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Really your post is really very good and I appreciate it. It’s hard to sort the good from the bad sometimes, but I think you’ve nailed it. You write very well which is amazing. I really impressed by your post.
green jade
ABSO-LUCKIN-FLUTELY
Human kind may live on past the next few generations but civilization as we know it is aready doomed. What is it now? 7 Billion and counting. Is there anybody out there that can honestly say this is a sustainable level? If were not at peak oil now we will be in a few years. As soon as oil starts to climb, I mean really climb like to $250.00 to $400.00 per barrel we will see a mass extinction on this planet.
The simple fact is that man today uses 600 times more energy than coloinal man. Every bit of this energy comes from oil. When the oil goes so does our life style. In pre colonial times there was 9 farmers to 1 tradesman. Now theres 1 farmer for every 10,000 people. What happens when disel is $30.00 per gallon and your tomatoes cost $12.00 a pound and hambuger is $35.00 a pound???
Without the easy energy most people wont survive. All that will be left is the native tribes that live in harmony with nature and the farmer survivalists.
I asked a survivalist friend what he had stocked up. He told me food and water for a year. Then he asked me what I had. I replied a lot of guns.
That/daveGuy asks "Was there ever a time that we, collectively, gave a rat's ass about future generations and the overall health of the planet?"
He's right -We never had to before. Somewhere in the last 5,000 years, we went from being another hanger-on, to an epidemic, to a pandemic. When a disease takes over its host, we don't see anything that might resemble conscience. But then who else ever took over everything?
There are 2 potential limits - conscience and nature. One of them will not be pretty,
I think the question may be, can we learn to cooperate on a large enough scale before it's too late?
Global Warming may get us... - But if we don't change course soon, the inertia of the ecological and social degradation we're immersed in will destroy everything that's worth living for anyway.
What amazes and drives me, is that as a species we have sent spacecrafts beyond the orbits of the solar system. In a split second we can zip electro-magnetic signals around the Earth to hand held audio / video transceivers. We have achieved, and are capable of, countless and amazing technological feats; Yet we cannot reevaluate Economic Philosophy... ?
- This is freakin insane... - Greed and ignorance are consuming our potential right before our eyes, and we appear nearly powerless to stop it. - Still, I believe that Regenerative Economics (A conservation-based economy) is totally plausible if we can somehow ignore all the two-sided absurdity of politics, and attempt cooperative problem solving discussions till we get a handful of billionaires to consider a new game. - We all pretty much know this Monopoly game is over...
Personally, I don't begrudge the winners their billions. Maybe we just need a few more Buffets and Turners to help engage a new discussion? - A laissez faire, greed and consumption-based economy has an absolutely Zero Viable Future at a time of 7 billion people and the associated resource needs, depletion and pollution. Period. - Is there anybody who is willing to look at the global picture who would really deny that??
"A modern economy may be largely an illusion we've bought into. A better illusion is certainly conceivable. It's up to us whether it's possible or not..."
It's hard for any of us to break free of 'This Economy' to where we can show working models of a conservation-mitigation economy, and then scale it up. - 'The Economy', itself, is the barrier to a functional definition of "Economics", and to alternative approaches. - It will probably require subsidies, of a sort, to prove that we can involve, inspire and employ many more people in an economy that is purposed towards the regeneration of the soil, the water and the maintenance of the habitable earth environment.
It's nobody's fault and it's everybody's fault. It's nobody's responsibility and it's everybody's responsibility. And nobody's perfect.. God help us to help each other. The miracles we've been fortunate enough to bear witness to deserve our best effort to see if intelligence is possible on a large scale .. or something like that. ? Regenerate... (apologies for the length..) Regenerate..
The Citizens United v the Federal Election Commission Supreme Court decision of 2010 took away restrictions on and regulations of spending on political and defined money as speech. That is, the freedom to spend money on political ads was equated with freedom of speech. Oligarchic capitalists, the obeisant and uncritical and sophistic libertarians accepted the definition.
Anybody who thinks money is speech believes that people with more money have more a right to be heard than those with less. They apparently believe that "money is truth". If "the solution to bad speech is more speech" - which I believe is true - then if you don't have enough money for "more speech" to counter "bad speech" then the bad speech or fraudulent, false speech prevails.
This is a particarly odious part of capitalism where apparently someone can buy truth. As is said in geopolitics, "truth belongs to the one with the power". In our capitalist and campaign finance system "truth belongs to the one with the money". We live in a situation where anyone with enough money can "buy the truth".
The ideas that no one is ever deceived by bad speech or false campaigning or that those who are fooled - and so, the rest of us - deserve a terrible society because they were gullible or innocent enough to be decieved (and both cannot be simultaneously true, by the way) are absurd on their faces. If the first were true then no one would spend more than the cost of initial basic public information on a political campaign - if that were even necessary since noone could ever be decieved. The second, of course, is just an avoidance of responsibility for what happens in one's own society.
Libertarianism, therefore, is just a slippery evasion of responsibility to one's community.`
There is a reason the money hounds are building under-ground condo's. Complete with swimming pools, hair dressers,spa's, food(MRE'S) medical rooms.etc. There is a reason the governments are building storage facilities with "air loom seeds" and plants etc.
But can they survive each other? Can they survive the radiation while their breathing air is filtered? Can they survive the big one?
How long before the first fight breaks out over who is richer, and the richer one deserves the better view of the inside of the mountain wall? Or the rich woman that dropped her 2 million dollar ear ring and another 2.5 million dollar man finds it and makes an effort to return it personally.( " " )
Or the water is rationed, the squid runs out, TSD medication is low, the gold run out to fill their teeth.Will they crawl out then and wonder, "What have we done?"
Of course in thier minds, their breeding will bring a superior race. I wonder who will rake their yards then?
This is the most intelligent comment I've read on the Internet in a while!
Thank you!
We should be asking ourselves: is global warming our chicxulub? Are we on a final approach with disaster as helpless as the dinosaurs of eons past. Helpless because we are easily pursuaded to believe that lie that everything is going to be alright no matter what we do.
I think we may soon learn the exclusive lesson of the universe- that being causality.
We might be able to turn it around if we are willing to spend on CO2 sequestering technology and move away from fossil fuel based economy.
Germans and other Europeans are headed in the right direction. US? not so much.
BTW, how many of you are doing something about it? Are you all talk and still drive megaSUVs or play soldier and drive a fauxHumvees H2s, H3s and others like it. And do you still want to eat porter house steak? Those things are contributing to global warming. yes even the porterhouse steak.
And are you recycling as much as you can?
Have you thrown away batteries of all kind in regular trash? Those with mercury, NiCd, NiMH, or Li ion batteries? Are you sure you didn't? What about those old cell phones and other hand held eletronics like iPAD. If you did, you did contribute to the problem.
Loggers of Hideous Obama puppet and Hillary’s Environmental Horror Dilma Rousseff puts Brazilian Amazon indigenous people at risk of extinction along with everything else.
All for Obama’s oligarchs and their 1% owners and executives.
I have nothing but abject Disgust for the duplicity Obama achieves in his foreign dealings…for instance his actions toward Greece!
http://news.yahoo.com/development-push-puts-brazils-indigenous-risk-160647236.html
"Warmest U.S. spring on record: NOAA"
http://news.yahoo.com/warmest-u-spring-record-noaa-204427303.html
One note to clarify Thom's post: The NOAA records are strictly for the continental United States. Warmest spring in the US, not globally. So far, anyway.
We have become the modern day version of the Easter Islanders who cut down every tree on the island to move their huge statues. We should ask one of them how that worked out for their people. Oh that's right, their aren't any of them left to answer.
I hear ya. We're headed for - no joke - the Cayman Islands. Not for any tax privileges, but because (a) my wife's health seems to be the best there, and (b) being part of the British Commonwealth, they have a top-notch climate change plan. Unlike a certain behemoth world-leading economic "powerhouse" I once knew...
There was a time when I thought the human drive for self-preservation would ultimately cause us to come to our senses in time to prevent self-extinction but no more. I can see the last human staring into a smart phone as they go bye-bye. This pervasive belief that if we can just rich enough to buy some kind of immunity from all this will be our undoing.
I came to the conclusion a couple of years ago after learning that the permafrost in the arctic, holding thousands of years worth of undecomposed stuff, was thawing that we had probably already gone into a positive feedback loop where the methane and co2 from the decomposition of those frozen plants and animals would complete what fossil fuels had started. In fact, I think in order to prevent that global warming feedback loop, we probably would have had to eliminate fossil fuels before 1980 or so because of the longevity of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere.
Sadly, I personally know climate scientists who agree with me.
We're going to have to stop using fossil fuels quickly, and figure out how we're going to get ourselves out of this mess we've created, or extinction of the human race is a real possibility.
I am turning 60 this year in September. I never thought that the human race would destroy itself for love of money, this "In God We Trust" lie (first printed upon our paper money in 1957) that remains as ash from the burned out American Dream. I never conceived that I would become this cynical in my life. Yet, while I am discouraged by our ignorance and how we have allowed ourselves to accept the lie as the truth, to be completely distracted by the ruse, to care only about ourselves, I am still an optimist. Not for our human race, but for the salvation of the cosmos. Our grand experiment is nearing the final chapters. What we write as our history is a sham. In 1968 when I was 15, one helluva year, I wrote, "Put being human back into Human Being." I looked around my life then, on Viet Nam, on American Politics, on World Affairs and I look around today on Afghanistan, Iraq, 9/11 and Syria and I see we have not improved one iota. In fact, we have fallen so far from our potential for love that it is becoming difficult to continue actively participating in citizenship. I am sad to agree with you, gramma blanche, in your assessment of our humanity. Without some complete rise in collective consciousness, our time is past. Everything is temporary, but all of it can be so much better than it is. When I take my final breath, I still hold optimism that we can make it better than we have allowed it to become, by simply waking up to the facts and the truth, not fall in front of this design for destruction.
In he long term, human extinction is certain - most likely from (1)starvation (2) disease (3) wars. In the short term, unfortunately, only the 1% will survive - Why? While they are the key to changing anything, that is, they must be on board for any meaningful change to happen, they are also those who can afford to, and will, put off any global attempts at solution. They will eat while we starve. They will avoid disease while we rot. They will watch from afar as their wars kill millions.
And this is my most optimistic prediction.
Time to invoke the XIV Amendment, Sec. 2:
But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
I've seen the steady and rapid destruction of the world's coral reefs 1st hand. I watched what happened in WI, and with Prop 29 (Big Tobacco $48MM Influence) in CA.
This goose is cooked and tactically has been since Citizens United. On MSNBC (& elsewhere) there is a steady stream of commercials about the social virtues of Exxon/Mobil and Chevron so that you can feel good about it. Don't hear much about that hypocracy, but they learned from WI and Tobacco, and that's how business is done in the United Syndicate of Affluence.
I missed the part of the show, explaining what the closed-door meeting was about. Can anyone bring me up to speed?
Plus new diseases cropping and old ones reappearing, not only affecting humans but other species as well. If the bees go... we go.
The problem is, there will never be a " golden age " with the attitude that the money magnates have in the here and now. It is an innate characteristic of mankind to push a good thing to the brink of extinction, and then try to figure out a last minute bandaid to hold things together while they try to do what they should have been doing all along. Unfortunately, money makes the world go around, and as long as there is a nickle to be drained out of our planet, they will do so. Ironically, maybe it will be money that makes the world STOP going around.
Republican Treason, Yes!
If the meeting Thom has been reporting is not some fabrication and can be verified by other sources, it is my hope that unlike President Johnson, who did not expose Nixon's treasonous meetings with North Vietnam, President Obama will have these traitors arrested and prosecuted. Too many times the politicians think doing nothing regarding law breaking is better for the country than prosecuting, unless you are Republican and a BJ is of national security.
We are looking at the collapse of human civilization probably within the lifetimes of our grandchildren. The species will survive...but that's about it. It doesn't need to be this way - we COULD turn it around. But we would have to do so within about 4 years. That is obviously not going to happen. And so...yes, we're pretty much toast.