clown fest

theoildrum | We evolved to favor the ‘in group’ over the ‘out group’, for resource, defensive, and ultimately reproductive advantages. The internet has spawned millions of ‘in-groups’ – peak oilers, tea-party evangelizers, deflationistas, gold-bugs, Austrian economics followers, anti-abortion activists, and myriad less controversial groups such as ‘Claremount High School Boosters", "Kerr Jar Enthusiasts", “Earthworm Snack Creators” and the like. People gravitate towards groups they identify with. And they usually stay there. (After all, a room full of clowns feels a lot less clown-like).

Achieving status is a primary driver in the biological kingdom and remains a key driver in our human social groups. But today, for the first time in our species history, the same ‘feelings’ we get from moving up in a real life social hierarchy can be attained cheaply and easily online. Being the most vocal, most persuasive or most interesting in a small group of dedicated/interested followers engenders the same neural reward as being the head of a small business, or a Mayor, or a high school basketball star. Our brains don’t really know that being the head of the “Morel Foraging Society” or “Nudists for Nader 2012” with several hundred members online is different than being County Treasurer in real life – we receive respect, positive feedback, deference etc. from the people in our ‘in-group’ (the fact they might be just anonymous mushroom pickers or passionate nude people is not relevant to our brains).

Human ethologists liken this phenomenon to 'dispersal phenotype' prevalent in nature:

Dispersal is important in biology. Often a species will produce two forms:
1) a maintenance phenotype (the outcome of genes and the structures they produce interacting with a specific environment) that is adapted to the environment in which it is born, and (2) a dispersal phenotype that is programmed to move to a new area and that often has the capacity to adapt to a new environment.

According to the present theory, humans have developed two dispersal phenotypes in the forms of the prophet and the follower. The coordinated action of these two phenotypes would serve to disperse us over the available habitat. This dispersal must have been aided by the major climatic changes over the past few million years in which vast areas of potential human habitat have repeatedly become available because of melting of ice sheets.

The dispersal phenotypes might have evolved through selection at the individual level, since the reproductive advantage of colonizing a new habitat would have been enormous. They would also promote selection between groups. Factors that promote selection at the group level are rapid splitting of groups, small size of daughter groups, heterogeneity (differences) of culture between groups, and reduction in gene flow between groups. These factors are all promoted by the breaking away of prophet-led groups with new belief systems.

Cult followers have been studied and found to be high on schizotypal traits, such as abnormal experiences and beliefs. They have not yet been tested for the sort of selfish attitudes and behavior that characterize free-riders. If a large cohort of people were tested for some measure of selfishness, it is predicted that those who subsequently joined cults would be low on such a measure. Predictions could also be made about future cult leaders. They would be likely to be ambitious males who were not at the top of the social hierarchy of their original group. If part of why human groups split in general is to give more reproductive opportunities to males in the new group, it can also be predicted that leaders of new religious movements would be males of reproductive age. Female cult leaders are not likely to be more fertile as a result of having many sexual partners, but their sons might be in an advantageous position for increased reproduction.

From THE BIOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BEHAVIOR, Edited by Jay R. Feierman (bold added my me)
[pp. 184-186] DISPERSAL

Most people are both reasonable, and passive. Some people are either unreasonable or assertive (or both). In a free form forum one unreasonable or assertive person will drown out 10 or more who are either reasonable or passive. Especially for those whose assertion or unreasonableness in real life leads to fewer social opportunities, the internet has been a godsend. Either anonymous or in their own name, they can easily accumulate a following by articulating what people already believe or like to hear. Given the self-selected audience, there doesn’t exist the normal social checks and balances. As such, due to the myriad different categories, those assertive and/or social acceptance seeking souls who find their niches online dig in hard and ‘feel’ as if they are true celebrities. Combine that with the iterations and scale that come from long time periods, little or no barriers to entry and an apathy/lack of interest from those not spending time on the internet and these folks have become ensconced at all sorts of cyber guideposts on topics that cover the map. Dispersal phenotypes.

Basically, since people believe in authority figures, and nominate their own authority figures based on their own belief systems, it is no wonder that time and numbers has by circa 2010 amassed an internet army of 'clowns'. We see increasingly hysterical caricatures emerge on the internet/media that undergo some perceived status/ego boost that they wouldn't/couldn't have gotten in normal situations. The feedback from the true believers (of whatever tribe they communicate to), then locks these personalities into an utterly confident belief in their own position as an expert, and their actions become considerably (and understandably) clownlike over time to people not in their sub-group, especially magnified in those cases of borderline mental illness (which I suspect are not few). I notice this dynamic in numerous areas of discourse but its particularly prevalent in the the peak oil, finance and climate change circles where I have spent alot of time.

$84,000 means that's-era, that's-era, that's ALL folks!!!

pbs |  Walter Bianco has had hepatitis-C for 40 years, and his time is running out.

“The liver is at the stage next to becoming cirrhotic,” the 65-year-old Arizona contractor says. Cirrhosis is severe scarring, whether from alcoholism or a chronic viral infection. It’s a fateful step closer to liver failure or liver cancer.

If he develops one of these complications, the only possible solution would be a hard-to-get liver transplant. “The alternative,” Bianco says, “is death.”

Previous drug treatments didn’t clear the virus from Bianco’s system. But it’s almost certain that potent new drugs for hep-C could cure him.

However, the private insurer that handles his medication coverage for the federal Medicare program has twice refused to pay for the drugs his doctor has prescribed.

Doctors are seeing more and more patients approaching the end-stage of hep-C infection. “There isn’t day that goes by when I don’t have a story very similar to Mr. Bianco’s,” says Dr. Hugo Vargas of Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, AZ, his liver specialist.

Researchers estimate that 3 to 5 million Americans carry the insidious hep-C virus. The biggest concentration is among those born between 1945 and 1965.

Many, like Bianco, got hep-C from injecting street drugs in their youth. He says he’s been drug- and alcohol-free for 32 years, but the infection was permanent.

Other baby boomers got the virus from transfusions before 1992, a period when blood wasn’t screened. Some got it from sharing razors or toothbrushes, or from contaminated tattoo needles or hospital equipment. For some, transmission was sexual, although fortunately this isn’t the highest-risk route.

The timing of these infections spells trouble for Medicare, which insures Americans over 65.

our way of life IS our polity and our way of life is non-negotiable...,

newscientist | We predict that blackouts will occur with greater frequency and greater severity due to trends in both electricity supply and demand. Supply will become increasingly precarious because of the depletion of fossil fuels, neglected infrastructure and the shift toward less reliable renewable energy. Demand, meanwhile, will grow because of rising populations and affluence.

Resource depletion is already having an effect on countries that rely on fossil fuels such as coal for electricity generation. Countries with significant renewable resources are not immune either. Weather is not predictable and is likely to become less so, courtesy of climate change: in the past decade shortages of rain for hydro dams has led to blackouts in Kenya, India, Tanzania and Venezuela.

Deregulation and privatisation have created further weaknesses in supply as there is no incentive to maintain or improve the grid. Almost three-quarters of US transmission lines and power transformers are more than 25 years old and the average age of power plants there is 30 years.

The looming threat of blackouts cannot be solely blamed on vulnerabilities in generation, however. Overconsumption is also a factor. Between 1940 and 2001, average US household electricity use rose 1300 per cent, driven largely by growing demand for air conditioning. And such demand is forecast to grow by 22 per cent in the next two decades.

Demand for aircon is also growing elsewhere. In China, ownership tripled in the decade since 1997 and aircon units already account for 20 per cent of the country's electricity consumption. A similar pattern is seen in India. Global warming will only add to demand.

Another future driver of demand is likely to be electric vehicles. The World Bank forecasts that these could total 10 per cent of all new vehicle sales by 2020, requiring a 15 to 40 per cent increase in electricity demand.

Overall, between 2008 and 2035, demand for electricity is expected to grow by 80 per cent across the world. No one knows how this will be generated.

These converging trends are already impacting the system's integrity. In the US, blackouts increased across all three five-year periods between 1995 and 2009. A report written for the Executive Office of the President concedes that the incidence of major blackouts is increasing.

It is worth reiterating what is at stake here. We analysed almost 50 significant power-outages across 26 countries. They had numerous causes, from technical failure to sabotage. Nonetheless, the same set of problems emerged.

Blackouts affect computers, microprocessors, pumps, fridges, traffic and street lights, security systems, trains and cellphone towers, with consequences across society. The economic losses can be enormous: power outages are already estimated to cost up to $180 billion a year in the US.

As the world becomes more reliant on digital technology, where interruptions of as little as one-sixtieth of a second can crash servers and computers, the negative effects will only multiply.

look at my gun!

salon |  Imagine you’re sitting in a restaurant and a loud group of armed men come through the door. They are ostentatiously displaying their weapons, making sure that everyone notices them. Would you feel safe or would you feel in danger? Would you feel comfortable confronting them? If you owned the restaurant could you ask them to leave? These are questions that are facing more and more Americans in their everyday lives as “open carry” enthusiasts descend on public places ostensibly for the sole purpose of exercising their constitutional right to do it. It just makes them feel good, apparently.  

For instance, in the wake of the new Georgia law that pretty much makes it legal to carry deadly weapons at all times in all places, parents were alarmed when an armed man showed up at the park where their kids were playing little league baseball and waved his gun around shouting, “Look at my gun!” and “There’s nothing you can do about it.” The police were called and when they arrived they found the man had broken no laws and was perfectly within his rights to do what he did. That was small consolation to the parents, however. Common sense tells anyone that a man waving a gun around in public is dangerous so the parents had no choice but to leave the park.  Freedom for the man with the gun trumps freedom for the parents of kids who feel endangered by him. 

After the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre, open carry advocates decided it was a good idea to descend upon Starbucks stores around the country, even in  Newtown where a couple dozen armed demonstrators showed up, to make their political point. There were no incidents.  Why would there be? When an armed citizen decides to exercise his right to bear arms, it would be reckless to exercise your right to free speech if you disagreed with them. But it did cause the CEO of Starbucks to ask very politely if these gun proliferation supporters would kindly not use his stores as the site of their future “statements.” He didn’t ban them from the practice, however. His reason? He didn’t want to put his employees in the position of having to confront armed customers to tell them to leave. Sure, Starbucks might have the “right” to ban guns on private property in theory, but in practice no boss can tell his workers that they must try to evict someone who is carrying a deadly weapon. 

unprofitable food-powered make-work

pbs |  Editor’s Note: If you’re reading this at work, you’re probably not all that busy. Don’t you ever wish you could just fit your “work” into fewer hours, then go home to do your own thing instead of being paid to look busy all day?

John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that technological advancement would make that possible by the turn of the century. He foresaw a 15-hour workweek. Instead, Americans are now working more and more hours. But what are they actually doing, asks American anthropologist David Graeber? “It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working,” Graeber wrote in a summer 2013 essay in Strike Magazine that we’ll call “BS Jobs.”

For one thing, he writes, we’ve created entirely new jobs to accommodate the workaday world. Administrators (think telemarketing and financial services) and the growing number of human resources and public relations professionals can’t pick up their own pizzas or walk their dogs. That’s why, Graeber says, we have all-night pizza delivery men and dog-walkers.

Graeber’s (rather rank) vision of hell captures the cycle of meaningless work he’s criticizing:

Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. [...]There’s only a very limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there’s endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it’s all that anyone really does.

Graeber is a professor at the London School of Economics. So isn’t that a classic example of frying fish (i.e., meaningless work)? He welcomes that question, but quickly dismisses it, saying he wouldn’t dare tell anyone who truly believes in their work that it’s not meaningful. It’s those workers who are already cognizant of the futility of their day that he’s after — like his friend, the poet-musician-turned-corporate lawyer, whom he told us about in his previous Making Sen$e post on the guaranteed basic income. Those are his fish-fryers, resenting the cabinet-makers for doing “real” work.

Paul Solman interviewed Graeber for our broadcast segment on the basic income (watch below). That conversation led to a discussion of Graeber’s theory that many jobs shouldn’t exist.

when a child or a woman is taken captive, they become a slave by the fact of capture

centerforsecuritypolicy |  The tragic story of hundreds of young girls captured by the Islamic terror group and Nigerian insurgency Boko Haram has caught much national attention, along with a twitter campaign Hashtag #BringOurWomenBack. But not much attention has been paid to Boko Haram’s stated ideology. In a ForeignPolicy.com column subtitled, “Why women are the ‘spoils of war’ in Nigeria and around the world — and nobody cares,” writer Lauren Wolfe generalizes,  “Girls are the low-hanging fruit of the biblically proportioned anger at Eve.” 

Yet even while sermonizing regarding the lack of seriousness with which the world deals with sexual slavery and violence against women, Wolfe fails to give the situation the seriousness it deserves by examining why Boko Haram does what it does, the Sharia, Islamic law. 

Wolfe points out that Boko Haram means “Western Education is Forbidden”, without ever enlightening Foreign Policy’s readers that they mean “forbidden by Islamic law”.  And despite claims by organizations like The Islamic Society of North America, and Egypt’s Al Azhar university, there’s ample evidence to suggest that Boko Haram’s understanding of what is and is not forbidden under Islamic law is accurate. 

In ‘The Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law’ by Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri (d. 1368) and published in English translation by Nuh Ha Mim Keller in 1994 under the section, “The Rules of Warfare”:

“O.913 When a child or a woman is taken captive, they become slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman’s previous marriage is immediately annulled.” 

The implication of the marriage annulment is that the women are now available as sexual slaves or wives. 

Not that ISNA and Al-Azhar should be surprised by this.  The ISNA-affiliated Fiqh Council of North America approved Reliance with then President Taha Jabir al ‘Alwani calling it an “eminent work of Islamic jurisprudence.” The Al-Azhar Islamic Research Academy certified that the manual, “conforms to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni school (ahl al-Sunna wa al-Jama’a).”

Nor is Reliance’s interpretation alone in understanding Islamic law to permit sexual slavery. As Ibn Kathir (d.1373) in his highly regarded Tafsir (exegeses) of the Koran, explains, the source of this understanding is Quran Sura 4:25: 

“Also (forbidden are) women already married, except those whom your right hands possess.) The Ayah means, you are prohibited from marrying women who are already married, (except those whom your right hands possess) except those whom you acquire through war, for you are allowed such women after making sure they are not pregnant.” 

So to sadly, to answer Wolfe’s question, “Why are women spoils of war in Nigeria?” 

Because Shariah law requires it. 

"boko" is writing 999 words and still not saying what you mean...,

christiansciencemonitor |  Newman writes that "boko" has a variety of meanings focused around denoting "things or actions having to do with fraudulence, sham, or inauthenticity" or deception. He says the false linkage to the English word "book" was first made in a 1934 Hausa dictionary by a Western scholar that listed 11 meanings for the word – ten of them about fraudulent things and the final one asserting the connection to "book." An incorrect assertion, says Newman.

A big deal? Not a huge one, but a good example of how received "facts" are often far from the truth.

I'm more interested in the current claims that Boko can be translated as "Western education." Does it? Sort of, but not really.

Let's go back to the British colonialists in northern Nigeria. In their aggressive push for modern secular schooling – and the resistance from Muslims – lies the spark for Boko Haram's murderous rampages against "Western" education.

Newman writes about the history of the word's use in this context:

    The correct answer was implicitly presented by Liman Muhammad, a Hausa scholar from northern Nigeria, some 45 years ago. In his study of neologisms and lexical enrichment in Hausa, Muhammad (pp. 8-10) gives a list of somewhat over 200 loanwords borrowed from English into Hausa in the area of “Western Education and Culture”. Significantly, boko is not included. Rather one finds boko in his category for western concepts expressed in Hausa by SEMANTIC EXTENSION of pre-existent Hausa words.

    According to Muhammad, boko originally meant “Something (an idea or object) that involves a fraud or any form of deception” and, by extension, the noun denoted “Any reading or writing which is not connected with Islam. The word is usually preceded with ‘Karatun’ [lit. writing/studying of]. ‘Karatun Boko’ therefore means the Western type of Education."

Newman explains that when Britain's colonial government began introducing its education system into Nigeria, seeking to replace traditional Islamic education (including replacing the Arabic script traditionally used to write Hausa with a Roman-based script that they also quickly called "boko") , this was seen as a "fraudulent deception being imposed upon the Hausa by a conquering European force."

    Rather than send their own children to the British government schools, as demanded by the British, Hausa emirs and other elites often shifted the obligation onto their slaves and other subservients. The elite had no desire to send their children to school where the values and traditions of Hausa and Islamic traditional culture would be undermined and their children would be turned into ’yan boko,’ i.e., “(would-be) westerners”.

some han gnurds make symbolic gesture in response to the extended open-season on adopting little chinese girls...,

guardian |  China is considering plans to build a high-speed railway line to the US, the country's official media reported on Thursday.

The proposed line would begin in north-east China and run up through Siberia, pass through a tunnel underneath the Pacific Ocean then cut through Alaska and Canada to reach the continental US, according to a report in the state-run Beijing Times newspaper.

Crossing the Bering Strait in between Russia and Alaska would require about 200km (125 miles) of undersea tunnel, the paper said, citing Wang Mengshu, a railway expert at the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

"Right now we're already in discussions. Russia has already been thinking about this for many years," Wang said.

The project – nicknamed the "China-Russia-Canada-America" line – would run for 13,000km, about 3,000km further than the Trans-Siberian Railway. The entire trip would take two days, with the train travelling at an average of 350km/h (220mph).

The reported plans leave ample room for skepticism. No other Chinese railway experts have come out in support of the proposed project. Whether the government has consulted Russia, the US or Canada is also unclear. The Bering Strait tunnel alone would require an unprecedented feat of engineering – it would be the world's longest undersea tunnel – four times the length of the Channel Tunnel.

According to the state-run China Daily, the tunnel technology is "already in place" and will be used to build a high-speed railway between the south-east province of Fujian and Taiwan. "The project will be funded and constructed by China," it said. "The details of this project are yet to be finalised."  Fist tap Dale.

congress learns an EMP could kill 90% of americans...,

activistpost |  Yesterday Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee held a hearing about the potential impact of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) bomb over America.

An EMP is caused by the detonation of a high-altitude nuclear bomb which sends a massive surge that fries anything electrical. It destroys anything with a microchip, the entire electric grid, and all vehicles built after the mid-1980s.

McCaul opened the hearing entitled, "Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP): Threat to Critical Infrastructure," saying an EMP would be far more catastrophic than even ground-level nuclear bombs. (watch video below)

"Some would say it’s low probability, but the damage that could be caused in the event of an EMP attack, both by the sun, a solar event, or a man-made attack, would be catastrophic," said McCaul. "We talk a lot about a nuclear bomb in Manhattan, and cybersecurity threat to the power grid in the Northeast, and all of these things would actually probably pale in comparison to the devastation that an EMP attack could perpetrate on Americans."

can america survive?

foundationwebsite | The answer, quite simply, is no – not in its current form for very long, and perhaps not in any form at all for very long.  This book describes why pending changes in energy availability, cultural changes brought about by recent massive immigration, the global population explosion, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, technology and materials will combine to bring an end to the United States as we currently know it – soon.

In the past four centuries, the world human population has skyrocketed, from about half a billion people to six billion at the present time.  Population projections from various sources suggest that, barring a major change of some kind, the population will continue to soar, to nine billion or more by the year 2050.   In the past half-century – less than a lifetime -- the population of the US has exploded from about 150 million to over 270 million.  This explosive growth occurred despite the fact that fertility rates in the US dropped to low levels – it is the result of uncontrolled immigration.

The tremendous global population increase has been brought about by the development of technology to utilize the energy stored in fossil fuels, such as petroleum, natural gas, and coal.  Petroleum and gas reserves will be exhausted, however, by about 2050, and coal reserves will not last much beyond that date if industrial development continues to expand worldwide.

Look around you.  If you live in the US or other economically developed country, every man-made thing you see or see happening is a product of the expenditure of energy, and most of that energy is derived from fossil fuels.  To establish and maintain our present lifestyle requires prodigious amounts of energy – an amount equivalent to about 8,000 kilograms of oil annually for each man, woman, and child living in the country.  Pre-agricultural man lived “off the land,” consuming only the bounty of nature.  Agricultural man could produce about 10 calories of energy with the expenditure of about one calorie of energy.  Industrial man, it has been estimated, uses over ten calories of energy to produce a single calorie of food!  The present system is not only exquisitely wasteful, but it is completely unsustainable.  Most of what you see in the industrial world is a transitory illusion made possible by a one-time windfall supply of energy from fossil fuels that were accumulated over millions of years.  When the fossil fuel reserves deplete in about 50 years, the modern world will simply disappear along with them.

Whatever age you are, if you were raised in a town or a small city, go back to where you lived as a child and observe what has happened to the nearest natural field you played in.  Chances are it is now urban sprawl – pavement, concrete, and steel.  For each immigrant admitted to the US – legal or illegal – about an acre of natural land is permanently destroyed, by roads, buildings, parking lots, houses, schools, and other structures that take the land out of production – both for wildlife and for agriculture.  Last year the US admitted 1.2 million more immigrants.  That represents the complete destruction of another .6 million acres of farmland, forest, and pastureland.  Who cares?  Certainly not the people in charge – they want more people because it makes more money, and they are not particularly concerned with the concomitant destruction of the environment!

Industrial activity at the massive scale of the present is causing substantial changes to Earth’s environment. By now, everyone knows that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and other gases produced by industrial activity is increasing substantially every year, and that the planet’s climate and weather are controlled by these concentrations.  Large-scale industrial activity is causing substantial changes to the planet’s environment – land, air, water, and ecology.  In view of the established relationship of the planet’s climate and ecosystem to these concentrations, it is possible that man’s industrial activity could cause dramatic changes in the sea level, and trigger another ice age or create a lifeless “hothouse.”  And for what good reason?  What is the good purpose of burning all the planet’s fossil fuels as fast as possible, when it risks the destruction not only of mankind but of much other life on the planet as well?  The answer is “None.”  This activity cannot continue at current levels without risking dire consequences, even apart from the issue of depletion of fossil fuel reserves and other nonrenewable resources.  To continue to do so is the height of folly.

This book describes the current situation and its predicted course.  For the US – and any other overpopulated, multicultural, high-energy-use country -- the future is one of war, social fragmentation, and dramatic population reductions.  Power will consolidate in a single dominant ethnic group; others will be eliminated or reduced to slavery or serfdom.

This book is not “just another book” on the human population “problem.”  Thousands of books have been written on the problems of human population, energy and the environment.  The real “problem” is that everyone is talking about the problem and no one is doing anything about it.  Proposed solutions to date have either failed or been ignored.  Environmentalists and ecologists continue to wring their hands while the planet croaks.  This book identifies a radically new approach to the problem – one that offers the promise of reducing the risk of ecological destruction to a low level.  It identifies an approach to population policy analysis and a course of action that will bring an end to the massive environmental destruction being caused by human industrial activity and significantly increase the likelihood of the survival of the human and other species.

The author of this book has a career that includes both military defense analysis and economic development.  He worked for about fifteen years in defense applications and about fifteen years in social and economic applications.  His work in military applications includes ballistic missile warfare, nuclear weapons effects, satellite ocean surveillance, naval general-purpose forces, tactical air warfare, air/land battle tactics, strategy, civil defense, military communications-electronics, and electronic warfare.  His work in social and economic development applications includes tax policy analysis, agricultural policy analysis, trade policy analysis, health, human resource development, demography, development of systems for planning, monitoring and evaluation of social and economic programs, and educational management information systems.  He has lived and worked in countries around the world.  He holds a PhD degree in mathematical statistics and is an expert in mathematical game theory, statistics, operations research, and systems and software engineering.  The analysis presented in this book is derived from years of experience related to, and years of analysis of, the population problem.

The organization of this book follows a logical progression, starting with a description of the current state of the planet and human population.  Current trends in human population growth are identified.  The relationship of human welfare to energy availability is described, and the future availability of energy is discussed.  The role of economics to population growth is examined.  Policies for determining what the human population size should be are identified.  A new approach to population policy is introduced; it is called the “minimal-regret” approach.  The likelihood of nuclear war is considered, and the damage that would result from a limited nuclear war is estimated.  The impact of this war is assessed for the United States, Canada, and other countries.  An assessment is made of the likelihood that the United States and various other countries will prevail after a nuclear war.  The relationship of the minimal-regret approach to nuclear war strategies and the postattack environment is discussed in detail.

The main text of the book is generally nontechnical – as much as it can be for subjects (population growth, economics, energy, nuclear war) that are technical in nature.  Technical discussions are presented in appendices.  The appendices include graphs and tables in support of the arguments presented in the text.

The research underlying the population policy approach introduced in this book was conducted over a four-year period.  During the course of doing the research, a large number of books and articles were reviewed and analyzed.  The bibliography includes a list of about 600 books that were reviewed.  To keep the message of this book as succinct as possible, little description is given of the content of these books.  Instead, the most relevant publications are simply listed. Little space is allocated to describing the state of the environment or other population policies – just enough to provide a context for the new material presented.

how putin is reinventing warfare

foreignpolicy | The Kremlin, according to Barack Obama, is stuck in the "old ways," trapped in Cold War or even 19th century mindsets. But look closer at the Kremlin's actions during the crisis in Ukraine and you begin to see a very 21st century mentality, manipulating transnational financial interconnections, spinning global media, and reconfiguring geo-political alliances. Could it be that the West is the one caught up in the "old ways," while the Kremlin is the geopolitical avant-garde, informed by a dark, subversive reading of globalization? 

The Kremlin's approach might be called "non-linear war," a term used in a short story written by one of Putin's closest political advisors, Vladislav Surkov, which was published under his pseudonym, Nathan Dubovitsky, just a few days before the annexation of Crimea. Surkov is credited with inventing the system of "managed democracy" that has dominated Russia in the 21st century, and his new portfolio focuses on foreign policy. This time, he sets his new story in a dystopian future, after the "fifth world war." 

Surkov writes: "It was the first non-linear war. In the primitive wars of the 19th and 20th centuries it was common for just two sides to fight. Two countries, two blocks of allies. Now four coalitions collided. Not two against two, or three against one. All against all."

 

This is a world where the old geo-political paradigms no longer hold. As the Kremlin faces down the West, it is indeed gambling that old alliances like the EU and NATO mean less in the 21st century than the new commercial ties it has established with nominally "Western" companies, such as BP, Exxon, Mercedes, and BASF. Meanwhile, many Western countries welcome corrupt financial flows from the post-Soviet space; it is part of their economic models, and not one many want disturbed. So far, the Kremlin's gamble seems to be paying off, with financial considerations helping to curb sanctions. Part of the rationale for fast-tracking Russia's inclusion into the global economy was that interconnection would be a check on aggression. But the Kremlin has figured out that this can be flipped: Interconnection also means that Russia can get away with aggression.

"A few provinces would join one side," Surkov continues, "a few others a different one. One town or generation or gender would join yet another. Then they could switch sides, sometimes mid-battle. Their aims were quite different. Most understood the war to be part of a process. Not necessarily its most important part."

valodya not scurred...,

Translation: Russian President and Supreme Commander Vladimir Putin conducted a routine management workout of the armed forces of the Russian Federation. The event focused on issues of application of individual formations and units of missile troops and artillery, aircraft and air defense systems - to destroy ground reflection groups and to deliver massive missile and air strikes against an advanced hypothetical opponent.

chickens wondering about what capitalists want when the rainbow is not enough...,

rwer |  The chicken that is fed by the farmer each morning may well have a theory that it will always be fed each morning – it becomes a ‘law’. And it works every day, until the day the chicken is instead slaughtered …

Now you might say that no chicken is an economist, but suppose that chickens were as intelligent as the farmer who keeps them, so they could be an economist … So if (the)  chicken had been an economist, they would not simply have observed that every morning the farmer brought them food, and therefore concluded that this must happen forever. Instead they would have asked a crucial additional question: why is the farmer doing this? … And of course trying to answer that question might have led them to the unfortunate truth …

You can see why the habit of introspection would make economists predisposed to assume rationality generally, and rational expectations in particular … It only works to use your own thought processes as a guide to how people in general might behave, if you think other people are essentially like yourself. So if your own thoughts lead you to postulate some theory about how the economy behaves, then others similar to yourself might be able to do something like the same thing …

Economists may also be fooled into thinking their introspection is representative, because they are surrounded by other economists. So this conjecture about introspection does little to show that assuming agents have rational expectations is right (or wrong), but it may be one reason why most economists find the concept of rational expectations so attractive.

 Following the greatest economic depression since the 1930s, the grand old man of modern economic growth theory, Nobel laureate Robert Solow, on July 20, 2010, gave a prepared statement on “Building a Science of Economics for the Real World” for a hearing in the U. S. Congress. According to Solow modern macroeconomics has not only failed at solving present economic and financial problems, but is “bound” to fail. Building dynamically stochastic general equilibrium models (DSGE) on “assuming the economy populated by a representative agent” – consisting of “one single combination worker-owner-consumer-everything-else who plans ahead carefully and lives forever” – do not pass “the smell test: does this really make sense?” One cannot but concur in Solow’s surmise that a thoughtful person “faced with the thought that economic policy was being pursued on this basis, might reasonably wonder what planet he or she is on.”

bill nye "bullies" a potatohead denier "economist" from the heritage foundation...,

WaPo | “The scare tactics have not worked,” S. E. Cupp announced on CNN’s Crossfire to Bill Nye Tuesday night.

“Isn’t it a problem when SCIENCE GUYS attempt to bully other people?” Cupp went on, later. “I mean, Nick here had to say, I’m not a denier, because really the science group has tried to shame anyone who dares question this and the point I was trying to make is, it’s not working with the public.”

I am glad that someone is finally addressing the serious problem of bullying by scientists! It has gone on much, much too long.

Especially bullying by climate change scientists.

Do these scientists think they just OWN the place? Among the incidents of bullying that have been swept under the rug, to join dust mites and the occasional bit of data the scientists didn’t like, here are a few of the painful moments that have been reported.

on climate, republicans and democrats are from different continents

NYTimes | Americans are less worried about climate change than the residents of any other high-income country, as my colleague Megan Thee-Brennan wrote Tuesday. When you look at the details of these polls, you see that American exceptionalism on the climate stems almost entirely from Republicans. Democrats and independents don’t look so different from people in Japan, Australia, Canada and across Europe.

According to Pew Research Center surveys conducted last year, 25 percent of self-identified Republicans said they considered global climate change to be “a major threat.” The only countries with such low levels of climate concern are Egypt, where 16 percent of respondents called climate change a major threat, and Pakistan, where 15 percent did.

By comparison, 65 percent of Democrats in the United States gave that answer, putting them in the same range as Brazilians (76 percent), Japanese (72 percent), Chileans (68 percent) or Italians and Spaniards (64 percent). If you combine Democrats and independents into one group, 52 percent called climate change a major threat, according to Pew. That’s the same broad range of concern as in Germany (56 percent), Canada and France (54 percent), Australia (52 percent) or Britain (48 percent).

Over all, between 40 percent and 45 percent of Americans in recent Pew polls have called climate change a major concern (with a similar share of independents giving that answer).

The Republican skepticism about climate change extends across the party, though it’s strongest among those who consider themselves part of the Tea Party. Ten percent of those aligned with the Tea Party called climate change a major threat, compared with 35 percent of Republicans who did not identify with the Tea Party.

Not surprisingly, these patterns match recent political events. In international negotiations, the United States has been less interested in taking steps to slow global warming than many other rich countries. President Obama and a majority of Democrats favored a bill that would have raised the cost of emitting carbon, and such a bill passed the House of Representatives in 2009. Strong opposition from Republicans in the Senate, as well as some Democrats from coal-producing states, defeated the bill there.

your genes are obsolete

pacificstandard |  Today, DNA is central to modern biology, but scarcely a century ago biologists were debating whether or not genes actually existed. In his 1909 textbook on heredity, Danish botanist Wilhelm Johannsen coined the term gene to refer to that hereditary “something” that influences the traits of an organism, but without making a commitment to any hypothesis about what that “something” was. Just over a decade later, a prominent biologist could still note that some people viewed genes as “a convenient fiction or algebraic symbolism.”

As the century progressed, biologists came to see genes as real physical objects. They discovered that genes have a definite size, that they are linearly arrayed on chromosomes, that individual genes are responsible for specific chemical events in the cell, and that they are made of DNA and written in the language of the Genetic Code. By the time the Human Genome Project was initiated in 1988, researchers knew that a gene was a segment of DNA with a clear beginning and end and that it acted by directing the production of a particular enzyme or other molecule that did a specific job in the cell. As real things, genes are countable, and in 1999 biologists estimated that humans had “80,000 or so” of them.

Yet, when the dust from the Human Genome Project cleared, we didn’t have nearly as many genes as we thought. By the latest count, we have 20,805 conventional genes that encode enzymes and other proteins. Our inflated gene count, though, wasn’t the only casualty of the Human Genome Project. The very idea of a gene as a well-defined segment of DNA with a clear functional role has also taken a hit, and as a result, our understanding of our relationship with our genes is changing.

One major challenge to the concept of a gene is the growing evidence that many genes are shapeshifters. Instead of a well-defined segment of DNA that encodes a single protein with a clear function, we should view a gene as “a polyfunctional entity that assumes different forms under different cellular states,” according to University of Washington biologist John Stamatoyannopoulos. While researchers have long known that genes are made up of discrete subunits called “exons,” they hadn’t realized until recently the degree to which exons are assembled—like Legos—into sometimes thousands of different combinations. With new technologies, biologists are cataloging these various combinations, but in most cases they don’t know whether those combinations all serve the same function, different functions, or no function at all.

u.s. climate has already changed...,

NYTimes |  The effects of human-induced climate change are being felt in every corner of the United States, scientists reported Tuesday, with water growing scarcer in dry regions, torrential rains increasing in wet regions, heat waves becoming more common and more severe, wildfires growing worse, and forests dying under assault from heat-loving insects.

Such sweeping changes have been caused by an average warming of less than 2 degrees Fahrenheit over most land areas of the country in the past century, the scientists found. If greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane continue to escalate at a rapid pace, they said, the warming could conceivably exceed 10 degrees by the end of this century.

“Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present,” the scientists declared in a major new report assessing the situation in the United States.

 “Summers are longer and hotter, and extended periods of unusual heat last longer than any living American has ever experienced,” the report continued. “Winters are generally shorter and warmer. Rain comes in heavier downpours. People are seeing changes in the length and severity of seasonal allergies, the plant varieties that thrive in their gardens, and the kinds of birds they see in any particular month in their neighborhoods.”

The report is the latest in a series of dire warnings about how the effects of global warming that had been long foreseen by climate scientists are already affecting the planet. Its region-by-region documentation of changes occurring in the United States, and of future risks, makes clear that few places will be unscathed — and some, like northerly areas, are feeling the effects at a swifter pace than had been expected.

Alaska in particular is hard hit. Glaciers and frozen ground in that state are melting, storms are eating away at fragile coastlines no longer protected by winter sea ice, and entire communities are having to flee inland — a precursor of the large-scale changes the report foresees for the rest of the United States.

The study, known as the National Climate Assessment, was prepared by a large scientific panel overseen by the government and received final approval at a meeting Tuesday.

The White House, which released the report, wants to maximize its impact to drum up a sense of urgency among Americans about climate change — and thus to build political support for a contentious new climate change regulation that President Obama plans to issue in June.

confusing the right to be heard with the right to be taken seriously

skepticalscience | In a recent interview, federal attorney-general George Brandis laments that deniers of climate science are being “excluded” from the debate. On the surface this seems a justifiable complaint, but the point hangs on what he means by “excluded”. Brandis said he was:

…really shocked by the sheer authoritarianism of those who would have excluded from the debate the point of view of people who were climate change deniers.

The literal sense of “excluded” implies that no commentary is permitted that does not resonate with accepted scientific wisdom on climate change. This is clearly not the case. Australia boasts one of the world’s best examples of mainstream climate science denial, evident in both expressed political opinion and in the provision of media platforms for those wishing to express such views.

A more figurative sense of “exclusion” might be that those who do not accept the scientific findings are under social or political pressure to keep silent. This is where it gets interesting.

Echoes of vaccination and evolution ‘debates’

Debates over disparate areas such as vaccination and creationism survive because of a call to see both sides of the coin. The truth, at least for these issues, is that there is no coin. To pretend otherwise is to perpetuate an irrational approach.

Climate change is not as well understood as vaccination or evolution, and I would not put deniers of climate science in the same camp as anti-vaccination and anti-evolution movements, but there is an increasing trend among them all to adopt similar methods.

The most obvious of these is appealing to the right to be heard, to see both sides of the coin. Brandis hopes that our natural repulsion at excluding a particular view from the public arena will be aroused in support of climate science denial. This, however, ignores a vital characteristic of public debate: when ideas suffer body blows of sustained scientific refutation any attempt to maintain their status by appeal to an equal right of hearing is also an attempt to exempt them from evidential requirements and argumentative rigour.

scenes from militarized uhmurka...,

WaPo | The group above just graduated from a special training school. Can you guess what that school was for? Perhaps some sort of Special Forces division within the U.S. military? Maybe a private seminar run by a far-right militia outfit?

No, none of those. These are cops with the Michigan State Police Emergency Support Team — basically the agency’s equivalent of a SWAT team. This photo got a retweet and plaudits from Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder.

you don't really have to do anything, you just let them talk...,

activistpost |  In the recent weeks we've observed the power of the mainstream media propaganda machine displayed in full force. We've recently witnessed the engineered demonization of Cliven Bundy for federal government-related political purposes and to deliberately turn the general public against him so as to possibly set him up to be taken down or imprisoned at some point in the possibly not-so-distant future. We are now witnessing the heartless character assassinating entity that is the pro-globalist, pro-Federalists, pro-new world order mainstream media PR machine. This organized gang of "news" corporations seems to be taking on the role of accuser, whose voice has the power to create reality. Like the legendary crowd that yelled "crucify him" in the Bible, as Jesus was accused by the people and later murdered by consensus, the mainstream media is now the voice of the masses yelling "crucify him" whenever the federal and global goons give the word. 

We are now seeing how governments cannot fight back against those who openly stand for personal sovereignty, freedom and the Constitution without the help of mainstream media. When war crimes, genocide and murder are exposed, no one in the mainstream gets charged for not reporting these crimes. No one in the mainstream media will ever face charges for helping cover up any of the countless false flag operations we've seen in America in the last few years. For example, has Jane Standley of BBC ever been prosecuted for lying to the world on 9/11 telling us Building 7 of the World Trade Center had collapsed a full twenty-six minutes before it actually did? Of course not. The Boston Globe for instance, factually was aware and tweeted about drills and "controlled explosions" that were taking place prior to the pressure cooker detonation at the Boston Marathon in 2013, yet no one at Boston Globe was ever arrested or charged, or questioned in any way shape or form.

The mainstream media represents a whole challenge and an entirely new level of evil and deception for all of humanity to deal with. Thankfully, humanity as a whole is just now calculating ways in which to solve this massive problem. Yes, mainstream media really is one of the greatest, and some may argue, the greatest challenge for humanity to overcome in these times we live in only because so many people are literally plugged into their matrix of lies.

So before mainstream media kills off too many of us with their lies and propaganda to rationalize violence against liberty and freedom lovers, many of whom they maliciously name-call "conspiracy theorists" and "domestic terrorists", let us take a strong stand against them and focus on exposing their nature. I believe we are now in a crisis of epic proportions. We've seen how tyrants of the past used propaganda to destroy their enemies and silence their opposition. And now we are seeing this same propaganda disseminated on-cue by these agents of death against selected enemies of the state. (i.e. Michael Hastings)
 

lying or just stupid?

kunstler | Despite its Valley Girl origins, the simple term clueless turns out to be the most accurate descriptor for America’s degenerate zeitgeist. Nobody gets it — the “it” being a rather hefty bundle of issues ranging from our energy bind to the official mismanagement of money, the manipulation of markets, the crimes in banking, the blundering foreign misadventures, the revolving door corruption in governance, the abandonment of the rule-of-law, the ominous wind-down of the Happy Motoring fiasco and the related tragedy of obsolete suburbia, the contemptuous disregard for the futures of young people, the immersive Kardashian celebrity twerking sleaze, the downward spiral of the floundering classes into pizza and Pepsi induced obesity, methedrine psychosis, and tattooed savagery, and the thick patina of public relations dishonesty that coats all of it like some toxic bacterial overgrowth. The dwindling life of our nation, where anything goes and nothing matters.

It’s not just the individual cluelessness of ordinary people leading lives too frantic for a moment’s reflection about anything, but the appalling institutional cluelessness of enterprises where you’d think combined intellects might tend toward a more faithful view of reality. But these days all we get is a low-order of wishful and clownish group-think, such as this item from today’s New York Times discussing a proposed reversal of Gazprom pipelines along the Ukraine / Slovakian frontier as the solution to the Kiev government’s fuel problem:

Nearly all the gas Washington and Brussels would like to get moving into Ukraine from Europe originally came from Russia, which pumps gas westward across Ukraine, into Slovakia and then on to customers in Germany and elsewhere. Once the gas is sold, however, Gazprom ceases to be its owner and loses its power to set the terms of its sale.

Get that? To avoid depending on Russian gas, they’re going to buy Russian gas from sources other than Russia. What New York Times editor can read this story without spraying her video display with coffee? What genius in John Kerry’s “Haircut-in-Search-of-a-Brain” State Department dreamed up this dodge? Who would think that you could improve a Chinese fire drill by tacking on a Polish blanket trick (i.e. trying to make your blanket longer by cutting a foot from the top and sewing it onto the bottom).

why russia's propaganda machine is loving a nytimes report

abcnews | ANALYSIS: MOSCOW – The New York Times is – improbably – the latest darling of the Russian propaganda machine.

The paper this weekend published one of the most detailed articles to date on a group of separatists in eastern Ukraine. The report found no evidence of Russians within the unit’s ranks or Russian influence or arms, although it was careful to note that its findings are far from definitive.

Russian media, however, quickly seized on the report, eager to cash in on the Times’ credibility to back Moscow’s claims that it has nothing to do with the unrest there.

READ: Obama Accuses Putin, Russia of Dishonesty on Ukraine

“No Russians among Slavyansk self-defense forces – NYT reporters,” RT, the Kremlin’s foreign language mouthpiece, tweeted more than once. Other state-run outlets trumpeted the article as well.

The Russian Foreign Ministry posted the article on its Facebook page. The Russian Mission to the United Nations touted it on its Twitter account. (Of course, they did not do this when the same reporter wrote a lengthy story proving the fighters in Crimea were Russian troops.)

Chalk it up to another volley in what has so far been a strikingly successfully Russian propaganda campaign in Ukraine.

WATCH: Violence and Reprisals in Ukraine

Russian propaganda has been in overdrive since the unrest in Ukraine began. Soon after ousted President Viktor Yanukovich fled, Kremlin-backed media began screaming about threats to the Russian-speaking population. (Ukraine’s parliament added fuel to the fire by trying to remove Russian as an official language.)

transnational money sequencing the ruling meta program?

globalresearch |  It is true that Ukraine – the biggest country and bread basket of Europe – has now been pried wide open for transnational Western banks, agribusiness, Big Oil and NATO to feed on. And it is true that all talk of “land grab” has been projected onto Russia even as US Greystone  and Blackwater mercenaries – now called “Academi” in the Big Lie lexicon – move on the ground in Ukraine as the US and NATO propagate ever more threats of force and embargo against “Russia’s aggression”.

 Reverse blame is always the US geostrategic game. “Russia’s designs to take the whole of Ukraine” is again US projection of its own objective, as in the old days when “world rule plot” was attributed to the former USSR. Yet a line has been drawn at Crimea, and drawn again in Eastern Ukraine, and it is backed by a country that cannot be arm-twisted, propaganda invaded, or air-bombed with impunity. That is why the one-way threats never stop. It is the first line yet drawn by an historical power outside of China against the exponentially multiplying US-led private transnational money sequences devouring the world.

People now have a chance to reflect on who is the aggressor and who stands for democratic choice as events unfold. They can observe the patterns of Orwellian distortion day to day. Never is the other side presented. The US and NATO alone continuously denounce, lie and threaten. Financial contracts and assets are violated by one side alone. Hate campaigns without evidence go one way. Uprisings have been mass murderous from the US-coup side and without harm from the resisting side. Russia is behind its own borders, and the US deploys threats, covert operations and mercenaries from thousands of miles away. But this time US-NATO-led corporate globalization cannot destroy nations at will. Sometimes history can happen as it should.

The Mechanisms of Reverse Blame to Justify Destroying Societies

Reversal of blame is always the US method of pretext and justification. This is why Russia is pervasively vilified in the mass media, and Canada’s big-oil regime joins in along with the UK.   As always, denunciation rules without reasoned understanding. As always, the US-led financial and military forces of private money-power expansion move behind the abomination of designated enemies. Any nation or leader not serving transnational corporate control of resources and markets across borders is always the villain. This is the ruling meta program.

Thus too in Ukraine. When Europe tried to broker a peace deal between the opposition and elected government of Ukraine, the US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland continued to  court the neo-Nazi coup leaders to overthrow the state, instructing  “Yats” (appointed PM Yatsenyuk) to consult with the main putsch leader Oleh Tyahnybok “at least four times a week”.  When she is reminded of the EU peace talks and agreement to stop the bloodshed, her response is telling, “Fuck the EU”. The coup peaked after three days of murder by the neo-Nazi faction. When former “Orange revolutionary” and gas oligarch leader of the Fatherland Party, Yulia Tymoshenko, then got out of jail for criminal embezzlement of state property, she expressed the logic of power shared with the US regarding Russia. She says without denial of the words: “take up arms and go and wipe out these damn katsaps” [Russian minority] – - – so that not even scorched earth would be left of Russia.” Yet in every Western media of record, it is Russia who remains “the aggressor”, “the growing threat”, “the source of the rising crisis”, and “the out-of-control power that must be stopped”.

There are exact thought governors at work throughout. I have analysed these structures of delusion in learned journals as ‘the ruling group-mind’ (collectively regulating assumptions that are false but taken for granted) and, sustaining it, the ‘argumentum ad adversarium’ (the diversion of all issues to a common adversary). The “escalating crisis in Ukraine” expresses these fallacious operations in paradigm form. So does the false claim of “Syrian use of chemical weapons” which almost led to US bombing of Syria’s civilian infrastructures a few months earlier. The mind mechanics at work form the inner logic of the lies which never stop. The grossest operations go back to the Reagan regime naming Nicaragua as “a clear and present danger to the United States” to justify US war crimes against it which in turn fed the ever- growing corporate-military complex and murderous covert operations. Always the mind-stopping mendacity and criminal aggressions are justified through the ruling group-mind and enemy-hate switch which form the deep grammar of this thought system.

who is the propagandist?

rsn |  A younger version of John Kerry was a U.S. senator who bravely investigated these Reagan-affiliated crimes and faced attacks from the State Department’s public diplomacy operatives. 

Part of Kerry’s punishment for being early in his investigation of White House skullduggery in Central America was to be excluded from the Iran-Contra investigation when some of Reagan’s crimes and lies surfaced dramatically in late 1986.

Because Kerry had been ahead of the curve, he was judged “biased” on the issue of Reagan’s guilt and thus passed over for the “select committee” investigation. Only Democratic senators who had been fooled by the lies or were asleep at the switch were deemed “objective” enough for the high-profile inquiry. [For more on the contrast between Kerry's past and present, see Consortiumnews.com’s “What’s the Matter with John Kerry?”]

Another irony of Stengel’s defense of Kerry’s anti-RT outburst is that one of the senior “public diplomacy” operatives on Central America back in the 1980s was a young neocon named Robert Kagan, whose State Department team developed propaganda themes to undercut Kerry and various journalists, like myself, who would not toe the line.

At one point when Kagan realized that I would not play ball with the administration’s propaganda, he informed me that I would have to be “controversialized,” that is become the focus of public attacks from pro-Reagan attack groups and thus have my journalistic career damaged, a process that was subsequently carried out.

The irony in this is that Robert Kagan went on to become a leading light in the neocon movement, a Washington Post columnist, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, a star proponent of Iraqi “regime change” – and the husband of Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, the recent cheerleader for “regime change” in Ukraine.

That Stengel, the current master of the State Department’s “public diplomacy” operation, is now offended by what he considers “propaganda” by RT has to be considered one of the purest expressions of hypocrisy in the long history of U.S. government hypocrisy. [For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Kerry’s Propaganda War on Russia’s RT.”]

the new abolitionism

thenation |  Before the cannons fired at Fort Sumter, the Confederates announced their rebellion with lofty rhetoric about “violations of the Constitution of the United States” and “encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States.” But the brute, bloody fact beneath those words was money. So much goddamn money.

The leaders of slave power were fighting a movement of dispossession. The abolitionists told them that the property they owned must be forfeited, that all the wealth stored in the limbs and wombs of their property would be taken from them. Zeroed out. Imagine a modern-day political movement that contended that mutual funds and 401(k)s, stocks and college savings accounts were evil institutions that must be eliminated completely, more or less overnight. This was the fear that approximately 400,000 Southern slaveholders faced on the eve of the Civil War.

Today, we rightly recoil at the thought of tabulating slaves as property. It was precisely this ontological question—property or persons?—that the war was fought over. But suspend that moral revulsion for a moment and look at the numbers: Just how much money were the South’s slaves worth then? A commonly cited figure is $75 billion, which comes from multiplying the average sale price of slaves in 1860 by the number of slaves and then using the Consumer Price Index to adjust for inflation. But as economists Samuel H. Williamson and Louis P. Cain argue, using CPI-adjusted prices over such a long period doesn’t really tell us much: “In the 19th century,” they note, “there were no national surveys to figure out what the average consumer bought.” In fact, the first such survey, in Massachusetts, wasn’t conducted until 1875.

In order to get a true sense of how much wealth the South held in bondage, it makes far more sense to look at slavery in terms of the percentage of total economic value it represented at the time. And by that metric, it was colossal. In 1860, slaves represented about 16 percent of the total household assets—that is, all the wealth—in the entire country, which in today’s terms is a stunning $10 trillion

.

Ten trillion dollars is already a number much too large to comprehend, but remember that wealth was intensely geographically focused. According to calculations made by economic historian Gavin Wright, slaves represented nearly half the total wealth of the South on the eve of secession. “In 1860, slaves as property were worth more than all the banks, factories and railroads in the country put together,” civil war historian Eric Foner tells me. “Think what would happen if you liquidated the banks, factories and railroads with no compensation.”