F That

F*ck that. An honest meditation.

Inner f*cking peace. A guided meditation.

Flashback: 1989

U.N. PREDICTS DISASTER IF GLOBAL WARMING NOT CHECKED. Peter James Spielmann, AP. Jun. 29, 1989. from AP News Archive.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.

Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ''eco- refugees,' ' threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP.

He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control. [that 10-year window ended 18 years ago]

As the warming melts polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations, Brown told The Associated Press in an interview on Wednesday. 

[hah! 3 feet, eh? well, that estimate was based on the general scientific wisdom of the time, which was based on earth system sensitivity to rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, but which did not account for all of the positive feedback effects resulting from higher CO2 concentrations and higher temperatures; to wit, the last time that the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere was above 400 parts per million was in the Pliocene (i.e. 2.6 to 5.3 million years ago... a bit before humans were around, needless to say)... and, at the time, global temperatures were 4 degrees warmer than today, while temperatures at the poles were 10 degrees warmer... and sea levels were  at least 5 meters higher and as much as 40 metres higher than today... that would be 16 feet to 130 feet.... not just 3 feet; see: here or here or here]

Coastal regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. A fifth of Egypt's arable land in the Nile Delta would be flooded, cutting off its food supply, according to a joint UNEP and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study.

''Ecological refugees will become a major concern, and what's worse is you may find that people can move to drier ground, but the soils and the natural resources may not support life. Africa doesn't have to worry about land, but would you want to live in the Sahara?'' he said.

UNEP estimates it would cost the United States at least $100 billion to protect its east coast alone.

Shifting climate patterns would bring back 1930s Dust Bowl conditions to Canadian and U.S. wheatlands, while the Soviet Union could reap bumper crops if it adapts its agriculture in time, according to a study by UNEP and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.

Excess carbon dioxide is pouring into the atmosphere because of humanity's use of fossil fuels and burning of rain forests, the study says. The atmosphere is retaining more heat than it radiates, much like a greenhouse.

The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth's temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown. [i.e. up to 7 degree temp rise predicted by 2019]

The difference may seem slight, he said, but the planet is only 9 degrees warmer now than during the 8,000-year Ice Age that ended 10,000 years ago.

Brown said if the warming trend continues, ''the question is will we be able to reverse the process in time? We say that within the next 10 years, given the present loads that the atmosphere has to bear, we have an opportunity to start the stabilizing process.''

He said even the most conservative scientists ''already tell us there's nothing we can do now to stop a ... change'' of about 3 degrees.

''Anything beyond that, and we have to start thinking about the significant rise of the sea levels ... we can expect more ferocious storms, hurricanes, wind shear, dust erosion.''

He said there is time to act, but there is no time to waste. [oops!]

UNEP is working toward forming a scientific plan of action by the end of 1990, and the adoption of a global climate treaty by 1992. In May, delegates from 103 nations met in Nairobi, Kenya - where UNEP is based - and decided to open negotiations on the treaty next year.

Nations will be asked to reduce the use of fossil fuels, cut the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases such as methane and fluorocarbons, and preserve the rain forests.

''We have no clear idea about the ecological minimum of green space that the planet needs to function effectively. What we do know is that we are destroying the tropical rain forest at the rate of 50 acres a minute, about one football field per second,'' said Brown. [and that rate has been maintained, and likely increased, in the interim... over 26 million acres per year]

Each acre of rain forest can store 100 tons of carbon dioxide and reprocess it into oxygen.

Brown suggested that compensating Brazil, Indonesia and Kenya for preserving rain forests may be necessary. [instead, they've been incentivized by insane neoliberal corporatocracy to keep it up]

The European Community is talking about a half-cent levy on each kilowatt- hour of fossil fuels to raise $55 million a year to protect the rain forests, and other direct subsidies may be possible, he said.

The treaty could also call for improved energy efficiency, increasing conservation, and for developed nations to transfer technology to Third World nations to help them save energy and cut greenhouse gas emissions, said Brown.

Flashback: 1990

Carl Sagan on climate as an emerging issue (1990). youtube.

Feature Reference Articles #7: Collapse

No, really, how sustainable are we? Paul Chefurka.

Carrying Capacity 

“Carrying capacity” is a well-known ecological term that has an obvious and fairly intuitive meaning: “The maximum population size of a species that the environment can sustain indefinitely, given the food, habitat, water and other necessities available in the environment."

Unfortunately that definition becomes more nebulous and controversial the closer you look at it, especially when we are talking about the planetary carrying capacity for human beings. Ecologists will claim that our numbers have already well surpassed the planet’s carrying capacity, while others (notably economists and politicians...) claim we are nowhere near it yet! 

This confusion may arise because we tend to confuse two very different understandings of the phrase “carrying capacity”. For this discussion I will call these the “subjective” view and the “objective” views of carrying capacity. 

The subjective view is carrying capacity as seen by a member of the species in question. Rather than coming from a rational, analytical assessment of the overall situation, it is an experiential judgment. As such it tends to be limited to the population of one's own species, as well as having a short time horizon – the current situation counts a lot more than some future possibility. The main thing that matters in this view is how many of one’s own species will be able to survive to reproduce. As long as that number continues to rise, we assume all is well – that we have not yet reached the carrying capacity of our environment. 

From this subjective point of view humanity has not even reached, let alone surpassed the Earth’s overall carrying capacity – after all, our population is still growing. It's tempting to ascribe this view mainly to neoclassical economists and politicians, but truthfully most of us tend to see things this way. In fact, all species, including humans, have this orientation, whether it is conscious or not.

Species tend to keep growing until outside factors such as disease, predators, food or other resource scarcity – or climate change – intervene. These factors define the “objective” carrying capacity of the environment. This objective view of carrying capacity is the view of an observer who adopts a position outside the species in question.It’s the typical viewpoint of an ecologist looking at the reindeer on St. Matthew Island, or at the impact of humanity on other species and its own resource base.

This is the view that is usually assumed by ecologists when they use the naked phrase “carrying capacity”, and it is an assessment that can only be arrived at through analysis and deductive reasoning. It’s the view I hold, and its implications for our future are anything but comforting.

When a species bumps up against the limits posed by the environment’s objective carrying capacity, its population begins to decline. Humanity is now at the uncomfortable point when objective observers have detected our overshoot condition, but the population as a whole has not recognized it yet. As we push harder against the limits of the planet’s objective carrying capacity, things are beginning to go wrong. More and more ordinary people are recognizing the problem as its symptoms become more obvious to casual onlookers. The problem is, of course, that we've already been above the planet’s carrying capacity for quite a while. 

One typical rejoinder to this line of argument is that humans have “expanded our carrying capacity” through technological innovation. “Look at the Green Revolution! Malthus was just plain wrong. There are no limits to human ingenuity!” When we say things like this, we are of course speaking from a subjective viewpoint. From this experiential, human-centric point of view, we have indeed made it possible for our environment to support ever more of us. This is the only view that matters at the biological, evolutionary level, so it is hardly surprising that most of our fellow species-members are content with it.

The problem with that view is that every objective indicator of overshoot is flashing red. From the climate change and ocean acidification that flows from our smokestacks and tailpipes, through the deforestation and desertification that accompany our expansion of human agriculture and living space, to the extinctions of non-human species happening in the natural world, the planet is urgently signaling an overload condition.

Humans have an underlying urge towards growth, an immense intellectual capacity for innovation, and a biological inability to step outside our chauvinistic, anthropocentric perspective. This combination has made it inevitable that we would land ourselves and the rest of the biosphere in the current insoluble global ecological predicament.

Overshoot

When a population surpasses its carrying capacity it enters a condition known as overshoot. Because the carrying capacity is defined as the maximum population that an environment can maintain indefinitely, overshoot must by definition be temporary. Populations always decline to (or below) the carrying capacity. How long they stay in overshoot depends on how many stored resources there are to support their inflated numbers. Resources may be food, but they may also be any resource that helps maintain their numbers. For humans one of the primary resources is energy, whether it is tapped as flows (sunlight, wind, biomass) or stocks (coal, oil, gas, uranium etc.). A species usually enters overshoot when it taps a particularly rich but exhaustible stock of a resource. Like fossil fuels, for instance... 

Population growth in the animal kingdom tends to follow a logistic curve. This is an S-shaped curve that starts off low when the species is first introduced to an ecosystem, at some later point rises very fast as the population becomes established, and then finally levels off as the population saturates its niche.

Humans have been pushing the envelope of our logistic curve for much of our history. Our population rose very slowly over the last couple of hundred thousand years, as we gradually developed the skills we needed in order to deal with our varied and changeable environment,particularly language, writing and arithmetic. As we developed and disseminated those skills our ability to modify our environment grew, and so did our growth rate.

If we had not discovered the stored energy stocks of fossil fuels, our logistic growth curve would probably have flattened out some time ago, and we would be well on our way to achieving a balance with the energy flows in the world around us, much like all other species do. Our numbers would have settled down to oscillate around a much lower level than today, similar to what they probably did with hunter-gatherer populations tens of thousands of years ago.

Unfortunately, our discovery of the energy potential of coal created what mathematicians and systems theorists call a “bifurcation point” or what is better known in some cases as a tipping point. This is a point at which a system diverges from one path onto another because of some influence on events. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that bifurcation points are generally irreversible. Once past such a point, the system can’t go back to a point before it.

Given the impact that fossil fuels had on the development of world civilization, their discovery was clearly such a fork in the road. Rather than flattening out politely as other species' growth curves tend to do, ours kept on rising. And rising, and rising.

What is a sustainable population level?

Now we come to the heart of the matter. Okay, we all accept that the human race is in overshoot. But how deep into overshoot are we? What is the carrying capacity of our planet? The answers to these questions, after all, define a sustainable population.

Not surprisingly, the answers are quite hard to tease out. Various numbers have been put forward, each with its set of stated and unstated assumptions –not the least of which is the assumed standard of living (or consumption profile) of the average person. For those familiar with Ehrlich and Holdren’s I=PAT equation, if “I” represents the environmental impact of a sustainable population, then for any population value “P” there is a corresponding value for “AT”, the level of Activity and Technology that can be sustained for that population level. In other words, the higher our standard of living climbs, the lower our population level must fall in order to be sustainable. This is discussed further in an earlier article on Thermodynamic Footprints.

To get some feel for the enormous range of uncertainty in sustainability estimates we’ll look at six assessments, each of which leads to a very different outcome. We’ll start with the most optimistic one, and work our way down the scale.

The Ecological Footprint Assessment 

The concept of the Ecological Footprint was developed in 1992 by William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

The ecological footprint is a measure of human demand on the Earth's ecosystems. It is a standardized measure of demand for natural capital that may be contrasted with the planet's ecological capacity to regenerate. It represents the amount of biologically productive land and sea area necessary to supply the resources a human population consumes, and to assimilate associated waste. As it is usually published, the value is an estimate of how many planet Earths it would take to support humanity with everyone following their current lifestyle.

It has a number of fairly glaring flaws that cause it to be hyper-optimistic. The "ecological footprint" is basically for renewable resources only. It includes a theoretical but underestimated factor for non-renewable resources. It does not take into account the unfolding effects of climate change, ocean acidification or biodiversity loss (i.e. species extinctions). It is intuitively clear that no number of “extra planets” would compensate for such degradation.

Still, the estimate as of the end of 2012 is that our overall ecological footprint is about “1.7 planets”. In other words, there is at least 1.7 times too much human activity for the long-term health of this single, lonely planet. To put it yet another way, we are 70% into overshoot.

It would probably be fair to say that by this accounting method the sustainable population would be (7 / 1.7) or about four billion people at our current average level of affluence. As you will see, other assessments make this estimate seem like a happy fantasy.

The Fossil Fuel Assessment

The main accelerator of human activity over the last 150 to 200 years has been our exploitation of the planet's stocks of fossil fuel. Before 1800 there was very little fossil fuel in general use, with most energy being derived from the flows represented by wood, wind, water, animal and human power. The following graph demonstrates the precipitous rise in fossil fuel use since then, and especially since 1950.

This information was the basis for my earlier Thermodynamic Footprint analysis. That article investigated the influence of technological energy (87% of which comes from fossil fuel stocks) on human planetary impact, in terms of how much it multiplies the effect of each “naked ape”. The following graph illustrates the multiplier at different points in history:

Fossil fuels have powered the increase in all aspects of civilization, including population growth. The “Green Revolution” in agriculture that was kicked off by Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug in the late 1940s was largely a fossil fuel phenomenon, relying on mechanization, powered irrigation and synthetic fertilizers derived from fossil fuels. This enormous increase in food production supported a swift rise in population numbers, in a classic ecological feedback loop: more food (supply) => more people (demand) => more food => more people etc…

Over the core decades of the Green Revolution from 1950 to 1980 the world population almost doubled, from fewer than 2.5 billion to over 4.5 billion. The average population growth over those three decades was 2% per year. Compare that to 0.5% from 1800 to 1900; 1.00% from 1900 to 1950; and 1.5% from 1980 until now:

This analysis makes it tempting to conclude that a sustainable population might look similar to the situation in 1800, before the Green Revolution, and before the global adoption of fossil fuels: about 1 billion people living on about 5% of today’s global average energy consumption, all of it derived from renewable energy flows.

It’s tempting (largely because it seems vaguely achievable), but unfortunately that number may still be too high. Even in 1800 the signs of human overshoot were clear, if not well recognized: there was already widespread deforestation through Europe and the Middle East; and desertification had set into the previously lush agricultural zones of North Africa and the Middle East.

Not to mention that if we did start over with “just” one billion people, an annual growth rate of a mere 0.5% would put the population back over seven billion in just 400 years. Unless the growth rate can be kept down very close to zero, such a situation is decidedly unsustainable.

The Population Density Assessment

There is another way to approach the question. If we assume that the human species was sustainable at some point in the past, what point might we choose and what conditions contributed to our apparent sustainability at that time?

I use a very strict definition of sustainability. It reads something like this: "Sustainability is the ability of a species to survive in perpetuity without damaging the planetary ecosystem in the process." This principle applies only to a species' own actions, rather than uncontrollable external forces like Milankovitch cycles, asteroid impacts, plate tectonics, etc.

In order to find a population that I was fairly confident met my definition of sustainability, I had to look well back in history - in fact back into Paleolithic times. The sustainability conditions I chose were: a very low population density and very low energy use, with both maintained over multiple thousands of years. I also assumed the populace would each use about as much energy as a typical hunter-gatherer: about twice the daily amount of energy a person obtains from the food they eat.

There are about 150 million square kilometers, or 60 million square miles of land on Planet Earth. However, two thirds of that area is covered by snow, mountains or deserts, or has little or no topsoil. This leaves about 50 million square kilometers (20 million square miles) that is habitable by humans without high levels of technology.

A typical population density for a non-energy-assisted society of hunter-forager-gardeners is between 1 person per square mile and 1 person per square kilometer. Because humans living this way had settled the entire planet by the time agriculture was invented 10,000 years ago, this number pegs a reasonable upper boundary for a sustainable world population in the range of 20 to 50 million people.

I settled on the average of these two numbers, 35 million people. That was because it matches known hunter-forager population densities, and because those densities were maintained with virtually zero population growth (less than 0.01% per year)during the 67,000 years from the time of the Toba super-volcano eruption in 75,000 BC until 8,000 BC (Agriculture Day on Planet Earth).

If we were to spread our current population of 7 billion evenly over 50 million square kilometers, we would have an average density of 150 per square kilometer. Based just on that number, and without even considering our modern energy-driven activities, our current population is at least 250 times too big to be sustainable. To put it another way, we are now 25,000%into overshoot based on our raw population numbers alone.

As I said above, we also need to take the population’s standard of living into account. Our use of technological energy gives each of us the average planetary impact of about 20 hunter-foragers. What would the sustainable population be if each person kept their current lifestyle, which is given as an average current Thermodynamic Footprint (TF) of 20? 

We can find the sustainable world population number for any level of human activity by using the I = PAT equation mentioned above. 

We decided above that the maximum hunter-forager population we could accept as sustainable would be 35 million people, each with a Thermodynamic Footprint of 1.
First, we set I (the allowable total impact for our sustainable population) to 35, representing those 35 million hunter-foragers. 

Next, we set AT to be the TF representing the desired average lifestyle for our population. In this case that number is 20. 

We can now solve the equation for P. Using simple algebra, we know that I = P x AT is equivalent to P = I / AT. Using that form of the equation we substitute in our values, and we find that P = 35 / 20. In this case P = 1.75. 

This number tells us that if we want to keep the average level of per-capita consumption we enjoy in in today’s world, we would enter an overshoot situation above a global population of about 1.75 million people. By this measure our current population of 7 billion is about 4,000 times too big and active for long-term sustainability. In other words, by this measure we are we are now 400,000% into overshoot.

Using the same technique we can calculate that achieving a sustainable population with an American lifestyle (TF = 78) would permit a world population of only 650,000 people – clearly not enough to sustain a modern global civilization.

For the sake of comparison, it is estimated that the historical world population just after the dawn of agriculture in 8,000 BC was about five million, and in Year 1 was about 200 million. We crossed the upper threshold of planetary sustainability in about 2000 BC, and have been in deepening overshoot for the last 4,000 years.

The Ecological Assessments

As a species, human beings share much in common with other large mammals. We breathe, eat, move around to find food and mates, socialize, reproduce and die like all other mammalian species. Our intellect and culture, those qualities that make us uniquely human, are recent additions to our essential primate nature, at least in evolutionary terms.

Consequently it makes sense to compare our species’ performance to that of other, similar species – species that we know for sure are sustainable. I was fortunate to find the work of American marine biologist Dr. Charles W. Fowler, who has a deep interest in sustainability and the ecological conundrum posed by human beings. The following three assessments are drawn from Dr. Fowler’s work.

First assessment

In 2003, Dr. Fowler and Larry Hobbs co-wrote a paper titled, “Is humanity sustainable?” that was published by the Royal Society. In it, they compared a variety of ecological measures across 31 species including humans. The measures included biomass consumption, energy consumption, CO2 production, geographical range size, and population size.

It should come as no great surprise that in most of the comparisons humans had far greater impact than other species, even to a 99% confidence level. When it came to population size, Fowler and Hobbs found that there are over two orders of magnitude more humans than one would expect based on a comparison to other species – 190 times more, in fact. Similarly, our CO2 emissions outdid other species by a factor of 215.

Based on this research, Dr. Fowler concluded that there are about 200 times too many humans on the planet. This brings up an estimate for a sustainable population of 35 million people.

This is the same as the upper bound established above by examining hunter-gatherer population densities. The similarity of the results is not too surprising, since the hunter-gatherers of 50,000 years ago were about as close to “naked apes” as humans have been in recent history.

Second assessment

In 2008, five years after the publication cited above, Dr. Fowler wrote another paper entitled “Maximizing biodiversity, information and sustainability." In this paper he examined the sustainability question from the point of view of maximizing biodiversity. In other words, what is the largest human population that would not reduce planetary biodiversity?

This is, of course, a very stringent test, and one that we probably failed early in our history by extirpating mega-fauna in the wake of our migrations across a number of continents.

In this paper, Dr. Fowler compared 96 different species, and again analyzed them in terms of population, CO2 emissions and consumption patterns.

This time, when the strict test of biodiversity retention was applied, the results were truly shocking, even to me. According to this measure, humans have overpopulated the Earth by almost 700 times. In order to preserve maximum biodiversity on Earth, the human population may be no more than 10 million people – each with the consumption of a Paleolithic hunter-forager. 

Addendum: Third assessment 

After this article was initially written, Dr. Fowler forwarded me a copy of an appendix to his 2009 book, "Systemic Management: Sustainable Human Interactions with Ecosystems and the Biosphere", published by Oxford University Press. In it he describes yet one more technique for comparing humans with other mammalian species, this time in terms of observed population densities, total population sizes and ranges.

After carefully comparing us to various species of both herbivores and carnivores of similar body size, he draws this devastating conclusion: the human population is about 1000 times larger than expected. This is in line with the second assessment above, though about 50% more pessimistic. It puts a sustainable human population at about 7 million.

Urk!

Conclusions 

As you can see, the estimates for a sustainable human population vary widely – by a factor of 500 from the highest to the lowest

The Ecological Footprint doesn’t really seem intended as a measure of sustainability. Its main value is to give people with no exposure to ecology some sense that we are indeed over-exploiting our planet. (It also has the psychological advantage of feeling achievable with just a little work.) As a measure of sustainability, it is not helpful. 

As I said above, the number suggested by the Thermodynamic Footprint or Fossil Fuel analysis isn’t very helpful either – even a population of one billion people without fossil fuels had already gone into overshoot. 

That leaves us with four estimates: two at 35 million, one of 10 million, and one of 7 million. 

The central number of 35 million people is confirmed by two analyses using different data and assumptions. My conclusion is that this is probably the absolutely largest human population that could be considered sustainable. The realistic but similarly unachievable number is probably more in line with the bottom two estimates, somewhere below 10 million. 

I think the lowest two estimates (Fowler 2008, and Fowler 2009) are as unrealistically high as all the others in this case, primarily because human intelligence and problem-solving ability makes our destructive impact on biodiversity a foregone conclusion. After all, we drove other species to extinction 40,000 years ago, when our total population was estimated to be under 1 million. 

So, what can we do with this information? It’s obvious that we will not (and probably cannot) voluntarily reduce our population by 99.5% to 99.9%. Even an involuntary reduction of this magnitude would involve enormous suffering and a very uncertain outcome. It’s close enough to zero that if Mother Nature blinked, we’d be gone. 

In fact, the analysis suggests that Homo sapiens is an inherently unsustainable species. This outcome seems virtually guaranteed by our neocortex, by the very intelligence that has enabled our rise to unprecedented dominance over our planet’s biosphere. Is intelligence an evolutionary blind alley? From the singular perspective of our own species, it quite probably is. If we are to find some greater meaning or deeper future for intelligence in the universe, we may be forced to look beyond ourselves and adopt a cosmic, rather than a human, perspective.

Your oil wake-up call. Ted Trainer, Damn The Matrix. April 8, 2017.

ALMOST NO ONE has the slightest grasp of the oil crunch that will hit them, probably within a decade. When it does it will literally mean the end of the world as we know it. 

Here is an outline of what recent publications are telling us. Nobody will, of course, take any notice. 

It is gradually being understood that the amount of oil reserves and increases in them due to, for instance, fracking, is of little significance and that what matters is their EROI (Energy Return on Energy Invested). If you found a vast amount of oil, but to deliver a barrel of it you would need to use as much energy as there is in a barrel of oil, then there would be no point drilling the field. 

When oil was first discovered the EROI in producing it was over 100/1. But Murphy (2013) estimates that by 2000 the global figure was about 30, and a decade later it was around 17. These approximate figures are widely quoted and accepted although not precise or settled. 

Scarcer and difficult to produce 

In other words, oil is rapidly getting scarcer and more difficult to find and produce. Thus, they are having to go to deep water sources (ER of 10 according to Murphy), and to develop unconventional sources such as tar sands (ER of 4 according to Ahmed), and shale (Murphy estimates an ER of 1.5, and Ahmed reports 2.8 for the oil and gas average.) 

As a result, the capital expenditure on oil discovery, development and production is skyrocketing but achieving little or no increase in production. Heinberg and Fridley (2016) show that capital expenditure trebled in a decade, while production fell dramatically. This rapid acceleration in costs is widely noted, including by Johnson (2010) and Clarke (2017). 

Why can’t we keep getting the quantities we want just by paying more for each barrel? Because the price of the oil in a barrel cannot be greater than the economic value the use of the barrel of oil creates. 

Ahmed (2016) refers to a British government report that: 

“…the decline in EROI has meant that an increasing amount of the energy we extract is having to be diverted back into getting new energy out, leaving less for other social investments … This means that the global economic slowdown is directly related to the declining resource quality of fossil fuels.” 

Everything depends on how rapidly EROI is deteriorating. Various people, such as Hall, Ballogh and Murphy (2009), and Weisbach et al. (2013) do not think a modern society can tolerate an ER under 6 – 10. If this is so, how long have we got if the global figure has fallen from 30 to 18 in about a decade? 

Several analysts claim that because of the deteriorating resource quality and rising production costs the companies must be paid $100 a barrel to survive. But oil is currently selling for c$50/barrel. Clarke details how the companies are carrying very large debt and many are going bankrupt: “The global oil industry is in deep trouble.” 

Ignorance, debt bubble and catastrophic implosion 

Why haven’t we noticed? Very likely for the same reason we haven’t noticed the other signs of terminal decay… because we don’t want to. 

We have taken on astronomical levels of debt to keep the economy going. In 1994 the ratio of global debt to GDP was just over 2; it is now about 6, much higher than before the GFC (Global Financial Crisis), and it is continuing to climb. 

Everybody knows this cannot go on for much longer. Debt is lending on the expectation that the loan will be repaid plus interest, but that can only be done if there is growth in the real economy, in the value of goods and services produced and sold …but the real economy (as distinct from the financial sector) has been stagnant or deteriorating for years. 

The only way huge debt bubbles are resolved is via catastrophic implosion. A point comes where the financial sector realizes that its (recklessly speculative) loans are not going to be repaid, so they stop lending and call in bad debts … and the credit the real economy needs is cut, so the economy collapses, further reducing capacity to pay debts in a spiral of positive feedback that next time will deliver the mother of all GFCs. 

There is now considerable effort going into working out the relationships between these factors, ie. deteriorating energy EROI, economic stagnation, and debt. The situation is not at all clear. Some see EROI as already being the direct and major cause of a terminal economic breakdown, others think at present more important causal factors are increasing inequality, ecological costs, aging populations and slowing productivity. 

Whatever the actual causal mix is, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that within at best a decade deteriorating EROI is going to be a major cause of enormous disruption. 

Peaking oil production, national income and resource deterioration 

But there is a far more worrying aspect of your oil situation than that to do with EROI. Nafeez Ahmed has just published an extremely important analysis of the desperate and alarming situation that the Middle East oil producing countries are in, entitled Failing States, Collapsing Systems, (2016). He confronts us with the following basic points:

• in several countries oil production has peaked, and energy return on oil production is falling; thus their oil export income is being reduced 
• in recent decades populations have exploded, due primarily to decades of abundant income from oil exports; the 1960 – 2014 multiples for Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Nigeria, Egypt, India and China have been 5.5, 4.6, 5.3, 4.2, 3.4, 3.0 and 2.1 respectively
• there has been accelerating deterioration in land, water and food resources. If water use per capita is under 1700 m3 pa, there is water stress; the amounts for the above countries, (and the percentage fall since 1960), are Yemen 86 m3 (71% fall), Saudi Arabia 98 m3 (82% fall), Iraq 998 m3 (88% fall), Nigeria 1245 m3 (73% fall), Egypt 20 m3 (70% fall). 

Climate change will make these numbers worse. 

The consequences of these trends are:

• more of the falling oil income now has to go into importing food
• increasing amounts of oil are having to go into other domestic uses, reducing the amounts available for export to the big oil consuming countries.
• in many of the big exporting countries these trends are likely to more or less eliminate oil exports in a decade or so, including Saudi Arabia.
• these mostly desert countries have nothing else to earn export income from, except sand
• falling oil income means that governments can provide less for their people, so they have to cut subsidies and raise food and energy prices
• these conditions are producing increasing discontent with government as well as civil unrest and conflict between tribes over scarce water and land; religious and sectarian conflicts are fuelled; unemployed, desperate and hungry farmers and youth have little option but to join extremist groups such as ISIS, where at least they are fed; our media ignore the biophysical conditions generating conflicts, refugee and oppression by regimes, giving the impression that the troubles are only due to religious fanatics
• the IMF makes the situation worse; failing states appeal for economic assistance and are confronted with the standard recipe — increased loans on top of already impossible debt, given on condition that they gear their economies to paying the loans back plus interest, imposing austerity, privatizing and selling off assets
• local elite authoritarianism and corruption make things worse; rulers need to crack down on disruption and to force the belt tightening; the rich will not allow their privileges to be reduced in order to support reallocation of resources to mass need; the dominant capitalist ideology weighs against interfering with market forces, ie. with the freedom for the rich to develop what is most profitable to themselves.
• thus there is a vicious positive feedback downward spiral from which it would seem there can be no escape because it is basically due to the oil running out in a context of too many people and too few land and water resources
• there will at least be major knock-on effects on the global economy and the rich (oil consuming) countries, probably within a decade; it is quite likely that the global economy will collapse as the capacity to import oil will be greatly reduced; when the fragility of the global financial system is added (remember, debt now six times GDP), instantaneous chaotic breakdown is very likely
• nothing can be done about this situation; it is the result of ignoring fifty years of warnings about the limits to growth. 

A tightening noose 

So, the noose tightens around the brainless, taken for granted ideology that drives consumer-capitalist society and that cannot be even thought about, let alone dealt with. 

We are far beyond the levels of production and consumption that can be sustained or that all people could ever rise to. We haven’t noticed because the grossly unjust global economy delivers most of the world’s dwindling resource wealth to the few who live in rich countries. Well, the party is now getting close to being over. 

You don’t much like this message? Have a go at proving that it’s mistaken. Nar, better to just ignore it as before. 

A way out? 

If the foregoing account is more or less right, then there is only one conceivable way out. That is to face up to transition to lifestyles and systems that enable a good quality of life for all on extremely low per capita resource use rates, with no interest in getting richer or pursuing economic growth. 

There is no other way to defuse the problems now threatening to eliminate us, the resource depletion, the ecological destruction, the deprivation of several billion in the Third World, the resource wars and the deterioration in our quality of life. 

Such a Simpler Way is easily designed, and built…if that’s what you want to do (see: thesimplerway.info/). Many in voluntary simplicity, ecovillage and Transition Towns movements have moved a long way towards it. Your chances of getting through to it are very poor, but the only sensible option is to join these movements. 

Is the mainstream working on the problem? Is the mainstream worried about the problem? Does the mainstream even recognize the problem?

Society will collapse by 2040 due to catastrophic food shortages, says study. Louis Dore, The Independent. June 22, 2015.

'The results show that based on plausible climate trends and a total failure to change course, the global food supply system would face catastrophic losses, and an unprecedented epidemic of food riots'

A scientific model has suggested that society will collapse in less than three decades due to catastrophic food shortages if policies do not change. 

The model, developed by a team at Anglia Ruskin University’s Global Sustainability Institute, does not account for society reacting to escalating crises by changing global behaviour and policies.

However the model does show that our current way of life appears to be unsustainable and could have dramatic worldwide consequences.

Dr Aled Jones, the Director of the Global Sustainability Institute, told Insurge Intelligence: "We ran the model forward to the year 2040, along a business-as-usual trajectory based on ‘do-nothing’ trends — that is, without any feedback loops that would change the underlying trend. 

"The results show that based on plausible climate trends, and a total failure to change course, the global food supply system would face catastrophic losses, and an unprecedented epidemic of food riots.

"In this scenario, global society essentially collapses as food production falls permanently short of consumption. "The model follows a report from Lloyds of London which has evaluated the extent of the impact of a shock scenario on crop production, and has concluded that the "global food system is under chronic pressure." 

The report said: "The global food system is under chronic pressure to meet an ever-rising demand, and its vulnerability to acute disruptions is compounded by factors such as climate change, water stress, ongoing globalisation and heightening political instability.

"A global production shock of the kind set out in this scenario would be expected to generate major economic and political impacts that could affect clients across a very wide spectrum of insurance classes. This analysis has presented the initial findings for some of the key risk exposures. 

"Global demand for food is on the rise, driven by unprecedented growth in the world’s population and widespread shifts in consumption patterns as countries develop."

What you should not say in public. Geoffrey Chia, Doomstead Diner. March 1, 2017.

I am due to speak at the Griffith Ecocentre on 9 March and will run through the usual gamut of why things are fiendishly rotten in the state of Denmark and what to expect in the near future. “Denmark” is of course the metaphor for our besieged planetary ecosphere. It is a commentary familiar to Diners: why global warming will have consequences far worse than the mainstream population have been led to believe (but will NOT cause NTHE by 2026) and why the depletion of “easy” oil guarantees that the collapse of industrial civilisation will be complete within 20 years (a conservative estimate, based on falling EROEI and the ELM). However the fraud pervading our banks and sharemarkets will cause financial and economic collapse and the demise of our global industrial system much sooner. Not to mention all the other fun stuff ahead like mass human die-off, mass extinctions of other species, the rise of fascist extremists around the world, increasing conflicts between nations, increasing risk of global nuclear war, the possibility of pandemics etc. This is all old hat to Diners, but not to the general public. My purpose will not be misery mongering and nihilism however, but to encourage members of the audience to set up their own remote, climate resilient, off-grid homesteads to weather the coming storms. They must not look for salvation from without, but from within. Not everyone will succeed but some will. 

I expect the majority will find my commentary repugnant and reject it. I expect the Q&A session will throw up the usual predictable questions such as “how can we fix these problems?” or “surely technofix A can solve problem B?” The standard answer, which Diners are familiar with, is that the issues we face are not problems for which there are solutions, but are predicaments (or conundrums) for which there are no solutions. The correct question at this late stage is not “how can we fix these problems?“, but “what can we do in anticipation of these events?“. Given the more than century long build up to these events, the sapients realise that global industrial collapse is unavoidable, as has been amply demonstrated by even the most optimistic scenarios modelled by the updated Limits to Growth analyses. We have fallen off the cliff and even though we may feel “fine” now, we will not feel so good when we inevitably and excruciatingly smash into the ground. Gravity is a bitch and there is no prospect we can invent an anti-gravity device before impact, or indeed ever. 

Not satisfied with such an answer, there is usually the odd tenacious audience member who attempts to pose the same question in a different manner, such as “if you were King of the world and had unlimited policy power, what would you do to tackle these predicaments?” The unstated expectation behind such a question is that a benevolent “philosopher king / ecosystems guru” can find ways to keep 7.5 billion people alive, solve climate change, find a replacement for petroleum etc, etc. Well I ain’t no King and I ain’t no Guru, but for the sake of argument, let us play along with such fantasy based wishful thinking and imagine we can enforce the following:

1. Abolish all nation states. Demobilise all military forces everywhere and re-employ all ex-military personnel for the refurbishment and maintenance of essential domestic infrastructure, for civil defence and for disaster relief. All nuclear weapons to be dismantled, all weapons manufacturers to be eliminated.
2. Equitable redistribution of resources, which will require that people in the rich parts of the world give up their luxuries to allow poorer people to survive. This will also require that refugees from climate ravaged and war torn parts of the world be allowed to emigrate to more climate favoured areas.
3. Impose a moratorium on all human reproduction for the next 30 years, following which we allow only one child per couple until the global population falls to perhaps 100 million and thereafter allow only for replacement reproduction rates. Draconian? Yes, but far preferable to chaotic die-off which could trigger nuclear war.
4. Transform the existing predatory rapacious capitalist system to a steady state ecology based economic system which penalises polluters and “closes the loop” – to treat and use all waste as a resource.
5. Stop all unnecessary “economic” activity which will include the cessation of all fossil fuel based tourism and the entire process of globalisation. Limit activities to essential ones such as the production and distribution of food and clean fresh water and the construction and maintenance of dwellings. Localise all economic activities, although international trade in non perishable goods can still occur by use of sailing vessels.
6. Educate everyone that the main “solution” to our looming energy shortfall must be energy efficiency and conservation, not new whizbang technowizardry such as fusion energy. Cease all fossil fuel electricity generation and change electricity provision to decentralised renewable energy systems such as solar PV for individual dwellings or microgrids. Let the central grid rot or better still, cannibalise it for materials. Pursue research to determine whether we can manufacture and maintain renewable energy generators and batteries using only renewable energy sources. 
7. Phase out all industrial scale monocrop agriculture (which is doomed anyway as fossil fuel based fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides and the petroleum to run mass agriculture will eventually become unavailable). Reduce meat and seafood consumption by more than 90%. Food security to be achieved by the establishment of hundreds of millions of local permaculture smallholdings providing a plant based diet with abundant protein from peas, beans and nuts and supplementary protein from eggs, dairy products, aquaponics and even farmed insects. 

What is the likelihood of achieving even one of the above? We are, on the whole, moving in directions away from each and every one of the measures indicated above. So get real.  

Even if they could all be done, the following issues will remain:

1. Additional global warming from existing GHGs in the atmosphere is already locked in place but is yet to fully manifest and will render most of the planet uninhabitable. All existing coastal cities will eventually (perhaps in 200 years) be submerged under at least 23 metres of seawater.
2. We have no liquid transport fuel to replace “easy” oil at scale, which means that industrial civilisation as we know it is still doomed.
3. Enforcement of the policies outlined above can only be carried out through edict and coercion. External imposition of policies on an ignorant and resistant populace will fail to address the primary underlying reason for all our planetary travails: the possession of advanced, destructive technology in the hands of a “trumped up” (pun intended) species of ape governed by their reptile brain. Cleverness without wisdom. This means that even if all the predicaments above could magically be made to vanish and we could magically reset human society and our planetary ecosphere back to, say 1950 before overshoot began in earnest, we will merely repeat the same patterns over and over again, in the absence of restraint and wisdom. Groundhog day with no hope of redemption, no matter how many times the scenario is replayed. 

Semi-sapient people must abandon childish fantasy notions of what we would like happen, grow up and accept the reality of what is going to happen. 

The bottom line is this, and I have said it before: the only hope for the continuation of our benighted species is that the survivors who emerge at the other end of this genetic bottleneck are truly sapient and adopt the principles of restraint (in resource consumption and reproduction) and vigorously protect any viable ecohabitats remaining (and cultivate new ones as icebound areas of the planet melt). It is possible, although by no means certain, that the impending cull of the global population may result in just such an outcome, especially if the sapient 0.01% of the population can be encouraged to save themselves NOW. The sapients should be advised not to grieve as future events unfold and they observe, from a safe distance, the morbid spectacle of billions of clueless sheeple killing each other, egged on by the 0.1% psychopathic sheeple herders who had promised to make them great again. Such is the nature of a cull.

The Real Threat Explained. Survival Acres. May 30, 2016.

Much has been written about the escalating methane threat. 

I’d like to clear something up regarding this topic: There is no threat and there never was. A threat is something that that “is likely to cause damage”. Calling methane a threat is erroneous and entirely incorrect. There is no threat. 

Methane eruptions have occurred on Earth 11 times (known). Each time this has caused global massive extinctions. A rise in temperature always preceded the release of methane. Methane then drove the temperatures even higher, past biosphere survival. Extinctions were widespread, each time wiping out most life on Earth. 

Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas then carbon dioxide, with estimates ranging from 20 – 70 times more potent. Most methane has been locked away, frozen in the world’s permafrost and the icy Arctic seabed for thousands of years. However, this is no longer true as both the Arctic ice and the permafrost are now melting and methane gas releases are being detected from the seabed. The 12th extinction level event from a methane release into the Earth’s atmosphere is now underway. 

The Earth, and all life within it, has the absolute certainty of another gigantic methane release, causing temperatures to dramatically rise ensuring the 12th methane extinction. I reiterate, this is not a threat, it is an absolute certainty. A “coup-de-grace“ for the biosphere. The Earth itself will go on, as it has before, but it will be an extremely long time before life returns. 

Like most climate topics, this has been ignored for too long. Humans believe that ‘their’ world has permanence and even divine protection, but the geological records indicates otherwise. Humans neither own the world nor control the world and our deities don’t either. These beliefs are a direct interference with the acceptance of reality and the conclusions of science and the historical record. The paleontology of Earth and what has occurred many times before isn’t debatable. Nor are the projections and assessments of what is occurring today. Even so, I well realize that these facts are irrelevant for many humans. 

Therefore, the real “threat” to humanity isn’t whether or not we are going to survive on this planet much longer, this answer is already well known by scientists. The real threat is how billions of disbelieving humans are going to behave as the world gets increasingly hotter and life becomes more untenable. These facts are indisputable. 

I’ve mentioned this before but perhaps not quite so directly. There are many, many real and valid threats. Methane however is not one of of them. There is nothing anybody can do about methane. Methane promises us all that we are all going to die and that humans are going to go extinct. There are many other promises of global extinction now unfolding too, but we cannot do anything about any of these either. It is the threats that we face that we should now be concerned about. What humans intend (or will) be doing to each other as we descend into the last days of the Anthropocene. 

This is why I rail on false beliefs as I do. Billions of people are going to act very irrationally and quite dangerously as the world descends into chaos and collapse. We know already that this will happen because we cannot survive in a hotter world (the biosphere and all the living things that we depend on cannot adapt and therefore, we starve to death). Like methane, dangerous people represent a greater threat then the non-dangerous. But who are the dangerous people? We have them all around us right now. They are the predators who occupy all walks of life. They’re also the ones who have raped and destroyed the planet, triggering these extinction level events. They head up corporations and governments, businesses and industry, but they’re also the “little guys” who are choosing ignorance and indifference to the warnings now screaming around the world. 

It’s incredibly naive to believe that the people who caused these problems are going to go off quietly into the night and “die in peace” as the inescapable reality of extinction finally sinks home. I suspect just the opposite will be true. They will choose to believe that: a) they can protect themselves (and will do so by all means); b) they can go on plundering the planet even faster; c) they will continue to orchestrate fights and competition among everyone else; d) and they finally resort to truly insane tactics like population eradication and desperate geo-engineering techniques. All this and no doubt more in the mistaken belief that they can somehow save themselves and enough slaves to ensure their own comfort. 

It’s also naive to believe that the so-called indifferent people will finally start acting rationally when things gets tough and they realize how wrong they were. They’re not doing it now while they still can. When it is easy. When it counts. No, it’s far more likely they’ll stay hostile to the truth and lash out against those that tried and upset their apple cart. This is exactly what I’ve experienced all these years of publishing this blog and exposing the lies and deception. It’s also what climate scientist have experienced all over the world. Climate change was only one of these hated topics I covered, I also pointed out the faketriots and false patriotism and many other topics this group still embraces. I found myself further and further distanced from my own ability to survive and make a living and still do. They’re not acting rationally and it’s very unlikely that they ever will (witness the 2016 (s)Election antics and the fuhrer [sic] they’ve enacted). Nobody really gets rewarded for telling the truth. 

As things worsen, it will be the rest of the world that will have to suffer for the arrogance of these two groups (even more the we already have). I don’t think we should let this happen. In this twilight hour of humanity, we should not be at war with one another or even in competition. There is no dignity in any of this. We should not let this happen, and we should not participate in any of their schemes or deceptions. Lending not our minds or our bodies or our wallets or even our attention, we should abstain from any participatory acts (of any kind) that would contribute to any of their lies and manipulation. They are the real threat for humanity and in point of fact, they have always been the real threat to humanity. 

Humans won’t live forever. Our species won’t live another thousand years, or even 500 years more. It’s not even likely that we’ll survive as a species for another 100 years. It’s not what anyone likes or expects, but it is what it is now. We’ll never reach the stars or establish colonies on Mars. Our children won’t get to imagine what their great-great grandchildren might do in the future. We won’t because generations of mankind listened to the idiots and naysayers and disbelievers, the false and phony and propheteers, and we all let them govern the decisions and direction the world has taken even when we (finally) knew we needed to reject their lies, but we were much too late. 

This is perhaps the greatest irony of them all. Both groups will have fully achieve their stated goals in the end. The power-hungry ruled, raped and plundered the Earth while lording over it all, and the apocalyptic who imagined a future judgement and a fiery hell. But it will be the last, final surviving humans who will be the true judges of us all, as millennia of torture upon a heated Earth wipes out everything living. The empty and crumbling relics of our civilization will endure for tens of thousands of years, but we won’t. We know where we are going, all of us. 

What we do with the living time that we still have left to us is all that matters now. In truth, it’s all that has actually ever mattered. We need to spend the short time we all have left in dignity, not in fighting, or warring, or competing or deciding who is right and who is wrong. The forces that we have unleashed are utterly indifferent to our passions and whims and will steamroll over us all. The biosphere of the planet is dying and so are we. All we have left now is compassion for what still remains, but it is threatened by the bad behavior of billions of humans who will violently react as their world crumbles down around them. We do not need to be a part of this. We need to find a better way.

Down with the Donald -- Reality Check, Please, People.

The ‘Global Order’ Myth. Andrew Bacevich, American Conservative. Jun. 15, 2017.

Teary-eyed nostalgia as cover for U.S. hegemony

During the Age of Trump, Year One, a single word has emerged to capture the essence of the prevailing cultural mood: resistance. Words matter, and the prominence of this particular term illuminates the moment in which we find ourselves.

All presidents, regardless of party or program, face criticism and opposition.Citizens disinclined to support that program protest. Marching, chanting, waving placards, and generally raising a ruckus in front of any available camera, they express dissent. In normal times, such activism testifies to the health of democracy.

Yet these are not normal times. In the eyes of Trump’s opponents, his elevation to the pinnacle of American politics constitutes a frontal assault on values that until quite recently appeared fixed and unassailable. In such distressing circumstances, mere criticism, opposition, protest, and dissent will not suffice. By their own lights, anti-Trump forces are fending off the apocalypse. As in November 1860 so too in November 2016, the outcome of a presidential election has placed at risk a way of life.

The very word resistance conjures up memories of the brave souls who during World War II opposed the Nazi occupation of their homelands, with the French maquis the best known example. It carries with it an unmistakable whiff of gunpowder. After resistance comes revolution.

Simply put, Trump’s most ardent opponents see him as an existential threat, with the clock ticking. Thus the stakes could hardly be higher. Richard Parker of Harvard has conjured what he calls Resistance School, which in three months has signed up some 30,000 anti-Trump resistors from 49 states and 33 countries. “It is our attempt to begin the long slow process of recovering and rebuilding our democracy,” says Parker. Another group styling itself the DJT Resistance declares that Trump represents “Hatred, Bigotry, Xenophobia, Sexism, Racism, and Greed.”

This is not language suggesting the possibility of dialogue or compromise. Indeed, in such quarters references to incipient fascism have become commonplace. Comparisons between Trump and Hitler abound. “It takes willful blindness,” writes Paul Krugman in the New York Times, “not to see the parallels between the rise of fascism and our current political nightmare.” And time is running short. Journalist Chris Hedges says “a last chance for resistance” is already at hand.

In the meantime, in foreign-policy circles at least, a second, less explosive term vies with resistance for Trump-era signature status. This development deserves more attention than it has attracted, especially among those who believe that alongside the question that riles up the resistance—namely, what values define us?—sits another question of comparable importance: “What principles define America’s role in the world?”

That second term, now creeping into the vocabulary of foreign-policy specialists, is liberal, often used interchangeably with the phrase rules-based and accompanied by additional modifiers such as open, international, and normative. All of these serve as synonyms for enlightened and good.

So Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution, describing what he refers to as the “twilight of the liberal world order,” worries about the passing of “the open international economic system the United States created and helped sustain.” Donald Trump’s misguided emphasis on “America First,” Kagan writes, suggests that he has no interest in “attempting to uphold liberal norms in the international system” or in “preserving an open economic order.”

Commenting on Trump’s Inaugural Address, Nicole Gaouette, CNN national-security reporter, expresses her dismay that it contained “no reference to America’s traditional role as a global leader and shaper of international norms.” Similarly, a report in the Financial Times bemoans what it sees as “a clear signal about Mr. Trump’s disregard for many of the international norms that have governed America as the pillar of the liberal economic order.” The historian Jeremi Suri, barely a week into Trump’s presidency, charges Trump with “launching a direct attack on the liberal international order that really made America great after the depths of the Great Depression.” At the Council on Foreign Relations, Stewart Patrick concurs: Trump’s election, he writes, “imperils the liberal international order that America has championed since World War II.” Thomas Wright, another Brookings scholar, piles on: Trump “wants to undo the liberal international order the United States built and replace it with a 19th-century model of nationalism and mercantilism.”

In Foreign Policy, Colin Kahl and Hal Brands embellish the point: Trump’s strategic vision “diverges significantly from—and intentionally subverts—the bipartisan consensus underpinning U.S. foreign policy since World War II.” Failing to “subscribe to the long-held belief that ‘American exceptionalism’ and U.S. leadership are intertwined,” Trump is hostile to the “open, rule-based international economy” that his predecessors nurtured and sustained.

Need more? Let Gen. David Petraeus have the last word: “To keep the peace,” the soldier-turned-investment-banker writes in an essay entitled “America Must Stand Tall,” the United States has established “a system of global alliances and security commitments,” thereby nurturing “an open, free and rules-based international economic order.” To discard this legacy, he suggests, would be catastrophic.

You get the drift. Liberalism, along with norms, rules, openness, and internationalism: these ostensibly define the postwar and post-Cold War tradition of American statecraft. Allow Trump to scrap that tradition and you can say farewell to what Stewart Patrick refers to as “the global community under the rule of law” that the United States has upheld for decades.

But what does this heartwarming perspective exclude? We can answer that question with a single word: history.

Or, somewhat more expansively, among the items failing to qualify for mention in the liberal internationalist, rules-based version of past U.S. policy are the following: meddling in foreign elections; coups and assassination plots in Iran, Guatemala, the Congo, Cuba, South Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, and elsewhere; indiscriminate aerial bombing campaigns in North Korea and throughout Southeast Asia; a nuclear arms race bringing the world to the brink of Armageddon; support for corrupt, authoritarian regimes in Iran, Turkey, Greece, South Korea, South Vietnam, the Philippines, Brazil, Egypt, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and elsewhere—many of them abandoned when deemed inconvenient; the shielding of illegal activities through the use of the Security Council veto; unlawful wars launched under false pretenses; “extraordinary rendition,” torture, and the indefinite imprisonment of persons without any semblance of due process.

Granted, for each of these, there was a rationale, rooted in a set of identifiable assumptions, ambitions, and fears. The CIA did not conspire with Britain’s MI6 in 1953 to overthrow Iran’s democratically elected president just for the hell of it. It did so because shelving Mohammad Mosaddegh seemingly offered the prospect of eliminating an annoying problem. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson did not commit U.S. combat troops to South Vietnam because he was keen to fight a major ground war in Asia but because the consequences of simply allowing events to take their course looked to be even worse. After 9/11, when George W. Bush and his associates authorized the “enhanced interrogation” of those held in secret prisons, panic rather than sadism prompted their actions. Even for the most egregious folly, in other words, there is always some explanation, however inadequate.

Yet collectively, the actions and episodes enumerated above do not suggest a nation committed to liberalism, openness, or the rule of law. What they reveal instead is a pattern of behavior common to all great powers in just about any era: following the rules when it serves their interest to do so; disregarding the rules whenever they become an impediment. Some regimes are nastier than others, but all are law-abiding when the law works to their benefit and not one day longer. Even Hitler’s Third Reich and Stalin’s USSR punctiliously observed the terms of their non-aggression pact as long as it suited both parties to do so.

My point is not to charge à la Noam Chomsky that every action undertaken by the United States government is inherently nefarious. Rather, I am suggesting that to depict postwar U.S. policy in terms employed by the pundits quoted above is to whitewash the past. Whether their motive is to deceive or merely to evade discomfiting facts is beside the point. What they are peddling belongs to the universe of alt facts. To characterize American statecraft as “liberal internationalism” is akin to describing the business of Hollywood as “artistic excellence.”

“Invocations of the ‘rules-based international order,’” Politico’s Susan Glasser rightly observes, “had never before caused such teary-eyed nostalgia.” Whence comes this sudden nostalgia for something that never actually existed? The answer is self-evident: it’s a response to Donald Trump.

Prior to Trump’s arrival on the scene, few members of the foreign-policy elite, now apparently smitten with norms, fancied that the United States was engaged in creating any such order. America’s purpose was not to promulgate rules but to police an informal empire that during the Cold War encompassed the “Free World” and became more expansive still once the Cold War ended. The pre-Trump Kagan, writing in 2012, neatly summarizes that view:

The existence of the American hegemon has forced all other powers to exercise unusual restraint, curb normal ambitions, and avoid actions that might lead to the formation of a U.S.-led coalition of the kind that defeated Germany twice, Japan once, and the Soviet Union, more peacefully, in the Cold War.

Leave aside the dubious assertions and half-truths contained within that sentence and focus on its central claim: the United States as a hegemon that forces other nations to bend to its will. Strip away the blather about rules and norms and here you come to the essence of what troubles Kagan and others who purport to worry about the passing of “liberal internationalism.” Their concern is not that Trump won’t show adequate respect for rules and norms. What has them all in a lather is that he appears disinclined to perpetuate American hegemony.

More fundamentally, Trump’s conception of a usable past differs radically from that favored in establishment quarters. Put simply, the 45th president does not subscribe to the imperative of sustaining American hegemony because he does not subscribe to the establishment’s narrative of 20th-century history. According to that canonical narrative, exertions by the United States in a sequence of conflicts dating from 1914 and ending in 1989 enabled good to triumph over evil. Absent these American efforts, evil would have prevailed. Contained within that parable-like story, members of the establishment believe, are the lessons that should guide U.S. policy in the 21st century.

Trump doesn’t see it that way, as his appropriation of the historically loaded phrase “America First” attests. In his view, what might have occurred had the United States not waged war against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan and had it not subsequently confronted the Soviet Union matters less than what did occur when the assertion of hegemonic prerogatives found the United States invading Iraq in 2003 with disastrous results.

In effect, Trump dismisses the lessons of the 20th century as irrelevant to the 21st. Crucially, he goes a step further by questioning the moral basis for past U.S. actions. Thus, his extraordinary response to a TV host’s charge that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a killer. “There are a lot of killers,” Trump retorted. “We’ve got a lot of killers. What, you think our country is so innocent?” In offering this one brief remark, Trump thereby committed the ultimate heresy. Of course, no serious person believes that the United States is literally innocent. What members of the foreign-policy establishment—including past commanders-in-chief—have insisted is that the United States act as if it were innocent, with prior sins expunged and America’s slate wiped clean. This describes the ultimate U.S. perquisite and explains why, in the eyes of Robert Kagan et al., Russian actions in Crimea, Ukraine, or Syria count for so much while American actions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya count for so little.

The desperate exercise in historical revisionism that now credits the United States with having sought all along to create a global community under the rule of law represents that establishment’s response to the heresies Trump has been spouting (and tweeting) since his famous ride down the escalator at Trump Tower.

Yet in reclassifying yesterday’s hegemon as today’s promulgator and respecter of norms, members of that establishment perpetrate a fraud. Whether Americans, notably gullible when it comes to history, will fall for this charade remains to be seen. Thus far at least, Trump himself, who probably knows a thing or two about snake-oil salesmen, shows little inclination to take the bait.

Say this for the anti-Trump resistance: while the fascism-just-around-the-corner rhetoric may be overheated and a touch overwrought, it qualifies as forthright and heartfelt. While not sharing the view that Trump will rob Americans of their freedoms, I neither question the sincerity nor doubt the passion of those who believe otherwise. Indeed, I am grateful to them for acting so forcefully on their convictions. They are inspiring.

Not so with those who now wring their hands about the passing of the fictive liberal international order credited to enlightened American statecraft. They are engaged in a great scam, working assiduously to sustain the pretense that the world of 2017 remains essentially what it was in 1937 or 1947 or 1957 when it is not.

Today’s Russia is not a reincarnation of the Soviet Union; the People’s Republic of China is not Imperial Japan; and the Islamic State in no way compares to Nazi Germany. Most of all, United States in the era of Donald Trump is not the nation that elected Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower, not least of all in the greatly reduced willingness of Americans to serve as instruments of state power, as the failed post-9/11 assertions of hegemony have demonstrated.

The world has changed in fundamental ways. So too has the United States. Those changes require that the principles guiding U.S. policy also change accordingly.

However ill-suited by intellect, temperament, and character for the office he holds, Trump has seemingly intuited the need for such change. In this regard, if in none other, I’m with the Donald.

But note the irony. Trump may come closer to full-fledged historical illiteracy than any president since Warren G. Harding. Small wonder then that his rejection of the mythic past long employed to preempt serious debate regarding U.S. policy gives fits to the perpetrators of those myths.

Hodgkinson’s Disease: Politics and Paranoia in the Age of Trump. Justin Raymondo, Anti-War.com. Jun. 19, 2017.

A would-be assassin was incited and validated by the media and the Democratic leadership

James T. Hodgkinson, the would-be assassin of Republican congressmen, wasn’t a radical. If you look at his published output – a series of letters to his local newspaper in Belleville, Illinois, as well as the majority of his Internet postings – it’s mostly about matters nearly every progressive cares about: taxes (the rich don’t pay enough), healthcare (the government must provide), income inequality (it’s all a Republican plot). All in all, a pretty unremarkable worldview that any partisan Democrat – either a Bernie Sanders supporter, as Hodginkinson was, or a Hillary fan – could sign on to.

So what drove him over the edge?

One of his more recent Facebook posts was a link to a petition that called for “the legal removal of the President and Vice-President, et. al., for Misprision of Treason.” Hodgkinson had signed it and he was asking his readers to follow suit: “Trump is a Traitor,” he wrote, “Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.” He was also a big fan of Rachel Maddow, who – incredibly — has spent the majority of her airtime ranting about “The Russian Connection,” as this Intercept piece documents. Hodgkinson was also a member of a Facebook group ominously dubbing itself “Terminate the Republican Party,” an appellation Hodgkinson apparently took quite literally. The group has over 13,000 members. The main page of the Terminators is adorned with a cartoon of Putin manipulating Trump like a puppet.

When Hodgkinson left his home and his job to travel to Alexandria, Virginia, he told his wife he was going to “work on tax issues.” But is that what motivated his murderous spree? Do “tax issues” really seem like something that would inspire someone to plan and carry out an assassination attempt that, but for the presence of Capitol police on the scene, would have certainly resulted in a massacre?

Hodgkinson clearly believed that the President of the United States was an agent of a foreign power. He had signed on to the idea that Trump not only benefited from a Russian campaign to discredit Hillary Clinton, but that he is engaged in a war against his own country. As Maddow put it in one of her more unhinged broadcasts:

“If the presidency is effectively a Russian op, right, if the American Presidency right now is the product of collusion between the Russian Intelligence Services, and an American campaign, I mean, that is so profoundly big. This is not part of American politics; this is not, you know, partisan warfare between Republicans and Democrats. This is international warfare against our country.”

“International warfare” – and Hodgkinson, a soldier in that fight, saw it as his duty to use the sort of weapons that are commonly used in international warfare. That’s why he sprayed that baseball field with a hail of gunfire – over fifty rounds. And when his rifle ran out of ammunition, he took out his handgun and continued firing. Because “this is not, you know, partisan warfare between Republicans and Democrats. This is international warfare against our country” – and it’s the obligation of patriotic citizens to take up that fight and take out the enemy.

This sort of craziness is usually reserved for the farther fringes of the American polity. Back in the 1960s, far-right groups like the Minutemen – who believed the United States government was effectively under the Kremlin’s control – armed themselves to prepare for the day when they would “liberate” America. Indeed, this sort of lunacy has traditionally been a fixture of extreme right-wing politics in this country: that it has now appeared on the left – and not the far-left, but in the “mainstream” of the Democratic party, which has taken up the Russia-gate conspiracy theory to the virtual exclusion of all else — is the proximate cause of what I call Hodgkinson’s Disease: the radicalization of formerly anodyne Democrats into a twenty-first century version of the Weathermen.

How did this happen? Democratic party leaders, in tandem with their journalistic camarilla, have validated an unconvincing conspiracy theory for which not a lick of definitive evidence has been provided: the idea that the Russians “stole” the election on behalf of Trump, and that the Trump campaign cooperated in this treasonous effort.

Yet that hasn’t stopped the Democratic party leadership from taking this ball and running with it. As Jennifer Palmieri, a top official in the Clinton campaign, put it, Democrats should push the “collusion” issue “relentlessly and above all else. They should talk about it in every interview.” The New York Times writes about this conspiracy theory as if it is uncontested fact. Democratic officeholders have declared that the alleged “hacking” of the election was an “act of war” – with the NeverTrump Republicans echoing the party line – and the Twitterverse’s conspiracy theorists are having a field day with the dangerously loony contention that we are at war with Russia. What’s more, the wildest imaginings of the nutjob crowd are being taken up and amplified by “respectable” people like constitutional lawyer Laurence Tribe.

In this way Hodgkinson’s Disease was incubated, its toxicity penetrating the mind of a suggestible and embittered little man until the poison had accumulated to such an extent that it burst through to the surface in an explosion of uncontrollable rage. Rachel Maddow is the theory: James T. Hodgkinson is the practice. The ultimate result is civil war.

That such a conflict would be born out of a full-scale delusional system that resembles a third-rate cold war era thriller just adds a Bizarro World cast to the whole sorry spectacle. The “Russia-gate” conspiracy theory that has consumed the energies of the media, the Congress, and President Trump is an elaborate hoax. This farrago of falsehood rests on a fallacious assumption: that the Russians necessarily “hacked” the DNC and John Podesta’s emails. The contention is that the methods supposedly utilized by the alleged hackers were similar to those used in the past by “suspected” Russian hackers, and that this makes the case. Yet this argument ignores the fact that these tools and methods were already out there, available for anyone to use. This is a textbook example of what cyber-security expert Jeffrey Carr calls “faith-based attribution,” which amounts to, at best, an educated guess, and at worst is the end result of confirmation bias combined with the economic incentive to tell a client what they want to hear. In the case of the DNC/Podesta “hacks,” the company hired to investigate, CrowdStrike, had every reason to echo Hillary Clinton’s contention that the Russians were the guilty party. CrowdStrike, by the way, never gave US law enforcement authorities access to the DNC’s servers: indeed, the FBI’s request for access was rebuffed.

The “Russia-gate” hoax has injected a pernicious and highly dangerous theme into our political discourse: the accusation that the Trump administration is a traitorous cabal intent on “destroying democracy,” as Hodgkinson put it, and handing over the country to the tender mercies of a foreign power. Taken seriously, this theme necessarily and inevitably leads to violence, which means there’s a good chance we’ll see more Hodgkinsons in the headlines.

And standing behind it all is the Deep State – the leakers (with access to all our communications) who are feeding disinformation to the Washington Postand the New York Times in order to bring down this presidency. One prong of this operation is embodied in the Special Counsel, Robert Mueller, whose investigation was provoked and fueled by Deep State leakage. The other prong consists of the useful idiot crowd, those who believe the propaganda and can be mobilized to take to the streets.

The Deep State types don’t have to get in direct contact with people like Hodgkinson in order to provoke violence against this administration or Trump’s supporters. They have only to continue to do what they’ve been doing since before Trump even took office, covertly spreading the idea that Trump is “Putin’s puppet,” as Mrs. Clinton put it: radicalized useful idiots like Hodgkinson will do the rest. It is eerily similar to the methods the CIA has used to overthrow foreign governments: spread rumors, utilizing their journalistic sock-puppets, and indirectly motivate and mobilize mobs to carry out their “regime-change” agenda. The only difference now is that they’re doing what they’ve always done on the home front instead of in, say, Lower Slobbovia.

Yes, that’s where we are right now – we’ve become Lower Slobbovia. Get used to it, folks, because it won’t end until the Deep State is defeated and dismantled.

Derangement and Danger on the Potomac. David Stockman. Jun. 15, 2017.  via anti-war.com.

The horrific shooting spree on the practice field of the GOP’s congressional baseball team happened early in the morning, but it was hardly the end of Wednesday’s madness on the Potomac. 

As it happened, the former was apparently another random eruption by of one of America’s sicko lone wolves – a wretch in the same league as South Carolina church killer, Dylann Roof. Notwithstanding that the latter had littered the nether regions of the Internet with racist rantings while the former was apparently a prolific Never Trumper left-winger, neither represented a real threat to the nation’s equanimity – even if they did bring a savage rain of violence to bear on those unfortunate dozens caught in their immediate line of fire. 

Not so for the 325 million American citizens who were pounded upon during the balance of the day by the allegedly "sane" Imperial City officialdom which rules the roost in America. 

Specifically, we have in mind Janet Yellen’s hideous presser in which she declared "mission accomplished" and that the US economy is blessed with "solid fundamentals" that are getting ever stronger. And in the same vein of unreality, there soon came the Senate’s 97-2 vote to smack the Donald in his ample jaws and impose even more sanctions on Russia, thereby bringing the nation another step closer to the brink of war and bankruptcy. 

Let us unpack this. The American people are being brought to ruin by three institutions that are mortal threats to liberty and prosperity. To wit, the Federal Reserve, the military/industrial/surveillance complex and a sinecured Congress that is burying unborn generations in debt – even as it sanctimoniously presumes that it is doing god’s work by servicing the beltway racketeers who keep it perpetually in office. 

On the latter score, it is worth reminding once again. An incumbent House member standing for reelection has a smaller chance of losing his seat than did a Politburo member during the heyday of the postwar Soviet Union. 

So it is no wonder that the Congress is filled by Warfare State lifers like Senator John McCain. This senile old fool appears to believe that he is some kind of latter day proconsul of the American Empire – who struts around Washington spreading bellicose lies and flagrant exaggerations about Washington’s self-created enemies. 

So doing, McCain helps to keep the Imperial City enthrall to the defense contractors and military and intelligence bureaucracies that he champions out of sheer will to power and ornery bloodlust. 

Not surprisingly, therefore, McCain was one of the principal authors and movers behind yesterday’s latest spasm of anti-Russia hysteria. The bill would impose new sanctions against Russia “in response to the violation of the territorial integrity of the Ukraine and Crimea, its brazen cyber-attacks and interference in elections, and its continuing aggression in Syria,” according to the deal’s sponsors. 

Everyone of these assertions are blatant lies, of course. Russia is in Syria at the behest of its constitutionally established government; it is the CIA and its stooges among the Persian Gulf states which provides arms and billions to the head-chopping jihadist radicals, who are the real aggressors in what is now a desolate land of ruin and refugees.
Likewise, it was Washington’s aggression – via funding and political support – in February 2014 that led to a coup on the streets of Kiev and the overthrow of its honestly elected President. The latter made the "mistake" of spurning NATO and the EU in favor of a more palatable economic deal with Moscow – its historic suzerain. 

Moreover, it was the virulent anti-Russian neo-Nazi putsch – handpicked by the US Ambassador to Ukraine – that led to insurrection against the Kiev regime in the historically Russian-speaking Donbas and Crimea regions; and then to the 90% referendum vote of the latter to rejoin Russia, which it had been an integral part of for more than 160 years after 1783. 

As for Russian "interference" in the 2016 elections in America – the very idea of it is ludicrous. The overwhelming source of "influence" in the American election process is the respective political parties, the legions of self-interested lobbies and PACs and the mainstream media and cable channels, which are overwhelmingly and irrationally anti-Putin. 

So where did this nefarious "influencing" come from? The RT television network?
Puleese! Your editor can attest to having appeared on that network several times and to have attacked with some vigor the three rotten American institutions mentioned above – the Fed, the military/industrial/surveillance complex and the Congress. 

But never once did we get any instructions from the Russians on the formulation of our broadsides. We thunk ’em up all on our own! 

More importantly, we never heard from a single American viewer, either. Perhaps that’s because RT apparently has fewer than a million viewers per day in the US.
So all the brouhaha is apparently about two-bit cyber-hacking that may or may not be the work of Russian State actors. 

But so what? There exists a massive $200 billion per year Internet security business in the world because by its very nature the worldwide web begets legions of hackers, thieves and malicious trolls. 

These hacking operations are overwhelmingly conducted privately for profit and malice, but there is one giant state actor that does operate for the purpose of political influence and meddling in the affairs of nearly every nation on earth. 

We are talking about the massive multi-billion hacking operation at National Security Agency (NSA) called Tailored Access Operations (TAO). The latter spends billions not only trolling every agency and bureau of the Russian Government – and the French government and Canadian government, too, among others – but also engages in worldwide cyber-false flag operations designed to lay down the "footprint" of Russian and others foreign agencies on top of Washington’s own skull-duggery. 

And that’s just NSA. The CIA has a counterpart operation in the same kind of worldwide hacking business, and these may only be the tip of the iceberg. After all, the total acknowledged budget of the 17-agency "Intelligence Community" (IC) is upwards of $75 billion or nearly 50% more than Russia’s entire military budget including aircraft fuel, soldiers pay and spare boots. 

Needless to say, the self-appointed imperial proconsuls’ like McCain never stop to ask whether or not Washington’s massive cyber warfare operations might be expected to generate counteractions from those targeted as Washington’s enemies or, more importantly, something even more insidious. 

That is, McCain and in his Capitol Hill war party do not even know for sure whether "fancy bear" and the other code-named Russian state malefactors constantly bandied about in the mainstream media are really anything more than a couple of fat guys siting at desks at NSA headquarters in Ft. Meade propagating false-flag cyber-attacks. 

In any event, Senator McCain, was delighted with yesterday’s handiwork. The amendment allows “broad new sanctions on key sectors of Russia’s economy, including mining, metals, shipping and railways” and authorizes “robust assistance to strengthen democratic institutions and counter disinformation across Central and Eastern European countries that are vulnerable to Russian aggression and interference.” 

Likewise, these new sanctions would be imposed on “corrupt Russian actors” and those “involved in serious human rights abuses". They would also target those who supply weapons to the Syrian government or who work with the Russian defense industry, as well as “those conducting malicious cyber activity on behalf of the Russian government” and “those involved in corrupt privatization of state-owned assets.” 

In short, yesterday afternoon the US Senate just plain went nuts attacking a largely nonexistent threat emanating from a pipsqueak nation that has a GDP equal to only 7% of that of the US and no capacity whatsoever – other than one smoke-belching 40-year old aircraft carrier and a fleet rowboats – to attack the shores of New Jersey or any other place in the USA. 

But those realities did not stop McCain from gassing effusively about his own dangerous handiwork: 

“We must take our own side in this fight. Not as Republicans, not as Democrats, but as Americans,” said Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) before the vote. “It’s time to respond to Russia’s attack on American democracy with strength, with resolve, with common purpose, and with action.” 

The truth is, Russia has no more attacked American democracy than did the North Vietnamese at the Bay of Tonkin or the Spaniards on the Battleship Maine in 1898.
More importantly, no one else in the world thinks Russia is a serious threat – except the bureaucrats of NATO who make a living concocting such threats; and some itinerant nationalist politicians in Eastern Europe who are never loathe to play the Russian card in their quest for power and attention. 

Even the Donald’s own Secretary of State had this to say earlier in the week during his congressional testimony: 

“I have yet to have a bilateral, one-on-one, a poolside conversation with a single counterpart in any country: in Europe, Middle East, even South-East Asia, that has not said to me: please, address your relationship with Russia, it has to be improved,” Tillerson said on Tuesday, testifying before the Senate appropriations subcommittee about the proposed State Department budget. 

Folks, the point is quite simple. Unless Washington’s bloated and wasteful $700 billion national security budget is pared back drastically, there is not a snowball’s chance in the hot place of reestablishing fiscal discipline. As long the GOP hawks and pro-war Dems are pumping massive funding into the Deep End of the Swamp, the will be no cuts in domestic appropriations and no entitlement reforms, either. 

Indeed, ever since Ronald Reagan’s mild assault on the Welfare State was decisively turned back on Capitol Hill in the spring of 1981, the "guns and butter coalition" has ruled the roost. And that insidious coalition has taken the national debt from $1 trillion to $20 trillion along the way – even has it has locked in an automatic growth to $30 trillion or 140% of GDP by 2027. 

That is also why the Deep State and Washington’s bipartisan War Party will not desist until they have removed the Donald from office. And that’s for the unspeakable sin of suggesting that rapprochement with the Russians and Putin makes more sense than the path to war and fiscal bankruptcy that is underway today. 

Self-evidently, hell hath no fury like the prospect for world peace and the dismantlement of Imperial Washington’s destructive global empire. A tiny step in that direction was all that General Mike Flynn undertook during his infamous calls with the Russian Ambassador in late December – -a welcome initiative for which he was unceremoniously fired and is now under unrelenting prosecution. 

But it gets worse. Based on new leaks to the Washington Post it is now clear that the Deep State has used the Flynn Affair and the Donald’s naïve request to former FBI director Comey to "go easy" on Flynn as a pretext for obstruction of justice charges against the President himself: 

The special counsel overseeing the investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 election is interviewing senior intelligence officials as part of a widening probe that now includes an examination of whether President Trump attempted to obstruct justice, officials said. 

The move by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III to investigate Trump’s own conduct marks a major turning point in the nearly year-old FBI investigation, which until recently focused on Russian meddling during the presidential campaign and on whether there was any coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Investigators have also been looking for any evidence of possible financial crimes among Trump associates, officials said. 

In this context, it is truly amazing that the "markets" have not yet woken from their stupor. The drive to unseat the Donald will leave the Imperial City in ungoverned chaos during the interim – meaning an unending crisis over debt ceilings, continuing resolutions and government shutdowns. 

Still, perhaps by the looks of today’s sea of red, the whopper told by Yellen during her presser yesterday may finally be sinking in. 

Our clueless Keynesian school marm not only falsely claimed "mission accomplished" and that the US economy is heading for the promised land of permanent full employment and unprecedented prosperity. She also claimed ...