safe as - “houses”, now most of the “High Net Worth Individuals” ($1 million + in assets) are perhaps there only because of the property they hold title over, despite 2008 showing housing was not safe at all.
The Paris Climate Agreement was lauded as the solution to climate change, but the strategy for staying under 2.0C warming has to be seen for what it is.
There is no plan to “cap” emissions at 1.5C, or 2.0C, we go sailing past what were once “targets”, as no-one really wants to give up the lifestyle they have inherited, albeit loaded with debt.
The answer is “Negative Emissions Technology”, in the creation of a global liquid carbon sequestration “industry” which by 2050 has already stashed 100 billion tonnes of liquid carbon underground. This “industry” is now gearing up post Paris as the E.U. carbon price gets out of the gutter and is now standing around 25eu per tonne, people are now moving quickly to provide an industry TWICE as big as the existing global oil/petroleum industry and by 2050 the International Energy Authority ‘speculates’ 10 billion tonnes of liquid carbon will be sequestered every year.
This is what the world signed up for in 2015 to save the planet, pass me some more crazy pills. A discussion between Andrew Revkin and Vaclav Smil from 2009.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SIjlZQf28I
Just letting folks know we are indeed aware of the comment editing issue and working to fix it. Somehow, the feature got removed during a recent update and we’re working on getting it restored.
Thanks for your tolerance. We’ve successfully squashed the vast majority of the bugs from the recent site migration, but Murphy’s Law is alive and well and keeping us on our toes as we go over the bugs that remain.
cheers,
Adam
“media presstitutes“
So totally stealing this one.
So totally stealing this one.Actually, you'll be re-re-re-borrowing it. Original author unknown.
As if we need more anecdotal evidence on the environmental shifts going on, this post from a friend in Germany popped up on my feed:
And this is just the beginning!
Here in Baltimore, we’ve had a few weeks in a row of scorching 90+ temps, including a record-breaking weekend of 100+, which was preceded by a thunderstorm line that brought down three large limbs from one of my silver maples. Thankfully no structures were hurt, and I’d harvested the potatoes from that bin two days prior. Big blessings in a minor tragedy.
To add add insult to injury, my screen door continues to be void of insect life on nights when I leave the lights on, and I haven’t seen a single lightning bug all season. In Maryland. In summer.
I will continue to do what I can, but I fear we’re long past being able to stop this.
From an article on natural gas prices:
If the natural gas industry had hoped that a stunning heat wave sweeping over a large swathe of the East Coast would rescue prices, they are surely now disappointed. Natural gas prices continue to fall, despite the heat, and there is little prospect of a rebound. On Friday, spot natural gas prices fell by another 3 percent, dipping below $2.20/MMBtu. Record production from the Marcellus is one of the main reasons. But oil drillers are also to blame. The frenzied pace of drilling in the Permian – which, to be sure, has been slowing as of late – has produced a wave of natural gas so large that the industry is flaring enormous volumes of gas because of the lack of pipelines. Texas regulators seem unwilling to regulate the rate of flaring over fear of hurting the industry, so the flaring continues. (Source)This is a complete tragedy. Perfectly usable energy being flared, burned into the night sky and the bright light of day, 24/7 all because nobody wants to dare tell the industry to slow down a bit. What kind of reason is that? One that future generations will look back on with derision and well-founded contempt. This is the same as the if the US park service decided to cut down all the last giant redwoods and sequoias under their care because they feared slowing down the local timber industry. Or harpooning whales and sinking them because that made whaling a tiny bit faster and more dollar-efficient. The times call for intense conservation and careful use of every BTU. Instead we're ripping it out of the ground so fast some has to be simply burned into the air while some of the rest has to be turned into a liquid and shipped across oceans at a tremendous loss of energy. This is just insane.
- Adam - I am happy to see that you didn’t immediately jump to the typical conspiracy theories about the garlic festival shooting that pop up every time there is a mass shooting somewhere. Your speculation that they are a sign of general cultural deterioration is much more plausible to me than assuming that the shootings a) didn’t happen, or b) were done by the ‘deep state.’
Mark BC “As for the “worst mass shooting in US history” up until its time (Orlando night club), only to be exceeded soon after by the Las Vegas massacre (which was, unfortunately, a real massacre, but not perpetrated by parties that the media wants you to believe), the evidence that Orlando was a disgracefully blatant hoax is so overt that one would have to be in either of three camps to actually believe it as fact: 1) part of the evil segment of society perpetrating these hoaxes, 2) blissfully unaware of the evidence, or 3) in deep denial.”
This is an opportunity for a potentially fruitful conversation. As I recall, shortly after the Orlando shooting, SP jumped on the conspiracy theory, but was later dissuaded when someone he knew (I believe an EMT who actually responded to the shooting) confirmed that it happened.
Perhaps you two can discuss.
Yep, everybody talks about how it’s all going to end up nasty pretty soon.
You know, Japan has been living with zombie banks, zombie corporations, zombie government . . . since 1989.
Thirty years going on now.
You know, the last time I was in Tokyo (18 months ago) it looked pretty damn good to me.
Who’s to say the Fed, the PTB, the MICC, and Wall Street, can’t keep this shit show alive for another 30 years too?
Who/What is definitely going to stop them??
After watching Vaclav Smil’s exposition and accepting that his data and analysis are correct, I agree with him that BAU’s goal of burying CO2 underground is physically, energetically and economically impossible.
But BAU insists that the opposite is true and will not resile. Indeed, it cannot, for obvious reasons. I observe much time given to promoting carbon sequestration as THE technique to deal with climate change (which is not happening, by the way) and give us a way to continue eating, drinking and being merry. And damn stupid.
This is why I call it the Final Conspiracy Theory. Its inevitable failure kills us.
By the way, the cult of neoliberalism requires a market in everything so that resources may be allocated the most efficiently and profits taken accordingly. I wonder where they imagine a market in carbon sequestration will come from, and how will it operate? Who will it benefit and, more to the point, who will it not benefit?
Nah, we’ve lost all agency over CO2. Maybe there is one hope left: water vapour.
@CrisisMode: Climate change. 10 meters of sea level rise in the next 30 years (instead of the half-meter by century’s end predicted by the IPCC). That’s “who”.