Debt Rattle February 6 2019

[Raúl Ilargi Meijer]

Pablo Picasso Portrait de femme au col d’hermine (Olga) 1923   • Trump Calls For End To ‘Politics Of Revenge,’ Touts ‘Hottest Economy’ (AP) • Tru
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle February 6 2019]

[V. Arnold]

I didn’t listen to or watch, the SOTU.
I despise Pelosi; but to her credit, she gave Trump a “fuck you clap”, and the picture of it is quite explicit.
IMO, there is nothing worth paying too much attention to, regarding the U.S. government; especially if it involves some alleged altruistic benefit for anybody below the rank of upper middle class (financially) human being. Even then, highly skeptical of anybody below the 1% getting anything.
It’s all just happy horseshit…
My daily news programs (all) involve less than 4 hours/day now.

[Dr. D]

This subject is hot and no one wants to bring it up, but note the Cherokee Nation’s exact wording in the statement to Warren/Public, viz. Genetics are NOT an indicator of being a legitimate member of the Cherokee nation/a REAL Cherokee. First, the obvious: genetics are also NOT an indicator of being a real Frenchman, a real German, a real Swede or a real American. …Unless you’re a virulent racist of the kind almost inconceivable in modern society. …But apparently ‘white’ Congresswomen, western masses, think that DOES apply to Native Americans. …Who are all the same, btw, except they’re not, having far more nations, cultures, and ethnicities than Europe.

…Back to the point, WHY is the Cherokee Nation so strict on this point? Because like the other Iroquois and indeed many other tribes, they had a century of enslaving, and/or adopting captives, just like you see in the movies. So by the time that settled down in 1800 there literally no single, genetic Cherokee “nation”, just an adoptive national/cultural/political one like the United States.

This goes with the tweeky bulls—t of the “23-and-Me” crowd. Where are they getting their data from? What on earth could possibly be the science that would tell you you’re Italian, Mexican, or African (of no specific nation)? That seems sensible to us, but Italy wasn’t a nation until the 1830s. Germany had changing borders, with colonists going to the frontier in Poland, Ukraine, and even Russia into the 1890s. The Jews and Roma have no home locations at all. So let’s say you were a group of Frenchmen in a war and you decided to move the town/family over the hill, only to discover the border shifted and now you’re “Italian.” Or you and the whole township are of 100% German descent but are now “Polish.” And the 1800s are not the first time. People moved constantly for a thousand years, intermarried, crossed tribes, tribes merged, Scottish Clans, descendants of the Vikings, ceased to exist, moved to Ireland, intermarried with the English, and landed in South Africa. Are they not Africans now, 200 years later? How are they less African than the Indians imported and living there nearly as long? Or are the Egyptians, mixing with the Middle East for 5,000 years, not “Africans”? If not, how long does it take? Does 23-and-Me list the date at which you’re “real” “Spaniard” or “Nigerian”? 100 years? 1,000? 10,000?

What does any of that even mean? How would you possibly back-date, back-engineer any of that anymore than you can track language back and pretend you’re fluent in Indo-European? It’s quack science. Is it because no one knows either so no one can disagree with you? Although naturally there is some linage, some regionality, some reality, ultimately it’s racist nonsense of the first order. As if we ever had racially-pure, ethnically-cleansed “nations” that were later “corrupted” and “diluted” with a “drop of black blood” as the Americans feared. As if the Franks were one people, never intermarried with the Romans, and there were no Celts and Basques there. That never happened in any history I’ve ever read, going back to Israel brought into Babylon and never coming out, further and further into the past, always the same.

So welcome to our modern, “scientific,” “enlightened,” “liberated” time when the Congressmen, the press, the public all believe in the ultimate purity of race and that it entitles you to rights and privileges of a superior class, and no one notices a thing. It all seems normal. Even though only 200 years ago these nations had wildly different borders, a dozen sub-groups, and in modern terms, didn’t exist.

[John Day]

I couldn’t watch much of the speech last night, just up to the point of glorifying all the poor farm-boys who died on the beaches at Normandy. It was clear that the unifying theme was going to be the goodness of Americans at war, and that 75 years was the necessary reach back into the past, necessary to pull that off.
This was a speech of conciliation between the Republicans and Democrats. This was the common ground, upon which they could agree, and they did.
The agreement is that the empire goes on bleeding the rest of the world, and that drug prices will come down.
Reduce the costs of health care and price of prescription drugs.
Immigration that is safe lawful and secure
And pursue a foreign policy that puts Americans first.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-02-05/watch-live-president-trump-delivers-state-union-address

​The biggest problem which I see all of us facing is the same problem which was identified in The Limits To Growth, in 1972.
In 1972, Nixon had gotten off the gold standard, and US oil production had already peaked (as predicted in the 1950s). That book presented the best possible systemic analysis of the trajectories of all the aspects of global economy and population going forward. Systems Analysis was the new science, which programmed multiple variables, which all affected each other in certain ways, into the biggest mainframe computer of the day at MIT. The first model, tested against the history of the 20th century was Word-1. The second model, somewhat refined, was World-2, and that created the projections that showed the peak of industrial economy around 2014-2015. The limits to growth were resource depletion, environmental degradation, and the increasing inefficiencies of larger and larger layered complex economic systems.​
This analysis seemed intuitively obvious through the rest of the 1970s, and Jimmy Carter’s efforts to get Americans to conserve fuel typified the rational acceptance of it.
After Carter, we got Reagan/Bush decrying the analysis as false, and claiming that there was no limit to the growth of American prosperity.
That went over well, much better, but I think Dick Cheney and other henchmen of the elites still understood the validity of the analysis. They merely abandoned the majority of society in their plans going forward with “Continuity of Government” preparations. They have prepared a separate world for the elites in their well supplied bunkers, but it seems sterile, like a zoo. Zoo life is already a huge part of what makes us sick critters. The elite approach so far has been to goose the fuel-burning economy as much as possible, promise a rosy future, and to secretly prepare their own nests, by robbing the cookie jar. We can’t know the full extent of it, and their is increasing discord in the ranks of our rulers. It’s going to be hard to implement, and might stray as far from projections as the invasion of Iraq did.
We are not included in any of that, anyway, and we can reasonably expect our world to have much less fuel, much less electricity, much less information and supply chain problems with groceries and utilities.
Painting this as being necessitated by war is the traditional approach to accomplish vast societal change. The problem with that approach this time is that war sucks out every bit of available resource rapidly. The side that can burn more fuel faster usually wins. There is nothing left to pay the victors this time. The risks of major-power war are just too high, and the benefits are hard to imagine at all.
Global warming is a noble threat, but it is exactly not the kind of threat that humans are biologically wired to mobilize for. It creeps over generations.
Human societies have collapsed before, when the combination of maximal use and bad weather destroyed their systems of food and fuel provision. It’s part of our cycle.
We have never had this much benefit of fossil fuel wizardry ever. We can’t imagine living without it. Each of us has the equivalent of 50 to 60 “energy slaves”, fossil fuel equivalent slaves. That is invisible to us. All of the products and materials we use have lots of fossil fuel energy embedded. How do we get shovels?
The question is whether we human members of industrialized society can reset our ways in a couple of generations to use vastly less coal, oil and iron ore, maybe 80% less, maybe 90% less.
We will need a completely different approach, if we can do it at all. We will need to become loving stewards of life on earth. In the short term, whoever burns more fuel wins. How can we possible make a transition to stewardship, when anybody burning more fuel can kill us and take whatever we have made?
It is a koan. We will have to solve the koan to survive, and not just a few of us. It is a test we have to pass as a species.
That seems very unlikely, but I would rather die in the attempt than die in a bunker with big screen TV.
Unless we get WW-3, this will be long and hard. I want to die without regrets. How about you?

[zerosum]

@dr.D.
Yep!
That’s a great example of our politics.

In other important news

Watch what will happen to med that are exported and imported to the USA

Matching of USA prices to increase profits.

[John Day]

Today’s post: Criminal Union, begins as above.
http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/02/criminal-union.html

[PlanetaryCitizen]

First of all…The fuck you clap that got shopped around the internet is a product of photo shop as is so much of the right and alt right…the ends justify the means bull shit. Try watching the actual video of it or better yet next time try watching it live. Yes, I suffered through it in spite of detesting the SOB. If you watch it yourself you won’t be hood winked by the fake news.

Secondly…23&me and Ancestry dot com do not purport nor attempt to determine whether one is Italian, French, or Sudanese. It does give percentages of probabilities of being part of a particular group and percentages of another group. They also provide a context of the known history of groups and their migrations. Your analysis is correct but complains about a non existent problem.

The SOTU speech was just so much blather about BS as they have historically been in any that I have seen in my life time and I’ve seen quite a few.

[V. Arnold]

The SOTU speech was just so much blather about BS as they have historically been in any that I have seen in my life time and I’ve seen quite a few.

Well duh? I didn’t have to watch it to know that.
Oh gee; I got fooled; so what, it’s a trivial point whether photo shopped or not.
Generally I don’t get pulled into the minutiae of U.S. politics; it’s their foreign policy I pay attention to; internal politics no longer matter to me.
As a self exiled American it is not easy to cut the cord completely…

[V. Arnold]

PlanetaryCitizen

By the way; you are mistaken re: the “fuck you clap”.
I just watched a vid of it; it’s genuine.

[PlanetaryCitizen]

Yes it happened but one split second of changing facial expression doesn’t tell a story when the rest of the expression is saying something else. I didn’t personally see a Fuck You. But then we all project our own intent on to everything we perceive, myself included.

[Author]

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