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Kids With Guns - Gorillaz Top
Off to Putney yesterday to drummygirl & internetsdairy 's wedding. It was a steamy hot day on the coach, and overall I was glad I'd travelled in mufti and carried me posh clothes to get changed into on arrival (even though it was a bit of a pain lugging the bag along - props to R for sharing the carrying, mind). Once in London, we stopped briefly for a bite of felafel in Notting Hill - thank goodness for comida arabe , so tasty and reliable! - and washed up afterwards - tasty and reliable it may be, but garlic sauce is kinda messy. Thence on to Putney, getting to the Star and Garter in just the right time to meet other early arrivers, moleintheground and angelv . By the time I'd nipped to the loo to freshen up and get changed, loads of others had arrived, too. The wedding ceremony itself was lovely - Jen & Rob obviously simultaneously moved, very happy, and kinda tickled, in a beautiful venue with all the organizational stuff running smoothly. Jen looked lovely; so did Rob, but less "dressy": Tasty food, a genuinely funny best man's speech (but then we expected no less from gideondefoe ), and lots of lovely people = an A-grade wedding. O yes, and Jen even made her own ceramic table centrepiece vases ! Big thumbs up. *** We got back to Oxford tired and happy and were in bed at a very reasonable midnight or so, meaning that getting up in good time to go plant-shopping with cleanskies was not too difficult despite the generous amounts of wine consumed at the wedding. And plant-shop we did - shrubs and bedding plants ahoy. Jrmy did the bulk of the pulling up and digging out and planting in, while I did a bit more trimming of hedge and some other useful stuff like taking the load of euphorbia remains to the tip part-way through the afternoon. The result is ace and I am much pleased - thanks again, Jrmy! yay for gardens. Two of the plants are ones that R and I were given as non-wedding presents at August Holiday, so it was particularly nice to see them planted up. I nearly did them myself earlier in the week, but then thought again when I read the label more cautiously and saw that they grow to around 6 ft. Hmm, not ones to go in the middle of the nearby bed, then! In the end one is near to a rather bald bit of fence and the other is in a gap towards the back of the garden, so we will enjoy them separately. Source
 
Nfl Tv Schedule 2009 Top
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Shane Mosley Calls Out Mayweather Top
Sunday morning Google trends UFC 103 Mayweather Marquez » The SAV … 14) Shane Mosley calls out Mayweather 38) Who won the Mayweather Marquez fight 51) Floyd Mayweather 54) Floyd Mayweather vs Juan Manuel Marquez video 60) Mayweather vs. Marquez live stream free 69) Manny Pacquiao 71) Miguel Cotto … More Google search trends UFC 103 Mayweather/Marquez » The SAV SCI … 16) Shane Mosley calls out Mayweather 38) Mayweather vs. Marquez video replay 86) Who won the Mayweather/Marquez fight. 50) Who won the fight last night. I’m assuming that the ‘who won the fight last night’ is referring to … rochesterturning.com » Blog Archive » President Obama's opinion … … mayweather vs marquez live stream free; mayweather vs marquez live stream free; shane mosley calls out mayweather ; shane mosley calls out mayweather ; richard alden samuel mccroskey iii; richard alden samuel mccroskey iii … Sugar Shane Mosley Calls Out Mayweather . Mayweather gets mad … Video: Get Em’: Floyd Mayweather Gettin At Shane Mosley For Trying To Play Him While Gettin Interviewed! (Shane vs Floyd Might Be Going Down Soon) Shane Mosley Calls Out Mayweather (Video) | ShowStalker Shane Mosley Calls Out Mayweather Floyd, in a most animated fashion as it happens before the fight. However this time around things. showstalker says: New Blog post Shane Mosley Calls Out Mayweather (Video) http://bit.ly/18lsh3 …   memchip says: jumeirah essex house hotel upon &copy against steinway piano prices with merrick bank across shane mosley calls out mayweather   xnewsvze says: SHANE MOSLEY CALLS OUT MAYWEATHER http://bit.ly/4bwZji   memchip says: pa unemployment claims near shane mosley calls out mayweather concerning richard alden samuel mccroskey iii regarding ken burns national   marilynnyeabee says: RT shane mosley calls out mayweather -TipTop Results http://bit.ly/3nDGaz   kinougo says: shane mosley calls out mayweather http://bit.ly/48hCTt   buzzfollow2 says: shane mosley calls out mayweather http://buzzfollow.com/17131  
 
Transitions? Top
We are in what I suspect will be the most fundamental transition Homo sapiens has ever experienced. By transition I mean a change in the ways of living so radical it constitutes a revolution. Preceded by the language revolution, the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and the so-called information revolution, the current transition is hard to characterize by one single name — an evocative sound bite. If I were to try to describe it succinctly it might be called the "Evolution Revolution"! Our world is changing, mostly at our own hands, so much that the only possible transition we can make is a rapid evolution. And by that I do not mean cultural evolution alone. I mean primarily evolution of our species. The reason is that evolution, that is speciation, takes place under emerging (and long-term) stressful conditions that select for fitness in dealing with them. Fitness means individuals having certain traits, either behavioral or physical (or both) are better able to cope with the new conditions and procreate more successfully than their less fit conspecifics. Individuals having a genetic headstart, meaning possessing a specific allele ** that endows them with slightly better coping capacity, have a good chance of passing that allele on to their offspring, and over generations even better versions of the allele may emerge. Then the continuing selection pressure will assure that the allele starts to dominate in the population. Another scenario is that a drastic change in the environment can result in active selection against most members of the population NOT possessing a favorable allele, leaving only those whose "pre-adaptation" allows them to survive. Of course if no such allele exists than it can spell extinction for that species. The fact is that our world is changing rapidly and those changes are leading to highly stressful conditions for us and many other species. Are we on the verge of an evolutionary revolution as a result? Can Homo sapiens produce a new, better adapted species — adapted to what the world is becoming? The answer depends on whether or not there are individuals in the population who have pre-adapted allelic forms 1 . The two main questions about this transition are: How rapidly will the changes occur? and How radical will they be? There is a great deal of uncertainty about the changes in the physical environment due to climate changes resulting from global warming. Even though we have some startling and frightening empirical data on things like polar ice cap melting, we are still struggling with the validity of our models that produce various scenario projections regarding how bad and how soon. However, there is another major threat looming that may very well have a sooner and much more drastic impact on our species in terms of a change so radical that it could lead to an evolutionary revolution. That threat comes from the decline in net energy available to support our complex, high energy civilization. Many people in economics and politics are starting to, at least vaguely, grasp the significance of something like peak oil production. For many people, affected by Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth", the initial concern has been on raising CO 2 atmospheric (and oceanic) concentrations due to burning fossil fuels and leading to a general average heating of the world's fluidic systems. Now it turns out that we have been burning those fossil fuels at accelerated rates for the last 100 years (or more) and depleting a non-renewable reservoir at a phenomenal rate. Now we learn that it is taking increasing amounts of energy to do the work of getting the raw fuels out of the ground, leaving less net energy to do the work of the rest of the economy. On top of that, and because of it, we are finding it increasingly unprofitable to get that next unit of energy out. It now looks pretty much like we have reached the peak of production of oil, and will before long reach the same limits for natural gas and coal! After the peak things don't look promising. As I've written elsewhere in these blogs, except for nuclear power, there is no other (renewable) energy source that comes close to fossil fuels for the purposes of running the kind of economy we have gotten used to (or as I claim, spoiled by!) The talk among these economists (e.g. Paul Krugman), commentators (e.g. Tom Friedman), and politicians (e.g. Barack Obama) now is of a transition from a high energy (carbon-based) civilization to a low energy one. In the minds of all too many people this is imagined as a civilization that in not much different from today but perhaps with more localization of production, smaller communities, using locally generated electricity from solar and wind. These communities will be dotted all over the world to replace dense urban centers which require transportation of all essential commodities from distant production centers (though imagined to be not too distant). Some urban visionaries imagine such centers will persist but the transportation bringing stuff in will be electrified rail, powered by giant thermal solar generators out in the desert. In most cases the scenarios accommodate the 9+ billion population that the UN projects for 2050. It isn't clear to me though what these visionaries picture for grappling with climate change. I think many of the same people believe that we will, as part of that transition (to smaller carbon footprints), fix global warming and avert climate disasters. We are in a transition alright. But I seriously doubt that it will be the one these many hopeful people envision. Human beings are extremely adaptive. As a species we have shown remarkable capacity to adapt to so many kinds of environments and events over history. We are extremely clever. We are inventive and often insightful when it comes to making do with what we have to work with. There is no doubt that humans have the capacity to accommodate a wide range of stressful conditions. But there is one very significant difference between all prior historical experience and what we are about to experience. For all of history the net flow of energy has been increasing in volume and power. Much of our pre-history and history is a story of finding and learning to exploit new, more potent sources of energy to supplement our simple physiological conversion of food into new biomass and the ability to move and do work. We discovered how to control fire, how to plant and harvest seeds, how to manipulate animals, how to harness water and wind for mechanical power, etc. With the discovery of fossil fuels, however, we really broke into the bank . And today we have a global population of 7.8 billion people, most of whom depend either directly or indirectly on the burning of fossil fuels for their incomes. We can't even build a nuclear reactor without a significant input from coal and oil! And the bank vault is getting spare. Oh sure there is still plenty of oil, coal, and gas underground. The problem is it is getting harder and harder to get to it. Simple laws of physics. And the principle of picking the low-hanging fruit first. It takes much more work (and hence energy) to pick the apples high in the tree. Similarly, it takes much more work to get at those diminishing supplies of fossil fuels. What is true about not being able to build a reactor without fossil fuel is also the case for alternative energy capture equipment. As of right now you can't build wind turbines or solar panels and deliver them to suitable collection sites without fossil fuels 2 . Then there is the problem of scale. Currently fossil fuels account for more than 80% of the energy flow in the US (somewhat less in other OECD countries). Hydroelectric and nuclear for about 19% and the new alternatives about 1%. How do you go from that low base to virtually replace the 80% (a lot of which is transportation) in just a decade or two. That is what it will take because the projections for the decline in fossil fuel availability indicate that after about two more decades fossil fuels will be prohibitively expensive 3 . Some commentators and politicians imagine a WWII-level effort to ramp up production of alternative power systems because of this. What it would more likely require is an order of magnitude greater than WWII effort AND redirecting most of the current energy flow from fossil fuels to the effort. The rationing of fuels for such an effort will make the rationing of rubber and fuels during WWII look like a cake walk. More and more, the likely scenario is looking to me like an accelerating downward spiral (and this doesn't take into account truly foolish reactions of violence and attempts to grab resources through war — you know, like what we are doing now!) that will diminish civilization to a meager shadow of itself, if anything that you could call civilization remains at all. And the really devastating news is that such a scenario has horrific consequences for the vast majority of people in the world. The current population cannot be sustained without massive inputs of high power energy. Modern farming depends entirely on huge inputs from fossil fuels. So does the health care system everywhere (no matter how funded). Indeed, all of our infrastructure and protection services (fire, police, etc.) could not operate without equipment (manufactured using fossil fuels) and transportation. It is a matter of time and resources. It looks increasingly like we have not enough of either. And then there really is the human psychology factor. How will we humans react to a declining energy world? Will we roll over and die without some kind of reaction? Not likely. Will we thrash out trying to preserve our own skins and screw civil behavior? Certainly an imaginable reaction. But if the rate of energy decline is fast enough there won't be time for even hoarders to get a leg up. There won't be energy supplies to fuel an army, navy, or certainly not an air force! There aren't even enough horses to have a mounted cavalry. Some people have envisioned a future in which we simply regress back through the 19th, then 18th, then 17th centuries, and so on, until we reach some kind of equilibrium, perhaps a pre-Roman style civilization. After all they didn't have fossil fuels like we do. Maybe we could live like they did before the collapse of the Roman Empire? Right. Really? The transition we are entering is global and fundamentally different from anything our species has faced before. There is no where else to go now. We can't escape to some different continent. We can't even leave our gravitational well without significant energy. This is it. We are stuck in this world with the consequences of our own past excesses and that is all there is to the story. I can imagine a future world where the population is down to a sustainable level using real-time solar energy capture to sustain a suitable civilization, even a technological one. It is feasible for humans to exist, have their comforts, their entertainments, arts, and leisure thanks to energy supplementation beyond food and shelter, at appropriate population size and in steady-state. But getting from where we are to that ideal future is going to involve a revolution — an evolution revolution. The stresses are going to be substantial. I suspect that the selection forces are going to be primarily directed at selecting against most current failings of human nature. I have written extensively about how we humans today are, ourselves, what I think is a transition species. We set on the path toward truly sapient beings, but we're at best a work in progress. The brain, particularly the prefrontal cortex, needs further physical development to boost our moral sentiments, our strategic thinking abilities, and our abilities to regulate our limbic emotions. We need to become a much wiser version of what we are now. And by 'we' I mean our genus Homo since I mean that the brain needs actual genetic improvements. Our distant progeny would be a new species, one I have dubbed Homo eusapiens , man the truly wise. I have evidence-based reasons for believing that the pre-adapted alleles are available in the population of humanity. Perhaps they are sparse, perhaps only in a weak form, but the potential is there. We just have to find them. If this scenario is even partially correct then it leaves a very important question for those of us who are thinking about what to do so save humanity. If we can see our real objective as saving our genus and realizing that our species has to evolve to meet the new environment of tomorrow, then what should we be doing now to help make survival more likely? Or do we just give up on that and either fight for our own hopeless survival or roll over and accept the extinction of Homo ? As our species is now, smart, creative, and with the glimmer of high moral sentiments, do we have the capability of facing reality when it means our demise? Do we have the courage to set aside our own selfish desires to imagine our kind going on until the Sun dies. Do we have the moral fortitude to accept the science we have embraced even when it tells us we are finished and it's time for a new start with a more adapted species? Can we, or many of us anyway, do the right thing and help prepare for a distant future that we will never see? All of us know, as individuals, that we are mortal. As we approach the end years we come to accept that mortality and, if we are concerned at all for our surviving families, we take steps to help them carry on after we are gone. This is a natural part of life that all of us face. Some probably better than others, of course. But it makes sense to plan for the futures of those we leave by investing our resources in their future. Why should it be different for us as a species?   ** Wikipedia article with some possible problems, read carefully! I thought it fairly stated the definition and description well enough to save me some typing! 1 We are talking not just about a single allele (a single gene), but most likely several important ones. Not only that we have to consider various versions of the short snippets of DNA that are not protein-coding, but part of the elaborate gene expression control program we now know to exist in much of what we used to call 'junk' DNA, the huge segments between protein-coding sections. Small changes in these control segments can have major impacts on when genes are expressed during development and hence produce significant changes in phenotypes with very little difference in genotypes. Our genome differs from that of chimpanzees by less than expected by the gross differences in behavior and body form. Part of the explanation may well involve subtle but important differences in the control networks for development. 2 I have heard there are attempts to construct manufacturing facilities for both solar cells and wind turbines using electricity generated by these technologies! I hope a lot more of this is tried. However, we shouldn't get too excited until those technologies are also being used to extract the raw materials, ship them, drive the final assembly, ship the final products, and account for their installation. The shipping is particularly interesting since it means using electrified vehicles that can be recharged based on electricity production by, say some windmill somewhere, putting the electricity into the grid. Running the main manufacturing plant using your own product is a step in the right direction, but so much more needs to be done. 3 A complicating factor is that many exporting nations (for oil in particular) are increasingly using their own products even while production rates are not rising or are even declining. That means countries dependent on imports of energy are going to be hurting far more quickly than those
 
De week in vogelvlucht......... Top
Supersnel weer gegaan deze week, daarom even een up-dateje: Maandag Eerst nuchter bloed laten prikken voor de jaarlijkse grote controle voor de suiker en met veel last weer naar de fysio geweest die de behandeling aangepast heeft naar mijn bevindingen. Dinsdag gewerkt, het lijkt erop of er steeds minder personeel rondloopt en dat klopt ook wel, want de vakantieperiode is weer voorbij zodat de hulpkrachten niet meer zoveel aanwezig zijn. Dit was ook wel te merken, hun afwezigheid dan......... komt goed (hoop ik). Heel raar, maar na amper een half uur aan het werk te zijn werd ik helemaal niet lekker, ben gaan zitten en heb aan mijn collega gevraagd om een bekertje water te halen met flink wat suiker erin. Waarom weet ik niet, maar nadat ik dat op had ging het stilletjes aan weer beter en heb er de rest van de dag geen last meer van gehad. In de avond onverwacht bezoek gehad van Mieke die gezellig even op de koffie kwam, altijd welkom en leuk! Woensdag had ik met ons moederke in spe afgesproken om samen met haar de babykleertjes te wassen en te strijken, een hele leuke bezigheid waar ik echt van heb genoten! Nog niet alles klaar maar de rest doen we snel. Ook nog een heel leuk kleedje gekocht voor op de babykamer van Winnie de Pooh Donderdag stond een bezoekje aan het ziekenhuis op het programma, jaarlijkse controle voor de suiker waarbij ik in ieder oog 3x gedruppeld werd en ik een groot gedeelte van de dag weinig heb kunnen zien, lastig maar niet meer dan dat. Vrijdag weer naar de fysio waarbij ik op aanraden van ons moederke in spe (die tenslotte ook verpleegkundige is) aangegeven aan de therapeut wat ik ondervonden had dinsdag waarbij hij opmerkte dat het ook weleens kon liggen aan een beklemming in mijn nek. Daarom heeft hij weer eens gekraakt en inderdaad, er zaten nog een paar belemmeringen. Heel voorzichtig ben ik ook optimistisch, het lijkt erop de de therapie vruchten af gaat werpen, sommige dingen gaan weer wat makkelijker al ben ik er nog lang niet, maar net wat is zeg: ik ben "voorzichtig optimistisch" ! Zaterdag zijn we saampjes met de Brabantliner naar de 50+ Beurs in Utrecht geweest, gezellig maar iedere beurs houd bijna hetzelfde in. Wel hebben ze daar mijn suiker gemeten en volgens hun was deze aan de hoge kant, 8.0 maar goed dat ik komende week naar het diabetes-spreekuur moet, kijken hoe de waarde daar is. Vroeg in de avond gezellig op de koffie bij de jongens en daarna lekker met de voeten omhoog lui op de bank . Zondag vandaag dus, eerst lekker uitgeslapen, genoten van het nog heerlijke weer, vanmiddag op de fiets naar ons moederke in spe en haar manneke gereden, lekker glaasje gedronken en wat gebuurt, daarna weer naar huis en lekker gegeten. Morgen begint alweer een nieuwe week..................(!) Voor wie het wil: " Tot gauw!" Source
 
Greg Hunter, "The Fed's Secret Money and the Media Cover-Up" Top
"The Fed's Secret Money and the Media Cover-Up" By Greg Hunter "HR 1207 is a bill, first sponsored by Congressman Ron Paul in the U.S. House of Representatives, that will audit the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve has never been audited in it's 96 year history. Contrary to popular belief, the Fed is not an arm of the U.S. Government but a subcontractor for monetary policy. It is the Fed that also produces the money in your pocket, thus the term Federal Reserve Note. The Bill, as of September 16, has 289 co-sponsors in Congress. If the Bill is signed into law, the Fed will be forced to open its books and show how clandestine policy decisions are made. Some of the questions Congress wants answered are: Why did the Fed give foreign bank s 500 billion dollars during the financial meltdown last year? What are the names of the all the bank s, both foreign and domestic that got bailed out, and how much money did each bank get? Why was AIG bailed out and not Lehman Brothers? The Fed has spent or committed trillions of dollars; where did the money go? These are just a few of the secrets the Fed is keeping from American taxpayers. H.R. 1207 will receive a hearing in the House Committee on Financial Services towards the end of September. Representative Alan Grayson of Florida's 8th Congressional District has been a staunch advocate of the Bill. Listen as Rep. Grayson announces the hearing on H.R. 1207, also known as "The Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009." I also have some questions for the mainstream media. Why is a story with trillions of dollars in secret bailout money not being covered? As a former investigative correspondent for both ABC and CNN, I know what makes a good legitimate story that will hold up to scrutiny. This is a very big legitimate story with profound implications for every American! Just last month, the Fed lost a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in Federal Court: "Aug. 25 (Bloomberg) — The Federal Reserve must for the first time identify the companies in its emergency lending programs after losing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit….The judge said the central bank "improperly withheld agency records" by "conducting an inadequate search" after Bloomberg News reporters filed a request under the information act. She gave the Fed five days to turn over documents it told the reporters it located, including 231 pages of reports, and said it must look for more at the Federal Reserve bank of New York, which runs most of the loan programs bank s are worried that the disclosure of borrowers' identities by the Fed, the lender of last resort, would cause customers to empty their bank accounts in a run on the bank , said Scott Talbott, vice president of governmental affairs at the Washington-based 'Financial Services Roundtable,' a lobbying group." The Fed has indicated it plans to appeal the case and has until the end of September to do so. Meanwhile, the biggest story in the financial history of the country is being ignored by the press. Maybe this is part of the reason the news media's credibility rating sank to a new all time low in a recent Pew Research Center poll." - Greg Hunter, http:// usawatchdog.com/the-feds-secret-money-and-the-media-cover-up/ A Comment: Present company, Mr. Hunter, excluded, you won't find a better description of todays so-called "journalists" than this: "There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes." - John Swinton, 1913 Oh yeah, "fair and balanced..." Source
 
Fantasy Football Now Top
FANTASY FOOTBALL NOW AOL Sports Fantasy Football ESPN’s Matthew Berry on “One Life to Live” Xclusive Interview | Molly Qerim – PureStyle Magazine | Music … In addition to the mainstream sports I cover fantasy sports and Mixed Martial Arts, working on MMA Live and Fantasy Football Now . I also interview all the guests that come to Bristol and cover sporting events for the site, … botanical vitality, the face on the milk carton, … | ПОРНФОЛИО … new zealand warm up match live streaming wisconsin unemployment apple picking in massachusetts shane mosley calls out mayweather black brant xii fantasy football now resveratrol side effects carrboro music festival wes welker week 2 … proantinox konarka superman batman public enemies resveratrol … superman batman public enemies fantasy football now merrick bank monster miata rich franklin vs vitor belfort fight video monster miata ufc 103. mmillonida says: Correction Fantasy Football Now not Fantasy Gameday, my apologies @therealtmr .   flying_gramma says: hot: fantasy football now http://bit.ly/17JNze   Traepoint says: Need to get Fantasy Football Now on ESPN2!! #ffn_espn   tiptop_trends_1 says: Sentiment about fantasy football now is 91 %Tips & 6 %Pits on TipTop: http://bit.ly/9PBQz Re-Tip: http://bit.ly/cb0YRV   NealStewart says: espn’s web show " fantasy football now " is way better than their TV show "sunday NFL countdown" why? no chris berman, mostly.   MelloAngeles says: ESPN.com’s Fantasy Football Now is fast becoming the best Sunday morning pre-game show.   hnic1971 says: I like @espn commercial w/Ditka & Snoop Dog. Love @espn Fantasy Football Now . Great line up of @nfl games today.   Mowder says: Watching Fantasy Football Now on ESPN.com waiting for a big Sunday of football. Thought I was set until Welker came up inactive. #ffn_espn  
 
"Carl Jung: The Holy Grail of the Unconscious" Top
"Carl Jung: The Holy Grail of the Unconscious" By Sara Corbett "This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say "Liber Novus," which is Latin for "New Book." Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn't know the book's vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome. And yet between the book's heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again. Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book — what it is, what it means — is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it. Of those who did see it, at least one person, an educated Englishwoman who was allowed to read some of the book in the 1920s, thought it held infinite wisdom — "There are people in my country who would read it from cover to cover without stopping to breathe scarcely," she wrote — while another, a well-known literary type who glimpsed it shortly after, deemed it both fascinating and worrisome, concluding that it was the work of a psychotic. So for the better part of the past century, despite the fact that it is thought to be the pivotal work of one of the era's great thinkers, the book has existed mostly just as a rumor, cosseted behind the skeins of its own legend — revered and puzzled over only from a great distance. Which is why one rainy November night in 2007, I boarded a flight in Boston and rode the clouds until I woke up in Zurich, pulling up to the airport gate at about the same hour that the main branch of the United bank of Switzerland, located on the city's swanky Bahnhofstrasse, across from Tommy Hilfiger and close to Cartier, was opening its doors for the day. A change was under way: the book, which had spent the past 23 years locked inside a safe deposit box in one of the bank 's underground vaults, was just then being wrapped in black cloth and loaded into a discreet-looking padded suitcase on wheels. It was then rolled past the guards, out into the sunlight and clear, cold air, where it was loaded into a waiting car and whisked away. This could sound, I realize, like the start of a spy novel or a Hollywood bank caper, but it is rather a story about genius and madness, as well as possession and obsession, with one object — this old, unusual book — skating among those things. Also, there are a lot of Jungians involved, a species of thinkers who subscribe to the theories of Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and author of the big red leather book. And Jungians, almost by definition, tend to get enthused anytime something previously hidden reveals itself, when whatever's been underground finally makes it to the surface. Carl Jung founded the field of analytical psychology and, along with Sigmund Freud, was responsible for popularizing the idea that a person's interior life merited not just attention but dedicated exploration — a notion that has since propelled tens of millions of people into psychotherapy. Freud, who started as Jung's mentor and later became his rival, generally viewed the unconscious mind as a warehouse for repressed desires, which could then be codified and pathologized and treated. Jung, over time, came to see the psyche as an inherently more spiritual and fluid place, an ocean that could be fished for enlightenment and healing. Whether or not he would have wanted it this way, Jung — who regarded himself as a scientist — is today remembered more as a countercultural icon, a proponent of spirituality outside religion and the ultimate champion of dreamers and seekers everywhere, which has earned him both posthumous respect and posthumous ridicule. Jung's ideas laid the foundation for the widely used Myers-Briggs personality test and influenced the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous. His central tenets — the existence of a collective unconscious and the power of archetypes — have seeped into the larger domain of New Age thinking while remaining more at the fringes of mainstream psychology." The rest of this (very long) article can be found here: - http:// www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html?em Source
 
The Economy: "GEAB N°37, LEAP/E2020 Report, 9/16/09" Top
GlobalEurope Anticipation Bureau "GEAB N°37, LEAP/E2020 Report: Global Systemic Crisis: In Pursuit of the Impossible Recovery" Public announcement GEAB N°37 (Septembre 16, 2009) "Before this summer, LEAP/E2020's team announced that there would be no recovery in sight in September 2009, and not until summer 2010 in any event. Well indeed, contrary to the claims of the media, and financial and political circles, we confirm our anticipation. The slowdown in the speed of collapse of the global economy, at the origin of all the "good news", is only due to the world's enormous public financial effort of the last twelve months. But the "time saved" using taxpayers' money around the world should have been dedicated to redesigning the international monetary system at the heart of the current systemic crisis. Yet, besides a few cosmetic considerations and huge gifts to US and European bank s, nothing serious has been undertaken, and, when it comes to the future, the "every man for himself " rule prevails. Now, as summer 2009 comes to a close, and as the three rogue waves start impacting the global economy hard (unemployment bank ruptcies and monetary shocks, the time to mend the system, or to prepare for a soft transition towards a new global system, is over. The first signs of a major decoupling are beginning to appear: the rest of the world is rapidly moving away from the Dollar zone. There is a 95 percent chance that 1,000 billion new USDs will be printed in a very near future... not very attractive for the Dollar zone. Inconsistent statistics reflect a chaotic world economy: We are heading straight to the phase of geopolitical dislocation expected to begin in the fourth quarter of 2009. In this issue of the GEAB, our team analyses the trends at work (real estate market, strategic issues…) within the current chaos resulting from a flood of unchecked public expenditure and a persistently uncontrolled financial system in a context of growingly inconsistent statistics. Paradoxically, dislocation has become, according to our researchers, the only way to economic recovery (a recovery that will take place around a global architecture and interaction between economic, social and financial spheres profoundly different from anything we knew in past decades. Our team believes that the first features of the "post-crisis world" should begin to appear by summer 2010 and, in the coming months, they will dedicate themselves to their identification. Meanwhile, as anticipated in the previous editions of the GEAB, no one can now construct a true picture of today's global economic situation as macroeconomic figures are more and more contradictory or simply absurd. Measurement data and instruments have been so manipulated and limited to a volatile US Dollar as sole benchmark, that no government, international organisation or bank can now tell in which direction the global system is heading. The media reflect this chaos and contribute to their readers'/auditors'/viewers' bewilderment: depending on the day, or even the hour, that they give contradictory news on finance, economy or currency. Policy makers, entrepreneurs, employees,… economists or analysts… are reduced to Pascal's wager to assess what will happen in future months. Click image for larger size. According to LEAP/E2020, the chart above tells about facts that cannot be ignored: the global economic, financial and monetary system is drifting at an increasing rate, its weakness is reaching unequalled lows in modern history, and the slightest shock (financial, geopolitical or even natural) can now break it apart. The States' breathtaking plunge into bottomless public debt (governments feel that, without the support of public money, world economies would soon resume their collapse) is creating a literally explosive situation, conveying massive tax increase in Japan, Europe, the US… If there is any recovery in sight, it is that of tax. As a matter of fact, confronted to historic unemployment rates and a free-falling economy, Japanese voters decided to dismiss their decade-old leaders: they have probably inaugurated the great political upheaval of the next phase of the crisis. This summer, the Obama administration was also surprised to discover the importance of the popular anger which focused on his health system reform programme (though a much needed one). Here is a very illustrative analogy of the crisis today that imposed itself on our researchers: a rubber ball in a staircase. It seems to rebound on every step (then giving the impression that the fall has stopped) but it falls even lower on the next step, "resuming" its collapse. "Disoriented" economic players and policy-makers: Of course, all this doesn't create a favorable investment climate for business. Production capacity is under-used everywhere in historic proportions. Stocks are only renewed at a drip-feed rate (eliminating any hope of a recovery based on their replacement). Consumers have become realistic economically: no money, no purchase. Their salaries fall when they haven't simply been lost through job losses, the bank s don't lend any more because they know that they themselves are still insolvent (despite the "golden" powder thrown in the eyes of public opinion these last months). The state itself, on its own, cannot substitute itself for the frenetic consumerism of the past. In the US, a return to the previous state would require about USD 2,500 billion pumped into the economy each year. Barak Obama's stimulus package, less than USD 400 billion a year over two years is far from the amount needed if he has to replace the non-spending of households and businesses. The problem is that this is exactly the present situation of the US economy. But the US are not alone in this regard. Asia and Europe are also confronted with a drastic unemployment surge that statistical manipulation cannot hide beyond this summer: jobless no longer entitled to unemployment benefits, youngsters placed in waiting internships or jobless recruited for short-term public construction projects, lay-offs postponed by means of short-time allowance measures, plants artificially maintained in activity thanks to public funds,… from Beijing to Paris, in Washington, Berlin, London or Tokyo, every trick is being used to hide the situation as long as possible… until the recovery arrives. Unfortunately, the recovery will not arrive in time. It's Blücher instead of Grouchy. Instead of a recovery in September, the world is suffering the impact of this summer's three rogue waves: • massive unemployment, for people soon to be excluded from further benefits in particular, and its disastrous consequences for nations' political and social stability, are beginning to appear. • the number of bank ruptcies (companies, municipalities,…) and deficits of all sorts, are exploding. • and, of course, the impact of all this on the US Dollar, Treasuries (and the UK, suffering collateral damage) . The first wave already reached the shore at the end of summer 2009. The second one is coming up. And the third is beginning to appear on the horizon. In any event, if the Eurozone and Asia are in a better situation to face up to the impact of these waves (as already analyzed in GEAB N°28 of last October), their situation is not so good that they can expect a recovery yet. It is however on the US, the Dollar and US Treasuries on the one hand, and on the UK and the Pound on the other, that the consequences of the three waves will be harder. Mid-summer night dreams also have an end!" - http:// http://www.leap2020.eu/GEAB-N-37-Contents_a3798.html Source
 
The Economy: Mike Whitney, "The Post-Bubble Malaise" Top
"The Post-Bubble Malaise" by Mike Whitney "We keep hearing that "The worst is behind us", but the spin doesn't square with the facts. Sure the stock market has done well, but scratch the surface and you'll find that things are not as what they seem. Zero hedge--which is quickly becoming the "go-to" market-update spot on the Internet- recently posted an eye-popping chart which traces the Fed's monetization programs (Quantitative Easing) with the 6-month surge in the S&P 500. The $917 billion increase in securities held outright equals the Fed's $1 trillion increase to its balance sheet. In other words, the liquidity from the Fed is following the exact same trajectory as stocks, a sure sign that the market is being manipulated. Surprisingly, traders seem to know that the Fed is goosing the market and have just shrugged it off as "business as usual". Go figure? Perhaps it pays to take a philosophical approach to market rigging. Who needs the gray hair anyway? The result, however, has been that short-sellers (traders betting the market will go down) who have placed their bets according to (weak) fundamentals, have gotten clobbered. They appear to be the last holdouts who still place their faith in the unimpaired operation of the free market. (Right!) Here's how former hedge fund manager Andy Kessler sums it up in a recent Wall Street Journal article, "The Bernanke Market": "By buying U.S. Treasuries and mortgages to increase the monetary base by $1 trillion, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke didn't put money directly into the stock market but he didn't have to. With nowhere else to go, except maybe commodities, inflows into the stock market have been on a tear. Stock and bond funds saw net inflows of close to $150 billion since January. The dollars he cranked out didn't go into the hard economy, but instead into tradable assets. In other words, Ben Bernanke has been the market." So, the Fed has given a boost to stocks while keeping the bond market priced for deflation. That's quite a trick. One market is flashing "recovery" while the other is signaling "contraction". Bernanke has worked this miracle, by simply changing the definition of "indirect bidders" (which used to mean "foreign buyers" of US Treasuries) to mean just about anyone, anywhere. Here's an explanation of this latest bit of chicanery from the Wall Street Journal in June: "The sudden increase in demand by foreign buyers for Treasurys, hailed as proof that the world's central bank s are still willing to help absorb the avalanche of supply, mightn't be all that it seems. When the government sells bonds, traders typically look at a group of buyers called indirect bidders, which includes foreign central bank s, to divine overseas demand for U.S. debt. That demand has been rising recently, giving comfort to investors that foreign buyers will continue to finance the U.S.'s budget deficit. But in a little-noticed switch on June 1, the Treasury changed the way it accounts for indirect bids, putting more buyers under that umbrella and boosting the portion of recent Treasury sales that the market perceived were being bought by foreigners." ("Is foreign Demand as Solid as it Looks, Min zeng.) Pretty clever, eh? So, if the Treasury doesn't want dupes like us to know when foreign demand drops off a cliff, they just twist the definitions to meet their needs. My guess is that the Fed is building excess bank reserves (nearly $1 trillion in the last year alone) with the tacit understanding that the bank s will return the favor by purchasing Uncle Sam's sovereign debt. It's all very confusing and circular, in keeping with Bernanke's stated commitment to "transparency". What a laugh. The good news is that the trillions in government paper probably won't increase inflation until the economy begins to improve and the slack in capacity is reduced. Then we can expect to get walloped with hyperinflation. But that could be years off. For the foreseeable future, it's all about deflation. No matter how you look at it, the economy is on the ropes. Yes, there should be a rebound in the next few quarters, but once the stimulus wears off, it's back to the doldrums. According to David Rosenberg of Gluskin Sheff, "All the growth we are seeing globally this year is due to fiscal stimulus.... For 2010, the government's share of global growth, by our estimates, will be 80 per cent. In other words, there are still very few signs that organic private sector activity is stirring." The question is, how long can the Obama administration write checks on an account that's overdrawn by $11 trillion (the national debt) before the foreign appetite for US Treasurys wanes and we have a sovereign debt crisis? If the Fed is faking sales of Treasurys to conceal the damage- as I expect it is- we could see the dollar plunge to $2 per euro by the middle of 2010. Imagine pulling up to the gas pump and paying $6.50 per gallon. Ouch! That should be revive the economy. For the next year or so, the demon we face is deflation; a severe contraction exacerbated by household deleveraging and big financial sector defaults. The Fed's money-printing operations just can't keep pace with a capital hole that continues to expand from delinquencies, foreclosures, and failed loans. Workers have seen their credit lines cut and their hours reduced, households are $3 trillion above trend in their debt-to-equity ratio, and unemployment is soaring. Industry analysts expect a $1.5 trillion cut-back in credit card spending. That's why Bernanke is firehosing the whole financial system with low interest liquidity, to stimulate speculation and reverse the effects of a slumping economy. Here's a clip from an article in the UK Telegraph: "Both bank credit and the M3 money supply in the United States have been contracting at rates comparable to the onset of the Great Depression since early summer, raising fears of a double-dip recession in 2010 and a slide into debt-deflation..." Similar concerns have been raised by David Rosenberg, chief strategist at Gluskin Sheff, who said that over the four weeks up to August 24 bank credit shrank at an "epic" 9pc annual pace, the M2 money supply shrank at 12.2pc and M1 shrank at 6.5pc. "For the first time in the post-WW2 [Second World War] era, we have deflation in credit, wages and rents and, from our lens, this is a toxic brew," he said. (Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, "US credit shrinks at Great Depression rate prompting fears of double-dip recession", UK Telegraph). The Fed has pumped up bank reserves, but the velocity of money has sputtered to a standstill. There won't be an uptick in economic activity until consumers reduce their debt-load, rebalance their personal accounts and find jobs. That's a long way off, which is why San Francisco Fed chief Janet Yellen sounded more like Nouriel Roubini in this week's presentation "The Outlook for Recovery in the U.S. Economy" in S.F.: "With slack likely to persist for years, it seems likely that core inflation will move even lower, departing yet farther from our price stability objective. From a monetary policy point of view, the landscape will continue to present challenges. We face an economy with substantial slack, prospects for only moderate growth, and low and declining inflation. With our policy rate already as low as it can go, it's no wonder that the FOMC's last statement indicated that 'economic conditions are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for an extended period.' I can assure you that we will be ready, willing, and able to tighten policy when it's necessary to maintain price stability. But, until that time comes, we need to defend our price stability goal on the low side and promote full employment." That's from the horse's mouth. Recovery? What recovery? The consumer is maxed out, private sector activity is in the tank, and government stimulus is the only thing keeping the economy off the meat-wagon. Bernanke might not admit it, but the economy is sinking into post-bubble malaise." - http:// www.sott.net/articles/show/193535-The-Post-Bubble-Malaise Source
 
"Another $100 Billion in Bearer Bonds Seized on Italian Border?" Top
"Another $100 Billion in Bearer Bonds Seized on Italian Border?" by Sonia Sirletti and Elisa Martinuzzi "The U.S. Secret Service is examining more than $100 billion of U.S. government bonds confiscated in northern Italy in August, just two months after $134 billion of allegedly fake securities were seized in a nearby town. The Secret Service is analyzing whether the bonds taken in August may be counterfeit, said a spokeswoman for the U.S. embassy in Rome. Italy's financial police in Varese, north of Milan, arrested two individuals carrying the securities in a briefcase, according to a person involved in the case. The two men currently are in custody as prosecutors in the town of Busto Arsizio carry out their investigation, the person said. The seized notes include securities with face values of $500 million and $1 billion, Italian daily MF reported today, without saying where it got the information. "There must be a well-organized group behind these alleged crimes," Fabio Polimeni, a Milan lawyer specializing in counterfeiting cases, said. Italian authorities seized U.S. treasuries on June 4 with a face value of more than $134 billion from two Japanese travelers attempting to cross into Switzerland. * The two men later disappeared and the case is still under investigation. The U.S. government bonds found in the false bottom of a suitcase carried by the men were fake, a U.S. Treasury spokesman said June 18. "As financial markets become more sophisticated, creative and bigger, we can expect criminal activity to go with it and it's happening everywhere," Livia Oglio, a Milan lawyer, said. "The amount seized is phenomenal." Since the beginning of the year the police at border stations in Italy have seized 1.7 million euros of genuine money and bonds, and have confiscated more than 100 million euros of bonds that have been determined to be false, according to an Italian finance police statement in July." To contact the reporter on this story: Sonia Sirletti in Milan at ssirletti@bloomberg.net - http:// www.sott.net/articles/show/193533-U-S-Authorities-Probing-100- Billion-of-Bonds-Seized-in-Italy-Following-134-billion-Seized-in-June * The story of the earlier seizure is here: http:// coyoteprime-runningcauseicantfly.blogspot.com/2009/06/karl-denninger-1345-billion-bearer.html Karl Denninger: "You're not going to walk into a bank with $130 billion in bearer bonds and cash them. Nor are you going to sell a bond with a $500 million face value to someone without them authenticating it. They will be authenticated before you get one dime out of them - no matter who you think you're going to "give" them to. So if they're fakes and you're "just screwing around", there is no reason to hide them. Nor is there any particular reason to have authentic and recent original bank documents in your luggage with them, as has been reported. Next, unless someone knew you were smuggling them, why would you be subject to that sort of search? What made the people involved "interesting" to the authorities? This doesn't sound like a random stop to me; how many people are carrying $130 billion in bearer bonds at any given point in time? No, someone was tipped off that this was happening. Now why would you bother to stop them here, prior to their attempted delivery of such instruments, if they were fake?" - http:// market-ticker.denninger.net/archives/1119-The-Saga-Of-The-Bearer-Bonds.html Real bearer bonds must be authenticated before they're cashed in. Why smuggle fakes that are worthless? So the question then becomes, who has the capacity to acquire $100 billion in bearer bonds? And why smuggle them, instead of processing them on the open market? Source
 
"Minsky Minimum Wages, After the "Minsky Moment" Top
"Minsky Minimum Wages, After the "Minsky Moment" by Rutabaga Ridgepole "Steven Mihm, the Boston Globe's econ correspondent, has posted a relatively long appreciation of the economist Hyman Minsky, also recently celebrated by Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz for predicting the "Minsky moment" when capitalism more or less melted down after Wall Street's fourth biggest investment bank , Lehman Brothers, collapsed in September, 2008. Minsky charted a progression of financial markets beginning with predominantly conservative borrowers, who can cover the interest on their loans and pay down the principal out of income. These solid citizens are succeeded by speculative borrowers whose income only covers interest, and then by Ponzi schemers, who can only pay the interest on their loans by borrowing more money. When financial markets were dominated by Ponzi borrowers, Minsky predicted that the failure of one big player could bring down the whole system, and that's exactly what happened when Lehman failed in September 2008: a Minsky moment. So Hyman Minsky predicted the mess we're in more accurately than anybody else, and you might think that his prescription for fixing this mess would enjoy more respect than the prescriptions of boneheads like Larry Summers and Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke, who never saw it coming. But Minsky's influence is still minimal, and intelligent readers can probably figure out why from Steven Mihm's excellent summary in the Boston Globe... 'The preferred mainstream tactic for pulling the economy out of a crisis was - and is - based on the Keynesian notion of "priming the pump" by sending money that will employ lots of high-skilled, unionized labor - by building a new high-speed train line, for example. Minsky, however, argued for a "bubble-up" approach, sending money to the poor and unskilled first. The government - or what he liked to call "Big Government" - should become the "employer of last resort," he said, offering a job to anyone who wanted one at a set minimum wage. It would be paid to workers who would supply child care, clean streets, and provide services that would give taxpayers a visible return on their dollars. Such a program would not only help the poor and unskilled, he believed, but would put a floor beneath everyone else's wages too, preventing salaries of more skilled workers from falling too precipitously, and sending benefits up the socioeconomic ladder.' "Sending money to the poor and unskilled first!" But the boneheads who made this mess put Goldman Sachs at the front of the line, and the poor and unskilled... nowhere." - http:// tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/rutabaga_ridgepole/2009/09/ minsky-minimum-wages-after-the.php?ref=recdc Source
 
"The Right Way to Fix Wall Street" Top
"The Right Way to Fix Wall Street" by Henry Blodget "The Fed has apparently gotten so frustrated with the Obama administration's inability to bring change to Wall Street that it's taking matters into its own hands- parachuting Fed regulators into the bowels of bank s to make sure their compensation policies don't encourage inappropriate risk-taking. We're all for more intelligent Wall Street compensation policies. But these should come from Wall Street, not Washington. Back in the very old days, before everyone decided that letting Lehman fail was the biggest mistake made in the history of government, before Washington started to pretend that it could control everything that happened in the economy, there was a pretty good system for regulating Wall Street risk-taking: Let stupid firms fail. We need to get back to that. Yes, the fact that the "stupid firms" this time around included most of Wall Street shows that special rules of financial bank ruptcy should apply so the whole system doesn't collapse. But the firms need to be allowed to fail. What should the special rules of financial bank ruptcy be? • Managements should be tossed. • Compensation contracts and other liabilities should be torn up. • Bonus pools should be zeroed until the firms return to annual profitability. • Equity and preferred holders should be wiped out. • Junior bondholders should get a major haircut through the immediate, forced conversion of debt to equity. All of this should happen not over years in the courts, but overnight- in the manner in which the FDIC seizes failing bank s. In such proceedings, all of Wall Street's idiocy enablers will lose their shirts: The folks who work at the firms, the folks who lend money to the firms, the folks who invest in the firms and trust the firms' managements to be something other than morons. Losing your shirt generally has a sobering effect on decision-making. As long as managers, lenders, and shareholders know they will lose their shirts, the next generation of Wall Street enablers will likely be far more careful and demanding than their predecessors, at least for a little while (and don't hallucinate that the Fed's new policy is anything other than temporary). Instead of trying to stick a bureaucrat mini-pay czar in every bank to micromanage compensation, therefore, the Fed should simply develop a clear set of rules for what it will do to firms that fail (all of the above). Once the government sends a clear message that this is the fate that will befall any firm that gets itself into trouble, there will be a lot of sobering up on and around Wall Street. And that should have a quick and profound impact on compensation, without the Fed having to get involved. Lloyd Blankfein and Pete Peterson, both of Wall Street, have recently floated some intelligent compensation practices designed to boost the long-term value and health of Wall Street firms: • long-term versus short-term incentive plans (comp based on multiple-year performance). • heavy emphasis on equity versus cash comp (screw up and you'll go down with the ship). • restrictions on sale of equity comp (execs have skin in the game). • clawbacks (to discourage traders who have made a fortune in prior years to bet the firm in the next one). These are all good ideas. They will help build sounder, stronger, smarter firms. If the policies are transparent and rigorous, they should also lead to higher stock prices, as investors recognize which firms have smart incentive plans and which are being reckless and dumb. Meanwhile- and here's the real role for government on Wall Street- the Fed and Treasury should also drastically limit the amount of leverage Wall Street firms and bank s are allowed to take on. In the years leading up to the collapse, 30X-40X levered bets became the norm. As any weekend gambler can appreciate, it's not hard to go bust when you can borrow $30-$40 on margin for every dollar you have- and it's easy to borrow that $30-$40 when the folks lending it to you know that the government will guarantee them against any losses. 10X-15X leverage limits seem more reasonable, and lenders should actually be putting real money on the line (And this, too, of course, will have a dampening affect on compensation). Also, firms should be required to disclose every conceivable liability and factor it into their leverage calculation, including derivatives exposure. There shouldn't be any "off-balance sheet" assets or special-purpose vehicles, at least not any that could have a material impact on the firm's capital ratios. In short, Washington's Wall Street "fix" should be two-fold: 1. Encourage Wall Street to reform its own compensation policies and behavior by making clear what will happen to firms that get in trouble, and 2. Reduce the likelihood of disaster by setting simple, clear leverage limits. If we do that and firms still blow themselves up, then so be it. The financial system will be insulated, and Wall Street's lenders, shareholders, employees, and managements will have only themselves to blame." - http:// www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-the-feds-pay-caps- another-terrible-washington-idea-2009-9 Source
 
Are we guilty of over abstraction? Top
What makes humans different from other animals? All mammals and birds form representations of things in the world in their brains. It is doubtful that other animals assign "names" to these things. The representation in neural encoding is its own index. This is essentially what we mean when we say we see something in our mind's eye. We are activating the representation directly. But, we humans go beyond this direct representation and also assign an abstract , second order representation to index the thing-itself representation. That is we give it a name, a more compact representation, presumably encoded in the language area of neocortex (as opposed to the visual cortex). This is the basis of language ability — to be able to talk about the thing or hear someone else talk about the thing. [We might interpret the fact that some chimpanzees, gorillas, and even parrots(!) have been trained to associate symbols (hand language or symbols on a computer screen) with very primitive language expression that these animals have some simple abstraction capacity. After all, our capacity to form true abstractions had to start somewhere.] Arguably, however, an even more significant differences between human and all other animal mentation is the capacity for recursive abstraction. That is, we not only assign abstract symbols (like words or pictographs) to represent real things, relations, and events in the world, but we also manipulate those abstract representations coming up with even more abstract symbols to represent relations between our abstract representations! For example, we can classify all words referring to objects as "nouns", the name for all such words is an abstraction once removed from the object abstractions (names of things). Moreover, we can manipulate these abstractions of abstractions to form even higher order abstractions, e.g. we can talk about grammars as rules for how to use nouns (and verbs, etc.) without any reference at all to the basic word representations and certainly no reference to specific 'thing' representations. Our ability to create new abstractions from combinations of lower-level abstractions is seemingly endless. It is based on a recursive operation that is one of the new tricks that the human brain has mastered. We use it to build mental models of the world and conceptualize rules for how that world works. Our creativity allows us to construct novel manipulations and play "What-If" games in our heads. The problem with recursion is knowing when to stop! Could it be that we have gone overboard? Is one of humanity's mental problems in dealing with the real world (e.g. denial of global warming) that we have a tendency to go too far in abstracting already existing abstractions? Essentially what I am asking is, have we gotten so abstract in our ways of thinking that we can no longer refer back to what is happening in the real world for confirmation that our beliefs are veridical? It would be like saying that we have constructed mental representations of names for things that don't actually exist, but now we think of those things as a reality in themselves. Consider how easily people cut off in their minds the linkage between the steak wrapped in plastic in the butcher's case and the steer that was raised in miserable conditions, that had to be slaughtered, butchered, and transported in many pieces to the grocery store for them to buy and consume. None of this is abstract, yet it is easy to ignore when picking out that perfect cut for the barbecue. The grocery store as our source of food is a metaphorical abstraction. We've been so good at creating and manipulating abstractions that we now believe in non-metaphorical realities that do not conform to physical reality. Unlike other metaphorical realities, fictions, we create for merely entertainment value, these realities are accepted as actual reality. And we are willing to risk our existence on those beliefs. I want to explore this conjecture a bit more. First I will give you a couple of examples of 'good' recursive abstraction, that is where the process is generally a 'good' thing and in which there is always a way to reference back to physical reality, thus assuring veridicality. Then I will offer some examples of where I think we might be too inclined to over-abstraction with a result that is problematic, and we can discuss the consequences of the latter. I've already mentioned language as an expression of recursive abstraction. Our ability to form complex sentences that go beyond merely describing things and beyond describing relations between things, but can also describe higher-order abstractions (like the noun) and relations between these, is at the root of some of our crowning glories in the expansion of knowledge. Two examples come immediately to mind. Mathematics and science are spectacular achievements based on the ability to abstract and manipulate abstractions forming higher-order abstractions. In my series on I expound on the ultimate abstraction of science and math in the sense of being able to describe these in a completely abstract form. Mathematics is a system of symbols used as abstractions, for example using variables to represent some parameters or equations and relations to represent relationships, with a well developed set of rules for manipulating these symbols so as to derive other abstractions. Mathematics, in all its various forms, is a formal language. Formal means that the use of the rules is very strict (consistent). Interestingly, there is a slight (and surprising) hitch in mathematics that fortunately only shows up at the fringes — that the system might be consistent, but it cannot be complete, or vice versa, (see: Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem ) in the sense that one can prove all true theorems in the same system. That little hitch isn't much of a problem for the practical use of mathematics, but it is interesting to pure mathematicians and philosophers. Even with this interesting hiccup, math is still an extremely useful, productive way to drive abstraction to stratospheric levels. Math is the language of science. All of the sciences use mathematics in multiple different ways to express statements about the nature of the world at all levels. This can be as simple as algebraic expressions relating various variables in a dynamic process (e.g. Newton's Laws of Motion, F = ma ), or as complex as mathematical models of complex processes composed of multiple partial differential equations (calculus) that can only be solved by advanced computation. Computer models are, in some sense, the penultimate in abstractions since they are the result of the aggregation of more abstraction than any one human mind can accomplish and no single human could ever 'run' such simulations in their heads. Math and science can be viewed as systems of extreme abstraction that have been shown repeatedly to 'work' in the sense of producing practical results. Philosophy is another formal system of abstraction that preceded math and science (at least the logic part of philosophy is formal), but taken as a whole is too dependent on ambiguous language and mentation (argument) to produce consistent results. How many schools of philosophy that have been at odds with one another have been started? The branches of science and math don't compete with one another. And when there are seeming incompatibilities between any two or more sub-branches, there are formal methods for resolving the conflict. Again, these have proven to work time after time. So, while I consider philosophy to be an important endeavor to keep the mind sharp and working well, it is not an adequate method of recursive abstraction that is reliable or always tracked back to the grounding in reality. Now for some examples of rather poor abstraction that has gotten us into some serious trouble. My first example is money. Once long ago, the value of things could be determined rather straightforwardly based on the thing's contribution to survival and perhaps (after survival was assured) pleasure. But gross things, like cows and bushels of barley, are difficult to trade and even keep track of. So somewhere in Mesopotamia sometime after agriculture got going, some bright bulbs started creating markers (symbols pressed into clay slabs) representing quantities of goods of value (see: Wikipedia's History of Money ). The markers were abstractions. They worked because the represented something real in the minds of the farmers and accountants. Simple enough. People in Sumer and Ur and throughout the Middle East as well as other parts of the world, developed trading methods based on the markers. You deposited your quantity of barley in a granary, received a 'chit' marking the 'value' and later you could use the chit to buy back your grains or convert the value into something else you needed. It still worked because it wasn't that far from the old direct barter system — just a hell of a lot more convenient. But things have gotten bizarre since then! One of my earlier blogs provided a different way of looking at money ( What is money, really? ) as being information about the amount of usable energy that was available to do useful work — a physicist's perspective, if you will. This viewpoint actually takes us back to the original idea that money (those markers in clay tablets) ought to represent the actual survival/enjoyment value of things rather than some abstract market value that no one has a clue about connection to reality. I will be writing a good deal more about money in its current incarnation, especially in its form called debt, in future blogs. Here I just want to point out how incredibly abstract we have gotten in our thinking about wealth, denominated in monetary terms. Tell me, exactly what is a collateralized debt obligation (CDO) worth in terms of survival/enjoyment value? Our financial economy system (as opposed to the so-called 'real' economy where we make things that we use to survive and enjoy) has gotten so over abstracted that no one, not the economists, not the boys on Wall Street, or the investment bankers, or the politicians, or the Fed chairman and his minions — no one knows what the hell anything is worth any more. And it has had a devastating effect on valuation of real things like houses and infrastructure. Today's concept of money is so abstract (in fact money is treated as a commodity without any intrinsic value at all!) that the reality of the financial world is as much about religious beliefs as about anything called economic science (the latter now widely acknowledged as an oxymoron). Stay tuned over the next several weeks as I steep myself in biophysical economics and explore the evolution of our conceptualization of money and how disconnected from physical reality it has gotten. While we are on the topic of economics (as a study) lets mention that that particular discipline has gotten so out of touch with reality that the practitioners' guidance of policy decisions, by poor deluded politicians, has become downright dangerous. Nay, not just dangerous, suicidal! As I read Paul Krugman's Sept. 2 nd article in the New York Times it became abundantly clear to me that NO economists, even the ones who supposedly predicted this economic debacle, has any real idea about what is going on. Krugman, at least, understands that markets are not perfect, but he falls short of recognizing that the real underlying problems with the economy is that we have finally reached fundamental limits to growth and resource extraction. Krugman, Nobel prize winner, is apparently a Keynesian. someone who believe that the government should pump lots of "money" into the economy to save jobs and stimulate spending! My god, what a delusion! A formula for disaster if ever there was one, given that net energy flow into the economy is declining. Krugman, like all non-biophysical/ecological economists believes in growth. And he has his own ideas (different from the Obama crowd) as to how that can be accomplished. Economics is one of those fields that deals in over abstraction. Early economists like Leon Walras were entranced by the spectacular achievements of physics with its mathematical models. Some have coined the term "physics envy" to describe the desire that economists had for developing elegant mathematical formulations describing the "laws" of economics, and this is probably accurate to some degree. Economists are enthralled with the perfection of mathematics as a method for abstracting the underlying processes of economic activity and then manipulating those abstractions (in accordance with strict mathematical rules) to make predictive pronouncements about the way the economy works and will work in the future. The problem is that none of these deep thinkers bothered to check whether their math made sense! Until people like Kahneman and Tversky started questioning the basic assumptions of rational agents in the standard models of economics (see: Behavioral economics ) there was very little attempt (within classical economics) to check with reality (to be fair many economics PhD candidates spent years collecting data from favorable periods that seemed to confirm economic models, but there are statistics and then there are statistics!). Today economics is a religion rather than a science. Anything that doesn't conform to orthodoxy is not recognized (the psychological data about how humans are anything but rational agents is getting harder and harder to ignore!) Politicians have yet to figure this out so, for the time being, economists still have power (look at Bernanke, Geithner, and Summers as examples). But it can't last forever. Physical reality has a way of forcing itself into our consciousness even when we try hard to ignore it. Incidentally, the so-called Nobel prize in economics is actually not recognized as a true Nobel science award. It is called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel . It is highly regarded by economists, naturally, but is not now, nor ever was a recognition for 'scientific achievement'. Just so you know. Well, speaking of religion... One of the most profound and dangerous abstractions humans have engaged in is convincing themselves, and firmly believing, that they are something so special in the world that they have transcended nature completely. The human mind, as epitomized in Descartes' philosophy, for example, and in the teachings of most religions, is beyond natural law. We have extraordinary powers of reason and mentation that do not depend on bodily functions to exist. We have convinced ourselves that we have an immortal soul that exists beyond the death of the body. Never mind that no one has ever shown this with evidence. But just about everybody believes it. Those who claim it isn't so are called atheists, and I have to wonder how they know any more than believers what the 'truth' is. I will be the first to proclaim that humans are unique in the animal kingdom. We have evolved an extraordinary brain that can do things, like recursive abstraction, that, apparently, no
 
Stimulus package? Stimulate this! Top
More economic indicators are being claimed to provide evidence that the economy is stabilizing. No doubt the administration is going to spin this as showing that the enormous Keynesian stimulus package that Geithner, Summers, et al. and the duplicitous Congress put together is working. And maybe they are right, up to a point. But what exactly does it mean to say that it is working? A big chunk of the package was actually a bailout of the financial system, particularly banking, after the horrendous consequences of the sub-prime meltdown and housing bubble burst demonstrated how exposed that whole industry was. Banks of all kinds have failed and there are still a huge number of toxic assets on the books of too many remaining. The commercial real estate debt is still to be dealt with and with back-to-school sales down, Christmas orders down, and people, in general not spending, the retail business looks bleak. What happens when the businesses that pay rents (and hence service the mortgages) on those commercial properties fail? There are already huge swaths of commercial office space empty. What will happen when the banks have to take back such properties? And all the while the government is writing checks to the banks to keep them solvent (money coming from government debt extension) banking executives are paying themselves huge bonuses for being so successful at staying afloat. Hey, why not? They deserve it don't they. Never mind that the purpose of saving the banking system, so they could make loans to keep business running, hasn't exactly panned out. Just keeping these toxic waste dumps afloat is cause for celebration. Speaking of foreclosures, the number of homes going into foreclosures this year is expected to exceed last year's number, 1.4 million, by one estimate. The government was putting a big chunk of money into helping home owners (actually that term is an oxymoron isn't it!) through various non-bankruptcy restructuring of mortgage debt. Apparently that program is overwhelmed. Meanwhile job losses are still going up and even prime loan borrowers are being hit by loss of income. Another big chunk of bailout went to GM and Chrysler (Ford apparently had been a bit more prudent and didn't need the help, for now). They both eventually went into bankruptcy/reorganization despite vociferous protestations not that long ago that doing so would destroy people's confidence in their ability to maintain, and hence kill future sales. My bet is that when the reality that the Volt is too expensive, too costly to maintain, and doesn't, in fact, get the equivalent of 230 miles to the gallon (when all energy inputs are considered), that will not help consumer confidence one bit. Gasoline prices hover close to $3.00 a gallon in the US at present, and oil is still over $60.00 per barrel. That is applying significant pressure to the transportation sector. When consumers purchase cars these days, and that isn't often, they are still conscious of gas savings, meaning the car companies are selling lower profit-margin fuel efficient vehicles. And 'Cash-for-Clunkers'? Every democrat hails it as a huge success while every republican despairs at the costs (as if they had done a wonderful job of balancing the budget when they were in power!). It is a huge giveaway with the weak rationalization that it will help reduce CO 2 emissions while at the same time boosting car sales (to help out the auto makers and dealers). It may help a tiny fraction on both counts, but is probably insignificant compared with the massive scale of both problems. In the end, trying to reboot the car economy is possibly as big a waste of money as the bank bailout. And what was this stimulus package/bailout supposed to do? Why restart the consumer economy and get it back into a growing state of course. The idea that a growing economy is the only healthy economy is so deeply entrenched in our neoclassical economic thinking that to consider any other situation, like a recession, is absolutely unacceptable. In fact the average pundit can't even imagine any other perspective. It's like a law of nature: Growth produces jobs; jobs mean people have good credit and can borrow money to buy stuff. The more they buy the more growth and more jobs created. And as long as the population is growing, we need more jobs. They buy cars and SUVs and trucks and bigger houses. All that stuff has to be produced and retailed and those jobs are reasonably paying. Everything goes up, up, up. And so everyone is happy. Which means they will look favorably on the politicians that were seen to be 'responsible' for helping the economy grow. Of course protecting people's income is important. Job loss can be devastating to individual psyches and families. What makes it more harrowing is the fact that Americans have been very naughty about not saving and have been living way above their means for many years. Consequently there isn't a cushion in the bank to cover hard times. So many Americans, and many other citizens of developed nations that sought to live the party life, are deep in debt and either out of work or threatened by potential unemployment. At very least, the rest of us are faced with huge uncertainty about the stability of our own situations. Consumer confidence is way down. They/we won't be doing much consuming in the near future. So we get back to where we started. If our economy depends so heavily on consumption and that isn't happening, how can the economy grow? It certainly looks like a downward spiral is in the offing just from the jobless situation alone. The stimulus package might indeed be offering a brief respite to this downward trend. It may, indeed, be a large factor in slowing down the downward slide, giving hope that the bottom is near. But as massive seeming as it was (and folks like Paul Krugman don't think it was nearly enough), it was still a finite pulse injected into a strongly declining process, like taking a big breath and blowing into a balloon that has a big leak in it. You may get it to expand for a while, but the leak doesn't go away. Sooner or later the pulse's impact will be diluted by the fact that the jobless rate will remain high for some time to come. Sooner or latter the effect will wear off and we will resume our downward movement. All that is happening is that there has been an injection of 'money' into the economy through various channels that has slowed the bleeding for a time. But what is money? The stuff is just an abstract token representing some amount of actual physical (mental) work that can be done. That is, it is supposed to represent the ability to do work (in the future). But in fact there is only one thing that is the basis for work and that is energy flow. It takes energy, in a special, available, form, to do economic work, produce and distribute products and services, even to repair buildings and infrastructure. Money is supposed to represent energy available to do work. But money is just an abstraction with no hard ties to the underlying energy flow. Governments and banks can virtually print more money than there is energy backing it, leading to the illusion that the economy is growing. Leading everyone to believe that things are going to be better — there is more money out there, right? And here is the real crux of the problem we face. The money that is 'out there' is worth less and less actual work. We count ourselves rich when we have more money even as we become poorer from having less potential to get work done. But it is even worse than just a money-to-energy inflation (more money — debased currency — chasing fewer products/services is classic inflation). The net energy available to civilization for doing economic work is going down. That is, not only is there more money trying to represent some amount of energy and work, it is trying to do so at a time when there is a decreasing amount of energy to represent! Where did all of this money come from if there isn't energy to back it? The answer, not simple in details but simple in principle: Financial instrument inventions assigned nominal values — pure abstractions of bets on bets — that the same financial geniuses booked as assets in expectation of future profits. "Oh, I will make a kazillion dollars in six months so lets count that as assets today!" Talk about irrational exuberance. However, I should point out that this is no different from home owners looking at the supposed market value of their houses going up while interest rates were going down and thinking, "Hey I'm getting rich on the investment in my house! What can I buy with the profits?" Based, of course, on the belief that the market will always go up. So why do I say energy decline is the problem? For most of the history of our western economic engine, energy production has been rising faster than governments and banks could create the abstract stuff. Coupled with the golden age of technological advances and improvements in work process efficiencies, which got into full swing in the post-WWII years, the increase in total available energy flow is what has allowed our economies to grow so prodigiously. The physical fact of energy growth enabled growth in the 'real' economy, which in turn, allowed the expansion of the 'financial' economy into uncharted territories. At first the financial industry existed to grease the skids of the physical production economy. It provided capital aggregation (stocks and bonds) for investment in new ventures. It provided short-term financing where the borrowers were seemingly reasonably assured (because of growth) that their ability to pay back the principal with interest would improve in the future (profits for companies and wage increases for worker/consumers). Then, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which had to do with people becoming convinced that growth would go on forever (note this is equivalent to believing energy flow would increase forever, even though that wasn't in the forefront of most people's thinking), the financial geniuses started gambling on short-term variations (like day-trading in the stock market) in perceived values of financial instruments. Then came hedging, first futures on agricultural commodities (made sense to hedge against weather as long as some sucker thought he knew better how crops would come out!), then more elaborate forms of betting on the betting itself (these fancy derivatives). Yet all of these schemes amounted to nothing more than creating debt against a presumed future of greater real wealth production. Unfortunately, no one was paying attention to how much debt money was being created in these second and tertiary derivative markets relative to the real wealth production. Everyone was booking future profits as if they were real. The volume of debt money relative to real underlying economic value simply spun out of control. And the 'Masters of the Universe' who created this faux value patted themselves on the back, their share holders patted them on the back, and everyone participating in this grand illusion went out and bought mansions and fast cars to show how successful they had been. Meanwhile as oil and gas became increasingly hard to locate in convenient locations, more energy was poured into finding and drilling offshore and other exotic places. The energy recovery operations were starting to take much more energy just to find the next increment of production growth. More oil, for example, was actually being recovered. But it was taking more energy to do it, meaning the net energy per increment was declining. At first this was slight and not given much thought. What counted is that those North Sea and Gulf coast platforms were pumping more oil. The Saudis had to pump seawater into their fields to push out more oil, but, hey, it did mean more oil. It just took a bit more oil to do the pumping. Oh, and lets not forget that mountain top removal techniques were replacing underground mining in order to produce more coal per unit time. The problem is, those techniques take more oil (diesel fuel) to accomplish, or, in other words, more energy was required to get the next increment of coal as well. Then starting sometime in the 1970s another phenomenon started to be felt. The rate of increase in total (global) oil production volume started to tail off. We were still producing more oil overall, but the rate of increase in production was starting to show signs of reaching a peak, long predicted from both models of oil production and actual empirical evidence from US oil production. It is a simple physical fact that the extraction of any finite natural resource will eventually reach a point of diminishing returns just due to the physical constraints. It is actually related to the above phenomenon of requiring more energy to get at the harder to extract resource. Eventually there comes a time when it is simply not profitable to try to increase production. At that time production goes through a peak and then starts to decline. The overall result is a decline in net energy available to the non-extraction (including refining) industries and the general economy. Not only has the energy volume stopped growing, but has actually started to decline. This means, all other things being equal, that less work per unit time can be done; the real economy cannot continue to grow. At least not using the then current technologies and work processes. Adjustments needed to be made. Very few people, like Jimmy Carter, for example, realized that diminishing energy flow through the whole economy was the problem. Because everyone else had become so used to thinking that that abstract stuff called money was a true measure of wealth, all they could see was declining profits or threats to such. It was a roundabout process, operating mostly through wage inflationary pressures coupled with profligate consumption (even the health industry cost increases had as much to do with wages and expansion of complex equipment/procedures as much as greedy profiteering in pharmaceuticals, etc.) And there was the greed factor. People saw other people creating money and getting paid handsomely for it. Everyone wanted a piece of the action. Profits needed to not only be protected but inflated in order for executives to 'earn' huge salaries and bonuses. So began an acceleration in trend to find the cheapest labor (transportation costs were still relatively low compared with labor - at the time), and, not coincidentally, regions of the world that were more amenable to ignoring environmental external costs. Anything to lower costs and make greater profits. And while everyone was paying attention to the wonder that was western capitalism, giving credit to free markets and profit motive, the real driver of economic growth was petering out. Energy flow has been in decline. Increases in technological improvements have been tailing off, especially in non-digital electronic technologies. Growth in alternative energy production has probably not kept pace with reductions in conventional fossil fuel-based net energy. In short, the economic rug was being pulled out from under us. Or, perhaps a better analogy is that the monetary house of cards was losing some of those cards at the base while no one noticed. So here we are in mid 2009, net energy declining at an increasing rate and no one actually knowing by exactly how much (all of our estimates are based on models developed from first principles — since it's physics we're reasonably confident of the basic picture, but we don't actually know the specific numbers until more empirical work is done). No substantial investments are being made into alternatives to fossil fuels. No one seems to realize that we are in a rear guard action. We have to make those investments just to try to compensate for the loss of net energy. We can't be worried about monetary profits in the usual sense. It isn't a question of whether or not alternatives compete in an open market against fossil fuels. We simply don't have any other options. We have to spend the money on alternatives and efficiency just to survive.
 
Is Obama passing the acid test? Top
Back in January I posted This is the acid test shortly after the Obama presidential inauguration. I was feeling the hopefulness that the excitement of the moment brought but pointed out that we would have to wait and see if 'real change' would be brought to Washington. My (some would call it cynicism) cautious optimism runs along the lines that if Obama can't break the various maladaptive cycles in our government (like the influence of lobbyists and big money on governance) then very likely no one ever could. The system would be seen to be permanently broken. Then at the end of February I revisited this concern, The acid test revisited with some good and bad news. The good news was that Obama did seem to have a more holistic concept of the problems we face and had chosen a few key leverage points to work on. The bad news was, however, that his pattern of key office appointments (like Treasury Secretary) portended that his attempts to 'fix' things meant simply getting the economy back to a borrow-and-spend consumption-based, jobs-creating, growth-oriented business as usual. I thought that was a bad idea. I gave him the benefit of the doubt that he might actually learn by doing and begin to see the folly of this approach. But seven months in now, I am losing hope. It seems very clear to me now that his stimulus package amounts to little more than a way to allow bank ers, brokers, and hedge fund managers to continue reaping exorbitant rewards for driving our civilization deeper into the hole. He (with the complicity of Congress) have bailed out auto makers at a time when instead of promoting automobiles we should be directing our resources into building localized infrastructure and rejuvenating our rail system. Incidentally, the auto worker jobs could have just as easily been saved by an all out effort to build a worthy rail system. Had Obama made efforts to 1) tell the American people the truth about what kind of future to expect, 2) made efforts to vastly reform the whole financial superstructure so that it would serve its original function, facilitating the channeling of capital into productive purposes rather than fat cats' wallets, 3) provided vision of a new America living in a much lower energy environment, and a few other things, I would have said he at least had passed the acid test of his competency. Even if he failed in getting the country moving in the right direction (as Rush Limbaugh wanted) I would have saluted him for trying to do the right thing. Instead, he has basically given in to the financial powers that control every aspect of our society. His recent deal with Big Pharma, to eliminate the ability to dicker over drug prices, is just the latest evidence that he is playing the game by their rules. No knight in shining armor. No savior. No 'change we can believe in.' The irony of this is that neither he nor all of those financial masters have grasped the fundamental reality of what it means when energy flow starts to diminish. They just don't grasp basic physics. For them it is just a matter of getting the bus moving again and everything will be OK. Then we can worry about 'energy independence' (as if there really were such a thing), and really doing something about CO 2 emissions. Then we can turn our attention to fixing education (especially with all the money we are saving on reduced health care costs!) Their model is a growing economy fixes all problems. And, oh yes, when the economy is growing, those who are responsible bank ers, et al) should be rewarded handsomely for their wisdom and action. Thank you very much. I've pretty well gone from mild hopefulness, with a healthy bit of skepticism, to complete lack of any hope. What I still believe could have been achieved, had Obama really understood the way the world works, is a managed (though by no means easily accomplished) restructuring of our economy and life styles that would have prevented the very worst consequences. But I also believe this had to start as soon as Obama took office. It had to start with facing the truth about how the world works and taking actions to adapt ourselves to the true reality. Our example might also have helped other nations face reality. I was lulled into thinking that that part of his inaugural speech where he talked about sacrifice by all of us was a signal that he did understand and would begin the process. Fool me once. But not only has it not happened, I think the evidence screams loudly that it will never happen. Oh we might experience a minor up-tick in the economy — you'd think so by watching the stock market. Energy prices have remained stable (oil around $70 is about right to spur new development meaning supplies ought to be stable for a while) as the general economic activity has adjusted. This takes some of the pressure off price inflation, such as for food. But as long as we are talking about a so-called 'jobless recovery' we are blowing smoke into the house of mirrors. The developed world needs easy credit and buying junk so that people have jobs in retail. The developing world works on building the junk and selling it to the developed world consumers. It's worked pretty well because developed-world consumers could borrow from the savings of developing-world (China) folks to pay for the junk. But if people in the developed world don't have jobs, do you really think they will continue buying junk? Moreover, since it appears that a lot of that bailout money to the bank s and Wall Street has been used for bonuses, and the credit card companies have raised the APR right through the roof, people are probably not able or willing to borrow more money just to buy junk. Back when their houses were worth a lot of money (on paper anyway) they felt rich. They borrowed and spent. That meant jobs for a lot of Chinese workers. What now? You can't have a growing economy that depends entirely on borrowing, spending, and consuming (to start the cycle over again). More to the point, the money that has been borrowed from Chinese savings is presumably going to have to be paid back some day, with interest. What happens when the developed world borrowers default? The Chinese savers funds will be lost and without developed-world spenders buying the junk so will their incomes. How do you suppose they are going to feel about that? No matter that some economists and politicians think they see green shoots. No matter if there is a brief respite from the sickening drop. We have not reached the bottom; we're not even close. As long as net energy is declining we have nowhere to go but down. Sorry, but that is really the story Obama owed us. Instead he wasted whatever resources we had (mainly China's willingness to lend us money) to put us right back where we were. You know the place, where the economy was seeming to be chugging along and almost NO economists predicted a crash. If we could just get back to seeming to be chugging along, maybe this time things will be different. Maybe this time the economy will work the way the economists say. Yeah, and maybe pigs will learn to fly. In the end, the acid test isn't really so much about Obama as it is about us. We are the failures. We are the ones who want things to be the way they were before. We want to go on happily consuming. We don't want the world to change. We don't want to have to struggle and sacrifice so that our grandchildren might have a livable world. We ordinary humans are failing the acid test. Obama is just the symbol of that failure. Source
 

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