Debt Rattle January 25 2016
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Harris&Ewing “Pennsylvania Avenue with snow, Washington, DC” 1918 • Oil Falls 4% On Swelling Oversupply • Commodities Stocks Sink As Oil Resumes Downw
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle January 25 2016]The Nobel peace prize, since awarding it to Obama, is a travesty. All living, previous recipients, should return their prize, until and unless Obama is stripped of his award!!!
If the Nobel committee cannot do this asap; then said committee should be disbanded and; the prize recommended for the bullshit it is….Previous article by Turkish smuggler said Turkey could close the crossing any time they felt like it — but no one had told him to stop, so they keep the rich trade going. It takes a lot of money to move a million people. Where’s that money come from?
And what is Europe’s plan for asylum-seekers who don’t get asylum? Execution? Put them on a plane? To where? What happens if the receiving nation refuses to re-take them? Especially as plans gg and ff to create a “Safe Zone” in Syria (Turkey was trying again this weekend, by attempting a U.S. base of operations in Qamishli) has been shut down by Russia. Looks to me like however many millions make it to Europe they’ll never leave, legal asylum or no.
This seem destined to cause dangerous ethnic tension between “Christians” (Christian-cultured, as there are very few practicing European Christians left) and Muslims in Europe, perhaps to a low-level war that breaks nation states and incites a call for a super-state, just like the white papers from some think-tanks have written.
I’m sure we all support the individuals in this disaster. But let’s not take our eyes off the larger goals and their insider advocates. It took a lot of time and money to get it like this so they made this mess for a reason. Because if they didn’t like what was going on, they’d fix it or heads would roll. If no heads roll it’s because it’s exactly the way they want it: deadly and inciting war.
From the edited extract you linked to in “The End of Economic Growth”, which is taken from Robert Gordon’s book, “The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living since the Civil War”:
In the century after the end of the Civil War, life in the United States changed beyond recognition. There was a revolution—an economic, rather than a political one—which freed people from an unremitting daily grind of manual labour and household drudgery and a life of darkness, isolation and early death. By the 1970s, many manual, outdoor jobs had been replaced by work in air-conditioned environments, housework was increasingly performed by machines, darkness was replaced by electric light, and isolation was replaced not only by travel, but also by colour television, which brought the world into the living room. Most importantly, a newborn infant could expect to live not to the age of 45, but to 72. This economic revolution was unique—and unrepeatable, because so many of its achievements could happen only once.
I’m not sure that is Robert Gordon’s summary of life prior to the Civil War, but this myth that every life was an unending grind because you couldn’t work in a cubicle and work often involved using your body, or household tasks were like Dante’s 9th circle because you had to can your own food instead of using an electric jar opener or that life was isolated because there was no tv or, horrors, social media, is pretty silly (Bowling Alone, anyone?). And, news flash, as George Carlin once said, “scattered darkness through the night”–it’s supposed to be dark at night. Longevity averages were also greatly skewed by high infant mortality, something that rapidly declined mostly with basic hygiene, not whiz bang technology.
It’s always discouraging and disappointing when a promising premise starts out built on false propositions. Also, in the extract, there was not a single mention of the role of energy–even electricity was presented as an “innovation”, and one of the five ways households became “networked”–the other four being gas, water, sewer, and telephone.
It would seem that Gordon believes “progress” simply sprung from the minds of humankind, and that innovations themselves were the drivers that built our present economy.
Unfortunately, this is simply not true. I await the book that attempts to examine the interrelationships between human innovation, economies, and the age of fossil fuel, and how they melded to create the dangerous myths of endless growth and eternal progress. It is this huge, what I call “cultural ego” that continues to restrict our ability to deal with the enormous dilemmas bearing down on the planet and everything and everyone on it, and continues to shrink what Nicole calls the “solution space.”
Note that NYT resident nonsense economist, Paul Krugman, reviewed the book recently. His review is less annoying than I supposed it might be. It was also reviewed by Lawrence Summers. I have not read that one.
“New York’s Central Park had the second highest accumulation of snowfall in the city since records began in 1869.”
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