Saturday toons 31 MARCH 12

Sometimes even Republicans get it

Paul Douglas came to the Minneapolis / St. Paul TV market during some ratings war in the 1980s.  Because weather forecasting can be a serious life-and-death matter around here, the weather forecasts tend to be a LOT longer and more complex than they would be in, say, San Diego.  Back when it was still new and very expensive, several local TV stations bought their own Doppler radar systems and Douglas was brought in to give a new face to this fancy equipment.  He was young, very bright, educated, and empathetic.  He is also a superb weather man and soon he was a ratings sensation.  I'd read he was also something of a minor celebrity on the Jesus circuit but that didn't bother me because he got the weather right.

So now we see Douglas trying to convince his conservative Republican brethren that climate change is real.  Of course, you could see this day coming because at some point, the evidence out the window just crushes ideological objections.  I like to say that climate change is most noticeable the further you get from the oceans, the equator, and sea level.  Minnesota is in the middle of a huge continent and is halfway to the North Pole.  The evidence of climate change around here is so overwhelming, climate change deniers come in but two flavors—morons and drooling morons.  Douglas is neither of these!  The question is, can he convince his comrades over on the right?

The BRICS summit

The rest of the world seems to think their economic prospects will get better if they get the USA and its economic hegemony often called "The Washington Consensus" out of their lives.  Institutional analysis suggests that home-grown banksters will be as big a bunch of crooks and screw-ups as foreign ones, but you can hardly blame the rest of the world for wanting to try something else.

The people of the Iberian peninsula get angrier

The troubles of the heavily indebted Eurozone nations are not about to disappear on their own anytime soon.  The debts are multiplied in a computer somewhere while efforts to pay those mounting debts are fought with methods old and new.  One thing is absolutely certain—there is NO ways the real economy can keep pace with computers calculating new debts.  But now it has become Spain and Portugal's turn to try to pay off the banksters.

Why Iran isn't backing down

One of the very few signs of sanity these days is that you can find excellent, well-written articles dealing with why making war on Iran is a terrible idea.  Because war-mongering is so easy and coming up with intelligent alternatives so hard, we need as many of these as possible.

Fukushima is still a BIG problem

This video is perhaps the most powerful I have ever seen.  It is an interview with an engineer who is trying to keep the reactors at Fukushima from collapsing into a large pile of disaster.  This is a highly educated man who trained to have a comfortable life managing one of Japan's most important power sources.  Just remember, there were SIX reactors at Fukushima.  His life is being shortened by nuclear exposure and he knows it.  And yet he still goes to work to solve highly complex problems—problems he did not cause—when moving to Australia would seem a better choice.

(And there are people who actually say there is no "instinct of workmanship" and that Producers, by their very nature, cannot be heroic.  Idiots!)

A note:  This embedded video is mostly in German because it was originally made by ZDF.  Maybe your browser plays the subtitles in the embed but if it does not, click on the YouTube logo in the lower right corner and it will open in YouTube.  Then look for the red CC button on the bottom.  Click that and you see the subtitles.  It is pretty solid video—it CAN be watched full-screen.

Debating Peak Oil

Old men with heart conditions shouldn't go around arguing with people who have no intention of letting small things like facts change their minds.  But I got into a pointless debate over the weekend and it probably didn't do my heart any good.  I am sure it changed no minds.  The subject was Peak Oil.

In my mind, the questions surrounding Peak Oil are NOT very complicated.  When an oil well comes in, those first barrels are incredibly easy to extract.  In fact though they have become extremely rare, the wells that made people rich were called "gushers" because underground pressure pushed the crude up the drill-hole.  But soon things are under control and pumps are connected to the field pipes.  It has become a production well.  As the well gets older, the flow of oil to the pumps slow.  At some point, it isn't worth the costs and trouble to run the pump.  The well has gone "dry."  This is highly oversimplified because there are host of factors that determine how long the well produces and how much, but nothing changes the fact that even highly productive wells do not produce forever.  They have a life span that is finite.  And because wells are finite, oil fields are finite.

We have been drilling for oil since at least 1859—that's 153 years.  We have learned a very great deal about the lifespans of oil fields.  This knowledge was gained through known and tested methodologies.  When Hubbard predicted the peak output for USA in 1956, he was only off by months even though the prediction was for 1970.  This isn't like betting on sporting events—this is like predicting the dawn and can be done almost as accurately.

The problem with Peak Oil deniers is that they cannot differentiate in their minds between predictions on football and predictions on known scientific phenomenon.  They know that predictions can be wrong—just look at how often the "experts" on the Sunday morning football shows get it wrong, they will say.  And since they believe that predictions are mostly random guesses, they give priority to the beliefs in religious principles like: If oil runs short, the price will rise and there will be more incentive to extract hard-to-get oil.  The MARKET will prevent a Peak Oil economic meltdown—because unlike predictions, the MARKET is ALWAYS right.

But over here in the world of Producers, we make predictions all the time in matters of life and death and get it wrong so seldom, our failures make headline news—like if one of our bridges falls into the river because one of the predictions (that some girder is large enough) was wrong.  We are right about 99.99% of the time in our predictions.  What's better, every time we get one wrong, we upgrade our prediction mechanisms so they are more accurate the next time.

Peak Oil Theory is a HIGHLY refined Producer Class prediction mechanism.  The chance of it being wrong is TINY because it has already demonstrated countless times that it works.  So there's your problem debating a Peak Oil denier.  He doesn't even know there are whole classes of predictions that are VERY reliable.  He cannot be bothered with understanding WHY Peak Oil is one of those very reliable predictions—mostly because it is too complicated.  And since his lack of understanding for how the Producer Class makes predictions leads him towards confusion and frustration, he falls back on religious beliefs like the one about the "Free Market."  It comforts him—so is a worthy substitute for his lack of understanding.  Unfortunately, should you decide to debate this creature, facts don't work because they only confuse his belief structure—the same facts that would instantly convince a good Producer Class oil field pro.  You are probably lucky if the fact-hater doesn't try to get violent with you.

The Gold Standard? (sigh)

I am at LEAST a third generation hater of the gold standard.  I had grandfathers who tried to making a living growing food in Kansas and Minnesota which put them both squarely in the middle of the organized fight against the gold bugs.  My mother's father worked actively for congressman Lindbergh—a man perhaps best known for his speeches and a book against the Money Trusts.  My father's father farmed in Kansas—home to perhaps the most intellectual wing of the People's Party and one of the prime stomping grounds for Nebraskan William Jennings Bryan of the famous "Cross of Gold" speech.

Farmers hated the gold standard for a wide assortment of reasons but one of the primary complaints was gold's inflexibility.  When farmers brought their crop to market in the fall, an inflexible currency would cause a shortage of money which would drive down prices.  For the farmer, this defeated all his hard work.  For the robber barons, this was gold's main feature.  So out here in the heartland, the abolition of the the gold standard was priority #1 for farmers and their political organizations, from 1873 when USA went back on a very harsh version of the gold standard, to at least 1933 when Roosevelt REALLY modified the gold standard by making it illegal for USA citizens to hold gold.  Nixon drove the final nail in the coffin in 1971 when he closed the international gold window.

So a legitimate question could be asked, "Did the People's Party ultimately win a major victory?"  After all, if there is no gold standard, shouldn't the currency now be flexible enough to accommodate the needs of the real economy?  Well, in theory monetary policy should work like that now that money is information on a server somewhere.  And yes, electronic money is indeed more flexible.  But keep in mind the central demand of the agrarian monetary reformers was for democratic control on the creation of money—so even winning this minor detail would have hardly satisfied my grandfathers.

Unfortunately, since the primary function of money is to convey information, there is nothing that says electronic money cannot be just as onerous and regressive as the old gold standard.  If fact, as is argued below, that is exactly what is happening.

Neoliberalism and today's Sweden

This article confirms what I have long suspected—that the Sweden I discovered in 1970, 1972, and 1989 exists only in the history books these days. I saw the evidence for myself in 1995 that neoliberalism had come to dominate Sweden and especially the Social Democratic Party just as certainly as in USA and with the Democrats.  I just didn't want to believe it.  Bigotry must have been working, I confess, because even though the Nobel Committee was handing out their "Memorial" Prize in Economics to one neoliberal crackpot after another, I just assumed that "my" tribe was just too sane to be caught up in this madness.  I was clutching at straws when I saw that Sweden didn't join the Euro, or when they handled their banking crises in 1992 by nationalizing the bad actors.

Then last sumer when I was visited by a college professor from Finland, I was utterly shocked at how far to the right he had drifted politically.  He still maintained his Nordic political correctness, only now it was in service of the Leisure Classes.  For example, when I suggested that the banksters had committed so many serious crimes that the citizenry might well be thinking of greasing up the old guillotines, he informed me quite primly that such a crack would now be labeled "hate speech" in Finland.  And while Finland is not Sweden, the big difference is that the Finns are only truly happy when they are outperforming their old colonial masters.  So I am pretty sure that my friend was an A+ version of whatever is going on in Sweden.

Sweden is already paying a high price for her embrace of neoliberalism.  Youth unemployment is ridiculously high and in 2011, more Swedes emigrated than at any time since 1887.  Apparently, parroting right-wing economics will destroy (at least partially) the hard-won global reputation for having the most admirable and advanced political system in the world.

The cultural importance of religion

For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
I Timothy 6:10

One of the great teachings of Christianity is that while it is good to organize a society so that folks prosper, that society WILL fail if the pursuit is money is substituted for the pursuit of production excellence.  Big difference!  HUGE!

Of the all the fallacies of the Marxist worldview, the greatest is that in his telling, religion is merely an opiate that folks should lose like any other harmful addiction.  This is very likely why he never understood the Industrial Revolution even though he liked to write about it.  Because the Industrial Revolution was PROFOUNDLY religious.

In England, the Protestant Reformation was an uneven affair.  The Church of England (CoE) was founded by a greedy, overweight, serial killer whose split with the mother church was driven by sexual needs and power politics.  When Henry VIII actually thought about religion, he damned the Protestants to hell—his screed against Luther got him the title "Defender of the Faith" which the British monarch uses until this day.  So "official" Protestantism had almost nothing to do with matters of faith.

On the other hand, Britain had plenty of Protestants who WERE motivated by matters of faith and conscience.  They were the "dissenting" Protestants and they included the Puritans, the Presbyterians, and perhaps most interestingly, the Quakers.  Because if you look at the history of industrialization, the Quakers are just everywhere.  In hindsight this was not surprising—they were banned from establishment CoE schools like Oxford and Cambridge but because of their thrift and hard work, had money to invest and bright young folks for whom to provide opportunities.  They loved precision and honored inventiveness.  Sounds like a recipe for precision manufacture to me.

An interesting example of the Quaker influence in USA can be seen in the life of Ben Franklin.  In Puritan Boston he was a furious young man with a very limited future.  In Quaker Philadelphia, he just explodes with bright ideas and is welcomed into the community as someone who had been given a mega-dose of inner light.  BTW, Max Weber who is often considered an authority on the Protestant Work Ethic, uses Franklin as an example of Calvinism—which most assuredly applied to his Boston childhood but certainly did not apply to the colony where he became a rich man.

Back to England.  While the Industrial Revolution flourished in the Midlands and Scotland, the CoE types surrounding the king conspired to appropriate the fruits of the new wealth-generation for themselves.  And through an assortment of methods, were quite successful.  What Marx called Capitalism was the humanism of Industrialization seized by Predators determined to suck every farthing out those "dirty" enterprises up north.  Marx's Capitalism was the outcome of the conflict between the cynics who believed Protestantism was just another way to get laid and those who actually believed a religious life should lead one to higher callings—like creating the means for universal prosperity.

Poor Marx!  By writing off religion as a subject worth examining, he missed the critically important nuances of the historical event that was easily the most interesting revolution in human history.  It's no damn wonder his followers would some day build Ladas.  Because if you confuse money and prosperity, it's pretty easy to confuse industrialization with Capitalism.  And if you confuse those, your desire to regulate or destroy Capitalism has the unfortunate side effect of crippling the output of the Producing Classes.  And Trabants, Wartburgs, and Moskovichs are examples that prove Ladas weren't even the worst.  (You cannot make this shit up.)

Anyway, here we have a real Quaker writing in the Washington Post trying to explain how the economic thinking of their sect differs from the "Capitalism" as described by Marx.

About those trade sanctions against Iran

It is not so very surprising that trade sanctions against a country that exports the world's most desirable commodity are extremely difficult to enforce.  In fact, because sanctions against Iran are almost certain to fail, it is likely that she will emerge far stronger for the experience.  Iran will develop a new customer base, new strategic alliances, and new suppliers.  And unless her enemies start bombing out of sheer frustration, she will probably look on these sanctions as an historic opportunity.

Speculators and oil prices

It's damn interesting the lengths someone or institution will go to to avoid saying, "Speculators will always take a bad situation and make it so much worse.  They are, after all, the Predator's Predators."

If gasoline was $5 a gallon and you knew that $2.50 was going to finance the necessary alternative infrastructure we are going to need as the easy-to-get oil runs out, bring it on.  But knowing that gasoline will probably hit $5 this summer (with the bulk of the increased prices going to the nastiest of speculators who will contribute less than NOTHING to the social order) is possibly the single greatest reason for laughing neoliberalism out of any discussions by sane adults dealing with real problems.

But hey, even the St. Louis Fed has come to the earth-shattering conclusion that speculators "exacerbate" the price swings in oil.

Saturday toons 24 MARCH 12

World Bank boasting on poverty reduction called a lie

The World Bank's claim that it has helped reduce poverty worldwide by one half is being called a lie by scholars and observers independent of the neo-liberal monolith.

I always thought the World Bank's program was a cruel joke. A few years ago, I read about the WB boasting that poverty had been significantly reduced because a few hundred million people had doubled their incomes. There were no longer living on just one dollar a day. They now had two dollars a day to survive on.

And now Portugal one more time

This is sick.  The austerity ghouls, having worked their financial magic on Greece, will now turn their attention to Portugal (again).  Just remember, doing this dirty work is someone's full-time job at places like IMF.  And things won't get better until the austerity ghouls get new marching order they can believe in.  Hearts and minds, folks, hearts and minds.

Carbon fiber?

One of my life's highlights was attending a meeting of a group of guys who were teaching each other how to make glider parts out of carbon fiber.  The finished sailplane would have a 12 meter wingspan (39 ft.) and yet weigh less than 300 pounds (136 kg.)  They were passing around some of the smaller completed parts and they were absurdly light—it was as if gravity had been suspended.  Of course, the reason for the gathering was to exchange building tips because carbon fiber is insanely fussy to work with.  The key to superlight parts is to lay up the fabric with just enough epoxy to wet every fiber—but not one drop more.  Add in the regular problems of proper cure time and temperature, regulating the humidity, accurately mixing the epoxy, etc. and it became quite clear that fabricating the carbon-fiber parts for that 300# sailplane would be a LOT harder than it looked.  As I held an aileron hinge that weighed about as much as a postage stamp, I decided that I would wait a couple of generations before I flew in any airplane made of this exotic wonder-material.

Well, folks, it turns out that Airbus' new super-jumbo is having problems with its carbon-fiber parts.  Goodness knows it's hard enough to build such a plane out of aluminum—and all you have to do is call up the metal guys and they ship over material that has worked magnificently since the days of the DC-3.  So substituting carbon fiber turns time-tested engineering into a crap shoot.  Yes, we know quite a lot about fabricating parts of carbon fiber—but do we know enough to make jumbo-jets out of the stuff?  But the weight savings and the resulting fuel savings are just too large a temptation to pass up.  I mean, I REALLY want folks to solve these tricky fabrication problems because of the fuel savings but are we really ready to test our theories on transportation devices that will kill 400+ passengers at a crack if they fail?

(BTW, this isn't just an A380 question because Boeing's new 747-8 is also heavily into carbon—of course, if Boeing really has solved the fabrication problems, 747-8 will just destroy the A380 in the market.  Because 747-8 is also late and over budget, we don't hear any gloating from Boeing...yet.)

Renewable energy in Asia

Because there is so much manufacturing excellence in Asia, it is easy to assume that they could make sustainable energy work if only they would just choose to do it.  The fact that they have not demonstrates some interesting things.

• Manufacturing excellence is great—but does it really trump fire?
• Playing industrial catch-up is easier than leading the pack.
• If Asia isn't setting the industrial pace—who is?  If the answer is Germany, perhaps that explains the growing interest in renewables.

The criminals gunning for World Bank presidency

Since the World Bank has become a known hangout for neoliberal swine, it should not surprise anyone that two of the more disgusting neoliberals are competing to become its next president.  Both are intellectual lightweights.  Both have track records that would shame a normal person into disappearing into the life of a recluse.  So not surprisingly, both have been part of the economics department at Harvard.  That institution collects mega-failures who are arrogant enough to be bullies.  It's a prime requirement to become a neoliberal, after all.

These are just two of the better-known applicants for the top job at the World Bank.  There are probably dozens more from within the institution itself who are just as reactionary.  The World Bank was formed with some pretty lofty intentions.  It would actually be helpful if it fulfilled some of the founders' vision for it.  But the World Bank lost the narrative sometime around the disastrous presidency of Robert Strange McNamera—another Harvard wünderkind—so maybe Summers or Sachs would be the "logical" choices.

Can the technologically illiterate govern?

Ever since the Industrial Revolution and the rise in power of the Producing Classes, there has been a growing awareness of the yawning gap between the worldviews of the Industrial and Leisure Classes.  To the technologically literate, the Leisure Classes usually sound like the ditz in Slap Shot who complains that her radio reception is poor in Charlestown (Johnstown) Pennsylvania because she is so far below sea level.

I must admit to having little patience with techno-cretins.  I try to be polite but there are just times when some little thing makes me wish I had my own nukes.  The best example comes from the days when VCRs became popular.  I would visit someone's home and there it was, flashing 12:00 at me.  For some reason, this drove me crazy because not only was it annoying, it meant the VCR's owners could not be bothered to learn how to make their machine record programs while they were out—which was the main reason to own one, after all.  They would rather have a flashing light in front of them than read the sixteen instructions needed to get their machine to function.  I actually told several people that I thought that anyone who wouldn't set their VCRs' clock was too lazy and ignorant to be allowed to vote.  (So now you know how I get the reputation for being a bit harsh.)

Anyway, it's nice to know Kovacs of Mozilla thinks that anyone who cannot communicate with the Internet is unfit to govern.

A bankster foregoing profits in food speculation?

This a VERY small step towards returning the banking community to the civilized world.  But we must celebrate even tiny steps because it might signal a turn.

DEUTSCHE BANK: We Will No Longer Create Certain Securities Until We're Sure They Don't Contribute To Food Poverty

When the economic rules changed

The economic history of the 1930s is probably the most interesting era of them all.  By vastly expanding the means of production, industrialization had destroyed the assumptions of traditional Alfred Marshall economics.  Conventional wisdom made the Great Depression inevitable.  The only question was—what would replace it?  In USSR, a sociopathic killer lurched between schemes for industrialization that could be excused by the (mostly preindustrial) teachings of Karl Marx.  In Italy and Germany the economic rules would be set by the industrialists themselves which proved remarkably successful.

It was the English-speaking world that had the most awkward adjustment to the death of the conventional "wisdom."  Part of this is due to a good thing—the English world was not as prepared to use naked police-state terror to change the economic debate as were the Communists and Nazis.  So the new economics had to win by debate.  And the debate had not been won as late as 1937.  It could be argued that civilized behavior cost the English-speaking world the economic output of a decade.