 Whatta Hero! |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
A MEANS OF CONTROL Treason doth never prosper: What's the reason? Man still bears in his bodily frame the Males typically obtain meat in human and nonhuman primate societies and then attempt to use it to manipulate or control females. -- Craig B. Stanford, 1999 A feeling arose in the Renaissance -- and crystallized by
the "Peasant rebellions were not exceptional events. They erupted so frequently in the course of these four centuries that they may be said to have been as common in this agrarian society as factory strikes would be in the industrial world. In southwestern France alone, some 450 rebellions occurred between 1590 and 1715. No region of Western Europe was exempted from this pattern of chronic violence. The fear of sedition was always present in the minds of those who ruled. It was a corrective, a salutary fear -- since only the threat of insurrection could act as a check against unlimited exactions."[3] Bernard Mandeville (1670?-1733) suggested that a society based on the deadliest of the seven deadly sins[4] -- "avarice" -- would create common Machiavellian interests and suppress irrational passions. Mandeville's ideal society was one where the unwitting cooperation of individuals, each working for his or her own interest, would result in the greatest benefit to society at large. Mandeville anticipated laissez-faire economic theory, which promoted self-interest, competition, and little government interference in the workings of the economy. The utopian agenda of economic liberalism to set up a self- regulating market system was fully realized in the American political model -- one dollar, one vote: "In 1884, one of the wealthiest men
of his time, Henry The most important function of a market system is its political function.[6] The market system serves as a stealth political system to foster rational thought, universal values based on calculation, and world peace based on self-interest. Great idea! But despite good intentions, inherently defective economic methodology has led to two world wars with millions killed: "By the end of the seventies the
free trade episode "The origins of the cataclysm lay in the utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system."[p. 29] [7] Today, this same flawed economic methodology is being taught to students all over the world and is leading to a new generation of world wars with billions killed. SOCIAL PHYSICS Modern economics is shrouded in idiosyncratic self-serving definitions, arcane mathematics, and circular arguments which make it very difficult to understand. But once one gets the scorecard straight, it can be seen that modern economics is nothing more than a social imitation of nineteenth-century physics: "[ With the development of modern
physics ] it became Economists are trained to believe that "money" is to the economy what "energy" is to the physical world. This leads them to believe that whatever is "economically" possible is "physically" possible too. What economists fail to realize is that the economy is a subsystem of the physical system, and thus constrained by universal physical laws that they have not studied. Economists do not know that something must be physically possible before it can be economically possible. Since they only study money, they have no idea where the physical limits, and thus, economic limits are. Since economists study the prices of everything, they feel they are qualified to issue opinions about everything. But the reality is quite the opposite. Economists first abstract all commodities to money -- which of course, obliterates all physical differences between the commodities themselves. This leaves economists uniquely unqualified to know the physical relationships between the commodities they purport to study. Because of their total dependence on the measure of "money", today's leading economists do not even know the difference between " libraries" and "oil": "Should we be taking steps to limit the use of these most precious stocks of society's capital so that they will still be available for our grandchildren? ... Economists ask, Would future generations benefit more from larger stocks of natural capital such as oil, gas, and coal or from more produced capital such as additional scientists, better laboratories, and libraries linked together by information superhighways? ... in the long run, oil and gas are not essential." [Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus] [9] Obviously, the economics taught by Samuelson and Nordhaus has nothing to do with science.[10] If it's isn't science, it's ideology. Since economics has a political agenda, it becomes nothing more than politics in disguise. POLITICS IN DISGUISE #1. Economists are trained to believe that "money" has nothing to do with politics and is simply a medium of exchange. But even the casual observer can see that money is social power because it "empowers" people to buy and do the things they want -- including buying and doing other people: politics. Money is, in a word, "coercion",[11] and "economic efficiency" is correctly seen as a political concept designed to conserve social power for those who have it -- to make the rich, richer and the poor, poorer. #2. Economists are trained to believe that people always "benefit" from free market transactions. Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman explains: "Adam Smith's key insight was that both parties to an exchange can benefit and that, so long as cooperation is strictly voluntary, no exchange will take place unless both parties do benefit."[12] Since economists do not explicitly define "benefit", one wonders how Friedman could possibly know? In fact, he doesn't. Friedman is programming his unsuspecting students to further his own personal political agenda. Economic professors like Friedman resort to meaningless, circular arguments to convince their students. For example, economists assume people make "rational" [13] decisions but abstain from testing that assumption. Instead of testing, economists invoke "revealed preferences theory" which states that choices are rational because they are based on preferences that are known through the choices that are made.[14] In other words, meaningless, circular arguments. #3. Economists are trained to believe there are no "limits to growth". Because they abstract everything to money, even leading economists like William Nordhaus can't imagine an economy that is physically limited by energy. The best Nordhaus can do is to model increasing energy prices: "The estimate is based on an energy model I constructed several years ago. To estimate the drag on economic growth, I calculated the difference between the economic growth rate with actual energy supplies versus a case in which current (low cost) fuels were available in infinite quantities. In the first case, energy prices would be rising, while in the second case of superabundence, relative energy prices would be constant. This study indicated that the resource-limited case would lower net output in the middle of the next century by about 10 percent."[15] Although Nordhaus thinks he is modeling "energy", he is actually modeling "energy prices". There is a big difference! What would have happened if he had modeled declining energy inputs instead of rising energy prices? We already know the answer to that one: "In late 1973 the first OPEC oil shock
struck, as oil "The Nixon-Ford Administration
responded with oil and gas "What was worse, economists could
pose no solution to the "Once again, falling back on the
principle that higher "Stagflation was both a term and an indictment, since economists had taught that the phenomena -- slow growth, rising unemployment, and rising inflation -- could not all exist at the same time. Yet they did."[16] #4. Economists are trained to believe that we will never "run out" of a commodity. This is because as prices increase, we will use less-and-less of it, but there will always be some available at some finite price. Practically every economics textbook teaches this. But every economics textbook is wrong because "energy" is fundamentally different from every other commodity. There is no substitute for energy. Energy is the prerequisite for all other commodities, so if we "run out" of energy, we will "run out" of everything else too. By definition, energy "sources" must produce more energy than they consume, otherwise they are called "sinks". By definition, energy sources have "run out" when they consume more energy than they produce. This universal energy law holds no matter how high the money price of energy goes. Economists completely miss this basic energy law and have misled government regulators all over the world. Here is part of an interview with Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman (worth quoting at length because of his colossal stupidity): Ravaioli: But there are many other environmental problems ... Nobel Laureate Friedman: Of course. Take oil, for example. Everyone says it's a limited resource: physically it may be, but economically we don't know. Economically there is more oil today than there was a hundred years ago. When it was still under the ground and no one knew it was there, it wasn't economically available. When resources are really limited prices go up, but the price of oil has gone down and down. Suppose oil became scarce: the price would go up, and people would start using other energy sources. In a proper price system the market can take care of the problem. Ravaioli: But we know that it takes millions of years to create an oil well, and we can't reproduce it. Relying on oil means living on our capital and not on the interest, which would be the sensible course. Don't you agree? Nobel Laureate Friedman: If we were living on the capital, the market price would go up. The price of truly limited resources will rise over time. The price of oil has not been rising, so we're not living on the capital. When that is no longer true, the price system will give a signal and the price of oil will go up. As always happens with a truly limited resource. Ravaioli: Of course the discovery of new oil wells has given the illusion of unlimited oil ... Nobel Laureate Friedman: Why an illusion? Ravaioli: Because we know it's a limited resource. Nobel Laureate Friedman: Excuse me, it's not limited from an economic point of view. You have to separate the economic from the physical point of view. Many of the mistakes people make come from this. Like the stupid projections of the Club of Rome: they used a purely physical approach, without taking prices into account. There are many different sources of energy, some of which are too expensive to be exploited now. But if oil becomes scarce they will be exploited. But the market, which is fortunately capable of registering and using widely scattered knowledge and information from people all over the world, will take account of those changes.[17] POLITICS IN ACTION The United Nations, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund have all followed the American lead and attempted set up a global self-regulating market system based on these same elaborate economic lies: "There are no... limits to the carrying capacity of the
earth that are likely to bind any time in the foreseeable future. There isn't a
risk of an apocalypse due to global warming or anything else. The idea that we
should put limits on growth because of some natural limit, is a profound error
and one that, were it ever to prove influential, would have staggering social
costs." Endless economic growth is the sine qua non of the economist's agenda. If there are, in fact, limits to growth, then the fraud will be exposed and public attention will shift from "economic growth" to "economic redistribution". This is why the ruling elites work so hard to discredit (via their economist robots like Summers) anyone who claims that limits to growth do, in fact, exist. Also see THE ECONOMIST, December 1997: "So, according to the Club of Rome, [petroleum] reserves should have been overdrawn by 50 billion barrels by 1990. In fact, by 1990 unexploited reserves amounted to 900 billion barrels -- not counting the tar shales, of which a single deposit in Alberta contains more than 550 billion barrels. "The Club of Rome made similarly wrong predictions about natural gas, silver, tin, uranium, aluminum, copper, lead and zinc. In every case, it said finite reserves of these minerals were approaching exhaustion and prices would rise steeply. In every case except tin, known reserves have actually grown since the Club's report; in some cases they have quadrupled."[18] But THE ECONOMIST is just plain wrong! The Club of
Rome expected OIL IS THE PREREQUISITE Although economists treat energy just like any other resource, it's not like any other resource. Available energy is the precondition for all resources -- including more available energy. For many years, geologists and petroleum engineers have published estimates of how much oil can be recovered from any given basin. This is known as "Estimated Ultimately Recoverable" (or EUR) oil. Remarkably, estimates of total worldwide EUR oil have varied little over the past half century![20] Forty years ago, geologist M. King Hubbert developed a method for projecting future oil production and predicted that oil production in the lower 48 states would peak about 1970. This prediction has proved to be remarkably accurate. Both total and peak yields have risen slightly compared to Hubbert's original estimate, but the timing of the peak and the general downward trend of production were correct. Hubbert showed that oil production begins to peak and starts to decline when approximately half of the EUR oil has been recovered. The petroleum industry itself has announced that global oil production will "peak" in less than ten years! IHS Energy Group (formerly Petroconsultants) is the world's leading provider of data and analysis for oil exploration and production. The company maintains its headquarters at a custom-built communications center in Geneva. It also has offices in London, Houston, Calgary, Sydney, Perth, Singapore and Hong Kong and a global information network. The backbone of the company is a staff of 300, embracing numerous nationalities, cultures and professions, specializing in petroleum geology, geophysics, petroleum engineering, economics, political science, petroleum legislation, cartography, computer science and information technology.[21] In 1995, Petroconsultants published a report for oil industry insiders ($32,000 per copy) titled WORLD OIL SUPPLY 1930-2050 which concluded that world oil production could peak as soon as the year 2000 and decline to half that level by 2025. Large and permanent increases in oil prices were predicted after the year 2000.[22] ECONOMIST VS GEOLOGIST "Minerals are inexhaustible and
will never be depleted. Could Adelman be right? Hardly! Obviously, oil and gas are not "renewed" as they are extracted, otherwise energy companies wouldn't have to keep drilling new holes. But more importantly, Adelman doesn't realize that oil and gas are in such great demand because they are sources of "energy" -- not because they are "minerals". Economists like Adelman are blind to the unique properties of energy because they abstract everything to money and, thus, know nothing about energy. Adelman: "There are plenty of fossil fuels and no limit to potential electrical capacity. It is all a matter of money."[25] But Adelman is just plain wrong. It's not a matter of "money" -- it's a matter of "energy". It's a bit late, but regulators are starting to get the message because leading petroleum engineers and geologists are actively opposing the economists. In November 1997, the International Energy Agency (IEA) convened an Oil Conference in Paris. Jean Laherrère and Colin Campbell[26] presented three papers on oil depletion (against Adelman and Lynch from MIT).[27] As a result of this conference, IEA prepared a paper for the G8 Energy Ministers' Meeting in Moscow March 31, 1998. IEA followed Laherrere and Campbell's view and forecast a peak in conventional oil for 2010 at 78.9 Mb/d and a decrease in 2020 at 72.2 Mb/d.[28] According to Richard Duncan, this represents a significant reversal of the IEA position: "This is a real stand-down for them because until recently they were in the Julian Simon no-limits camp."[29] THE UTOPIAN AGENDA HAS FAILED -- AGAIN! War analyst Stanislav Andreski concluded that the trigger for most wars is hunger, or even 'a mere drop from the customary standard of living.' Anthropologists Carol and Melvin Ember spent six years studying war in the late 1980s among 186 preindustrial societies. They focused on precontact times in hopes of collecting the 'cleanest, least distorted' data. Andreski, it seems, was right. War's most common cause, the Embers found, was fear of deprivation. The victors in the wars they studied almost always took territory, food, and/or other critical resources from their enemies. Moreover, unpredictable disasters -- droughts, blights, floods, and freezes -- which led to severe hardships, spurred more wars than did chronic shortages. "This also holds true among modern nations. In 1993, political scientists Thomas E Homer-Dixon, Jeffrey H. Boutwell, and George W. Rathjens examined the roots of recent global conflicts and concluded, 'There are significant causal links between scarcities of renewable resources and violence.' "In short, many wars seem to be a mass, communal robbery of another social group's life-support resources."[30] Ever increasing standards-of-living require ever increasing per-capita energy use: "If one considers the last one hundred years of the U.S. experience, fuel use and economic output are highly correlated."[31] But Richard Duncan discovered that the utopian agenda failed
Global energy-use per capita increased during the sub-interval from 1850 to 1909 by a strong 3.88%. Then -- despite World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II -- energy-use per capita from 1909 to 1945 still managed to increase by 0.92%. Next came the exuberant post-war years from 1945 to 1973 when energy-use per capita grew by a remarkable 3.51%. Then strong growth ended abruptly in 1973. Thereafter, world energy-use per capita peaked in 1978 and then went into an irregular decline, averaging 0.36 % per year from the peak in 1978 through 1997. Although global energy use per capita has been declining at an average of 0.36% per year since 1978, energy use in the US has increased an average of 0.7 % per year since 1983: The near-term "peak" in global oil production means will make it physically impossible -- thus economically impossible -- for the so-called "developing" countries to ever "develop": AN ENERGY-LIMITED ECONOMY In an energy-limited economy it is physically impossible -- thus, economically impossible -- to provide a constant level of energy for non-energy sectors of the economy during a shift to alternative energy. Keeping the production of goods and services at current levels will require more energy than we can presently generate. To have more energy in the future means that energy must be diverted now from non-energy sectors of the economy into future energy generation. Economic development projects must "compete" with each other for available energy. The rich and powerful will buy up -- or simply take -- all the energy they need and the poor will die off.[32] HOW COULD IT BE OTHERWISE? If the anarchy scenario were to reach its natural conclusion, the global elites would be eliminated by the angry masses. Those who managed to escape would die more miserably than the poor since they are unsuited for day-to-day survival because they lived their lives like queen bees. But when the above scenario seems inevitable, the elites will simply depopulate most of the planet with a bioweapon. 33 When the time comes, it will be the only logical solution to their problem. It's a first-strike tactic that leaves the built- infrastructure and other species in place and allows the elites to perpetuate their own genes into the foreseeable future: "War is a male reproductive strategy. All that is needed for the strategy to evolve, is that aggressors fight and win more often than they lose".[34] The global genocide will be rationalized as a second chance for humanity -- a new Garden of Eden -- a new Genesis. The temptation will prove irresistible: "Strangelove said, 'Offhand, I should say that in addition to the factors of youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross section of necessary skills, it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included, to foster and impart the required principles of leadership and tradition.' "The arrow had not missed its mark, and around the table there was an outbreak of sober, nodding heads. Attention was concentrated more than ever on Doctor Strangelove. "Strangelove went on. 'Naturally they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time and little to do. With the proper breeding techniques, and starting with a ratio of, say, ten women to each man, I should estimate the progeny of the original group of two hundred thousand would emerge a hundred years later as well over a hundred million...'" How could it be otherwise? WHAT YOU CAN DO! #2. Prepare yourself to survive without municipal power, water, or sewer services. You won't have to live without hookups initially, but you will be forced to do without them sometime in the next few decades. Most of the country's groundwater is already contaminated, and once sewage systems and dumps are abandoned, it will ALL become contaminated. Without power to pump or chlorine to disinfect groundwater, you really have no option except to rely on rain catchment for drinking water. #3. In order to survive, you are going to need a large garden. An oversized garden would allow you to exchange your extra produce to your neighbors for hard goods -- like ammunition. #4. Remember that you will not be able to rely on complex technology, because once supply lines break down, you won't be able to get spares. So limit yourself to technology that you can fix with a hammer and forge. (If you don't know what a "forge" is, go see an old cowboy movie.) Beyond these four points, just try to fit in with your community as best you can. Perhaps join a church, lodge, or club -- find someone who is willing to help you in case you are attacked. Obviously, I don't follow all of my own suggestions, but
it's something to think about. |
|
Jay Hanson
|
