Friday, September 30, 2011
Saturday, September 24, 2011
The Birth of Post Petroleum Human
Original Source: http://www.collapsenet.com/free-resources/collapsenet-public-access/item/1026-mike-ruppert-green-life-eco-fest-2011
MIKE RUPPERT @ GREEN LIFE ECO FEST 2011
GREEN LIFE ECO FEST 2011 from CollapseNet.com on Vimeo.
Q&A
Eco Fest - Grass Valley, May 2011, Q&A from CollapseNet.com on Vimeo.
MIKE RUPPERT @ GREEN LIFE ECO FEST 2011
GREEN LIFE ECO FEST 2011 from CollapseNet.com on Vimeo.
Q&A
Eco Fest - Grass Valley, May 2011, Q&A from CollapseNet.com on Vimeo.
Reading Excerpt: Emma Goldman-Anarchism: What It Really Stands For
original source: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/goldman/anarchism.html
Anarchism could not hope to escape the fate of all other ideas of innovation. Indeed, as the most revolutionary and uncompromising innovator, Anarchism must needs meet with the combined ignorance and venom of the world it aims to reconstruct.
To deal even remotely with all that is being said and done against Anarchism would necessitate the writing of a whole volume. I shall therefore meet only two of the principal objections. In so doing, I shall attempt to elucidate what Anarchism really stands for. The strange phenomenon of the opposition to Anarchism is that it brings to light the relation between so-called intelligence and ignorance. And yet this is not so very strange when we consider the relativity of all things. The ignorant mass has in its favor that it makes no pretense of knowledge or tolerance. Acting, as it always does, by mere impulse, its reasons are like those of a child. "Why?" "Because." Yet the opposition of the uneducated to Anarchism deserves the same consideration as that of the intelligent man. What, then, are the objections? First, Anarchism is impractical, though a beautiful ideal. Second, Anarchism stands for violence and destruction, hence it must be repudiated as vile and dangerous. Both the intelligent man and the ignorant mass judge not from a thorough knowledge of the subject, but either from hearsay or false interpretation.
A practical scheme, says Oscar Wilde, is either one already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under the existing conditions; but it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to, and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The true criterion of the practical, therefore, is not whether the latter can keep intact the wrong or foolish; rather is it whether the scheme has vitality enough to leave the stagnant waters of the old, and build, as well as sustain, new life. In the light of this conception, Anarchism is indeed practical. More than any other idea, it is helping to do away with the wrong and foolish; more than any other idea, it is building and sustaining new life.
The emotions of the ignorant man are continuously kept at a pitch by the most blood-curdling stories about Anarchism. Not a thing too outrageous to be employed against this philosophy and its exponents. Therefore Anarchism represents to the unthinking what the proverbial bad man does to the child,--a black monster bent on swallowing everything; in short, destruction and violence.
Destruction and violence! How is the ordinary man to know that the most violent element in society is ignorance; that its power of destruction is the very thing Anarchism is combating? Nor is he aware that Anarchism, whose roots, as it were, are part of nature's forces, destroys, not healthful tissue, but parasitic growths that feed on the life's essence of society. It is merely clearing the soil from weeds and sagebrush, that it may eventually bear healthy fruit.
Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think. The widespread mental indolence, so prevalent in society, proves this to be only too true. Rather than to go to the bottom of any given idea, to examine into its origin and meaning, most people will either condemn it altogether, or rely on some superficial or prejudicial definition of non-essentials.
Anarchism urges man to think, to investigate, to analyze every proposition; but that the brain capacity of the average reader be not taxed too much, I also shall begin with a definition, and then elaborate on the latter.
ANARCHISM:--The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.
The new social order rests, of course, on the materialistic basis of life; but while all Anarchists agree that the main evil today is an economic one, they maintain that the solution of that evil can be brought about only through the consideration of EVERY PHASE of life,--individual, as well as the collective; the internal, as well as the external phases.
A thorough perusal of the history of human development will disclose two elements in bitter conflict with each other; elements that are only now beginning to be understood, not as foreign to each other, but as closely related and truly harmonious, if only placed in proper environment: the individual and social instincts. The individual and society have waged a relentless and bloody battle for ages, each striving for supremacy, because each was blind to the value and importance of the other. The individual and social instincts,--the one a most potent factor for individual endeavor, for growth, aspiration, self-realization; the other an equally potent factor for mutual helpfulness and social well-being.
The explanation of the storm raging within the individual, and between him and his surroundings, is not far to seek. The primitive man, unable to understand his being, much less the unity of all life, felt himself absolutely dependent on blind, hidden forces ever ready to mock and taunt him. Out of that attitude grew the religious concepts of man as a mere speck of dust dependent on superior powers on high, who can only be appeased by complete surrender. All the early sagas rest on that idea, which continues to be the LEIT-MOTIF of the biblical tales dealing with the relation of man to God, to the State, to society. Again and again the same motif, MAN IS NOTHING, THE POWERS ARE EVERYTHING. Thus Jehovah would only endure man on condition of complete surrender. Man can have all the glories of the earth, but he must not become conscious of himself. The State, society, and moral laws all sing the same refrain: Man can have all the glories of the earth, but he must not become conscious of himself.
Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man's subordination. Anarchism is therefore the teacher of the unity of life; not merely in nature, but in man. There is no conflict between the individual and the social instincts, any more than there is between the heart and the lungs: the one the receptacle of a precious life essence, the other the repository of the element that keeps the essence pure and strong. The individual is the heart of society, conserving the essence of social life; society is the lungs which are distributing the element to keep the life essence--that is, the individual--pure and strong.
"The one thing of value in the world," says Emerson, "is the active soul; this every man contains within him. The soul active sees absolute truth and utters truth and creates." In other words, the individual instinct is the thing of value in the world. It is the true soul that sees and creates the truth alive, out of which is to come a still greater truth, the re-born social soul. Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony. To accomplish that unity, Anarchism has declared war on the pernicious influences which have so far prevented the harmonious blending of individual and social instincts, the individual and society.
Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Government, the dominion of human conduct, represent the stronghold of man's enslavement and all the horrors it entails. Religion! How it dominates man's mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion. But out of that nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world since gods began. Anarchism rouses man to rebellion against this black monster. Break your mental fetters, says Anarchism to man, for not until you think and judge for yourself will you get rid of the dominion of darkness, the greatest obstacle to all progress.
Property, the dominion of man's needs, the denial of the right to satisfy his needs. Time was when property claimed a divine right, when it came to man with the same refrain, even as religion, "Sacrifice! Abnegate! Submit!" The spirit of Anarchism has lifted man from his prostrate position. He now stands erect, with his face toward the light. He has learned to see the insatiable, devouring, devastating nature of property, and he is preparing to strike the monster dead.
"Property is robbery," said the great French Anarchist, Proudhon. Yes, but without risk and danger to the robber. Monopolizing the accumulated efforts of man, property has robbed him of his birthright, and has turned him loose a pauper and an outcast. Property has not even the time-worn excuse that man does not create enough to satisfy all needs. The A B C student of economics knows that the productivity of labor within the last few decades far exceeds normal demand a hundredfold. But what are normal demands to an abnormal institution? The only demand that property recognizes is its own gluttonous appetite for greater wealth, because wealth means power; the power to subdue, to crush, to exploit, the power to enslave, to outrage, to degrade. America is particularly boastful of her great power, her enormous national wealth. Poor America, of what avail is all her wealth, if the individuals comprising the nation are wretchedly poor? If they live in squalor, in filth, in crime, with hope and joy gone, a homeless, soilless army of human prey.
It is generally conceded that unless the returns of any business venture exceed the cost, bankruptcy is inevitable. But those engaged in the business of producing wealth have not yet learned even this simple lesson. Every year the cost of production in human life is growing larger (50,000 killed, 100,000 wounded in America last year); the returns to the masses, who help to create wealth, are ever getting smaller. Yet America continues to be blind to the inevitable bankruptcy of our business of production. Nor is this the only crime of the latter. Still more fatal is the crime of turning the producer into a mere particle of a machine, with less will and decision than his master of steel and iron. Man is being robbed not merely of the products of his labor, but of the power of free initiative, of originality, and the interest in, or desire for, the things he is making.
Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in. But if man is doomed to wind cotton around a spool, or dig coal, or build roads for thirty years of his life, there can be no talk of wealth. What he gives to the world is only gray and hideous things, reflecting a dull and hideous existence,--too weak to live, too cowardly to die. Strange to say, there are people who extol this deadening method of centralized production as the proudest achievement of our age. They fail utterly to realize that if we are to continue in machine subserviency, our slavery is more complete than was our bondage to the King. They do not want to know that centralization is not only the death-knell of liberty, but also of health and beauty, of art and science, all these being impossible in a clock-like, mechanical atmosphere.
Anarchism cannot but repudiate such a method of production: its goal is the freest possible expression of all the latent powers of the individual. Oscar Wilde defines a perfect personality as "one who develops under perfect conditions, who is not wounded, maimed, or in danger." A perfect personality, then, is only possible in a state of society where man is free to choose the mode of work, the conditions of work, and the freedom to work. One to whom the making of a table, the building of a house, or the tilling of the soil, is what the painting is to the artist and the discovery to the scientist,--the result of inspiration, of intense longing, and deep interest in work as a creative force. That being the ideal of Anarchism, its economic arrangements must consist of voluntary productive and distributive associations, gradually developing into free communism, as the best means of producing with the least waste of human energy. Anarchism, however, also recognizes the right of the individual, or numbers of individuals, to arrange at all times for other forms of work, in harmony with their tastes and desires.
Such free display of human energy being possible only under complete individual and social freedom, Anarchism directs its forces against the third and greatest foe of all social equality; namely, the State, organized authority, or statutory law,--the dominion of human conduct.
Just as religion has fettered the human mind, and as property, or the monopoly of things, has subdued and stifled man's needs, so has the State enslaved his spirit, dictating every phase of conduct. "All government in essence," says Emerson, "is tyranny." It matters not whether it is government by divine right or majority rule. In every instance its aim is the absolute subordination of the individual. Referring to the American government, the greatest American Anarchist, David Thoreau, said: "Government, what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instance losing its integrity; it has not the vitality and force of a single living man. Law never made man a whit more just; and by means of their respect for it, even the well disposed are daily made agents of injustice." Indeed, the keynote of government is injustice. With the arrogance and self-sufficiency of the King who could do no wrong, governments ordain, judge, condemn, and punish the most insignificant offenses, while maintaining themselves by the greatest of all offenses, the annihilation of individual liberty. Thus Ouida is right when she maintains that "the State only aims at instilling those qualities in its public by which its demands are obeyed, and its exchequer is filled. Its highest attainment is the reduction of mankind to clockwork. In its atmosphere all those finer and more delicate liberties, which require treatment and spacious expansion, inevitably dry up and perish. The State requires a taxpaying machine in which there is no hitch, an exchequer in which there is never a deficit, and a public, monotonous, obedient, colorless, spiritless, moving humbly like a flock of sheep along a straight high road between two walls."
Yet even a flock of sheep would resist the chicanery of the State, if it were not for the corruptive, tyrannical, and oppressive methods it employs to serve its purposes. Therefore Bakunin repudiates the State as synonymous with the surrender of the liberty of the individual or small minorities,--the destruction of social relationship, the curtailment, or complete denial even, of life itself, for its own aggrandizement. The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.
In fact, there is hardly a modern thinker who does not agree that government, organized authority, or the State, is necessary ONLY to maintain or protect property and monopoly. It has proven efficient in that function only.
Even George Bernard Shaw, who hopes for the miraculous from the State under Fabianism, nevertheless admits that "it is at present a huge machine for robbing and slave-driving of the poor by brute force." This being the case, it is hard to see why the clever prefacer wishes to uphold the State after poverty shall have ceased to exist. Unfortunately there are still a number of people who continue in the fatal belief that government rests on natural laws, that it maintains social order and harmony, that it diminishes crime, and that it prevents the lazy man from fleecing his fellows. I shall therefore examine these contentions. A natural law is that factor in man which asserts itself freely and spontaneously without any external force, in harmony with the requirements of nature. For instance, the demand for nutrition, for sex gratification, for light, air, and exercise, is a natural law. But its expression needs not the machinery of government, needs not the club, the gun, the handcuff, or the prison. To obey such laws, if we may call it obedience, requires only spontaneity and free opportunity. That governments do not maintain themselves through such harmonious factors is proven by the terrible array of violence, force, and coercion all governments use in order to live. Thus Blackstone is right when he says, "Human laws are invalid, because they are contrary to the laws of nature."
Unless it be the order of Warsaw after the slaughter of thousands of people, it is difficult to ascribe to governments any capacity for order or social harmony. Order derived through submission and maintained by terror is not much of a safe guaranty; yet that is the only "order" that governments have ever maintained. True social harmony grows naturally out of solidarity of interests. In a society where those who always work never have anything, while those who never work enjoy everything, solidarity of interests is non-existent; hence social harmony is but a myth. The only way organized authority meets this grave situation is by extending still greater privileges to those who have already monopolized the earth, and by still further enslaving the disinherited masses. Thus the entire arsenal of government--laws, police, soldiers, the courts, legislatures, prisons,--is strenuously engaged in "harmonizing" the most antagonistic elements in society.
The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.
Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime. What does society, as it exists today, know of the process of despair, the poverty, the horrors, the fearful struggle the human soul must pass on its way to crime and degradation. Who that knows this terrible process can fail to see the truth in these words of Peter Kropotkin: "Those who will hold the balance between the benefits thus attributed to law and punishment and the degrading effect of the latter on humanity; those who will estimate the torrent of depravity poured abroad in human society by the informer, favored by the Judge even, and paid for in clinking cash by governments, under the pretext of aiding to unmask crime; those who will go within prison walls and there see what human beings become when deprived of liberty, when subjected to the care of brutal keepers, to coarse, cruel words, to a thousand stinging, piercing humiliations, will agree with us that the entire apparatus of prison and punishment is an abomination which ought to be brought to an end."
The deterrent influence of law on the lazy man is too absurd to merit consideration. If society were only relieved of the waste and expense of keeping a lazy class, and the equally great expense of the paraphernalia of protection this lazy class requires, the social tables would contain an abundance for all, including even the occasional lazy individual. Besides, it is well to consider that laziness results either from special privileges, or physical and mental abnormalities. Our present insane system of production fosters both, and the most astounding phenomenon is that people should want to work at all now. Anarchism aims to strip labor of its deadening, dulling aspect, of its gloom and compulsion. It aims to make work an instrument of joy, of strength, of color, of real harmony, so that the poorest sort of a man should find in work both recreation and hope.
To achieve such an arrangement of life, government, with its unjust, arbitrary, repressive measures, must be done away with. At best it has but imposed one single mode of life upon all, without regard to individual and social variations and needs. In destroying government and statutory laws, Anarchism proposes to rescue the self-respect and independence of the individual from all restraint and invasion by authority. Only in freedom can man grow to his full stature. Only in freedom will he learn to think and move, and give the very best in him. Only in freedom will he realize the true force of the social bonds which knit men together, and which are the true foundation of a normal social life.
But what about human nature? Can it be changed? And if not, will it endure under Anarchism?
Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet, how can any one speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed? John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?
Freedom, expansion, opportunity, and, above all, peace and repose, alone can teach us the real dominant factors of human nature and all its wonderful possibilities.
Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.
This is not a wild fancy or an aberration of the mind. It is the conclusion arrived at by hosts of intellectual men and women the world over; a conclusion resulting from the close and studious observation of the tendencies of modern society: individual liberty and economic equality, the twin forces for the birth of what is fine and true in man.
As to methods. Anarchism is not, as some may suppose, a theory of the future to be realized through divine inspiration. It is a living force in the affairs of our life, constantly creating new conditions. The methods of Anarchism therefore do not comprise an iron-clad program to be carried out under all circumstances. Methods must grow out of the economic needs of each place and clime, and of the intellectual and temperamental requirements of the individual. The serene, calm character of a Tolstoy will wish different methods for social reconstruction than the intense, overflowing personality of a Michael Bakunin or a Peter Kropotkin. Equally so it must be apparent that the economic and political needs of Russia will dictate more drastic measures than would England or America. Anarchism does not stand for military drill and uniformity; it does, however, stand for the spirit of revolt, in whatever form, against everything that hinders human growth. All Anarchists agree in that, as they also agree in their opposition to the political machinery as a means of bringing about the great social change.
"All voting," says Thoreau, "is a sort of gaming, like checkers, or backgammon, a playing with right and wrong; its obligation never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right thing is doing nothing for it. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority." A close examination of the machinery of politics and its achievements will bear out the logic of Thoreau.
What does the history of parliamentarism show? Nothing but failure and defeat, not even a single reform to ameliorate the economic and social stress of the people. Laws have been passed and enactments made for the improvement and protection of labor. Thus it was proven only last year that Illinois, with the most rigid laws for mine protection, had the greatest mine disasters. In States where child labor laws prevail, child exploitation is at its highest, and though with us the workers enjoy full political opportunities, capitalism has reached the most brazen zenith.
Even were the workers able to have their own representatives, for which our good Socialist politicians are clamoring, what chances are there for their honesty and good faith? One has but to bear in mind the process of politics to realize that its path of good intentions is full of pitfalls: wire-pulling, intriguing, flattering, lying, cheating; in fact, chicanery of every description, whereby the political aspirant can achieve success. Added to that is a complete demoralization of character and conviction, until nothing is left that would make one hope for anything from such a human derelict. Time and time again the people were foolish enough to trust, believe, and support with their last farthing aspiring politicians, only to find themselves betrayed and cheated.
It may be claimed that men of integrity would not become corrupt in the political grinding mill. Perhaps not; but such men would be absolutely helpless to exert the slightest influence in behalf of labor, as indeed has been shown in numerous instances. The State is the economic master of its servants. Good men, if such there be, would either remain true to their political faith and lose their economic support, or they would cling to their economic master and be utterly unable to do the slightest good. The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue.
The political superstition is still holding sway over the hearts and minds of the masses, but the true lovers of liberty will have no more to do with it. Instead, they believe with Stirner that man has as much liberty as he is willing to take. Anarchism therefore stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral. But defiance and resistance are illegal. Therein lies the salvation of man.
Everything illegal necessitates integrity, self-reliance, and courage. In short, it calls for free, independent spirits, for "men who are men, and who have a bone in their backs which you cannot pass your hand through."
Universal suffrage itself owes its existence to direct action. If not for the spirit of rebellion, of the defiance on the part of the American revolutionary fathers, their posterity would still wear the King's coat. If not for the direct action of a John Brown and his comrades, America would still trade in the flesh of the black man. True, the trade in white flesh is still going on; but that, too, will have to be abolished by direct action. Trade-unionism, the economic arena of the modern gladiator, owes its existence to direct action. It is but recently that law and government have attempted to crush the trade-union movement, and condemned the exponents of man's right to organize to prison as conspirators. Had they sought to assert their cause through begging, pleading, and compromise, trade-unionism would today be a negligible quantity. In France, in Spain, in Italy, in Russia, nay even in England (witness the growing rebellion of English labor unions) direct, revolutionary, economic action has become so strong a force in the battle for industrial liberty as to make the world realize the tremendous importance of labor's power. The General Strike, the supreme expression of the economic consciousness of the workers, was ridiculed in America but a short time ago. Today every great strike, in order to win, must realize the importance of the solidaric general protest.
Direct action, having proven effective along economic lines, is equally potent in the environment of the individual. There a hundred forces encroach upon his being, and only persistent resistance to them will finally set him free. Direct action against the authority in the shop, direct action against the authority of the law, direct action against the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code, is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism.
Will it not lead to a revolution? Indeed, it will. No real social change has ever come about without a revolution. People are either not familiar with their history, or they have not yet learned that revolution is but thought carried into action.
Anarchism, the great leaven of thought, is today permeating every phase of human endeavor. Science, art, literature, the drama, the effort for economic betterment, in fact every individual and social opposition to the existing disorder of things, is illumined by the spiritual light of Anarchism. It is the philosophy of the sovereignty of the individual. It is the theory of social harmony. It is the great, surging, living truth that is reconstructing the world, and that will usher in the Dawn.
- Ever reviled, accursed, ne'er understood,
- Thou art the grisly terror of our age.
"Wreck of all order," cry the multitude,
"Art thou, and war and murder's endless rage."
O, let them cry. To them that ne'er have striven
The truth that lies behind a word to find,
To them the word's right meaning was not given.
They shall continue blind among the blind.
But thou, O word, so clear, so strong, so pure,
Thou sayest all which I for goal have taken.
I give thee to the future! Thine secure
When each at least unto himself shall waken.
Comes it in sunshine? In the tempest's thrill?
I cannot tell--but it the earth shall see!
I am an Anarchist! Wherefore I will
Not rule, and also ruled I will not be!
ANARCHISM
JOHN HENRY MACKAY
Anarchism could not hope to escape the fate of all other ideas of innovation. Indeed, as the most revolutionary and uncompromising innovator, Anarchism must needs meet with the combined ignorance and venom of the world it aims to reconstruct.
To deal even remotely with all that is being said and done against Anarchism would necessitate the writing of a whole volume. I shall therefore meet only two of the principal objections. In so doing, I shall attempt to elucidate what Anarchism really stands for. The strange phenomenon of the opposition to Anarchism is that it brings to light the relation between so-called intelligence and ignorance. And yet this is not so very strange when we consider the relativity of all things. The ignorant mass has in its favor that it makes no pretense of knowledge or tolerance. Acting, as it always does, by mere impulse, its reasons are like those of a child. "Why?" "Because." Yet the opposition of the uneducated to Anarchism deserves the same consideration as that of the intelligent man. What, then, are the objections? First, Anarchism is impractical, though a beautiful ideal. Second, Anarchism stands for violence and destruction, hence it must be repudiated as vile and dangerous. Both the intelligent man and the ignorant mass judge not from a thorough knowledge of the subject, but either from hearsay or false interpretation.
A practical scheme, says Oscar Wilde, is either one already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under the existing conditions; but it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to, and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The true criterion of the practical, therefore, is not whether the latter can keep intact the wrong or foolish; rather is it whether the scheme has vitality enough to leave the stagnant waters of the old, and build, as well as sustain, new life. In the light of this conception, Anarchism is indeed practical. More than any other idea, it is helping to do away with the wrong and foolish; more than any other idea, it is building and sustaining new life.
The emotions of the ignorant man are continuously kept at a pitch by the most blood-curdling stories about Anarchism. Not a thing too outrageous to be employed against this philosophy and its exponents. Therefore Anarchism represents to the unthinking what the proverbial bad man does to the child,--a black monster bent on swallowing everything; in short, destruction and violence.
Destruction and violence! How is the ordinary man to know that the most violent element in society is ignorance; that its power of destruction is the very thing Anarchism is combating? Nor is he aware that Anarchism, whose roots, as it were, are part of nature's forces, destroys, not healthful tissue, but parasitic growths that feed on the life's essence of society. It is merely clearing the soil from weeds and sagebrush, that it may eventually bear healthy fruit.
Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think. The widespread mental indolence, so prevalent in society, proves this to be only too true. Rather than to go to the bottom of any given idea, to examine into its origin and meaning, most people will either condemn it altogether, or rely on some superficial or prejudicial definition of non-essentials.
Anarchism urges man to think, to investigate, to analyze every proposition; but that the brain capacity of the average reader be not taxed too much, I also shall begin with a definition, and then elaborate on the latter.
ANARCHISM:--The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.
The new social order rests, of course, on the materialistic basis of life; but while all Anarchists agree that the main evil today is an economic one, they maintain that the solution of that evil can be brought about only through the consideration of EVERY PHASE of life,--individual, as well as the collective; the internal, as well as the external phases.
A thorough perusal of the history of human development will disclose two elements in bitter conflict with each other; elements that are only now beginning to be understood, not as foreign to each other, but as closely related and truly harmonious, if only placed in proper environment: the individual and social instincts. The individual and society have waged a relentless and bloody battle for ages, each striving for supremacy, because each was blind to the value and importance of the other. The individual and social instincts,--the one a most potent factor for individual endeavor, for growth, aspiration, self-realization; the other an equally potent factor for mutual helpfulness and social well-being.
The explanation of the storm raging within the individual, and between him and his surroundings, is not far to seek. The primitive man, unable to understand his being, much less the unity of all life, felt himself absolutely dependent on blind, hidden forces ever ready to mock and taunt him. Out of that attitude grew the religious concepts of man as a mere speck of dust dependent on superior powers on high, who can only be appeased by complete surrender. All the early sagas rest on that idea, which continues to be the LEIT-MOTIF of the biblical tales dealing with the relation of man to God, to the State, to society. Again and again the same motif, MAN IS NOTHING, THE POWERS ARE EVERYTHING. Thus Jehovah would only endure man on condition of complete surrender. Man can have all the glories of the earth, but he must not become conscious of himself. The State, society, and moral laws all sing the same refrain: Man can have all the glories of the earth, but he must not become conscious of himself.
Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man's subordination. Anarchism is therefore the teacher of the unity of life; not merely in nature, but in man. There is no conflict between the individual and the social instincts, any more than there is between the heart and the lungs: the one the receptacle of a precious life essence, the other the repository of the element that keeps the essence pure and strong. The individual is the heart of society, conserving the essence of social life; society is the lungs which are distributing the element to keep the life essence--that is, the individual--pure and strong.
"The one thing of value in the world," says Emerson, "is the active soul; this every man contains within him. The soul active sees absolute truth and utters truth and creates." In other words, the individual instinct is the thing of value in the world. It is the true soul that sees and creates the truth alive, out of which is to come a still greater truth, the re-born social soul. Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony. To accomplish that unity, Anarchism has declared war on the pernicious influences which have so far prevented the harmonious blending of individual and social instincts, the individual and society.
Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Government, the dominion of human conduct, represent the stronghold of man's enslavement and all the horrors it entails. Religion! How it dominates man's mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion. But out of that nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world since gods began. Anarchism rouses man to rebellion against this black monster. Break your mental fetters, says Anarchism to man, for not until you think and judge for yourself will you get rid of the dominion of darkness, the greatest obstacle to all progress.
Property, the dominion of man's needs, the denial of the right to satisfy his needs. Time was when property claimed a divine right, when it came to man with the same refrain, even as religion, "Sacrifice! Abnegate! Submit!" The spirit of Anarchism has lifted man from his prostrate position. He now stands erect, with his face toward the light. He has learned to see the insatiable, devouring, devastating nature of property, and he is preparing to strike the monster dead.
"Property is robbery," said the great French Anarchist, Proudhon. Yes, but without risk and danger to the robber. Monopolizing the accumulated efforts of man, property has robbed him of his birthright, and has turned him loose a pauper and an outcast. Property has not even the time-worn excuse that man does not create enough to satisfy all needs. The A B C student of economics knows that the productivity of labor within the last few decades far exceeds normal demand a hundredfold. But what are normal demands to an abnormal institution? The only demand that property recognizes is its own gluttonous appetite for greater wealth, because wealth means power; the power to subdue, to crush, to exploit, the power to enslave, to outrage, to degrade. America is particularly boastful of her great power, her enormous national wealth. Poor America, of what avail is all her wealth, if the individuals comprising the nation are wretchedly poor? If they live in squalor, in filth, in crime, with hope and joy gone, a homeless, soilless army of human prey.
It is generally conceded that unless the returns of any business venture exceed the cost, bankruptcy is inevitable. But those engaged in the business of producing wealth have not yet learned even this simple lesson. Every year the cost of production in human life is growing larger (50,000 killed, 100,000 wounded in America last year); the returns to the masses, who help to create wealth, are ever getting smaller. Yet America continues to be blind to the inevitable bankruptcy of our business of production. Nor is this the only crime of the latter. Still more fatal is the crime of turning the producer into a mere particle of a machine, with less will and decision than his master of steel and iron. Man is being robbed not merely of the products of his labor, but of the power of free initiative, of originality, and the interest in, or desire for, the things he is making.
Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in. But if man is doomed to wind cotton around a spool, or dig coal, or build roads for thirty years of his life, there can be no talk of wealth. What he gives to the world is only gray and hideous things, reflecting a dull and hideous existence,--too weak to live, too cowardly to die. Strange to say, there are people who extol this deadening method of centralized production as the proudest achievement of our age. They fail utterly to realize that if we are to continue in machine subserviency, our slavery is more complete than was our bondage to the King. They do not want to know that centralization is not only the death-knell of liberty, but also of health and beauty, of art and science, all these being impossible in a clock-like, mechanical atmosphere.
Anarchism cannot but repudiate such a method of production: its goal is the freest possible expression of all the latent powers of the individual. Oscar Wilde defines a perfect personality as "one who develops under perfect conditions, who is not wounded, maimed, or in danger." A perfect personality, then, is only possible in a state of society where man is free to choose the mode of work, the conditions of work, and the freedom to work. One to whom the making of a table, the building of a house, or the tilling of the soil, is what the painting is to the artist and the discovery to the scientist,--the result of inspiration, of intense longing, and deep interest in work as a creative force. That being the ideal of Anarchism, its economic arrangements must consist of voluntary productive and distributive associations, gradually developing into free communism, as the best means of producing with the least waste of human energy. Anarchism, however, also recognizes the right of the individual, or numbers of individuals, to arrange at all times for other forms of work, in harmony with their tastes and desires.
Such free display of human energy being possible only under complete individual and social freedom, Anarchism directs its forces against the third and greatest foe of all social equality; namely, the State, organized authority, or statutory law,--the dominion of human conduct.
Just as religion has fettered the human mind, and as property, or the monopoly of things, has subdued and stifled man's needs, so has the State enslaved his spirit, dictating every phase of conduct. "All government in essence," says Emerson, "is tyranny." It matters not whether it is government by divine right or majority rule. In every instance its aim is the absolute subordination of the individual. Referring to the American government, the greatest American Anarchist, David Thoreau, said: "Government, what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instance losing its integrity; it has not the vitality and force of a single living man. Law never made man a whit more just; and by means of their respect for it, even the well disposed are daily made agents of injustice." Indeed, the keynote of government is injustice. With the arrogance and self-sufficiency of the King who could do no wrong, governments ordain, judge, condemn, and punish the most insignificant offenses, while maintaining themselves by the greatest of all offenses, the annihilation of individual liberty. Thus Ouida is right when she maintains that "the State only aims at instilling those qualities in its public by which its demands are obeyed, and its exchequer is filled. Its highest attainment is the reduction of mankind to clockwork. In its atmosphere all those finer and more delicate liberties, which require treatment and spacious expansion, inevitably dry up and perish. The State requires a taxpaying machine in which there is no hitch, an exchequer in which there is never a deficit, and a public, monotonous, obedient, colorless, spiritless, moving humbly like a flock of sheep along a straight high road between two walls."
Yet even a flock of sheep would resist the chicanery of the State, if it were not for the corruptive, tyrannical, and oppressive methods it employs to serve its purposes. Therefore Bakunin repudiates the State as synonymous with the surrender of the liberty of the individual or small minorities,--the destruction of social relationship, the curtailment, or complete denial even, of life itself, for its own aggrandizement. The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.
In fact, there is hardly a modern thinker who does not agree that government, organized authority, or the State, is necessary ONLY to maintain or protect property and monopoly. It has proven efficient in that function only.
Even George Bernard Shaw, who hopes for the miraculous from the State under Fabianism, nevertheless admits that "it is at present a huge machine for robbing and slave-driving of the poor by brute force." This being the case, it is hard to see why the clever prefacer wishes to uphold the State after poverty shall have ceased to exist. Unfortunately there are still a number of people who continue in the fatal belief that government rests on natural laws, that it maintains social order and harmony, that it diminishes crime, and that it prevents the lazy man from fleecing his fellows. I shall therefore examine these contentions. A natural law is that factor in man which asserts itself freely and spontaneously without any external force, in harmony with the requirements of nature. For instance, the demand for nutrition, for sex gratification, for light, air, and exercise, is a natural law. But its expression needs not the machinery of government, needs not the club, the gun, the handcuff, or the prison. To obey such laws, if we may call it obedience, requires only spontaneity and free opportunity. That governments do not maintain themselves through such harmonious factors is proven by the terrible array of violence, force, and coercion all governments use in order to live. Thus Blackstone is right when he says, "Human laws are invalid, because they are contrary to the laws of nature."
Unless it be the order of Warsaw after the slaughter of thousands of people, it is difficult to ascribe to governments any capacity for order or social harmony. Order derived through submission and maintained by terror is not much of a safe guaranty; yet that is the only "order" that governments have ever maintained. True social harmony grows naturally out of solidarity of interests. In a society where those who always work never have anything, while those who never work enjoy everything, solidarity of interests is non-existent; hence social harmony is but a myth. The only way organized authority meets this grave situation is by extending still greater privileges to those who have already monopolized the earth, and by still further enslaving the disinherited masses. Thus the entire arsenal of government--laws, police, soldiers, the courts, legislatures, prisons,--is strenuously engaged in "harmonizing" the most antagonistic elements in society.
The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.
Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime. What does society, as it exists today, know of the process of despair, the poverty, the horrors, the fearful struggle the human soul must pass on its way to crime and degradation. Who that knows this terrible process can fail to see the truth in these words of Peter Kropotkin: "Those who will hold the balance between the benefits thus attributed to law and punishment and the degrading effect of the latter on humanity; those who will estimate the torrent of depravity poured abroad in human society by the informer, favored by the Judge even, and paid for in clinking cash by governments, under the pretext of aiding to unmask crime; those who will go within prison walls and there see what human beings become when deprived of liberty, when subjected to the care of brutal keepers, to coarse, cruel words, to a thousand stinging, piercing humiliations, will agree with us that the entire apparatus of prison and punishment is an abomination which ought to be brought to an end."
The deterrent influence of law on the lazy man is too absurd to merit consideration. If society were only relieved of the waste and expense of keeping a lazy class, and the equally great expense of the paraphernalia of protection this lazy class requires, the social tables would contain an abundance for all, including even the occasional lazy individual. Besides, it is well to consider that laziness results either from special privileges, or physical and mental abnormalities. Our present insane system of production fosters both, and the most astounding phenomenon is that people should want to work at all now. Anarchism aims to strip labor of its deadening, dulling aspect, of its gloom and compulsion. It aims to make work an instrument of joy, of strength, of color, of real harmony, so that the poorest sort of a man should find in work both recreation and hope.
To achieve such an arrangement of life, government, with its unjust, arbitrary, repressive measures, must be done away with. At best it has but imposed one single mode of life upon all, without regard to individual and social variations and needs. In destroying government and statutory laws, Anarchism proposes to rescue the self-respect and independence of the individual from all restraint and invasion by authority. Only in freedom can man grow to his full stature. Only in freedom will he learn to think and move, and give the very best in him. Only in freedom will he realize the true force of the social bonds which knit men together, and which are the true foundation of a normal social life.
But what about human nature? Can it be changed? And if not, will it endure under Anarchism?
Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet, how can any one speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed? John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?
Freedom, expansion, opportunity, and, above all, peace and repose, alone can teach us the real dominant factors of human nature and all its wonderful possibilities.
Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.
This is not a wild fancy or an aberration of the mind. It is the conclusion arrived at by hosts of intellectual men and women the world over; a conclusion resulting from the close and studious observation of the tendencies of modern society: individual liberty and economic equality, the twin forces for the birth of what is fine and true in man.
As to methods. Anarchism is not, as some may suppose, a theory of the future to be realized through divine inspiration. It is a living force in the affairs of our life, constantly creating new conditions. The methods of Anarchism therefore do not comprise an iron-clad program to be carried out under all circumstances. Methods must grow out of the economic needs of each place and clime, and of the intellectual and temperamental requirements of the individual. The serene, calm character of a Tolstoy will wish different methods for social reconstruction than the intense, overflowing personality of a Michael Bakunin or a Peter Kropotkin. Equally so it must be apparent that the economic and political needs of Russia will dictate more drastic measures than would England or America. Anarchism does not stand for military drill and uniformity; it does, however, stand for the spirit of revolt, in whatever form, against everything that hinders human growth. All Anarchists agree in that, as they also agree in their opposition to the political machinery as a means of bringing about the great social change.
"All voting," says Thoreau, "is a sort of gaming, like checkers, or backgammon, a playing with right and wrong; its obligation never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right thing is doing nothing for it. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority." A close examination of the machinery of politics and its achievements will bear out the logic of Thoreau.
What does the history of parliamentarism show? Nothing but failure and defeat, not even a single reform to ameliorate the economic and social stress of the people. Laws have been passed and enactments made for the improvement and protection of labor. Thus it was proven only last year that Illinois, with the most rigid laws for mine protection, had the greatest mine disasters. In States where child labor laws prevail, child exploitation is at its highest, and though with us the workers enjoy full political opportunities, capitalism has reached the most brazen zenith.
Even were the workers able to have their own representatives, for which our good Socialist politicians are clamoring, what chances are there for their honesty and good faith? One has but to bear in mind the process of politics to realize that its path of good intentions is full of pitfalls: wire-pulling, intriguing, flattering, lying, cheating; in fact, chicanery of every description, whereby the political aspirant can achieve success. Added to that is a complete demoralization of character and conviction, until nothing is left that would make one hope for anything from such a human derelict. Time and time again the people were foolish enough to trust, believe, and support with their last farthing aspiring politicians, only to find themselves betrayed and cheated.
It may be claimed that men of integrity would not become corrupt in the political grinding mill. Perhaps not; but such men would be absolutely helpless to exert the slightest influence in behalf of labor, as indeed has been shown in numerous instances. The State is the economic master of its servants. Good men, if such there be, would either remain true to their political faith and lose their economic support, or they would cling to their economic master and be utterly unable to do the slightest good. The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue.
The political superstition is still holding sway over the hearts and minds of the masses, but the true lovers of liberty will have no more to do with it. Instead, they believe with Stirner that man has as much liberty as he is willing to take. Anarchism therefore stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral. But defiance and resistance are illegal. Therein lies the salvation of man.
Everything illegal necessitates integrity, self-reliance, and courage. In short, it calls for free, independent spirits, for "men who are men, and who have a bone in their backs which you cannot pass your hand through."
Universal suffrage itself owes its existence to direct action. If not for the spirit of rebellion, of the defiance on the part of the American revolutionary fathers, their posterity would still wear the King's coat. If not for the direct action of a John Brown and his comrades, America would still trade in the flesh of the black man. True, the trade in white flesh is still going on; but that, too, will have to be abolished by direct action. Trade-unionism, the economic arena of the modern gladiator, owes its existence to direct action. It is but recently that law and government have attempted to crush the trade-union movement, and condemned the exponents of man's right to organize to prison as conspirators. Had they sought to assert their cause through begging, pleading, and compromise, trade-unionism would today be a negligible quantity. In France, in Spain, in Italy, in Russia, nay even in England (witness the growing rebellion of English labor unions) direct, revolutionary, economic action has become so strong a force in the battle for industrial liberty as to make the world realize the tremendous importance of labor's power. The General Strike, the supreme expression of the economic consciousness of the workers, was ridiculed in America but a short time ago. Today every great strike, in order to win, must realize the importance of the solidaric general protest.
Direct action, having proven effective along economic lines, is equally potent in the environment of the individual. There a hundred forces encroach upon his being, and only persistent resistance to them will finally set him free. Direct action against the authority in the shop, direct action against the authority of the law, direct action against the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code, is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism.
Will it not lead to a revolution? Indeed, it will. No real social change has ever come about without a revolution. People are either not familiar with their history, or they have not yet learned that revolution is but thought carried into action.
Anarchism, the great leaven of thought, is today permeating every phase of human endeavor. Science, art, literature, the drama, the effort for economic betterment, in fact every individual and social opposition to the existing disorder of things, is illumined by the spiritual light of Anarchism. It is the philosophy of the sovereignty of the individual. It is the theory of social harmony. It is the great, surging, living truth that is reconstructing the world, and that will usher in the Dawn.
Activist Post Deleted: Google Erases Popular Alternative News
A friend of mine, who also blogs here on blogspot and gets a good number of hits had his blog shut down for criticizing our Great Leader as his blog is political in nature. I think its only a matter of time for this one. Its also comforting to know that google shares user data with the NSA. Sometimes I wonder if google is an operation run by TPTB (the powers that be) under the guise of a private corporation. At this point it doesnt really matter, the corporations run the country regardless. Google, Monsanto, Lockheed Martin and Exxon Mobil dont want an informed citizenry.
Be good consumers! Shop for your country! Pay your taxes! Obey your masters!
Original Source: http://beforeitsnews.com/story/1138/878/Activist_Post_Deleted_Google_Erases_Popular_Alternative_News_Source.html
by Zen Gardner
At mid-day on Friday, September 23, 2011, the popular alternative news blog, ActivistPost.com, was taken offline. Activist Post receives over one million views per month and has been hosted by Google’s Blogger since its founding in June 2010.
“We remain puzzled as to why Activist Post was erased completely by Google,” said chief editor and co-founder Michael Edwards. “When we tried to load our back-up file into our secondary Blogger account, that was blocked as well,” he added.
It remains unclear whether Google has acted to censor ActivistPost.com for their controversial reporting. Google is becoming somewhat notorious for clamping down on truth and liberty activists, of which Activist Post is known for.
“Clearly, this is a huge set back for us and the work we do,” said co-founder Eric Blair. “Our entire crew is working on resolving the issue and restoring the website. We certainly look forward to an explanation from Google.”
Activist Post will file an appeal with Google to restore the site in full, and asks their loyal supporters to make their voices heard as well. However, they also are seeking other hosting services to avoid these types of censorship issues in the future.
“We want to thank our loyal readers, contributors, and advertisers for being patient while we work this out. We plan to come on even stronger in face of this adversity,” Edwards said
_________
Until Activist Post is back in action, you can find their work at Before It’s News HERE
Be good consumers! Shop for your country! Pay your taxes! Obey your masters!
Original Source: http://beforeitsnews.com/story/1138/878/Activist_Post_Deleted_Google_Erases_Popular_Alternative_News_Source.html
by Zen Gardner
At mid-day on Friday, September 23, 2011, the popular alternative news blog, ActivistPost.com, was taken offline. Activist Post receives over one million views per month and has been hosted by Google’s Blogger since its founding in June 2010.
“We remain puzzled as to why Activist Post was erased completely by Google,” said chief editor and co-founder Michael Edwards. “When we tried to load our back-up file into our secondary Blogger account, that was blocked as well,” he added.
It remains unclear whether Google has acted to censor ActivistPost.com for their controversial reporting. Google is becoming somewhat notorious for clamping down on truth and liberty activists, of which Activist Post is known for.
“Clearly, this is a huge set back for us and the work we do,” said co-founder Eric Blair. “Our entire crew is working on resolving the issue and restoring the website. We certainly look forward to an explanation from Google.”
Activist Post will file an appeal with Google to restore the site in full, and asks their loyal supporters to make their voices heard as well. However, they also are seeking other hosting services to avoid these types of censorship issues in the future.
“We want to thank our loyal readers, contributors, and advertisers for being patient while we work this out. We plan to come on even stronger in face of this adversity,” Edwards said
_________
Until Activist Post is back in action, you can find their work at Before It’s News HERE
Permaculture
If anyone is following this blog I apologize for the dearth of posts during the past week, as of the 19th of September I left "The Bunker", possibly for good, and drove to Oregon to attend a 6 week Permaculture Course at Aprovecho and have been pretty busy with it. It is very exciting.
This just so happens to be the same Permaculture School that a few of the hikers recently released from Iran were from.
Here's a description of the course and a list of whats covered in the curriculum:
"Aprovecho’s Sustainable Living Skills Program is the oldest program of its kind in the Northwest and includes hands on training in appropriate technology, sustainable forestry, natural building, and sustainable agriculture. The 72 hour Permaculture Design curriculum is woven throughout the program, leaving students with a framework for integrating strategies and techniques into cohesive designs for sustainable human settlement. A certificate of Permaculture Design will be presented at the end of the program. This program is also accredited through Humboldt State University as an extended education program.
As a well established yet ever evolving 30 year old site, Aprovecho’s campus is an excellent working classroom for the development of hands-on skills. Various hands on projects from past courses have included constructing a solar shower, installing a greywater system, pond development, and ferro-cement tank construction. Additionally, students will have the opportunity to become proficient in mixing and applying natural plasters and finishes, harvesting trees with hand tools, building bicycle powered machines, understanding and experiencing aquaculture and aquaponics systems, and much more.
This program is structured using Permaculture’s concept of zones: zones of interaction and influence starting with your self and your home, and moving out into the garden, orchard, pasture, production forest, wild lands, and political and financial structures. Over a dozen teachers bring their experience to the table to help students best design and integrate the dynamic components of a sustainable lifestyle."
Week 1
The Context, Self and Home Care
Introduction to Permaculture
Patterns and Design Process
Whole Foods and Nutrition
Home Herbal Remedies
Fermentation, Brewing
Week 2
The Garden and Orchard
Soils, Composting
Bed Preparation, Sowing & Transplanting
Animals in the System
Forest Gardening
Seed Saving
Propagation
Week 3
Home Work
Wood-Fired Cooking
Solar Hot Water
Introduction to Natural Building Principles and Practices
Earthen Plasters and Natural Finishes
Working with Wood
Humanure
Week 4
Larger-Scale Systems
Non-Timber Forest Products (Mushroom Cultivation, Bamboo)
Forest Surveying
Rainwater Catchment and Greywater Systems
Earthworks and Water Harvesting
Tree Falling
Horse Logging
Week 5
The Wilderness and Beyond
Brice Creek Old Growth Hike
Botany and Plant Identification
Watershed Walk
Creek Restoration Project
Week 6
Integration
Invisible Structures
Design for Catastrophe
Urban Systems
Design Project Presentations
And here's some info on Permaculture:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=permaculture&aq=f
This just so happens to be the same Permaculture School that a few of the hikers recently released from Iran were from.
Here's a description of the course and a list of whats covered in the curriculum:
"Aprovecho’s Sustainable Living Skills Program is the oldest program of its kind in the Northwest and includes hands on training in appropriate technology, sustainable forestry, natural building, and sustainable agriculture. The 72 hour Permaculture Design curriculum is woven throughout the program, leaving students with a framework for integrating strategies and techniques into cohesive designs for sustainable human settlement. A certificate of Permaculture Design will be presented at the end of the program. This program is also accredited through Humboldt State University as an extended education program.
As a well established yet ever evolving 30 year old site, Aprovecho’s campus is an excellent working classroom for the development of hands-on skills. Various hands on projects from past courses have included constructing a solar shower, installing a greywater system, pond development, and ferro-cement tank construction. Additionally, students will have the opportunity to become proficient in mixing and applying natural plasters and finishes, harvesting trees with hand tools, building bicycle powered machines, understanding and experiencing aquaculture and aquaponics systems, and much more.
This program is structured using Permaculture’s concept of zones: zones of interaction and influence starting with your self and your home, and moving out into the garden, orchard, pasture, production forest, wild lands, and political and financial structures. Over a dozen teachers bring their experience to the table to help students best design and integrate the dynamic components of a sustainable lifestyle."
Week 1
The Context, Self and Home Care
Introduction to Permaculture
Patterns and Design Process
Whole Foods and Nutrition
Home Herbal Remedies
Fermentation, Brewing
Week 2
The Garden and Orchard
Soils, Composting
Bed Preparation, Sowing & Transplanting
Animals in the System
Forest Gardening
Seed Saving
Propagation
Week 3
Home Work
Wood-Fired Cooking
Solar Hot Water
Introduction to Natural Building Principles and Practices
Earthen Plasters and Natural Finishes
Working with Wood
Humanure
Week 4
Larger-Scale Systems
Non-Timber Forest Products (Mushroom Cultivation, Bamboo)
Forest Surveying
Rainwater Catchment and Greywater Systems
Earthworks and Water Harvesting
Tree Falling
Horse Logging
Week 5
The Wilderness and Beyond
Brice Creek Old Growth Hike
Botany and Plant Identification
Watershed Walk
Creek Restoration Project
Week 6
Integration
Invisible Structures
Design for Catastrophe
Urban Systems
Design Project Presentations
And here's some info on Permaculture:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=permaculture&aq=f
Friday, September 16, 2011
The Devolution and Rebirth of Western Thought
Original Source: http://www.realitysandwich.com/devolution_rebirth_western_thought
Western thought has moved from Platonic texts to tectonic plates. We began with the unshakeable Absolute, and we are now on the very shaky ground of scientific beliefs that we once thought were solid bedrock, but that are now recognized as being subject to cataclysmic seismic shifts, as new paradigms of understanding emerge with a stunning suddenness that is overturning our conception of what we are.
Once we focused our minds on the unmoving eternal Ideas that transcend the physical dimension. But Plato's poetry soon paled as inquiring minds built their empires with empirical concepts designed to confer command and control. Aristotle shifted our gaze first to the unmoved Prime Mover, and then to the motions that Mover created. But his student, Alexander the Great, had other uses for philosophy. Military technology was first on his agenda. Mathematics developed as an instrument to map the heavens as well as the Earth, to gain control through knowledge. And gradually the scientific drive to understand the structures that appear in this world and the dynamic interactions of such structures enabled us to build extremely complex theories about the nature of reality. These theories led to ever more marvelous technologies, and the result was apparent mastery of Nature.
The growing body of scientific theories, to be credible, had to be testable whenever possible. The protocols of such tests led to the establishment of critical boundaries to the field of experimental science. The logical application of Occam's razor, the principle that a theory regarding an unknown phenomenon must make use of the smallest number of hypothetical entities, has led to the development of a generally accepted ethical/aesthetic sense of elegance as a prime theoretical criterion.
But many problems have appeared that cannot be solved through experiment. And as our understanding of the phenomenal world has become ever more complex, the capacity of reason to maintain its own standards of rigor, parsimony, and elegance has been stretched to the breaking point. Darwin's theory of natural selection as the driver of evolution is not verifiable. It may, in fact, have already been falsified in the field of microbiology by Behe's principle of irreducible complexity, but the desperate neo-Darwinists can always add hypotheses to account for their theoretical difficulties. The more hypotheses they add, however, the less elegant the theory becomes.
At some point, what keeps the theory alive is not scientific credibility but political power. The Darwinists may in their hearts actually realize that intelligent design is the only rational hypothesis to make sense of all the data. But they are terrified that to admit such blasphemy would destroy the church of science itself, and lead to a collapse of consciousness back into the dark ages of superstition and tyrannical popery. The problem is that maintaining a theory that no longer exhibits the indicia of adequacy on scientific grounds undermines the edifice of science far more effectively than could religion.
A similar conundrum has come to plague the hardest science of all: physics. For nearly a century, science has struggled with the observations of subatomic particles. They defy the logic we have come to expect from the behavior of physical objects. Electrons and photons and other such objects can apparently be in more than one place at a time, or be nowhere at all. They can jump from point A to point B without crossing the intervening space (the proverbial quantum leap). They can shift from being particles to being waves. They can be entangled with other particles that are in different parts of the universe. They can seemingly communicate with other particles that they are entangled with instantaneously, without even the limitation of the speed of light. One could go on to delineate other enigmas of these supposedly fundamental particles. Theories that have developed within the physics establishment itself to explain all this strange behavior, such as string theory, have resulted in ever more outrageous hypotheses (like that of an eleven-dimensioned cosmos or even parallel universes), none of which are testable.
The most insulting aspect of quantum mechanics is the emerging fact that consciousness is apparently as fundamental as matter. The old ghost of Cartesian dualism that scientists had considered exorcised forever has returned with a vengeance. An even more terrifying spirit, that of absolute idealism, the specter that consciousness is even more primary than matter, and beyond that, even the possibility that matter itself is a myth, and that there is only consciousness, has arisen again to threaten the entire modern paradigm of reality. The border between science and religion has now been obliterated. This is a frightening development to the rational mind. It opens the way to limitless, baseless conjecture. The field of philosophy of science, long dormant in the heyday of logical positivism and other forms of reductionistic materialism, has now come to life again and is struggling to maintain coherence in the face of these extraordinary developments in human intellectual evolution that threaten to overwhelm collective sanity itself.
The line between rational thought and psychotic delusion has always been tenuous. Nowadays it is a thoroughly permeable membrane. This problem has flared up exponentially as a result of the need for finally accounting for consciousness itself, the perennial black hole of scientific discourse. Is there a reasonable way to think through the current situation without falling prey to the Scylla of dogmatic phenomenalism or the Charybdis of delusional realms, entities, and paranoid conspiracy theories? And since it may well be possible that some conspiracy theories are correct, and that some incorporeal entities may be real, how can we establish rational criteria for their exploration?
This work is now being tentatively undertaken by such disciplines as psychoanalysis and parapsychology, but they themselves have little scientific credibility to the rigid hold-outs fighting to preserve the old paradigm. And since the scientific establishment as a whole is now in the grip of multinational military-industrial corporate forces -- forces that control the universities, tenure decisions, peer-reviewed journals, and funding for research -- those scientists with the courage to speak out regarding the social corruption of knowledge and to present politically incorrect theories can find their careers and reputations quickly terminated.
On the softer side of science, such as the disciplines of psychology and psychoanalysis, the situation is no healthier. Licensing requirements easily silence those who would challenge the hegemonic paradigm. Rebels can be rapidly marginalized and ridiculed. In any case, psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic theories are not objectively testable. That is why so many competing schools of thought flourish. So long as the different theories remain within the allowable limits of political acceptability -- controlled by a governing diagnostic manual that encourages treatment with drugs and short-term intervention models that insurance companies will deign to cover --the ruling powers benefit from the chaos of competing voices. Divide and conquer has always been their modus operandi. They do not care if someone's existential difficulty be considered an artifact of a dysfunctional family system or a severe superego or an unresolved Oedipus complex or a cognitive glitch or a conditioned response or even an archetypal defense, or any other such hypothetical psychic entity. How could one prove that a patient's relief from a compulsive behavior pattern or recurrent emotional suffering was the result of a correct interpretation of unconscious phantasies, a catharsis, a subtle energy transfer, a consistent supportive environment, a new mythology compatible with an enhanced self-image, or simply a feeling of being loved?
Once we admit consciousness into consideration as a fundamental, if not the fundamental element of the Real, then how can we prevent the spread of the virus of relativism? Why is my reality less valid than your reality? Why is Lacan's psychic reality any better than Jung's? And who can say that Buddha did not trump them all?
To deal with this chaos that quantum consciousness has now dealt us, we must return to first principles. This is the enduring value of the ancient practice of Yoga, the original philosophy of science that was established at the very dawn of civilization to guard human culture from being destroyed by the un-castrated death drive of ego-consciousness itself.
We shall refer to this original Yoga as Sat Yoga, to distinguish it from the current use of the word yoga to refer to systems of physical exercise, Hatha Yoga, that are deviations from the true practice of ego transcendence. But every spiritual tradition is centered on the same resonant understanding of the need to center our consciousness in the stillness at the Heart of Being.
The same truth, propounded originally in the East, has been downloaded in our time by Walter Russell, Nikola Tesla, Viktor Schauberger, Alan Watts, and many other independent Western visionaries. The ethical self-disciplining of the ego-mind and its impure desires is the necessary first step in establishing both clarity and community. Only from the silent center of consciousness, the oneness of which all beings are manifestations, can emerge a universally valid discourse that can sustain the ongoing development of scientific thought within ethical and aesthetic parameters that safeguard life and the highest values that the human project can unfold in its quest for the transfinite Truth of Being.
This is why the threshold agreements that create the conditions for human community and those for scientific discourse are the same. The agreements necessary are not those regarding the ultimate nature of reality, since that is what is in question, but those regarding our conduct of relationship in the quest of the Real. The essential vows of a Sat Yogi are the ineluctable commitments to truthfulness, openness, non-violence, purity of intention, physical and psychic hygiene, not stealing, not treating others as objects, dedication to egoless service, and acceptance of all beings into the circle of care as manifestations of the Absolute.
These ethical vows of recognition and non-narcissistic action are imperative if we are to develop a science capable of integrating all aspects of the Real. We cannot attain an understanding of phenomenal reality without also understanding consciousness. This requires a transformation of our own consciousness that opens up the vertical dimension of self-transcendence.
We must eliminate the distortions of our thinking function that result from the egocentric perspective. That perspective perverts our capacity to apperceive our universality and our linkage in a unified field of cosmic consciousness. If we are to succeed in the development of a true science of the Absolute -- one that enables us to overcome the quandaries and aporias of current thought -- we must first overcome the ego itself. The shift in consciousness that comes about from the death of the ego alone is capable of revealing the ultimate horizon of the Real. It is this higher level of understanding, based on the transformational imperative, that is opening the portals to a vaster paradigm of transfinite reality. And only that attainment can get us beyond the impasse of futile egoic constructs and the concomitant oppressive social structures that are leading to collective madness and suicide.
Part of the problem scientific thought faces today is the lack of credibility brought about by the social structure of secrecy. There are shadowy forces that lie behind our apparent governments that keep untold numbers of secrets from the public. Whether it concerns the actual effects of oil spills on the ecosystem, or the reality of climate change, peak oil, the presence of mutant bacteria and viruses that have no antidote, the flawed nature of cancer treatment and the dangers of other medical procedures and pharmaceutical products, the safety of our food supply, the forces behind political assassinations and terror attacks, the fragility of the global economic system, the accurate vote count in elections, or the reality of extraterrestrial visitors, we all have the sense that information is being withheld. This burgeoning field of forbidden knowledge leads to the festering of conspiracy theories and the profusion of paranoid sub-cultures that create competing versions of reality that have no relation to one another.
The danger escalates from the fact that neither the mainstream culture nor most of the dissident sub-cultures are governed by the higher law of love and non-violence. That law is no longer part of our social contract. This has created spiritual anarchy and barbarism. The gates of hell are open. The lowest frequencies of consciousness -- murder, cannibalism, and torture -- are growing in strength. The signal of love, compassion, and intelligent mutuality, is being eclipsed by the noise of hate and destruction. We are entering a terminal phase of devolution. The ruling mindset is leading us inevitably to thermonuclear Armageddon and, beyond that, to a final lawless dystopia, a ruined world of war, a hellish desert of death, of all against all until none are left alive.
There is one way to stave off such a destiny: through return to unconditional love. But love can only be found in the trans-egoic Self. Attaining liberation from the ego and abidance in the Absolute is our one means to salvation. But we must earn it. Grace will be given only to those who remain in true awareness of the Self without ceasing, who silence the egoic mind, who surrender completely to the Absolute. Because the power-driven collective ego-mind of the West has brought us to the brink of global destruction, we have the responsibility to undo our mistake and integrate at last the mystic and the genius, of East and West. May we all have the will and wisdom to seek this goal and the perseverance to attain That. The life of our sacred planet depends on us.
Namaste.
Shunyamurti
Shunyamurti
Western thought has moved from Platonic texts to tectonic plates. We began with the unshakeable Absolute, and we are now on the very shaky ground of scientific beliefs that we once thought were solid bedrock, but that are now recognized as being subject to cataclysmic seismic shifts, as new paradigms of understanding emerge with a stunning suddenness that is overturning our conception of what we are.
Once we focused our minds on the unmoving eternal Ideas that transcend the physical dimension. But Plato's poetry soon paled as inquiring minds built their empires with empirical concepts designed to confer command and control. Aristotle shifted our gaze first to the unmoved Prime Mover, and then to the motions that Mover created. But his student, Alexander the Great, had other uses for philosophy. Military technology was first on his agenda. Mathematics developed as an instrument to map the heavens as well as the Earth, to gain control through knowledge. And gradually the scientific drive to understand the structures that appear in this world and the dynamic interactions of such structures enabled us to build extremely complex theories about the nature of reality. These theories led to ever more marvelous technologies, and the result was apparent mastery of Nature.
The growing body of scientific theories, to be credible, had to be testable whenever possible. The protocols of such tests led to the establishment of critical boundaries to the field of experimental science. The logical application of Occam's razor, the principle that a theory regarding an unknown phenomenon must make use of the smallest number of hypothetical entities, has led to the development of a generally accepted ethical/aesthetic sense of elegance as a prime theoretical criterion.
But many problems have appeared that cannot be solved through experiment. And as our understanding of the phenomenal world has become ever more complex, the capacity of reason to maintain its own standards of rigor, parsimony, and elegance has been stretched to the breaking point. Darwin's theory of natural selection as the driver of evolution is not verifiable. It may, in fact, have already been falsified in the field of microbiology by Behe's principle of irreducible complexity, but the desperate neo-Darwinists can always add hypotheses to account for their theoretical difficulties. The more hypotheses they add, however, the less elegant the theory becomes.
At some point, what keeps the theory alive is not scientific credibility but political power. The Darwinists may in their hearts actually realize that intelligent design is the only rational hypothesis to make sense of all the data. But they are terrified that to admit such blasphemy would destroy the church of science itself, and lead to a collapse of consciousness back into the dark ages of superstition and tyrannical popery. The problem is that maintaining a theory that no longer exhibits the indicia of adequacy on scientific grounds undermines the edifice of science far more effectively than could religion.
A similar conundrum has come to plague the hardest science of all: physics. For nearly a century, science has struggled with the observations of subatomic particles. They defy the logic we have come to expect from the behavior of physical objects. Electrons and photons and other such objects can apparently be in more than one place at a time, or be nowhere at all. They can jump from point A to point B without crossing the intervening space (the proverbial quantum leap). They can shift from being particles to being waves. They can be entangled with other particles that are in different parts of the universe. They can seemingly communicate with other particles that they are entangled with instantaneously, without even the limitation of the speed of light. One could go on to delineate other enigmas of these supposedly fundamental particles. Theories that have developed within the physics establishment itself to explain all this strange behavior, such as string theory, have resulted in ever more outrageous hypotheses (like that of an eleven-dimensioned cosmos or even parallel universes), none of which are testable.
The most insulting aspect of quantum mechanics is the emerging fact that consciousness is apparently as fundamental as matter. The old ghost of Cartesian dualism that scientists had considered exorcised forever has returned with a vengeance. An even more terrifying spirit, that of absolute idealism, the specter that consciousness is even more primary than matter, and beyond that, even the possibility that matter itself is a myth, and that there is only consciousness, has arisen again to threaten the entire modern paradigm of reality. The border between science and religion has now been obliterated. This is a frightening development to the rational mind. It opens the way to limitless, baseless conjecture. The field of philosophy of science, long dormant in the heyday of logical positivism and other forms of reductionistic materialism, has now come to life again and is struggling to maintain coherence in the face of these extraordinary developments in human intellectual evolution that threaten to overwhelm collective sanity itself.
The line between rational thought and psychotic delusion has always been tenuous. Nowadays it is a thoroughly permeable membrane. This problem has flared up exponentially as a result of the need for finally accounting for consciousness itself, the perennial black hole of scientific discourse. Is there a reasonable way to think through the current situation without falling prey to the Scylla of dogmatic phenomenalism or the Charybdis of delusional realms, entities, and paranoid conspiracy theories? And since it may well be possible that some conspiracy theories are correct, and that some incorporeal entities may be real, how can we establish rational criteria for their exploration?
This work is now being tentatively undertaken by such disciplines as psychoanalysis and parapsychology, but they themselves have little scientific credibility to the rigid hold-outs fighting to preserve the old paradigm. And since the scientific establishment as a whole is now in the grip of multinational military-industrial corporate forces -- forces that control the universities, tenure decisions, peer-reviewed journals, and funding for research -- those scientists with the courage to speak out regarding the social corruption of knowledge and to present politically incorrect theories can find their careers and reputations quickly terminated.
On the softer side of science, such as the disciplines of psychology and psychoanalysis, the situation is no healthier. Licensing requirements easily silence those who would challenge the hegemonic paradigm. Rebels can be rapidly marginalized and ridiculed. In any case, psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic theories are not objectively testable. That is why so many competing schools of thought flourish. So long as the different theories remain within the allowable limits of political acceptability -- controlled by a governing diagnostic manual that encourages treatment with drugs and short-term intervention models that insurance companies will deign to cover --the ruling powers benefit from the chaos of competing voices. Divide and conquer has always been their modus operandi. They do not care if someone's existential difficulty be considered an artifact of a dysfunctional family system or a severe superego or an unresolved Oedipus complex or a cognitive glitch or a conditioned response or even an archetypal defense, or any other such hypothetical psychic entity. How could one prove that a patient's relief from a compulsive behavior pattern or recurrent emotional suffering was the result of a correct interpretation of unconscious phantasies, a catharsis, a subtle energy transfer, a consistent supportive environment, a new mythology compatible with an enhanced self-image, or simply a feeling of being loved?
Once we admit consciousness into consideration as a fundamental, if not the fundamental element of the Real, then how can we prevent the spread of the virus of relativism? Why is my reality less valid than your reality? Why is Lacan's psychic reality any better than Jung's? And who can say that Buddha did not trump them all?
To deal with this chaos that quantum consciousness has now dealt us, we must return to first principles. This is the enduring value of the ancient practice of Yoga, the original philosophy of science that was established at the very dawn of civilization to guard human culture from being destroyed by the un-castrated death drive of ego-consciousness itself.
We shall refer to this original Yoga as Sat Yoga, to distinguish it from the current use of the word yoga to refer to systems of physical exercise, Hatha Yoga, that are deviations from the true practice of ego transcendence. But every spiritual tradition is centered on the same resonant understanding of the need to center our consciousness in the stillness at the Heart of Being.
The same truth, propounded originally in the East, has been downloaded in our time by Walter Russell, Nikola Tesla, Viktor Schauberger, Alan Watts, and many other independent Western visionaries. The ethical self-disciplining of the ego-mind and its impure desires is the necessary first step in establishing both clarity and community. Only from the silent center of consciousness, the oneness of which all beings are manifestations, can emerge a universally valid discourse that can sustain the ongoing development of scientific thought within ethical and aesthetic parameters that safeguard life and the highest values that the human project can unfold in its quest for the transfinite Truth of Being.
This is why the threshold agreements that create the conditions for human community and those for scientific discourse are the same. The agreements necessary are not those regarding the ultimate nature of reality, since that is what is in question, but those regarding our conduct of relationship in the quest of the Real. The essential vows of a Sat Yogi are the ineluctable commitments to truthfulness, openness, non-violence, purity of intention, physical and psychic hygiene, not stealing, not treating others as objects, dedication to egoless service, and acceptance of all beings into the circle of care as manifestations of the Absolute.
These ethical vows of recognition and non-narcissistic action are imperative if we are to develop a science capable of integrating all aspects of the Real. We cannot attain an understanding of phenomenal reality without also understanding consciousness. This requires a transformation of our own consciousness that opens up the vertical dimension of self-transcendence.
We must eliminate the distortions of our thinking function that result from the egocentric perspective. That perspective perverts our capacity to apperceive our universality and our linkage in a unified field of cosmic consciousness. If we are to succeed in the development of a true science of the Absolute -- one that enables us to overcome the quandaries and aporias of current thought -- we must first overcome the ego itself. The shift in consciousness that comes about from the death of the ego alone is capable of revealing the ultimate horizon of the Real. It is this higher level of understanding, based on the transformational imperative, that is opening the portals to a vaster paradigm of transfinite reality. And only that attainment can get us beyond the impasse of futile egoic constructs and the concomitant oppressive social structures that are leading to collective madness and suicide.
Part of the problem scientific thought faces today is the lack of credibility brought about by the social structure of secrecy. There are shadowy forces that lie behind our apparent governments that keep untold numbers of secrets from the public. Whether it concerns the actual effects of oil spills on the ecosystem, or the reality of climate change, peak oil, the presence of mutant bacteria and viruses that have no antidote, the flawed nature of cancer treatment and the dangers of other medical procedures and pharmaceutical products, the safety of our food supply, the forces behind political assassinations and terror attacks, the fragility of the global economic system, the accurate vote count in elections, or the reality of extraterrestrial visitors, we all have the sense that information is being withheld. This burgeoning field of forbidden knowledge leads to the festering of conspiracy theories and the profusion of paranoid sub-cultures that create competing versions of reality that have no relation to one another.
The danger escalates from the fact that neither the mainstream culture nor most of the dissident sub-cultures are governed by the higher law of love and non-violence. That law is no longer part of our social contract. This has created spiritual anarchy and barbarism. The gates of hell are open. The lowest frequencies of consciousness -- murder, cannibalism, and torture -- are growing in strength. The signal of love, compassion, and intelligent mutuality, is being eclipsed by the noise of hate and destruction. We are entering a terminal phase of devolution. The ruling mindset is leading us inevitably to thermonuclear Armageddon and, beyond that, to a final lawless dystopia, a ruined world of war, a hellish desert of death, of all against all until none are left alive.
There is one way to stave off such a destiny: through return to unconditional love. But love can only be found in the trans-egoic Self. Attaining liberation from the ego and abidance in the Absolute is our one means to salvation. But we must earn it. Grace will be given only to those who remain in true awareness of the Self without ceasing, who silence the egoic mind, who surrender completely to the Absolute. Because the power-driven collective ego-mind of the West has brought us to the brink of global destruction, we have the responsibility to undo our mistake and integrate at last the mystic and the genius, of East and West. May we all have the will and wisdom to seek this goal and the perseverance to attain That. The life of our sacred planet depends on us.
Namaste.
Shunyamurti
Is China Ready To Pull The Plug?
Original Source:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-china-ready-pull-plug
Submitted by Brandon Smith from Alt Market
Is China Ready To Pull The Plug?
There are two mainstream market assumptions that, in my mind, prevail over all others. The continuing function of the Dow, the sustained flow of capital into and out of the banking sector, and the full force spending of the federal government are ALL entirely dependent on the lifespan of these dual illusions; one, that the U.S. Dollar is a legitimate safe haven investment and will remain so indefinitely, and two, that China, like many other developing nations, will continue to prop up the strength of the dollar indefinitely because it is “in their best interest”. In the dimly lit bowels of Wall Street such ideas are so entrenched and pervasive, to question their validity is almost sacrilegious. Only after the recent S&P downgrade of America’s AAA credit rating did the impossible become thinkable to some MSM analysts, though a considerable portion of the day-trading herd continue to roll onward, while the time bomb strapped to the ass end of their financial house is ticking away.
Now that all that has been cleared up (again), the primary point becomes rather direct; the reason it is difficult to predict an exact time frame for an American collapse is because all the pieces are in place to trigger an event right now! There are, of course, stress points within the system that set a time limit, even on global banks and China, but a full spectrum catastrophe is not only a concern for some distant future. Every element needed for the so called “perfect storm” is ever present and ready to ignite at a moments notice. The destructive potential coming from China alone is undeniable. Everyday that the spark is subdued should be treated as a gift, an extra 24 hours of education and preparation. This is how close we are to the edge. It is not for us to be alarmed, but to be ready, and ever aware.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-china-ready-pull-plug
Submitted by Brandon Smith from Alt Market
Is China Ready To Pull The Plug?
There are two mainstream market assumptions that, in my mind, prevail over all others. The continuing function of the Dow, the sustained flow of capital into and out of the banking sector, and the full force spending of the federal government are ALL entirely dependent on the lifespan of these dual illusions; one, that the U.S. Dollar is a legitimate safe haven investment and will remain so indefinitely, and two, that China, like many other developing nations, will continue to prop up the strength of the dollar indefinitely because it is “in their best interest”. In the dimly lit bowels of Wall Street such ideas are so entrenched and pervasive, to question their validity is almost sacrilegious. Only after the recent S&P downgrade of America’s AAA credit rating did the impossible become thinkable to some MSM analysts, though a considerable portion of the day-trading herd continue to roll onward, while the time bomb strapped to the ass end of their financial house is ticking away.The debate over the health and longevity of the dollar comes down to one very simple and undeniable root pillar of economics; supply and demand. The supply of dollars throughout the financial systems of numerous countries is undoubtedly overwhelming. In fact, the private Federal Reserve has been quite careful in maintaining a veil of secrecy over the full extent of dollar saturation in foreign markets in order to hide the sheer volume of greenback devaluation and inflation they have created. If for some reason the reserves of dollars held overseas by investors and creditors were to come flooding back into the U.S., we would see a hyperinflationary spiral more destructive than any in recorded history. As the supply of dollars around the globe increases exponentially, so too must foreign demand, otherwise, the debt machine short-circuits, and newly impoverished Americans will be using Ben Franklins for sod in their adobe huts. As I will show, demand for dollars is not increasing to match supply, but is indeed stalled, ready to crumble.
China, being the second largest holder of U.S. debt next to the Fed, and the number one holder of dollars within their forex reserves, has always been the key to gauging the progression of the global economic collapse now in progress. If you want to know what’s going to happen tomorrow, watch what China does today.
Back in 2005, China began a low profile program to issue government debt denominated in the Yuan, called Yuan bonds, or “Panda Bonds”. This move was almost entirely ignored by establishment economists. They should have realized then that China was moving to strengthen the Yuan, expand its use in other markets, and recondition their economic structure away from export dependency and towards consumerism (as they have done with the establishment of the ASEAN trading bloc). Of course, in the MSM at that time, there was no derivatives bubble, no credit crisis, no debt implosion. America was on cloud nine. China, through inside knowledge, or perhaps a crystal ball, knew exactly what was about to happen, and insulated itself accordingly by generating distance between its system and the soon to derail retail based society of the U.S. This dynamic has not changed since the 2008 bubble burst, and Chinese activity is still the ultimate litmus test for economic volatility.
Today, there is widespread confusion in markets over the direction of America’s financial future. In the wake of the credit downgrade, most investors unaware of the bigger picture are desperately clinging to any and every piece of news no matter how trivial, every rumor from the Fed, and every announcement from the government no matter how empty. China’s economic news feeds have been tightly regulated and filtered, even more so than usual (which is cause for concern, in my opinion), while distractions in Europe abound. Let’s take a step by step journey through these issues, and see if we can’t produce some clarity…
U.S. versus EU: A Game Of Hot Potato…To The Death?
The theatrical seesaw between the U.S. and Europe is not only becoming obvious to the most narrow of economic analysts, it is also becoming kind of boring. The entire ordeal has been subversively exploited as a false example of systemic “contagion”, and with purpose; global banks need to convince average Americans and average Europeans that destabilization in one portion of the world will automatically lead to destabilization everywhere. This concept is true only so far as forced globalization and centralization have made it true. That said, the charade has been somewhat effective in conditioning the populace with ideas of collectivist survival. In other words, we are being trained to take fiscal responsibility for countries outside of our sovereign national boundaries as if we are morally tied to every penny they have or do not have (global socialism/feudalism - here we come!). This process is culminating in worldwide harmonization through fear as well as guilt.
What we are witnessing is NOT contagion. Instead, we are seeing multiple and mostly separate collapses activated simultaneously. Each nation suffering dire straights in Europe is doing so because of its own particular financial problems, not the problems of other countries nearby, and certainly not those of countries on the other side of the world. Contagion arguments are only applicable to those economies overly dependent on exports, yet, China has already shown (at least in the case of the U.S.) that such dangers can be controlled by minimizing exposure to the poisoned portions of the system and reverting to more internalized wealth creation.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and the heads of World Bank and IMF have perpetuated the lie of contagion between the U.S. and the EU primarily to service the progress of globalization, but also to hide the inflationary effects of dollar devaluation. While the greatest threats are stacked squarely against America’s economy and the dollar, somehow we have been led to focus on the comparatively less explosive drama in the EU. U.S. dollars, as well as Chinese funds, are flooding into Europe to support the region, while investment in the U.S. and its debt weakens and disappears. In the meantime, a weaker Euro makes the dollar look more attractive (at least on paper), but in reality, both currencies are on the path to bloody hari-kari.
How much longer can this game of hot potato go on? Again, China decides. Eventually, China is going to have to choose which currency to support; the dollar or the euro. Supporting both is simply not an option, especially when the chance of collapse in both currencies is so high. So far, the most logical path has been the euro. While the EU may suffer an astonishing breakdown, we must take into account that our own Treasury and central bank have seen fit to throw trillions of dollars into propping up Europe (with even more on the way):
With so much inflation and devaluation being thrust upon the dollar in the name of saving the EU, China’s move towards a stronger economic relationship with Europe at the expense of the U.S. is a no-brainer:
If I were to place a bet on who would come out of the crisis less damaged, my money would be on the EU, everyone else’s money certainly seems to be…
China Discreetly Moving To Dump U.S. Debt
China has been tip-toeing towards this for years, and has openly admitted on numerous occasions that they plan to institute a break from U.S. debt and the dollar in due course. Anyone who continues to argue that a Chinese decoupling from America’s economy is impossible at this point is truly beyond hope. Though increasingly more rare, news on China’s push to drop the U.S. still leaks out. Recently, a top advisor to China’s central bank let slip that a plan is in place to begin “liquidating” (yes, they said liquidate) their U.S. Treasury bonds as soon as possible, and reposition national investments into more physical assets:
But let’s step back for a moment and pretend China hasn’t told us exactly what it is going to do time and time again. Instead, let’s look at the fundamentals.
The primary concern in China right now is inflation. Because China does not yet have the ability to export its fiat to other markets the way the U.S. does, its own liquidity injections in the face of the credit crisis have led to severe price increases. In August alone, overall inflation was rated at 6.2% (always double government produced numbers to get true inflation). Food prices jumped 13.4%, while meat and poultry jumped 29.3%. Because these numbers are around 1% lower than in previous months, the Chinese government has prematurely proclaimed a “cooling period”:
With harsh inflation continuing unabated, eventually, the Asian nation will be forced to enact abrupt policies. This will likely take the form of a strong Yuan valuation, or a “floating” of the Yuan. A sizable increase in the value of the Chinese currency is the ONLY way that the government will be able to combat rising prices. By increasing the buying power of its citizens, the government allows them to keep pace with rising prices, and eases the tension within the populace which could otherwise lead to civil unrest. For China to ensure that a floating of the Yuan will lead to a much higher value, their forex and treasury holdings will have to fall. Period.
A dumping of the dollar will give the Chinese room to breath, and this space will be needed very soon. The debt ceiling deal made by Congress in the aftermath of the credit downgrade left the rest of the world unimpressed. While the MSM tries to make us forget that this event ever occurred, most foreign investors have not. Markets are anxiously awaiting an announcement from the Fed for further liquidity injections. If this announcement is not made after meetings next week, then it will certainly be made before the end of the year. Ironically, the same quantitative easing that investors are clamoring for today is liable to become the final signal for China to cut its losses and separate from U.S. securities completely. China has been positioned for many months now to take such measures…
Lights Out…
Delusions of Chinese dependency on the U.S consumer still abound, and those who suggest a catastrophic dump of U.S. debt and dollars in the near term are liable to hear the same ignorant talking points we have heard all along:
“The Chinese are better off with us than without us…”
"China needs export dollars from the U.S. to survive…”
“China isn’t equipped to produce goods without U.S. technological savvy…”
"America could simply revert back to industry and production and teach the Chinese a lesson…”
“The U.S. could default on its debts to China and simply walk away…”
“The whole situation is China’s fault because of their artificial devaluation of the Yuan over the decades…”
And on and on it goes. Though I have deconstructed these arguments more instances than I can count in the past, I feel it my duty to at least quickly address them one more time:
U.S. consumption of all goods, not just Chinese goods, has fallen off a cliff since 2008 and is unlikely to recover anytime soon. China has done quite well despite this fall in exports considering the circumstances. With the institution of ASEAN, they barely need us at all.
China is well equipped to produce technological goods without U.S. help, and if Japan is inducted into ASEAN (as I believe they soon will be), they will be even more capable.
America will NOT be able to revert back to an industrial based economy before a dollar collapse escalates to fruition. It took decades to dismantle U.S. industry and ship it overseas. Reeducating a 70% service based society to function in an industrial system, not to mention resurrecting the factory infrastructure necessary to support the nation, would likely take decades to accomplish.
If the U.S. deliberately defaults on debt to China, the global reputation of the dollar would implode, and its world reserve status would be irrevocably lost. We won’t be teaching anyone a “lesson” then.
Yes, China currently manipulates its currency down, but then again, so does the U.S. though quantitative easing. Both sides are dirty. Taking sides in this farce is pure stupidity...
Dawn of the Zombie Apocalypse.....
Original Source:
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/lawless-america-20-examples-of-desperate-people-doing-desperate-things
All over America today, desperate people are doing desperate things. As the economy continues to crumble, the American people are starting to become very frustrated. Millions have lost their homes and millions have lost their jobs. As hopelessness and despair rise, an increasing number of Americans are turning to crime or are lashing out in unpredictable ways. Many parts of America are rapidly turning into lawless hellholes. In some of the areas that have been the hardest hit by the declining economy, police forces are being severely cut back and desperate criminals are being given a lot of freedom to roam. In fact, in some major cities (such as Oakland, California), the police have announced that there are certain types of crime that they will not even respond to any more. For a couple of decades, crime had been steadily declining in the United States, but now we are seeing very disturbing reports from all over the nation of desperate people doing desperate things as they scramble to survive or as they vent their frustrations. If the examples that you are about to read are any indication, then America is headed down a very dark path.
Today, there are a whole lot of young people that feel as though all hope is gone. Less than 30 percent of all teens had a job this summer. Only 14 percent of Americans that are 28 or 29 years old are optimistic about their financial futures.
As Gerald Celente always says, when people lose everything that they have, they tend to lose it.
The very fabric of American society is starting to come apart, and it is frightening to even think about what is going to happen if the economy gets even worse.
The following are 20 examples of desperate people doing desperate things in America....
#1 As the price of gold has risen to unprecedented heights, thieves have taken notice. This summer there has been an epidemic of gold robberies in the city of Los Angeles. Store owners have felt forced to significantly beef us security. In fact, store owners have added so much security that at this point "parts of downtown Los Angeles now look more like a militarized zone than a commercial corridor."
But it is not just Los Angeles that is having a major problem with gold robberies. The following is a brief excerpt from a recent article by Thomas Watkins....
#3 When people become truly desperate, they also tend to become highly unpredictable. Just consider what Justino Sanchez Diaz did recently during a family dinner....
In another incident, a Vancouver, Washington woman has been charged with trying to sell her newborn baby in front of a Taco Bell. She was only trying to get somewhere between $500 and $5000 for her baby.
#8 What some parents are doing to their children is absolutely horrifying. If you have a weak stomach, you may not want to read this one. In Louisiana recently, a 30-year-old man decapitated his 7-year-old son with a meat cleaver and left his head on the side of the road. What made this crime even more shocking is the fact that his son was suffering from cerebral palsy and was confined to a wheelchair. Reportedly the man had gotten "tired of taking care" of the young child. The following is an excerpt from a Daily Mail report about this horrible crime....
#9 But it isn't just parents that are becoming cold-hearted. In Georgia recently, a 14-year-old teen stabbed his grandmother and his great-grandmother with a sword. The 77-year-old great grandmother is dead, but it looks like the grandmother is going to be okay.
#10 All over the nation, there are reports of kids killing their parents. A 21-year-old man in the Chicago area is accused of killing his father with a weed trimmer while his father was sleeping in bed.
#11 In one of the most famous cases of parental murder this year, a 17-year-old Florida teen killed his parents with a hammer, hid their bodies in the master bedroom, and then invited dozens of people over for a massive house party.
Did this kind of stuff happen in America 50 or 60 years ago?
#12 Not all desperate people are committing crimes of violence. In fact, some desperate Americans are now purposely committing crimes just so that they can be arrested and receive free medical care.
Yes, you read that correctly. There are 50 million Americans without health insurance and some of them are now purposely breaking the law so that they can go to prison and receive the care that they need. Just consider the following example from an article in the Gaston Gazette....
Another disturbing thing that we are seeing is the trend toward mob violence. Previously, I have written about the epidemic of "flash mob" crimes that we are now seeing all over the nation. When large groups of people start banding together to commit violent crimes, that is a very disturbing sign.
#16 When criminals get desperate, they don't care who they attack and they will take everything from you that they can. For example, three young thugs in the Bronx recently beat the living daylights out of a 64-year-old man and took his wallet, his cellphone and even his Bible.
#17 If you are attacked, are you going to call the police? Are you sure that they can be trusted? Even police officers are committing desperate acts these days. Just check out what one police officer in Chicago is charged with doing....
#19 When people get desperate, they will often do things that they never even imagined that they would be willing to do. In Utah recently, an unemployed 28-year-old man starting running advertisements in which he actually offered to serve as "human prey" for hunters for the bargain price of $10,000. For an additional $2,000, he said that he would be willing to allow hunters to "hunt" him down while running around naked.
#20 When criminals become desperate, they often lose all common sense. In the San Diego area recently, one desperate thief actually tried to rob a 7-11 convenience store while dressed in a Gumby costume. Apparently the clerk thought it was a prank, so the thief tried to pull a weapon but was unable to do so because the costume was too awkward. Police are still searching for the suspect, who is described as being very tall, very green and very thin.
America is quickly becoming a lawless place. Yes, authorities in many areas will attempt to crack down, but what are they going to do when millions of people all start doing desperate things all at once?
A reader identified as El Pollo de Oro recently left a comment in which he summed up the direction that he thinks this country is headed....
Now, much of the rest of the world is watching our decline in horror.
When a complete economic collapse finally occurs, what is this country going to look like? Will it be an all-out struggle for survival, or will we be able to handle ourselves fairly well like we did during the Great Depression?
One thing is for sure, this nation is headed in the wrong direction.
So what is the solution to our problems?
One group in Massachusetts thinks that they know what the problem is. Amazingly, they are actually pushing really hard to have the Pledge of Allegiance permanently banned from all public school classrooms in the state.
Apparently the group believes that the Pledge of Allegiance has "no educational value" and that it places "unnecessary pressure" on kids.
This is yet another example of how divided our country has become. We are constantly fighting over really stupid stuff, and meanwhile our nation is rapidly going down the toilet.
Look, our economy is going to get even worse and tens of millions of hurting Americans are going to become even more frustrated.
Something desperately needs to be done to turn this country around.
Do you think that you know the solution to the problems facing America?
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/lawless-america-20-examples-of-desperate-people-doing-desperate-things
Lawless America: 20 Examples Of Desperate People Doing Desperate Things
All over America today, desperate people are doing desperate things. As the economy continues to crumble, the American people are starting to become very frustrated. Millions have lost their homes and millions have lost their jobs. As hopelessness and despair rise, an increasing number of Americans are turning to crime or are lashing out in unpredictable ways. Many parts of America are rapidly turning into lawless hellholes. In some of the areas that have been the hardest hit by the declining economy, police forces are being severely cut back and desperate criminals are being given a lot of freedom to roam. In fact, in some major cities (such as Oakland, California), the police have announced that there are certain types of crime that they will not even respond to any more. For a couple of decades, crime had been steadily declining in the United States, but now we are seeing very disturbing reports from all over the nation of desperate people doing desperate things as they scramble to survive or as they vent their frustrations. If the examples that you are about to read are any indication, then America is headed down a very dark path.
Today, there are a whole lot of young people that feel as though all hope is gone. Less than 30 percent of all teens had a job this summer. Only 14 percent of Americans that are 28 or 29 years old are optimistic about their financial futures.
As Gerald Celente always says, when people lose everything that they have, they tend to lose it.
The very fabric of American society is starting to come apart, and it is frightening to even think about what is going to happen if the economy gets even worse.
The following are 20 examples of desperate people doing desperate things in America....
#1 As the price of gold has risen to unprecedented heights, thieves have taken notice. This summer there has been an epidemic of gold robberies in the city of Los Angeles. Store owners have felt forced to significantly beef us security. In fact, store owners have added so much security that at this point "parts of downtown Los Angeles now look more like a militarized zone than a commercial corridor."
But it is not just Los Angeles that is having a major problem with gold robberies. The following is a brief excerpt from a recent article by Thomas Watkins....
In Oakland, police say dozens of women have had gold necklaces yanked from their necks on the street. More than 100 similar thefts have been reported in Los Angeles, a rash of robberies is taking place in St. Paul, Minn., and police in Phoenix say muggers chatted up high school girls then ripped their gold necklaces from them.#2 When the level of trust in society starts declining significantly, people start becoming very paranoid. And when people feel constantly threatened, they tend to lash out in unusual ways. For example, one man wearing a Dallas Cowboys jersey actually smuggled a taser into a recent game between the Cowboys and the New York Jets and started zapping people with it.
“We’ve never seen this,” said Oakland police Sgt. Holly Joshi.
#3 When people become truly desperate, they also tend to become highly unpredictable. Just consider what Justino Sanchez Diaz did recently during a family dinner....
Before the family gathered for dinner, Sanchez-Diaz soaked the walls of the dining room in gasoline and set cans of gas under the furniture. And when the 13 members of the family sat down to eat, the man came out with a can of kerosene and splashed it all over everyone, then set them on fire with a blowtorch.#4 When desperation spreads throughout a society, you literally do not know who you can trust. Right now identity theft in the United States is at epidemic levels and it is getting worse. Every time you give someone your information now, there is a chance that your identity could be compromised. Just consider the following example from the state of Texas....
If you have a mind sick enough to rip off desperately ill people, you probably think to yourself, "Cancer patients -- hey, they may die soon, so what'll they care?''#5 When thieves get desperate, they also tend to become very bold. A reader named Mark left the following comment on one of my recent articles....
Houston police say Shantel Moore, 29, apparently had that kind of coldhearted and inhumane logic. The Stafford woman worked for Methodist Hospital in Houston, and cops say she stole identity information from cancer patients and used it to get tons of payday loan money.
Some tweekers drove up last week looking for scrap metal and one was out of their truck and heading to the shop when I came out of the house. It used to be that strangers would not even cross our bridge or get out of their car wondering about what the dogs would do. Times are changing and not for the better.#6 In some areas of the country, desperate people are not just searching for scrap metal. As one reader shared recently, there are some parts of the U.S. that are literally being transformed into hellholes by hordes of desperate people....
Here, in the California desert, many vacant houses are being taken over. Fixtures are being ripped out and sold as scrap. Trench latrines are being dug in backyards and water is being pilfered from neighboring pools and hoses. While most of these folks are simply trying to keep a roof over their heads (while they keep their heads down), many are also setting up meth labs and in-door marijuana grows.#7 Sadly, family units all over the country are breaking down. The hearts of parents have become very cold. Some people are so desperate that they are even trying to sell their own babies. For example, one grandmother in Florida has been accused of trying to sell her newborn grandson for $75,000.
I can see the eventual day when the total breakdown of the economy and our society will drive thousands from the cities. A lot of those will be looking for ‘opportunities’.
As sad as it is, if you’re not one of the most unfortunate, it’s time to prepare a defense for your goods, family and self. You are going to be viewed as wealthy, no matter how poor you feel, by someone with nothing left to lose.
Do not rely on police or government authorities. We all saw how that went in New Orleans. Be ready as an individual family unit.
In another incident, a Vancouver, Washington woman has been charged with trying to sell her newborn baby in front of a Taco Bell. She was only trying to get somewhere between $500 and $5000 for her baby.
#8 What some parents are doing to their children is absolutely horrifying. If you have a weak stomach, you may not want to read this one. In Louisiana recently, a 30-year-old man decapitated his 7-year-old son with a meat cleaver and left his head on the side of the road. What made this crime even more shocking is the fact that his son was suffering from cerebral palsy and was confined to a wheelchair. Reportedly the man had gotten "tired of taking care" of the young child. The following is an excerpt from a Daily Mail report about this horrible crime....
A father has admitted to chopping his son's head off with a meat cleaver and leaving it in the roadside outside his home so that the child's mother would see it.Keep in mind that the father and son had not had a fight. Rather, the father had just "gotten tired" of taking care of the son.
#9 But it isn't just parents that are becoming cold-hearted. In Georgia recently, a 14-year-old teen stabbed his grandmother and his great-grandmother with a sword. The 77-year-old great grandmother is dead, but it looks like the grandmother is going to be okay.
#10 All over the nation, there are reports of kids killing their parents. A 21-year-old man in the Chicago area is accused of killing his father with a weed trimmer while his father was sleeping in bed.
#11 In one of the most famous cases of parental murder this year, a 17-year-old Florida teen killed his parents with a hammer, hid their bodies in the master bedroom, and then invited dozens of people over for a massive house party.
Did this kind of stuff happen in America 50 or 60 years ago?
#12 Not all desperate people are committing crimes of violence. In fact, some desperate Americans are now purposely committing crimes just so that they can be arrested and receive free medical care.
Yes, you read that correctly. There are 50 million Americans without health insurance and some of them are now purposely breaking the law so that they can go to prison and receive the care that they need. Just consider the following example from an article in the Gaston Gazette....
James Richard Verone woke up June 9 with a sense of anticipation.#13 Millions of other desperate Americans are not lashing out or committing crimes at all. Instead, they are just quietly suffering. A reader named Richard recently left a comment in which he shared the desperation that he encountered during a recent trip to the beach....
He took a shower.
Ironed his shirt.
Hailed a cab.
Then robbed a bank.
He wasn’t especially nervous. If anything, Verone said he was excited to finally execute his plan to gain access to free medical care.
I was at the beach today, it was almost dark. I watched as a well dressed lady in her 50′s walked onto the public access deck and laid down her things. She looked around to see if she was being observed, felt safe enough to proceed with her shameful task and then she pulled out several small plastic bags. Quickly she went through the trash can and began to remove anything of value, especially aluminum drink cans. That is when I made my way to her. At first she seemed embarrassed, but after I assured her that I sold scrap metal sometimes for extra money, she seemed relieved. She then released a pent up storm of sorrow and hurt as she spoke of her shame and humiliation.#14 Other Americans have become so desperate that they have given up completely. The following tragic example is from an article posted on MSN Money....
She had recently lost her husband of 32 years and was all alone. She lived in a home she couldn’t afford and was about to lose. Attempts to sell brought only discouragement and despair. “Soon” she said, “I will be homeless.” She said the cans were her insurance, her only means of real survival, since she had already run out of unemployment money. When I tried to offer to help in some way, she suddenly shut me down and refused any help. I told her she wasn’t alone and prayed with her. It certainly made the beach a sad place to be. In the coming months I feel we will all see this same scene played out over and over.
On the morning she realized her husband and son would learn the family was losing their house, Carlene Balderrama, 53, faxed a note to the mortgage company, then went to the basement and shot herself.#15 When people get desperate, violence tends to increase. We are starting to see shocking examples of this all over the country. For example, at least 42 people were hit by gunfire in New York City over the Labor Day weekend.
"I hope you're more compassionate with my husband than you were with me," she wrote in a suicide note left for the company.
Another disturbing thing that we are seeing is the trend toward mob violence. Previously, I have written about the epidemic of "flash mob" crimes that we are now seeing all over the nation. When large groups of people start banding together to commit violent crimes, that is a very disturbing sign.
#16 When criminals get desperate, they don't care who they attack and they will take everything from you that they can. For example, three young thugs in the Bronx recently beat the living daylights out of a 64-year-old man and took his wallet, his cellphone and even his Bible.
#17 If you are attacked, are you going to call the police? Are you sure that they can be trusted? Even police officers are committing desperate acts these days. Just check out what one police officer in Chicago is charged with doing....
A Chicago Police officer stole $50,000 from his ailing elderly father to pay off his bills and gambling debts and unsuccessfully attempted to swipe his dad’s retirement savings by impersonating him#18 In the old days, thieves would usually only focus on items of high value. But these days it seems like there is nothing that they will not steal. There have been reports coming in from all over America of thieves stealing air conditioners, drain covers, hair extensions and even embalming fluid.
#19 When people get desperate, they will often do things that they never even imagined that they would be willing to do. In Utah recently, an unemployed 28-year-old man starting running advertisements in which he actually offered to serve as "human prey" for hunters for the bargain price of $10,000. For an additional $2,000, he said that he would be willing to allow hunters to "hunt" him down while running around naked.
#20 When criminals become desperate, they often lose all common sense. In the San Diego area recently, one desperate thief actually tried to rob a 7-11 convenience store while dressed in a Gumby costume. Apparently the clerk thought it was a prank, so the thief tried to pull a weapon but was unable to do so because the costume was too awkward. Police are still searching for the suspect, who is described as being very tall, very green and very thin.
America is quickly becoming a lawless place. Yes, authorities in many areas will attempt to crack down, but what are they going to do when millions of people all start doing desperate things all at once?
A reader identified as El Pollo de Oro recently left a comment in which he summed up the direction that he thinks this country is headed....
The Banana Republic of America, the Third World cesspool that used to be the United States, is a very violent place, but the violence is going to get much, much worse. If the BRA is this dangerous and unstable now, what is it going to be like when our terrible economy becomes even worse and unemployment becomes even higher? It won’t be pretty. As Gerald Celente says, get ready for a lot of violence. We’ll continue to see acts of thuggery for the sake of thuggery (flash mobs), but most of the violence will be profit-motivated: drug violence (hola Sinaloa Cartel, hola Los Zeta y la Familia Michoacana), kidnapping, carjacking, home invasions, armed robbery in broad daylight. Today’s unemployed IT worker is tomorrow’s kidnapper; today’s unemployed construction worker is tomorrow’s drug trafficker or carjacker. The former USA is now a Third World hellhole, and the BRA will have all the violence, poverty, squalor and crime that Third World hellholes are known for.America used to be the envy of the world.
Now, much of the rest of the world is watching our decline in horror.
When a complete economic collapse finally occurs, what is this country going to look like? Will it be an all-out struggle for survival, or will we be able to handle ourselves fairly well like we did during the Great Depression?
One thing is for sure, this nation is headed in the wrong direction.
So what is the solution to our problems?
One group in Massachusetts thinks that they know what the problem is. Amazingly, they are actually pushing really hard to have the Pledge of Allegiance permanently banned from all public school classrooms in the state.
Apparently the group believes that the Pledge of Allegiance has "no educational value" and that it places "unnecessary pressure" on kids.
This is yet another example of how divided our country has become. We are constantly fighting over really stupid stuff, and meanwhile our nation is rapidly going down the toilet.
Look, our economy is going to get even worse and tens of millions of hurting Americans are going to become even more frustrated.
Something desperately needs to be done to turn this country around.
Do you think that you know the solution to the problems facing America?
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Disasters, Arrogance and Greed: From the Titanic to Fukushima (and the one person who could have made a difference)
Original Source: http://www.realitysandwich.com/disasters_arrogance_and_greed
Russell Targ
The wounds suffered by the survivors and shown by the bodies of the dead are of a shocking description. In some cases the flesh is torn in shreds, exposing the bones beneath; in others the eyes are forced from their sockets; in others the victim looks as though he has been plunged into boiling water and almost every body shows purple spots as if it had been forcibly pelted with fragments of stone and iron.
--An unsigned description of the 1896 tsunami that hit north-Eastern Japan with a 110-foot wall of water, killing more than 28,000.
Accidents are rarely accidental. Paradoxically, there is almost always one person who could have spoken up courageously and prevented a catastrophe. This article explores why they didn't do that. The tragic and avoidable accidents from recent history, that I describe here, are the result of various combinations of cost-cutting for profit, risk-taking for fame, or ignorance of the complexities of modern systems.
In his wonderful book The Black Swan, Nissam Taleb vigorously points out that leaders and planners tend to underestimate and neglect the potentially devastating calamities that can occur as the result of highly improbable events until they finally do occur. Today we are seeing the entire country of Japan brought to its knees because some planner didn't take account of the possible occurrence of giant tsunami waves that do occur, but less often than once in a century. Anyone who has lived as long as I have has learned to create an internal "payoff matrix" before he leaps to the next great opportunity. This is a statistical tool that is useful in keeping you alive. You estimate "what is the worse thing and the best thing that could happen" in this situation. And then multiply each by the probably of its occurrence. For example, the upside might be an unbelievably exotic and romantic adventure with a new and desirable partner! And the downside might be the remote possibility of AIDS. The analyst learns to avoid attractive opportunities like this, in which the payoff matrix contains a +++ in one of the squares, and a "minus-infinity" (death) in the other square -- even if the probability is really pretty small. If the payoff is national destruction and calamity, we don't build the nuclear power plant eighteen feet above high-tide, even though the twenty-foot tsunami comes only once a century. And above all. We don't put the back-up generator in the basement!
The story I present here is about a world of calamitous accidents, all of which could have been avoided. They represent a grisly and unnecessary loss of life in addition to the loss of many billions of dollars. Perhaps you recall that, before he resigned -- under pressure -- George W. Bush's Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told Congress that "mistakes were made" in the firing of U.S. Attorneys. Senator John McCain used the same locution in describing the conduct of the war in Iraq. The idea that "mistakes were made and lies were told" is a popular distancing device-a Nixon-era political contrivance to indicate that something went terribly wrong, but "It wasn't me. I didn't do it." (This last quotation appears on tee-shirts available from your local bail bondsman.) In the tragedies I will describe here, the mistakes and the lies belong to the rich and powerful. The dismaying result is that none of the perpetrators went to prison-which differs from the case of the bondsman's usual customer, who tends to be poor and disenfranchised.
I am well aware of the problems faced by men and women in the trenches, who see something going wrong, but cannot get a hearing for their concerns. Karen Silkwood at the Kerr-McGee nuclear plant comes to mind. You will remember that she was mysteriously murdered as she was on her way to a press conference to talk about negligence at the nuclear plant. So this is serious business.
As a physicist with a professional career spanning forty-five years in research, development, production and aerospace, I am aware of the dangers in high-level undertakings. I began work as a researcher and pioneer in the development of the laser in the late 1950s -- recruited out of graduate school at Columbia University to work on the exciting laser project while it was still unfolding in the mind of Gordon Gould, its creator. In my last industrial job, I was a project manager standing on the tarmac at Kennedy Space Center measuring the winds along the space shuttle's trajectory -- using a high-power laser system I developed with my team at Lockheed Missiles & Space. So this is a high-risk world I understand. Since 1962 I have ridden my motorcycle through the foothills and potholes of Silicon Valley, while working for Sylvania, Lockheed and Stanford Research Institute.
There is a category of mishaps called "normal accidents," in which a tightly-coupled complex system experiences multiple unexpected component failures. The initial phases of the catastrophic failure of Three Mile Island nuclear power plant was of this type. It wasn't until the operators made some bad decisions that the situation became hopeless. In the end, even with clueless operators, a total meltdown was avoided. With modern technology and massive redundancy, these types of accidents are mercifully rare. In aerospace we have an expression that I have heard many times, "We can make the system foolproof. But we can't make it damn-fool proof." For example, if a modern airplane's electrical or hydraulic system fails, the backup systems will usually come to the rescue even for such a major systems breakdown. However, if the pilot is intoxicated, or has a stewardess on his lap (as in one of our examples), the situation is usually beyond repair. I hear you saying, "A thing like that could never happen." But we are talking here about world-class accidents that did in fact occur. They require world-class stupidity or arrogance for their occurrence. (Just think, if Monica Lewinsky had chosen to have her now famous blue dress dry-cleaned to remove all traces of the president's DNA, the forty-third President of the United States would have been Al Gore instead of George W. Bush, and the world would be a vastly different place than it is today -- no war in Iraq, etc.)
I will briefly summarize the ten cases I have chosen to present, illustrating the extent to which greed and ignorance are sufficient to bring down even the largest edifice or most foolproof contraption. It does not require an earthquake nor a bolt of lightning.
Icebergs and Arrogance: One of the most famous disasters of our time is the 1912 sinking of the ocean liner Titanic during a moonless midnight race to set a trans-Atlantic speed record. The ship roared at its top speed through the icebergs of the North Atlantic, while other nearby ships waited for sunrise to reveal the iceberg hazards. Meanwhile, six warnings were received by the Titanic's radio operator, but the captain was too busy entertaining high society passengers to get the message. The ship struck the iceberg just before midnight, with the loss of fifteen-hundred lives in the freezing water. The calamity was exacerbated by the fact that the ship had only the minimum allowable number of lifeboats, to allow dancing on the top (lifeboat) deck! (Interestingly, the entire event was foretold fourteen years earlier by Morgan Robertson's 1898 book The Wreck of the Titan, Or Futility. Robertson, an American writer, correctly prophesied the length, displacement, number of waterproof compartments and ultimate fate of the then unconceived and unbuilt ship.)
Molasses in January: To my mind the most bizarre of the calamities fitting my greed and ignorance model is the great two-million gallon Boston Molasses Catastrophe of 1919. The fifty-foot high, ninety foot diameter tank filled with molasses was designed by Mr. Arthur Jell, the chief accountant of the U.S. Industrial Alcohol Company (USIA), and built in one of Boston's most crowded slums. There was no building inspection conducted, because the Boston building department was convinced that this enormous structure shouldn't be considered a building. Its continual leakage of molasses from all its plates was dealt with by a coat of molasses-colored paint. Finally, in a rush for one more shipment of molasses to the rum makers before Prohibition became the law of the land, the tank was filled to capacity. Although there is nothing as slow as molasses in January, the tank collapsed at noon, flooding the streets of Boston's North End with a twenty foot wave of sticky, gooey death -- killing twenty, injuring more than a hundred, and taking down the elevated railroad tracks. After six years of litigation, USIA was found guilty of negligence and fined $600.000, equivalent to about $30 million today.
Tragic Weakness in the Chain of Command: One of the events with which I had some personal concern was the explosion of Space Shuttle Challenger, launched with its attendant rockets on a clear cold morning of January 28, 1986. It was the 25th shuttle into space-the tenth flight of Orbiter Challenger. This was one of the most publicized launches because it was the first time that a civilian -- a school teacher, Christa McAuliffe -- was going into space and she was invited to speak live during President Reagan's state of the Union address. The launch of Challenger had been delayed five times due to bad subfreezing weather at the Cape. And January 28 was by fifteen degrees the coldest day on which NASA had ever launched. Not surprisingly this launch was decried beforehand by all the experts. The Lockheed engineers measured the temperature of the O-rings and found them too cold to contain the hot exhaust gas. They would not give NASA a variance to launch. Neither would the design engineer, Roger Boisjoly (now a celebrated whistleblower), at Morton Thiokol who designed the rocket and containment system. Finally, under considerable pressure, NASA's administrator William Graham (presidential campaign advisor to Reagan who appointed him to NASA) called the president of Thiokol and ordered him to provide a variance to launch, or risk losing their billion dollar contract. In the conflagration that followed, the Challenger's seven crew members were all killed when the ship exploded at thirty-five thousand feet. The flames burned through the frozen O-ring, while the forces of a surprising and unseen 100-knot windshear ripped the craft apart. My job became the investigation of the part windshear played in the crash.
The Culture of NASA: Similarly, the disintegration of Space Shuttle Columbia, on February 1, 2003 was probably an avoidable tragedy. Politics and NASA's head-in-the-sand approach trumped obtaining launch damage data from classified Air Force spy satellites. A suitcase-sized piece of insulation foam had been photographed as it fell from the fuel tank and hit the wing of the shuttle at launch. But the extent of the damage from this five pound missile traveling at five-hundred miles per hour was never assessed. We all recall that Columbia broke up fourteen days later upon re-entry, as super-heated plasma entered a hole in the left wing punched by the falling foam, killing its seven astronaut crew. If a damage assessment had been made in a timely fashion, as was desperately attempted by one NASA engineer, investigators believe that the ship might have been repaired in flight by the crew, or rescued by another shuttle that was on the pad almost ready for launch. But that was not the top-down NASA culture at the time. The engineer was not allowed to send his info up the line.
Silkwood: The nuclear melt-down movie The China Syndrome was released just before the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, which occurred at 4AM, on March 31, 1979. The Karen Silkwood case is one of the sources for the movie. Silkwood had discovered evidence of falsified quality control data at the Kerr-McGee plant near Crescent, Oklahoma where she worked as a technician, and like Hector in the movie, she fell victim to a supposed accident as someone rammed her car off the road from behind while she was on her way to deliver the evidence to the press. I saw the film the day before the accident. And when I heard of the disaster on the radio the next morning, I though it was a movie trailer. (These things always happen on the graveyard shift -- in the industry there is a phenomenon known as "wide awake at 3AM," after a book of the same name.) The near melt-down of this 850-megawatt power reactor outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania was contained by the thick steel containment vessel (unlike Chernobyl). The reactor spontaneously shut itself down ("scrammed") in response to spurious internal signals -- which also disastrously shut down the cooling water pumps. Many books, and tens of thousands of pages of findings have been written on this immensely complicated accident which released 43,000 curies of radioactive krypton into the atmosphere -- luckily with no fatalities. From my point of view, the principle cause of the accident was not the inappropriate action of the two sleepy operators who closed off the cooling water when they should have opened it up. It was that they simply didn't know how to respond to two pressure gauges giving contradictory readings. In my opinion they just guessed wrong, although the President's Report blames them. The other contributing factor in play here was a major cost-cutting operation to reduce maintenance costs by Metropolitan Edison, who was the owner and operator of the plant. For unknown reasons the two large valves that control the back-up cooling water had been manually closed two days before the accident, and evidently nobody noticed! If the valves had been properly inspected and opened there would have been no calamity, even with the accidental shut down. Obviously, the technicians operating the system could also have been better trained. As with most accidents, there were numerous factors-and numerous mistakes. Unfortunately, reactor operators save lots of money by eliminating inspections. But here we are thirty years later.
New York Times, May 8, 2011
NUCLEAR AGENCY BESET BY LAPSES
Critics Say Watchdog Is Too Close To Industry
In the fall of 2007, workers at the Byron nuclear power plant in Illinois (just outside Chicago) were using a wire brush to clean a badly corroded steel pipe-one in a series that circulate cooling water to essential emergency equipment -- when something unexpected happened: the brush poked through. The resulting leak caused a 12-day shutdown of the two reactors for repairs. The plant's owner, the Exelon Corporation, had long known that corrosion was thinning most of these pipes. But rather than fix them, it repeatedly lowered the minimum thickness it deemed safe. By the time the pipe broke, Exelon had declared that pipe walls just three-hundredths of an inch thick -- less than one-tenth the original minimum thickness -- would be good enough. [This is also not an "accident."]
Pass the Vodka: Several years after Three-Mile Island, on April 26, 1986, at 1:30 AM reactor number four at the Chernobyl power plant in the northern Ukraine exploded releasing into the midnight air four-hundred times more radiation than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It would require the resettlement of more than 300,000 people, and is thought to have caused 4000 additional cancer deaths. The explosion blew the 2000-ton concrete top off the intensely hot reactor, spreading debris over hundreds of miles-because there was no containment vessel of any kind for the reactor! (Who needs a expensive steel containment for a well tested reactor?) A safety test had been planned for the reactor the previous day, but it could not be concluded before the next shift. To briefly summarize the Chernobyl Reactor disaster: Late that night two technicians decided to do the safety test themselves, which involved carefully reducing the cooling water to the reactor -- always a delicate operation. Next, one must even more carefully withdraw two of the control rods while monitoring the reactor power. (Incidentally, this reactor was three times the size of Three Mile Island-several gigawatts.) As the two techs huddled over the still-surviving scribbled notes that had been left for them, the reactor violently spiked in energy and heated up so exponentially that the control rods could not be pushed back into place. Thus the core overheated, melted and went critical. Once again, wide awake at 3AM -- this time at 1:30AM. We know the tragic end. (In my experience, over several years in various Russian labs, nothing happened without a couple glasses of vodka-although that doesn't usually appear in the accident report.)
The Unfortunate Nearsighted Telescope: The $2.5 billion Hubble Space Telescope was carried into orbit by the Space Shuttle Discovery in April, 1990. Hubble's position outside the Earth's atmosphere allows it to take extremely sharp images with almost no background light. The mirror and optical systems of the telescope were the most crucial and complex part, and were designed to exacting specifications. Construction of the eight-foot mirror by the highly regarded optical company, Perkin-Elmer began in 1979, starting with an optical blank manufactured by Corning from their ultra-low expansion glass. Within weeks of the 1990 launch of the telescope, the returned images showed that there was a serious problem with the focusing of the optical system. Analysis of the flawed images showed that the cause of the problem was that the primary mirror had been ground to the wrong shape.
A commission headed by Lew Allen, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was established to determine how the error could have arisen. The Allen Commission found that the main null corrector lens -- a device used to measure the exact shape of the mirror, had been assembled incorrectly by the optical shop at P&E fabricating the giant mirror. But luckily the Quality Assurance department had its own precision test lens to evaluate the mirror. When the mirror got to QA it failed to show the proper curvature. From this point on, we can say "mistakes were made": Perkin-Elmer was way behind schedule and over budget on the mirror. So, rather than try to reconcile the two discrepant measurements they said-you guessed it-"let's go with the guys who made the mirror. To hell with QA." Thus the nearsighted Hubble Space Telescope mirror was shipped to Lockheed for assembly and integration into the space craft module.
Lockheed's optical shop performed their integration and proposed to test the telescope from end-to-end. NASA's cost cutting management said, "Don't test it, just launch it," even though the mirror failed some of the maker's tests! Lockheed's optical shop eventually had to design corrective lenses for the Hubble, which now allows it to take the beautiful and inspiring pictures we have been looking at for the past decade. My Lockheed colleague Paul Robb, was head of the Optics Department at that time, and he was able to fill me in on the gory details.
Doomed to Crash: I joined Lockheed Research and Development Laboratory in September 1985, with the intention of investigating the use of lasers to detect windshear in front of aircraft to prevent crashes from that source. In August 1995 a Lockheed L-1011 crashed at Dallas-Fort Worth airport due to windshear, killing 130 on board. The last words from the pilot as he headed into the torrential down-burst were, "I guess we're going to get the plane washed." So, Lockheed and NASA were both very supportive of my recently proposed (1986) premonitory detection program. While building my laser wind sensor hardware, I had also carefully examined several windshear plane crashes. The karmic crash of Northwest Flight 255 on August 16, 1987, which killed all but one of its 156 passengers, was one of the most shocking to me.
I call this crash karmic because of the very large number of factors all contributing to the tragic event. (In Buddhism, one of the understandings of karma, is the immutable law of cause and effect. If one makes bad decisions his whole life, then he is going to suffer.) The McDonnell-Douglas MD-82 had been scheduled to fly from Detroit to Los Angeles with a layover in Phoenix. It was 8:00 in the evening and the totally-filled aircraft was sitting on the tarmac where the temperature was still eighty-five degrees. (A full aircraft and hot weather both require extra energy and lift to get off the ground.) But, unfortunately the aircraft was ordered to move from the longest runway to a shorter runway, due to crowding. As the plane taxied to the new runway, the pilot and a stewardess who was also in the cockpit were engaged in an energetic hopeful conversation about their forthcoming layover at Sky Harbor airport in Phoenix. Apparently, to get rid of the annoying annunciator voice which kept calling out "Flaps. Flaps" the pilot tripped the circuit breaker which controlled the system that alerts the pilot to the fact that he is taxiing without flaps, which are of course essential for takeoff. So enthralling was their rendezvous conversation, that the pilot neglected to perform the checklist before take off, nor did he remember to set the flaps. The reason that I was reading this fateful cockpit voice-recorded transcript (later sanitized in the published NTSB version), was because there had been a twenty knot windshear at the end of the runway, which further contributed to the crash. I am sorry to say that the happy couple in the cockpit, along with all but one of the passengers and other crew were dead forty-five seconds after the last of their giggles.
The Apogee of Greed and Arrogance: Enron's iconic fifty-story oval glass headquarters in Houston is emblematic of the house of cards that Enron comprised. It was a virtual company with virtual profits, featuring fictitious special purpose entities (SPEs) generally located off shore. I'm sure you are aware that it was the Enron scandal has led to the revival of the term "Ponzi Scheme." They managed to control vast amounts of U.S. energy generation capacity, causing unnecessary brown-outs in California, and the subsequent recall and dismissal of its governor, Gray Davis. Without Enron, there would have been no Governor Schwarzenegger. The Directors of Enron have been accused by members of the US Congress and others of operating a vast fraud where the primary return to the upper management was from recruiting and inventing new businesses rather than from the sale of a product or making a profit. This kind of pyramid strategy is often referred to as a Ponzi Scheme-named after Charles Ponzi, an immigrant to Boston in 1919, who made millions in the 1920's before he was sent to prison. The distinguishing feature of a Ponzi type pyramid is that old investors are paid back with funds received from new victims. As long as the fraud continues to grow, the investors are not usually aware that their money has been misappropriated. Most Ponzi schemes are uncovered when new "investors" can no longer be located. In the case of Enron, obvious mistakes were made, and lies were told. The whole massively unstable edifice came catastrophically tumbling down when it became known to the share holders that there were no actual profits at Enron. The corporation collapsed just like a nuclear power plant suddenly going critical. It eventually became clear that the whole thing was an illusion. Enron was a fifteen-year adventure with a huge and complex organization based on greed and corruption. The company lost $50 billion in its last month and went bankrupt in 2000-causing tragic financial losses to its thousands of workers whose pensions had became worthless. It also destroyed the esteemed accounting firm of Arthur Anderson, who had used its prestige to endorse Enron's lies.
Who Didn't know It Was A Bubble?: Perhaps closest in memory is the Great Crash of 2008. After 150 years of distinguished service Lehman Brothers went bankrupt while trying to entice customers to invest in the exciting $45 trillion worldwide opportunity of credit default swaps-betting against their worthless bonds. Financial guru Alan Greenspan recently said before Congress:
"I have made a mistake... I have found a flaw in my fundamental ideology, markets don't correct themselves. Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief!"
By implication, Ayn Rand, Greenspan's mentor, was wrong about the desirability of totally free markets. In 1958, I was deeply engrossed in the mid-Manhattan salon of the Russian-born novelist and Libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand -- which was held in her luxurious apartment. Alan Greenspan was also a regular -- and cranky - attendee, already clad in his ubiquitous pin-striped suit. In a letter to the editor of the New York Times about her just-published, mammoth novel of capitalism, he wrote, "Atlas Shrugged is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should."
Traditionally, banks lend money to homeowners for their mortgages and retain the risk of default, called credit risk. However, due to twenty-first century financial innovations, banks can now sell rights to the mortgage payments and pass-on related credit risk to other banks and securities dealers through a process called securitization. Until 2000, the Roosevelt era Glass-Steagall Act prohibited banks from offering investment, commercial banking, or insurance services. But the Republican driven Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 allows commercial and investment banks to consolidate and create securities out of their junk mortgages. That is, your local bank can now wrap up hundreds of worthless home loans in tinfoil, tie them with a ribbon, and call them securities. A bank no longer cares whether or not the borrower will ever pay back the loan, because it will soon be bundled and sold to someone else. These are called "ninja" loans -- no income, no job, no assets. This new "originate to distribute" banking model means credit risk has been distributed broadly to investors around the world, with a series of consequential impacts. Economists have criticized Texas senator Phil Gramm's deregulation Act as a principal contribution to the on-going subprime mortgage financial crisis, arguing that the "bail out" amounts to corporate welfare for financial institutions and a moral hazard that will make taxpayers pay dearly-$700 billion so far. Banks used to hold their loans, and therefore made sure that they were backed by collateral and the borrower's ability to pay the mortgage. It is especially interesting to note that in the financial meltdown of 2008, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson decided to give several billion dollars to his old firm, Goldman-Sacks, while letting his old adversary Lehman Brothers go bankrupt with no financial aid what-so-ever. The men who sold the worthless bonds, called the transactions IBG/YBG trades-I'll be gone/you'll be gone! Such is the kingdom of heaven. But disasters have always been with us.
The Hundred-Year Black Swan: One final disaster flashback. Consider the 1896 tsunami that swept into and destroyed a good part of North-eastern Japan in 1896, with 28,000+ fatalities. This 100-foot high wall of water blasted the harbor at a 100 miles per hour and swept many miles inland. As I was completing this article, we have been greeted with the March 11, 2011 disastrous breaching of the seawall at Japan's Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant in North Eastern Japan. Not far from the 1896 disaster just described.
The Fukushima reactor was built five-and-a-half meters above sea level in a location whose average tsunami had been eight meters high for the past thousand years. And of course the generators to supply cooling water were installed in the basement. It's known that Japan's nuclear regulators and the operator of the crippled Fukushima reactors were warned that a tsunami could overwhelm the plant's defenses, but they failed to acknowledge the threat. The minutes from a government committee show that the Trade Ministry dismissed evidence two years before the disaster from geologists that the power station's stretch of coast was overdue for a giant wave. Tokyo Electric Power Co. engineers didn't heed lessons from the 2004 tsunami off Indonesia that swamped a reactor 2,000 kilometers away in India, even as they advised the nuclear industry on coping with the dangers.
Tokyo Electric's Dai-Ichi plant successfully withstood the impact of Japan's record March 11 earthquake, only for a wall of water to knock out generators needed to keep its reactors cool. The cost of the miscalculation is still mounting as explosions and fires at the plant cause radiation leaks that force the evacuation of more than 200,000 people and contaminated drinking water and food supplies.
Underscoring the Japanese government's failure to foresee the risk posed by tsunamis to nuclear power plants is the country's national report on nuclear safety, filed with the International Atomic Energy Agency in September 2010. The 194-page document discusses detailed earthquake mitigation measures 74 times. Tsunamis are mentioned twice, both times in reference to a working group studying the issue. Furthermore Tokyo Electric's sea-wall defenses for the Dai-Ichi plant were built under the assumption that the coastline on which it sat wasn't prone to tsunamis higher than 5.5 meters, said Yoshimi Hitosugi, a Tokyo-based company spokesman.
As an historical precedent an 8-meter tsunami that hit Japan's northeast in the year 869 swept as far as four kilometers inland at Sendai Bay, stretching south toward the Dai-Ichi plant. "A repeat could occur soon," because sediment samples showed the tsunami had a pattern of recurring every 800 to 1,000 years, according to a 2001 report by a research team funded by the government's Science Ministry.
Minutes of a committee meeting held by the Trade Ministry to assess reactor safety on June 24, 2009, show that Yukinobu Okamura, who heads the government-funded Active Fault and Earthquake Research Center, asked Tokyo Electric why it hadn't taken on board evidence of the tsunami risk. "We didn't think the damage would be that significant," replied Isao Nishimura, a manager at Tokyo Electric's nuclear earthquake resistance technology center. When will we ever learn?
Update: ANEYOSHI, Japan -The April 20, 2011 New York Times writes:
"The stone tablet has stood on this forested hillside since before they were born, but the villagers have faithfully obeyed the stark warning carved on its weathered face: ‘Do not build your homes below this point!' Residents say this injunction from their ancestors kept their tiny village of 11 households safely out of reach of the deadly tsunami last month that wiped out hundreds of miles of Japanese coast and rose to record heights near here. The waves stopped just 300 feet below the stone, and the village beyond it."
Like most of the terrible events described in this article, this most recent one described above, was not at all improbable. In fact it was almost certain to occur, only its time of occurrence was uncertain. And a stone marker showed where one must never build. The take-home message is that greed and arrogance is the cause of most of our suffering -- both personal and institutional -- and will always get us in the end.
Bibliography
Cabbage, Michael and Harwood, William, Com Check...: The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia (New York, Free Press, 2004).
Coleman, Richard M., Wide Awake at 3:00 A.M.: By Choice of by Chance, (New York, W.H. Freeman & Co., 1986).
Cook, Richard C., Challenger Revealed: An Insider's Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age, New York, Thunder
Mouth Press, 2006).
Degani, Asaf, Taming Hal: Designing Interfaces Beyond 2001 (New York City, Palgrave McMillan, 2003).
Dörner, Dieetrich, The Logic of Failure: Recognizing and Avoiding Error in Complex Situations, (New York, Basic Books, 1996).
Gerstein, Marc, Flirting With Disaster: Why Accidents are Rarely Accidental, New York, Union Square Press, 2008).
Norbu, Chogyal Namkhai, The Crystal and the Way of Light: Sutra, Tantra and Dzogchen, (Ithaca, NY Snow Lion Press, 1999).
Perrow, Charles, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technology, Princeton (NJ, Princeton University Press, 1984).
Puleo, Stephen, Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, (Boston, MA, Beacon Press, 2003).
Robertson, Morgan, The Wreck of the Titan, or Futility, (Mattiuck, NY, Ameron Ltd. 1995).
Spignesi, Stephen, Catastrophe: The 100 Greatest Disasters of All Time, (New York, Kensington Publishing, 2002).
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, (New York, Random House, 2010).
Russel Targ's Blog
--An unsigned description of the 1896 tsunami that hit north-Eastern Japan with a 110-foot wall of water, killing more than 28,000.
Accidents are rarely accidental. Paradoxically, there is almost always one person who could have spoken up courageously and prevented a catastrophe. This article explores why they didn't do that. The tragic and avoidable accidents from recent history, that I describe here, are the result of various combinations of cost-cutting for profit, risk-taking for fame, or ignorance of the complexities of modern systems.
In his wonderful book The Black Swan, Nissam Taleb vigorously points out that leaders and planners tend to underestimate and neglect the potentially devastating calamities that can occur as the result of highly improbable events until they finally do occur. Today we are seeing the entire country of Japan brought to its knees because some planner didn't take account of the possible occurrence of giant tsunami waves that do occur, but less often than once in a century. Anyone who has lived as long as I have has learned to create an internal "payoff matrix" before he leaps to the next great opportunity. This is a statistical tool that is useful in keeping you alive. You estimate "what is the worse thing and the best thing that could happen" in this situation. And then multiply each by the probably of its occurrence. For example, the upside might be an unbelievably exotic and romantic adventure with a new and desirable partner! And the downside might be the remote possibility of AIDS. The analyst learns to avoid attractive opportunities like this, in which the payoff matrix contains a +++ in one of the squares, and a "minus-infinity" (death) in the other square -- even if the probability is really pretty small. If the payoff is national destruction and calamity, we don't build the nuclear power plant eighteen feet above high-tide, even though the twenty-foot tsunami comes only once a century. And above all. We don't put the back-up generator in the basement!
The story I present here is about a world of calamitous accidents, all of which could have been avoided. They represent a grisly and unnecessary loss of life in addition to the loss of many billions of dollars. Perhaps you recall that, before he resigned -- under pressure -- George W. Bush's Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told Congress that "mistakes were made" in the firing of U.S. Attorneys. Senator John McCain used the same locution in describing the conduct of the war in Iraq. The idea that "mistakes were made and lies were told" is a popular distancing device-a Nixon-era political contrivance to indicate that something went terribly wrong, but "It wasn't me. I didn't do it." (This last quotation appears on tee-shirts available from your local bail bondsman.) In the tragedies I will describe here, the mistakes and the lies belong to the rich and powerful. The dismaying result is that none of the perpetrators went to prison-which differs from the case of the bondsman's usual customer, who tends to be poor and disenfranchised.
I am well aware of the problems faced by men and women in the trenches, who see something going wrong, but cannot get a hearing for their concerns. Karen Silkwood at the Kerr-McGee nuclear plant comes to mind. You will remember that she was mysteriously murdered as she was on her way to a press conference to talk about negligence at the nuclear plant. So this is serious business.
As a physicist with a professional career spanning forty-five years in research, development, production and aerospace, I am aware of the dangers in high-level undertakings. I began work as a researcher and pioneer in the development of the laser in the late 1950s -- recruited out of graduate school at Columbia University to work on the exciting laser project while it was still unfolding in the mind of Gordon Gould, its creator. In my last industrial job, I was a project manager standing on the tarmac at Kennedy Space Center measuring the winds along the space shuttle's trajectory -- using a high-power laser system I developed with my team at Lockheed Missiles & Space. So this is a high-risk world I understand. Since 1962 I have ridden my motorcycle through the foothills and potholes of Silicon Valley, while working for Sylvania, Lockheed and Stanford Research Institute.
There is a category of mishaps called "normal accidents," in which a tightly-coupled complex system experiences multiple unexpected component failures. The initial phases of the catastrophic failure of Three Mile Island nuclear power plant was of this type. It wasn't until the operators made some bad decisions that the situation became hopeless. In the end, even with clueless operators, a total meltdown was avoided. With modern technology and massive redundancy, these types of accidents are mercifully rare. In aerospace we have an expression that I have heard many times, "We can make the system foolproof. But we can't make it damn-fool proof." For example, if a modern airplane's electrical or hydraulic system fails, the backup systems will usually come to the rescue even for such a major systems breakdown. However, if the pilot is intoxicated, or has a stewardess on his lap (as in one of our examples), the situation is usually beyond repair. I hear you saying, "A thing like that could never happen." But we are talking here about world-class accidents that did in fact occur. They require world-class stupidity or arrogance for their occurrence. (Just think, if Monica Lewinsky had chosen to have her now famous blue dress dry-cleaned to remove all traces of the president's DNA, the forty-third President of the United States would have been Al Gore instead of George W. Bush, and the world would be a vastly different place than it is today -- no war in Iraq, etc.)
I will briefly summarize the ten cases I have chosen to present, illustrating the extent to which greed and ignorance are sufficient to bring down even the largest edifice or most foolproof contraption. It does not require an earthquake nor a bolt of lightning.
Icebergs and Arrogance: One of the most famous disasters of our time is the 1912 sinking of the ocean liner Titanic during a moonless midnight race to set a trans-Atlantic speed record. The ship roared at its top speed through the icebergs of the North Atlantic, while other nearby ships waited for sunrise to reveal the iceberg hazards. Meanwhile, six warnings were received by the Titanic's radio operator, but the captain was too busy entertaining high society passengers to get the message. The ship struck the iceberg just before midnight, with the loss of fifteen-hundred lives in the freezing water. The calamity was exacerbated by the fact that the ship had only the minimum allowable number of lifeboats, to allow dancing on the top (lifeboat) deck! (Interestingly, the entire event was foretold fourteen years earlier by Morgan Robertson's 1898 book The Wreck of the Titan, Or Futility. Robertson, an American writer, correctly prophesied the length, displacement, number of waterproof compartments and ultimate fate of the then unconceived and unbuilt ship.)
Molasses in January: To my mind the most bizarre of the calamities fitting my greed and ignorance model is the great two-million gallon Boston Molasses Catastrophe of 1919. The fifty-foot high, ninety foot diameter tank filled with molasses was designed by Mr. Arthur Jell, the chief accountant of the U.S. Industrial Alcohol Company (USIA), and built in one of Boston's most crowded slums. There was no building inspection conducted, because the Boston building department was convinced that this enormous structure shouldn't be considered a building. Its continual leakage of molasses from all its plates was dealt with by a coat of molasses-colored paint. Finally, in a rush for one more shipment of molasses to the rum makers before Prohibition became the law of the land, the tank was filled to capacity. Although there is nothing as slow as molasses in January, the tank collapsed at noon, flooding the streets of Boston's North End with a twenty foot wave of sticky, gooey death -- killing twenty, injuring more than a hundred, and taking down the elevated railroad tracks. After six years of litigation, USIA was found guilty of negligence and fined $600.000, equivalent to about $30 million today.
Tragic Weakness in the Chain of Command: One of the events with which I had some personal concern was the explosion of Space Shuttle Challenger, launched with its attendant rockets on a clear cold morning of January 28, 1986. It was the 25th shuttle into space-the tenth flight of Orbiter Challenger. This was one of the most publicized launches because it was the first time that a civilian -- a school teacher, Christa McAuliffe -- was going into space and she was invited to speak live during President Reagan's state of the Union address. The launch of Challenger had been delayed five times due to bad subfreezing weather at the Cape. And January 28 was by fifteen degrees the coldest day on which NASA had ever launched. Not surprisingly this launch was decried beforehand by all the experts. The Lockheed engineers measured the temperature of the O-rings and found them too cold to contain the hot exhaust gas. They would not give NASA a variance to launch. Neither would the design engineer, Roger Boisjoly (now a celebrated whistleblower), at Morton Thiokol who designed the rocket and containment system. Finally, under considerable pressure, NASA's administrator William Graham (presidential campaign advisor to Reagan who appointed him to NASA) called the president of Thiokol and ordered him to provide a variance to launch, or risk losing their billion dollar contract. In the conflagration that followed, the Challenger's seven crew members were all killed when the ship exploded at thirty-five thousand feet. The flames burned through the frozen O-ring, while the forces of a surprising and unseen 100-knot windshear ripped the craft apart. My job became the investigation of the part windshear played in the crash.
The Culture of NASA: Similarly, the disintegration of Space Shuttle Columbia, on February 1, 2003 was probably an avoidable tragedy. Politics and NASA's head-in-the-sand approach trumped obtaining launch damage data from classified Air Force spy satellites. A suitcase-sized piece of insulation foam had been photographed as it fell from the fuel tank and hit the wing of the shuttle at launch. But the extent of the damage from this five pound missile traveling at five-hundred miles per hour was never assessed. We all recall that Columbia broke up fourteen days later upon re-entry, as super-heated plasma entered a hole in the left wing punched by the falling foam, killing its seven astronaut crew. If a damage assessment had been made in a timely fashion, as was desperately attempted by one NASA engineer, investigators believe that the ship might have been repaired in flight by the crew, or rescued by another shuttle that was on the pad almost ready for launch. But that was not the top-down NASA culture at the time. The engineer was not allowed to send his info up the line.
Silkwood: The nuclear melt-down movie The China Syndrome was released just before the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, which occurred at 4AM, on March 31, 1979. The Karen Silkwood case is one of the sources for the movie. Silkwood had discovered evidence of falsified quality control data at the Kerr-McGee plant near Crescent, Oklahoma where she worked as a technician, and like Hector in the movie, she fell victim to a supposed accident as someone rammed her car off the road from behind while she was on her way to deliver the evidence to the press. I saw the film the day before the accident. And when I heard of the disaster on the radio the next morning, I though it was a movie trailer. (These things always happen on the graveyard shift -- in the industry there is a phenomenon known as "wide awake at 3AM," after a book of the same name.) The near melt-down of this 850-megawatt power reactor outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania was contained by the thick steel containment vessel (unlike Chernobyl). The reactor spontaneously shut itself down ("scrammed") in response to spurious internal signals -- which also disastrously shut down the cooling water pumps. Many books, and tens of thousands of pages of findings have been written on this immensely complicated accident which released 43,000 curies of radioactive krypton into the atmosphere -- luckily with no fatalities. From my point of view, the principle cause of the accident was not the inappropriate action of the two sleepy operators who closed off the cooling water when they should have opened it up. It was that they simply didn't know how to respond to two pressure gauges giving contradictory readings. In my opinion they just guessed wrong, although the President's Report blames them. The other contributing factor in play here was a major cost-cutting operation to reduce maintenance costs by Metropolitan Edison, who was the owner and operator of the plant. For unknown reasons the two large valves that control the back-up cooling water had been manually closed two days before the accident, and evidently nobody noticed! If the valves had been properly inspected and opened there would have been no calamity, even with the accidental shut down. Obviously, the technicians operating the system could also have been better trained. As with most accidents, there were numerous factors-and numerous mistakes. Unfortunately, reactor operators save lots of money by eliminating inspections. But here we are thirty years later.
New York Times, May 8, 2011
NUCLEAR AGENCY BESET BY LAPSES
Critics Say Watchdog Is Too Close To Industry
In the fall of 2007, workers at the Byron nuclear power plant in Illinois (just outside Chicago) were using a wire brush to clean a badly corroded steel pipe-one in a series that circulate cooling water to essential emergency equipment -- when something unexpected happened: the brush poked through. The resulting leak caused a 12-day shutdown of the two reactors for repairs. The plant's owner, the Exelon Corporation, had long known that corrosion was thinning most of these pipes. But rather than fix them, it repeatedly lowered the minimum thickness it deemed safe. By the time the pipe broke, Exelon had declared that pipe walls just three-hundredths of an inch thick -- less than one-tenth the original minimum thickness -- would be good enough. [This is also not an "accident."]
Pass the Vodka: Several years after Three-Mile Island, on April 26, 1986, at 1:30 AM reactor number four at the Chernobyl power plant in the northern Ukraine exploded releasing into the midnight air four-hundred times more radiation than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It would require the resettlement of more than 300,000 people, and is thought to have caused 4000 additional cancer deaths. The explosion blew the 2000-ton concrete top off the intensely hot reactor, spreading debris over hundreds of miles-because there was no containment vessel of any kind for the reactor! (Who needs a expensive steel containment for a well tested reactor?) A safety test had been planned for the reactor the previous day, but it could not be concluded before the next shift. To briefly summarize the Chernobyl Reactor disaster: Late that night two technicians decided to do the safety test themselves, which involved carefully reducing the cooling water to the reactor -- always a delicate operation. Next, one must even more carefully withdraw two of the control rods while monitoring the reactor power. (Incidentally, this reactor was three times the size of Three Mile Island-several gigawatts.) As the two techs huddled over the still-surviving scribbled notes that had been left for them, the reactor violently spiked in energy and heated up so exponentially that the control rods could not be pushed back into place. Thus the core overheated, melted and went critical. Once again, wide awake at 3AM -- this time at 1:30AM. We know the tragic end. (In my experience, over several years in various Russian labs, nothing happened without a couple glasses of vodka-although that doesn't usually appear in the accident report.)
The Unfortunate Nearsighted Telescope: The $2.5 billion Hubble Space Telescope was carried into orbit by the Space Shuttle Discovery in April, 1990. Hubble's position outside the Earth's atmosphere allows it to take extremely sharp images with almost no background light. The mirror and optical systems of the telescope were the most crucial and complex part, and were designed to exacting specifications. Construction of the eight-foot mirror by the highly regarded optical company, Perkin-Elmer began in 1979, starting with an optical blank manufactured by Corning from their ultra-low expansion glass. Within weeks of the 1990 launch of the telescope, the returned images showed that there was a serious problem with the focusing of the optical system. Analysis of the flawed images showed that the cause of the problem was that the primary mirror had been ground to the wrong shape.
A commission headed by Lew Allen, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was established to determine how the error could have arisen. The Allen Commission found that the main null corrector lens -- a device used to measure the exact shape of the mirror, had been assembled incorrectly by the optical shop at P&E fabricating the giant mirror. But luckily the Quality Assurance department had its own precision test lens to evaluate the mirror. When the mirror got to QA it failed to show the proper curvature. From this point on, we can say "mistakes were made": Perkin-Elmer was way behind schedule and over budget on the mirror. So, rather than try to reconcile the two discrepant measurements they said-you guessed it-"let's go with the guys who made the mirror. To hell with QA." Thus the nearsighted Hubble Space Telescope mirror was shipped to Lockheed for assembly and integration into the space craft module.
Lockheed's optical shop performed their integration and proposed to test the telescope from end-to-end. NASA's cost cutting management said, "Don't test it, just launch it," even though the mirror failed some of the maker's tests! Lockheed's optical shop eventually had to design corrective lenses for the Hubble, which now allows it to take the beautiful and inspiring pictures we have been looking at for the past decade. My Lockheed colleague Paul Robb, was head of the Optics Department at that time, and he was able to fill me in on the gory details.
Doomed to Crash: I joined Lockheed Research and Development Laboratory in September 1985, with the intention of investigating the use of lasers to detect windshear in front of aircraft to prevent crashes from that source. In August 1995 a Lockheed L-1011 crashed at Dallas-Fort Worth airport due to windshear, killing 130 on board. The last words from the pilot as he headed into the torrential down-burst were, "I guess we're going to get the plane washed." So, Lockheed and NASA were both very supportive of my recently proposed (1986) premonitory detection program. While building my laser wind sensor hardware, I had also carefully examined several windshear plane crashes. The karmic crash of Northwest Flight 255 on August 16, 1987, which killed all but one of its 156 passengers, was one of the most shocking to me.
I call this crash karmic because of the very large number of factors all contributing to the tragic event. (In Buddhism, one of the understandings of karma, is the immutable law of cause and effect. If one makes bad decisions his whole life, then he is going to suffer.) The McDonnell-Douglas MD-82 had been scheduled to fly from Detroit to Los Angeles with a layover in Phoenix. It was 8:00 in the evening and the totally-filled aircraft was sitting on the tarmac where the temperature was still eighty-five degrees. (A full aircraft and hot weather both require extra energy and lift to get off the ground.) But, unfortunately the aircraft was ordered to move from the longest runway to a shorter runway, due to crowding. As the plane taxied to the new runway, the pilot and a stewardess who was also in the cockpit were engaged in an energetic hopeful conversation about their forthcoming layover at Sky Harbor airport in Phoenix. Apparently, to get rid of the annoying annunciator voice which kept calling out "Flaps. Flaps" the pilot tripped the circuit breaker which controlled the system that alerts the pilot to the fact that he is taxiing without flaps, which are of course essential for takeoff. So enthralling was their rendezvous conversation, that the pilot neglected to perform the checklist before take off, nor did he remember to set the flaps. The reason that I was reading this fateful cockpit voice-recorded transcript (later sanitized in the published NTSB version), was because there had been a twenty knot windshear at the end of the runway, which further contributed to the crash. I am sorry to say that the happy couple in the cockpit, along with all but one of the passengers and other crew were dead forty-five seconds after the last of their giggles.
The Apogee of Greed and Arrogance: Enron's iconic fifty-story oval glass headquarters in Houston is emblematic of the house of cards that Enron comprised. It was a virtual company with virtual profits, featuring fictitious special purpose entities (SPEs) generally located off shore. I'm sure you are aware that it was the Enron scandal has led to the revival of the term "Ponzi Scheme." They managed to control vast amounts of U.S. energy generation capacity, causing unnecessary brown-outs in California, and the subsequent recall and dismissal of its governor, Gray Davis. Without Enron, there would have been no Governor Schwarzenegger. The Directors of Enron have been accused by members of the US Congress and others of operating a vast fraud where the primary return to the upper management was from recruiting and inventing new businesses rather than from the sale of a product or making a profit. This kind of pyramid strategy is often referred to as a Ponzi Scheme-named after Charles Ponzi, an immigrant to Boston in 1919, who made millions in the 1920's before he was sent to prison. The distinguishing feature of a Ponzi type pyramid is that old investors are paid back with funds received from new victims. As long as the fraud continues to grow, the investors are not usually aware that their money has been misappropriated. Most Ponzi schemes are uncovered when new "investors" can no longer be located. In the case of Enron, obvious mistakes were made, and lies were told. The whole massively unstable edifice came catastrophically tumbling down when it became known to the share holders that there were no actual profits at Enron. The corporation collapsed just like a nuclear power plant suddenly going critical. It eventually became clear that the whole thing was an illusion. Enron was a fifteen-year adventure with a huge and complex organization based on greed and corruption. The company lost $50 billion in its last month and went bankrupt in 2000-causing tragic financial losses to its thousands of workers whose pensions had became worthless. It also destroyed the esteemed accounting firm of Arthur Anderson, who had used its prestige to endorse Enron's lies.
Who Didn't know It Was A Bubble?: Perhaps closest in memory is the Great Crash of 2008. After 150 years of distinguished service Lehman Brothers went bankrupt while trying to entice customers to invest in the exciting $45 trillion worldwide opportunity of credit default swaps-betting against their worthless bonds. Financial guru Alan Greenspan recently said before Congress:
"I have made a mistake... I have found a flaw in my fundamental ideology, markets don't correct themselves. Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief!"
By implication, Ayn Rand, Greenspan's mentor, was wrong about the desirability of totally free markets. In 1958, I was deeply engrossed in the mid-Manhattan salon of the Russian-born novelist and Libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand -- which was held in her luxurious apartment. Alan Greenspan was also a regular -- and cranky - attendee, already clad in his ubiquitous pin-striped suit. In a letter to the editor of the New York Times about her just-published, mammoth novel of capitalism, he wrote, "Atlas Shrugged is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should."
Traditionally, banks lend money to homeowners for their mortgages and retain the risk of default, called credit risk. However, due to twenty-first century financial innovations, banks can now sell rights to the mortgage payments and pass-on related credit risk to other banks and securities dealers through a process called securitization. Until 2000, the Roosevelt era Glass-Steagall Act prohibited banks from offering investment, commercial banking, or insurance services. But the Republican driven Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 allows commercial and investment banks to consolidate and create securities out of their junk mortgages. That is, your local bank can now wrap up hundreds of worthless home loans in tinfoil, tie them with a ribbon, and call them securities. A bank no longer cares whether or not the borrower will ever pay back the loan, because it will soon be bundled and sold to someone else. These are called "ninja" loans -- no income, no job, no assets. This new "originate to distribute" banking model means credit risk has been distributed broadly to investors around the world, with a series of consequential impacts. Economists have criticized Texas senator Phil Gramm's deregulation Act as a principal contribution to the on-going subprime mortgage financial crisis, arguing that the "bail out" amounts to corporate welfare for financial institutions and a moral hazard that will make taxpayers pay dearly-$700 billion so far. Banks used to hold their loans, and therefore made sure that they were backed by collateral and the borrower's ability to pay the mortgage. It is especially interesting to note that in the financial meltdown of 2008, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson decided to give several billion dollars to his old firm, Goldman-Sacks, while letting his old adversary Lehman Brothers go bankrupt with no financial aid what-so-ever. The men who sold the worthless bonds, called the transactions IBG/YBG trades-I'll be gone/you'll be gone! Such is the kingdom of heaven. But disasters have always been with us.
The Hundred-Year Black Swan: One final disaster flashback. Consider the 1896 tsunami that swept into and destroyed a good part of North-eastern Japan in 1896, with 28,000+ fatalities. This 100-foot high wall of water blasted the harbor at a 100 miles per hour and swept many miles inland. As I was completing this article, we have been greeted with the March 11, 2011 disastrous breaching of the seawall at Japan's Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant in North Eastern Japan. Not far from the 1896 disaster just described.
The Fukushima reactor was built five-and-a-half meters above sea level in a location whose average tsunami had been eight meters high for the past thousand years. And of course the generators to supply cooling water were installed in the basement. It's known that Japan's nuclear regulators and the operator of the crippled Fukushima reactors were warned that a tsunami could overwhelm the plant's defenses, but they failed to acknowledge the threat. The minutes from a government committee show that the Trade Ministry dismissed evidence two years before the disaster from geologists that the power station's stretch of coast was overdue for a giant wave. Tokyo Electric Power Co. engineers didn't heed lessons from the 2004 tsunami off Indonesia that swamped a reactor 2,000 kilometers away in India, even as they advised the nuclear industry on coping with the dangers.
Tokyo Electric's Dai-Ichi plant successfully withstood the impact of Japan's record March 11 earthquake, only for a wall of water to knock out generators needed to keep its reactors cool. The cost of the miscalculation is still mounting as explosions and fires at the plant cause radiation leaks that force the evacuation of more than 200,000 people and contaminated drinking water and food supplies.
Underscoring the Japanese government's failure to foresee the risk posed by tsunamis to nuclear power plants is the country's national report on nuclear safety, filed with the International Atomic Energy Agency in September 2010. The 194-page document discusses detailed earthquake mitigation measures 74 times. Tsunamis are mentioned twice, both times in reference to a working group studying the issue. Furthermore Tokyo Electric's sea-wall defenses for the Dai-Ichi plant were built under the assumption that the coastline on which it sat wasn't prone to tsunamis higher than 5.5 meters, said Yoshimi Hitosugi, a Tokyo-based company spokesman.
As an historical precedent an 8-meter tsunami that hit Japan's northeast in the year 869 swept as far as four kilometers inland at Sendai Bay, stretching south toward the Dai-Ichi plant. "A repeat could occur soon," because sediment samples showed the tsunami had a pattern of recurring every 800 to 1,000 years, according to a 2001 report by a research team funded by the government's Science Ministry.
Minutes of a committee meeting held by the Trade Ministry to assess reactor safety on June 24, 2009, show that Yukinobu Okamura, who heads the government-funded Active Fault and Earthquake Research Center, asked Tokyo Electric why it hadn't taken on board evidence of the tsunami risk. "We didn't think the damage would be that significant," replied Isao Nishimura, a manager at Tokyo Electric's nuclear earthquake resistance technology center. When will we ever learn?
Update: ANEYOSHI, Japan -The April 20, 2011 New York Times writes:
"The stone tablet has stood on this forested hillside since before they were born, but the villagers have faithfully obeyed the stark warning carved on its weathered face: ‘Do not build your homes below this point!' Residents say this injunction from their ancestors kept their tiny village of 11 households safely out of reach of the deadly tsunami last month that wiped out hundreds of miles of Japanese coast and rose to record heights near here. The waves stopped just 300 feet below the stone, and the village beyond it."
Like most of the terrible events described in this article, this most recent one described above, was not at all improbable. In fact it was almost certain to occur, only its time of occurrence was uncertain. And a stone marker showed where one must never build. The take-home message is that greed and arrogance is the cause of most of our suffering -- both personal and institutional -- and will always get us in the end.
Bibliography
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Cook, Richard C., Challenger Revealed: An Insider's Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age, New York, Thunder
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Dörner, Dieetrich, The Logic of Failure: Recognizing and Avoiding Error in Complex Situations, (New York, Basic Books, 1996).
Gerstein, Marc, Flirting With Disaster: Why Accidents are Rarely Accidental, New York, Union Square Press, 2008).
Norbu, Chogyal Namkhai, The Crystal and the Way of Light: Sutra, Tantra and Dzogchen, (Ithaca, NY Snow Lion Press, 1999).
Perrow, Charles, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technology, Princeton (NJ, Princeton University Press, 1984).
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Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, (New York, Random House, 2010).
Russel Targ's Blog
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