Decline of the Empire

Are Our Best Days Behind Us?

Here's some weekend entertainment for you.

The PBS Newshour asks Are the best days of the U.S. economy over?

Well, let's see.

Is the Pope Catholic? Does a bear shit in the woods? Does Hillary take Wall Street money?

There are many ironies to consider as you watch the video report below, which is based on Robert Gordon's new book The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Gordon notes that we have been increasingly fucked since 1970.

Have a nice weekend.

 

It's Not Easy Being Green

This post's title comes from a 2011 essay of the same name by Joseph Heath, professor in the Department of Philosophy and the School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Toronto. That essay is worth reading, so I've reprinted some of it with comments here.

The introduction explains why it is not easy being green. I like the way it relates the climate change mitigation problem to everyday life. I've reprinted it without comment.

A couple of years ago, while contemplating the dandelions running riot alongside the road in front of my house, I decided it was time to get a weed whacker. I went down to my local Canadian Tire to see what was available. Being an environmentally sensitive guy, I picked out a nice 18-volt battery-powered one.

I returned home, plugged it in overnight and set out the next morning to wreak havoc on the obstreperous dandelions. The results, however, fell somewhat short of expectations. My childhood memory of weed whackers was that they were slightly alarming contraptions, always on the verge of running out of control, posing a danger not just to plants but to bystanders and exposed shins as well.

My new trimmer, however, did not exactly whack the weeds. Really, it just knocked them around a bit. Half of them got bent over, rather than being severed at the base. I often had to come at them from several different angles in order to get them clipped. This took a long time, so that after 20 minutes when the batteries ran out, the job was only half done.

Oh well, I thought, I will finish up tomorrow.

Everybody Knows

Among liberal pundits who benefit from the status quo, the contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders has come down to this:

1) Hillary is pragmatic. Bernie is a pie-in-the-sky idealist. (Obama the pragmatist was a great president and Hillary is his heir.)

2) Everybody knows profound change (as suggested by Bernie) is impossible. The status quo is all-powerful.

Therefore—

3) Vote for Hillary.

Here's Dave Roberts talking about our future:

In 2016, barring some truly disruptive political event (which, who knows, Trump may prove to be), Republicans are going to keep control of the House of Representatives... 

So there will be no single-payer health care, no national carbon tax, no free college, no reparations.

Given the current disposition of the Republican Party, it will be a miracle if regular-order business like budgets and debt ceiling bills can get through — if the government can keep functioning at all.

There's an often unstated corollary to liberal political "logic" in 2016—

4) Not only is a vote for Hillary a vote for the status quo (with the possibility of meaningless incremental change), but it is also a vote against Cruz or or Trump or Rubio or somebody else who will be truly disruptive in a bad way.

The word "bankrupt" (as in "America's political system is bankrupt") doesn't quite do this nonsense justice. In case you were wondering, the "logic" outlined above is what all the delusional hullabaloo is all about. These clueless self-interested fuckheads are going to argue about this bullshit for months to come. They will be paid to do so. 

Really, I just wanted to post this Leonard Cohen tune 

 

The True Extent Of Overfishing

Many years ago, Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia and the Sea Around Us project set out to determine the true of extent of human exploitation of marine fish populations. Last week Pauly and his colleague Dirk Zeller published their startling results in a Nature Communications study called Catch reconstructions reveal that global marine fisheries catches are higher than reported and declining (January 19, 2016, open access).

Graph from the Nature News report Independent study tallies 'true catch' of global fishing

We reached "peak" wild-caught fish in the mid-1990s. This text if from the Nature News report linked-in above:

The Twin Tides Of Change

I'm not even going to say anything. I'm just going to re-print this astonishing bullshit and let you comment on it. I'm tired of doing all the work. Show me you've understood what Flatland is.

The short essay The Twin Tides of Change was written by Timo Hannay at Edge.org (image below).

File under: Flatland, optimism bias, technophilia, bad news filtering, generalized delusion, anthropocentrism, story-telling, head so far up your ass you've never seen the sun shine

The Twin Tides of Change

News stories are by their nature ephemeral. Whipped up by the media (whether mass or social), they soon dissipate, like ripples on the surface of the sea. More significant and durable are the great tides of social change and technological progress on which they ride. It is these that will continue to matter in decades and generations to come. Fortunately, like real tides, they are more predictable too.

One such inexorable trend is our changing relationship with the natural world—most vividly represented by the ongoing debate about whether humanity's impact has been so profound as to justify the christening of a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. Whether or not a consensus emerges in the next few years, it will do so eventually, for our effect on the planet will only grow. This is in part because our technological capabilities continue to expand, but an even more important driver is our evolving collective psyche.

Widespread Panic!

Disclaimer — I do not presume to know what will happen to the global economy in 2016 and you should be very skeptical of those who think they do know.

Hardly a day passes now without turmoil in the world's financial markets. Oil prices have yet to find the bottom, which tells us that there's not much demand for the stuff. And yet, when we look at the data, we are told that oil (liquids) demand grew in 2015, and that it's expected to rise some more in 2016.

Perhaps supply has outstripped (still growing?) demand, but that certainly doesn't imply that crude oil should be trading at the ultra-low price of $28/barrel.

What the fuck?

The Bark Beetle Plague

Yale's Environment 360 recently conducted an interview with Montana entomologist Diana Six. Here's the part that got my attention.

e360 —The scale of the current epidemic is unprecedented. Since the 1990s more than 60 million acres of forest, from northern New Mexico through British Columbia, have suffered die-offs. By the time the outbreak in British Columbia peters out, some 60 percent of the mature pines in the province may be dead. That’s a billion cubic meters of wood. People who have not been to the Rockies lately may not grasp the extent of the tree die-off due to the bark beetle infestation. Could you paint a picture of what is going on there?

Six — It’s pretty amazing. There have been tens of millions of acres of trees killed. If you go north to British Columbia, a really big province, something like 80 percent of the trees are dead. You can get in a plane and fly for literally hours over dead forest. So this is massive. Beetle outbreaks are normal, they have been happening for thousands of years.

But this one is estimated to be more than ten times bigger than any event we know of in the past. And there is no end in sight.

80 percent! Well, OK—in April, 2015, National Geographic said:

The scale of the current epidemic is unprecedented. Since the 1990s more than 60 million acres of forest, from northern New Mexico through British Columbia, have suffered die-offs. By the time the outbreak in British Columbia peters out, some 60 percent of the mature pines in the province may be dead. That’s a billion cubic meters of wood.

60 percent? Maybe it's closer to 80% now. At this level of die-off, what's the difference?

You would think this story would be getting more attention. Check out this map.

Total "Intelligence" Blackout In The United States

We're only a few weeks into 2016 and bullshit is everywhere. It's even worst than I thought it would be. Here in the United States, the media are obsessed with the presidential race to the near-total exclusion of everything else. 

I mean, this is bad. In 2015 at least we could ridicule that bogus Paris climate deal. This year, we'll be lucky if climate change gets mentioned at all. Even the oversold recovery, which is always the most important issue on voters' minds, is taking a back seat to Donald, Bernie, Hillary and Ted. And nobody has cast a vote yet. Check out The Huffington Post homepage to see what I mean.

Oh, wait, there's the $1.6 billion Powerball jackpot. I forgot.

I keep a notes file for stuff I may want to write about or stuff I might want to link-to when I post. So far this year, there's been hardly anything to take note of. There's that natural gas leak in southern California, and there are those dying seals and sea lions courtesy of Al Jazeera. That's about it among the things I might want to comment on. But neither story is compelling to me. Been there, done that.

The world's financial markets, including the U.S. stock market, are in "correction" territory, and that's interesting, sort of. But really, what is there to say about it? We're in the 21st year of the Bubble Era. What goes up must come down. Case closed.

And oil prices? Well, $30/barrel for crude is indeed newsworthy, although I am at a loss to tell you what that means exactly outside the fact that the global economy is in really bad shape. Prices will go up again, eventually. Producers have to to keep the supply side going, though when prices will rise is anybody's guess at this point. China continues to unravel. The "emerging markets", especially those that are resource-based, are a mess.

Both the market turmoil and plummeting oil prices give a big boost to daily "end of the world'" predictions, but that's not what DOTE is all about.

Regardless, none of these stories is getting much coverage in the United States, where we are suffering a near-total intelligence blackout, as in there's not anything remotely "intelligent" going on. It's all politics all the time. There's dumb, and there's dumber.

While the blackout persists, posting will be light. David Bowie died. I was sorry to hear that.

 

Thomas Ligotti's Deep Pessimism

In my bleak post The Meaning Of Life, reader Sam Taylor mentioned Thomas Ligotti's book The Conspiracy Against The Human Race. I was not familiar with Ligotti, so I took a look. We're talking about Deep Pessimism here.

I am still reading through the text—more like skimming through it—but I found a page of Ligotti quotes from that book which we can look at today. Here's the first one.

“If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.”

Exactly right! I found that out too late. Don't read DOTE. Save yourself!

Just kidding. If you're reading here, it's already too late for you

Still, I am not a Ligotti fan based on what I've seen so far.

Flatland Predictability

Have you looked at Future Tense?

Future Tense is the citizen’s guide to the future.

A partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University, Future Tense explores how emerging technologies will change the way we live. The latest consumer gadgets are intriguing, but we focus on the longer-term transformative power of robotics, information and communication technologies, synthetic biology, augmented reality, space exploration, and other technologies.

Future Tense seeks to understand the latest technological and scientific breakthroughs, and what they mean for our environment, how we relate to one another, and what it means to be human.

Future Tense also examines whether technology and its development can be governed democratically and ethically. Future Tense asks these questions in daily commentary published on Slate and through public events featuring conversations with leading scientists, technologists, policymakers, and journalists.

To connect with Future Tense, you can follow us on Twitter and read the Future Tense channel on Slate. A full list of events can be found on the New America website.

Among other things, Future Tense seeks to figure out what it means to be human.

I have an answer for that