Debt Rattle Sep 8 2014: Please Scotland, Blow Up The EU
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Esther Bubley Greyhound bus at Washington Court House, Ohio Sep 1943 You know they’re desperate when they play the royal card and announce a new baby
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle Sep 8 2014: Please Scotland, Blow Up The EU]What is the best option ???? ( for the person asking the question)
Will I be A big fish in a big pond…
Will I be A big fish in a little pond …
???I was a run of the mill sort of liberal, now called progressive, and on the hot social/political matters of the day my sentiments tend to side that way. it has been on the economic side that I have had a hard time coming up with a very very broad definition or explanation for liberal failure. An explanation which compares liberalism to conservatism, as both are generally defined today.
Setting aside any policy you can think of, monetary, fiscal, whatever, the original sin of modern liberalism is growth. The growth IM always disparages. That ‘growth’, growth of the middle class, growth for all can be understood as a liberal project.
Most think everyone is for growth but in fact conservatives are not. Even if most don’t know it. Conservatism at root can be defined as the desire for a strictly hierarchical society with a small aristocracy who hold most power and wealth. Conservatives believe this is not only the proper order but a natural one. They expect a very large lower class. They want a very large lower class that knows it’s place. That does not strive to advance. Get uppity in American parlance. Give the lower class some money and they will no longer toe the line and defer so readily to their betters.
Look no further than the heart of American conservatism, the South. Slaves were the perfect underclass. After slavery blacks continued to be the lower class and don’t forget many whites were poor too. To this day the states of the old South are poorest and lowest in every possible measure of social well being. Education, health, family stability, all last.
It was the liberals who brought the idea of raising up everyone economically and every other way that conservatives decry to this day. If not in those terms directly since saying they want the low classes to stay low, and for there to be little social mobility would be death at the ballot box. They do however skate very close to outright saying they want people to suffer and live in fear, to have no security.
The thing is growth is over and so in an odd way conservatives are riding the path of history, but for the wrong reasons. In my eyes anyway. The proper political message should be forget growth let’s focus on using and distributing our gigantic wealth for the benefit of more people. Liberals can’t say that however so they have Krugman et al saying growth can come again, with the right policies.
I will stop rambling. I will link to an old great blog essay that touches on this, let’s call it conservative psychosis about prosperity. Thinking they want prosperity but really wanting a proper social order. Truth be told of course the end of growth will be the end of them too.
https://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/11/dead_right.html
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”
https://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_population_energy.html
Professor Al Bartlett famously made this statement at the beginning of a lecture he gave over 1700 times, beginning in 1969, about the problem with exponential growth of resource use in a finite world.
It applies to taking out a loan with interest, and things like that, too.
I see it applying to the current Ebola epidemic, which is growing exponentially in urban areas, away from tasty fruit-bats, having established a human-human transmission, which now makes it extremely virulent.
If the number of cases doubles each month, we will be up to 8 billion cases in 23 months, August 2016, less than 2 years away.
It is really easy to discount that, and we are powerfully inclined to discount it.
Ebola has never done that.
This is a very different Ebola, a new situation, completely.
This will be contained in Sub-Saharan Africa. It is really remote from Europe, Asia and the Americas.
Containment efforts in Africa may mean stopping all trade with Africa. If nobody leaves Africa, ever, that will be effective. The ability to enact such a stringent quarantine will probably lag the spread of human carriers, who have up to 3 weeks of active infection before they get sick. Politically and economically, the flow of (wealthy) people and oil out of Nigeria is really going to take a crisis in the West or East to stop it. It will have to be a bit too late already.
Medicine outside of Africa is much better and more sophisticated, and will defend us.
This has been worked on with US military funding, for at least 12 years. We have Zmapp, which is mouse antibodies to Ebola, grown in GM tobacco, and given as IV. That won’t be ramped up in anything like the time we have, nor will it be possible to administer to everybody who gets sick in our world.
Vaccines are being worked on.
Flu vaccine gives about as much protection from influenza as taking vitamin-D, maybe a little less. https://www.worldhealth.net/forum/thread/99358/vitamin-d-proven-more-effective-than-bo/?page=1
Antiviral drugs are being developed. HIV has given us a lot of experience in that field.
The time to develop antiviral drugs is fairly long, and certainly began over a decade ago. We don’t really know where the progress may be on this, but there is nothing proven to work, and if there was something that worked, the business folks would have it out there front and center in the news.Plague was a scourge of Europe, Africa and Asia for a couple of thousand years, possibly linked to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and still infecting people in Madagascar, and is endemic in rodents worldwide, including the US. There was a pretty big outbreak in Vietnam, during the war. This is now treated with doxycycline and Cipro, since it is bacterial, not viral.
The longer history of Plague may be more instructive for our current situation. Economic ruin and starvation traveled with Plague, and Plague traveled with ships. https://www.cdc.gov/plague/history/This BBC article actually begins to take a broader look at this new Ebola, and implications. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-29060239
Once there is viral spread within a human population, not just from a reservoir host like fruit bats, the virus has already mutated to do this trick. Further mutations to facilitate spread in the new ecological niche will be strongly selected for.
They will thrive in us. The latency of up to 3 weeks will be strongly selected for, since it thwarts our efforts at containment, “Stealth Ebola” drops the bombs and moves on before there is any sign at all.
The fatality rate may drift down, and there may be sustained viral shedding after recovery, which is being seen in semen samples of recovered men.
The fatality rate is about 50%, which is well within the range of prior Ebola outbreaks. We can’t really make the call for reduced fatality rate yet. We will all be watching that, I’m sure.I propose that we should expect to see Ebola virus in our cities, and that no defense will be ideal, and that it will spread globally within the next couple of years.
I’ll be happy if I’m wrong, of course, and viral mutation could lead to a more benign variant being predominant, but how benign will Ebola ever get?
Measles and Smallpox killed about 90% of North and South American people when the Europeans brought them over. More recently, there was an 80% reduction in the population of the Hawaiian Islands, when Captain Cook’s contact led to the introduction of measles. These were old viruses, which had co-existed with humans for a long time, but were still extremely deadly, and brought wholesale change to the social orders of these societies.@ John Day
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”I think it’s belief and all that it entails…
Addendum:
…understanding the exponential function.”
…is easy; it is understanding belief that is difficult. And that’s our (human’s) Achilles Heel…@John Day
The Ebola numbers as of the 6th Sep have come in and they are terrible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_virus_epidemic_in_West_Africa – scroll to bottom for table. The infections seem to be following an exponential curve and it doesn’t look to me if there’s any way of stopping from moving across Africa now. It is amazing that the requisite international effort was not made a couple of months ago. Maybe the Ebola virus virulence will drop by mutation to increase the transmission coefficient, but the transmission coefficient of the virus is already high and that will reduce the selection pressure for lower virulence mutants. (I have limited understandig of epidemiology)“… it doesn’t look to me if there’s any way of stopping from moving across Africa now. ”
Will prayers and imploring to a “god” save me when the prayers of so many others have been ignored?
( There’s one missionary lady who claims that her prayers saved her.)We do have a harbinger:
https://www.lochaber-news.co.uk/News/Black-swan-visitor-is-a-long-way-from-home-28082014.htm
The following interview nearly frightens me to death, as what Kotlikoff describes here would almost certainly kill me:
Bail-ins are just kid stuff, folks.
I sympathize with your position on Conservatives, but I disagree that’s what it’s about.
In essence, Conservatives believe that people should take care of each other on a private, local, individual level, but don’t. Progressives believe people should be taken care of at the Public, National, Group level, but this has never once been successful and in fact leads to great evil.
So both both are the politics of utter failure, just in different ways.
Do Conservatives believe in growth? Depends on the definition. Clearly, going back through most permutations of the word, the answer is yes, but slower. Their attitude is that the way things are is good and was developed for a reason, so we should be careful about changing it. The Progressive view is that the way things are is bad and should be changed immediately, sometimes even if we have to burn everything down. But as per growth, apparently even Conservatives believe in it, since according to the general view, they are the industrialists, and therefore make and force enormous changes on society and have been the definition of “Growth” (i.e. Industrial Revolution) for 300 years. I’m not as familiar with the Progressive line going way back, but generally growth collapses with them for when they focus on social justice and social changes, there are internal wars, and capital flees uncertainty by hiding or moving abroad. The French Revolution, USSR, or modern France come to mind, as Capital and “Growth” now flees to Singapore and Hong Kong.
So in some ways, does this make them the opposite of their intent? By this theory, is it true that Conservatives have pulled the canal-ropes that changed the world unrecognizably (i.e. AntiConservatively), while under Progressives things stagnate in fact extending the injustices they hoped to remedy? I don’t know. Also you have to contrast social Conservatism with economic Conservatism–they flop back and forth over time. In any case, the present Environmental movement is entirely merged with the Progressives, and they are clearly anti-growth, by EIEO green-energy fact, if not by direct intent.
This may be a good or a bad thing, depending how you feel about the need to limit growth, energy use, and prepare for future energy limits or transformations, but in any case, that’s how it stands around the world at present: Energy companies, Consumer corporations, etc, all the Status Quo, seem very oriented to the Conservative view and are 100% Pro-Growth –limitless, exponential growth– while the Progressives are about further regulation, oversight, Green Energy, and cutting back sharply, even dangerously on growth, as with the promotion of CO2 taxes, emissions limits, laws steering society, and so on.
It’s an interesting subject, but I disagree. In addition, just as Republicans were responsible for Emancipation and Civil Rights (now forgot and role-reversed) it was actually Conservatives and their industry that created the unparalleled wealth of the modern world. …By disrupting society, by creating factories, by putting people out of jobs, because the lowered prices and increased access to goods ultimately overwhelmed the lower wages and social repression they were trying to enforce. Ironically, they defeat themselves. The opposite happens with Progressives, for as they increase power in order to suppress industry, goods get more expensive, jobs are cut, the economy stagnates (as in modern France) and the concentrated central power of government actually enhances the opportunities for insiders to widen the divide between rich and poor, grabbing the now expansive power of government as the tool.
But then, human history is rife with irony.
We might do better to note that a major difference between Capitalism and Communism is that neither scales properly. That is to say, on the Macro level, Communism doesn’t work; while at the Micro/personal level, Capitalism doesn’t work. That is to say: there is nothing more Communistic than the behavior of a family between husbands and wives, parents and children. Everyone shares no matter whose income it is, and that is the only thing that ever worked. At the same time, such sharing between groups of men numbering 300 and above, and especially Nations, is a complete failure and only voluntary trade works, because the members involved can’t be vetted beforehand or punished afterward for crooked dealing like a family, churchmember, or villager can.
This is very similar to the divide between Conservatives and Progressives. Progressives want the world to be a family, which it isn’t; while Conservatives treat family and community to behave as coldly as a business contract, which it can’t.
Just some thoughts from the Doctor.
I appreciate the attention to my contribution.
Indeed it is hard to settle conclusively on one human failing that outshines the rest.
The graph from the Wikipedia site (linked by Carbon waste life form above), which seems most informative to me is the semi-logarithmic graph of Ebola cases and deaths over time.
In this format a straight line is a consistent exponential increase.
The first few months were smaller numbers, and likely had a lot of sampling error.
By June this had become a straight rising line, as Ebloa became established in cities, with human to human spread predominating.
(Next, what if there’s a false-flag-Ebola-suicide-bombing-attack-on Washington DC for the 13th anniversary of 9/11? 😮 Dick Cheney)A two-minute video from the “money master” himself, on banking in Independent Scotland:
And for your consideration, an excellent eight-minute synopsis of climate change:
I still maintain that Chemtrails are the elephant in the room (and in the skies). But somehow they still manage to keep that a secret.
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