Sunday, August 28, 2016

Beat This Hand

Capable of More,

"Since the next twenty years may well be the last phase of the more traditional and familiar political alignments with which we have grown comfortable, the response needs to be shaped now. During the rest of this century, humanity will also have to be increasingly preoccupied with survival as such on account of a confluence of environmental challenges. Those challenges can only be addressed responsibly and effectively in a setting of increased international accommodation. And that accommodation has to be based on a strategic vision that recognizes the urgent need for a new geopolitical framework."  (Brzezinski's summary in the last paragraph is excellent, and the rest of the piece models the world as an abstract game, which irritates me. It's also less than fully truthful, since he must pretend the lies we receive daily are true. Consider the source. By elites; for elites.)

Eleni sends more contextual commentary:

4 Mega banks make arrangements to do international transactions with "Utility-Settlement-Coin" (son-of-bitcoin) technology, not requiring $US. [No $9 billion fines for US law violation, as French bank got for transaction routed through $US channels that US didn't like.]

Central Banks now "own" $25 trillion in Financial Assets. (These words seem meaningless to me, but I think it means that all these promises of governments to pay people back some day can be shredded in the big reset.)

Colorado has a lot of Green Party supporters (still under 6% though) compared to most of the US, and welcomes Jill Stein MD and Ajamu Baraka to Ft. Collins.

Here are the weak points of the Green Party platform, which we should consider. (Yeesh, American army under UN control!) Still better than the establishment meat-puppets-of-doom... It's all an opinion poll, anyway. We don't actually get to decide anything bigger than a back-yard.

Rolling Stone has a shopping list of "why you shouldn't vote for (Libertarian candidate) Gary Johnson": Kinda' ho-hum list and ho-hum candidate. "Offsetting penalties"? Less evil than Punch and Judy. Some will rightly make this their protest vote.

Apolitical Party

Friday, August 26, 2016

Stalemate

Officially Informed,

The main architect of Washington’s plan to rule the world has abandoned the scheme and called for the forging of ties with Russia and China. While Zbigniew Brzezinski’s article in The American Interest, titled “Towards a Global Realignment”, has largely been ignored by the media, it shows that powerful members of the policymaking establishment no longer believe that Washington will prevail in its quest to extent US hegemony across the Middle East and Asia. Brzezinski, who was the main proponent of this idea and who drew up the blueprint for imperial expansion in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, has done an about-face and called for a dramatic revising of the strategy.  Thanks Ray.

France seems to be leaving the EU, also, but passive-aggressively. This looks like just not complying with anything, not supporting the EU, not declaring anything, except "We're French" and seeing how things fall apart.

The (other) history of money holds that it was not so much used in response to flexible markets trades, but to pay for your life when the king came by, and you could prove that you had "paid in advance" by holding his IOU, which you could exchange for your life at that moment. The IOU could be gold, a clay tablet or a notched stick. It was having alrready paid the king that protected you from the army.  http://theminskys.org/the-history-of-money-not-what-you-think/

Ice Free Arctic Next Summer (or maybe the summer after). This is a huge heat sink getting used up. This is the jumping off point for another explanation of just where we are with long-lasting CO2 and the sudden-death threat of massive methane release. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/21/arctic-will-be-ice-free-in-summer-next-year

A cruise ship with 1725 passengers and crew, by far the largest ever to traverse the northwest passage, will carry you to tiny Inuit villages before they go extinct, for about $100k. The nicer berths cost more, but there are some cheaper ones as well. This is "Extinction Tourism", sort of the anti-eco-tourism, though all strict rules of engagement will be followed and no legal liability will incur. LAST CHANCE!  

Formally Invited

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Great Balls Of Fire

Preordained,

Brad sends this article about the thrust we might extrapolate for a Trump and for a Clinton government. 
It is the approach that matters to our oligarchs, and any president could serve their purposes, once clearly agreed amongst them.
The issue is that the Neocons and Neoliberal Capitalists have a value-extracting empire going on, but the sea lines are completely vulnerable, and the imperial extraction process is loathsome-to-genocidal for the countries paying tribute.
The US just could not defend shipping against modern missiles. 
Empires overreach and their arms get severed.
There is a quiet surge among industrial capitalist oligarchs to retrench, to make the continental United States self-sufficient in fuel, military production, and as many other essentials as is feasible. this is eminently defensible. 
Trump's foreign policy faces the inevitable. The Wall-Street/Neocon foreign policy faces the next 5 minutes, but mostly the last 30 years. (I'll vote Green, again.)
Vladimir Putin is rational in this "Great Game", and Russia is united behind his game. China has the very long view of history with China at the center, and chafes at the choke chain the US now has around shipping of fuel and resource commodities. Iran, also an ancient civilization, is most prudent, but would much prefer the neocons and financial hit-men be replaced with reclusive industrialists over here.

"A thousand balls of flame": Dmitry Orlov looks at the current imperial chessboard, and what war between Russia and the US would look like for the US.
"You see, there are just a few magic ingredients that allow the US to continue to exist as a stable, developed country capable of projecting military force overseas. They are: the electric grid; the financial system; the interstate highway system; rail and ocean freight; the airlines; and oil and gas pipelines."

Colleen sends this article, asserting that the US is moving nuclear bombs from Incirlik air base in Turkey, to Romania. 
It's vehemently denied. 
This puts pressure on Russia and Turkey, even to float the idea, but it might not be productive...

Turkish artillery blasts northern Syria as Turkish tanks and APCs move toward Jarablus, a critical city for control of truck convoys into Syria. 
Syrian Kurds are fleeing the assault, and many civilian deaths are already reported. This is billed as "fighting ISIS" and it sort-of is true, but Turkey really does not want Kurdish presence in a continuous area of northern Syria, along the Turkish border. Turkey wants the Kurds to remain divided and conquered. The US and Russia have not made definitive moves yet.

Biden flies to Ankara to meet with Erdogan, and Kerry will meet Lavrov Friday in Geneva.

Paul Craig Roberts discusses the PR war around the power struggle for Syria.
"Let us not forget the tens of thousands of children that Washington’s wars and bombings of 7 Muslim countries have killed without any tears shed by CNN anchors, and let us not forget the 500,000 Iraqi children that the United Nations concluded died as a result of US sanctions against Iraq, children’s deaths that Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said were worth it."

Opaque NGOs run refugee camps for profit, while Mafia gangs take over at the level of mud and fear. Greeks, who jumped forward to help refugees last year, are now mostly kept out of the closed camps.

Serving the living and suddenly-dead on the high seas. "What surprised me was how polite people are, how they take their time to say "thank you'".

The US Federal Government will end the use of private prisons. Thanks Ray. This opens the door to states getting out of this arrangement, too. 
It's clearly time for prison reform.

Walking Away

Sunday, August 21, 2016

Equipping The Future

Traveling to the Future,

I've just finished reading the book, 2052 A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years, by Jorgen Randers, who was the computer math whiz in the original MIT group that produced the computer models of economy, population, environmental degradation and resource use, while looking at various scenarios, in the 1972 Limits To Growth book. The key modeling folks were not involved in this work, except one commentary from one of them. There are a lot of expert commentaries here. The computer models worked out and refined over four decades were not really used here, except as a comparison. The projections of this 2012 book include peaking global economy and fossil fuel use around 2040. 
What I see is peak economy and peak CO2 emissions happened in 2014. They are not "decoupled".

The implications of the earlier peak in CO2 emissions (not total atmospheric CO2) coming sooner are "good" all around for life on our fair planet. It means we have to change sooner, which is much better than changing later. It would have been better to change course in the 1970s, and Carter was on that track, but it was not popular, so we got Reagan.

Jorgen Randers is a middle class Norwegian technocrat in very good standing, and envisions a world of more people, living in apartments in mega-cities, and eating food from distant fields, and enjoying virtual vacations in 40 years. (This is his own view, I believe. This is a big-solutions view. He was not one of the systems-analysis guys.)

What adaptations will we adopt in the US? The US uses the most resources and energy, and much of them come from far away, because the $US is the global reserve currency, and it's really unhealthy to go up against the $US forces, or even just have something they really want, like oil.
The first adaptation for the US is obviously to use much less oil, like the 55% to 60% of our use that is pumped here.
How can we do that? 
Transportation uses 70% of the US oil budget, and personal transportation uses 65% of that. The US pumps something like 50% of the oil it uses at home.

Your car and my car are the main thing using more liquid fuel than the US makes. Natural gas, wind and solar can provide electricity as coal keeps phasing out.
Our entire suburban lifestyle grew up around commuting to work and stores in cars, so there is really no other way to live in the structure we have built than to be rapidly transported in small vehicles.
Without small vehicles to take each of us, and small groups of us, everywhere, the American economy does not work, and our whole landscape of houses, roads and work places becomes lost investment.

The fully autonomous vehicles, with no steering wheel, which Ford will market in 2021 provide an elegant answer to America's energy conundrum.
http://www.claimsjournal.com/news/national/2016/08/18/272914.htm
Driverless cars will be owned by big corporations, so big corporations like the idea, so it can happen. We will all pay rent to go places, and we will depend on the system for anything farther than we can bike, and to get things brought to us. Centralized power likes this kind of solution.
One of these vehicles can efficiently serve day and night, replacing numerous other vehicles, so fewer parking places will be needed. Fewer parking places at stores will be needed as personally owned vehicles give way to a public utility which is always available. The use of driverless delivery vehicles at night will make shopping be more online, with deliveries at night. This will further reduce daytime congestion on roads, and eliminate a lot of our stores.
There will be a lot of urban and suburban malls and parking lots to repurpose, a new wave of urban renewal.
If these vehicles use electricity, they can mitigate load on the electrical grid, and they can charge from solar farms and coordinate their storage capacity and their use for riders with the overall smart(ish) grid. There will still be summer days at 5:00 PM where AC is running everywhere and everybody wants a ride home.
This one technology will reinforce the current power heirarchy, not threaten it, and will let us stay where we are, reduce CO2, import less oil, and slowly build in the spaces in our cities and towns, which have been freed up. They can be living spaces, or food gardening spaces, or parks. We cn work on rebuilding them, because we won't be working at Macy's or Texaco.
This disruptive technology will make our whole economic system more vulnerable to glitches in the electronics. Still, how can it be avoided? It is bound to take over fast. Nobody will have to buy another car, ever.
Those who can pay to get places faster will pay and get places faster. These cars will let the high-paying customer through first. The rent structure will be maximally inclusive on the low end, and maximally profitable on the high end. The rest is details.

Those Google self-driving cars have been around Austin a lot for the past couple of years, particularly on some of my bike commute routes. They are really careful around bicyclists. I like that.

Vehicle-Powering-Human

Thursday, August 18, 2016

Your Own Choices

Relatively Autonomous,

Russian Strategic Bombers are now using Iranian airfields to carry out (very effective) bombing strikes against ISIS and friends in Syria. 
(America is working to unify the rest of the nations of the world, but in a very awkward way. WW-3 anybody?) Thanks, Tom and Eleni.

China officially takes Syrian side, along with Russia and Iran. Eurasian Union is getting more real, isn't it? 
(U-NI-FY, U-NI-FY, U-NI-FY!)

America's "Humanitarian War Against the World" is ready to go nuclear, pre-emptively, at any moment. Thanks Eleni.
"War criminals occupy positions of authority. The citizenry is galvanized into supporting the rulers, who are “committed to their safety and well-being”. Through media disinformation, war is given a humanitarian mandate."

There is not so much inflation for things (from China) that you don't need, like big-screen TVs, but stuff you really do need will choke you to death. Thanks Gary.

Ford Motor Company will debut a completely autonomous automobile for driverless taxi service in 2021, sort of like a "horseless carriage", but a driverless-taxi.
(I expect this to completely eliminate personally owned/operated vehicles, as quickly as the Model-T eliminated carriages. It's "green technology", as we will all soon be informed. Fewer vehicles; less parking...)

Green Growth, or sleight of hand? Can the growth economy actually "decouple" from fossil fuel use? (It all depends on what you call "growth". It gets really Orwellian a little way down this rabbit hole.)

The world just had the hottest month ever on any kind of record available to science. 
Perhaps 1.5 degrees C is the tipping point for climate catastrophe. 
It is not possible to be certain before the fact, is it? 
What are the plans of global elites, who really are smart enough to believe in climate science, but keep themselves well hidden to avoid danger from the herd? (I think the plans to just destroy economies and kill populations with wars in Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, and so on, and financial war on the no-man's-land of Greece are readily apparent. The big question facing us is whether nuclear winter is the green technology planned to confront global warming. I wish it were a joke. Really.)

We just got a whole lot of rain here in Austin, and maybe more. (My rain gauge flooded at 5.25 inches Monday, and collected 2 more since then.) 
This Weather Underground story looks at the 20-30 inches of rain that people in Louisiana just got.

Swamp Thang


Sunday, August 14, 2016

Reality Double Check

Wonderlandians,

Why does the current US Presidential Election seem so crazy and harsh? 
I think this is the last hand to play before the global financial reset, which has been fake-managed since 2008.
Here is substantiation for that opinion:
It has long been acknowledged that CO2 emissions from fossil fuels track real economic activity as perfectly as anything. When economic statistics vary from fuel use, it is the fuel use which is believed.
The latest cover-up is "economic decoupling" from CO2, and it is a really good idea, and a place we may some day reach, but it is not the current reality.
It is hard to find unobfuscated data on this. Here is global CO2 emissions data with hand-waving about "decoupling".  CO2 emissions are flat from 2013 through 2015.
"In the more than 40 years in which the IEA has been providing information on CO2emissions, there have been only four periods in which emissions stood still or fell compared to the previous year. Three of those – the early 1980s, 1992 and 2009 – were associated with global economic weakness. But the recent stall in emissions comes amid economic expansion: according to the International Monetary Fund, global GDP grew by 3.4% in 2014 and 3.1% in 2015."
In 1972 a team of Harvard academics in the field of Systems-Analysis used the best economic model they could derive, tested, retested, compared to history, and ran it going forward. The curves for the "business as usual" global economic picture are seen below. Notice that food-per-capita, services-per-capita and industrial-output-per-capita all have a simultaneous peak, then sudden drop-off, right about now, or last year, or next year. This was just a model, not a prediction, but it has been a chillingly accurate model so far. There was not really a global awakening to the threat facing all of us. Much has been learned about human psychology in this process. Deng Xiaoping read this book, and was profoundly influenced by it. China got the one-child-policy and massive industrialization, while still possible. (I personally think global elites mostly paid close attention, see that the inflection-point is upon us, and are all desperate to hatch their schemes upon us, but they don't all have the same scheme. This is getting obviously off-script. It's about to get catastrophic. 
Actually, and to disagree with MAD-President George W. Bush, the American way of life IS NEGOTIABLE, like the Greek way of life, and the Syrian, Libyan and Palestinian ways of life.
In Iceland, the real vanguard of democracy in our world, the Pirate Party, formed 3 years ago, is about to take the reins of government. 
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/12/polls-suggests-icelands-pirate-party-form-next-government

Assuming our global elites all know this, and want to control all of us effectively, we can look at the leak that EU President Juncker (the drunkard) wants to dictate all of social welfare and labor policies for every EU country from his lofty perch. This was known by Eurocrats before the Brexit vote, alluded to by pro-Brexiters (those nut-cases), but not divulged to the massive herds of Britans and various Europeans, because they spook easily. Thanks Eleni (in heavily-overgrazed Greece)

German President, Joachim Gauck clarifies something we may all have wondered about, "The elites are not the problem. The people are the problem." (OK, so can we flesh that out a little more fully, your excillency?)

Trump calls for Election Observers "to stop Crooked Hillary Rigging the Vote". Yeah, it's how elections are done, and it's what already happened in many Democratic Primary elections, and it's how the Bush-machine rolls (Clinton's "secret" allies).
This asshat keeps saying all this true "conspiracy theory" stuff that has every self-respecting liberal retching and puking. He's not playing by the rules. 
(I do not support Trump's appeal to the baser instincts of our species, but I do support him pointing to "the man behind the curtain" pulling those levers. What is about to happen will be very harsh. The richest people in the world, excluding the 0.1% of course , have to take the deepest cuts to wealth and resources. That means us.)

Bayer makes Bee-Contraceptives. (One way of looking at the neonicotinid pesticides that are devastating bee populations wherever they are used.) Thanks Tom.
The Royal Society for Biological Sciences releases study data confirming this effect.

Hey, what if you drove around and hired beggars to pick up trash as day-labor, fed 'em a meal and gave 'em a bunk for the night? 
Yeah, it works really well. Radical! Cheaper than bureaucracy, too.

Low-Carbon-(bare) Footprint

Saturday, August 13, 2016

Peeling Off

Less Easily Led,

The Mainstream Has Failed (or maybe just got completely led astray to "Donkey Island"), Charles Hugh Smith explains how we are sick, frustrated and poor, because we have been sold a bunch of crap products and marketing concepts, instead of learning to be ourselves (whatever that means).
http://www.oftwominds.com/blogaug16/mainstream8-16.html

Black Lives Matter supports Palestinian rights, and is in hot water with Israel and vast perception-management apparatus. BLM has come out against Israeli genocide against Palestinians, the native and rightful inhabitants of the land. Black Lives Matter also spoke against the US imperial policies of destroying brown-people-countries with oil, and other murder-for-profit policies. (I wonder if the next economic crisis in America will reveal through our free-press that back people are actually to blame...)

Here is a fun headline, saying Erdogan and Putin will further weaken dollar hegemony by trading in Russian and Turkish currencies, not dollars or Euros. (This may be way overblown...)

John Helmer interview on Real News Network (transcript) is the best analysis I could find on Putin/Erdogan meeting. Helmer notes that Erdogan made some very undiplomatic public statements before going in to negotiate, poisoning his own well. It wad a dull-thud meeting...

Speaking of "undiplomatic", here are the results of the most in-depth study of who supports Trump. It's not just uneducated poor whites. Affluent white folks like Trump, and it's in regions where they see their children getting left out, even if they are doing fine themselves.

Speaking VERY diplomatically, Bill and Hillary made a quarter of a  billion dollars, mostly from speaking fees, since they left the white house. 
They didn't even have a busy schedule...

Scotland got all her electricity from wind recently, on a particularly steadily windy day. Thanks Jeanine.

Storing Solar Energy in Okra Forest



Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Deep State Rules

Placebo-Responders,

What we vote doesn't matter, except to inform our masters how to best manipulate us. Thinking we are deciding stuff works pretty well, overall. We get to have a much higher opinion of ourselves than most herds of cattle. We don't even think we're being herded. We think WE get to decide things for the herd.
The latest example that I see is the friends and family who tell me very gravely that we have to vote for Clinton or we'll get Trump, who is Hitler. Trump is sure channeling the right-populist energy that Hitler and Mussolini channeled. Hillary Clinton is what she is, and represents the post-Reagan status-quo, neocons and Goldman Sachs. There is no lesser evil, and we will be told what we think, what we've decided, and what we will be doing about it in the crisis.
Knowing that Dr Stein will never be elected President, and that she would have to do what she is told by the Deep-State, same as Obama does, I have spent my own money in the futile human act of making #100 of  "I VOTE GREEN, JILL STEIN MD PRESIDENT 2016" t-shirts. To save money, I model one myself below.
I just want bicyclists to wear them in traffic. Jenny says I should give some to the beggars I give $1 to on my bike commutes. I might...


Charles Hugh Smith has an excellent analysis here, and I won't ask him to divulge his sources. He says the Deep-State, our real government in this great empire, is divided, and that Hillary Clinton  might become more of  liability than even Donald Trump, as the militarism-only neocon-driven foreign policy keeps backfiring, unraveling and getting more acutely insane.

Tom sent me an article, and there are many with the same video of Hillary Clinton having a seizure on-camera. A couple are included. Hillary had a closed head injury, with loss of consciousness, right temporal lobe damage and a right temporal area venous sinus thrombosis (blood clot) in 2012. The bizarre and sudden facial and body movements, and eyes briefly crossing as right eye turns in, are typical of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy and the Partial Complex Seizures it produces, which result in sudden bizarre behavior of many sorts.

There have been 5 Clinton-related deaths in 6 weeks (so don't bench-press without a spotter after testifying against Clintons), but this one may have been the DNC staffer who leaked the Clinton emails. 
Julian Assange comments in a painfully-constrained fashion about the murder of Seth Rich, who was shot multiple times in the back, and not robbed of obvious valuables, in his very safe Washington, DC neighborhood. 
Assange/Wikileaks offer $20k reward for info leading to the murderer(s).

Jenny and I have been visiting family in New York State and rural Massachusetts, for a little over a week, so no news blogs. Easing back into it tonight.

Ineffectual-Newsboy-in-T-Shirt

Monday, August 1, 2016

The Bountiful Earth

Living Today,

Inside City 40, "The Graveyard of the Earth". Thanks Charles. This is Russia's Los Alamos. It has higher radioactivity than Chernobyl, and has for generations. People live an idyllic life here, mostly their whole lives, though a fair number die young of cancer. Even in the bad days, this was a good place, but you had to disappear from the face of the earth, and your family, to live here. Really interesting.

Notre Dame Professor of Constitutional Studies explains how bright, polite and competent American elite college students are "a generation of know-nothings".
"That's not a bug, it's a feature!" Our establishment really does not want bright Americans thinking about revolution and representative-democracy and weird perversions like that. "Just do good work and don't ask questions! We've got it covered. Vote Clinton!" Thanks again, Charles.

NSA staffer, turned whistle-blower, William Binney, says the NSA has all of Clinton's deleted emails, and may be the source of the leak. The FBI can better ask the NSA for that crap than ask Moscow.

Former Congresswoman from Georgia, and Green Party Presidential Candidate in 2008, Cynthia McKinney, points out the circumstantial evidence that Israel's Mossad was either complicit in or responsible for the recent terrorist attacks (or false-flags) in Munich and Nice. It seems the same photographer was pre-positioned for both events, and got out the ideal quick-and-early pictures and story that makes a false-flag terror-event so effective for mass consciousness. All the answers, right away, sleep on it that night. (Usually they have continuity-folks to prevent this kind of breach-of-cover. Maybe somebody was taking sick-leave or vacation. Anyway, the guy quickly "accidentally deleted" his pictures on multiple websites really quickly, once he was spotted and called-out.) Thanks Colleen.

Satyajit Das has a story with a humdrum title, but he really has excellent information compiled in it. Yes, "The Pieces are Falling Into Place for Another Global Financial Crisis". This is not long.

Depletion is Real; Depletion is Now, and If a Jellyfish stings You, You Know Why, Ugo Bardi

Here are the subtropical (not EVERYTHING dies in winter, so cabbage, lettuce, carrots, onions and snow peas work) garden rotation protocols, which produce and improves the soil in all beds year round, every year. Liberty Garden ("Food-Partial-Security-Garden" lacks a certain ring.)

Preparing for Next Season