The business of declaring a gas essential to life on earth toxic, and then using law and treaties to create a system of “caps and trade” in that gas, with no meaningful way to meter the efficacy of lack of emissions on the part of the trade partner, is a concept just begging for scammers and con artists to hop on board and pocket wealth of chumps and suckers. In Europe, Europol has declared this is happening, $7.4 billion in cap and trade fraud.
Getting a 2% piece of the action on wealthy country’s GDP and every foreign financial transaction would make the ghosts of the old 20th century Chicago mafia applaud with admiration. And that is exactly what has the World Bank salivating. The international banking cartel is the biggest mafia on this planet. They are not getting their usual protection money due to recession, but now they’ve come up with the mother of all con jobs and the world leaders are on board.
A public address system can have a problem, when a sound comes out of a speaker and hits the microphone loud enough to make that sound come out of the speakers again, and the cycle can repeat itself so fast the only thing the audience hears is a big high pitched squeal. That is positive feedback, and the healthcare system in the United States of America has a positive feedback loop going with insurance premiums, big pharmaceutical’s prices, health “care” chains and hospitals, and medical supplies.
The ever increasing amount of money taken is going into the pockets of profiteers. The healthcare bill in the Senate in its current state amounts to a huge bailout, a money injection, for those profiteers. It not only won’t help the healthcare problems, it will throw gasoline onto the conflagration. Another economic bubble will soon burst.
11
Even Smoke Breathing Steel Beasts Bowed Before The Great Mighty Honkers
0 Comments | Posted by Dr. Tuber in Economics
My place of employment is in an “industrial park”, which is where a town puts all the businesses they don’t want as next door neighbors. For example, metal casting is a 6,000 year old art, but no one wants a metal casting manufacturing plant next door. There is one next to my employer, they have accidents every now and then that summon the fire department and make us evacuate our own building across the parking lot because of fumes, fear of explosion, fire, molten rivers of metal and other such annoyances more commonly associated with war zones. There is also the cable extrusion plant across the street, a strut plant, a welding rod plant providing the US RDA of arsenic, manganese, and lead, and other more fascinating places than the boring warehouse plus sales offices of a computer VAR (value added reseller) where I report Monday through Friday.
Some of the bigger places have acres of well manicured lawn, and ponds. And so we have geese that dwell there most of the year, converting grass and pond water inputs into goose poop, except the most bitter cold of the end of January and February when they go to their time-share condos in Florida. Those geese are protected by law of the city’s well-to-do wear-the-nails-and-care crowd, one cannot molest or bother or run under the wheels the goose or their so ugly they’re cute goslings.
The geese know of their exalted status, they will strut single file in a marching parade formation, with heads held high, right into 30 MPH (darn near 50 KPH for my foreign readers) traffic flow, for they know the steel beasts will screech to a stop and worship with awe as the goose stepping procession proceeds from near to far curb.
Alas, but once in a while there is a vehicle that neither knows nor heeds of proper Goose procession protocol (PGPP for you internet datagram engineers). And the street is thereupon besmirched with bloody feathers and high quality lard. Alack!
Now the USA is used to being the king of the neighborhood, one fourth the economy of the planet. We wage war with whom we want for whatever reason we want. We project military power over the entire planet to ensure our lifeblood of petroleum comes from thither to yon. We make the world take our currency as standard, I can go to an ATM in Phnom Penh Cambodia and one of the choices is for it to spit out crisp 100 dollar U.S. bills. We are country code “1″ on the telephone. We move ten times the ton-miles of rail freight in our borders than the entire 15 countries of the European Union.
But something has been going on the past few decades. Our money no longer tied to gold nor any other real thing, it is none the less being borrowed by bankers at near zero percent for them to buy real gold and other real wealth. China’s economy is growing and they are buying land for plantations in Africa and South America to be worked with their own countrymen rather than hiring locals. India is gearing up manufacturing of real goods. Countries are building gold vaults and filling them to partially back their currencies. Talk is of a soon coming mass-selloff of U.S. securities, a run on the dollar. Meanwhile the U.S. is getting out of the production of real things and into paper wealth, intellectual property, services, futures, derivatives.
Honk, honk. waddle, waddle. splat.
The word “climatologist” needs to be in double quotes, for it is one of those “ist” words that implies the bearer is some sort of expert. Like a rabble rouser with a megaphone who incites a riot is an “activist”, or a disgruntled student who chains himself to a tree is an “environmentalist”. A “climatologist” isn’t a scientist who follows the scientific method and/or categorizes datums, but a sheepskinned grant taker who models future events, rather like a stock analyst who if endowed with great skill at the art is right half the time and loses his shorts for the rest.
The United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009 is ongoing, started December 7 and running until the 18th, and it is drafting a thing called the Copenhagen Treaty, which has a very obtainable goal of limiting global temperature rise to 2 degrees C. This goal is obtainable because due to the deep solar minimum the Sun has been in for over 750 days, the Earth’s global average temperature has nose-dived down from the dreaded Al Gore “hockey stick” to 1930s levels. Thus the Earth has not only not risen 2 degrees C, it has had the brazen audacity and intrepidity, which only a giant 8,000 mile rock can muster, to drop 0.8 degrees C without so much as a by-your-leave-sir.
Now the benefactors of “climatologists”, the politicians, must scramble to enact these costly protocols before even the most obtuse ignoramous cottons on to the reality that carbon dioxide concentrations are going up while global average temperatures are going down. Perhaps such people in the know should be called “realists”.
President Obama has received the Nobel Peace prize, though he supports continuation of the U.S. “wars”. The word “wars” belongs in double quotes because it has been a very long time indeed since the U.S. was at war declared by actual U.S. constitutional means.
The problem with the war in Afghanistan is that our enemy isn’t there. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban that hosted Al-Qaeda have long left for a province in Pakistan, and from there maybe to somewhere else. But neither the U.S. nor Pakistan have any troops fighting in that province, and the billions of dollars we have given Pakistan are mainly used to line pockets and a little given to troops who are otherwise occupied with Pakistan’s own internal affairs. Meanwhile, the word “Taliban” is used to describe any disgruntled farmer who picks up a gun, our continued presence in that land is sure to generate a never-ending stream of those, and so the coffers of the defense contractors like Cheney have a recurring revenue stream, something that most businesses covet.
Having need to haul large items now and then, and a family of four continuously, I love my mini-van. Unlike my fellow countrymen, I also like fuel economy, and when looking at a list of available engines I don’t automatically consider the smallest one too wimpy for consideration.
So my 2006 mini-van has a 2.4L 4 cylinder engine, getting 22 MPG in the city, 30 on the highway. I don’t like to blow money out the exhaust pipe, unlike most USAers.
Unfortunately, it looks like in the future a 4 cylinder mini-van will be hard to come by, they are discontinuing such things in the USA, and even the promised diesel engined mini-vans are NOT going to be sold in the land of amber waves of grain. And for my kindred middle-aged dinosaurs (and I are one) who may not know, here in the early 21st century it is now possible to have a clean-burning diesel engine, not like those in our childhoods with the engines belching black smoke, soot, and nitrogen oxides.
The best I would be able to do is get a 6 cylinder sucking down 25 MPG on the highway and 16 in the city. Eeek, 16% more money at least, plus long term maintenance of 50% more cylinders.
Now I’ll agree wholeheartedly with any reader who lives in a place like San Francisco or the mountains that my kind of vehicle isn’t for you, you *do* need more power than my hamster-wheeled little engine. And others are like my plumber friend who have to haul around a quite literal half ton of tools and equipment. But most of us live in fairly flat places, with paved roads, and the family and groceries for cargo.
When will Americans learn to be frugal, have the present fossil fuel futures markets and recession taught them nothing?
– Best Regards, Dr. Tuber
30
Memory Hole To The Incinerator Service
0 Comments | Posted by Dr. Tuber in about memorytubed.com
Welcome to MemoryTubed.com This is an online journal of politics mixing with technology and human nature. Articles posted here remain your property, but you agree by posting or submitting articles that we have the right to edit, publish, store and transmit them. Since this is a “family” web site, meaning we don’t want kids visiting to shock their parents and loved ones with horrible and disrespectful vocabulary, we don’t allow profanity, hate speech against ethnic groups, abuse or threats against people or ethnic groups. Disagreeing with or disliking ideologies, philosophies and religious beliefs not tied to a specific person or named religious group are fair game though. So you can say, for example, you hate creationism or evolutionism or Libertarians, but not Catholics or Jews or the local Baptist Church or its head deacon.
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Sound bites, labels and slogans are an effective way to at once name something and attach a point of view to it in one fell swoop. “Climatologist” must be an expert on climate, past and future. “Anthropological Global Warming” must be something that is happening and must be caused by humans. Let’s list some sound bites, labels and slogans and examine their innards a bit:
“The Sea Level is Rising!” – Yes it has been for thousands of years. In fact, a study of the graph of sea level rise reveals that the norm is something like 2 meters (or yards, if you’re a USAer) every 200 years. Thankfully the rise is now only a sixth of that now!
“The South Pole is Melting” – A tiny bit of it has been warming for some time now, the Antarctic Peninsula which is 0.5% of the land mass of the South Pole. The rest, 99.9% of it, has been cooling since the 1960s, as all serious geophysicists know. And speaking of geophysicists, what is a “Climatologist”? I didn’t recall having that choice of major when I went into Engineering Physics.
“Climate Change Denier” – Anyone who questions man made global warming gets this derisive label, not worthy of explanation nor of anyone’s further consideration. Actually, no one who questions AGM (man made or Anthropological Global Warming) questions that climate has changed. The earth’s climate has been much hotter and much colder on average in the recent past. Google something called the Maunder Minimum, when 400 years ago we had a “little ice age” and it was snowing and cold in the summers in some places.
There is something that has changed in the past 20 years, the Sun went from a period of extreme activity and output in the late 1990s, but now it is very quiet. No sunspots for over two years except for a few short-lived ones. One of my favorite websites is spaceweather.com, you can see the sunspot record there. The energy output of the Sun drops during low sunspot count times, a well known fact. But somehow that little bit of wisdom is being glossed over by the Climatologists (their label for themselves, not mine), that the Sun dominates and causes climate.
“Man is generating huge amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas”. Yes, carbon dioxide is generated by man, much more than the natural amounts made by some plants, animals, bacteria. But there is another greenhouse gas, much more potent than carbon dioxide, its effects far outweigh those of all other greenhouse gasses (like carbon dioxide and methane) combined. It is water vapor! And we have no way of modelling or knowing how much of that comes and goes in the atmosphere, for water likes to change form and snow or rain down or get absorbed into the ground.
Now we have climate-gate, which doesn’t even have entries in mainstream news sites like cnn.com or abcnews.com, though others like another one I shall not name has 9,509 at present. For some reason, many major news sites are ignoring a huge news event that has congressmen frothing mad and screaming for investigations. They have spent billions of dollars (and yen and euros spent by other countries) for climate models and studies and are in the process of making climate protocols that will cost trillions of dollars for developed nations on the strength of the results. Except now we have climate-gate.
What has happened is once again politics has mixed with hard science, and science in that case always loses. I’ve observed and learned this working at a major physics laboratory, seeing how programs were funded and in some cases dropped.
– Best Regards, Dr. Tuber
Still trying to recover from the current recession, but once again the U.S.A. is using easy credit to finance bubbles in markets. This is the very same thing that brought the country into trouble in the first place. A lesson can be taken from the troubles of Dubai World, which has nothing in itself of real value, just sand and camels and goats. It has no oil or other natural resources, but is located at the center of a paper pyramid scheme of easy money to finance projects in anticipation of and assumption of future continued wealth.
The U.S.A. is losing the ability to actually create wealth, to add value to resources, in favor of paper wealth (futures, derivatives, stocks, intellectual property, etc.) But when the hard times come, paper wealth loses value while real wealth is sought.
Even now central banks are using easily obtained U.S. securities to finance the acquisition of gold and other real resources. The dollar bubble, and the petrodollar cartel (more articles on that to come) will soon burst with a sell-off by foreign holders of U.S. dollars and securities. The dollar crash might have some silver lining here in the U.S.A., and that is a necessary return to self-sufficiency in the matter of domestic production and wealth creation.
One resource production system the U.S. does have has a very bad reputation right now, but soon will be the center of attention. That is agriculture, the world market and demand for food and things grown and herded is high will only go higher. Real wealth, real commodities, real production will be the key words for investors and wealthholders for the 21st century. The 21st century will be a time of resource wars, resource grabbing, resource hoarding, and resource management. Other resources soon to be in extremely high demand include fresh water, arable land, strategic minerals and the traditional precious metals.
– Best Regards, Dr. Tuber
