Back again with another Monday Message Board.
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John Quiggin 
https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/26/were-doomed-mayer-hillman-on-the-climate-reality-no-one-else-will-dare-mention
No comment.
We lose species all the time because we have a land hunger form of capitalism. We have a mono-culture style of agriculture where we kill everything that wants to live and keep alive a single plant that would really want to die or be eaten by pests. We don’t have enough wildlife corridors within our larger farms and the idea of larger farms may be inimical to wildlife. So we have real problems, that take non-fantasy solutions to fix. Yet the Guardian, dishonest oligarchical rag that it is, quotes some old fool who thinks the world is going to end on account of the plants having access to too much CO2.
Try science people. Just try it. You won’t die. You might think you will but you won’t.
Apart from the last two sentences I actually nearly agree with what Graeme Bird has written. Modern agriculture is excessively monocultural which provides certain efficiency gains at the expense of leaving environments excessively vulnerable to risks such as pests and crop failures diue to adverse weather. The problem of lack of wildlife corridors is clear – particularly, in Australia, the areas around southern Queensland where much land clearing is occurring. The only corridors are along roadside verges that have become slaughterhouses for native species. the land has such low value that leaving 20% for corridors would not significantly impact on costs.
Of course, climate change makes the issue of wildlife corridors more important as species will need to move altitudinally or further south to survive.
“The problem of lack of wildlife corridors is clear – ” Big problem. During authentic climate change a species can adapt, or he can travel. One degree Celsius difference is like moving 100 miles North or South. But if the fences are everywhere there has to be extinctions. The farms need to emerge out of a natural environment. We can even exploit more natural parks so long as we are kind of swapping the land for corridors within the land we now have cultivated.
Plus its healthier to have all manner of caveats on these properties for the humans to be able to get away from it all. In Britain they have particularly good laws for walkers on rural lands. Even in urban landscapes we have buffer areas where there are unspoken rules. I can use the land in front of your house, so long as I am just passing by. If I take a nap under a tree on the footpath outside of your house I’m breaking an unspoken social contract. Third world countries where there isn’t this buffer are horrifying. It becomes socially acceptable to ride your bike dangerously on the road but on foot people see you as an embarrassment in some areas.
Really this is not often discussed. Private property was MEANT to have commons buffer areas. If not for us, for nature. We need to change a lot. And this CO2 story may be distracting us quite a bit.
You fly over the country and you see hundreds of miles of unowned bush which seems unvarying from the air. Much of it bound to go up in flames under current conditions. It would be better if we cut very small farms inside of some of this and got a lot of bush-covered pathways through the lands that are currently all privately owned. Partial but not total isolation is actually good for genetic diversity and adaptation. Good for evolution so to speak.
But one or two things ought not be controversial. This mono-culture has to go. Monoculture cropping is obscene. Its got to go. Its had its time and its been a disaster.
And these deserts have to be fixed.
“ One degree Celsius difference is like moving 100 miles North or South”
No it isn’t, 1C increase means the whole climate has changed, it’s not specific to any particular location but is a measure of energy distributed over a whole body.
Do you have a problem with mixing metric and imperial? I do, it’s indicative of muddled thinking.
“You fly over the country and you see hundreds of miles of unowned bush which seems unvarying from the air. Much of it bound to go up in flames“
You do/we do? You keep mixing your personal pronouns; are we royally inclined?
Sitting in a plane and drawing assumptions formed only from the view, is really myopic
Its about right. But CO2 doesn’t warm the climate, unless you are the man we have been looking for all this time. You know. The man with the evidence. Are you that man?
Exhibit one. Also known as rog. See how his subservient approach to oligarchical fake science and CO2-hysteria somehow makes him allergic to real problems with sensible solutions. It doesn’t matter that we can take more CO2 out of the air by way of soil development. Doesn’t matter that we have a perfect storm of excellence that can be pursued here. The devotion to lies and bad science makes him run towards harmful policies and makes him inimical to the good stuff.
Mono culture provides a much better environment for offensive military operations to boot. So if a group of people are leading a large and powerful institution and want to expand their empire, promoting monoculture practices in targeted countries and in subservient countries is an obvious thing to do.
A group of people trying to establish and maintain a a Taoist Platonic Republic on the other hand would promote Hutterite Utilitarian Nija Maxi Agricultural Practices in a nation that they were sheparding. Then even the landscape becomes a force multiplyer for the defenders, using asymetrical warfare tactics, rather than the attackers, using complete spectrum dominance surrvellance and targeting tactics.
It’s all very well to talk, in general terms, about the sequestration of carbon in soil. However, from my experience the evidence needed to elevate the status of this notion beyond mere speculation is lacking.
Birdy, at some point you will have to stump up with the goods. The burden of proof is yours to bear.
No thats just rubbish rog. You are making it up. Some soil scientists talk as though the soil loss since World War II is more important than the hydro-carbon industries in our release of CO2 to the air. Thats probably right but its a quantitative matter and so I would defer to these people. Soil building strategies are well-known and effective. Science is not about looking at your belly button and deciding based on some sort of internal liver quiver. Good soil building strategies are the key to excellence in nutrition. So its a perfect storm of excellence we are after here. Its pulling at a single thread and an whole bundle of knotty problems fall away into nothingness. From the alleged CO2 problem, to all manner of health problems, to the fire problems, the flooding problems, the drought problems. Pull on one string and they are all gone.
Plus the soil loss catastrophe is ongoing. Only a few places have started to reverse this soil loss and desertification. And as I pointed out, your CO2 fanaticism is diverting you and others away from the real catastrophes and the real solutions. Conceptually the Australians are world leaders in this space. The innovation for land rehydration and soil development is coming from crusty old farmers out in woop woop. Plus we are the country that invented permaculture. But in terms of putting things into practice we are being shamed by a lot of these Africans. And the West itself deserves a farming inferiority complex in that we churn over mega-billions in loan and aid money to farmers but cannot seem to terrace our hills like the ancient Chinese and Peruvians. This is clear market failure stemming from a useless finance system and almost supernaturally bad policy.
War and peace…
…”Before I go on, though, here’s another distinctive aspect of our forever-war moment: Have you noticed that peace is no longer even a topic in America today? The very word, once at least part of the rhetoric of Washington politicians, has essentially dropped out of use entirely. Consider the current crop of Democratic candidates for president…”
American Exceptionalism Is Killing the Planet
The Many Abuses of Endless War
By William J. Astore
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176635/
GB. Feel free to cite something from … Here is the csiro and Australian government on;
“An overview of key socio-economic factors, principles and guidelines in wildlife “corridor” planning and implementation
CSIRO, 2011
“A report for the Australian Government Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities, June 2011”
http://www.environment.gov.au/biodiversity/publications/overview-key-socio-economic-factors-principles-and-guidelines-wildlife-corridor-planning
Times like this I really miss Freelander 😦
JQ, time for “Epistemic & Personal Transformation:
Dealing with the Unknowable and Unimaginable” to advise or learn from Google Brain?
“Learning to Predict Without Looking Ahead:
World Models Without Forward Prediction
C. DANIEL FREEMAN Google Brain
LUKE METZ Google Brain
DAVID HA Google Brain
October 29 2019
“Much of model-based reinforcement learning involves learning a model of an agent’s world, and training an agent to leverage this model to perform a task more efficiently. While these models are demonstrably useful for agents, every naturally occurring model of the world of which we are aware–e.g., a brain–arose as the byproduct of competing evolutionary pressures for survival, not minimization of a supervised forward-predictive loss via gradient descent. That useful models can arise out of the messy and slow optimization process of evolution suggests that forward-predictive modeling can arise as a side-effect of optimization under the right circumstances. Crucially, this optimization process need not explicitly be a forward-predictive loss. In this work, we introduce a modification to traditional reinforcement learning which we call observational dropout, whereby we limit the agents ability to observe the real environment at each timestep. In doing so, we can coerce an agent into learning a world model to fill in the observation gaps during reinforcement learning. We show that the emerged world model, while not explicitly trained to predict the future, can help the agent learn key skills required to perform well in its environment.”
https://learningtopredict.github.io/
Some neuroscience re ptsd says various “peaks” and “valleys” in our minds are lacking ability to communicate. By deopping a bot in a valley it can learn to navigate whole system without barriers
“UtEB’s brain is a mountainous landscape, with fertile valleys separated by towering peaks. Some memories (or pieces of your predictive model, or whatever) live in each valley. But they can’t talk to each other. The passes are narrow and treacherous. They go on believing their own thing, unconstrained by conclusions reached elsewhere.
Consciousness is a capital city on a wide plain. When it needs the information stored in a particular valley, it sends messengers over the passes. These messengers are good enough, but they carry letters, not weighty tomes. Their bandwidth is atrocious; often they can only convey what the valley-dwellers think, and not why. And if a valley gets something wrong, lapses into heresy, as often as not the messengers can’t bring the kind of information that might change their mind.”
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/26/mental-mountains/
“GB. Feel free to cite something from … Here is the csiro and Australian government on;”
Essentially I see the idea as zero interest loans for water harvesting and other programs designed to phase away from straight monoculture. Or indeed anything that can be related indirectly or directly to soil development. But this is a kind of subsidy. Subsidies can lead to land inflation and unjust enrichment. So the bigger farmers, to qualify ought to be willing to sell a chunk of land. And that chunk could be sold to an aspiring farmer. Or it could be sold to the government and turned into a nature corridor. Don’t really know how the CSIRO is more or less qualified than myself to put forward such a plan.
All the many billions of dollars off-loaded onto farmers in the past has come about on the basis that their farms were not kitted out for resilience and water-harvesting. You cannot get greater policy incompetence than that. Its like this endless money-pit because of policy brain damage.
for a good read on soil see ‘ Dirt : the erosion of civilisations ‘ by David R Montgomery
GB. Note last reference. By Prof John Quiggin.
Walk not talk as you “Don’t really know how the CSIRO is more or less qualified than myself to put forward such a plan.”. Where is it other than in derisive gish gallops?
And if you would grace us with a referenced or enumerated plan, here are the references you’ll need. Your plan will get you a job at the csiro.
“However, tree plantings that pose a significant adverse risk to water availability, biodiversity conservation, employment, the local community or access for agricultural production, are excluded.”
“As a result, tree planting projects are generally excluded from the CFI in areas that receive greater than 600mm average annual rainfall. However, environmental plantings and plantings for the mitigation of dryland salinity may be permissible in these areas under the CFI. Plantings may also be permissible where:…”
https://www.agriculture.gov.au/water/policy/carbon-farming-initiative
Methodology, maps local and global;
https://github.com/ANZSoilData/ANZSoilML/wiki/ANZSoilML-Primer
“Further information… The Clean Energy Regulator – contains information on submitting project applications, as well as on reporting and auditing.”
https://www.agriculture.gov.au/water/policy/carbon-farming-initiative
“The carbon price: three months on
OCTOBER 29, 2012
JOHN QUIGGIN
” * Soil carbon storage, much beloved of Opposition climate spokesman Greg Hunt and others, is (almost) a complete furphy”
https://johnquiggin.com/2012/10/29/the-carbon-price-three-months-on/
All papers at JQ’s Rsmg re soil;
https://www.uq.edu.au/search/?q=soil&submit=%EF%80%82&output=xml_no_dtd&client=ws&proxystylesheet=ws&as_sitesearch=https%3A%2F%2Frsmg.group.uq.edu.au
See that stuff about tree-planting being a threat to the availability of water.
“However, tree plantings that pose a significant adverse risk to water availability, biodiversity conservation, employment, the local community or access for agricultural production, are excluded.”
You cannot reference these people because they are completely useless. The planting of desert-loving trees is a water retention strategy. Yet these dummies talk as if the trees are going to deplete water availability. Which is almost never the case. You have to be careful who you cite. You cannot cite people who are clueless since that is just passing on misinformation.
The problem comes when you don’t follow permaculture principles and you start doing things for one reason only. So its likely to be a disaster if you decide to have another Abba-Dabba Berman numbers racket aka a carbon price and trading scheme. Thats just more loot for the Goldman Sachs looters and other welfare queens. So maybe in such a case they will start plant water-thirsty trees in the desert. Like you have a desert and instead of growing saltbush and cactus for the camels you end up planting a thirsty tree like Osage Orange for some Goldman Sachs trading racket.
So while royalties need to be pumped up higher to take out the banker overhead and slow down non-renewable resource usage, these numbers rackets have to be avoided like the plague. They are overhead for welfare queens.
The idea is to take any sloping grown and put swales on them. A swale is a ditch. But its a ditch that is completely level. You dig that ditch and you put the soil on the bottom side of it. Then you plant the desert-loving trees, that can also double as forage, on the bottom side of that ditch. Maybe on the top side as well but definitely on the bottom side. You might do this for every 3 metres of altitude. Then when it rains one time in a blue moon the ditches fill up. The water then soaks into the soil, given its weight. It doesn’t drain away. So the water is now soaked under the soil at a level where it cannot evaporate. It can only evaporate via plant transpiration. But this supports trees and grasses. Desert-loving trees particularly pull moisture from the water vapour in the air. They actually provide more water for the downhill area.
Gullies are like a dormant river. They become a river the next time it rains. You need to fill the gullies in over time with a series of check-dams. Also rivers should be given a series of check dams but only upstream from the town. Not downstream lest you flood the town.
So in what way can a CSIRO citation either detract from, or inform this basic knowledge of how the world works? How artificial markets distort decisions and are overhead? How you go about rehydrating the land? A CSIRO citation can do nothing to fundamental knowledge of economics and land care. To think otherwise reminds one of the story of the mathematician with constipation. He tried to fix his problem with his pencil.
“for a good read on soil see ‘ Dirt : the erosion of civilisations ‘ by David R Montgomery”
Sounds like the right stuff. A civilisation is only as good as its soil. And ours is degrading.
GB. “You have to be careful who you cite. You cannot cite people who are clueless since that is just passing on misinformation.”
That was the point. You deride everybody and cite none.
We get permaculture. We get what you are on about.
You need to present or create some research along with your words. The only person I read you cited was jo nova. Do you respect anyone?
KT2,
Your accusation directed at GB could also easily be pointed at me. Therefore I think that I should answer that question too.
1.) James Petras
2.) Cynthia McKinney
3.) Tim Wise
4.) Warren Mosler, Bill Mitchell, and Randal Wray
5.) Paul Beckwith
6.) Chelsa Manning
7.) Ilhan Omar
8.) Jesse Ventura
9.) Julian Assange
10.) Manuel Garcia Jr.
11.) Sam Harris
12.) Glen Ford (of Black Agenda Report)
13.) Michael Albert
14.) David Chapman (Buddhist Scholar)
15.) Eliezer Yudkowsky
16.) Juan Cole
17.) Barbara Grey
18.) John Quiggen, for allowing me the opportunity to try to incite sedition in Australia.
19.) Miguel Diaz Canel
20.) Fake Ploeg IV for continuing a family tradition unappreciated by the rest of the world.
“ desert-loving trees”
Have you any examples of the above? I’m very curious, they could be a winner.
“That was the point. You deride everybody and cite none.”
You are championing misinformation and denying science. Citations mean nothing unless you can convert them into evidence. Evidence is data broadly considered, related to a specific hypothesis, by way of human reason, and then only in the context of three or more competing hypotheses.
You are always quoting dropkicks. Thats what you do you quote dummies and you think thats a citation and that a citation its evidence for ……. something. It is not. Its just some fool typing and another fool cutting and pasting. A citation only counts as evidence if it conforms to what I have written above.
Rog you literalist dummy. Its a well-known phrase for trees that do well under FAIRLY dry conditions. Under conditions that would be difficult for most other trees. Of course all trees need water and so such a tree may well need nursing along for a few years until its roots were deep enough to hit a deep water table.
See you cannot learn anything. Your learning curves are flat. And its tribal primitive fatwah on hydrocarbons and devotion to lies and fake science that must repel you from any real solutions to the problems you pretend to care about. Its really about a primitive smelling blood. Its no a reasoned approach you are taking.
“”desert-loving trees”
Have you any examples of the above? I’m very curious, they could be a winner.”
See the smalmyness. The hatred of the truth once it presents itself to you. Like not just a little bit of hatred for science and truth but a deep loathing. You feel it in your shoulder blades.
“A UBI would direct much larger shares of transfers to childless, nonelderly, nondisabled households than existing programs, and much more to middle-income rather than poor households. A UBI large enough to increase transfers to low-income families would be enormously expensive. We review the labor supply literature for evidence on the likely impacts of a UBI. We argue that the ongoing UBI pilot studies will do little to resolve the major outstanding questions.”
Citation
Hoynes, Hilary, and Jesse Rothstein. “Universal Basic Income in the United States and Advanced Countries.” Annual Review of Economics, vol. 11, no. 1, 2019, pp. 929–958., doi:10.1146/annurev-economics-080218-030237.
https://irle.berkeley.edu/universal-basic-income-in-the-united-states-and-advanced-countries/
Thanks Curt.
“The only person I read you cited was jo nova. Do you respect anyone?”
There was an $80 000USD study on White Oaks Farms, which is a big outfit that is polycultural and regenerative as to its farming practices. The study concluded that for every kilo of beef these guys produce, 3 kilos of CO2 is interred. So the soil development overmatches all the tractors, electricity and other machinery that is used in the raising of the beef. Smaller even more focused outfits could do a lot better. Plus if the emphasis was on water retention we could do better still. Especially in Australia.
The Rodale institute believes that regenerative agriculture can inter more carbon than the entirety of what the hydro-carbon industry releases. It ought to be an obvious thing, but if you want to read studies tangential to this judgement call, then you could go to their website. But in science the citation isn’t the thing. Not a raw citation anyway. To convert it to evidence you need to have the body of the study in front of you, understand the assumptions behind the glib paragraphs in the summary, and you have to dwell on it a long time to see if you can convert the citation to evidence, one way or the other. My experience is that the body of the study is usually at variance with the summary.
So because phasing out major energy sources is notoriously slow and difficult in energy economics, we know what to do. You have to pump up royalties, and have a few (non-subsidy)incentives in place and you don’t help renewables beyond that too much, or you are in violation of price discovery and all economic law. Those high royalties and minor incentives sustained over many many decades will have their effect eventually. But the big gains to be made are in soil development.
We know what we have to do here. Its only that few people are up to date on water retention strategies and soil science. And there is always the people like rog playing silly-buggers. Getting in the way when the solution is already known.
…”…has developed a simple new method that can be used to identify the best decision-makers from a group of experts without having to know whether their decisions—past or present—are correct or incorrect. “…
Kurvers, R., et al. How to detect high-performing individuals and groups: Decision similarity predicts accuracy.
Science Advances, (2019).advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/11/eaaw9011
What are all these citations about? You think you needed to cite those guys to make that argument? The argument makes itself whether or not you are in favour of the UBI. The citation adds nothing to the argument. This is a crude understanding of science you have here. What does Jesse Rothstein mean to you?
If the Americans want the UBI they need to close down the government departments to pay for it and get rid of the banker and pharmaceutical industry overhead. There is so much fat to cut on both sides of the public-private divide. They need 3 trillion up front, the deficit is about one trillion. So to get a UBI they ought to be looking for maybe 5 trillion in cuts to bullshit jobs. Easy in theory, hard in practice.
So birdy, you like to point the finger at others and accuse them of failing the science and lying but when it comes to your turn, you fail the science and lie.
You provided the oxymoron “desert-loving trees” and then backtrack with “ FAIRLY dry conditions”. Leaving that aside, you still haven’t supplied a list of plants suitable to the environment that you envisage.
If this thought bubble of yours ever gained traction I could see a serious situation, this green army would be all kitted out ready to go but no plants to plant because nobody could list the species.
It’s obvious to me that you are operating out of a darkened airless room, a dungeon maybe and this virtual reality is in need of a test.
“Desert-loving trees” is a well-known phrase you idiot. As I just explained to you moron. So what is your problem dopey? We may to go over this several times.
Actually I’m on the second floor and I have a view of something that is not quite a hill and almost a mountain. Very good view of the countryside. But I know how you racist tribal types hate white people who aren’t successful.
So are we clear on the desert-loving trees phrase yet? Too bad old Bill Mollison isn’t still alive so that you, expert that you are, could pick him up on his phraseology.
So are clear on the desert-loving trees phrase yet? You IDIOT? Are we clear on it yet? We good with the phrase now? You dim bulb.
And now we can see that your religious commitment to fake science is detracting from solutions which are known, and right in front of you.
We good with the phrase now? Dopey?
Birdy, show me the evidence.
What exactly is a Desert-loving tree?
You say it’s well known so I say, tell me what it is.
There’s a park at Alice Springs, called the Desert Park, good for those interested in desert friendly flora and fauna.
Another at the Olive Pink Garden.
Well worth the visit, for desert warriors.
For the bigot with the flat learning curves we can go over this as many times as it takes.
“Its a well-known phrase for trees that do well under FAIRLY dry conditions. Under conditions that would be difficult for most other trees. Of course all trees need water and so such a tree may well need nursing along for a few years until its roots were deep enough to hit a deep water table.”
You good?
Sepp Holzer uses desert-loving trees at the top of hills and at the top of Krater-Gartens. Crater-Gardens are even better than pasture-cropping. Since they can take flat land and effectively increase the amount of arable real estate. Also at the top with the desert-loving trees, are the nitrogen fixing trees. One element of course can serve many different functions. So a tree can be a commercial crop, desert-loving (effectively a water-harvester), and a forage tree all at once. In fact any element in the design, according to permaculture ideology, ought to have three or more reasons to be where it is.
You good with desert-loving trees? Here we see the bigotry of the tribalist. You wanted a tribe member to come up with all the solutions and it turned out that it was Aussies and an Austrian that got it right. So you are always going to be opposed to this stuff.
I’m totally with you now, birdy.
You’ve got absolutely no idea on the subject, you quote selectively from others to lend a patina of authenticity to your constructions and display a deep ignorance.
I’ll be determined in applying this filter to future bird droppings.
No no. We’ve got to go over it again, because you are a moron. So for the man with the flat learning curves, we will just have to keep going over it again until you are good with desert-loving trees? Because you are retarded
“Its a well-known phrase for trees that do well under FAIRLY dry conditions. Under conditions that would be difficult for most other trees. Of course all trees need water and so such a tree may well need nursing along for a few years until its roots were deep enough to hit a deep water table.”
Are we good now? Idiot? Do you have the desert-loving trees “down” now?
Are you good now? Do you at least have the desert-loving trees under your belt now? Blockhead? Can we confirm that you at least understand what a “desert-loving-tree” is?
China coal update, from CoalWire, indicating that the coal lobby, that has been hrabbing all the headlines with horrible expansion plans, is not having things all its own way:
“The state-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC) has proposed that five government-owned utilities be required to cut their coal generating capacity by between a quarter and a third by the end of 2021 in order to halve their financial losses.”
https://endcoal.org/2019/12/coalwire-302-december-5-2019/
This isn’t settled yet. Xi has a hugely important decision to take.
I thought that someone would make some comments about people on my list. Comments attacking or perhaps defending the integrity of people on my list.
I could of also done a list of people who have died already but who are still very relevent.
That list would start with Thomas Paine.
Curt, JQ said “If anyone is worth emulating in that period, it’s anti-slavery radicals like Tom Paine and Benjamin Rush — not John Locke.
https://jacobinmag.com/2019/03/john-locke-freedom-slavery-united-states
… but I think you like Paine as “a revolutionary. He authored the two most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution and inspired the patriots in 1776 to declare independence from Great Britain ”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Paine
Yes?
We will await your references and context before “Comments attacking or perhaps defending the integrity of people on my list.”.
Besides smoke / dust keeping school kids indoors at morning tea and lunch 3 days last 2 weeks, we are getting mini in town dust micro storms.
I can attest to this locally on pasture farm and “forest” but also towns now where once bare earth was deemed a public health risk and always greened & tended appropriately.
It is just into summer on on windy days we can be swamped in a mini dust storm from the once proudly green verges in town.
I know a feral shooter. Cats foxes everywhere. Pigs goats now harder to find. Almost zero ground cover out western nsw.
. ..”Mr Heidenreich said dust storms have been having a greater impact on more populated, urban locations.
“The unusual thing this time is actually that the central-west and the north-west have enough exposed soil to create their own dust storms,” he said.
“It’s having a serious impact even on the coastal fringe.
“A lot of dust storms are making it to Sydney and Newcastle.”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2019-12-06/dust-storms-happening-with-record-breaking-frequency/11768306
And that got me thinking…. when did councils cease mowing house front verges? I am the last in my street with ‘natural’ verge. Love the native orchids. No water. No mow. No dust either.
Okay Curt I’ll comment two of your people. Dr Cynthia McKinney was courageous when all others were not. Mother McKinney must have been a wonderful lady because she brought Dr Cynthia up right.
Mosler is loveable when he talks about social policy. But he’s a horrifying bait-and-switch merchant who is secretly campaigning against banking reform. Like any good scam he appears to be for the opposite of what he is really for. He appears to be for monetary reform and monetary reality. But in reality he’s thrown a spanner in the works in order to delay the phasing out of fractional reserve banking. He is a wolf in sheeps clothing.
I’m trying to think of a positive aspect to all this relentless burning, perhaps the acceptance that climate change is a reality and we have a responsibility for the future.
KT2,
Thank you for your scholarly input. There is an organization in England and one in the USA dedicated to the memory of Thomas Paine. I value Paine for helping to popularize secularism and for his role in establsihing the ideological groundwork for the welfare state. He was not a Marxist obviously as he died decades before Marx started writing. Would he have been a Marxist if he if had been born in say around 1780? I find that a very interesting quesion.
For the role that Thomas Paine played in the American Revolution I refer to him as the spiritual mother of America. But his influence after the birth of America was not what it should have been because George Washington took custody of America after the revolution and Thomas Paine was cut off of from his motherly role.
GB,
That is an interesting comment. It is tailor made for someone of your stature. The national “banks” of the world, such as the Federal Reserve, certianly do play a role in the smoke and mirrors maninpulation of the political thinking of the masses.
Norway is addressing its addiction to fossil fuels;
“ The markets and politics are telling Norway that fossil fuels are not its future. The climate change issue commands action now. The science is urgent and uncompromising. But the institutional movement of markets and politics is cautious and tentative.
… . The country is clear about where it will land financially in ten years. What path the country will travel is more of an open question. The political openness and full disclosure of fundamental economic and climate change policy will have lessons for us all.”
https://ieefa.org/ieefa-update-norways-2020-budget-signals-hard-choices-ahead/
“I’m trying to think of a positive aspect to all this relentless burning, perhaps the acceptance that climate change is a reality and we have a responsibility for the future.”
Its not like its a mystery. Its a stop-gap measure to deal with the potential for big fires thanks to fuel building. Its to do with high CO2 levels leading to superior plant performance. Got nothing whatsoever to do with the climate. The climate is cooling yet the bush fires get worse thanks to the fuel. But its fire-fighting in the management sense, since what is needed in the longer run is fuel control with animals and the hydrating of the land.
The problem with unscientific people using Orwellian language, is that they constantly stooge themselves. You cannot think straight about anything rog. Your brain is in a constant state of confusion because you choose never to use honest language.
“Desert loving tree”.
On Wikipedia main page ‘in the news’ today:
“The Power of Siberia pipeline begins operations, delivering Russian natural gas to China.”