TPP ought to stand for "Truly Potty Paper"

The following post was prompted by the Rolling stone article linked below.

The Trans Pacific-Partnership was written by, and for, those with the most to gain. Elizabeth Warren is quite correct in opposing it. President Obama is... Well, lets just say he's showing who's paying most of the campaign bills for the Democrats now.

If you believe in truly unfettered markets, as well as trickle down prosperity, than this is your baby. If you are an everyday working person, or an environmentalist, than you should be very worried.

Which is no more than to say that, in purely commercial terms, this would represent a big boost to overall trade numbers. The President is correct in that assertion. The problem is that you and I are not the ones who actually benefit directly from such increases. Jobs in some sectors might indeed increase, but the upshot is that wage competition from overseas manufacturing only gets worse. And, as the article points out, there is undoubtedly a lot of fine print that got buried in the secret negotiations that will allow Big Money to do the old "Gold Mine" con once again (you know... That's were they get the gold and you get the shaft); either in an environmental dodge as Warren suggests, and/or in other "stick it to us" clauses in everything else.

The real question here is why a Democrat would be pushing the usual predetermined situation framing that the Republicans do. The kind of thing where the questions is framed as "it's either this 'imperfect trade greaser' or bad job growth."

The beauty of this kind of preconditioning is that it works to take away any thought that the underlying assumptions are absurd in the first place.

If the economic model, and those few who really benefit from it, present choices that either screw you a bunch up front, or allow for a lot more screwing to occur incrementally over time, than its time to stop playing in an obviously rigged game. It's time to frame the situation as it actually affects you, and not how it absurdly benefits them. See this now or learn to love living on "Chump Change."



The Trade Beef Between Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama, Explained

Didn't I say pretty low!

Why Billionaires Don't Pay Property Taxes in New York

How low can it go?

The following post was prompted by the Ars Technica article linked below.

Hold on to your hats because there is no doubt that "capitalized" labor, and the value/production priority system that goes with it, can stoop quite a bit lower before it finally implodes from the gravity of its massing contradictions.

Knowing where we are all of the time will go hand in hand with the chip implanted to finally identify you without ambiguity. This will then augment the final removal of hand held currency. Once that occurs their control will be complete. You won't be able to be off the grid no matter how much you may want to be.

Just more of that glowing future of the "capitalized" mind.

LAW & DISORDER / CIVILIZATION & DISCONTENTS Worker fired for disabling GPS app that tracked her 24 hours a day [Updated]

Humanity's future requires only the will and effort of people with a shared vision

The following post was prompted by the New Yorker article linked below.

It never ceases to amaze me how the depths of arrogance can plumb so deep as that of the the successful entrepreneur. One has to wonder how the ability to make money automatically equates with the idea of some kind of sage wisdom as to where, and how, humanity should proceed through time.

One could certainly understand that any such "capitalized" future would look quite enticing to the significant holder of said "capital." But as to its additional appeal to the rest of us a great deal of skepticism ought to be in place. After all, even if we assume an Elon Musk kind of altruism, a "capitalized" future is one subject to the insane vagaries of the market at the very least. Going down that path might be all well and good, as with commercial space development might seem now, but just wait till the next destabilizing event occurs. And lest there be any mistake, not only does an abused planet guarantee an ever increasing rate of such events, the electrically mutated economic model that makes "capitalizing" possible in the first place has its own new penchant for exactly the same effect. And that hardly even begins to suggest what will happen as the former interacts with the latter.

Live by the market, die by the market. If that's your idea of a bright future you are, in my humble opinion, an idiot.



TOMORROW’S ADVANCE MAN

Addendum:
And the ability to cooperate. Remember, we don't have to like our neighbors, we just have to find a way to work together, for the sake of humanity as a whole

Three Cooperative Ladies Share A Classical Guitar

More evidence that we have lost our way

The following post was prompted by the Aljazeera America article linked below.

As if it were really needed, what we see here is yet another indication that we are not right with ourselves. It is certainly complex, and not simply economic injustice, or the inequality of outcomes, but only a fool would think that these are not quite significant contributors.

The economics of scarcity, the inherent tendency of our current economic model to allow for the concentration of power, coupled with its inability to fairly prioritize value in a larger context of social cohesion and, most importantly, empathy and the ability to nurture, make the current economic model a hot house to incubate everything virulent and destructive.

I ask myself repeatedly how the intellectual elites of this nation can stand by and not denounce this cruel system once and for all for what it has become. And then to also take the next logical step of demanding that the nation as a whole begin the process of figuring out what the alternative should be, and how we go about putting it into place. The shame that should be in place here for the absence of this action is as stark as that for those who participate directly in these kinds of acts of horrific cruelty.

US cited for police violence, racism in scathing UN review on human rights

And what happens to your job status if you don't want to shill for your boss?

Yet another way the corporate mentality can find to bend the wage slave to their agenda.



The new U.S. office politics: funding your boss's political causes

The myth of sustainable anything in a profit driven world

The following post was prompted by the Pacific Standard article linked below.

The fallacy of sustainable seafood within a profit driven industrial model is aptly demonstrated in this article. What might not be so obvious, however, is that even with engineering taken, literally to new heights, by creating our own, controlled, food spheres off planet (or even some vast underground accommodations), the profit/risk mentality will prove disastrous.

Firstly, of course, is the fact that we have to admit to ourselves that industrialized food production of some sort is a given with population numbers that will start clicking over the tens of billions, sooner rather than later, unless truly horrific global collapse occurs. Continuing on with business as usual will, at a best case scenario, allow for a slow creep towards that final catastrophe. And the basis for this assertion is the simple fact that the profit/risk mind set has cutting corners embedded in its DNA; the combination of competition and the need for margin maximization makes this inevitable.

The fact of the matter is that you not only can't do industrialized food within a complex ecosystem that you wish to preserve on a much more fundamental level, you cannot do it on the scale of absolute critical control required by the demands of this kind of engineering; the shear size, low failure tolerance, and scope of effort required to get it started (investment without ordinary considerations of personal gain) make the current operating model absolutely inadequate to the task.

This is why I have been quite adamant in advocating social change integrated with several technological imperatives; namely the combination of a hydrogen fuel cycle, as well as a vastly more robust space program. Thus I have proposed sea based Tornado Wind turbines to be able to produce hydrogen on this kind of scale, and a mass driver launch system to enable the kind of tonnage throughput to make that scale of off planet operations feasible.

If you think this will happen, the way it ought to happen, if we continue playing the money game then you are truly not paying attention at all.


Is the Demand for Sustainable Seafood Unsustainable?