Off to LA until the 9th of August. Updates unlikely in the interim. In the meantime, a monster post:
Sarah, Plain and tall:
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First, special mention for the Chinese workers who beat a boss to death for gloating that he was going to fire 25,000 people:
"Then Chen disillusioned workers and provoked them by saying most of them would be laid off in three days. Chen, saying that a total number of 30,000 employees would be cut to 5,000, infuriated the crowd."...
An initial report from a Hong Kong-based human rights organisation suggested that 30,000 workers were involved in the riot – making it easily China's largest mass disturbance since an incident in Weng'an, Guizhou, last summer.
But other internet postings put the figures at about 10,000, while the state news agency Xinhua suggested 1,000 people were involved and China Daily reported 3,000.
Xinhua ... added: "A small number of the protesters found the injured manager who [had] been hidden and beat him repeatedly, while some others blocked the roads in the factory to prevent the police and ambulances from reaching the manager."
The Beijing News reported that employees began assaulting Chen after he demanded they resume work....
But Hong Kong-based labour researcher Geoff Crothall said: "It's not just about state-owned enterprises [being taken over] but about the lack of consultation with workers in general – managers presenting arbitrary, unilateral decisions.
"In most cases [redundancy pay] is a pretty derisory sum … Sometimes they get pension benefits, sometimes they don't. If people made redundant are middle-aged or elderly their job prospects are very slim, especially if they have been doing one job all their lives. If you are getting into your mid-30s, its increasingly difficult to find a job."
Crothall, of China Labour Bulletin, said workers had reportedly complained that wages at Tonghua had been cut to as little as 300 yuan (£26) a month and that the management had turned off heating in the factory and dormitories during the winter.
There's an old Chinese proverb: "Kill one, warn a hundred." So, abusive scumbag employers have been warned, at least in China. One wonders if an employee will be scapegoated by the Chinese authorities as a counter-demonstration of power. Still, interesting to see what happens when poorly paid members of the working class are treated like animals one time too many.
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A Mitchell & Webb sketch - this one about a "Homeopathic A&E Hospital":
"Moon maps" created by a little-known Englishman 400 years ago are to go on display to mark the launch of the International Year of Astronomy.
Experts say they prove their creator - Thomas Harriot - beat Galileo to become the first man to view the Moon through a telescope.
The Italian philosopher is credited with the feat in December 1609.
But papers at the West Sussex Record Office show that Harriot drew images of the Moon several months earlier.
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We never negotiate with terrorists. We never negotiate with terrorists. We never negotiate with terrorists. We never negotiate with terrorists. We never negotiate with terrorists. We never...We negotiate with terrorists.
A concerted effort to start unprecedented talks between Taliban and British and American envoys was outlined yesterday in a significant change in tactics designed to bring about a breakthrough in the attritional, eight-year conflict in Afghanistan.
Senior ministers and commanders on the ground believe they have created the right conditions to open up a dialogue with "second-tier" local leaders now the Taliban have been forced back in a swath of Helmand province.
An example of a skillful duckspeaker in action is provided in the beginning of chapter 9, in which an Inner Party speaker is haranguing the crowd about the crimes of Eurasia when a note is passed into his hand; he does not stop speaking for a moment, or change his voice or manner, but (according to the changed party line) he now condemns the crimes of Eastasia, which is Oceania's new enemy.
Mr Obama and the First Family are planning to spend their summer break on a $20 million retreat on the wealthy playground island off Cape Cod and even seem undeterred that the property is owned by a Republican.
The choice of such an exclusive location will inevitably be fodder for the President’s Republican critics who decried his recent “date night” to New York with his wife, Michelle — an excursion that cost taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars at a time of deep recession and soaring unemployment.
The farm features a swimming pool, golf practice facilities — Mr Obama plays regularly — a basketball court, access to a private beach and a rental price tag of up to $50,000 (£30,000) a week.
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How sad is this? US State Dept. workers beg Clinton for Firefox It makes fears of an Orwellian Big Brother seem just a tad unfounded. Post 911, it was revealed that many FBI agents didn't use email, and were faxing and snail-mailing documents - and probably using carrier pigeons to boot. This is like something from a Neal Stephenson novel:
US State Department workers have begged Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to let them use Firefox.
"Can you please let the staff use an alternative web browser called Firefox?" worker bee Jim Finkle asked Clinton during Friday's State Department town hall meeting...
...Presumably, the State Department is using Microsoft's Internet Explorer. And we wouldn't be surprised if it's still mired in the eight-year-old IE6. The only thing that moves slower than Orange is a US government agency...
..."The answer is, at the moment: It’s an expense question," Kennedy said. Then someone in the audience pointed out that Firefox is free.
"Nothing is free," Kennedy responded. "It’s a question of the resources to manage multiple systems. It is something we’re looking at...It has to be administered. The patches have to be loaded. It may seem small, but when you’re running a worldwide operation and trying to push, as the Secretary rightly said, out FOBs [for remote log-ins] and other devices, you’re caught in the terrible bind of triage of trying to get the most out that you can, but knowing you can’t do everything at once."
With any luck, our would be Big Brothers are still using Windows 98.
Yet three weeks ago, less than a month after the station opened, workers began prying the big yellow letters off the building's facade on orders from Customs and Border Protection. The plan is to dismantle the rest of the sign this week...
"There were security concerns," said Kelly Ivahnenko, a spokeswoman for the customs agency. "The sign could be a huge target and attract undue attention. Anything that would place our officers at risk we need to avoid."
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More from "That Mitchell and Webb Look", a funny sketch comedy show from the UK, a post-apocalyptic TV game show, set after "The Event":
The disclosure that the Kashiwazaki plant was prone to further earthquake damage threw Japan's nuclear industry into crisis as seismologists recommended that up to one-third of the country's 55 atomic power stations be closed for inspection.
US health care spending is over 15% of GDP, and within 10 years it will be 20% (there's your bubble). That means today’s dollar total is about $2.2 trillion (that's Britain's entire GDP), and we're on our way to $3 trillion. If the US would adopt a Western European system, it might save 50% of these costs. And a few very powerful corporations would lose $1 trillion per year in revenues. That's all you need to know about the reason why there will be no significant reform. Sick people are big business. And big business runs the nation.
Each obese patient costs health insurers and government programs $1,429, or 42 percent, more a year than a normal-weight individual in 2006, according to the analysis of health expenses released today by the journal Health Affairs. In 1998, the medical costs of obesity were estimated to have reached $78.5 billion.
Can we have a cage-match between the medical industry scumbags and the food industry scumbags (who put high-fructose-corn-syrup in everything?)
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Ireland is following its historical bad habit of aping everything British - in this case, the surveillance society. Ah, the joys of a national inferiority complex!
By the end of March 2008, the Irish Government will begin mass digital surveillance, noting when we log on and log off the internet, as well as every email we send and who we send it to. We have entered into a new democratic state where our entire digital footprint is recorded and stored for up to two years by our internet service providers (ISPs).
Legal professionals suggest the move equates to the mass digital surveillance of the entire people of Ireland and may leave the Government to weather a brewing legal storm over the issues of human rights and privacy.
British TV star to build life size Lego house. What bothers me about this is the toilet (yes, they're going to make a working toilet). The seals on the bricks better be thoroughly superglued together, or that thing is going to get very nasty indeed.
More than three million Lego bricks have been delivered to the site.
May will host a building day next Saturday, when members of the public can help him with the project.
The house will be life-size with a staircase, toilet and shower, and May said once it was completed he intended to live in it for a few days.
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Knock, knock, open wide - see what's on the other side...
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The vegetarian myth. A vegetarian diet is still preferable to a diet of industrially produced meat, (as that still uses grain to feed cows, so it combines the worst of both worlds). It's odd that so many vegetarians can't wrap their minds around the simple fact that farms (even organic ones) appropriate (steal) land from nature - wiping out the plants and animals that used to occupy that space. Only one group of humans live in true harmony with the land-base, and those are the dwindling number of hunter gatherers who have not yet been destroyed by civilisation.
Part memoir, nutritional primer, and political manifesto, this controversial examination exposes the destructive history of agriculture—caused the devastation of prairies and forests, driven countless species extinct, altered the climate, and destroyed the topsoil—and asserts that, in order to save the planet, food must come from within living communities. In order for this to happen, the argument champions eating locally and sustainably and encourages those with the resources to grow their own food.
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This Sunday I heard yet another twit on Irish radio utter the idiotic comment that the recession in America had ended. The reality denial in the Motherland is off the charts; it makes one wonder where these people get their information. The information is freely available in mainstream publications as well as less well known websites. To wit:
Towards the end of last year trade all but collapsed. According to the World Bank, the value of exports from a sample of 65 countries accounting for 97% of world trade rose by 20.2% in September, compared with a year earlier. But by November exports were worth 17.3% less than a year earlier, before slumping by a whopping 32.6% in the year to January. In March the managers of South Korea’s Busan port, long one of the world’s busiest, said that it had run out of space to store nearly 32,000 empty containers. The Baltic Dry Index, which measures demand for the ships that transport bulk goods such as iron ore or coal, fell from 11,793 at the end of May last year to a pitiful 663 in early December.
Estimates by the World Trade Organisation suggest that trade volumes will shrink by around a tenth this year. But recent figures from big economies give reasons to hope that the worst of the slump may now be past. Even in May, the value of trade was nearly a third lower than a year earlier. But the recent awful figures mask the fact that exports and imports have held more or less steady since January...
...It is too early, however, to conclude that trade will bounce back.
Economic output shrank by 5.6pc in the 12 months to the middle of the year, according to official figures which shattered hopes that the recovery has already begun.
U.S. commercial property prices fell 7.6 percent in May from a month earlier, bringing the total decline to 35 percent since the market’s peak, Moody’s Investors Service said in a report this week. Commercial properties in the U.S. valued at more than $108 billion are now in default, foreclosure or bankruptcy, almost double than at the start of the year, Real Capital Analytics Inc. said earlier this month.
Yesterday, more than a half-dozen members of the House panel mentioned or asked Bernanke about the topic, with Chairman Barney Frank saying there’s a “great deal of fear” that a wave of commercial defaults will produce economic problems similar to those caused by residential mortgages.
From December 2007, when the recession began, to May of this year, 6.0 million U.S. workers lost their jobs. The big three U.S. automakers are closing plants and letting white-collar workers go too. Chrysler, the worst off of the three, will lay off one-quarter of its workforce even if it survives. Heavy equipment manufacturer Caterpillar and giant banking conglomerate Citigroup have both laid off thousands of workers. Alcoa, the aluminum maker, has let workers go. Computer maker Dell and express shipper DHL have both canned many of their workers. Circuit City, the leading electronics retailer, went out of business, costing its 40,000 workers their jobs. Lawyers in large national firms are getting the ax. Even on Sesame Street, workers are losing their jobs.
With any more spinning we would be in a financial carousel. New home sales data was released on Monday and showed a “whopping” increase in sales. This is the primary headline on all mainstream reports. Little is mentioned that the median price of a new home fell to $206,200 in June from $219,000 in May (small caveat). A drop of over $13,000 in one month apparently is not important enough to discuss...
This is where you should take pause. 18 percent of all current mortgages in California are toxic waste or near toxic waste. That is a gigantic number. This isn’t including the many jumbo “prime” mortgages out in the market which are equally at risk. So when we talk about the Alt-A and option ARM tsunami this is what we are talking about. The only place you will find a new home in California for $200,000 is out in the Inland Empire or Central Valley but those areas unfortunately are facing massive economic problems. The state itself is in tatters but these areas are reeling. That is the new home market for California and it is a small subset.
...6 more banks were closed, and Guaranty, Texas' no 2. bank, will likely -self announced- follow as early as this weekend, and be the biggest failure in 2009 at $14 billion. Which would bankrupt the FDIC. Lovely!...
The whole country that America once proudly was is breaking into ever smaller shattering pieces, while you're watching Wall Street numbers go up. Hey, say what you will about God, you can't claim her sense of irony ain't dead on. California will take many years just to appear normal, forget about recovery. The mayor of Detroit throws the towel, without acknowledging he does (as is the spirit of politics). The Motor City is broke, and there's nothing on the horizon that could possibly prevent complete and utter bankruptcy. Neither in Detroit nor anywhere else, that is.
Every other government on the planet (yes, even the Chinese government) is also anxious to borrow huge sums of money from someone to fund their exploding deficit spending. Courtesy of frequent contributor U. Doran, here is a report from Sprott Asset Management on how dependent the U.S. is on non-U.S. capital: The Solution...Is the Problem.
The excellent John Mauldin recently issued a report on how governments want to borrow $5 trillion but there is no more than $3 trillion available to borrow: Buddy, Can You Spare $5 Trillion?
This is the classic "unstoppable force hitting the immovable object"--oh, but wait: interest rates are set by the market and are thus quite movable.
The mainstream media is gleefully hyping "the recession is over, the recovery is underway." Nice, except for everything that's missing in action.
"The recession is over, the recovery is underway." Exactly what will be driving this fabulous "recovery"? Let's check in on the usual forces which have powered previous recoveries...
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Michael Klare: Will Iraq be a global gas pump? Remember, we went into Iraq for WMDs, er, get Saddam, er, liberate the Iraqi people,, er...ah bugger, we wanted the fucking oil. Afghanistan however, is a GOOD WAR, one being fought to liberate Afghan Women (Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, with the UNOCAL pipeline blueprints!)
Has it all come to this? The wars and invasions, the death and destruction, the exile and torture, the resistance and collapse? In a world of shrinking energy reserves, is Iraq finally fated to become what it was going to be anyway, even before the chaos and catastrophe set in: a giant gas pump for an energy-starved planet? Will it all end not with a bang, but with a gusher? The latest oil news out of that country offers at least a hint of Iraq's fate.
For modern Iraq, oil has always been at the heart of everything. Its very existence as a unified state is largely the product of oil.
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The killers are coming home. The US military is very good at training once normal human beings how to murder. It's not quite so adept at training them how to stop. These articles are as depressing as they are long, nevertheless, an interesting read:
Human activity is driving Earth's 'sixth great extinction event' One of the commentators on that site made the astute observation that US newspapers encouraged us to cheer the family who spawned 15 children. Go forth, fill the Earth, Conquer it, and Kill it.
Much of the southern hemisphere is suffering particularly badly, with Australia, New Zealand and neighbouring Pacific islands destined to become the extinction hotspots of the world, the report warns.
Ecosystems in Oceania, which includes Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia, need urgent and effective conservation policies, or the region's already poor record on extinctions will worsen signficantly.
Researchers trawled 24,000 published reports to compile information on the flora and fauna of Australasia and the Pacific islands, home to six of the most biodiverse regions on the planet. Their report identifies six major causes that are driving species to extinction, almost all of which are linked in some way to human activity.
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China's 3 biggest power firms emit more carbon that the UK. Don't forget to "do your bit" by buying a CFL lightbulb. Ah, the futility!
The group warned that inefficient plants and the country's heavy reliance on coal are hindering efforts to tackle climate change. While China's emissions per capita remain far below those of developed countries, the country as a whole has surpassed the United States to become the world's largest emitter.
Greenpeace said the top 10 companies, which provided almost 60% of China's total electricity last year, burned 20% of China's coal — 590m tonnes — and emitted the equivalent of 1.44 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide.
We repeat the litany again, like a shibboleth to ward off the evil spirit of those thoughts and all the evidence, plain for us all to see, that support them, but no matter how much we ignore them, they remain.
90% of the water used each day goes not to individuals, but for industrial and agricultural purposes, like large factory farms, growing cotton in Arizona, or mining coal. It takes 700 gallons of water to grow the cotton for a single t-shirt, and Arizona’s desert environment means that nearly all of that has to come from somewhere else. The remaining 10% gets shared out not just to individual homes, but also for commercial purposes, like keeping golf course grass green (which itself requires about as much water as all of our individual water use combined).
The biggest contribution to greenhouse emissions, electricity, has a similar disparity. It takes 500,000 tons of coal each month to power one aluminum smelter needed to manufacture soda cans and aircraft—as much as a million average U.S. households (Booth, 2009). Even while trying to position individual contributions as significant, Michael Vandenbergh must concede that individuals in the United States contribute only 8% of the world’s global emissions—and only one-third of even the United States’ emissions. The remaining two-thirds—the clear majority—comes not from individuals, but from industrial production (Vandenbergh, 2007).
According to Jerry Mahlman, “There’s a colossal misperception that if you bike to work once a week and recycle your garbage, then global warming will be fixed up. The problem is that, even if everyone did that, the attempt to stop global warming would fail by a factor of, oh, roughly of 100, from what we really need to be doing.” (Salazar, 2006) Even if everyone in the United States took every suggestion at the end of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth to heart and fully implemented them, U.S. carbon emissions would only drop 22% (Jensen, 2009).
In 2007, the average Victorville home sold for nearly $400,000. Now banks are lucky if they get a quarter of that for the massive number of foreclosed properties. Some of the properties are so worthless that some banks have taken the wrecking ball to them. In some cases, paying for upkeep and property taxes was no longer worth it. And these homes had never even been lived in. Yep, Victorville is a glimpse into the American Dream, built on speculation, suckers and fraud, and now it is in full self-destruction mode.
That’s why I moved out here, to see the carnage with my own eyes. I wanted to rent a house in a foreclosure nightmare, one of those brand new neighborhoods that have sprouted from cabbage patches and rocky desert landscapes all across the country in the past few years. I wanted to get in on the debacle, to walk on the freshly paved deserted streets and breathe in the raspy dryness of blocks and blocks worth of yellow lawns, to check out abandoned homes, some of them ransacked by looters, others turned into prime real estate for squatters and all sorts of critters. But not all of the destruction took the shape I expected. The lounge’s all-black patronage was part of it.
The real estate boom here was a money-making machine built to enrich bank executives and land developers, but it is also a resettlement of lower-income Americans, a forced migration that takes the poor out of cities and isolates them in the middle of nowhere, safely out of view. Victorville is built on gentrification. Its newer—and mostly non-white—residents weren’t really moving here by choice. They were here because they were priced out of their homes by rising living costs and real estate prices.
A much sterner and more alarming polemic than “An Inconvenient Truth,” “The Age of Stupid,” directed by Franny Armstrong, will be taken by some as an emergency wake-up call to do everything possible to avert impending catastrophe. In the film Mark Lynas, the British environmental activist and author of “Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet,” warns of a tipping point around 2015 if the world doesn’t immediately act to reduce carbon emissions. Once global temperatures warm more than two degrees, he says, all will be lost.
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In the "Land of the Free, Home of the Brave" (methinks they doth protest too much) we have the apotheosis of voluntary servitude: people who will work for their cruel corporate cube-masters for NOTHING. Yes; free as in freeking insane.
With U.S. unemployment at a 20-year high, some Americans are working for free while looking for a job, but experts are split over whether it is a sign of dedication or desperation.
Unpaid job seekers can keep their resumes fresh by boosting their experience and learning new skills, experts say, but others warn businesses may take advantage of the jobless and that it is illegal for commercial companies not to pay workers.
Somewhere in the deepest circle of Hell, Ayn Rand is smiling. We keep waiting for riots and killing sprees - ha! In order for that to occur, you need to have a spinal column.
This was the golden age of both trucking and of unions. Thirty-five percent of American labor, 17 million working folks, were union members, and it was during this period the American middle class was created. The American middle class has never been as big as advertised, but if it means the middle third income-wise, then we actually had one at the time. But whatever it means, one third of working folks, the people who busted their asses day in and day out making the nation function, were living better than they ever had. Or at least had the opportunity to do so.
Kent Police set a new legal precedent last week, as they arrested a photographer on the unusual grounds of "being too tall".
This follows a year of increasingly unhappy incidents, in which continued reassurances from on high appear to have had little impact on how Police Forces deal with photographers – and reinforces a growing concern that the breakdown in trust and cooperation with the Police warned of in respect of demonstrations could soon transfer to photography too.
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Some lego goodness. The 4th one is particularly good:
Odd feeling, having finished all 18 hours of the superb 1964 BBC documentary "The Great War" (which should be compulsory viewing for all students), to see the death of the last British veteran Harry Patch at 111. Here's the man in 2007, visiting the battlefield. Note that he's no Jingo, and has a healthy contempt for war:
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Soon, the bankers will hang from lamp-posts, surely? Irish banker blames the public!
AN outgoing AIB boss yesterday insisted there was no clear warning of the devastating downturn -- and also claimed the public was partially to blame for the economic collapse.
Free advice to AIB: Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up (See my earlier post, below).
"The wood was rotten and they were cutting away when one of the lads working on it, Anthony Reddin, said, 'Look, there's the Virgin Mary.' Immediately, another one of the lads knelt down, blessed himself and began praying," Mr White said.
"About 30 minutes later, a crowd had gathered," he said.
Thankfully, poet Patrick Kavanagh dealt with the state of the hapless (and hopeless) Irish peasant several decades past:
Having To Live in the Country
Back once again in wild, wet Monaghan
Exiled from thought and feeling,
A mean brutality reigns:
It is really a horrible position to be in
And I equate myself with Dante
And all who have lived outside civilization.
It isn't a question of place but of people;
Wordsworth and Coleridge lived apart from the common man,
Their friends called on them regularly.
Swift is in a somewhat different category
He was a genuine exile and his heavy heart
Weighed him down in Dublin.
Yet even he had compensations for in the Deanery
He received many interesting friends
And it was the eighteenth century.
I suppose that having to live
Among men whose rages
Are for small wet hills full of stones
When one man buys a patch and pays a high price for it
That is not the end of his paying.
"Go home and have another bastard" shout the children,
Cousin of the underbidder, to the young wife of the purchaser.
The first child was born after six months of marriage, Desperate people, desperate animals.
What must happen the poor priest
Somewhat educated who has to believe that these people have souls
As bright as a poet's - though I don't, mind, speak for myself.
The desperate animals have cel-phones now. Other than that, bugger me backwards if I can see any evolution. Hairy knuckles still rule.
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Now that I'm making my own bread & cookies, the next step will be more challenging: booze. Portland's Urban Scout is making Dandelion Wine. The recipe is pretty easy, but it's a question of finding enough dandelion flowers to brew a batch. As to the taste...
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In case you missed this - NASA's LRO orbiter has imaged the Apollo landing sites. As the orbit improves, the resolution of these sites will double! Amazingly, the astronaut's FOOTPRINTS are visible in some frames.
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Cindy Sheehan: Obama more polished than the last puppet. Well, Presidents are more like chairmen of our democratically elected politburo than anything else these days. Probably just as well with maroons like Bush & Palin stinking up the place.
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More anon. My 40th birthday on Wednesday, egad. Where does your life go? Yes, I know. Down the shitter...
Sick of computers; sick of work; sick of Dreamweaver; sick of Flash; sick of Dick Cheney who won't SHUT UP; sick of animation; sick of Microsoft; sick of Dell; sick of Toshiba; sick of Obama; sick of Obama's fans who suddenly think that Afghanistan is a "good war"; sick of 'clever people' who got us into this mess who still rule; sick of Sarah Twat Whore Palin; sick of stupid, stupid stupid goddam people who will NEVER, EVER FUCKING LEARN.
Anyhow, could be worse. I could have been born in 1896, and drafted into the stupidest war of all time by a bunch of aristocratic simpletons, to rot in a trench for four long years, only to die of Spanish Flu after the armistice along with 40,000,000 other poor sods.
Those with any interest in World War 1 probably couldn't do better than the 1964 series "The Great War", which I'm currently watching. 26 episodes, 40 minutes long. It had the advantage of access to interviews with surviving participants in the War. Though most interviewees were regular folk, others had direct contact with David Lloyd George and other Important People. Bloody marvellous, and addicting. The footage alone is worth the watch.
The dispiriting aspect isn't the carnage - it's that the irrationality of people has not improved by one iota over the intervening years. Swap baby-killing Germans for baby-killing Iraqis, and it's yet another re-run. One surprise was the "business as usual" attitude of the British Middle classes as late as 1916...which parallels the indifference of our own chickenhawk 'warrior culture'. Special mention for the xenophobia (kill the Germans! I'm not German, I'm Russian! Don't matter mate, yer a forner! Get 'im!), or the trogoldyte patriotism - a global phenomenon, needless to say.
You maniacs, you blew it up, damn you, damn you all to Hell, etc.
Silence, silence. The story is done.
He stands in the doorway of his house
A ragged sculpture of the wind,
October creaks the rotted mattress,
The bedposts fall. No hope. No lust.
The hungry fiend
Screams the apocalypse of clay
In every corner of this land.
Patrick Kavanagh, The Great Hunger.
I've been amusing myself by listening to RTE, (the Irish National radio station) for several weeks. As Ireland is still the place I think of as home, and the situation there is even worse than most western economies, it's of interest. The most dismal aspect is the extent of the collective delusion, and the piss-poor calibre of those in charge: the same smarmy know-nothing gits clog the airwaves and parliament - an in-bred cabal of condescending privileged gobshites whose ignorance is matched only by their egos. The workers won't believe the scale of the national peril, as they're so used to being deceived that they assume that all the warnings are lies.
The country is banjaxed, in extremis.
Since I left in 1993 there has been a period of amazing economic growth, beginning in the mid 90s and ending last year. We also had the miracle of a settlement of sorts in Northern Ireland. Things were looking good for a while. Unfortunately, the economic boom was partly an illusion - the result of foreign companies moving to a low-tax English speaking nation - one ruled by a particularly venal and corrupt neo-liberal regime (the aptly named "Fianna Fail" party).
Once stage 1 of the "boom" was over, FF allowed the economy to experience the mother of all real estate bubbles - and the Inevitable bursting of that bubble has shattered the nation's banking system and economy. By sometime next year, unemployment will break 500,000 (out of a population of 4,000,000). Bear in mind that Ireland has a very large public sector labour force. Many of those who still work are government employees, and are subsidised by an ever shrinking private sector.
The national debt will cripple people yet to be born. It's unlikely to ever be repaid.
The inept government cares only about their own ever widening arses. Parliament is about to go on Summer Holiday - 3 MONTHS LONG. What are they, schoolchildren? So I listen to the voices, as it's going to be a fun few years as the country unravels, enduring the death of a thousand cuts. One usually calm government MP (TD) almost had what sounded like a nervous breakdown on air a few weeks ago. I wish I could say that he did so as a result of the economic crisis, but he didn't. The tantrum was triggered by FF's appalling results in the Euro/Local elections. Family first, Party second, Country last.
Anyhow, I've noticed some catchphrases on Irish radio - words that have crept in over the years. They stand out like a sore thumb, as they weren't used when I lived there. Every time one of these inanities is uttered I experience a visceral desire to stick a fork in the speaker's eye:
"We Are Where We Are". Translation: "We f_cked up, but we're not going to resign. We're going to run the country into the ground until 2012, and there's NOTHING you can do about it."
"Optics", as in "it's all about appearances". Why don't they just speak plainly and say that, instead of using American military jargon? Have the Irish taken a sudden interest in telescopes? With a refractor, chromatic aberration will discolour your image, but if you go with a reflector, you'll have to collimate the damned thing every few nights. You get more aperture for your buck with a reflector, sure, but a refractor gives better contrast, which is preferable if you're interested in observing planets. Optics my arse.
"Ireland, Inc". As in, "Ireland, Incorporated". The notion that the Republic is a business, see? It's a throwback to the "Celtic Tiger" era - and a sad, humiliating one to boot. I'm sure the leaders of the 1916 Rising, as they stood before the firing squad in Kilmainham Jail had one last wish: that the nation they were creating would one day rebrand itself as a corporation - its sole motive to make big bags of money for racketeering banksters and worthless real estate developers. As the British bullets smashed their brains into sweatbread, they at least had that consolation.
"Breadroll man". An Irish equivalent to the annoying American stereotypes of "Nascar Dad" and "Soccer Mom". Can we invent new categories of human filth, such as "Gobshite man", "Pollster Prick" and "Murdered PR shyster lying dead in a widening puddle of intestines"?
"Middle Ireland". A sad attempt at an Irish version of "Middle America" - de reel peepel of Oirland, in udder words. BIFFOS, to be precise (Big Ignorant F_ckers From Offaly, like our current hapless Prime Minister). Lord Lucifer, strike now with Thy Mighty Trident! "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."
"Tiger Cubs". It's embarrassing even to type this: our moighty younglings who have never known hardship, and who expect only calm seas and prosperous voyages. They each carry TWO celphones (one for each ear, for symmetrical brain tumors). Too bad they've all been killed, skinned or sold into debt slavery for life.
"We're talking ourselves into a recession". Mercifully, this idiotic sentence has fallen out of use. In the reality bubble inhabited by the Irish Elite, recessions are caused by Bad Thoughts. And people still can't figure out why we're up Shite Creek.
"Nobody could have known". OK, so this unadulterated lie isn't peculiar to the Auld Sod, but it's especially annoying, given the fact that many people did know, e.g., George Lee, a journalist-turned-politician who predicted the crash several years ago on the national TV station, and was advised by the then Prime Minister to "commit suicide". That PM was later pressured into resigning after revelations that he'd taken many thousands of dollars worth of loans from businessmen for a house extension when he was Minister for Finance! God, ye can't make this up. Who else knew? Oh yeah, Me. Read the archives of this humble journal for the record. Too bad I wasn't the PM of Ireland - the children yet to be born might have had half a hope in Hell, as opposed to none...because you ain't seen nothing yet.
So here's my patriotic advice to the Clever People who lord over Humble Hibernia: Shut up. Shut up, Shut up, Shut up, Shut up. Never speak again, and shuffle off into the shadows from whence ye came - because if you don't, one day you'll be dragged there by mobs with pitchforks. It's as much as you bumblers deserve...a slow and bloody death, swinging from a lamp-post, your giblets around your ankles.
Shame to stain those nice Guccis, n'est pas?
If unimaginative groupthink and mediocre bloviating bastards solved problems, Ireland would have nary a woe.
And I say to my people's masters: Beware,
Beware of the thing that is coming, beware of the risen people,
Who shall take what ye would not give.
Did ye think to conquer the people,
Or that Law is stronger than life and than men's desire to be free?
We will try it out with you, ye that have harried and held,
Ye that have bullied and bribed, tyrants, hypocrites, liars!
Padraig Pearse, from "The Rebel".
Enough from the nattering nabob of negativity! Following yesterdays post on the no-knead bread recipe, here's my first attempt at Scottish Shortbread cookies (I added some extra misery, for the extra bit of Gaelic authenticity):
Now that it's cooled off, it's most tasty.
Recipe here. If I buy the lowest cost ingredients I'm just barely able to match the cost of the cheapest store bought variety - and you can be sure that their ingredients will be even cheaper than mine - though these probably won't have as long a shelf life.
Now time for a wee tea break, ye sassenach bastards. FREEDOM!!!!!!
How much of our freedom is related to 'cheap energy'? Last I checked, the average American uses over 60 barrel of oil equivalents of the 3 primary fossil fuels (oil, coal and natural gas) per year. Depending on ones assumptions (and occupation), this is in the neighborhood of hundred(s) of years of manual human toil supplanted by cheap ancient sunlight. (At $20 per hour, a human laborer makes over $40,000 per year so even an energy subsidy of 100X p/a equates to $4 million in dollar terms.) Do our social freedoms emanate from the nature of our socio-political system, or the reverse - is our socio-political system a byproduct of the resources we acquired and used after finding this land? What is freedom, anyways? And what will freedom look like in the future?
Now, when I look around that Adirondack lake, I can easily imagine the time -- not far off -- when the motors cease to ring, and the big, white plastic ridiculous power boats vanish from the scene, and the houses along the shore de-laminate, or are plundered for their materials, and the sites they occupy return to nature, and the aroma of roasting hot dogs no longer wafts on the summer air, and the pastures and orchards run back from the shoreline up the slopes, with people laboring earnestly in them -- rather than dragging children on plastic tubes around the water behind a boat that gets four miles to the gallon of gasoline.
For those still capable of paying attention to our national predicament, the questions are: what happens from here... and how does it happen?
Over the last ten days, somebody shot the "Green Shoots" narrative in the head. There is no way the American economy can re-expand. This is a debt deflation like unto nothing the world has ever seen before. We've entered the really painful zone of the "work-out" where insolvency can no longer be denied. Things will be heard crashing every day -- enterprises, households, assets, institutions, prospects, deals. No amount of simulus, first, second, or beyond, will avail to stop this process.
A failure to distinguish between primary and secondary goods is at the root of a great deal of current economic nonsense. It’s usually possible, for example, to substitute one secondary good for another if the supply runs short or the price gets too high, and for this reason it’s a standard assumption of economics – and one of the foundations of the law of supply and demand – that consumers can meet their needs equally well with many different goods. Yet this assumption does not apply to natural goods. In the world of nature, a different rule – Liebig’s law of the minimum – applies instead: production is limited by the scarcest necessary resource. Thus if you have a farm and can’t get water for your crops, it doesn’t matter if you have excellent soil and all the other requisites of farming; you can’t grow anything.
In theory, at least, the supply of iron ore can never run out, since industry can simply keep on retooling to use ever more abundant supplies of ever lower-grade ores, right down to iron salts dissolved in the sea.
Try to do the same thing with energy, by contrast, and two awkward facts emerge. First, the only reason the iron industry can use progressively lower grades of ore is by using increasingly large amounts of energy per ton of iron produced, and the same rule applies across the board; the lower the concentration of the resource in its natural form, the more energy has to be used to extract it and turn it into useful forms. Second, when you try to apply this principle to energy, you very quickly reach the point at which the energy needed to extract and process the resource is greater than the energy you get out the other end. Once this point arrives, the resource is no longer useful in energy terms; you might as well try to support yourself by buying $1 bills for $2 each.
As a side effect of learning new software, you occasionally find gems: I owe U gays!
I haven't been completely idle during the 3 week bout of lazy fever. Here's one happy consquence - my first (partially) successful attempt at baking the famous "no knead" bread:
The only catch is that after mixing the ingredients (easy), you have to let it sit for 12-18 hours. Unfortunately, I drank two bottles of wine on the 4th of July, so the dough sat there for 30. As a result, the bread was a bit too yeasty, but perfectly edible - moreso when toasted.
I suspect that I should have let it sit in the oven for about 10 minutes longer than the recipe recommended - more to do with the properties of my pot than the one recommended. Still, it's a lot of fun to make your own.
