Gerry's Cat

A Quick Introduction to Vi (GVIM) for Programmers

2011-12-06T12:57:00.001-08:00

Vi is an awesome editor. A bit of a learning curve, but this little tutorial will get you going.

An Editor of Two Minds (or Modes as it were)

Vi has two modes: typing mode and command mode. Command mode turns the entire keyboard into a bunch of function keys.

Vi starts in command mode. To switch into typing mode press (for example) the i key (i for input). To exit typing mode (and go back to command mode) press Esc.

When in typing mode, type, as normal. This is the behaviour most people are used to, it is command mode that is somewhat unique to Vi.

Command Mode

Command mode turns the entire keyboard into function keys: not keys with which to enter text.

Some frequently used commands:

Command Key	Result
i	switch to typing mode; start at the current cursor position
Esc	exit typing mode
a	switch to typing mode, start after the current cursor position
d	delete the character at the current cursor position
D	delete from the cursor to the end of the line
dd	delete the current line
dG	delete from the current line to the end of the file
.	repeat the last editing command; for example if the last command was “d” repeat the d (delete character) command
o	open up a newline (after the current cursor position) and enter typing mode
j	move the cursor down a line
k	move the cursor up a line
h	move the cursor left
l	move the cursor right
u	undo last edit (this is repeatable command)
G	go to the bottom of the file
Y	yank; copy the current line into the buffer
3Y	yank 3 lines into the buffer (note many command can be prefixed with a count)
p	put the contents of the buffer (as line(s) after the current line
M	move the cursor to the middle of the current screen
:2,9 s/in/out/	from lines 2 to 9 substitute the first occurrence of in on each line with out (press Enter to execute)

The best vi editors:

General: vim.org

For Visual Studio: viemu.com

For Eclipse: viplugin.com

For NetBeans: jvi.sourceforge.net/

F#ck You FedEx

2011-12-06T12:21:00.001-08:00

Anyone living in Canada who has every ordered a package from the United States hates FedEx almost as much as they hate UPS. Here is an example:

Order a 50 pound package from epluselectricbike.com and E+ will tell you FedEx charges $350 to ship to Canada. $350! Unbelievable! We aren’t talking about shipping an car or something, just a box.

But if you go to yesweshiptocanada.com, a company that specializes in forward shipping and use their shipping calculator you get a surprise. They can ship to Canada via FedEx, for $158. So basically FedEx is ripping off E+’s Canadian customers. F#ck you FedEx. What is it about Canadians that all corporations feel we need to be ripped off all the time?

P.S. To ship to Victoria BC use Clipper Direct, the best deal by far.

Monroe Replacement Struts Suck Ass

2011-11-08T11:34:00.001-08:00

I wanted to get a warning out so other’s don’t get screwed by Monroe like I did.

A few years ago I needed new struts and Napa recommended Monroe. These guys had been good so I went with their recommendation. One of the replacement struts was defective and had to be replaced almost right away. Then they lasted less than 20,000 miles. I don’t put many miles on my car so the warranty expired long ago.

Monroe Struts: don’t buy them.

What does Occupy Wall Street have to do with you?

2011-10-10T08:25:00.000-07:00

"Occupy Wall Street" is a movement to bring democracy to America. No, not that fake democracy where politicians pay lip service to voters then meet behind closed doors with corporate leaders to decide how to run things. The movement's goals are to bring real democracy to the US, where government acts in the best interests of the people.

Keith Olbermann reads a statement from the Occupy Wall Street movement (click here). It is worth watching twice, and needs to be seen by as many people as possible.

The movement is spreading (including Canada!). Photo's from the movement here.

Lots of related video's on youtube, including this guy (who is well informed).

So, what does Occupy Wall Street have to do with you?
Debt, environmental degradation, pollution, injustice, inflation, war, poverty: all unnecessary, all the direct result of greed and corruption. Is that really the world you want to live in? The movement is fighting for everyone's quality of life, including yours.

Help spread their message and get involved!

Wind Power Rules

2011-08-02T13:09:00.001-07:00

I’ve heard the argument that wind power is not a great solution to our energy needs because it isn’t always windy. Makes sense huh? Except there are two realities that argument ignores.

The first is the energy grid. Most of us get our power from many miles away, often from hundreds of miles away. It might not be windy right here right now, but it is windy somewhere right now, somewhere not that far away. The energy grid moves the power from where it is generated to where it is needed. Wind power needs to be installed in multiple well-researched locations and connected to the energy grid. I live on Vancouver Island and the northwest coast of the island is very windy, yet there is no wind power installations (yet). It is because “BC Hydro” is stuck with a hydro mindset, not appreciating the benefits of wind.

The second thing is return on investment. The amount of energy invested into implementing wind power compared to the amount of energy produced. (The cost of the investment is closely tied to the energy cost.) Today it takes about 1 barrel of oil (energy) input to produce 3 barrels of oil output which explains why the costs of gas keeps going up (and will continue to go up). According to Crash Course wind power is actually one of the most efficient energy investments there is. Wind power has a great return on investment.

The United States of America: An Empire In Decline

2011-06-24T11:03:00.001-07:00

Empire? 800 military bases in 120 countries. Empire.

The United States used to export oil. Now it imports.

The United States used to be the world’s biggest creditor. Now it is the world’s biggest debtor.

What are the trends? Let’s look at some graphs.

The jobs situation sucks:

More and more require assistance:

The US government’s spending is out of control:

Households are scarcely any better:

The Federal Reserve is printing money like there is no tomorrow:

Out of control debt:

Debt compared to income:

It’s a lie that the Federal Reserve wants to keep inflation down:

The rich take it all for themselves:

The Baby Boomers want to fund their retirement by selling assets, but to who? The baby boomers (also know as "the selfish generation") out-number the next generation. The boomers have also been using their collective clout to get more for themselves, leaving their debt (both in dollar terms and environmental damage) and obligations to the next generation, insuring the next gen will be poorer.

Tens of thousands of manufacturing plants have closed. Millions of manufacturing jobs and other good jobs have been lost, jobs with good pay and benefits, replaced by low-paying service jobs with limited (if any) benefits.

The environment is in decline. Decades of abuse has stripped the soil of it's nutrients. The water table has dropped substantially. The ocean's all around the States have huge and expanding dead zones (actually this true all around the world).

Oil, the driver of the economy, has peaked and is in decline with no replacement in sight. The amount of energy in a gallon of gas is amazing, there is nothing like it (that isn’t radioactive). In a few years Mexico will stop exporting oil to the US. Expect gas prices to continue increasing 10-50% each year.

The last time the US defaulted was in 1971 when Nixon took the US off the gold standard. The US will inflate it’s way out of this mess, which really is just another form of default.

Ever since Nixon took the US off the gold standard the US has been in decline, but the decline has been hidden by the use of debt. I could do the same thing, cash all the equity out of my house to buy cars, go on vacations, etc. My neighbours would think we were doing well, but the truth would be the opposite.

Not a pretty picture. There is no hope for the US to recover, not in a “good” way, not as long as the incompetent criminal class are in charge.

What should the US do?

Close all military bases outside the US and bring the troops home. Shutdown the military industrial complex.
End the War on Drugs. Nationalize all private prisons.
Nationalize energy companies.
Nationalize water companies.
Default on all US treasury’s owned by China. Everyone may manipulate their currencies, but China is the master. The result: manufacturing jobs lost from American to China. It is time to fight back.
Use an act of Congress to force the privately owned Federal Reserve to forgive all US Government debt owned by the Federal Reserve.
End corporate personhood. A corporation is not a person and should not have the rights of a person.
Limit contributions to political parties to a very small amount (e.g. $100).
Return to the gold standard.
Return to a real democracy.

Problem solved.

I highly recommend: Crash Course

Germans: Break Up the EU!

2011-06-22T09:23:00.001-07:00

Spiegel is reporting: If the Euro Fails, Germany Will Be Responsible

Right on, go for it! The break-up of the Euro would be a defeat for the elites and a victory for people everywhere. You think some fuck in Brussels gives a shit about anything but his masters? Better to have local representation.

The more global these governing bodies become (like the EU, the WTO, the World Bank, etc.) the more control the elites have over them. And the less they answer to the people.

I’d also like to see the US break-up into a collection of independent states and Canada into a collection of independent provinces.

The Four Day Work Week

2011-05-20T12:10:00.000-07:00

This article is about much more than working fewer hours. It is about quality of life, for you, your family, your friends. For all people and all living things. It is about what is fair and about right and wrong. It is about all of us taking back control over our own lives.

Almost everyone agrees they would rather work less than 5 days a week. So why don't we? Some wrongly think it isn't possible, that we can't afford it. We can. As noted in this article, some have actually achieved it. For most of us it is very possible, but governments, businesses and corporations ("them") want us working longer hours. Not for our benefit - for theirs!

If you walk around a modern shopping mall today, what do you see? I see a whole lot of stuff that has no use, and a lot of services I have no need for. One way we can work less is to stop wasting our time and money on useless products and services. They are only there in a desperate attempt to take our money. Much of what is at the mall has no value.

As more jobs become automated, be it self-checkout at Home Depot or robots building cars, people are supposed to be working less. But all that is happening is fewer people are working and others are left in the cold.

It is pretty hard to get by in our (or almost any) society without a job. Sometimes the choice comes down to starve or steal! I realize not everyone is a great worker, but on the other hand many good people are having difficulty finding work. We need to fix this. The solution is to divide up the available work more fairly.

Who Benefits From Our Hard Work

Most of us work and even before we get paid, the government gets a share first. The government does an okay job of making us feel as if we get value from taxes we pay but it isn't true. The value we get from the taxes we pay is much less than it should be. Work less and you will be taxed less.

"The tax system is a very efficient means for the ruling class to finance their standard of living at the expense of the rest of us while claiming to provide some service in return" - James West, The Midas Letter

Many of us work for companies who profit from our work. Typically an employee's labour creates something of value which is sold. Both the employee and the company benefits. But most companies are not concerned with quality of life issues - they just want you to work more hours so they can make more money. Quality of life should come first.

How Do We Work Against Each Other?

Governments and corporations encourage us to work against each other. We compete for higher pay, more prestige, a bigger house (mortgage), etc. They encourage us to look down on people who are less successful. They tell us if we don't work long hours then we must be lazy. It benefits the powers that be but hurts people. Governments and corporations want you to depend on them, that way they can control you.

Governments also use patriotism to encourage prejudice against the people of other countries, but that is a topic for another day.

What About Retirement?

How can a person work only four days a week and still expect to retire? Governments and corporations push the idea of retirement for various reasons, but mostly to get you to work harder and longer now with the promise of taking it easy later. It is better to take those planned retirement days and spread them out throughout your life. Most of the world’s public and private pension plans are in trouble financially. You never know what tomorrow will bring. I take a few weeks of unpaid time off work each year.

Another big problem with trying to save for retirement: central-banks artificially create inflation making it necessary to invest retirement funds in an attempt to keep up with inflation. What a bunch of BS. Tell the banks and the investment houses like Goldman Sacks to go jump off a bridge.

What Can Be Done - Part 1: Inform

The first step is to continually become more informed and educated. The powers that be want to keep you ignorant and dependant. Are you going to just let them?

What Can Be Done - Part 2: Take Action

The second step is to take action. These are just some examples.

Join a union if you can because achieving our goal will require unity. What does the word "union" mean to you, is it a dirty word? The corporate-controlled media has worked very hard to make you believe unions are a bad thing. And they are - for the corporations. The rich coordinate their efforts: why shouldn’t we?

Join a co-op or start your own non-profit business. Join an environmental group. Grow some of your own food. Get to know your neighbours. Consume less. If you are in the market for a home, don't fall for the McMansion trap; buy something you can afford that was built using fewer resources.

Avoid any support for large companies, this especially includes any support for the corporate-controlled media (Fox News, New York Times, etc.). If you must keep your job at a large company do as little work as possible and encourage others to do the same. Cut back on your hours.

If you have cable or satellite television cancel it, because television is controlled by huge companies (like GE, a weapons maker) and it is the largest source of corporate propaganda. Try to avoid bank-credit as much as you possibly can: think of the interest you pay as a tax.

What Can Be Done - Part 3: Take Control Back

Governments and companies don't tell us what to do we tell them. Representatives, and I use the term loosely, need to know they will not be re-elected if they do not support people's rights. Companies that resist will be boycotted. It is that simple.

Today we have the problem of too many individual groups working separately, but we need to work together. Groups like WWF, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, etc. need to join forces and coordinate their efforts.

The goal of the Zeitgeist Movement is to put an end to war, poverty, environmental degradation, corruption and injustice. Watch Zeitgeist Addendum to understand how this can all be achieved: but not without your involvement.

Join the Zeitgeist Movement. Take Control. Success of this movement will result in a high quality of life for all, not just the rich.

Where to invest?

2010-07-15T12:21:00.000-07:00

If you happen to have some money to invest, lucky you! But where? The US stock market is as corrupt as it gets, thanks to government intervention, HFT (high frequency trading), a SEC that spends more time browsing Internet porn than enforcing rules, etc. Not to mention the market might be going no where but down for a while. Gold looks pretty good long term, but short term might be in for a summer pull-back. Real estate doesn't look so good, at least not until there is a clear bottom (we are not there yet). Interest rates in bonds and bank accounts suck ass. What is left?

The US government might have had good intentions with the "Cash for Clunkers" program, but that was an example of what not to invest in. Don't invest in something that losses value dramatically, like automobiles.

Invest in something that returns value. People need food, shelter, energy, transportation, etc. If a person could invest in order to have these things then that person would be investing in something of value.

An obvious example is of course energy. An investment in solar and/or wind power could really pay off. It depends on your own situation. Do you live somewhere with great sunshine and maybe even state and/or federal rebates on solar panels? Do you live somewhere with lots of wind and you have enough land to support a large wind mill?

I live in British Colombia, Canada, where electricity is (currently) cheap and solar panels cost twice what they go for in the States (why?). I am keeping an eye on what is going on in the industry, such as Lowes selling easy to install solar panels (in the States of course).

If solar panels last 25 years but pay for themselves in 5-7 years they could be a great investment. Something to consider when other investments are not looking so good.

Propaganda and the Mainstream Media

2010-04-23T11:23:00.000-07:00

The TV News must be completely honest, otherwise nobody would watch it. Right? Right and there are no dishonest people in the world and everyone's motivations are purely altruistic.

The people behind the mainstream media aren't stupid (the people in front of the mainstream media are stupid, but that a topic for another day). They aren't going to start by saying "the following is propaganda, so buyer beware". What they are going to do is be subtle. They are going to be vague. They are going to be honest and quite reasonable 98% of the time. They will claim to deliver what the public wants, or at least their interpretation of what the public wants. Seems reasonable.

Yet propaganda would not be propaganda if it were easily detected. It takes some study and experience to be able to recognize it. There are books, such as Manufacturing Consent which teach how to recognize propaganda (how it developed and why it exists) but here is a quick-start for recognizing propaganda. Look for these aspects or traits in the media:

1) Does a story in the news affect a lot of people, or is it (sad as it may be) just someone's personal tragedy and none of our business anyway?

2) In the case of an on-air interview, is the interviewer cutting off or degrading one of the points of view? A simple yet effective tactic is plain old name-calling, watch for it. Also note if the media is even attempting to present more than one point of view.

3) The corporate media simply omits much of the real news that affects people. Follow the top stories in the independent media (see links below) to see what they are not telling you.

4) Be aware the primary purpose of corporate media is to make money. The secondary purpose of the media is to form your opinions for you.

5) Be aware the controllers of the media are long-term thinkers and planners. And they are not micro-managers. They are quite willing to appear good, to lose a few skirmishes, etc. as they work towards their long term goals.

6) Notice how the media hardly even attempts to challenge government or corporate points of view anymore.

It is amazing how often the media will bring in someone who's point of view is actually total bullshit and lies. You will need to seek-out information yourself, rather than rely on the media to bring it to you. Take the time to independently confirm what your are being told.

The best way to learn to recognize propaganda is of course through practice. Monitor independent news media, such as www.theRealNews.com, www.Reddit.com (excellent source once you have setup your preferences), www.ZeroHedge.com (a bit hard to follow financials, but worth the effort), and many more.

As time goes by you will begin to see a huge difference between the corporate media and independent media. You will realize you are being lied to by the corporate media.

How to Spot a Blown Capacitor on Your Motherboard

2010-03-21T12:44:00.000-07:00

Now that I know what it looks like it's easy to spot. A good capacitor has a nice, perfectly flat top; a blown capacitor has a top which pokes up a bit. Blown capacitor = Dead Motherboard.

In a nutshell: How to determine why your computer crashing

This is the process I went through to figure out what was wrong with my system. Luckily I previously downloaded a few tools to help:

1) The easiest thing was to run a memory-checker from a bootable CD. That ran for an hour of memory checking before I decided memory probably wasn't the problem. But as time went on the system was crashing more and more (this is generally the sign of a bad motherboard or power supply).

2) Is it the operating system? On my system I booted up Knoppix Live (Linux) via bootable CD. Within a few minutes the computer crashed. Guess Windows was not to blame.

3) Before booting Knoppix I had disconnected the hard drive (with system powered off of course). But even with Knoppix running of CD the problem was still there so I knew it was not hard-drive related.

4) My motherboard had on-board video, so I also tried removing my video card. It didn't help.

5) So now it must be power-supply or motherboard. Power-supply is more likely and easier to swap out for a test.

At at this point I took mine to the local computer store (they had offered to swap out the power and see if it worked). He took one look at the motherboard, saw the capacitor blown and knew it was the problem.

Dear Google: Stop Automatically Adding Contacts to My Gmail Account!

2010-03-21T12:05:00.000-07:00

Is it too much to ask Google, really? Just add a simple option to Gmail to allow people to turn off the feature that automatically puts people you email into your contact list.

The strange thing is, Google has been making it harder and harder to remove unwanted contacts. It used to be easy to see contact details all in one list, making it easy to select unwanted contacts and delete them. Now the contract list doesn't list details, you have to click each one separately.

For a while they even had a group that explicitly listed unwanted, I mean automatically added, contacts. That made it really easy to delete them. But they took that away too.

I'm sure others have been asking for the ability to turn off this stupid feature. Google can provide all kinds of neat features - but no, they cannot turn off this one. Why the hell not?

Why All Canadians Should Support Quebec Separation

2010-02-11T12:26:00.000-08:00

Imagine two elected representatives who are basically very similar persons. The difference between them is one of them lives in your community and is your neighbor, the other has never been to your community, has never heard of your community, has never and will never meet you and lives thousands of miles away.

Everything else being equal, which of these representatives might do a better job for you and your community? Which of them understands the needs of your community better? Which of these representatives is more accessible and accountable?

The answer is pretty obvious: the elected representative who lives in your community understands your community, cares about your community and is much more accessible and accountable than someone who is thousands of miles away.

Having our "decision makers" live in Ottawa is actually a very bad thing for Canadians. They have become too powerful, too unaccountable and too inaccessible. They do not know what is best for our communities and they don't seem to care. Unfortunately for us, the neighbors of our "elected" officials are all lobbyists.

A better system would be a federal government with less power and provinces with more power. The job of the federal government should be to do one thing only: coordinate the provinces towards the advancement of the quality of life of all Canadians. We want our representatives to be people who are close to our communities, not people who can't connect with us. The more central and powerful a government becomes, the more corrupt that government becomes.

It is impossible to make that dramatic change to our system in one step. A better strategy is to weaken the federal government in any and all (legal) ways possible. One way is to support the separation of Quebec. That goal is very obtainable considering how close the last referendum was. If Quebec were to separate the federal government would be severely weakened and that would be a victory for all Canadians. And if it encouraged more provinces and even states to separate it would become a victory for many more people.

Even a partial separation would be a step in the right direction. Other provinces could and should demand the same rights that Quebec has and may acquire. Then our provincial representatives would be the ones we could hold accountable, rather than someone from thousands of miles away who only visits to campaign.

Update
These are great times for Europe. With any luck the European Union will break up and dirty politicians won't be able to hide in Brussels anymore, they will have to stay in their home countries and face the people they are screwing over.

Reading List

2010-01-14T13:43:00.000-08:00

A list of my recent reads, all highly recommended. In no particular order:

A Short History of Nearly Everything - well, not nearly everything (not a word about art, technology...) but mostly about science. Informative and entertaining.

Increase Your Financial IQ - Robert takes a lot of flack these days for his seminars being too expense, but his books are very worthwhile. The title of this book is very good advice.

The Four Hour Work Week - a great book. Not about work, about not working and living life.

The Ultimate Depression Survival Guide - the author believes the US is heading into depression, and he provides some pretty compelling evidence.

The Party's Over - mostly about peak oil and what it means.

The World Without Us - interesting look at what we are doing to the planet and how it might, or might not, recover if we stopped.

Peak Everything - peak oil really does mean peak everything.

Plan B 3.0 Mobilizing to Save Civilization - the 21st century will be a fascinating read for future history buffs.

The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets - investing advice.

Crash Proof 2.0 - investing advice.

Power Down - what peak oil means (add global warming with a good helping of environmental degradation and you get the collapse of civilization).

Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller - peak oil and economics. An important work but reads like it was written by an economist (a bit dry).

Nuclear Power is NOT the Solution

2010-01-04T10:12:00.000-08:00

Thorium might be the solution, but uranium is not. Solution to what? The coming energy crisis, also known as Peak Oil. There is currently no substitute for oil for our energy-based economies. Some believe that uranium based nuclear power is a possible solution. It is not.

The nuclear waste from uranium-based nuclear power is extremely dangerous for thousands of years. Even after decades of production there is still not even one long-term storage facility in the world. It is beyond immoral for us to expect countless future generations to deal with our nuclear waste. We can't assume that some technology will come to the rescue. Even if a storage facility is built we don't know if it will last (it probably won't).

Leave our nuclear waste for future generations to clean up? Leave thousands of tons of poisons for future generations to deal with? How selfish. How evil.

Turn Alberta's Oil Sands Into Electricity

2009-12-31T10:42:00.000-08:00

It is truly as shame what is happening in northern Alberta. Oil companies turn oil sands into oil, but only by using huge amounts of energy and water in the process. It takes the equivalent energy-input of one barrel for every three produced. What they are doing has been accurately called environmental Armageddon.

Canadians don't own the oil - foreign oil companies do. Their motivation is to make the most profit for themselves and that requires being able to ship the oil out of Canada. Alberta's environment is not their problem.

If we want to get the most out of the oil sands a better use would be to produce electricity. If a steam-plant at the mill in Campbell River can turn saw dust into energy then it should be possible to do something similar with oil sands. It would no longer be necessary to extract the oil from the sand - just burn the sand directly to drive steam turbines to produce electricity. Electricity is much easier to transport than oil and the environmental damage would be lessened. There would still be emissions but they would be lower. The process would not require any water or natural gas inputs.

As long as the Canadian government keeps selling the oil sands to foreign oil companies don't expect the sands to be used for anything but oil, oil that will be shipped outside of Canada. Don't expect ordinary Canadians to benefit from this resource either - we will just be left with the mess when oil gets too expensive and the oil companies are long gone.

Conspiracy Theory

2009-12-22T10:04:00.000-08:00

Conspiracy theorists have a bad reputation, possibly deserved. But one thing that can't be said about conspiracy books/documentaries. They can't be called boring. The mainstream (corporate) media and politicians hate conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists. What are they afraid of exactly?

It turns out a large part of "conspiracy theory" books and documentaries are about history. The history covered is often easily verified, but often not the typical stuff from our high-school history books. It is a history that makes corporations and politicians nervous, because history shows just what they are capable of and what they are capable of is pretty scary.

Just one example from history and this is not a conspiracy theory. The documentary 100,000 Radiations examines how the American military enlisted help from the Israeli Health Ministry for radiation testing in 1951. Children were given 35,000 times the allowable dose of x-rays in the head. 6000 of them died. [Maybe they should change their name to the Israeli Death Ministry.] This is not the type of history the military, corporations and politicians want people talking about. If the story had come out back then no one would have believed it. It would have been called a conspiracy theory and forgotten.

Surely our politicians and corporate leaders can't be that bad. Robert Hare, author of "Without Conscience" estimates 1% of the population to be just that: without a conscience. These are people who fight dirty and politics (including corporate politics) is a high stakes game without rules. And without rules the people who fight the dirtiest rise to the top.

Another part of most "conspiracy theory" books/documentaries consists of recent history in the form of news clips. Often the news clips are of "important" people like George W. Bush. The clips are often lengthy, unedited, clear and often quite damning.

The last part of your typical "conspiracy theory" book or documentary are the points the author(s) are attempting to convey. Some of it may sound reasonable and may be, while other parts not so much. But boring they are not.

What about 9/11? Conspiracy theories abound. The 911 Commission stated that following the money trail was not important. The money trail was not important, excuse me!? It is only important if you want to know who was behind the attack. The 911 Commission also did not even address why World Trade Center 7 collapsed, yet no one can provide a reasonable explaination. After looking hard at the available evidence any reasonably intelligent person must come to the conclusion the government is hiding something, we just don't know what or why.

Some "conspiracy theory" documentaries worth checking out:
- Zeitgeist I and II
- The Money Masters (puts the financial meltdown and the governments response into perspective)
- Hijacking Humanity 2
- Empire of the Ring, Ring of Power (funny and fascinating at the same time)
- Oh Canada, Our Bought And Sold Out Land
- Five Ring Circus

Related stories
From Time magazine; the majority of people consider those "in charge" to be either corrupt or incompetent, or both. But let me clarify something. Someone doesn't make it as far and make as much money as these people have by being incompetent, they are not incompetent they are corrupt.

From the New York Times; Warren Buffett (currently 3rd richest person in the world), says there is a "class war" going on, it is the rich who are making war and they are winning.

Cancel Your Cable/Satellite

2009-12-21T10:30:00.000-08:00

A few years ago we decided to cancel our cable. We had lived in the States and had gotten used to paying $8 a month for basic cable. But we moved back to Canada and the cable companies here want $30 a month for basic cable. More than three times the cost and basic cable in Canada is not even as good as in the States.

We tried it for a while and finally asked ourselves: was the value we were getting worth it? Answer: no. But then we didn't upgrade, we simply canceled.

That turned out to be the right thing to do, but for a reason we did not anticipate. Sure we don't miss the commercials and most of what is on TV is a total waste of time anyway. But we are now much better informed that when we watched TV - thanks to the Internet.

After considerable effort searching the 'net for a good news source I came across Reddit.com and now it is one of my favorite sites of all time. Reddit provides pointers to other sites, providing a tremendous variety in points of view. Didn't know the last financial crisis was coming? Redditors knew, because they read the blogs that explained the problems and what was going to happen. It was just math.

After following the stories on Reddit the bullshit on the corporate, profit-oriented, elite-owned television news becomes clear. [Reading "Manufacturing Consent" helps.]

Television news almost does a good job. Almost. Intelligent people watch and think they are informed. The television news people want everyone to believe they are in the news business but they aren't, they are in the advertising business. Compare the corporate news to independent news (e.g. TheRealNews.com) and the difference becomes glaring. Independent news is honest and covers important news. Corporate news often omits or downplays important news. It is all about keeping the advertisers and the very political owners happy.

We don't miss our cable, the commericals, or the propaganda that comes with it. We got zip.ca instead (Canada's lame answer to NetFlix) so we can still watch movies (and any TV show worth watching comes out on DVD to). We have no plans to sign up for cable again - ever.

Why We Must Convert to Green Energy NOW

2009-12-09T11:08:00.000-08:00

I just started reading "Peak Everything" an excellent book about our possible future (or lack thereof).

To help a person understand the amount of energy in a gallon of gasoline the book suggests this exercise: try pushing your car a few feet. Now imagine the energy it would take to push your car about 20 miles (or the distance your car travels on a gallon of gas). That gallon of gas contains an amazing amount of energy.

Let's take things a bit further. Think of a 380 ton dump truck at a mine, imagine pushing it. Not likely. Without oil, all of our mines will become a tiny fraction as productive as they are now. People who think nuclear power will save us consider uranium must be mined and at present rates uranium will run out in about 10 years.

Any non-violent transition to an oil-independent future will require a huge amount of: energy. Windmills, solar panels, hydro-electric dams, wave-energy gizmos, geothermal: building them all on a large scale will require massive amounts of energy, metals and materials.

If we are smart we will build them now while we still have access to relatively cheap and amazingly-full-of-energy oil. If we wait until oil becomes scarce and expensive what to you think will happen?

Global Warming and The United States of Hypocrisy

2009-12-07T11:41:00.000-08:00

Conservative congressman, senators and individuals are saying "We are not going to cut our CO2 emissions unless everybody else does too".

The hypocrisy of such statements is absolutely unbelievable. Americans are famous for their lack of knowledge of history and this is no exception. China may today emit more CO2 than the US but a very large percentage of the CO2 already in the atmosphere came from the United States in the first place. Global Warming would not exist if it were not the United States and their overconsumption of resources, especially their overconsumption of oil. America caused the problem but like a spoiled rotten little brat they are too selfish and immature to take the blame.

If other countries in the world had any balls at all they should form an economic boycott of the United States until the US accepts their responsibility to cleanup the mess they have created.

Open Letter to AARP Members and Old People Everywhere

2009-12-01T15:31:00.000-08:00

Dear AARP Member,

If you look around the world you can see your legacy: pollution, overconsumption, overpopulation, greed, war, biodiversity collapse, religion, global warming, dumping your garbage in the oceans, the list goes on an on. As managers of the planet you should be ashamed of what you have achieved. Future generations, if there are any, will look back at your generations and curse your ignorance, your short-sightedness and your selfishness. Sure some of you are wonderful, knowledgeable people. But that is a tiny minority.

It isn't entirely your fault, selfishness is a built-in human trait. And the mass media, such as Fox News, has done an amazing job of keeping you ignorant while at the same time making you think you are smart (you aren't). But with the emergence of independent media (e.g. TheRealNews.com) you don't have any excuses anymore. Either stop voting or take the time to really understand the issues.

Please. Because currently you do more harm than good.

---

See also, a message for you Baby Boomers: The Shallowest Generation

Keyboard Shortcut: Shutdown Windows 7

2009-11-27T13:54:00.001-08:00

I've been looking for a keyboard shortcut for shutting down Windows 7. Most of what I have found involves installing extra software. No thanks.

The solution is a sequence of keys: Windows-key, Tab, Tab, Enter.

Not as slick as the keys to lock the screen Windows-key/l (that is a lowercase L) but it works.

A Cheaper Alternative Energy System

2009-10-12T16:30:00.001-07:00

The problem with alternative energy (in Canada in particular) is it is obscenely expensive. In Victoria one solar installer's website talks about a 25 year payback period. Twenty five years? Twenty five years!?!?

A big part of the cost of alternative energy is the storage for the electricity. But have you ever notice how fridge'n cold and windy Canadian winters are? The solution to the storage cost problem: don't store the energy as electricity store it as heat. Use the energy to generate heat, connect the system (probably a windmill) directly to a DC baseboard or ceramic type heater. The house becomes the storage. I have yet to run into a Canadian home owner who thought their house was too warm in winter.

This isn't a system to replace the home's main heat source but to supplement it at a reasonable cost. Notice it isn't necessary to try and integrate this system with the grid either, saving considerable cost and complication. It should be possible to build windmill system (blades will need to be at least 5 or 6 feet long, small mills are useless) for under a thousand dollars. It could cut heating costs by roughly $50 to $100 dollars a month for the cold part of the year (6 months), paying for itself in a few years.

Top 5 Things You Can Do For Your Future

2009-09-01T21:15:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't noticed, we are pretty much doomed - unless about 60% of us (give or take another 20%) wake up and take action. In no particular order:

Number 1 - Banks

Ideally keep as little money in the bank as possible. Choose smaller banks over larger ones. Use credit cards as little as possible. Banks have funded most of the wars of the last 200 years. International banks funded Hitler, without them World War II probably would not have happened, or at least would have been over much sooner. Update: UK Banks funding cluster-bomb industry.

"When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes... Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain." - Napoleon Bonaparte, 1815

Number 2 - The Military

Boycott the military in all its forms and anything to do with the military. But somebody needs to fight the bad guys right? For one thing, our leaders are the bad guys and giving them a powerful military is suicide. For another thing, our leaders (more accurately, our leaders bosses) created and supported all the "bad guys" of the last 100 years at least. Support of war in the media is the dirtiest propaganda there is, don't fall for it. War is a racket.

Number 3 - Global Corporations

A simple rule of thumb: the bigger the corporation, the greater the evil. As much as you can choose smaller companies over larger companies. From Exxon to Monsanto, big corporations are working 24x7 to destroy your quality of life.

Number 4 - The Mainstream Media

The mainstream media have perfected the art of propaganda: most of the population still does not see it as such. Reading books like Manufacturing Consent or Asper Nation will open your eyes. Support independent media and boycott the mainstream media.

Number 5 - Join Up

The truth is the problems of the world will not get solved without your involvement. Like a union, the world's managers (the super rich) meet regularly (but in private of course) to discuss how to run things. Their goals are to further enrich themselves, just as they have been doing for many years. No one bitches more about unions than the rich. The rich have unionized, they just having fancy names for it, like "summit" and "organization".

Is it time you started taking care of your own? Don't bother sending letters to politicians, they don't care about you (click here and scroll down to "Who Owns You"). Look for causes you believe in and get involved. Join groups like TheZeitgeistMovement.com, Green Peace, etc. Forget groups like the World Wildlife Fund - they fall to recognize they are losing the battle and are too closely tied to the corrupt elite.

All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.

Is the Canadian Federal Government Completely Corrupt?

2009-08-10T14:46:00.000-07:00

Perhaps a more accurate title for this article would be "How Corrupt is the Canadian Federal Government?" It is not an easy question to answer, given the tight control of the mainstream media that the elite exercise. But consider just two pieces of information:

1) The Canadian government claimed that our banks have done well during the recent economic crisis; yet the Canadian government has still given the banks huge somes of money.

2) Despite the crisis and the harm it has caused to the average Canadian, the government has resisted increasing unemployment benefits (which barely cover the food bill for a small family, let alone rent or a mortgage payment). And this even after it was found past governments have been illegally raiding the unemployment fund for other purposes.

These two facts make it pretty clear: ordinary people (referred to correctly as "the sheep" by the elites) do not count, but banks (who provide our debt-based money) do. So does that mean the government is heartless and corrupt, or just heartless and incompetent?

They love to play it stupid but don't be fooled. They are as clever as the fox. When a government spends money it's funny (sad?) how often that money ends up in the hands of businesses with the right connections. Almost every politician has a foreign private bank account - great for kickbacks.

Is giving banks all the money really so bad? After all, then they can lend out more money. If you have seen the documentary Money As Debt then you know the harm that our debt-based money is doing to us all (except for bank owners, the elites, who are doing just fine thank you).

The Death of the Oceans

2009-05-23T09:11:00.000-07:00

The BC Royal Museum has an exhibit that notes the population of cod off the BC coast is now about 3% of what it was 100 years ago. To put that in perspective, imagine a 97% pay cut, or imagine getting 3% on an exam you thought you'd aced. It is a shocking drop in population. The population of large ocean fish, such as tuna, is estimated to have fallen 90% in the last 50 years. Fish catch in the UK is now 7% of what it was in 1920. As you look around the oceans, seas and rivers you see the same story over and over again: collapse.

Want to know the real reason to buy organic? Fertilizers from non-organic farming ends up in rivers turning estuaries into dead zones, over 300 of them world wide and some more than 100 miles across. It even happened in Esquimalt Lagoon, our friendly neighbourhood fish were dying because of a lack of oxygen in the water caused indirectly and in part by lawn fertilizer runoff. The ocean is absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere and becoming more acidic. This is expected to cause serious problems for all shellfish such as crab, shrimp, lobster and coral reefs.

What should we do? Large parts of the oceans need to become protected as fish sanctuaries. We need to stop using fertilizers that pollute the ocean. The fishing fleets out there are much too large and need to be cut, one million fishing boats is too many. We need to stop fishing for animal feed purposes. Bottom trawling, a practice still employed thanks to a Canadian veto against banning it, should be banned. Only fish mature enough to have had the chance to breed should be allowed to be caught: some species are legally caught before they even reach breeding age. Fishing must be done sustainability or we risk losing it all. The Grand Banks off Newfoundland were closed 15 years ago and remain so because there has been no recovery.

Can saving the oceans and the fish actually be achieved? No it cannot, not without your involvement. I joined and support Greenpeace. What you do is up to you, but do something.

The Guardian: Tuna Industry Slaughters Marine Life

BBC: Worlds ocean’s in shocking decline

The Economist: So long, and thanks for all the fish

Pacific Ocean Contains an Estimated 100 Million Tons of Garbage

Montery Bay Aquarium: How to buy fish

New Scientist: Meadows of the sea in 'shocking' decline

Salmon.com: Overfishing continues at a shocking rate, as countries break one environmental promise after another

Daily Telegraph: Full horror of Japanese whaling exposed

BBC: Whale-watching more lucrative than whale hunting

The Times: New research has shown that repeated trawling has turned much of the sea bed around the UK into a barren wasteland

Science Daily: Caribbean Coral Reefs Flattened

Discovery: Giant jellyfish are taking over parts of the world's oceans due to overfishing

National Geographic: Seafood May Be Gone by 2048, Study Says

Tree Hugger: 85% of World's Oyster Reefs Already Gone, Many Functionally Extinct

The Guardian: Documents prove Trafigura ship dumped toxic waste in Ivory Coast; more than 30,000 people were affected by the poisonous cocktail

Science Blogs: US Army secretly dumped 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard agents into the sea, along with 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, land mines and rockets and more than 500 tons of radioactive waste

The Guardian: Eels in Crisis After 95% Decline in Last 25 Years

The Guardian: Imagine a world without seafood for supper. It's nearer than you think

The Guardian: Scientists call for 20-year fishing ban in a third of the world's oceans

The Telegraph: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is twice the size of France

Tree Hugger: Image of the sea floor in the Western Baltic covered with dead or dying crabs, fish and clams killed by oxygen depletion - Climate Change Causing Ocean Dead Zones to Grow

Scientific American: Overfishing to wipe out bluefin tuna

WWF: Nearly half of the world's recorded fish catch is unused, wasted or not accounted for

Blue Living: By 2050, our planet’s oceans could be too acidic for corals to reproduce or rebuild, and the $16 trillion ocean-based economy is in danger of being wiped out if things continue as they are.

Times Herald: U.S. factory farms generated 1.4 billion tons of animal waste polluting waterways more than all other industrial sources

The Guardian: How the world's oceans are running out of fish

Bottom Trawling is so destructive it can be seen from space

World's Oceans Dying

BBC: Nuclear Waste Being Dumped in the Ocean

Ocean Acidification: What's Happening To Our Oceans And Why

NASA: Phytoplankton, The Basis Of The Ocean's Food Chain In Serious Decline

The Guardian: Fish Disappearing From World's Oceans

The March Of The Penguins, Toward Extinction

Discover: World's Largest Dump: The Ocean

The Gulf Of Mexico 8000 Square Mile Dead Zone

Pacific Salmon Population Collapsing

Discover: North American Fish Under Threat

CNN: 100 Million Sharks Killed Every Year

The True Cost of Shrimp

New York Times: Collapse Of Salmon Stocks Endangers Pacific Fishery

Washington Post: Wild Salmon Endangered

Der Spiegel: Globalization Is Destroying The World's Oceans

New Scientist: Drift Nets Could Spell Extinction for Endangered Species

Reuters: Coastal Dead Zones Spreading

Last Chance for the Oceans?

Earth First: UK Fishermen Dump Catch To Avoid Quotas

Anchovy and Sardine Populations Decimated to Feed Pigs

Good and Bad Choices when Buying Fish

Rate of Decline of Fresh Water Fish Is "Staggering"

The Last Days Of Fish

Discovery: Human Acoustic 'Smog' Killing Whales

National Geographic: Over Fishing Puts Birds At Risk

Reuters: One-third of World Fish Catch Used for Animal Feed

Fertilizers an Increasing Threat to Sea Life

Nature: Marine Dead Zones set to Expand Rapidly

Yahoo News: Australia to Japan: You Don't Need to Kill 1000+ Whales to "Study" Them

WWF: Europe Sits on Damning Bluefin Tuna Report

New Scientist: Last Great US Fishery in Danger of Collapse

Smithsonian: Our Imperiled Oceans

And Finally, Some Good News

Planet Save: Brazil Establishes Whale Sanctuary

The Guardian: Australia Plans World’s Largest Marine Park

Plan B 3.0 Mobilizing to Save Civilization

2009-04-30T20:08:00.000-07:00

by Lester Brown

The introduction to the book is below. Jared Diamond, a leading expert on civilizations and why they collapse gives ours a 50/50 change of making it past the next 20 years.

Entering a New World

During the late summer of 2007, the news of accelerating ice melting arrived at a frenetic pace. In early September, the Guardian in London reported, "The Arctic ice cap has collapsed at an unprecedented rate this summer, and levels of sea ice in the region now stand at a record low." Experts were "stunned" by the loss of ice, as an area almost twice the size of Britain disappeared in a single week.1

Mark Serreze, a veteran Arctic specialist with the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, said: "It's amazing. If you asked me a couple of years ago when the Arctic could lose all of its ice, then I would have said 2100, or 2070 maybe. But now I think that 2030 is a reasonable estimate.2

A few days later, the Guardian, reporting from a symposium in Ilulissat, Greenland, said that the Greenland ice cap is melting so fast that it is triggering minor earthquakes as pieces of ice weighing several billion tons each break off the ice sheet and slide into the sea. Robert Corell, chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, reported that "we have seen a massive acceleration of the speed with which these glaciers are moving into the sea. The ice is moving at 2 meters an hour on a front 5 kilometers [3 miles] long and 1,500 meters deep.3

Corell said that when flying over the Ilulissat glacier he had "seen gigantic holes (moulins) in it through which swirling masses of melt water were falling." This melt water lubricates the surface between the glacier and the land below, causing the glacier to flow faster into the sea. Veli Kallio, a Finnish scientist who had been analyzing the earthquakes, said they were new to northwest Greenland and showed the potential for the entire ice sheet to break up and collapse.4

Corell noted that the projected rise in sea level during this century of 18-59 centimeters (7-23 inches) by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was based on data that were two years old. He said that some scientists now believe the increase could be as much as 2 meters.5

In late August, a Reuters story began with "a thaw of Antarctic ice is outpacing predictions by the U.N. climate panel and could in the worst case drive up world sea levels by 2 meters (6 feet) by 2100, a leading expert said." Chris Rapley, head of the British Antarctic Survey said, "The ice is moving faster both in Greenland and in the Antarctic than the glaciologists had believed would happen.6

Several months earlier, scientists had reported that the Gan-gotri glacier, the principal glacier that feeds the Ganges River, is melting at an accelerating rate and could disappear entirely in a matter of decades. The Ganges would become a seasonal river, flowing only during the monsoon season.7

Glaciers on the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau that feed the Yellow and Yangtze rivers are melting at 7 percent a year. Yao Tandong, one of China's leading glaciologists, believes that at this rate, two thirds of these glaciers could disappear by 2060.8

These glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau feed all the major rivers of Asia, including the Indus, Ganges, Mekong, Yangtze, and Yellow Rivers. It is the water from these rivers that irrigates the rice and wheat fields in the region.

We are crossing natural thresholds that we cannot see and violating deadlines that we do not recognize. Nature is the time keeper, but we cannot see the clock. Among the other environmental trends undermining our future are shrinking forests, expanding deserts, falling water tables, collapsing fisheries, disappearing species, and rising temperatures. The temperature increases bring crop-withering heat waves, more-destructive storms, more-intense droughts, more forest fires, and, of course, ice melting.

We can see from ice melting alone that our civilization is in trouble. If the Greenland ice sheet melts, sea level rises 7 meters (23 feet). If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet breaks up, and many scientists think it could go before Greenland, it adds another 5 meters to the increase, for a total of 12 meters (39 feet).9

The International Institute for Environment and Development has studied the likely effects of a 10-meter (33-foot) rise. Their 2007 study projected more than 600 million refugees from rising seas. More people than currently live in the United States and Western Europe combined would be forced to migrate inland to escape the rising waters.10

Now that we are belatedly recognizing these trends and the need to reverse them, time is running out. We are in a race between tipping points in the earth's natural systems and those in the world's political systems. Which will tip first? Will we reach the point where the melting of the Greenland ice sheet is irreversible? Or will we decide to phase out coal-fired power plants fast enough to avoid this wholesale ice melting?

A rise in temperature to the point where the earth's ice sheets and glaciers melt is only one of many environmental tipping points needing our attention. While the earth's temperature is rising, water tables are falling on every continent. Here the challenge is to raise water use efficiency and stabilize population before water shortages become life-threatening.11

Population growth, which contributes to all the problems discussed here, has its own tipping point. Scores of countries have developed enough economically to sharply reduce mortality but not yet enough to reduce fertility. As a result, they are caught in the demographic trap a situation where rapid population growth begets poverty and poverty begets rapid population growth. In this situation, countries eventually tip one way or the other. They either break out of the cycle or they break down.

Over the last few decades, the world has accumulated a growing number of unresolved problems, including those just mentioned. As the stresses from these unresolved problems accumulate, weaker governments are beginning to break down, leading to what are now commonly referred to as failing states.

Failing states are an early sign of a failing civilization. The countries at the top of the lengthening list of failing states are not particularly surprising. They include, for example, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Chad, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Haiti. And the list grows longer each year, raising a disturbing question: How many failing states will it take before civilization itself fails? No one knows the answer, but it is a question we must ask.12

A Massive Market Failure

When Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank, released his ground-breaking study in late 2006 on the future costs of climate change, he talked about a massive market failure. He was referring to the failure of the market to incorporate the climate change costs of burning fossil fuels. The costs, he said, would be measured in the trillions of dollars. The difference between the market prices for fossil fuels and the prices that also incorporate their environmental costs to society are huge.13

The roots of our current dilemma lie in the enormous growth of the human enterprise over the last century. Since 1900, the world economy has expanded 20-fold and world population has increased fourfold. Although there were places in 1900 where local demand exceeded the capacity of natural systems, this was not a global issue. There was some deforestation, but overpumping of water was virtually unheard of, overfishing was rare, and carbon emissions were so low that there was no serious effect on climate. The indirect costs of these early excesses were negligible.14

Now with the economy as large as it is, the indirect costs of burning coal the costs of air pollution, acid rain, devastated ecosystems, and climate change can exceed the direct costs, those of mining the coal and transporting it to the power plant. As a result of neglecting to account for these indirect costs, the market is undervaluing many goods and services, creating economic distortions.15

As economic decisionmakers whether consumers, corporate planners, government policymakers, or investment bankers we all depend on the market for information to guide us. In order for markets to work and economic actors to make sound decisions, the markets must give us good information, including the full cost of the products we buy. But the market is giving us bad information, and as a result we are making bad decisions so bad that they are threatening civilization.

The market is in many ways an incredible institution. It allocates resources with an efficiency that no central planning body can match and it easily balances supply and demand. The market has some fundamental weaknesses, however. It does not incorporate into prices the indirect costs of producing goods. It does not value some services properly. And it does not respect the sustainable yield thresholds of natural systems. It also favors the near term over the long term, showing little concern for future generations.

One of the best examples of this massive market failure can be seen in the United States, where the gasoline pump price in mid-2007 was $3 per gallon. But this price reflects only the cost of discovering the oil, pumping it to the surface, refining it into gasoline, and delivering the gas to service stations. It overlooks the costs of climate change as well as the costs of tax subsidies to the oil industry (such as the oil depletion allowance), the burgeoning military costs of protecting access to oil in the politically unstable Middle East, and the health care costs for treating respiratory illnesses from breathing polluted air.16

Based on a study by the International Center for Technology Assessment, these costs now total nearly $12 per gallon ($3.17 per liter) of gasoline burned in the United States. If these were added to the $3 cost of the gasoline itself, motorists would pay $15 a gallon for gas at the pump. In reality, burning gasoline is very costly, but the market tells us it is cheap, thus grossly distorting the structure of the economy. The challenge facing governments is to restructure tax systems by systematically incorporating indirect costs as a tax to make sure the price of products reflects their full costs to society and by offsetting this with a reduction in income taxes.17

Another market distortion became abundantly clear in the summer of 1998 when China's Yangtze River valley, home to nearly 400 million people, was wracked by some of the worst flooding in history. The resulting damages of $30 billion exceeded the value of the country's annual rice harvest.18

After several weeks of flooding, the government in Beijing announced a ban on tree cutting in the Yangtze River basin. It justified this by noting that trees standing are worth three times as much as trees cut: the flood control services provided by forests were far more valuable than the lumber in the trees. In effect, the market price was off by a factor of three.19

This situation has occasional parallels in the commercial world. In the late 1990s Enron, a Texas-based energy trading corporation, may have appeared on the cover of more business magazines than any other U.S. company. It was spectacularly successful. The darling of Wall Street, it was the seventh most valuable corporation in the United States in early 2001. Unfortunately, when independent auditors began looking closely at Enron in late 2001 they discovered that the company had been leaving certain costs off the books. When these were included, Enron was worthless. Its stock, which had traded as high as $90 a share, was suddenly trading for pennies a share. Enron was bankrupt. The collapse was complete. It no longer exists.20

We are doing today exactly what Enron did. We are leaving costs off the books, but on a far larger scale. We focus on key economic indicators like economic growth and the increase in international trade and investment, and the situation looks good. But if we incorporate all the indirect costs that the market omits when setting prices, a very different picture emerges. If we persist in leaving these costs off the books, we will face the same fate as Enron.

Today, more than ever before, we need political leaders who can see the big picture, who understand the relationship between the economy and its environmental support systems. And since the principal advisors to government are economists, we need economists who can think like ecologists. Unfortunately they are rare. Ray Anderson, founder and chairman of Atlanta-based Interface, a leading world manufacturer of industrial carpet, is especially critical of economics as it is taught in many universities: "We continue to teach economics students to trust the 'invisible hand' of the market, when the invisible hand is clearly blind to the externalities and treats massive subsidies, such as a war to protect oil for the oil companies, as if the subsidies were deserved. Can we really trust a blind invisible hand to allocate resources rationally?21

Environment and Civilization

To understand our current environmental dilemma, it helps to look at earlier civilizations that also got into environmental trouble. Our early twenty-first century civilization is not the first to face the prospect of environmentally induced economic decline. The question is how we will respond.

As Jared Diamond points out in his book Collapse, some of the early societies that were in environmental trouble were able to change their ways in time to avoid decline and collapse. Six centuries ago, for example, Icelanders realized that overgrazing on their grass-covered highlands was leading to extensive soil loss from the inherently thin soils of the region. Rather than lose the grasslands and face economic decline, farmers joined together to determine how many sheep the highlands could sustain and then allocated quotas among themselves, thus preserving their grasslands. The Icelanders understood the consequences of overgrazing and reduced their sheep numbers to a level that could be sustained. Their wool production and woolen goods industry continue to thrive today.22

Not all societies have fared as well as the Icelanders. The early Sumerian civilization of the fourth millennium BC had advanced far beyond any that had existed before. Its carefully engineered irrigation system gave rise to a highly productive agriculture, one that enabled farmers to produce a food surplus, supporting formation of the first cities. Managing Sumer's irrigation system required a sophisticated social organization. The Sumerians had the first cities and the first written language, the cuneiform script.23

By any measure it was an extraordinary civilization, but there was an environmental flaw in the design of its irrigation system, one that would eventually undermine its food supply. The water that backed up behind dams built across the Euphrates was diverted onto the land through a network of gravity-fed canals. As with most irrigation systems, some irrigation water percolated downward. In this region, where underground drainage was weak, this slowly raised the water table. As the water climbed to within inches of the surface, it began to evaporate into the atmosphere, leaving behind salt. Over time, the accumulation of salt on the soil surface lowered the land's productivity.24

As salt accumulated and wheat yields declined, the Sumeri-ans shifted to barley, a more salt-tolerant plant. This postponed Sumer's decline, but it was treating the symptoms, not the cause, of their falling crop yields. As salt concentrations continued to build, the yields of barley eventually declined also. The resultant shrinkage of the food supply undermined this once-great civilization. As land productivity declined, so did the civilization.25

Archeologist Robert McC. Adams has studied the site of ancient Sumer on the central floodplain of the Euphrates River, an empty, desolate area now outside the frontiers of cultivation. He describes how the "tangled dunes, long disused canal levees, and the rubble-strewn mounds of former settlement contribute only low, featureless relief. Vegetation is sparse, and in many areas it is almost wholly absent....Yet at one time, here lay the core, the heartland, the oldest urban, literate civilization in the world.26

The New World counterpart to Sumer is the Mayan civilization that developed in the lowlands of what is now Guatemala. It flourished from AD 250 until its collapse around AD 900. Like the Sumerians, the Mayans had developed a sophisticated, highly productive agriculture, this one based on raised plots of earth surrounded by canals that supplied water.27

As with Sumer, the Mayan demise was apparently linked to a failing food supply. For this New World civilization, it was deforestation and soil erosion that undermined agriculture. Changes in climate may also have played a role. Food shortages apparently triggered civil conflict among the various Mayan cities as they competed for something to eat. Today this region is covered by jungle, reclaimed by nature.28

The Icelanders crossed a political tipping point that enabled them to come together and limit grazing before grassland deterioration .reached the point of no return. The Sumerians and Mayans failed to do so. Time ran out.

Today, our successes and problems flow from the extraordinary growth in the world economy over the last century. The economy's annual growth, once measured in billions of dollars, is now measured in the trillions. Indeed, just the growth in the output of goods and services in 2007 exceeded the total output of the world economy in 1900.29

While the economy is growing exponentially, the earth's natural capacities, such as its ability to supply fresh water, forest products, and seafood, have not increased. A team of scientists led by Mathis Wackernagel concluded in a 2002 study published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences that humanity's collective demands first surpassed the earth's regenerative capacity around 1980. Today, global demands on natural systems exceed their sustainable yield capacity by an estimated 25 percent. This means we are meeting current demands by consuming the earth's natural assets, setting the stage for decline and collapse.

In our modern high-tech civilization, it is easy to forget that the economy, indeed our existence, is wholly dependent on the earth's natural systems and resources. We depend, for example, on the earth's climate system for an environment hospitable to agriculture, on the hydrological cycle to provide us with fresh water, and on long-term geological processes to convert rocks into the soil that has made the earth such a biologically productive planet.

There are now so many of us placing such heavy demands on the earth that we are overwhelming its natural capacities to meet our needs. The earth's forests are shrinking. Each year overgrazing converts vast areas of grassland into desert. The pumping of underground water exceeds natural recharge in countries containing half the world's people, leaving many without adequate water as their wells go dry.31

Each of us depends on the products and services provided by the earth's ecosystems, ranging from forest to wetlands, from coral reefs to grasslands. Among the services these ecosystems provide are water purification, pollination, carbon sequestration, flood control, and soil conservation. A four-year study of the world's ecosystems by 1,360 scientists, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, reported that 15 of 24 primary ecosystem services are being degraded or pushed beyond their limits. For example, three quarters of oceanic fisheries, a major source of protein in the human diet, are being fished at or beyond their limits, and many are headed toward collapse.32

Tropical rainforests are another ecosystem under severe stress, including the vast Amazon rainforest. Thus far roughly 20 percent of the rainforest has been cleared either for cattle ranching or soybean farming. Another 22 percent has been weakened by logging and road building, letting sunlight reach the forest floor, drying it out, and turning it into kindling. When it reaches this point, the rainforest loses its resistance to fire and begins to burn when ignited by lightning strikes.33

Scientists believe that if half the Amazon is cleared or weakened, this may be the tipping point, the threshold beyond which the rainforest cannot be saved. We will have crossed the tipping point, with consequences that will reverberate around the world. Amazonian ecologist Philip Fearnside says "with every tree that falls, we increase the probability that the tipping point will arrive." Geoffrey Lean, summarizing the findings of a symposium on the Amazon in the Independent, says that the alternatives to a rainforest in the Amazon would be "dry savannah at best, desert at worst.34

Daniel Nepstad, an Amazon-based senior scientist from the Woods Hole Research Center, sees a future of "megafires" sweeping through the drying jungle. He notes that the carbon stored in the Amazon's trees equals roughly 15 years of human-induced carbon emissions in the atmosphere. If we reach this tipping point we will have triggered yet another climate feedback, taken another step that could help seal our fate as a civilization.35

The excessive pressures on a given resource typically begin in a few countries and then slowly spread to others. Nigeria and the Philippines, once net exporters of forest products, are now importers. Thailand, now largely deforested, has banned logging. So has China, which is turning to Siberia and to the few remaining forested countries in Southeast Asia, such as Myan-mar and Papua New Guinea, for the logs it needs.36

A similar situation exists with fisheries. At first only a few fisheries were under excessive pressure, mostly in the North Sea, off the east coast of North America, and off the coast of East Asia. Now with fishing fleets replete with factory processing ships and modern technologies, overfishing is the rule, not the exception. In the absence of intervention, the decline in scores of fisheries will culminate in collapse. Some, such as the cod fishery off the coast of Newfoundland and the Atlantic tuna fishery, may never recover. The Chilean sea bass fishery in the Southern Ocean and the sturgeon fishery in the Caspian Sea may also be approaching the point of no return.37

As wells go dry, as grasslands are converted into desert, and as soils erode, people are forced to migrate elsewhere, either within their country or across national boundaries. As the earth's natural capacities at the local level are exceeded, the declining economic possibilities generate a flow of environmental refugees.

While the continuing erosion of the economy's environmental support systems has convinced environmentalists, natural scientists, and others of the need to restructure the global economy, many others are not yet convinced. What is happening in China may change their minds.

China: Why the Existing Economic Model Will Fail

For almost as long as I can remember we have been saying that the United States, with 5 percent of the world's people, consumes a third or more of the earth's resources. That was true. It is no longer true. Today China consumes more basic resources than the United States does.38

Among the key commodities such as grain, meat, oil, coal, and steel, China consumes more of each than the United States except for oil, where the United States still has a wide (though narrowing) lead. China uses a third more grain than the United States. Its meat consumption is nearly double that of the United States. It uses three times as much steel.39

These numbers reflect national consumption, but what would happen if consumption per person in China were to catch up to that of the United States? If we assume that China's economy slows from the 10 percent annual growth of recent years to 8 percent, then in 2030 income per person in China will reach the level it is in the United States today.40

If we also assume that the Chinese will spend their income more or less as Americans do today, then we can translate their income into consumption. If, for example, each person in China consumes paper at the current American rate, then in 2030 China's 1.46 billion people will need twice as much paper as is produced worldwide today. There go the world's forests.41

If we assume that in 2030 there are three cars for every four people in China, as there now are in the United States, China will have 1.1 billion cars. The world currently has 860 million cars. To provide the needed roads, highways, and parking lots, China would have to pave an area comparable to what it now plants in rice.42

By 2030 China would need 98 million barrels of oil a day. The world is currently producing 85 million barrels a day and may never produce much more than that. There go the world's oil reserves.43

What China is teaching us is that the western economic model the fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy is not going to work for China. If it does not work for China, it will not work for India, which by 2030 may have an even larger population than China. Nor will it work for the other 3 billion people in developing countries who are also dreaming the "American dream." And in an increasingly integrated global economy, where we all depend on the same grain, oil, and steel, the western economic model will no longer work for the industrial countries either.44

The overriding challenge for our generation is to build a new economy one that is powered largely by renewable sources of energy, that has a much more diversified transport system, and that reuses and recycles everything. We have the technology to build this new economy, an economy that will allow us to sustain economic progress. Can we build it fast enough to avoid a breakdown of social systems?

Mounting Stresses, Failing States

States fail when national governments lose control of part or all of their territory and can no longer ensure the personal security of their people. When governments lose their monopoly on power, law and order begin to disintegrate. When they can no longer provide basic services such as education, health care, and food security, they lose their legitimacy. A government in this position may no longer be able to collect enough revenue to finance effective governance. Societies can become so fragmented that they lack the cohesion to make decisions.

Failing states often degenerate into civil war. As warring groups vie for power, they become a threat to neighboring countries when internal conflict spills over national borders. They provide possible training grounds for international terrorist groups, as in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, or they become sources of drugs, as in Myanmar (formerly Burma) or Afghanistan (with the latter accounting for 92 percent of the world's opium supply in 2006). Because they lack functioning health care services, weakened states can become a source of infectious disease, as Nigeria has for polio.45

In failed states, where governments are no longer in control, power is typically assumed by other elements in society. In Afghanistan, it is local warlords; in Somalia, tribal chiefs; in Haiti, street gangs. New governing groups may also include drug rings or organized crime.

In the past, governments have been concerned by the concentration of too much power in one state, as in Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union. But today it is failing states that provide the greatest threat to global order and stability. As Foreign Policy magazine notes, "World leaders once worried about who was amassing power; now they worry about the absence of it.46

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency estimates the number of failing states at 20 or so. The British government's international development arm has identified 46 so-called fragile states. The World Bank focuses its attention on 35 low-income countries under stress, which it also describes as fragile states.47

The most systematic ongoing effort to analyze failed and failing states is one undertaken jointly by the Fund for Peace and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which is updated annually and published in each July/August issue of Foreign Policy. This invaluable service, which draws on thousands of information sources worldwide, is rich with insights into the changes that are under way in the world and, in a broad sense, where the world is heading.48

In this analysis, countries are graded on 12 social, economic, political, and military indicators, with scores that range from 1 to 10. Scores for each indicator are aggregated into a single country indicator: the Failed States Index. A score of 120, the maximum, means that a society is failing totally by every measure.49

In the first Foreign Policy listing, based on data for 2004 and published in 2005, 7 countries had scores of 100 or more. In 2005 this increased to 9 countries, and in 2006 it was 12 nearly doubling in two years. This short trend is far from definitive, but both the rise in country scores near the top and the near doubling of countries with scores of 100 or higher suggest that state failure is increasing.50

Most of the top 10 countries in 2006 (see Table 1-1) were near the top of the list in the two preceding years. In reviewing the data for 2006, Foreign Policy noted that "few encouraging signs emerged in 2006 to suggest the world is on a path to greater peace and stability." The one bright spot was the improvement in Liberia, which moved from ninth in 2004, on the verge of state failure, to twenty-seventh in 2006. When Liberia, after years of turmoil, held an election that brought Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf to the presidency in late 2005, it restored both a measure of political stability and hope for the country's future.51

Ranking on the Failed States Index is closely linked with key demographic and environmental indicators. Of the top 20 failing states, 17 have rapid rates of population growth, many of them expanding at close to 3 percent a year or 20-fold per century. In 5 of these 17 countries, women have an average of nearly seven children each. Viewed in terms of the demographic transition, these 17 countries are caught in the demographic trap. They have progressed far enough economically to reduce mortality but not far enough to create the economic and social conditions for fertility decline.52

In all but 6 of the top 20 failing states, at least 40 percent of the population is under 15. Such a large share of young people often signals future political instability. Young men, lacking employment opportunities, often become disaffected, making them ready recruits for insurgency movements.53

Not surprisingly, there is also often a link between the degree of state failure and the destruction of environmental support systems. In a number of countries on the list including Sudan, Somalia, and Haiti deforestation, grassland deterioration, and soil erosion are widespread. The countries with fast-growing populations are also facing a steady shrinkage of both cropland and water per person. After a point, as rapid population growth, deteriorating environmental support systems, and poverty reinforce each other, the resulting instability makes it difficult to attract investment from abroad. Even public assistance programs from donor countries are often phased out as the security breakdown threatens the lives of aid workers, forcing their withdrawal.

State failure is not neatly contained by national boundaries. It often spreads to neighboring countries, much as the genocide in Rwanda spilled over into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, eventually drawing several other countries into the war that claimed some 3.9 million lives in the Congo over several years. More recently, the killings in Darfur have spread into Chad.54

As the number of failing states grows, dealing with various international crises becomes more difficult. Actions that may be relatively simple in a healthy world order of functioning nation states, such as controlling the spread of infectious diseases, could become difficult or impossible in a world with many disintegrating states. Even maintaining international flows of raw materials could become a challenge. At some point, spreading political instability could disrupt global economic progress, suggesting that we need to address the causes of state failure with a heightened sense of urgency.

A Civilizational Tipping Point

In recent years there has been a growing concern over thresholds or tipping points in nature. For example, scientists worry about when the shrinking population of an endangered species will fall to a point from which it cannot recover. Marine biologists are concerned about the point where overfishing will trigger the collapse of a fishery.

We know there were social tipping points in earlier civilizations, points at which they were overwhelmed by the forces threatening them. For instance, at some point the irrigation-related salt buildup in their soil overwhelmed the capacity of the Sumerians to deal with it. With the Mayans, there came a time when the effects of cutting too many trees and the associated loss of topsoil were simply more than they could manage.55

The social tipping points that lead to decline and collapse when societies are overwhelmed by a single threat or by simultaneous multiple threats are not always easily anticipated. As a general matter, more economically advanced countries can deal with new threats more effectively than developing countries can. For example, while governments of industrial countries have been able to hold HIV infection rates among adults under 1 percent, many developing-country governments have failed to do so and are now struggling with much higher infection rates. This is most evident in some southern African countries, where up to 20 percent or more of adults are infected.56

A similar situation exists with population growth. While populations in nearly all industrial countries except the United States have stopped growing, rapid growth continues in nearly all the countries of Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent. Nearly all of the 70 million people being added to world population each year are born in countries where natural support systems are already deteriorating in the face of excessive population pressure, in the countries least able to support them. In these countries, the risk of state failure is growing.57

Some issues seem to exceed even the management skills of the more advanced countries, however. When countries first detected falling underground water tables, it was logical to expect that governments in affected countries would quickly raise water use efficiency and stabilize population in order to stabilize aquifers. Unfortunately, not one country industrial or developing has done so. Two failing states where over-pumping and security-threatening water shortages loom large are Pakistan and Yemen.

Although the need to cut carbon emissions has been evident for some time, not one country industrial or developing has succeeded in becoming carbon-neutral. Thus far this has proved too difficult politically for even the most technologically advanced societies. Could rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere prove to be as unmanageable for our early twenty-first century civilization as rising salt levels in the soil were for the Sumerians in 4000 BC?

Another potentially severe stress on governments is the coming decline in oil production. Although world oil production has exceeded new oil discoveries by a wide margin for more than 20 years, only Sweden and Iceland actually have anything that remotely resembles a plan to effectively cope with a shrinking supply of oil.58

This is not an exhaustive inventory of unresolved problems, but it does give a sense of how their number is growing as we fail to solve existing problems even as new ones are being added to the list. The risk is that these accumulating problems and their consequences will overwhelm more and more governments, leading to widespread state failure and eventually the failure of civilization.

Analytically, the challenge is to assess the effects of mounting stresses on the global system. These stresses are perhaps most evident in their effect on food security, which was the weak point of many earlier civilizations that collapsed. Several converging trends are making it difficult for the world's farmers to keep up with the growth in food demand. Prominent among these are falling water tables, the growing conversion of cropland to nonfarm uses, and more extreme climate events, including crop-withering heat waves, droughts, and floods. As a result, world grain production has fallen short of consumption in seven of the last eight years, dropping world grain stocks to their lowest level in 34 years. Corn prices nearly doubled and wheat prices nearly tripled between late 2005 and late 2007.59

Just when it seemed that things could not get much worse, the United States, the world's breadbasket, is planning to double the share of its grain harvest going to fuel ethanol from 16 percent of the 2006 crop to 30 percent or so of the 2008 crop. With this enormous growth in the U.S. capacity to convert grain into fuel, the world price of grain is moving up toward its oil-equivalent value. This ill-conceived U.S. effort to reduce its oil insecurity has helped drive world grain prices to all-time highs, creating unprecedented world food insecurity. Under this stress, still more states may fail.60

State failure can come quickly and often unexpectedly. In looking back at earlier civilizations, it was often a single environmental trend that led to their demise. But countries today are facing several simultaneously, some of which reinforce each other. The earlier civilizations such as the Sumerians and Mayans were often local, rising and falling in isolation from the rest of the world. In contrast, we will either mobilize together to save our global civilization, or we will all be potential victims of its disintegration.

Plan B: A Plan of Hope

Plan B is shaped by what is needed to save civilization, not by what may currently be considered politically feasible. Plan B does not fit within a particular discipline, sector, or set of assumptions.

Implementing Plan B means undertaking several actions simultaneously, including eradicating poverty, stabilizing population, and restoring the earth's natural systems. It also involves cutting carbon dioxide emissions 80 percent by 2020, largely through a mobilization to raise energy efficiency and harness renewable sources of energy.

Not only is the scale of this save-our-civilization plan ambitious, so is the speed with which it must be implemented. We must move at wartime speed, restructuring the world energy economy at a pace reminiscent of the restructuring of the U.S. industrial economy in 1942 following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The shift from producing cars to planes, tanks, and guns was accomplished within a matter of months. One of the keys to this extraordinarily rapid restructuring was a ban on the sale of cars, a ban that lasted nearly three years.61

We face an extraordinary challenge, but there is much to be upbeat about. All the problems we face can be dealt with using existing technologies. And almost everything we need to do to move the world economy back onto an environmentally sustainable path has already been done in one or more countries.

We see the components of Plan B the alternative to business as usual in new technologies already on the market. On the energy front, for example, an advanced-design wind turbine can produce as much energy as an oil well. Japanese engineers have designed a vacuum-sealed refrigerator that uses only one eighth as much electricity as those marketed a decade ago. Gas-electric hybrid automobiles, getting nearly 50 miles per gallon, are twice as efficient as the average car on the road.62

Numerous countries are providing models of the various components of Plan B. Denmark, for example, today gets 20 percent of its electricity from wind and has plans to push this to 50 percent. Some 60 million Europeans now get their residential electricity from wind farms. By the end of 2007, some 40 million Chinese homes will be getting their hot water from rooftop solar water heaters. Iceland now heats close to 90 percent of its homes with geothermal energy. In so doing, it has virtually eliminated the use of coal for home heating.63

With food, India using a small-scale dairy production model that relies almost entirely on crop residues as a feed source has more than quadrupled its milk production since 1970, overtaking the United States as the world's leading milk producer. The value of India's dairy production now exceeds that of its rice harvest.64

Fish farming advances in China, centered on the use of an ecologically sophisticated carp polyculture, have made this the first country where fish farm output exceeds the oceanic catch. Indeed, the 32 million tons of farmed fish produced in China in 2005 was equal to roughly a third of the world's oceanic fish catch.65

We see what a Plan B world could look like in the reforested mountains of South Korea. Once a barren, almost treeless country, the 65 percent of South Korea now covered by forests has checked flooding and soil erosion, returning environmental health and stability to the Korean countryside.66

The United States which over the last two decades retired one tenth of its cropland, most of it highly erodible, and shifted to conservation tillage practices has reduced soil erosion by 40 percent. At the same time, the nation's farmers expanded the grain harvest by more than one fifth.67

Some of the most innovative leadership has come from cities. Curitiba, Brazil, a city of 1 million people, began restructuring its transport system in 1974. Since then its population has tripled, but its car traffic has declined by 30 percent. Amsterdam has developed a diverse urban transport system, where nearly 40 percent of all trips within the city are taken by bicycle. Paris has a transport diversification plan that also includes a prominent role for the bicycle and is intended to reduce car traffic by 40 percent. London is relying on a tax on cars entering the city center to attain a similar goal.68

Not only are new technologies becoming available, but some of these technologies can be combined to create entirely new outcomes. Gas-electric hybrid cars with an enhanced battery and a plug-in capacity, combined with investment in wind farms feeding cheap electricity into the grid, permit most daily driving to be done with electricity, and at a cost equivalent of less than $l-a-gallon gasoline. In much of the world, domestic wind energy can be substituted for imported oil.69

The challenge is to build a new economy and to do it at wartime speed before we miss so many of nature's deadlines that the economic system begins to unravel. This introductory chapter is followed by five chapters outlining the principal environmental, demographic, and economic challenges facing civilization. Then there are seven chapters that outline Plan B, the roadmap of where the world needs to go and how to get there.

Our civilization is in trouble because of trends we ourselves have set in motion. The good news is that momentum is building in efforts to reverse damaging environmental trends. Just to cite one example, in early 2007 Australia announced that it would ban incandescent light bulbs by 2010, replacing them with highly efficient compact fluorescents that use only one fourth as much electricity. Canada quickly followed with a similar initiative. Europe, the United States, and China are expected to do the same soon. The world may be approaching a tipping point on a political initiative that can drop world electricity use by nearly 12 percent, enabling us to close 705 coal- fired power plants. This "ban the bulb" movement could become the first major win in the battle to stabilize climate.70

Participating in the construction of this enduring new economy is exhilarating. So is the quality of life it will bring. We will be able to breathe clean air. Our cities will be less congested, less noisy, less polluted, and more civilized. A world where population has stabilized, forests are expanding, and carbon emissions are falling is within our grasp.

[Sorry I don't have the references; check out Lester Brown's book for those and more]

The Canadian Government's Idiotic Economic Rescue Package

2009-02-13T18:33:00.000-08:00

My god what short-sighted idiots. The government, in their complete lack of any wisdom at all, wants to help the economy by wasting money on such things as automobile manufacture and home renovations.

Gas-powered automobiles? The walking dead. Only a government would be stupid enough to invest in 100+ year old, incredibly inefficient and incredibly polluting technology. The idea of people driving around (by themselves mostly) in thousands-of-pounds vehicles that use most of the energy they consume to create heat is absurd and it needs to end, not be prolonged.

The solution is light rail. Expensive? The oil companies say it is so it must be so. If all the money that has gone into roads, cars, car insurance, car repair, etc. would have instead gone into light rail in the first place it would have cost us less. Instead of us all being 2 or 3 car families we could easily have had 1 or maybe even 0 car families. And we wouldn't have spent so much of our time stuck in traffic, contributing to pollution. We would have been encouraged to live near rail in denser housing, instead of on what was once farm land, range land or wilderness. Instead of a world built for cars we could have a world built for people.

Light rail would be an investment in the future that would have value. Light rail leads to a more efficient economy, raising everyone's standard of living. And today's light rail, where it exists, would have been 10x as effective if governments and people would not have had to invest in both light rail and roads. If we'd have stuck with light rail (and not let GM dismantle it) we would have been so much better off. Oh yeah, and GM, the company that destroyed public transit back in the 1920's deserves to be saved? They do not.

Home renovations? This is their great solution, more consumption? The consumption-based economic model (which can only end one way: badly) is part of what got us into this mess in the first place. This is nothing more than a small gift to the rich; only the well-off can even think of such expenses in today's economy. Gee, how about increasing funding for education, or lowering the cost of starting a small business, or investing in green technologies, or investing in broad-band (to encourage more people to work at home).

The amount talked about, something like 30 billion dollars, could have been used to jump start a wind-power industry in Canada. Factories could have been built. People could have been trained. Wind farms could have been built. And all of it would have been an investment in the future providing something of value - green energy. The wind is free and clean oh idiot leaders, oil is expensive and dirty.

But no, our government don't want to invest in our future. It isn't that they are too stupid to know better, it is just that they are too corrupt to care.

Is there an unnatural death in your future?

2009-01-25T21:29:00.000-08:00

If you are reasonably young and happen to have stumbled across the website dieoff.org you may be a little worried. And if you have read the book Plan B 3.0 - Mobilizing to Save Civilization by Lester Brown you may be a lot worried. But how worried should you be? Let's say you are in your early twenties with an expected lifespan of seventy years. What can happen in the next fifty years?

Well you can kiss oil goodbye that is for sure. Even the most optimistic forecasts by the talking heads on the idiot-tube (TV) have oil running out in less than sixty years. Give Twilight in the Desert a read and visit theoildrum.com. Oil will be finished very soon, probably within two decades on the outside. The Arctic is a bit of a wild card, but the odds are that most of the world's oil has already been found. All of the oil that was easy to get to has already been used up.

The problem of oil depletion is much worse than not being able to gas up our SUVs cheaply. All of the world's developed nations depend heavily on oil as a key ingredient for their fertilizer, and that these same nations have abused their soil with unsustainable practices. Not to mention all the oil-dependent farm machinery and transportation infrastructure. As the oil goes into decline food production will follow.

Perhaps we can all take up fishing. Or not. As we can see in this post the oceans are in big, big trouble. Some examples: in the last 50 years the population of large fish is down ninety percent. The population of a popular species of cod off British Columbia is now three percent of what is was 100 years ago, and this is typical of most commercial fish population. More than half of all fish species are in danger of extinction.

You might think governments would wake up to the problems in our oceans and do something. And they are. They're trying to grab as much of what's left for themselves while they still can. It is human greed and stupidity at its finest. Europeans are even dumping their nuclear waste into the oceans, how is that for good fisheries management. Nothing like giving the work of nuclear waste disposal to the lowest bidder. Nice job assholes.

Maybe we can all take up hunting to find food. Except mammal populations are (you guessed it) in steep decline. Down almost thirty percent in the just 30 years. If everyone took up hunting there would be nothing left to hunt after only a few years.

Much of the world is running out of water. Thanks to global warming glaciers, which are a major source of water for both drinking and farming are disappearing. The water table in much of India, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and the United States is dropping faster than the replenishment rate. In places like India and the Middle East it is dropping so fast they are turning to oil drilling equipment to go deeper and deeper in search of water. Half of all the electricity in some parts of India is used for pumping water.

After centuries of gains, the volumes in global food production for such staples as wheat, corn and rice is now shrinking. The United Nations estimates human population in 2050 at just under 9 billion, almost 50% higher than today.

The Rwandan Genocide wasn't about politics, people don't kill each other over how they vote when their basic needs are met. Rwanda was the most densely populated country in Africa. The land could not longer provide enough food to maintain basic needs. The people divided along tribal (political) lines, but it was a war over basic resources.

In Plan B 3.0 Mr. Brown outlines a lot of solutions, but he misses some important issues entirely. What to do about the power that corporations yield in our world, with their selfish and short-term thinking. What to do about corrupt politicians (the majority of politicians have offshore bank accounts to hide their ill-gotten-gains and to cheat on taxes). And finally what to do about the corporate media, who have perfected their role in keeping the people ignorant.

What is the likely result of less food, less water, less energy and an exponentially growing population? War and famine. The question is not if it will happen, the question is when. Will it be in your lifetime?

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"Preventing the collapse of human civilization requires nothing less than a wholesale transformation of dominant cultural patterns. This transformation would reject consumerism... and establish in its place a new cultural framework centred on sustainability"

-- State of the World 2010, Worldwatch Institute

Documentaries You Must See

2009-01-21T18:49:00.001-08:00

How important is it you see these documentaries? It is not an exaggeration to say your life may depend on it.

Is your life really at risk? The answer is surprisingly easy to understand after watching these documentaries. Consider the young man in “Why We Fight” who joins the marines. He has certainly put his life in harms way. Others may die as a direct result of his actions. If he were better informed maybe he would have made a different decision.

There are many risks we all must face, and many of these risks are as man-made as war. The first step in protecting one’s self is in understanding. Much of the nasty things that happen in this world, like say Global Warming, wouldn’t be allowed to happen if people were better informed.

Money As Debt

All money in this world is created as debt, with interest attached. The system was created hundreds of years ago to serve the elite. Why did governments give the right to create money away to private banks?

The Story of Stuff

The problem of a consumption based economy.

The End of the Line

Overfishing has been going on for decades. But not for much longer. Either it will stop voluntarily or it will stop when there is nothing left.

Zeitgeist - Addendum

Explains how the foundation of our entire economic system is breaking down and must eventually be recreated because it cannot go on forever as it is. The Federal Reserve system is a fraud that must be dismantled.

The 11th Hour

The majority of biologist have some doubt as to if humanity will be around in another 100 years.

The Corporation

This documentary looks at the most powerful entity of our time: the corporation. Corporations affect every aspect of our lives, often in negative ways.

Manufacturing Consent

Based on the book by Noam Chomsky. In Manufacturing Consent Chomsky shows how the media has more than failed to keep the public informed. The corporate controlled media has not only distracted the public with meaningless stories (e.g. Paris Hilton and O.J. Simpson), the media has actively misinformed the public. Here is just one of many examples.

Why We Fight

Why We Fight examines why the United States fights so many wars. It has nothing to do with freedom, “war is a racket“.

Zeitgeist

This may the most shocking documentary you will ever see. Religion, war and money.

The Panama Deception

A detailed example of how the United States uses propaganda to further the causes of the murderous corporate machine, and how the corporate media plays along.

The Money Masters - How International Bankers Took Control of America

Don’t believe it? This 3 hour history lesson will be a shock to your system. Not only did international bankers take control of America, they encouraged and financed most wars of the last 200 years causing tens of millions of deaths.

Sicko

The profit-driven system of corporations in the health sector is examined in the documentary Sicko. Greed is literally killing people.

The Power of Nightmares

From the BBC, discusses how politicians use terrorism and fear as a way to control populations. With much help from the media, the terrorism threat has been greatly exaggerated.

Without Conscience - the Book

People are generally good - generally. But approximately 1 person in 100 does not have a conscience. Someone like Dick Cheney knows to say that he cares about the troops, but he does not even know how to care or what it even really means. There are people in this world who will do anything to rise up in the ranks of power. To understand that some people are simply dangerous and that they should never be trusted read “Without Conscience” by Robert Hare.

Another List

Here is another list of documentaries, which includes the ones above and a few more.

Have Open Source Programmers Screwed Themselves?

2009-01-19T13:44:00.000-08:00

I am a software developer and make a little money on the side with some shareware. But it is getting a lot harder these days to make money developing and selling shareware with all the free software out there.

Wouldn't it be cool if not only open source programmers, but lawyers, carpenters and everyone else worked for free? Open source and free software is great for users and businesses, but is open source good for programmers? If programmer's don't get paid, then how will we be able to buy food and stuff?

Consider a fictional programmer, Freida. For months Freida spent much of her free time working on Plumware 5.0 – an open source, free program for plumbers. Late one Sunday night the pipe on Freida's kitchen sink broke, resulting in dish water all over the kitchen floor.

After consulting the online yellow pages Freida called up Jake the Plumber to fix her drain pipes. After the work was done Freida and Jake exchanged the expected small talk as Freida got out her check book. During the chitchat Freida mentioned she worked on Plumware 5.0 and asked Jake if he used it, and what a coincidence, it turns out he did use it. Jake was almost going to give Freida a discount, but he had just bought a boat. So Jake charged Freida the full amount for his services, $175.00, and left with check in hand.

Free Software For All
Just how much free software is out there? Check out SourceForge.Net, probably the biggest open source website out there. Their “Software Map” shows tens of thousands of projects. These projects are in various stages of development, but many have working versions of the software ready to download. Many are for Linux but many are also for Windows and for MAC. The vast majority are available under the “GNU General Public License” or “Open Source Initiative” licensing schemes, meaning free to use.

It is quite interesting that SourceForge.Net is "Powered by collaborative software development tools from VA Software". Why is this interesting? A look at VA Software's website provides the answer. VA Software specializes is enabling offshore software development. So the very company that is sponsoring so much open source and free software development is also helping companies move software development offshore. Neat trick!

The Microsoft Connection
There must be a Microsoft connection, after all we are talking about software here. Certainly Microsoft has been harmed by open source. Linux, MySQL, Open Office, every download potentially means a lost sale of Microsoft Windows, SQL Server and Microsoft Office. The same is true of all the other software that is now free that Microsoft was hoping to sell.

Take China. Not literally, think of all the lost Microsoft sales now that China has standardized on Linux. That is many, many millions of dollars in lost sales. Sales that would have gone to an American company, with America employees and investors. Sales that would have benefited programmers. It also means lost revenue for the tax man, so no new roads for those poor Seattlites stuck in traffic. A ton of money, that would have found its way to America, will now not be coming. The same trend is occurring around the world. Billions of dollars will now no longer be benefiting programmers as companies stop paying for software.

Motivation
Of course there is one area where I do understand a little of the open source programmers motivations:must... destroy... evil... Microsoft... empire...

While it is hard to agree with Microsoft's business tactics of the 80's and 90's, it might be better to work at Microsoft as a programmer than at The Home Depot as stock boy. Besides, the past is the past. Microsoft has settled, paid fines, changed its contracts and itself; Microsoft has paid its debt to society. If Sun Microsystems can forgive Microsoft (they settled the Java thing and agreed to have their software inter operate) then anybody can (the many millions in cash Microsoft gave Sun didn't exactly hurt). And compared to companies like Exxon and Monsanto, the Microsoft crew are a bunch of angels. There are much more harmful companies out there.

Are Open Source Programmers Stifling Competition?
Microsoft's past practices have stifled competition, but now there is a new kid on the block. The new kid is open source. Why would any company (or anyone) develop a program when there is a decent and free application that does the job already out there? It would not make economic or business sense. How can anyone compete against free?

Eventually companies are going to wake up to all this, not just free, but really good free software out there and buy less commercial software. It is happening already, companies are buying less software. If people and companies buy less software, how are programmers going to get paid?

Less cash for software means less cash for software developers.
There is no way around this fact, it is simply Economics 101.

If some lawyers started working for free, do you think the average lawyer would make more or less money?

Offshore Outsourcing
Before there was open source offshore outsourcing wasn't an issue. Offshore outsourcers are big users of open source software. Gee, anybody besides me see a problem here? The creation on of open source software has supported the whole offshore outsourcing industry. This has not exactly created more programming jobs in America.

In the End
We will always need more software, at least that is how it has been since the very first program was written. In the past software was, how shall I put this, not really of the highest quality, driving the need for more (hopefully better) software. But these days software is pretty decent. The truth is, if no new software were to become available the average PC user could make do with what they have. Maybe they'll still need new software, but perhaps less of it than in the past. Less software, less money for software developers.

No doubt the fact that companies are doing more with less has also had something to do with the stagnant wages for software programmers. But it seems logical to me that with all this free open source software and freeware floating around that the value of software, and by association, the value of programmers, is dropping and will continue to drop. Are open source programmers screwing themselves? It is a question, not an answer, but it is a question that should be asked by all programmers.