Dmitry Orlov is a Russian-American engineer and a writer on subjects related to "potential economic, ecological and political decline and collapse in the US," something he has called "permanent crisis".
liminal perspectives on consensus reality...,
By CNu at February 13, 2012 1 comments
Labels: The Hardline
By CNu at February 13, 2012 1 comments
Labels: self-sufficiency
By CNu at February 13, 2012 0 comments
Labels: weather report
By CNu at February 13, 2012 6 comments
Labels: Collapse Crime
By CNu at February 12, 2012 0 comments
Labels: The Great Game
By CNu at February 12, 2012 0 comments
Labels: The Great Game , WW-III
By CNu at February 12, 2012 0 comments
Labels: you used to be the man
By CNu at February 12, 2012 0 comments
Labels: propaganda , unspeakable
By CNu at February 12, 2012 0 comments
Labels: you used to be the man
By CNu at February 11, 2012 2 comments
By CNu at February 11, 2012 0 comments
Labels: WW-III
By CNu at February 11, 2012 0 comments
Labels: quorum sensing?
"This dishonest, self-serving individual behavior is a fractal of what is happening in our society at large: dishonest and self-serving people are extending and pretending, and their complicity keeps the system going."
The untouchables in India are told that they deserve to be treated as outcasts because of their karma from bad deeds done in a previous life. Of course, in reality, they are no more or less deserving than any other human being of a good life but as long as they believe that they deserve their station in life they are less likely to agitate for changes that will impact the wealth of the ruling class.
In the US we're told that an all-powerful, all-seeing, perfectly impartial free market gives everyone the wealth they deserve due to their own efforts. So if you're poor it's because you deserve to be poor and if I'm rich it's because I deserve to be rich. So you're more likely to accept your place in the Status Quo than if you believed that the division of wealth was more a function of an individual's political power and ability to participate in various crony-capitalist schemes.
In all cases a social control myth is an idea designed to affect the behavior of the people who believe it to the benefit of the people who are promulgating that idea.
I had a devil of a time understanding economics until I understood that 95% of what gets said in the name of economics is a social control myth rather than science. Economics is actually pretty straightforward to understand once you strip out all the propaganda, self-serving rationalizations, wish-fulfillment and outright misinformation that passes for analysis these days.
By CNu at February 10, 2012 5 comments
Labels: common sense , truth
Here's your homework. Think about the swarming tech you see above in the context of the following:
By CNu at February 10, 2012 24 comments
Labels: co-evolution , cull-tech
By CNu at February 10, 2012 2 comments
Labels: Living Memory , What Now?
By CNu at February 10, 2012 0 comments
Labels: Collapse Casualties
By CNu at February 09, 2012 11 comments
Labels: Collapse Casualties , magical thinking
If you don’t read about economics much, you might not know what the Baltic Dry Index actually is.
Investopedia defines the Baltic Dry Index this way….
A shipping and trade index created by the London-based Baltic Exchange that measures changes in the cost to transport raw materials such as metals, grains and fossil fuels by sea.
When the global economy is booming, the demand for shipping tends to go up. When the global economy is slowing down, the demand for shipping tends to decline.
And right now, global shipping is slowing way, way down.
In fact, recently there have been reports of negative shipping rates.
According to a recent Bloomberg article, one company recently booked a ship at the ridiculous rate of negative $2,000 a day….
Glencore International Plc paid nothing to hire a dry-bulk ship with the vessel’s operator paying $2,000 a day of the trader’s fuel costs after freight rates plunged to all-time lows.
Glencore chartered the vessel, operated by Global Maritime Investments Ltd., a Cyprus-based company with offices in London, Steve Rodley, GMI’s U.K. managing director, said by phone today. The daily payments last the first 60 days of the charter, Rodley said. The vessel will haul a cargo of grains to Europe, putting the carrier in a better position for its next shipment, he said.
So why would anyone agree to ship goods at negative rates?
Well, it beats the alternative.
This was explained in a recent Fox Business article….
“They’re doing this because you can’t just have ships sitting. If they sit too long, then that’s hard on the ships. They have to keep them loaded and moving from port to port,” said Darin Newsom, senior commodities analyst at DTN.
If the owner of a ship can get someone to at least pay for part of the fuel and the journey will get the ship closer to its next destination, then that is better than having the ship just sit there.
But just a few short years ago (before the last recession) negative shipping rates would have been unthinkable.
Asian shipping is really slowing down as well. The following comes from a recent article in the Telegraph….
Shanghai shipping volumes contracted sharply in January as Europe’s debt crisis curbed demand for Asian goods, stoking fresh doubts about the strength of the Chinese economy.
Container traffic through the Port of Shanghai in January fell by more than a million tons from a year earlier.
So this is something we are seeing all over the globe.
Another indicator that is troubling economists right now is petroleum usage. It turns out that petroleum usage is really starting to slow down as well.
By CNu at February 09, 2012 1 comments
Labels: reality casualties
By CNu at February 09, 2012 3 comments
Labels: $4.00 Gas Club
LATimes | University administrators canceled classes at UCLA on Wednesday, hours after violence broke out at a pro-Palestinian encampment...