Topic: WE'RE STUFFED!!!

[erik]

I would insert a few things that paint even bleaker picture.
Firstly, diasters unfolding in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq are in no small extent related to Obama's decisions.
Let's recall his election promises: to end wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and 'reset' relations with Russia (on a peaceful and cooperative note).
He did all that, but he withdrew from Afghanistan and Iraq despite his own intel and military warning him that both states remained unstable with security forces unable to maintain stability.
Moreover, Obama wanted, despite all warnings of Putin's nature, to 'reset' relations with Russia. His pursuit of cooperation with the known bastard merely encouraged Putin to do whatever his doing now.
Hence, it is worse than bad. Obama may be intelligent, but he built his election campaign onto the US war-tiredness and contributed to occurrence of even bigger problems.
Where are intelligent leaders with strong will and, most importantly, a clear understanding of what needs to be done?
Hillary may be a typical product of the US political system, but, by God, she has balls of ten men.
Trump is simply a bragging piece of dung. He will shit his pants at the first critical challenge or a hint of a threat of nuclear confrontation.

[Michael]

This is the bloody climax of a bloody world view. Who are these people who prosecute this attack on Mosul? What kind of men and women find themselves in such a violent place? And who are these people who are fiercely defending ISIS in Mosul? What personal stories lie behind their situation?

I know, this is about Sunni vs Shia, which explains so much about Turkey's involvement, and the reason ISIS are so competent in battle. I read all the reports, just to try to understand the complexities, but I can't help wondering about the individuals, with families and ambitions, who are mostly going to die over the next few weeks. Why have humans descended into such barbarity?

There seems little likelihood ISIS will succeed, as the forces arranged against them are too great. And this despite so much crumbling of Iraqi government unity in the midst of such a watershed fight. But the toll on lives of civilians, let alone combatants, will be terrible.

Nonetheless, this battle is a watershed. Victory by Shia forces, regardless of the troubles to come, will mark the turning point of this latest Sunni revival. They should never have backed such a violent and obsessive outfit. Yet, who knows, the next one could be worse.

Sometimes I despair that humanity will every have the heart to live without violent destruction and cruelty. Our future is in desperate need of a new wave of species.

[Michael]

As I mentioned, I have been trying to keep abreast of thinkers who are able to step outside the flux of the present and grasp the obvious currents that are building and waning for our species and the world. Recently, I saw an article about the late Stanford philosopher Richard Rorty who published Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America in 1998, and who has become famous for predicting someone like Trump achieving power. His criticism of the Left's abandonment of the working class, which would eventually lead to the rise of a 'strong-man', was at that time highly prescient. Now it appears obvious - the wisdom of hindsight.

I was thinking about the capacity involved in this man's ability to stand aside from current events and see the trajectory of consequences. I know many people attempt this, and are so idealogically encumbered, that they end up reflecting their own mental obsessions instead of the path of actual events. But some succeed in a highly rational perspective of the future from outside the cockpit of immediacy.

In our shamanic role, we also have a duty to stand on a high ground and see into the future for our tribe, and our world. Awareness is not just about perceiving the good things that abound amongst the bad. It is also about seeing the direction of events. Assessing the current of influences and seeing the consequences.

We are at a crucial practical crossroads in the evolution of our species. This is not about our species' spiritual evolution, but about our species' social evolution - how we structure practical life and meaning for the bulk of humanity. There are many storms of change converging on our immediate future, and they are all involved (although some will spin us totally out of the game - this is not about those).

The vast majority of people, men and women, were and continue to be, involved in manufacturing. Physical goods identify the economic evolutionary period in which we live. It has not always been this, but for the last few hundred years, it has been the focus. The global trade environment has meant that no one country or company can exist completely outside this extra-national mercantile sphere. We have been swept by precious items - tulips, pepper, fur, oil, coal, etc and etc. But the international sphere has grown within commerce to the point where if you are out of it, you collapse. There was absolutely no choice for any manufacturing business to avoid shifting production to Asia. And no political party or government could stand in the way.

Trump talks about rebuilding tariffs, but he has no comprehension of what this means - basically it spells disaster for the US, as globalisation is a force that can not be stopped - technological change has guaranteed that. All that a government can do is mitigate the consequences of those sections of its population that inevitably lose-out in this change. 'It will all be well in the long run' the Chicago School of Economics sprouts, but as John Maynard Keynes said, "In the long run we are all dead." What to do for the living? That is the crucial question that governments will stand or fall on.

Unfortunately, that is just the beginning. Another storm is approaching. That very same technological change is not constrained to global trade. It is altering the fabric of the workplace, and especially manufacturing. The working class are screwed, no matter which way they turn, and they are not an insubstantial political quantity!

In India, recently elected BJP supremo,Modi, is hailed as a saviour by all the aspirants for a working future - down on corruption and up on jobs etc. In the state of Gujarat, he, as Chief Minister, made his name as an economic miracle maker. But actually, he achieved a boost in the state's economic growth through high subsidies to capitalists. They duly invested in capital improvements to achieve efficient production - not in labour. Unemployment increased as the wealth of the state increased. Sounds familiar? The USA?.

Now, you could blame the capitalists, or the government. Why did Obama fund the large corporations to avoid collapse after the 2008 GFC, instead of giving the money directly to the people, as the Rudd government did in Australia? Would it have made any difference? Ultimately, it would probably have saved Hillary's pitch for President, but it would not have stalled the inevitable.

Technological change is not just an issue of capital investment over labour, efficiency over humanity. It is a total shift of the mechanism of production, away from human involvement, and it has been happening now for about a hundred years. The working class are stuffed - no one needs them any more except in the trades like electrical, carpentry and plumbing etc. Wherever a computer can do your job, it will go!

The bald fact is that we no longer need humans to do the bulk of the 'middle' work. We still need immigrants to do the dirty work that no national wants to touch. We still need the health carers, creatives, programmers, upper-management and so on, but the vast majority of tasks previously undertaken by both blue and white collar workers will soon be done by computers and robots. And most importantly, this applies to all those Asian workers. The jobs are never coming back!

Now the tricky part. How do we manage this socially? Saudi Arabia has been doing it for some time - shuffle the money down to those who are born nationals, then import the gross-job workers and pay them peanuts. But in most Western and Orient countries, work is a 'man's' status and self-worth. Women are more intelligent and capable of fitting in wherever possible, but still, everyone is subject to an entire economic and political system that rewards for productive effort. Take away that possibility, and what happens?

We have two choices.

One, pay people a living wage for simply living, and fund centrally all utilities and health. This means shift to a social model where the sheer fact of being alive is guaranteed by the state. The issue of status connected to work, would have to change. But some form of meaningful activity would need to be provided, as humans can't just sit in front of their TVs all their life. Health requires meaningful and effortfull activity. Competition will still have to exist in some way, but community involvement will be paramount.

Bali stands as an example. It is an island that was naturally abundant in food production, leaving the population with significant time on their hands. They solved the problem by developing a creative cultural environment, where 'substance-production work' was not the pivot of identity. A deeply engrained social focus on ritualised creativity took the place of the work-centred self-worth-based cultural focus that we have in most nations of the modern world.

Two, politicians strive more and more to placate the anger, frustration and impoverishment of their losing-out citizens. How can that be displaced, as the real solution is frankly impossible? The age old answer of scapegoating politics will begin with vilifying those within the nation who can be classified as 'not us', and who have 'taken our jobs'.

Democracy will begin to decay from within, as politicians seek to rally continuously disintegrating support from a population that is completely disenfranchised from meaningful participation, let alone financial viability. Climate Change will exacerbate the population migration and resource stresses. The only last pseudo-solution to calm this anger will be to blame outsiders: war against foreign nations.

[Michael]

Very interesting article by George Monbiot:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/02/corporate-dark-money-power-atlantic-lobbyists-brexit

One of the people most involved in especially the UK side of things, happens to be the man who bought the property we live on: Michael Hintze.

This article is exactly what I suspected is happening, but I had not seen the dots lined up so effectively. It is depressing, to say the least.
An aspect of all this is the way these people have been conniving to influence the Brexit vote for 'out', so that the UK could join with the US to force down the restrictive trade practices (as the US-based multinationals see them) of higher product and practice standards in the EU.

It has been a strategy to set up a counter-force to the EU, in the eventual hope that the EU would collapse, opening cheaper and higher levels of penetration into Europe of US multinationals, especially fossil-fuel energy. But a consequence for the UK government, is that they now need the US more than ever, and are thus in a vulnerable position towards the US per their own standards.

I was amazed at the level to which The Heritage Foundation has infiltrated Trump's executive structure. This really is a most confusing and disturbing time for our planet.

It was this article in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2017/feb/03/coal-lobbys-long-game-puts-talking-points-into-leaders-mouths that also filled in many dots for me, which I had been wondering about.

[erik]

Mass coral bleaching hits the Great Barrier Reef for the second year in a row
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/03/13/great-barrier-reef-mass-coral-bleaching-second-year-row/99116432/

An expansive aerial survey found that the Great Barrier Reef has been ravaged by coral bleaching for the second year in a row, marking the first time the reef has not had several years to recover between bleaching events, according to researchers.

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and researchers from the Australian Institute of Marine Science spent six hours flying over the reef between Townsville and Cairns, Australia. The survey found that bleaching is occurring in the central park of the park, which had escaped severe bleaching last year, according to a statement from the Marine Park Authority.

“How this event unfolds will depend very much on local weather conditions over the next few weeks,” Marine Park Authority Director of Reef Recovery Dr. David Wachenfeld said in a statement.

Warmer oceanic waters spurred by climate change, have led to an increase in coral bleaching around the world, according to the center.

The vibrant colors that draw thousands of tourists to the Great Barrier Reef each year come from algae that live in the coral's tissue. When water temperatures become too high, coral becomes stressed and expels the algae, which leave the coral a bleached white color. While some of the areas are expected to regain their normal color when temperatures drop, other parts of the reef have already experienced significant mortality of bleached coral.

The back-to-back summers of widespread coral bleaching likely mean that the water temperatures did not become low enough to allow the corral to adequately recovered, Neal Cantin from the Australian Institute of Marine Science said in a statement.

“We are seeing a decrease in the stress tolerance of these corals,” Cantin said. “This is the first time the Great Barrier Reef has not had a few years between bleaching events to recover.”

He said many coral species seem to be at greater threat of bleaching after more than a year of above-average ocean temperatures.

And while the bleaching is extremely alarming, Wachenfeld reiterated that not all bleached coral will die.

“As we saw last year bleaching and mortality can be highly variable across the 344,000 square kilometer Marine Park — an area bigger than Italy,” Wachenfeld said.

On social media, many used the hashtag #GreatBarrierReef to post photos of the reef and lament the latest bleaching.

[Michael]

A recent scientific report on the reef, said that cleaning up all the mining and agriculture pollution run-off from the land into the reef will have no effect on the bleaching. Because bleaching is caused by global warming effect on the ocean.

Then the Aust government says, 'why should we do anything while the really big carbon emitters are doing nothing?'

And then they don't believe in global warming anyway.

But it was interesting to see the latest report investigating smog in China during winter, found it was caused by the effects of global warming on the Arctic - melting ice and increased snow falls in Siberia. They also are facing a serious problem in their own country that is caused by the whole world's actions.

[erik]

...aside of all small events, catastrophes, greater and lesser struggles and disasters, the Great Barrier Reef is in HOT WATERS...literally.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/apr/10/great-barrier-reef-terminal-stage-australia-scientists-despair-latest-coral-bleaching-data

Back-to-back severe bleaching events have affected two-thirds of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, new aerial surveys have found. The findings have caused alarm among scientists, who say the proximity of the 2016 and 2017 bleaching events is unprecedented for the reef, and will give damaged coral little chance to recover.

Scientists with the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies last week completed aerial surveys of the world’s largest living structure, scoring bleaching at 800 individual coral reefs across 8,000km. The results show the two consecutive mass bleaching events have affected a 1,500km stretch, leaving only the reef’s southern third unscathed.

Where last year’s bleaching was concentrated in the reef’s northern third, the 2017 event spread further south, and was most intense in the middle section of the Great Barrier Reef. This year’s mass bleaching, second in severity only to 2016, has occurred even in the absence of an El Niño event.

Mass bleaching – a phenomenon caused by global warming-induced rises to sea surface temperatures – has occurred on the reef four times in recorded history. Prof Terry Hughes, who led the surveys, said the length of time coral needed to recover – about 10 years for fast-growing types – raised serious concerns about the increasing frequency of mass bleaching events. “The significance of bleaching this year is that it’s back to back, so there’s been zero time for recovery,” Hughes told the Guardian. “It’s too early yet to tell what the full death toll will be from this year’s bleaching, but clearly it will extend 500km south of last year’s bleaching.” Last year, in the worst-affected areas to the reef’s north, roughly two-thirds of shallow-water corals were lost. Hughes has warned Australia now faces a closing window to save the reef by taking decisive action on climate change. The 2017 bleaching is likely to be compounded by other stresses on the reef, including the destructive crown-of-thorns starfish and poor water quality. The category-four tropical cyclone Debbie came too late and too far south for its cooling effect to alleviate bleaching. But Hughes said its slow movement across the reef was likely to have caused destruction to coral along a path up to 100km wide. “It added to the woes of the bleaching. It came too late to stop the bleaching, and it came to the wrong place,” he said.

The University of Technology Sydney’s lead reef researcher, marine biologist David Suggett, said that to properly recover, affected reefs needed to be connected to those left untouched by bleaching. He said Hughes’ survey results showed such connectivity was in jeopardy. “It’s that connection ultimately that will drive the rate and extent of recovery,” Suggett said. “So if bleaching events are moving around the [Great Barrier Reef] system on an annual basis, it does really undermine any potential resilience through connectivity between neighbouring reefs.”

Some reef scientists are now becoming despondent. Water quality expert, Jon Brodie, told the Guardian the reef was now in a “terminal stage”. Brodie has devoted much of his life to improving water quality on the reef, one of a suite of measures used to stop bleaching. He said measures to improve water quality, which were a central tenet of the Australian government’s rescue effort, were failing. “We’ve given up. It’s been my life managing water quality, we’ve failed,” Brodie said. “Even though we’ve spent a lot of money, we’ve had no success.” Brodie used strong language to describe the threats to the reef in 2017. He said the compounding effect of back-to-back bleaching, Cyclone Debbie, and run-off from nearby catchments should not be understated. “Last year was bad enough, this year is a disaster year,” Brodie said. “The federal government is doing nothing really, and the current programs, the water quality management is having very limited success. It’s unsuccessful.”

Others remain optimistic, out of necessity. Jon Day was a director of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority for 16 years until retiring in 2014. Day, whose expertise lies in protected area planning and management, said the federal government’s approach to protecting the reef was sorely lacking. He said it was taking too relaxed an approach to fishing, run-off and pollution from farming, and the dumping of maintenance dredge spoil. The government was far short of the $8.2bn investment needed to meet water quality targets, he said, and Australia was on track to fail its short-term 2018 water quality targets, let alone achieve more ambitious long-term goals. “You’ve got to be optimistic, I think we have to be,” Day said. “But every moment we waste, and every dollar we waste, isn’t helping the issue. We’ve been denying it for so long, and now we’re starting to accept it. But we’re spending insufficient amounts addressing the problem.”

The Queensland tourism industry raised questions about the reliability of the survey, saying scientists had previously made exaggerated claims about mortality rates and bleaching.

[Michael]

Queensland tourism industry? They whole tourist industry is flowered, and they still don't get it.

[Nichi]

Ah! So you guys are joining the ranks of the threatened. A regular event for the west coast of the US.

http://www.mygc.com.au/north-korea-threatens-australia-nuclear-strike-sanctions-comments/

[Michael]

Ah! So you guys are joining the ranks of the threatened. A regular event for the west coast of the US.

http://www.mygc.com.au/north-korea-threatens-australia-nuclear-strike-sanctions-comments/

Yes, but unlikely. Nonetheless, it has developed into a serious issue. The problem with nuclear weapons is that they are more powerful if you don't use them. The world is genuinely concerned about the aggressive buildup in NK, including China. But what to do about it? Talking nice hasn't helped, and talking tough is even worse. The US can't really attack without unacceptable risks to South Korea and Japan, let alone the US coast.

A case of being unacceptable to do nothing and unacceptable to do something. And there is no way NK will give up its nuclear weaponry development, because that's their own safeguard.

[erik]

...a network of rivers, ponds and lakes has been mapped on the ice of Antarctica.

http://climatenewsnetwork.net/surface-antarctica-swimming-water/
The network of rivers, streams, ponds and lakes across Antarctica has been mapped for the first time, and the extent of water flow is phenomenal.

LONDON, 22 April, 2017 – Scientists poring over military and satellite imagery have mapped the unimaginable: a network of rivers, streams, ponds, lakes and even a waterfall, flowing over the ice shelf of a continent with an annual mean temperature of more than -50C.

In 1909 Ernest Shackleton and his fellow explorers on their way to the magnetic South Pole found that they had to cross and recross flowing streams and lakes on the Nansen Ice Shelf.

Antarctic waterways

Now, US scientists report in the journal Nature that they studied photographs taken by military aircraft from 1947 and satellite images from 1973 to identify almost 700 seasonal networks of ponds, channels and braided streams flowing from all sides of the continent, as close as 600km to the South Pole and at altitudes of 1,300 metres.

And they found that such systems carried water for 120km. A second research team reporting a companion study in the same issue of Nature identified one meltwater system with an ocean outflow that ended in a 130-metre wide waterfall, big enough to drain the entire surface melt in a matter of days.

In a world rapidly warming as humans burn ever more fossil fuels, to add ever more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, researchers expect to observe an increase in the volume of meltwater on the south polar surface. Researchers have predicted the melt rates could double by 2050. What isn’t clear is whether this will make the shelf ice around the continent – and shelf ice slows the flow of glaciers from the polar hinterland – any less stable.

“This is not in the future – this is widespread now, and has been for decades,” says Jonathan Kingslake, a glaciologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who led the research. “I think most polar scientists have considered water moving across the surface of Antarctica to be extremely rare. But we found a lot of it, over very large areas.” The big question is: has the level of surface melting increased in the last seven decades? The researchers don’t yet have enough information to make a judgment. “We have no reason to think they have,” Dr Kingslake says. “But without further work, we can’t tell. Now, looking forward, it will be really important to work out how these systems will change in response to warming, and how this will affect the ice sheets.”

Many of the flow systems seem to start in the Antarctic mountains, near outcrops of exposed rock, or in places where fierce winds have scoured snow off the ice beneath. Rocks are dark, the exposed ice is of a blue colour, and during the long days of the Antarctic summer both would absorb more solar energy than white snow or ice. This would be enough to start the melting process.

The Antarctic is already losing ice, as giant floating shelves suddenly fracture and drift north. There is a theory that meltwater could be part of the fissure mechanism, as it seeps deep into the shelves.

Drainage theory

But the companion study, led by the polar scientist Robin Bell of the Lamont-Doherty Observatory suggests that drainage on the Nansen Ice Shelf might help to keep the ice intact, perhaps by draining away the meltwater in the dramatic waterfall the scientists had identified.

“It could develop this way in other places, or things could just devolve into giant slush puddles,” she says. “Ice is dynamic, and complex, and we don’t have the data yet.” – Climate News Network

[Michael]

I hate to say it, but I can see no way out of this North Korean impasse without a war. Obama, I suspect, knew it would come to this, but was putting action off due to the dire consequences. This is actually why Mike Pence is flitting about - preparing the allies. Oddly, are we to consider China as an ally?

[erik]

I hate to say it, but I can see no way out of this North Korean impasse without a war. Obama, I suspect, knew it would come to this, but was putting action off due to the dire consequences. This is actually why Mike Pence is flitting about - preparing the allies. Oddly, are we to consider China as an ally?

Indeed, war seems to be the likelier outcome of dealing with NK. I'd guess Chinese are thinking and planning in long-term - 10-20 years into the future - and they see that NK needs to be dealt with. As far as I know, Chinese have concentrated 150,000 troops on NK border already and Russians are sending trainloads of hardware to their border with NK.

I am not sure, though, what the US and others could do to save Seoul from destruction. It is in the range of NK artillery and NK could keep firing on it for hours before the US and SK could silence these guns and rocket launchers.

If you want to dig deeper, this paper sheds some light on it: https://csis-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/publication/170131_Northeast_Asia_Korea_Book.pdf?IH5xTmaHrldeYRY7U6oqllps9XkTiCH9

[Michael]

I am not sure, though, what the US and others could do to save Seoul from destruction.

Precisely

[Nichi]

We hear too that the US has deployed a lot of Navy to the area. Sigh.