the power of faith is what'll drive man back to the abiotic reservoirs...,

Video - Peak Oil myth scientifically disproved (there is no oil shortage)

In response to some viewer critiques, this updated video takes a purely scientific approach to the Peak Oil myth. It exposes the eco-zealot conspiracy to deny big-bore engines to working Americans and tax them into smaller cars and homes.

If the Peak Oil doomsayers aren't stopped, economic growth may end by 2024, halting Man's productive use of nature and putting millions out of work. Americans will be forced to live "sustainably" in cedar bark huts, eating "locally grown" rhubarbs and pine nuts. The whole hippie agenda seeks to take away our pride.

Help stop this creeping socialism by spreading the word about this educational video and demanding that Congress investigate abiotic oil. Never vote for RINO Roscoe Bartlett if he runs for President, and don't believe Barack Hussein Obama when he claims that America only has 2% of the world's oil. Think independently and The Truth will come to you.

pop music, social mood, markets...,

Video - Cee Lo Green hit single off The LadyKiller.

TheDeflationTimes | Although there's lots of upbeat music in the air now, we can assume that after this current bear market rally, we will hear angrier music on the airwaves as the market turns down. It might be a good time, then, to pay attention to what the markets were doing the last time punk rock blasted the airwaves. Here's an excerpt from "Popular Culture and the Stock Market," which is the first chapter of Prechter's Pioneering Studies in Socionomics.

The most extreme musical development of the mid-1970s was the emergence of punk rock. The lyrics of these bands' compositions, as pointed out by Tom Landess, associate editor of The Southern Partisan, resemble T.S. Eliot's classic poem "The Waste Land," which was written during the 'teens, when the last Cycle wave IV correction was in force (a time when the worldwide negative mood allowed the communists to take power in Russia). The attendant music was as anti-.musical. (i.e., non-melodic, relying on one or two chords and two or three melody notes, screaming vocals, no vocal harmony, dissonance and noise), as were Bartok's compositions from the 1930s.

It wasn't just that the performers of punk rock would suffer a heart attack if called upon to change chords or sing more than two notes on the musical scale, it was that they made it a point to be non-musical minimalists and to create ugliness, as artists. The early punk rockers from England and Canada conveyed an even more threatening image than did the heavy metal bands because they abandoned all the trappings of theatre and presented their message as reality, preaching violence and anarchy while brandishing swastikas.

Their names (Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, Nazi Dog, The Damned, The Viletones, etc.) and their song titles and lyrics ("Anarchy in the U.K.," "Auschwitz Jerk," "The Blitzkrieg Bop," "You say you've solved all our problems? You're the problem! You're the problem!" and "There's no future! no future! no future!") were reactionary lashings out at the stultifying welfare statism of England and their doom to life on the dole, similar to the Nazis backlash answer to a situation of unrest in 1920s and 1930s Germany.

Actually, of course, it didn't matter what conditions were attacked. The most negative mood since the 1930s (as implied by stock market action) required release, period. These bands took bad-natured sentiment to the same extreme that the pop groups of the mid-1960s had taken good-natured sentiment. The public at that time felt joy, benevolence, fearlessness and love, and they demanded it on the airwaves. The public in the late 1970s felt misery, anger, fear and hate, and they got exactly what they wanted to hear. (Luckily, the hate that punk rockers. reflected was not institutionalized, but then, this was only a Cycle wave low, not a Supercycle wave low as in 1932.)

In summary, an "I feel good and I love you" sentiment in music paralleled a bull market in stocks, while an amorphous, euphoric "Oh, wow, I feel great and I love everybody" sentiment (such as in the late '60s) was a major sell signal for mood and therefore for stocks. Conversely, an "I'm depressed and I hate you" sentiment in music reflected a bear market, while an amorphous tortured "Aargh! I'm in agony and I hate everybody" sentiment (such as in the late '70s) was a major buy signal.

what IS going on in bologna?

NyTeknik | In a detailed report, two Swedish physicists exclude chemical reactions as the energy source in the Italian ‘energy catalyzer’. The two physicists recently supervised a new test of the device in Bologna, Italy.
Swedish physicists on the E-cat: “It’s a nuclear reaction”

“In some way a new kind of physics is taking place. It’s enigmatic, but probably no new laws of nature are involved. We believe it is possible to explain the process with known laws of nature,” said Hanno Essén, associate professor of theoretical physics and a lecturer at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology and chairman member of the board (chairman until April 2) of the Swedish Skeptics Society.

Essén and Professor Emeritus at Uppsala University Sven Kullander, also chairman of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ Energy Committee, both participated on 29 March as observers at a new trial in Bologna of the so-called ‘energy catalyzer’, which could be based on cold fusion, or LENR, Low Energy Nuclear Reaction.

Participants included the inventor of the device, Andrea Rossi, his scientific advisor Professor Sergio Focardi, and physicists Dr. David Bianchini and Dr. Giuseppe Levi from Bologna University who both supervised the first public demonstration of the E-cat on 14 January 2011 in Bologna, Italy.

The new trial was conducted in much the same way as the trial in January, and lasted for nearly six hours. According to observations by Kullander and Essén, a total energy of about 25 kWh was generated.

In a detailed report (download here), they write:

“Any chemical process should be ruled out for producing 25 kWh from whatever is in a 50 cubic centimeter container. The only alternative explanation is that there is some kind of a nuclear process that gives rise to the measured energy production.”

The power output was estimated to about 4.4 kW. It’s barely half the power compared with the two previous documented experiments in January and February 2011, because the trial was made with a new and smaller version of the energy catalyzer.

The new trial was the first officially documented with the smaller version which, according to Rossi, is more stable.

“With the smaller version we avoid the power peaks that occurred at ignition and switching off,” Andrea Rossi told Ny Teknik.

He also stated that the smaller version will be used for the planned installation of about one megawatt for the pilot customer Defkalion Green Technologies in Greece.

According to Rossi, a total of 300 reactors connected in series and parallel, will be used in the installation. Originally 100 reactors of the version that delivered 10 kW of power during earlier trials, were supposedly planned for the one-megawatt installation. Rossi still expects the inauguration to take place in October 2011.

post-peak's integrally interwoven enthusiasms

(Biopunk - Fist tap Dale)

post-peak's indispensible necessities

Farmer Scrub | We've just completed one full year of weighing and recording everything we harvest from the yard. I've uploaded a snapshot of the one year harvest so it's archived even as I update the regular harvest log. We harvested on average each day two pounds of food, providing 675 calories. As far as our goal of self sufficiency is concerned, that means we could choose between feeding less than half of Tulsi (who requires 1500 calories per day) or barely feed one third of me (2000 per day).

I last blogged about the harvest log in September.

wood at the cemetary...,

Video - In the Heat of the Night "cool, cool, marble...,"

magical thinking at the pump

Video - "pastor" Marshall Mabry clowning on CNN

AJC | Members of a central Georgia church plan to gather at gas pumps to pray for lower prices.
Related

WMAZ-TV reports the Beacon of Light Christian Center is planning the Saturday prayer gathering at gas pumps outside a Kroger grocery store in Dublin.

Pastor Marshall Mabry said he believes that if church members come together and pray as a community, they can make something happen.

Mabry said that with prices reaching almost $4, he says he plans to ask God for help.

He said it's the third time members of his congregation have met at gas pumps to pray.

Mabry said he wants to start a movement which spreads from the small town of Dublin to the rest of the nation.

Dublin is about 130 miles southeast of Atlanta.

socionomics - liminal perspectives or clever marketing?

the u.s.-saudi libya deal

Video - Gaddafi blasts Saudi King Abdullah.

Asia Times | You invade Bahrain. We take out Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. This, in short, is the essence of a deal struck between the Barack Obama administration and the House of Saud. Two diplomatic sources at the United Nations independently confirmed that Washington, via Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, gave the go-ahead for Saudi Arabia to invade Bahrain and crush the pro-democracy movement in their neighbor in exchange for a "yes" vote by the Arab League for a no-fly zone over Libya - the main rationale that led to United Nations Security Council resolution 1973.

The revelation came from two different diplomats, a European and a member of the BRIC group, and was made separately to a US scholar and Asia Times Online. According to diplomatic protocol, their names cannot be disclosed. One of the diplomats said, "This is the reason why we could not support resolution 1973. We were arguing that Libya, Bahrain and Yemen were similar cases, and calling for a fact-finding mission. We maintain our official position that the resolution is not clear, and may be interpreted in a belligerent manner."

As Asia Times Online has reported, a full Arab League endorsement of a no-fly zone is a myth. Of the 22 full members, only 11 were present at the voting. Six of them were Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members, the US-supported club of Gulf kingdoms/sheikhdoms, of which Saudi Arabia is the top dog. Syria and Algeria were against it. Saudi Arabia only had to "seduce" three other members to get the vote.

Translation: only nine out of 22 members of the Arab League voted for the no-fly zone. The vote was essentially a House of Saud-led operation, with Arab League secretary general Amr Moussa keen to polish his CV with Washington with an eye to become the next Egyptian President.

Thus, in the beginning, there was the great 2011 Arab revolt. Then, inexorably, came the US-Saudi counter-revolution.

Profiteers rejoice
Humanitarian imperialists will spin en masse this is a "conspiracy", as they have been spinning the bombing of Libya prevented a hypothetical massacre in Benghazi. They will be defending the House of Saud - saying it acted to squash Iranian subversion in the Gulf; obviously R2P - "responsibility to protect" does not apply to people in Bahrain. They will be heavily promoting post-Gaddafi Libya as a new - oily - human rights Mecca, complete with US intelligence assets, black ops, special forces and dodgy contractors.

Whatever they say won't alter the facts on the ground - the graphic results of the US-Saudi dirty dancing. Asia Times Online has already reported on who profits from the foreign intervention in Libya (see There's no business like war business, March 30). Players include the Pentagon (via Africom), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Saudi Arabia, the Arab League's Moussa, and Qatar. Add to the list the al-Khalifa dynasty in Bahrain, assorted weapons contractors, and the usual neo-liberal suspects eager to privatize everything in sight in the new Libya - even the water. And we're not even talking about the Western vultures hovering over the Libyan oil and gas industry.

Exposed, above all, is the astonishing hypocrisy of the Obama administration, selling a crass geopolitical coup involving northern Africa and the Persian Gulf as a humanitarian operation. As for the fact of another US war on a Muslim nation, that's just a "kinetic military action".

There's been wide speculation in both the US and across the Middle East that considering the military stalemate - and short of the "coalition of the willing" bombing the Gaddafi family to oblivion - Washington, London and Paris might settle for the control of eastern Libya; a northern African version of an oil-rich Gulf Emirate. Gaddafi would be left with a starving North Korea-style Tripolitania.

But considering the latest high-value defections from the regime, plus the desired endgame ("Gaddafi must go", in President Obama's own words), Washington, London, Paris and Riyadh won't settle for nothing but the whole kebab. Including a strategic base for both Africom and NATO.

BRICS frown on western use of force in libya

Video - BRICS blast NATO bombings in Libya.

The Hindu | The world's five major emerging economies — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) — on Thursday drew up an action plan to make the voice of developing countries more effective on the world stage. This followed a concurrence of views on almost all issues of international importance, including political, economic, climate change, terrorism and reforms of the United Nations and international financial institutions.

The plan schedules a string of high-level meetings on almost all issues — security, political and economic — to enable the five countries better coordinate their positions. They would initiate the plan with a meeting of National Security Advisers later this year in China.

Besides strongly pushing for a more equitable world economic order, the five nations frowned on the use of force by the West in Libya and supported the return of peace and stability in West Asia-North Africa according to the “legitimate aspirations of their peoples.”

India, Brazil and South Africa drew comfort from Russia and China “endorsing” their candidature for the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in the Sanya Declaration though Indian officials later sounded a cautionary footnote. “Language-wise this is an advancement but this only indicates the trend. Maybe China and Russia feel that the three [IBSA] have more wind behind their sails now,” observed a senior official. In return, the four countries called for early inclusion of Russia in the World Trade Organisation.

Earlier, speaking at the plenary session, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and other leaders indicated the other areas besides economic and political where the BRICS countries should work together. With the Fukushima radioactivity leakage still on, Dr. Singh called for cooperation in nuclear safety besides disaster relief and management.

He explained why the BRICS economies occupied a strategic economic position — besides accounting for a significant of world's land mass and population, they unitedly stood for a rule-based world order (primacy for the U.N.) and respected each other's political systems (abstaining from pushing for alterations in a country's political structure).

At the same time, Dr. Singh clarified that this burgeoning cooperation, mainly on economic issues, was neither directed against nor at the expense of anyone. Indeed, as senior officials were to later explain, the G-20 was the primary forum for deciding on macro economic issues.

The principal logic for the BRICS grouping was connected to the desire among all the five countries to effect lasting and visible socio-economic changes. Cooperation among them would help build an external environment that would help them complement the task of nation building.

“To that extent I would say the best is yet to come,” Dr. Singh said.

While the BRICS is still a work-in-progress with intentions still at the declaratory stage, the grouping decided to tackle the problem of foreign exchange volatility by endorsing primacy for local currency in trading with each other.

At the restricted session, the five leaders decided to ask their central banks to work out the modalities that would be subject to respective national laws.

Chinese President Hu Jintao, who opened the deliberations, set the tone by urging a reform in global economic governance and increasing the say and representation of emerging economies in international financial institutions.

With much media speculation on a change in the basket of currencies forming the Special Drawing Rights, the possibility of Yuan as a world currency and the decision to trade in local currencies, officials were quick to point out that there was “no desire” to diminish the importance of the dollar. It was also decided that India would host the next BRICS summit next year.

the higher education bubble

Techcrunch | the bubble that has taken the place of housing is the higher education bubble. “A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed,” he says. “Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”

Like the housing bubble, the education bubble is about security and insurance against the future. Both whisper a seductive promise into the ears of worried Americans: Do this and you will be safe. The excesses of both were always excused by a core national belief that no matter what happens in the world, these were the best investments you could make. Housing prices would always go up, and you will always make more money if you are college educated.

Like any good bubble, this belief– while rooted in truth– gets pushed to unhealthy levels. Thiel talks about consumption masquerading as investment during the housing bubble, as people would take out speculative interest-only loans to get a bigger house with a pool and tell themselves they were being frugal and saving for retirement. Similarly, the idea that attending Harvard is all about learning? Yeah. No one pays a quarter of a million dollars just to read Chaucer. The implicit promise is that you work hard to get there, and then you are set for life. It can lead to an unhealthy sense of entitlement. “It’s what you’ve been told all your life, and it’s how schools rationalize a quarter of a million dollars in debt,” Thiel says.

Thiel isn’t totally alone in the first part of his education bubble assertion. It used to be a given that a college education was always worth the investment– even if you had to take out student loans to get one. But over the last year, as unemployment hovers around double digits, the cost of universities soars and kids graduate and move back home with their parents, the once-heretical question of whether education is worth the exorbitant price has started to be re-examined even by the most hard-core members of American intelligensia.

Making matters worse was a 2005 President George W. Bush decree that student loan debt is the one thing you can’t wriggle away from by declaring personal bankruptcy, says Thiel. “It’s actually worse than a bad mortgage,” he says. “You have to get rid of the future you wanted to pay off all the debt from the fancy school that was supposed to give you that future.”

But Thiel’s issues with education run even deeper. He thinks it’s fundamentally wrong for a society to pin people’s best hope for a better life on something that is by definition exclusionary. “If Harvard were really the best education, if it makes that much of a difference, why not franchise it so more people can attend? Why not create 100 Harvard affiliates?” he says. “It’s something about the scarcity and the status. In education your value depends on other people failing. Whenever Darwinism is invoked it’s usually a justification for doing something mean. It’s a way to ignore that people are falling through the cracks, because you pretend that if they could just go to Harvard, they’d be fine. Maybe that’s not true.”

And that ripples down to other private colleges and universities. At an event two weeks ago, I met Geoffrey Canada, one of the stars of the documentary “Waiting for Superman.” He talked about a college he advises that argued they couldn’t possible cut their fees for the simple reason that people would deem them to be less-prestigious. Fist tap Dale.

finnish educational excellence

Time | Spring may be just around the corner in this poor part of Helsinki known as the Deep East, but the ground is still mostly snow-covered and the air has a dry, cold bite. In a clearing outside the Kallahti Comprehensive School, a handful of 9-year-olds are sitting back to back, arranging sticks, pinecones, stones and berries into shapes on the frozen ground. The arrangers will then have to describe these shapes using geometric terms so the kids who can't see them can say what they are.

"It's a different way of conceptualizing math when you do it this way instead of using pen and paper, and it goes straight to the brain," says Veli-Matti Harjula, who teaches the same group of children straight through from third to sixth grade. Educators in Sweden, not Finland, came up with the concept of "outside math," but Harjula didn't have to get anybody's approval to borrow it. He can pretty much do whatever he wants, provided that his students meet the very general objectives of the core curriculum set by Finland's National Board of Education. For math, the latest national core curriculum runs just under 10 pages (up from 3½ pages for the previous core curriculum).

The Finns are as surprised as much as anyone else that they have recently emerged as the new rock stars of global education. It surprises them because they do as little measuring and testing as they can get away with. They just don't believe it does much good. They did, however, decide to participate in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). And to put it in a way that would make the noncompetitive Finns cringe, they kicked major butt. The Finns have participated in the global survey four times and have usually placed among the top three finishers in reading, math and science.

In the latest PISA survey, in 2009, Finland placed second in science literacy, third in mathematics and second in reading. The U.S. came in 15th in reading, close to the OECD average, which is where most of the U.S.'s results fell.

Finland's only real rivals are the Asian education powerhouses South Korea and Singapore, whose drill-heavy teaching methods often recall those of the old Soviet-bloc Olympic-medal programs. Indeed, a recent manifesto by Chinese-American mother Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, chides American parents for shrinking from the pitiless discipline she argues is necessary to turn out great students. Her book has led many to wonder whether the cure is worse than the disease.

Which is why delegations from the U.S. and the rest of the world are trooping to Helsinki, where world-class results are achieved to the strains of a reindeer lullaby. "In Asia, it's about long hours — long hours in school, long hours after school. In Finland, the school day is shorter than it is in the U.S. It's a more appealing model," says Andreas Schleicher, who directs the PISA program at the OECD.

There's less homework too. "An hour a day is good enough to be a successful student," says Katja Tuori, who is in charge of student counseling at Kallahti Comprehensive, which educates kids up to age 16. "These kids have a life." Fist tap Arnach.

an anti-college backlash?

The Atlantic | "Some Say Bypassing a Higher Education Is Smarter Than Paying for a Degree," reads a recent headline in The Washington Post. (The article, which addresses everything from higher education's outsize price tag to its questionable correlation with career success, garnered more than 4,000 Facebook recommendations on the Post's web site.) And just last month, the Harvard Graduate School of Education published a study suggesting that (gasp!) four-year college is perhaps not for everyone. Rather, for a growing proportion of students, the report contends, internships, apprenticeships, and vocational training would be far more beneficial.

Even for the academically inclined, the value of college in this economic climate is increasingly subject to question. "Is Going to an Elite College Worth The Cost?," asked New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg in December. He surveyed economic studies, perused labor reports, and interviewed economists and sociologists to ascertain whether there's really a significant payoff for choosing a swanky private college over someplace less glamorous. The answer? Inconclusive. Parents, of course, obsess over the Ivy League admissions game, carefully studying up on how to give their kids an edge. And U.S. News & World Report's annual college breakdown gets as much publicity these days as the Oscar nominations. But are those students fortunate enough to gain admission really getting an education worthy of the fuss? Reports of rampant grade inflation at many of these schools throws even a straight-A transcript from a prestigious university into question. (Some colleges, including Princeton, have taken to imposing limits on how many A's instructors can award in any course, while the University of North Carolina has resorted to including median class grades on students' transcripts so as to make it more readily apparent which A's were earned in easy courses.) And a new book by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids, makes the case that students at elite colleges are being left to fend for themselves while their impressively credentialed professors take constant sabbaticals and leave the actual teaching to inexperienced assistants.

Yet despite the mounting skepticism about the value of a college degree, and in the face of the economic downturn, colleges continue to demand ever higher fees, saddling graduates with crushing debt along with their diplomas. In June of last year the Federal Reserve released new figures showing that the nation's total student loan debt now sits at about $830 billion - for the first time surpassing the nation's credit card debt. Student loan debt, it should be noted, is in many respects less forgiving than credit card debt: "These loans typically can't be discharged in bankruptcy," explains the Wall Street Journal. "They have different repayment terms, some of which have heavy consequences for borrowers who miss payments." Some commentators have even suggested that the crimp the financial downturn is putting on students' ability to get loans may in fact be doing those students a favor. In a piece titled, "Huge Debt Incurred for College Tuition Just Doesn't Make the Grade," syndicated financial columnist Michelle Singletary writes, "I'll be honest. I think if college students and their parents have a harder time getting loans, that's a good thing. Perhaps now more people will stop and consider the long-term implications of taking on so much of this so-called good debt."

is college education worth the debt?

NPR | A college degree has long been considered a golden ticket to success in this country. But with the current economic recession, some question whether obtaining a college degree is worth going into debt. Boyce Watkins, a professor of finance at Syracuse University; author Richard Vedder, a professor of economics at Ohio University, discuss how many are rethinking their high hopes of a college education. The men are joined by Hunter Walker, a recently-enrolled graduate student at Columbia School of Journalism, who recently wrote about his educational debt worries on the tabloid Web site Gawker.com. Fist tap Dale.

of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%...,

Video - Joseph Stiglitz addresses the growing class divide taking place in the United States Part 1.


Video - Part 2. of Joseph Stiglitz interview.

Cafe Americain | The pigmen are going to be unrelenting in their attacks on the middle class and the poor. The attacks are threefold:

1. resisting financial and political reform which caused the crisis in the first place. Three years after the crisis and no major player has even been indicted, the bonus system is flourishing again, and politicians are taking many millions in funds from the bankers and wealthy elite to promote their agendas.

2. blaming the victims, and compelling them to take the greatest pain of the bailouts, and continuing bailouts and subsidies to the financial class through spending reallocations. The bailouts and spending on the military industrial complex are crowding out the public functions of government. There are even people trying to justify the theft of the Social Security Trust. Look, the funds are gone, we've taken them and given them to the banks! So no use crying over spilt milk, suck it up, and let's move on and take your cuts.

3. shifting the impulse to reform from financial reform to 'tax reform' that further supports the monied interests. Cut taxes for the wealthiest as your primary agenda using a variety of deceptive means like promoting a consumption tax, or a flat income tax but with offshore havens and loopholes, so the burden falls most heavily on those who spend the greatest percentage of their labor on subsistence, their basic needs.

Listen to what Stiglitz has to say, and think about it. He is not perfect, the documentary Inside Job was not perfect, but start thinking for yourselves, and stop taking the easy route of allowing others to think for you, and mouth their slogans. They are only too willing to tell you what to think, what is real even if your eyes say no, if you let them.

soldaten - soldiers accounts of rape, murder, and genocide

Spiegel | The public discourse about war is characterized by contempt for the bloody sides of the military profession, a contempt to which soldiers themselves conform when they are asked to describe their experiences. But there is also another view of war, one in which it is not only an endless nightmare, but also a great adventure that some soldiers later remember as the best time of their life.

In World War II, 18 million men, or more than 40 percent of the male population of the German Reich, served with Germany's military, the Wehrmacht, and the Waffen-SS. Hardly any other segment of time has been as carefully studied in academia as the six years that began with Germany's invasion of neighboring Poland in September 1939 and ended with the total capitulation of the German Reich in May 1945.

Even historians find it difficult to keep track of the literature on the deadliest conflict in human history. The monumental "Germany and the Second World War," which was completed three years ago by the Military History Research Institute in Potsdam near Berlin and is seen as the standard German work on the war, encompasses 10 volumes alone.

Every battle in this monstrous struggle for control over Europe has its fixed place in the historical narrative today, as does, of course, the horrible violence that left 60 million dead around the world, including the suffering of the civilian population, the murder of the Jews and the partisan war in the East.

Sugarcoating Reality
But how the soldiers experienced the war, how the constant presence of death and violence changed them, what they felt and feared, but also enjoyed -- all of this tends to be marginalized in historical accounts. History was long suspicious of the subjective view of the events it considers, preferring to stick to verifiable dates and facts.

But this also has to do with the incompleteness of sources. Military letters, reports by contemporary witnesses or memoirs provide a sugarcoated version of reality. The recipients of these personal accounts were the wives and families of soldiers or the broader public. Descriptions of the daily business of war, in which soldiers just happened to massacre the residents of a village or "brush" a few girls, as rape was called in the troops' jargon, had no place in these accounts.

It isn't just that the recipients' expectations stood in the way of soldiers providing truthful accounts of what had actually happened -- the time that had passed since the war also distorted the soldiers' views of their experiences. In other words, anyone who wants to obtain an accurate picture of how soldiers see a war must gain access to them and gain their trust as early as possible, so that they can speak openly without the fear of being called to account afterwards.

What already seems hardly feasible for current military operations like the war in Afghanistan is nearly impossible when it comes to an event that happened so long ago as World War II. Nevertheless, two German historians have managed to produce precisely such a documentary of perceptions of the war using live historical recordings.

In Their Own Words

The material that historian Sönke Neitzel uncovered in British and American archives is nothing short of sensational. While researching the submarine war in the Atlantic in 2001, he discovered the transcripts of covertly recorded conversations between German officers in which they talked about their wartime experiences with an unprecedented degree of openness. The deeper Neitzel dug into the archives, the more material he found. In the end, he and social psychologist Harald Welzer analyzed a total of 150,000 pages of source material. The result is a newly published book with the simple title of "Soldaten" ("Soldiers"), published by S. Fischer Verlag. The volume has the potential to change our view of the war.

The recordings, which were made using special equipment that the Allies used to secretly listen in on conversations between German prisoners of war in their cells starting in 1939, offer an inside view of World War II. In doing so, they destroy once and for the myth of a "clean" Wehrmacht.

In "Soldiers," which is subtitled "Transcripts of Fighting, Killing and Dying," the soldiers talk about their views of the enemy and their own leaders, discuss the details of combat missions and trade astonishingly detailed accounts of the atrocities they both witnessed and committed.

psychopathology, parasitism, totalitarianism

Video - A parasitic wasp has injected her eggs into a caterpillar -- and now they're ready to hatch.

ActivistPost | Perpetual Parasitism - There are other examples in nature of parasites with evolved dependency upon a specific host species. If the host species becomes extinct, so does the parasite. It is unable to survive with any other host.

Some species of parasites are termed species specific. This means that they can complete their life cycle in only one species of host. Should they enter the wrong species they are unable to complete their life cycle and die, all generally without the host requiring treatment. Source

It seems clear to me that the psychopath/society relationship is that of highly specialized parasite/host. That the psychopath operates externally to the host in no way disqualifies it as parasite. The common mosquito is without question parasitic, as are the tick, the leech, and many other bloodsuckers. I think this human/human arrangement is unique in at least one regard, however: I know of no other situation wherein the host and parasite are, apparently, of the same species.

The psychopath/parasite cannot survive without non-psychopathic humans to prey upon. It needs the support of other humans, as do we all, but is incapable of functioning as a cooperative member of the population. Nor can it survive on its own or within a group comprised only of psychopaths. Although often highly intelligent, they frequently lack any real abilities or skills, but rely instead on deceit, malicious cunning, and ruthless self-interest enhanced by a complete absence of conscience or remorse.

What’s nice about this explanation is that it not only explains why psychopaths exist, but also why we’re not all psychopaths. If there are few enough psychopaths in the population, then being a psychopath makes sense because you’ll mostly have winning confrontations with nice people. But if there are too many psychopaths, then the gains from taking advantage of nice people will be swamped by the losses from confronting other psychopaths. In equilibrium, you’ll get both psychos and nice folks, with each strategy generating approximately equal returns, and with the precise balance determined by the relative payoffs of different interactions. Source

The Matter Of Degree
At the extreme, the psychopath simply resorts to outright violence to satisfy its needs. These cases are by far in the minority however. They may be a separate variety, a sub-group, which is not completely parasitic in some instances. In any case, however horrible their acts may be, they are not nearly as deadly as those who function within the system of government and business disguised as “aggressive”, “ambitious” and “savvy” type-A go-getters.

There's currently a bull market in corporate psychopaths, according to psychologist Paul Babiak of HRBackOffice, an industrial-consulting firm in Hopewell Junction, N.Y. Organizations undergoing major changes, such as downsizing or mergers, provide a chaotic atmosphere that savvy psychopaths exploit", Babiak holds. "They cozy up to a firm's power brokers, manipulate coworkers, and intimidate underlings on their way up the corporate ladder, stealing everything possible along the way.

Not all psychopaths resort to violence, however. Highly intelligent people with psychopathic personalities find fertile, nonviolent opportunities in conning and manipulating others, in Porter's view. Source

The ratio of parasites to host must be kept quite small, or the entire host population might be wiped out leaving the parasites unable to survive. In the past, when the drain became too great, the host population has attempted to exterminate the parasite, hence the repeated cycle of bloody revolutions throughout history. Evidently, the effort at eliminating the parasitic infestation has never been fully successful.

Threatened with extinction, the psychopath displays great skill at hiding in plain sight. A psycho-camouflage of sorts is employed, allowing the parasite to mimic a sense of sorrow, dismay or other feelings not actually present in the psychopathic character. Some always manage to survive by temporarily blending with the host population.

The Disease Blames The Afflicted The most ironic aspect of this condition is that these life-draining parasites, riding on the body of humanity like great, bloated ticks, are the first to scream bloody murder should anyone among the host population require aid in a time of distress. They express indignation and outrage at any action, program or institution that can be seen as benefitting the general welfare. Such people, they insist, are freeloaders and moochers and such programs a drain on society. The hypocrisy is breathtaking. Part of the skill-set I suppose.

skeleton dance

Video - 1929 Disney Short

Kunstler | Like the dancing skeletons of film history, here come the elected office-holders of the US government cutting their capers in the graveyard of empire, giving the paying customer - er... citizens - a nice case of the Friday night heebie-jeebies in a mock battle over inanities. It made for a few hours of diverting theater, with an emphasis on diversion - since the whole gruesome melodrama of the US budget finally hinged on a ploy to de-fund the Planned Parenthood organization, one of the few useful endeavors left in this land of depravity, monster trucks, and microwaved cheese snacks.

I don't believe for a moment that the political right cares about the well-being of fetuses, anyway. The abortion issue is just a convenient cudgel to bash their political adversaries on the left. Karl Marx, a useful polemicist if a hinky guide in practical politics, had an apt term for what has become the ideology of the American right wing: "rural idiocy." It included all the familiar superstitions, phobias, obsessions, bugaboos, misconceptions, animosities, and sadistic impulses of simple country folk. Of course, today we'd have to update it as "suburban idiocy," because that is where the simple country folk of yesteryear have transpired to relocate, most traumatically in the Sunbelt, where today's car dealers, franchise moguls, and country clubbers, were only two generations ago digging chiggers out of their bare ankles after long days in the sharecrop furrows.

These folk believe all kinds of things that are not true, in fact lack the mental equipment for measuring the difference between what is true and not true and, having never known it, don't miss it. How else can you account for the burgeoning industry of "creation" museums all across Dixieland? These are the folks who, in the name of "liberty," want to regulate your sex life in accordance with the Southern Baptist Convention, the folks who want to start World War Three in order to promote the mythical "rapture," the folks who don't think twice about destroying the conditions that tend to support life on Planet Earth.

little iceland panics big banks

The Daily Bell | For those of us who believe that the world and especially the West is headed in the wrong direction with its endless emphasis on centralization and consolidation leading inevitably to a "one-world order," the saga of little Iceland versus the big banks is actually an inspiring tale. This little nation of 300,000 has twice now voted against accepting a nearly US$7 billion national debt – accrued by several reckless Icelandic financial institutions – that would make every citizen responsible for their banks' actions and the equally rash actions of the Dutch and British governments.

The problem is aptly summed up by a splendid little article in the Wall Street Journal (excerpted above) by Hannes H. Gissurarson out of Reykjavik, Iceland. He explains the evolution of the contretemps as follows:

How Icelandic taxpayers got stuck with this bailout bill is a strange saga. When the international financial crisis hit bottom in the fall of 2008, it became clear that the Icelandic Insurance Fund for Depositors could not cover all the liabilities of the foreign branches of the private Icelandic bank Landsbanki. In order to avoid a general run on their own banks, the British and the Dutch governments decided to reimburse depositors, for not only the principal, but also the interest due, in Landsbanki branches in their countries, up to a certain level.

These two governments then presented the bill to the Icelandic government: £3.5 billion. For the tiny Nordic nation of 320,000, this was an enormous sum, amounting to half of its annual GDP. It would be equivalent to a £700 billion claim on the British government. The Icelandic government protested that it was not responsible for deposits in private banks. It had fully complied with European law in setting up the Icelandic Insurance Fund for Depositors, financed by a levy on the banks.

If the fund could not meet its obligations, it was a problem for those who, at their own risk and for a quick profit, had entrusted their money to Landsbanki. But under threats from the British and the Dutch governments, supported by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, at the end of 2009 Iceland reluctantly signed a treaty according to which it had to pay the total sum, with stiff interest rates, to the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.

The import of the above unfairness is powerful for those who believe (as we do) that the 21st century is marked by a clash between the truth-telling of the Internet and the dominant social themes – the fear-based promotions – of the Anglo-American elite that seeks a One-World Order. The power elite, which has been attempting to create global government for nearly a century now, or perhaps longer, needs to project a certain inevitability. Iceland's two rejections of attempts to force its citizens to pay for the financial mistakes of others must be causing nausea in the City of London and upending the sense of inevitability that is so important to the wretched bullying that has become the trademark signature of the European Union.

why iceland voted NO!!!

Video - the people of Iceland voted in a referendum to not pay back the UK and Netherlands the money they lost in the Icelandic bank collapse.

NEP | The relevant EU directive states “that the cost of financing such schemes must be borne, in principle, by credit institutions themselves.” As priority claimants Britain and the Netherlands will indeed get the lion’s share of what is left from the Landsbanki corpse. That was not the issue before Iceland’s voters. They simply aimed at saving Iceland from an open-ended obligation to take the bank’s losses onto the public balance sheet without a clear plan of just how Iceland is to get the money to pay.

Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir warns that the vote may trigger “political and economic chaos.” But trying to pay also threatens this. The past year has seen the disastrous experience of Greece, Ireland and now Portugal in taking reckless private sector bank debts onto the public balance sheet. It is hard to expect any sovereign nation to impose a decade or more of deep depression on its economy inasmuch as international law permits every nation to act in its own vital interests.

Attempts by creditors to persuade nations to bail out their banks at public expense thus is ultimately an exercise in public relations. Icelanders have seen how successful Argentina has been since it imposed a crew haircut on its creditors. They also have seen the economic and political disruption in Ireland and Greece resulting from trying to pay beyond their means.

Creditors did not give accurate advice when they told Ireland that it could pay for its bank failures without plunging the economy into depression. Ireland’s experience stands as a warning to other countries about trusting overly optimistic forecasts by central bankers. In Iceland’s case, in November 2008 the IMF staff projected yearend-2009 gross external public and private debt at 160% of GDP – but observed that an exchange rate depreciation of 30% would push the ratio to 240% of GDP, which would be “clearly unsustainable.” But the most recent IMF staff report (January 14, 2011) shows end-2009 gross external debt at 308% of GDP, and estimates end-2010 gross external debt at 333% – even before taking the Icesave and other debts into account!

The main problem with Iceland’s obligation to Britain and the Netherlands is that foreign debt is not paid out of GDP. Apart from what is recovered from Landsbanki (now with the help of Britain’s Serious Fraud Office), the money must be paid in exports. But there has been no negotiation with Britain and Holland over just what Icelandic goods and services these countries would be willing to take in payment. Already in the 1920s, John Maynard Keynes pointed out that the Allied creditor nation had to take some responsibility just how Germany could pay its reparations, if not by exporting more to these countries. In practice, German cities borrowed in New York, turned the dollars over to the Reichsbank, which paid Britain and France, which paid the money back to the U.S. Government for their Inter-Ally Arms debts. In other words, Germany tried to “borrow its way out of debt.” It never works over time.