Debt Rattle July 13 2016
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Tim McKulka Elderly Woman Receives Emergency Food Aid, Sudan 2008 • Markets Are In The Twilight Zone, Get Ready For New New Deal (AFR) • BOE Governor
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle July 13 2016]The whole world seems to be atwitter over the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s ruling against China. I can’t find my source, but the U.S. ignored a ruling against the U.S. by PCA in 1986 IIRC.
Much ado about nothing; except the U.S. will push hard against China. China will, of course, do as is its want.
The U.S. seems to be itching for a conflict with both Russia and China; my thinking is this; the U.S. has witnessed Russia’s newest weapons at work in Syria to an impressive result. U.S. anxiety now centers around its own capability against another modern army, navy, and air-force because, for the last 70+ years it has engaged only third world countries and various tribes of the M.E. and S. Asia. Never tested against equals and not faring well against guerrilla fighters anywhere on the planet.Just in case this from me was missed in yesterday’s thread:
“I forget what thread it was in, but the Chrome issue appears fixed now.”
But do let me know if you still experience problems.
“Brussels is completely lost. Time to end its misery.”
I think that realization is growing among world “leaders”. If you take a look at the photos from David Cameron’s Exit event: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-36778350 – you will see a happy, happy man. Radiantly happy. My interpretation as a student of primate signaling is he is overjoyed to be out of that position. It was not only incredibly stressful; but essentially powerless- do what you will, any results are unconnected to your actions; and incomprehensible to these folks to boot.
Which is also a partial explanation for why the GOP wound up with Trump – no vaguely competent “leader” wants the position enough to fight for it.
Making the world just a bit more chaotic in days to come.
The 50% loss of U.S. food is easily true: they didn’t also mention the tossing of half-eaten food once on the plate. But by U.S. law it’s basically illegal to economize food in a number of ways, and portions are too large because the massive legal overhead for restaurants (property taxes, OSHA, Obamacare, minimum wage, reporting, health compliance) means portion sizes is one of the few places they can provide more, which means we’re also eating more than we want or is healthy for us. –1st world problems.
Add to this the nation-sized agricultural spaces that are unused. Lawns, of course, but in the northeast virtually all land is arable, and everywhere is unused, or used wildly below its potential. Don’t believe me? Pick a random streetview on GoogleEarth. The southeast is also largely arable although the crops grown on them would have to be different and potentially lower-yielding. The deserts are probably arable but would require extensive time and remediation via permaculture terracing.
Since the U.S. alone has maybe 2 nations the size of France not being utilized, how close are we to overburden? Or is it more “We have enough for everyone’s need, not everyone’s greed”? Would we rather people starve than eat a blemished apple? The answer in the U.S. is “absolutely!”
We’re possibly even dumber than the 1930’s, where the answer to American hunger was to plow under crops. After years of tilling fields, mule teams tried to walk between the rows rather than plow them, resisting turning a productive green field into a desert. Economists thereby proved they didn’t have the brains God gave a jackass, and even today espouse creating prosperity by destroying things.
Like then, we have a distribution problem, not a production problem. And that’s a political problem, not a physical or even an economic one. Since the U.S. could feed much of the world if asked–we have the land, the ability, and 100m unemployed people–then we have a world-wide hunger and poverty problem solely because of political choice. In other words, we’re killing people on purpose. But we here already knew that.
“but in the northeast virtually all land is arable, ”
Beware of facts- that aren’t. That’s one. Yes much of the land in the NE is “plowable”. But the definition of arable is “suitable for growing crops” – and that is not the case. Because? The fertility of all those soils were strip-mined and wasted immediately during the European invasion. All the forests were cut (as in ‘all’) – much land cleared and plowed, planted to European grains – and what didn’t instantly erode lost all fertility within a half century or so So – the many farms were abandoned, (starting around 1700, so we don’t remember) and Europeans took their plows to Ohio and west- where at least much of the ground is flat, and not quite as rapidly erodible. Now there is tons of forest growing in the NE – because the farmers proved they would starve trying to farm the remnants.
Growing trees now? Arable? No. Most topsoil long gone, remaining soils desperately depleted; often in ways not understood by agronomists; but they know it won’t grow ‘crops’ anymore.
This same misapprehension is common around the world; non-farmers see land not being farmed, but green, and immediately assume that land could be farmed. Almost universally; not so; for any and/or all of 30 reasons.
Which is not to say I disagree with the concept that present agriculture could easily deliver far more food to the world – the waste is very real, and in my professional opinion, greatly underestimated; I have yet to see any study looking at the entire system top to bottom; and there is great waste in all stages. Example; last year corn and soybean crops in the US were often stored – outdoors, in a pile, with no roof. Insufficient storage available. Losses there to birds, rodents, rot? Not calculated. We don’t want to know.
Diablo – a point we agree on: “then we have a world-wide hunger and poverty problem solely because of political choice. In other words, we’re killing people on purpose. But we here already knew that.”
I’m on record, for years, with this quote (which has come back to me “No one starves in this world because we don’t have enough food. They starve because of a lack of sufficient compassion, and a lack of justice.”
What I don’t mention there, because it makes the audience go blank-faced – is that hunger has been a major weapon of war, and other forms of populace control, since we started recording wars. Being used very effectively in Venezuela right now, to bring about regime change.
Yet growing food in the future to feed who knows how many will be a challenge because the “modern agriculture is turning oil into food” paradigm won’t persist. Agriculture exacts a cost as well as providing a benefit. Was it Jared Diamond who said that agriculture may have been the worst mistake in the history of the human race?
Ilargi, when I tried to edit my above post, I ran into the same problem as before.
Asked me for e-mail, explanation, and still failed to edit.
Just hit edit again, we’ll see.
Now it is working.Nah, I live here, I’ve been all over the northeast: it’s arable. Is it top-quality soil, like when they first came off low-intensity, manure-based rotation agriculture? Of course not. But most any place in the northeast weeds will colonize and overgrow fields in a single season. The majority of those places it will colonize so densely as to create a mat composed of grasses, goldenrod, amaranth, chenopodia, milkweed, burdock, wild carrot, and a great deal more depending on the area and needs of the soil. With experience, you can read the weeds like a book and get a better understanding of the soil than a lab test, since it will also tell you how wet and dry, what months, what history, how compacted, etc.
Will a badly compacted, oversprayed field grow corn this year without massive tractors and petrol-based inputs? No, it may take years to recover even with focused attention. But that doesn’t mean it’s not arable: if it grows weeds, then it can grow hay, rye, daikon, helianthus, field peas, etc. Can you sell a 1,000 acres of hard-pan daikon to one neighborhood? No, the market won’t bear it. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t food, it just means people prefer beer and Cheetos. Nevertheless, north of the Mason Dixon line, the soil can be largely remediated in 5 years of these lesser crops, and you got a lot of food off it too…just that the food wasn’t cash profitable. That means your problem isn’t the soil, which can be restored without a lot of effort, but excessive property taxes, which is political. Who’s going to carry the farm while we drain out the glyphosate and rebuild the soil? And although we don’t have the inputs to recover every area this fast, topsoil can be rebuilt at a rate up to 1″/year, with truckloads of food coming off every acre you’re rebuilding. But with the taxes and market set the way it is, it’s illegal to try — you’d have the farm taken long before.
And we’re not even talking about laying down pots and high tunnels on parking lots to intensively grow greenhouse-style, aquaculture in old warehouses, or putting in orchards and grass, much less square-foot gardens or multi-storied food forests. The northeast has forest lots in every back corner, and every edge leading up to those forests can be put in berries and fruit trees, and every forest can be interplanted with nuts, so we can add, not subtract those as well.
There are 124.6 million houses in the U.S. and every one has running water. If you add an apple tree to every other front yard, at half the average yield of 3-4bu/tree, you add 125M bushels of production. 1 Bushel=40lb, Americans eat about 20lbs of apples/year, so apples enough for 250M Americans in one action. Apples do not require good soil, or at minimum the soil on their footprint can be strongly amended. Grapes are as productive but require less soil and less water.
Winter squash can be grown with lower yield on straight weeds (who will soil repair), so at less than half the +10 tons/acre you’d have 10,000lb per 4,000m sq or 40,000ft sq or 400ft x 100ft area. They provide 100-200 cal/lb. or 1,000,000cal/ac. They will also grow up fences or walls and there are many desert varieties so the edge of any parking lot or chain link fence becomes a food tsunami.
See what I mean by opportunities, increasing yields, soil repair?
Because I do this, I can see these things as obvious as the rest of us would go the mall and participate in a 99c sale, so I forget it looks like a brick wall to outsiders where every brick is the same hard, unbending rule, written by agribusiness or other outsiders in articles for the unknowing public. Yes there are problems, but it’s almost impossible to calculate how fast nature can bounce back, or how much food we’d have if we applied ourselves even a little.
Diablo – I wrote a response yesterday which somehow vanished, though I thought it had posted successfully. I’ll attempt a brief reconstruction:
Your familiarity with both the NE and agriculture are far higher than I’d been guessing; your facts are all correct. We still have different definitions of “arable”, however; my own requires that the agricultural practices should not be destructive of the land- and while standard agriculture could be practiced in many places; that is one of our greatest problems. Standard means strip mining resources; soil, fertility, biodiversity all steady drop. We have to stop doing that. Ergo my definition; we don’t even want to call land arable unless it can be worked in a non-corrosive fashion.
I was also amused to find another point where we differ: “There are 124.6 million houses in the U.S. and every one has running water.” Mine does not. Has not, for 40 years, will not, any time soon. And the other dwelling on this farm also does not.
Hi All,
I just wanted to pop in and correct a misconception and fill in a detail that is essentially a Rosetta Stone or skeleton key to comprehending the related topic.
1. The US military is controlled by a government financed by Debt-Money Monopolists (DMM) – the private group of people who control the definition money as debt issued, the issuance of money, and have collected interest on the world’s money supply for the majority of the last 100 years. The military serves the DMM agenda… which is not necessarily their stated agenda.
As JP Morgan stated, “Every man has two reasons for doing a thing: The good reason and the real reason.”
People who simply accept the good reason will never know the real reason.
The DMM profits off of wars. The longer the war, the more the profits, hence, they use the governments they finance to extend wars well beyond their expiration date. This isn’t due to incompetence – at last outside the ability of the citizenry to spot an empire masquerading as a liberty based Constitutional Republic. Then we are talking gross incompetence. The DMM has run the drug operations worldwide beginning with the Opium Wars and continuing to this day. Afghanistan produces 90% of the world’s heroin and most of the world’s marijuana. Local farmers are told to hand their crops over to the CIA or they stop screaming during tortures and aren’t seen again. The following is a first hand account:
U.S. Torture Practices Right Out of Nazi Playbook
Wars provide a pretext to build up the military complex to protect the interests and impose the agenda of the DMM on the world.
Also of interest is the idea put forward by George Orwell in 1984 in its sub-book entitled “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.” In it, Orwell, who was a Fabian Socialist and whose teacher, Aldous Huxley, was the brother of the DMM chosen first head of UNESCO, postulates that the DMM (your real rulers – Big Brother, as it were) engages in war because they 1. need a pretrext to siphon money off from society via their various corporate fronts and 2. desperately want to keep society from benefiting due to these expenditures. In other words, the DMM isn’t interested in making parks and the like with the money they take from society, they want the money and don’t want to return anything at all to society. And last, but not least, DMM’s profit from debt. Issuing debt is their business “widget,” if you will. The list of budgetary line items that generate more DMM “widgets” than war is small. Quite small.
So, no, the “failed wars” are no such thing. They are incredible, multi-trillion dollar successes with essentially no accountability whatsoever. Perhaps only the Debt-Money system itself provides the DMMs with more benefits than endless wars. Most people in America don’t realize that the real WAR is on them… but they will, one day. That’s what why the police state is being erected.The second issue has to do with why people starve. This is absolutely true.
“No one starves in this world because we don’t have enough food. They starve because of a lack of sufficient compassion, and a lack of justice.”
~GreenpaBut it is too general as to be useful to indicate how to FIX the problems.
What does “more compassion” and “more justice” look like?
Let’s make Socrates proud and think it through logically:
1. The #1 cause of death on planet Earth is poverty.
2. The #1 cause of poverty is the Debt-Money system and its controllers who lend money into existence, siphon off large portions for themselves, leaving billions of ordinary people buried under inextinguishable debt while using the various governments as their allies and protectorates because they finance the governments, too! And this assumes they didn’t just outright deny money to a people in the first place.
With this added information can you see what more “compassion” and “justice” would look like?As an aside, I was discussing GMO pesticide foods with my Father. He parroted the DMM line that GMOs are necessary to feed the world. I claimed that people weren’t starving because of a lack of GMOs, they were starving because a lack of money, and asked him to show me just one example of a monetarily wealthy person who was starving… he chose to change the subject. Oh, and since it is so important to address the ROOT CAUSE of starvation… where was the plan to actually address the root cause of starvation – which is a fraudulent debt-based monetary system in privately controlled hands?
Very few people want to actually do what their cheap “virtue signalling” pretends they want to do…
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