Debt Rattle April 19 2018
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Edgar Degas The laundress 1873 • Triffin Warned Us (Lebowitz) • Global Debt Has Reached A Record High, And 3 Countries Are To Blame – IMF (MW)
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle April 19 2018]Triffin’s theory, better known as Triffin’s Paradox, is essential to grasp the current economic woes and, more importantly, recognize why the path for future economic growth is far different from that envisioned in 1944.
Triffin is interesting; he knew the whole economic system was a fraud.
One, among myriad economic problems in the U.S, is property tax.
We just paid off our house last February. There is no property tax here; so, we actually own our home; free and clear!
In the U.S. one never owns their domicile, ever. Fail to pay your very expensive property tax and you lose your home, even if you have no mortgage payment! That is criminal and that is a fact.
Before moving here I had never heard of a country where there was no property tax; as the worm turns, there are a number of countries that do not tax one’s home or the land it’s on.
My point is that governments that exploit their citizens are leaches; the U.S. is the leader of the pack and its citizens are victims of cruel and unusual treatment.
The poor, sick, and elderly are exploited unto death.
Sheldon Wolen correctly identified the U.S. as a government, not of a democracy, but one of inverted totalitarianism.
I wonder if Triffen ever thought of, or saw that aspect of neoliberal economics in western capitalism?“150,000 tons of food is tossed out in US households each day, equivalent to about a third of the daily calories that each American consumes.”
Wow, you’re right. It certainly is silly to throw out food, and doubly silly for journalists to report how millions need to die because there isn’t enough. And this is only half the food – another half is tossed at the field and warehouses. But because, The Guardian, you just know it can’t be news.™
“Fruit and vegetables were the most likely to be thrown out, followed by dairy and then meat.”
So…you’re saying people throw out the cheapest, most perishable food first and the expensive food later in a direct relationship with cost and/or energy input?“This waste has an environmental toll, with the volume of discarded food equivalent to the yearly use of 30m acres of land, 780m pounds of pesticide and 4.2tn gallons of irrigated water.”
…Aaaaand right off the rails. I’m having a hard time processing all that’s wrong with this. Are the acres of land and effort of discarded food wasted? Yes? Sort of?? But being a journalist, you know he’s never been outside the city, never been where those dirty people live, and understands things only in a city way. Farming isn’t manufacturing. It’s not making widgets. In fact, even making widgets isn’t making widgets. Making food is an organic process that follows nature’s rules, which includes a lot of what we call “failure” and “waste.” In a forest, 100,000 seeds are released. Two survive. A tree falls down and is “wasted”. It is eaten and re-formed back into forest. If that tree didn’t fall over, the tree-eating critters would be “wasted” and go extinct instead. So there’s your “efficiency” in human terms, which you see unceasingly from schmartz-guys, the Intellectual-Yet-Idiots who are on University Farm Boards and other “helpful” people like Monsanto. You wouldn’t want to “waste” that wheat field, would you? Then get the natural diversity of weeds out of it, thereby poisoning every hedgerow, hedgehog and fruit bat, every Christopher Robin playing pooh sticks, and every butterfly, bee, and frog all the way down to Sugary Cove-on-Dartmouth. See how we stopped that waste? Oh and we made a chemical plant, with 10,000 50-gallon drums of pure poison, gave the workmen and the township cancer, and used Syrian oil as the feedstock. All to be efficient because “efficiency” is a human term. Nature is incredibly, horribly inefficient. She is, however, deeply resilient, and all parts are integrated to the whole of creating more life. Humans are too, but once they reach the reporter-and-university level, they go clean round the bend into creating less life by being too efficient, by treating creation as a big machine, by thinking, as in their minds, the world is dead, not alive. No longer knowing what “alive” even means.
Okay college educated expert Milman, ever heard of the water cycle? It’s a thing where water goes round and round the system, not being consumed or lost? So this 4.2 Trillion gallons of water? What’s that? Did it get burned like oil, or did it go from the mountains into the sea just like the non-irrigated, non-farm water, into the air as rain? And irrigation is used badly and has its consequences, but that’s not his argument. His argument is it’s “used”, like plastic wrap, then becomes…a pollutant? It disappears from earth? Only someone disconnected from nature, even from his own schooling and intellect could say so, and the readers nod their heads.
“Rotting food also clogs up landfills and releases methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.”
Clogs up landfills? The way dead trees clog up forests? The food is the ONLY thing in the landfill that’s good, nontoxic, and biodegradable, that makes good soil and clean earth. So much so, people will PAY to get this food waste for the sole purpose of composting, preferably through a chicken or a pig. Landfills are made of old batteries, refrigerators, LCD panels, water bottles, he’s worried about literally the only safe, degradable part, and the smallest portion of the waste stream. This “waste” is in fact the only thing that is not a waste: it’s like saying life is a waste.
Releases methane? AGW aside, what did you think was going to happen if a human ate it? 2nd level schmartz-guy, THE CARBON RELEASED BY ROT IS THE SAME CARBON THAT WAS SEQUESTERED INTO THE FOOD LAST MONTH: it’s CO2 neutral. 3rd level schmartz-guy, since it’s carbon-neutral AND was the same carbon the plant absorbed last month, the “greenhouse gassing” consequences of essentially a very small diversion of the food chain overall—which would have happened anyway, even if the field were a forest—is going to be so close to zero as not to measure. We’re talking about measuring the methane deer pellets create. You might better speak of the oil inputs, which are optional but a function of our present unsustainable monopoly mega-corps. 4th level schmartz-guy, although methane is probably released, the amount of methane vs other possible carbon-chains are a factor of how exactly it is broken down: could be none, could be a little, but it will never be more than a rounding error. You might visit your local sewage treatment plant for the methane released but I won’t temp you to attack humans as the problem. In nature, no CO2 or nitrate like methane is a problem: it’s pure fertilizer gold, the very essense of health and nature. These are the same schmartz-guys who created planetary-level pogroms to herd humans into mega-cities where the maximum oil and waste and methane can happen, instead of into hobbit gardens where waste is but a dream.
The people, the “shoppers” aren’t the problem here; they’re not the ones who need to be re-educated, in Green Re-education Death Camps of Tolerance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_Camp_of_Tolerance . Given a chance the people would probably toss their melon rind out the window to be chewed on by possums and turned into topsoil 3 feet thick. If only we could toss city idiots like this out the window and onto the rubbish bin of history. I’ve got a better name for them: not I-Y-I, which is Nassim polite term, but Arrogant-Yet-Ignorant, A-Y-I.
” Nature is incredibly, horribly inefficient. She is, however, deeply resilient, and all parts are integrated to the whole of creating more life. Humans are too, but once they reach the reporter-and-university level, they go clean round the bend into creating less life by being too efficient, by treating creation as a big machine, by thinking, as in their minds, the world is dead, not alive. No longer knowing what “alive” even means.”
Logos is a wonderful thing, but these days infrequently available for consumption.
Heard the one about the new bacterium that has been engineered to degrade common forms of plastic? If that translates into being able to use plastic as a food (energy) source AND such bacterium eventually mutates into an antibiotic-resistant human pathogen….Oh, but by then we will have Zioglobalist-programmed immortal AI (“the Messiah”) robots who will be resistant. Don’t mess with Mother Nature.
What will happen to my plastic lawn chair?
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6278/1196
Abstract
Poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) is used extensively worldwide in plastic products, and its accumulation in the environment has become a global concern. Because the ability to enzymatically degrade PET has been thought to be limited to a few fungal species, biodegradation is not yet a viable remediation or recycling strategy. By screening natural microbial communities exposed to PET in the environment, we isolated a novel bacterium, Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6, that is able to use PET as its major energy and carbon source. When grown on PET, this strain produces two enzymes capable of hydrolyzing PET and the reaction intermediate, mono(2-hydroxyethyl) terephthalic acid. Both enzymes are required to enzymatically convert PET efficiently into its two environmentally benign monomers, terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideonella_sakaiensis
Ideonella sakaiensis is a bacterium from the genus Ideonella and family Comamonadaceae capable of breaking down PET plastic which was isolated from outside a plastic bottle recycling facility.
The bacterium first uses PETase, an enzyme that works with water, to break down the PET plastic. It then breaks it down further using MHETase,[2] another enzyme that further reacts with water to break down the plastics into terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol.[3][2]
Thanks for these links, zerosum.
Importantly, the biologically useless polymer carbon is being converted to forms of carbon that can be used to build new life.
Late to the party I know, Ilargi.
“Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.”…
“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”~ T.S.Eliot, Burnt Norton
ref. https://www.davidgorman.com/4Quartets/1-norton.htm
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It’s not just other cultures is it, we can be proud too.
And yes, for us, there is only the dance. Take your partners, please.
🙂
Best regards,
Phil
PS
Omar:
“One Moment in Annihilation’s Waste,
One moment, of the Well of Life to taste–
The Stars are setting, and the Caravan
Starts for the dawn of Nothing–Oh, make haste!”Willie:
“What is love? ‘Tis not hereafter.
Present mirth hath present laughter.
What’s to come is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty.
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty.
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.”
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