Saturday, March 31, 2018

And Now Business And Markets Rule Almost Everything

And hasn't it just become such a better world to live in because of it, now that it has just about completely burned out the capacity of the planet to hold on to life at all now. Just like it has burned out most of us with an ethic that promotes mostly selfishness, excess, corruption and addiction. What an accomplishment. And it still goes on promoting itself because it sure has been successful at selling us a bill of goods of extraordinary proportions.

COMPANY MEN



How businesses campaigned to win constitutional rights and expand their political reach.

See Also:
[Post Note: And don't forget, it is their kind of logic that creates monstrosities like this: J.V.]
LEARN FROM THE PAST


It's a history lesson worth remembering: The exploitation of immigrant workers only encourages more — and worse — abuse.

[Post Note: And then there are these type of considerations that Business As Usual just seems to always gloss over: J.V.]
ENGINEERING MINUS ETHICS EQUALS EVIL


The great peril we face comes not from an over-reliance on human judgment, but from a distinct lack of it. Indeed, the most bone-jarring risks before us have less to do with human error than with engineering hubris — and that hubris has been synthesized into the uncritically celebrated discipline of computer science.







Thursday, March 29, 2018

Information and Knowledge Are Not Money

Should not be about money.

Passing information, and ability, to each new generation should not be about making money either.

And yet, here we are, in a system where information is about money, because it is money in every way it can be. That's because money is information, and vice versa, because it has all been electrified. Even more than being turned into ones and zeros in growing multitudes of servers, it is now electrons trying to seek the path of less resistance to the system of accumulation that serves to collect it. And nothing serves to smooth resistance than corruption, and addiction. And soon algorithms will be running themselves to do only that, for a collector, the people who paid for this madness, will bring into being without even realizing they are doing so. Assuming, of course, that the planet doesn't end that fantasy by making it quite unlikely we'll be able to continue to live here anymore.

Let us also be clear about something else here. Debt can be an instrument of control. Keep people saddled with debt and they are twice averse to being able to do any other kinds of mischief; you know, things like, for instance, where they find out about how outcomes for folks are absolutely not equitable at all anymore, and then want to do something to change it. That kind of mischief.

Having said all of that, however, you still have to understand something here. To truly get rid of this horrible thing called debt, as debt is now known to be, you have to get rid of the system that makes debt a part of its foundation. It is really that simple. Don't need debt if you come up with a system that doesn't need money in the first place. And why would we need money when we could use automation, and electrons, for the benefit of everybody, and the individual? Why would we need any of this monstrous mess that Capitalism has become? And remember, We Are The People. We get to create majorities that decide even the biggest of issues this nation might ever consider.

First and foremost here: Wake the hell up and take back control of your country. All working people. Salaried and hourly. Form your own Libertarian Socialist Party committees in every voting precinct. Start organizing in each. Do this yourselves because it makes sense to you, whether or not some fool charismatic or another is telling you to do so (or trying to tell you there's only one correct way to do it because that's not true at all). Do it for that community's needs and desires for a better way, but also for as many of the main principles of this party as I have suggested that appeal to you (I am biased and I let you know that), and all of the ones you think should be added for your own reasons. Then you start negotiating with other voting precincts on their stance, and how it can align with yours. Then you form ever increasing coalitions, via the same process, over an ever increasing sense of regional to national scope.

That is what forming a new part is all about. And if you are smart you will make doing the leadership a flexible combination of revolving, temporary task group leadership structures (a chairman and leadership board kind of thing, that you try to get as many participating in as possible). But that will be up to you as well. The bottom line here is that it has to be your party, for your area, but one that recognizes the advantages of trying to find ways to cooperate with as many of the other affiliates around you as you can. A party that would, I hope, recognize the wisdom of taking a balanced path as I have described it in my philosophy. If we can do this we can do anything. Absolutely anything.

The student debt crisis threatens the American way of life. Washington can't keep ignoring it.

See Also:
[Post Note: The irony here, that our teachers can't even afford to live where they teach, is just too plainly awful, and speaks for itself. J.V.]
WOULD MAKE FOR AN EASY COMMUTE


Amid a wide gap between modest teacher salaries and Miami's high housing prices, the county has a new plan: build apartments on school property and let faculty live there.


[Post Note: Here we see illustrated one of the main reasons information is so important to everyone. And why especially is it so that they know far more about us than they would ever let us know about them. You cannot have "Live, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Happiness" if you cannot be a truly informed public. Better believe that if you believe anything. But that also means taking a lot more responsibility for yourself. Are Americans up for it or aren't they? J.V.]

Peter Thiel's Palantir Proves Yet Again That It's Sketchy As Hell






Tuesday, March 27, 2018

If We Mobilize Now We Can Fix This

If we don't the Earth will fix itself by removing us.

I know, that might be appealing to a good number of you out there, but it will also have to reset most of the rest of what took evolution billions of years to create. That seems a pretty harsh price to pay for the rest of life simply for our stupidity; especially if it is still in our power to prevent.

And the biggest part of this is simply to realize that "Business As Usual Must Stop" (#BusinessAsUsualMustStop).




A FOSSIL FOOL


How the Environmental Protection Agency became the fossil-fuel industry’s best friend.







Monday, March 26, 2018

Can You Have A Neighborhood When It's Just A Place Where Everybody is Just Flying In And Out?

Which only serves to beg the more fundamental question:

Can you have any sense of neighborhood at all when it is an ever more cold, and calculating set of market made values (turning more and more into electrically established algorithms running beyond all human consideration, or norms) that determine all of the things we do? Can you keep any sense of what we used to mean as human in such a "not really living" nightmare?

I don't think so, but then I'm just a crazy old dreamer.



THE DISAPPEARING NEIGHBORHOODS


What happens when tourists replace long-term residents?





Putin's Criminal Capitalism Inc.

We need to be very clear about something. And that is the fact that it is not Russians that we have a problem with.

The fact of the matter is that we need Russian help. We need Russian technical, engineering expertise. We need Russian scientific expertise. We need the example of Russian perseverance in times of great difficulty to show us that we too can make it through hard times.

What we don't need is a particular Russian thug, who has made common cause with criminal enterprise, to act as another power hungry bully to get what he wants; which is only minimally connected to what is good for Russia, and maximally connected to what's good for him; which is, of course, why Vlad the Glad is so happy with the idiot we put into power in our government; because that idiot loves, and celebrates, such bullying criminals. Why else would he become Putin's money bitch otherwise, and why would he want to find more such friends around the world to become chummy with.

In a way, this is poetic justice for us here in the capital of Capitalism gone mad. It is precisely the kind of "turn around is fair play" that fate likes to hand out to people gotten too fat on their own hypocrisy, because criminal Capitalism flourishes quite well here despite our penchant for self delusion. And how can we fault a "player" in such enterprise for trying to take advantage of our own stupidity.

What we have to realize now is that Capitalism's penchant for corruption now is part and parcel of it having become a mutated monster by its own technological prowess for change; a prowess born of ever increasing competition globally for everything from market shares, and new sources of resource, to technical capability itself. Dangerous competitions that will threaten to destroy us, if nature doesn't destroy us first for our other criminal acts of thinking that her beauty is just something we can forge into power.

So the real bottom line here is that we reap what we sow, and unless we're ready to take real responsibility for ourselves nothing will change substantially. And this will not be the fault of any of the thugs who benefit now from Criminal Capitalism Inc. It will be our own fault for not seeing the truth and doing what it takes to make things right.


KLEPTOCRAT MANIA


How organized crime took over Putin's Russia.






Sunday, March 25, 2018

This Is Just Another Aspect Of What We Reap

When we sow the earth with the seeds of "Business As Usual" (#BusinessAsUsualHasToStop)


The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, full of ocean plastic, keeps growing


The Great Pacific Garbage Patch



See Also:
[Post Note: Another kind of contradiction for you to consider: J.V.]
THE DISMAL ALLIANCE


Politicians use economics the way a drunk uses a lamppost — for support, not illumination.


[Post Note: Here we see Capitalistic contradiction close up. On the one hand, it is quite profitable to make us unhealthy; and so certain sectors of our economy benefit. That this also makes for a huge expense in other parts of the economy matters only to the sectors in said economy that must deal with it directly. And so we have policy, and ideology battles that rarely solve anything, but do serve to make things more turbulent. And that is simply because he who profits most likely wins the most battles (in the narrowest of contexts) within this now insanely contradictory way to be organized as a society. J.V.]
HELPS YOUR HEALTH BUT HURTS YOUR WALLET



There's a reason why junk food is much cheaper than fruit and vegetables.


[Post Note: Here's a resource competition only a few are winning. How long, though, before those few are fighting amongst themselves for whatever is left?

And then there's the rest of the resources of our solar system as well. Are we seriously thinking of taking the always needing violence, way of thinking that personifies the economics of scarcity, out there? Out there is not only so much beauty, which power always wants to corrupt, but also material substance for which a lot of good could be done with; if it were done with a sense of balance of course, which is not what the economics of scarcity is about in any way, shape, or manner of disguise.

If you realize this. And if you are willing to own the responsibility of making it happen, we will have a way to make proper use of this bounty, and we won't need to take ever greater weapons along with, to do it. We will do that because we will have, by necessity, found a way to negotiate, and reach compromise, with even the most objectionable of other ways of seeing things. And we will do that because it is the only way humanity has much of any chance now to survive. J.V.]
NOT ENOUGH SPACE


Spectrum warehousing lets corporations control the price of the internet in the developing world.


Saturday, March 24, 2018

We Are Watching A Global Disaster In The Making

And we do so little about it. We barely even acknowledge it as a public issue because we have a government lead by idiots who don't even understand the simplest aspects of basic physics (as in thermodynamics and the fact that nature wants to eliminate temperature differences). Basics that even a kid in seventh grade science would know; as in hot things tend to set up fluid motions, which we call circulation currents, to try and keep the hot encountering the cold so that a new equilibrium can be achieved.

And in a way, our planet has been like your favorite cup of tea cooling, or coffee, or hot chocolate, as you wake up in the morning in a still cold house. The upper surface of the liquid, as it has contact with the cold air of the house, cools the liquid, making it heavier, pushing it down so that more of anything still hot can come up and be cooled.

With our planet, though, we used to be able to have a good portion of our cooling happen as radiation in the form of infrared energy; the same emissions that allow missiles to track hot hot airplane exhaust. That can't happen as much now because there is other stuff in the air making that transfer to space happen a lot less. So heat from the sun stays in the total flowing system of all of our atmosphere, and oceans, allowing for the ability to make bigger heat exchange events; as in, for example, sucking up more ocean water in evaporation; especially if there is less sea ice around to reflect that sunlight. That then means more saturated air that must do something with all of that moisture, which is does as horrendous rains someplace else; that often doesn't need it in such amounts. That condensation, to make the rain happen, is another temperature transfer, as well as a pressure affect. That means bigger wind events, and so on, causing the bigger storms we've been seeing.

What this boils (yes, that's a pun. I just can't help it) down to is that our polar ice caps are having bigger and bigger chunks of cold taken out of them, without cold being put back later (in the form of new winter ice) so as to be there for the next round of circulations to try and equalize things. So now places like the Pacific Northwest are getting unseasonably cold, and wet, springs, while other places get no rain at all, when they should, and/or a lot more hot when they are expecting the cold instead. A situation which cannot keep going forever if the poles lose their cold stores for good because no more temperature differences (on a large scale) means all of the good currents and circulations life on this planet used to depend on, go away forever. And that would be the death knell for all but the most extreme forms of life here.

Why does this not get people mobilized, and up in arms, to demand action from all of their governments is a complete mystery to me. The planet is crying out in anguish, life is being gutted in so many places, and yet we can only shuffle on in our spectacle numbed absorption; mesmerized into continuous, easily manipulated stupidity, for the greedy benefit of a quite limited number of people who shuffle along in their own special form of ignorance; thinking that they can buy their way of of any difficulty. It's just a matter of hoarding enough counters.

What madness. What unbelievable madness. Something as precious as life itself and this is the best we can do to account for ourselves. Just absolute madness.

Will you wake the hell up or not? Will you start demanding action? Action that understands that we just can't continue doing business as usual. That we have to stop. All of us stop and start taking responsibility for what we have done. To fix it and make it right. Which we could do if we could find the will to get us out of this commercialized trance we all seem to be consuming ourselves to death with.

How vanishing Arctic ice may set stage for extreme Nor'easters



See Also:

Politicians admire the gun-control marchers, but aren't changing their minds



[Post Note: Can we learn from our children? Can our children learn from our mistakes? Will they abandon "Business As Usual?" J.V.]
March For Our Lives draws hundreds of thousands in Washington and around the nation

March For Our Lives draws 

hundreds of thousands




LIGHTNING IS STRIKING THRICE


To some, Montecito might just seem like a town hit by a string of superlatively bad luck. But to people crunching the numbers it looks less like an outlier and more like an inevitability of climate change.



WE SHOUD TAKE THEIR MONEY, THEN


The basics stay the same, by design: Progress continues to benefit the privileged far more than those who truly need the help.