How Does the World Work?


  • See the About page for a description of the subjects of interest covered in this blog.

Series Indexes

Global Issues Blogroll

Blog powered by Typepad

Comment Policy

  • Comments
    Comments are open and welcome as long as they are not offensive or hateful. Also this site is commercial free so any comments that are offensive or promotional will be removed. Good questions are always welcome!

« The Science of Systems 8 | Main | From questions to cynicism? »

August 14, 2009

Comments

Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Beerzie

This is a pessimistic and depressing scenario. And of course, it is absolutely right. Unfortunately.

Glenn Atias

I think even better than the rail system would have been the electrical grid. Most of it is 50 year-old hunk of disconnected junk.

It got something like $3 bln, when it need $150 bln.

Instead, Obama goes and pushed $2 trillion over to the banks. They're now laundering it into the stock market through the back door. There are no fundamentals driving this run-up. Little of the money is coming from mutual funds, almost none by ma ans pa investors - it's the banks who are recapitalizing by playing the market with our borrowed money.

Bernanke is pulling off nothing less than a Generational Ponzi Scheme right under our noses, and nobody seems to care. None of the structural imbalances have ben fixed - we just ponzied over our future to the fatcats to reward us for getting into this mess to begin with.

And through it all the media jumps up and down yelling "green shoots green shoots" because Obama is their guy. Truly we are through the looking glass. All bets are off.

GaryA

Over the pond here in the UK things are no better. A few days ago the government announced assistance of 340million for the Airbus commercial aircraft industry but will not give a penny to Vestas, a wind turbine manufacturer on the Isle of Wight who are in trouble through lack of UK orders/investment..not that I'm a fan of wind power as a salvation but its a illustration of their insane priorities.
They have spent 775 million on bonuses for failed RSB bankers but only 100 million on all green projects combined...the recent scandal over literally hundreds of MP's (in all parties) fiddling their expenses resulted in some payback of stolen monies due to these 'mistakes' Strange how every single 'mistake' resulted in an increase in the MP's bank balance and none a reduction....
The present corrupt neoliberal bunch will be replaced by another flock of neoliberal turds next year..Pepsi,Coke or Tango thats the choice.
The best thing to help the environment of the UK would be a few hundred Sulphur candles under the Houses of Parliament to fumigate all 652 of the worthless maggots.
Apologies for the Rant George.

George Mobus

No worries GaryA, there are a lot of rants going on these days.

Beerzie, not to worry. Don't get depressed because all of what is happening is just the prelude to an evolutionary event! More in the future.

Glenn, I'm betting many of the so-called "green shoots" are actually weeds. I had that idea while weeding one of my planting areas yesterday afternoon. I try to pull the weeds out regularly before they get to be large and go to seed or spread. Too bad there isn't a great gardener who could expose these weeds for what they are and pull them out.

George

Neven

The man is a puppet, wielded by the same people that wielded the former puppet.

"We are the failures. We are the ones who want things to be the way they were before."

There is no way people will take a proactive stance on this, because it's all about changing habits and facing the pain of life as a mortal, conscious being. Yes, the Change campaign and the 'Yes, We Can' emo-trip was a great moment to feel united, to feel drunk and love everybody at the party, like everyone did when MJ died except the other way round, but it never was about Change beyond the abstract level. As usual it was a brief and temporary period of mass onanism. I was living in the Netherlands at the time and was amazed to see so many people around me were infected with the Obama-fever. I even remember translating a French current affairs program that only dealt with the 'Obamamanie' sweeping through France. 'Ooooh, now he's going to do the Martin Luther King speech, isn't it marvellous and so recognizable'. These weren't our elections, it wasn't our president, but people were acting as if the Beatles had landed. I fell for that once when I was 14 and watched the 1988 elections on CNN (I believe it was Dukakis vs Bush II), you know, when CNN still meant something.


It's a paradoxical kind of optimism, but it can only get better when things start coming apart. I wanted to write about which things will be important then, but couldn't get my head around it. Things like permaculture design and the importance of the survival of the Internet, blah blah blah. Nothing new really, just putting it into words for myself.

"Too bad there isn't a great gardener who could expose these weeds for what they are and pull them out."

And then put a thick mulch on the soil so the weeds get limits imposed on them and the soil life (that most important part that we cannot see) can start to replenish itself.

The comments to this entry are closed.