WIP

I have been revisiting my fascination with anthropology and archaeology that I stopped reading about decades ago. I'm back to the line of thinking that made the most sense to me in my radical youth days, first argued by Rousseau....that modernity has corrupted us/not made us better. Most people aren't psychopaths.... though the number who are could be growing because psychopathic conduct is encouraged and worshiped in so many aspects of modern life....business, military etc.. but most normal people do not want to cause pain and suffering for others. The problem today, is that we are separated by growing economic divisions and those divisions alone (even aside from race and ethnic divides) wall us off into separate little niches, where we only have passing awareness of how other people live. We also aren't made aware of the slave-labour conditions elsewhere in the world to make cheap consumer products for us, nor are we aware of the appalling animal suffering to provide cheap meats and dairy products in our stores. We can live in a protected bubble of ignorance today if we just consume mainstream news and live a relatively comfortable middle class life in this part of the world. But even without adding in the ecological consequences of modern life, we are living in modern cultures that are psychopathic, and some people decide that it's some sort of twisted patriotism to rally around our nations and ways of living, making them some sort of ideal standard....and voila! We have libertarianism and the idealization of selfishness.

Back up! Natural selection does not follow a plan or have anything to do with progress. Nevertheless, your comment is that of a sociopath, because humans have evolved natural phenotypic traits that give us basic fundamental moral principles (against murder, rape etc.) and these principles are culturally adapted and refined. It's about what WE want/not what nature wants.

And 10.6 is still not that much higher than what they've been averaging over the last five years. The real problem is there's no consumer demand to spur economic growth and increase demand for oil...and there's no consumer demand because wages have stagnated for decades, and too many are already in debt and unable to keep buying more products.

My shift to the left...or what you seem to call altruistic morality has nothing to do with which system will be most efficient or profitable. It's about us collectively not being able to afford to let greed be our guide in today's world. If the world was less crowded, less polluted, had more resources, I might still be a libertarian....but the facts are what they are, and I believe we have to start leveling out the huge disparities in how people live in today's world, whether that creates inefficiencies and "free rider" problems or not.

Rae showed himself as having no real political convictions....which may explain most of how he ended up as a Liberal! He sold out his supporters in the public service unions by rewriting their contracts...something that was of dubious legality and was never attempted by either Liberal or PC governments. Sometimes your worse enemies can turn out to be the ones who claim to be representing you. I hope Rachel Notley is cut from different cloth than Bob Rae!

So now, you're concerned about public servants getting their pensions!

Bad idea! Because physicists refer to our everyday world that works by our concepts of logic as the realm of "middle dimensions." At the very smallest scales, virtual particles can transfer forces through space as they pop in/and out of existence, an electron will jump up or drop down to a new orbit around a nucleus of protons and neutrons by rules of probability that cannot be determined in advance, two particles can be separated by great distance and still become "entangled." And it's no better at the grand scale where gravity curves spacetime so that light from a star hidden behind another star can be seen; time slows down, objects take on greater mass and shorten as they accelerate closer to the speed of light. Isaac Newton went about as far as you can take physics by using our rules of logic. The rules modern physicists work by, only make sense mathematically.

Except that....at least according to the Wikipedia entry - Saudi Arabia's oil production peaked in March of this year at 10,3 million barrels per day, while the previous high was 10.2 million barrels per day in 2013. Looking at the graph on the same page covering 1950 to 2012, it shows production in recent years just reaching the highs set back around 1980. That doesn't sound like flooding the market/ more like falling demand.

I say I don't trust him because he is so well connected with people in power. In 2003, he denied/then later had to admit that he got to sit in on a planning session with Paul Wolfowitz and other Middle East analysts that...according to Bob Woodward, led to the report presented to Dubya making the case for invasion of Iraq. I know his political views are hard to nail down...sometimes he sounds liberal, sometimes conservative, sometimes moderate, but he's always working for the most important media centers in Washington....and I know that he's a plagiarist, because he had to admit to it on at least one subject he is not all-too familiar with - gun control.

Thanks. I wanted to add in all of the facts that are left out of our MSM reports here, and make note of the obvious: what's good for us is not necessarily good for everyone else! There are other countries out there with their own national concerns.

When I was growing up during the Cold War years, we were led to believe that the problem was communism....that Russians were okay and would be our friends if they could overthrow communism and become a capitalist democracy. Thanks for confirming that right wing ideology means war regardless of changing conditions.

Thanks for rewriting history! Crimea had always been Russian territory..as it has a majority Russian population. And it was handed off to Ukraine by Kruschev back in the Soviet Union days when the Republican administrations had no real power or importance. As soon as the Soviet Union fell, there was a conflict between Ukraine and Russia regarding Russia's military bases there. What was NATO supposed to defend against after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Warsaw Pact? It's precisely because of NATO expansion east and south of Russia that we have Cold War 2.0.. NATO is just America and its vassal states. Russia would never have joined NATO, even if offered, because it would have meant following US objectives!

The animals around the shrinking watering hole today are capitalists coming to the realization that waging war may be the only way they can continue increasing their profits. Arms manufacture is a lucrative monopoly business backed by government, and though the nations destroyed by war come out losers, if rebuilding is in the cards for them, that's a whole nother profit-making enterprise! The big elephant at this watering hole (USA) wants to control all the water; and seems willing to risk nuclear annihilation to prevent smaller elephants like Russia and China from getting any more water.

I understand that we are moving in the wrong direction, and have been heading the wrong way since we started on the enlightenment project three centuries ago. But the ramping up of libertarian ruthless individualism is suicidal!

I'm signing on because this is the way the Bank of Canada used to function in this Country! The financing of WWII, Medicare, the Trans-Canada Highway, the St. Lawrence Seaway and so many other large public works projects were financed directly by the Bank of Canada, and NOT following the US Federal Reserve system which borrows money and pays interest to large private banking institutions. There's no reason why we had to change from public banking except that somebody obviously got huge rewards for turning it all over to the banking oligarchy!

I haven't looked in on Alberta politics since Rachel Notley won the Election, but off hand, I would avoid hiring anyone inside Alberta and favour outside candidates, because after half a century of PC rule, anyone in any position of importance in Alberta is a Tory hack....and an idiot who has played a role in getting Alberta into the mess they are in today! The last thing Alberta needs today is more of the same....so they need new blood and new thinking!

Don't believe anything Fareed Zakaria says unless it is confirmed by outside sources! The only value of his writing is as a window into the thinking inside the power centers of Washington, and what messages they want to disseminate to the public. So, it seems that Washington is pulling away from Saudi Arabia a bit (they're still willing to sell them a shitload of armaments though) and is going to accuse them of being the bad guy in America's failed domestic oil production strategy. The big flaw in this story is that the Saudi's have not "flooded" the world market with oil....it's more a matter of the demand for oil (and other commodities) not being there. I suspect falling worldwide demand...as we have seen another example of recently with China's falling economy, is a story that Washington doesn't want to talk about....hence Zacharia and other hacks steering the message towards oversupply of oil. Back in the spring, I came across this blog post from Gail Tverberg (Our Finite World) Gail and a number of other analysts were noting a glut in most commodity markets besides oil, and predicting the worldwide economic downturns that are starting to get noticed by mainstream media today. It's a lengthy blog post which emphasizes a theme made a number of times on Finite World and her earlier posts on the now defunct Oil Drum blog site: when resources start becoming scarcer, prices rise...but that's only as long as economic demand is high. We're entering a time like the 1930's and worse - where economies can no longer afford to drive resource prices higher, and even falling prices fail to spur economic growth, because so many other necessary factors that are needed to expand economic production are no longer there.

I wonder if the guy who's parents named him after an algebraic formula, will weigh in here. But, what I'm really wondering is whether you have attempted to get your theories published or reviewed by physicists or mathematicians who have been spending several decades trying to resolve the conflicts between Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity? I don't do math, but when I was reading the general level books discussing various types of String Theory or Quantum Loop Gravity and at least one other attempt to incorporate gravity, the problem seems to be that a theory can be internally consistent and still have no relevance with how forces work in the natural world. So, even if a Sean Carroll or some other luminaries in physics start working in your direction, the dilemma is still going to be whether the theories can be tested or validated by some sort of experiment to prove their relevance.

Seems more complicated than I want to be bothered with right now.....I'll just watch Harper's daily press conferences and see if his nose keeps growing longer!

Are you including the F-35? Any nation with thousands of nukes can destroy the world several times over, and yet the US has been following a strategy of encircling and breaking up Russia into smaller, more manageable nation-states. How the hell do you think Russia overwhelmingly elected a military hardliner in the first place? Most Russian federal leaders getting in position to replace Yeltsin in the early 90's, were so against further war in Chechnya and Dagestan that they were willing to grant autonomy and be done with them. Putin was the only warhawk talking about sending in the troops to subdue the ethnic, oil-rich territories. And Putin's continued high popular support within Russia has somewhat to do with improving economy...genuflecting to the Russian Orthodox Church and other nationalist tropes, but mostly because the average Russian can plainly see that they were lied to by the Americans when they were told NATO would not expand into former Soviet Bloc nations after their Warsaw Pact was dissolved....and, well the rest is history! The war in the Ukraine is likely the single most misrepresented conflict in western media around today! And the big reason is because our limited mainstream frame of political debate is between conservative Neocons and liberal Neocons. This is why so many disastrous regime change fiascos under Obama have gone with little or no criticism from the right. For example: Libya. One Republican after another drones on and on about Benghazi, Benghazi, because of the assault on a consulate in the eastern Libyan city, but never, ever question the policy to force Qadaffi out of power even though most of the senior staff in the CIA and Defense Dept. told Hillary and her minions (Susan Rice, Samantha Power, Victoria Nuland) it would be safer to leave Qadaffi in power. They pushed on with the strategy that has not only destabilized Libya and turned it into an Al Qaeda base, but the billions of dollars of loose arms have caused fighting all through West Africa and the Middle East.....leading to thousands of refugees risking their lives trying to get to Europe! The Ukraine was another managed civil war scripted by $5 billion through US NGO's operating there under the guidance (again) of Victoria (Yatz is our man) Nuland! But where the hell has the right wing been in criticizing this dangerous operation? Nowhere because they would have done the same damn thing...just like in Libya! The Orange Revolution brought the worst nazi organizations like the Right Sector and Svoboda to prominence, and as the takeover of non-compliant eastern provinces stalls out, the fascist movements which dominate the army and militias are threatening to take their war to Kiev and overthrow Poroshenko...and put him on trial. The only thing keeping him in power is more money coming in from the US to prop up his bankrupt regime. And what was it all for? Behind the scenes, Ukraine politics has been run by seven billionaires in the poorest nation in Europe since the fall of the Soviet Union. Most of the billionaires (like Poroshenko) are in the west...don't do business with Russia and wanted stronger ties with the Eurozone. But the richest man in the Ukraine - Rinat Akhmetov was from the east, and owned just about everything worth owning in Eastern Ukraine. His political representatives kept the doors open with Russia because Akhmetov's business (coal, steel production, shipping) depended on Russian markets. After the overthrow of the former government, Akhmetov was the guy trying to negotiate his way out of the war the West had planned on to separate Ukraine from Russia. He even had his oversized private "security" forces in the streets of Donetsk (the largest city in the east, keeping the rebel militia from taking over the government buildings. But negotiations were not in the cards, and Akhmetov's status has been drastically reduced as his largest former assets in the east have either been destroyed in the war or nationalized by the provisional government who say he will never get them back! So, all he's got left is the eastern port city of Mariupol, which the Kiev regime may lose eventually also, since most of that city is Russian or Russian-speaking and the rebels will likely take it if the US loses it's resolve and starts deciding that Kiev isn't worth all the money they have sunk into it. For Putin's part, he's going to keep supplying arms to the highly motivated rebels in the east, since his costs of war are a fraction of what the US is investing in the conflict, and he's already made it clear that Ukraine will not be allowed to join NATO and host NATO troops on its soil without it being declared an act of war. So, I'm glad that piece notes some of the important details that usually get overlooked in our media, like the US encirclement strategy and the nukes....it's about damned time somebody said something about the aggressive actions on the borders of a nuclear-armed state! Earlier this year, Obama committed the US to spend one trillion-with-a-T Dollars over the next 10 to 20 years refurbishing America's nuclear and missile arsenals. At the end of the Cold War, these were things we thought would end or wind down and be relegated to the past as we focused on new concerns. But here we are today, closer to full scale nuclear war than at any time in previous history. And most of the reason is because the Cold War generals and Defense Dept. staff of the 50's through the 70's were almost all WWII veterans. They had seen total war in their youth, and regardless of what they thought of the Soviet Union, they knew from first hand experience how bad war can be! But what does the US have today as it pushes for more and more aggressive military tactics mostly to leverage economic aims: a bunch of chickenhawks who want to prove their machismo by sending other people to fight and die or send robots to do the job of killing others (I wonder where all that terrorism is coming from!). And the ultimate chickenhawk of all, is sitting right there in the White House...his Nobel Peace Prize likely close by, and selecting targets from a stack of baseball cards, and signing on to every regime change idea that's passed his desk so far!

Doesn't anyone get the point: there wouldn't be any personal information to hack from former clients if the company hadn't been lying about destroying personal and credit information of past clients!

How about food prices Hal? Those are the costs that matter the most to people on the lower economic margins, especially those who have long been living on less than a dollar per day. So, all of those third world internal refugees forced off the land and working in urban sweatshops have to buy their food at local markets. And they don't buy processed crap like western consumers! They've never had that luxury. So, when basic grain prices rise, they feel it immediately and the results can be destabilizing for even dictatorial regimes....as witnessed in the round of "Arab Springs" three years ago. Food prices are going to keep trending upwards, because there's no easy ways to increase grain supplies in a world of declining arable land surface, water supplies, and topsoil erosion. That could be a big part of the reason why some hedge fund managers have shifted their portfolios from oil to land-grabs in Africa and Asia.

Thanks for posting! I was going to put it up last night since it's official now; but I expect someone in the oil-funded spin zone to already be typing up their blog posts about how July's weather is just part of the natural climate cycle and sunspots or some other excuse will reduce temperatures and bring back all the ice that's been lost in the Arctic.

Are you sure "cheat" is the proper term? I bet that if you re-read the material, it would have listed how many have had sex with another person while married. I doubt that all of them are done clandestine...on the sly...which is what Ashley Madison clients have been doing. And so far I notice from what little I've read on the story in the past two days, that the vast majority of clients are men! Where do they find the women for these men looking to have affairs? Maybe they have to line them up with prostitutes. Simple fact of life is that women do not have to try as hard to have an affair as most men do, so that might be part of the gender disparity I notice so far. My position is that the company - Ashley Madison should be shut down and it's owner charged with fraud...since it's his malpractice that led so many clients to thinking that they were safe on his site. Celebrity clients should be featured in Vox, Raw Story and some of the other liberal online scandal rags that are drawn to this kind of story, and the average joe's trying to cheat on their wives....I'm not even that sympathetic to their plight....it seems a little similar to a lot of guys I've known over the years who brag about their screwing around, until they get caught....and then they join the MRA movement etc..

I find it a scary trend when people start following demagogues. The right wing rhetoric in the US keeps getting more and more extreme with each passing year, and Republican hopefuls keep raising the bar....can you imagine a Republic candidate trying to court the Latino vote like Dubya did in 2000 today? As for Trump raising the bar, this latest example of his comments about a racist attack on a homeless 60 year old Latino tells us a lot about the attitudes of the rich and privileged and about Trump's arrogance on a personal level:Donald Trump’s appalling reaction to a hate crime committed in his name