oxymoron
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Whoa, I was at work today planting and mulching trees and missed a whole lot of good arguments. I think I am falling with Huskeynut – We are fully capable of constructing similar graduated risk mechanisms for managing the Covid risk. I’ve been thinking to myself for weeks or months now – How can we spend all our energy money and time modelling only one thing – namely flattening that curve? We have no media attention of how those models interact with society. It’s like factory farming – we have a problem (pests or viruses) so we go nuclear with Monsanto or whatever and never look at the broader impacts and certainly do not model them. What are the effects on soil biology? plant health? long term human health? etc.
And Bosco – I am a big fan of you and your take on things but blame gets allocated sometimes. Sure Dr D likes to neg out and is oft times quite the contrarian (but we kinda love him for it) but he offers a really needed Devils Advocate side to things.
How can we move forward if we don’t ask – Why is the roof leaking? Well it’s leaking because one of the sheets of tin lifted in the wind. That is blame. I blame the tin. I blame the wind. Now I know I have to fix the roof and blaming only serves us so long ( that roof has to get fixed) but if I don’t try and work out why the roof is filling with water then I’m staying wet.Anyway, thought I would weigh in.
Peace out homiesBosco, much appreciated your criticism of my venting arrogance. Even read it out to my wife who was in some agreement. I will add though that my statement sounded more specific than it really was meant to be. I AM frustrated with those aspects of myself where imprinting or lack of discipline has reduced my Darwinian winning capacity (sugar was my emotional rescue) and even now wrestle with tooth-ache which will result in another tooth pulled in short order. No one can set the learning limits and time-frame for anyone but themselves and that is why the actual seat of power resides within ones Self. In reality, I know that real and lasting peace comes through a deep and well practiced understanding of this phrase from the late Kenneth Wapnick via Jesus -“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. Problem is I let my ego run my mind. Thus my mind lets unkind and ‘insensitive’ thoughts take a front row. What drives this in part is that I just wish we would learn our lessons and move in the direction away from the Lord of More and toward the Lord of Content. This is known as impatience which is itself unloving and unkind, but give me a break – it is frustrating to watch us all do things we don’t need to do all the time. Throw on top of that the ambiguity of just living in this world and trying to do no harm when for example we know the toxins and waste streams eddying behind us from almost all our decisions – like purchasing and using these computers with their third world assembly and polluting after-lives.
I guess I am saying yep – you are right – I was being a bit of a dickhead but how hopeless is this world of time and space filled with we morons who just do dumb shit all the time?.Sorry did she say that? – “But (with) older people, it just seems like we’re saying, ‘We don’t care about you – you’re too old.’” I mean we are sending economies off a cliff and apparently we don’t care about the old people?
This is a new strain of the flu (and a bit of a nasty one) but not a lot changes in the real world of nature – you know the one where living things procure resources from their environment. As in nature weak, ageing and diseased individuals and organisms express poor resistance to the demands of the living environment – namely that they have vigour and health. I see it with trees and plants with my work. I don’t stop watering the entire nursery because some specimens start showing decline. Certainly I may group plants together or allow for some separation but I don’t enact the same protocols for all specimens.
Defence systems are barriers – we have none globally. Our numbers spiral out of control and our mobility just keeps increasing. Viruses have unlimited access. Globalisation is the real enemy. Now we want to keep the dream alive with virtual global living via our screens and devices but……
I don’t think it is a hoax but a power grab is a power grab and we should as citizens have some say over how this is handled. I also think it is weird that you can trash your body all your life with shit food and drugs and whatever and crush the health care system with diabetes and the rest and then crush the health care system with Corona. I feel like I am being insensitive but the Lord of More got us here and we ain’t getting out without casualties.Australia so far only at 50 deaths with a flattening curve. South Korea the darling of the covid internet at 200 – but yeah they are pretty close to China so they are doing well.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-17/coronavirus-cases-data-reveals-how-covid-19-spreads-in-australia/12060704
How we manage this going forward will be tough. All school canceled for next term. So my son has to learn on a computer remotely and via internet etc. I am the only one with computer literacy in our house and I am away at work so…..Boris might not make it and that will just add to the weirdness of 2020
UpstateNYer, I think you are coming from the right place to have Raul’s back, but disagreement here on this comments page has always seemed really healthy to me. Raul hates nothing more than an echo chamber so unless someone is persistently giving him a hard time it is great for me personally to read alt angles on this. I have come to find it extremely helpful in working out my position on things like numbers and responses. But yeah it is his blog and we should always remember to be respectful.
Dr D Rich that Bill Gates (of Hell) stuff if terrifying! Are they gunna know I’m harvesting my own wild-caught food from within the limits of my patch of regulated forest? Yes they are and will they regulate and monetise it based on their expert knowledge of how everything works just like Monsanto?- you bet.
The John Gray article is aight but I have to worry when someone uses a phrase like anarchy of the global market..
And while I am getting picky – AEI is a non-partisan think tank closely linked to conservative thought. – Really? what are they conserving? resources? nope. stability? nope. national unity? nope.
Raul, good job today calling bullshit on forecasters waxing lyrical about our future. The experts are just so expert these days it seems.
On Corona – I have to say that down here in Australia we seem to be in the top tier of dealing with this health crisis. When you consider our absolute iron-grip ties to Chinese tourists, students and businesses – they are our number one trading partner and all that – I would say our numbers are low and that curve is getting flat out like a lizard drinking.On a more positive note, I have been catching more rats in my box trap (stealing chook food and fruit). They die a peaceful death then go in the Yabbie trap. We then harvest the fresh aquatic beasts (Cherax Destructor – if you care to google) and tonight my darling wife prepared homemade pasta of home-grown vegetables with Yabbie tails and Dill – deliscious – we had it with Chardonnay. So closing the loop just gets better and weirder. I guess the Polish peasant women would be like “why don’t you eat the rat?”. My answer is – I will when I have to wise ladies but until then…….
The education thing is a joke. It is a year or at least 6 months to do whatever, gaming, wanking, googling, annoying parents or maybe even learning to be useful around the house. I don’t see how it will be possible to make it happen so it works for all. There are so many young people with shitty parents or home situation, lack of access to ncessary bandwidth or technology etc. Just seems another rung on the ladder of class division or wealth inequality or whatever but hey go ahead all that E-Waste has been great for the fishermen eeking a living off the coast of Somalia and everyone loves a dash of antimony in their soil too.
Not one but two just incredible douchbags. Branson and Biden. Lowly, creepy, conniving. The Vampire Squid love suckbags like these two. It shows the adage of never look at what one says but what one does. They do bad shit and talk like snake charmers.
This article with lockdown percentage modelling is worth a squizz
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-25/coronavirus-covid-19-modelling-stay-home-chart/12084144
When asked to go ahead Joe Biden says “probably best I don’t” OMG I pissed myself laughing. Great treat thanks Raul.
Raul, I reckon WES probably does read it but right now we are in info overload – sources coming from everywhere. And some of us have a lot more time on their hands right now too.
Also, what is with the universal use of the term Social Distancing – it’s very Orwellian. It is technically and unambiguously Phisical Distancing I mean we are socialising here on our computers. Are they just mentally priming us for actually being distanced socially or has that already been happening for ages. Everyone always has in the back of their minds to not say anything tooo subversive or for instance refer to it as The Wuhan Virus. If we are going to be so accurate so as to jump from Wuhan virus, to Corona Virus to COVID-19 then come on a little consistency govt’s and media please
Thanks V, good call but here under lockdown a bit of fantasy speculation is worth some time.
I am however designing the tower (in SketchUp) to mount my Hot water storage tank to be connected to the wood stove so gas is something I won’t buy anymore. The forest I own. So any future cost saving I can implement now is go!I would love it if we can get to work with our mind-powers and discuss out how we land on the other side of this. All suggestions and interpretations considered. TAE and it’s readers are after all Real Futurists.
Financially speaking is Asia/China #winning from this? I’m less interested in who is conspiring than what it will look like on the ground. They have chunks of Africa and South America growing food to pay back debt already so that is just gunna keep on keeping on.
Who is gunna get screwed hardest – obviously the least-connected and most over-leveraged but also – Musicians, Tourism, Health care workers and disadvantaged. There is clearly alot of money going right back to the nothing place where it was issued from and those who had claims on stranded assets have brown pants but what are the bigger picture flow on effects?I design and install permaculture gardens and food systems but diversified into every damn thing from house painting to building and see the possibility of keeping work happening after this, but what about specialists in the fields of interior design, life-coaching or craft beer? Because as far as i know during this crisis people gave up all notions of Veganism and Gluten-Free and #livingmybestlife and just went full-tilt “what is the most important thing I can have now regarding the necessities of my existence”.
So people – tell me what are the knock ons? What the actual F is it going to look like in 6 months.
Let’s think 6 months and 2 years. Short and Mid Term.
But hey – no presh…. just a thoughtGood news Boogaloo. She has to stay in bed and rest little while after the virus passes if she does get it. The re-infection in raw throats and lungs is turning out to kill a lot of dudes who just go normal activities when the virus passes.
Rest
It is a time of rest and reset.Also Bosco – “Bugs get around more than before by several orders of magnitude. Fear of government lockdown is misplaced. Fear of governmental collapse leading to wild lawless years during times of no plenty except plenty of less and less and less, seems more sound these days.
Sure, the governments will fuck it up. The people, I guarantee you, will fuck it up far more cuz they’ll practice that rarity: real egalitarian democracy, i.e., every person for themself. ”
I agree. Actually in a time of diminishing returns sometimes the cost of freedom is stability
I also think the planet wide lock down is going to cause such huge amounts of misery and death and global social and cultural resets of unknown outcome. Like I’ve said earlier it makes no sense for humanity to mobilise like this in the face of 5.6 million child deaths preventable each year…
Just number crunching is keeping me awake. Back of the envelope is now a terrifying place to look.
Oh yeah and money as debt is now not much of a thing so what is the new thing… Work of real and tangible value which means the Impossible burger and tells are about to become memories of a childish time.
The Party is Over
Yeah Dr D. I noticed on the news tonight that Trump says Banks will not foreclose till the end of April. Is that because with staff layoffs and job cuts they would rather just boot people out in one go rather than bit by bit? Or is it so the Trumpster can organise the muscle first?
Lost for words.
Nope found some….
This liquidity crunch and the virus is some dark stuff from ye olde human perspective.
I’d hate to own a dating app right now.
Gotta get work when you can and keep whatever money coming in as there is now a whole world of purse strings tightening like a noose.Thank God I paid attention (and took action) to those bloody TAE primers all those years ago.
Strangerdanger457 I think the titanic metaphor is useful here but not perfect. It is about timing – if the ship is actually going down then the rush is on already and the strategies you are contemplating may be a little late in the piece. Holding cash is always good as a hedge and buying something even this week may be hard or impossible as business everywhere is going full tilt wind back. Rototillerman’s advice above is spot on – spread your resilience into many areas including skill set and health. If you can buy without debt now – it may be safer than to try and hold large liquid sums in what ever form through the slide in prices. Avoid debt but trying to spot a bargain in this time is a high risk high speculation proposition in my opinion but I’m not an expert.
All the best and remember this virus in terms of actual percentage of the population dying may not be high but the risks are still there so focus on health as per John Day’s recommendations.John, pill bugs are the worst. In this dry climate they are great decomposers but shocking with vegetables. So hot and dry you need mulch in summer but if you put it down they ringbark every seedling. Our answer is to plant into tin cans open top and bottom dug into earth as a barrier. Also removing mulch until the plant stem hardens off.
Keep up the good work,
Oh and the cabbage whitefly can jump off a cliff- they are the worst.
The quote from Raul I posted was more for interest sake and review but re-reading some of their primers from way back reminded me of the value of this type of analysis. Raul, Nicole and David Holmgren amongst others have put their necks out with commentary and information sharing for a long time now and I for one am just so much better positioned during this Monetary reset and cultural chaos period because of them.
Life goes on (maybe not for the bazillion species now lost to history from our industry). Let’s keep digging people. There is a lot of bullshit to wade through.Oh and the Primer “40 ways to lose your future” – scary.
Raul, this is something you wrote in 2008- And after reading the room (there was a knife wielding in a supermarket over toilet paper) I reckon the trust horizon is shrinking so damn fast that I thought we could all have a re-read :
We have lived through a time of unprecedented affluence, and we have seen it as normal, and told ourselves we deserved all of it, that we are entitled to what it has given us. But it’s over, and it will be no more, nor will it ever return in our lifetimes. If we are to live in a functioning society in the years to come, we will have to share much of our riches, and we will have to find out how to be fulfilled with much less material wealth. If we don’t, our societies will collapse, and we will lose that wealth regardless. But looking around me, I see little hope that we will do all these things before it’s too late. It you don’t volunteer to share, the difference in wealth between you and your own children’s generation will become so glaring that they will come and take it away from you.
An era is over. We have been the last of the affluent, the carefree and the innocent. Not that we’re really all that innocent, mind you, it was all just pretense all the way, many millions of people have died for our affluence. We just never told ourselves their life stories. They will be our stories soon.
Are you now ready to fight in the streets, to protect your family, to share your meal with the hungry? It’s not about being a leftie, or a softie, and I certainly am neither. It’s about survival. It’s about being smart enough to read the world you live in. The model of the nuclear family will die with the affluence. It’s never been but an aberration. You will, like your ancestors before you, need your family, your friends, and your neighbors.
Life itself is about to come calling.
The US is now Australia’s no 1 infection vector. The Victorian Premier is asking why we are not cancelling flights from the US. Also the US has the lowest testing per capita in the world for countries affected by corona
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-15/three-reasons-why-america-coronavirus-testing-is-so-low/12052936It’s true about the planes and billionaires. What did Australia’s first people know about the black plague? 60 thousand years of doin’ stuff and then multi-national travel kicks in – boom small pox and all the rest. It’s been a long expansionist fuckup. But
We are the world,
We are the children,
We are the ones who make a brighter day
So let’s start giving, let’s start giving
But there’s a chance we’re taking,
We’re taking our own lives
It’s true we’ll make a brighter day
Just you and meAlso – this is huge, but woke up this morning and thought of Dr D’s position and then Yemen came to mind and I thought 5000 people…. I know more will die but there is just so much death going on that is preventable by govt. and popular action. People the world over can mobile so fast out of self interest but can’t seem to see the ‘other’ as a brother from another mother.
Same with nature.I’m gunna get back into meditation
Yeah Doc Robinson, not sure myself about the higher temperatures thingy. Australia seems to be following the same pattern of rising infections and according to that temperature map we be the hottest place on earth. So from a climate change perspective – reduction in industrial output is supposed to make me feel bad?…..
Very confusing times.“When schools close, mothers get worried – and this stops economic activity,” industry consultant and former GM executive Warren Browne said.
Damn! I had a feeling all along it was women and children responsible for the ecological holocaust of the modern market economy. Damn them.
So glad I was finally told what’s been going on.Raul – you know we all hang out for the feed and analysis. Now lock down is happening, waiting for your post is like being one of those morons standing outside the department stores for after christmas sales.
Also thanks to all of you contributing to comments for additional info and analysis.Fourth turning is making me dizzy. Ok, so I have always had an emergency cash and dry goods supply for me and the family – in case of fire, accident, war whatever. But if everyone is gunna rush the stores now I am going to have to refine the plan….. and get more – this thing could drag on…
Definitely getting the hot water jacket hooked up to the stove – wood I own, Gas, well the Oligarchs may need to sell it for more than I can afford.
Soon we will get to the social distancing here in Australia and kids won’t go to school so it’s bulk buying time I am afraid.Clearly we should run an 80 year old with 5 heart attacks who can’t stand up for 30 minutes rather than a 40-year-old decorated woman-of-color Army Major centerfold surfer. That’s just common sense!
Nope, you are not running out of words.
If you were a Jazz musician I’d tell you to write pop songs Dr D. You got licks for days.But hang on, I thought the dems wanted the next president a woman.
Still no toilet paper at the super market. I was chuckling looking at the huge empty space in the consumer vortex, however a reasonable young woman of about 20 was not as impressed – but it was even funnier because we both knew as we stood there we were thinking about poo and our toilets and what was missing as interface between them. I have a wife and two kids – 2 and 10. I have in the wood shed about 2 years worth of newspaper the council shoves in my letter box so luckily I have the composting toilet.Speaking of not caring. Wars are so boring when it’s just other people with our guns.
Outbreak. Virus. Pandemic. Lockdown. Pathogen. Vaccine.
I mean they just read well – hashtag trendingThe Media can’t help themselves.
No toilet paper on the shelves.
It’s getting a reaction
Damn Covid-19’s got traction.Sorry…… I should be at the piano but this crazy dumb-shit world!
Interesting Dr.D re the Italians locking down to ride out ye olde black plague way back when- that again originated in the East or Far East – China. Why do so many the nasty virusy thingies come from China? (Although it may have come from somewhere else). Some of the best bacterially dominated soils on earth with crap loads of humans and wide variety of dietary habits?
I dunno but it is weird. And those poor Italians – I didn’t know Florence took so damn long to recover – economically and socially (well socially they have really hung on to dark horror movies so……).
Still not a lot of people dying yet so I am backing your horse in this race.
We have some mud slinging going on here in Australia between politicians (protecting the people on the front line) and rich doctors (desperate to keep the good name of their practice clean now that one has gotten all Corona).Everyone is doing the funky chicken over this virus. I am glad TAE is covering the show.
It has the strange effect economically of kind of giving the population a little shake that says ‘hey the govt’ won’t really look after you. The media lie to you. The banks and corporations are out to get you. You have to start to look after yourselves’
That’s what this tiny little virus mixed in the age of too much fake news and weirdness is telling us.
In Australia the reaction has been to clean out all the supermarkets of toilet paper – which is Freud for “I am now shitting myself”
I just look forward to the seed section being cleaned out. Then we are headed in the right direction.
Dr D. You are onto it – it is a thing but it is a heist. Even if it is not a bullshit story there are just so many bullshit stories that you have to just put it in there with the rest by default.Assange is just being tortured. It is cruel and these people are able to just go about their business doing this harm and get paid for it by taxpayers. The Judge is just a straight up piece of shit. It is a crazy world full of crazy people. We need more love man. We really do.
Nice pick of Dr John there too.
