Category: Culture

Will the last person to leave turn the lights out!

It’s really terribly easy  – we just have to leave the oil in the ground!

The current issue of The Economist has an article on page 43, under The Americas section, headed Cheap at the price.

It’s a review of the biggest oil auction this year.

A single bid for a vast field shows the weakness of Brazil’s state-led approach to developing its oil reserves

SIX years after discovering giant offshore“pré-sal” oil deposits, so called because they lie beneath a thick layer of salt under the ocean bed, Brazil has finally auctioned the rights to develop some of its deeply buried wealth. On October 21st the Libra field, off Rio de Janeiro’s coast (see map), was sold to a consortium led by Petrobras, Brazil’s state-controlled oil firm, and including France’s Total, Anglo-Dutch Shell and China’s state-owned CNOOC and CNPC. Libra’s estimated 8 billion-12 billion barrels of recoverable oil make it the biggest oil prospect in the world to be auctioned this year. Once it reaches peak production, sometime in the next decade, it should increase Brazil’s output from 2.1m to about 3.5m barrels per day.

Libra oil field

The article was critical of the way Brazil managed the auction resulting in just one consortium bidding, against the expectation there would be strong competition for the oil from possibly 40 companies despite the huge costs in extracting it from over 6,000 metres (nearly 20,000 feet) below sea-level.  The article didn’t even hint at the madness of even thinking it should be extracted but I guess that’s The Economist for you.

So with that in mind, let me turn to a recent essay from TomDispatch by world-renown climate-change activist Bill McKibben.  As regular readers will be aware Tom Engelhardt of the TomDispatch blog has given blanket permission for TD essays to be republished here on Learning from Dogs.

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Tomgram: Bill McKibben, Can Obama Ever Stand Up to the Oil Industry?

Posted by Bill McKibben at 4:34pm, October 27, 2013.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch.

Recently, “good” news about energy has been gushing out of North America, where a cheering crowd of pundits, energy experts, and government officials has been plugging the U.S. as the “Saudi Arabia” of the twenty-first century.  You know, all that fracking and those luscious deposits of oil shale and gas shale just waiting to be pounded into shape to fill global gas tanks for an energy-rich future.  And then, of course, just to the north there are those fabulous Canadian tar sands deposits whose extraction is reportedly turning parts of Alberta into an environmental desert.  And that isn’t all.

From the melting Arctic, where the Russians and others are staking out energy claims, to the southernmost tip of South America, the dream of new energy wealth is being pursued with a fervor and avidity that is hard to take in.  In distant Patagonia, an Argentinean government not previously known for its friendliness to foreign investment has just buddied up with Chevron to drill “around the clock in pursuit of a vast shale oil reservoir that might be the world’s next great oil field.”  Huzzah and olé!

And can you even blame the Argentinean president for her choice?  After all, who wants to be the country left out of the global rush for new energy wealth?  Who wants to consider the common good of the planet, when your country’s finances may be at stake? (As with the Keystone XL pipeline protest movement here, so in Argentina, there actually are environmentalists and others who are thinking of the common good, but they’re up against the state, the police, and Chevron — no small thing.)  All of this would, of course, be a wondrous story — a planet filled with energy reserves beyond anyone’s wildest dreams — were it not for the fact that such fossil fuel wealth, such good news, is also the nightmarish bad news of our lives, of perhaps the lifetime of humanity.

There is an obvious disconnect between what is widely known about climate change and the recent rush to extract “tough energy” from difficult environments; between the fires — and potential “mega-fire” — burning wildly across parts of overheated Australia and its newly elected government run by a conservative prime minister, essentially a climate denier, intent on getting rid of that country’s carbon tax. There is a disconnect between hailing the U.S. as the new Saudi Arabia and the recent report of the prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warning that fossil fuel reserves must be kept in the ground — or else. There is a disconnect between what our president says about climate change and the basic energy policies of his administration. There is a disconnect between what the burning of fossil fuels will do to our environment and the urge of just about every country on this planet to exploit whatever energy reserves are potentially available to it, no matter how “dirty,” no matter how environmentally destructive to extract.

Somewhere in that disconnect, the remarkable Bill McKibben, whose new book, Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist, is at the top of my personal reading list, has burrowed in and helped to create a global climate change movement. In this country, it’s significantly focused on the Keystone XL pipeline slated, if built, to bring tar sands oil from Canada to the Gulf Coast.  For the last several years at TomDispatch, McKibben has kept us abreast of the most recent developments in that movement. Here is his latest report from the tar sands front. Tom

X-Ray of a Flagging Presidency 
Will Obama Block the Keystone Pipeline or Just Keep Bending?
By Bill McKibben

As the battle over the Keystone XL pipeline has worn on — and it’s now well over two years old — it’s illuminated the Obama presidency like no other issue. It offers the president not just a choice of policies, but a choice of friends, worldviews, styles. It’s become an X-ray for a flagging presidency. The stakes are sky-high, and not just for Obama. I’m writing these words from Pittsburgh, amid 7,000 enthusiastic and committed young people gathering to fight global warming, and my guess is that his choice will do much to determine how they see politics in this country.

Let us stipulate at the start that whether or not to build the pipeline is a decision with profound physical consequences. If he approves its construction, far more of the dirtiest oil on Earth will flow out of the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, and reach the U.S. Gulf Coast. Not just right away or for a brief period, but far into the future, since the Keystone XL guarantees a steady flow of profits to oil barons who have their hearts set on tripling production in the far north.

The history of oil spills and accidents offers a virtual guarantee that some of that oil will surely make its way into the fields and aquifers of the Great Plains as those tar sands flow south.  The greater and more daunting assurance is this, however: everything that reaches the refineries on the Gulf Coast will, sooner or later, spill into the atmosphere in the form of carbon, driving climate change to new heights.

In June, President Obama said that the building of the full pipeline — on which he alone has the ultimate thumbs up or thumbs down — would be approved only if “it doesn’t significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.”  By that standard, it’s as close to a no-brainer as you can get.

These days, however, as no one will be surprised to hear, brainless things happen in Washington more often than not, and there’s the usual parade of the usual suspects demanding that Keystone get built. In mid-October, a coalition that included Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Royal Dutch Shell, not to mention the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the Business Roundtable, sent Obama a letter demanding that he approve Keystone in order to “maintain investor confidence,” a phrase almost guaranteed to accompany bad ideas. A report last week showed that the Koch brothers stood to earn as much as $100 billion in profits if the pipeline gets built (which would come in handy in helping fund their endless assault on unions, poor people, and democracy).

But don’t think it’s just Republican bigwigs and oil execs rushing to lend the pipeline a hand. Transcanada, the pipeline’s prospective builder, is at work as well, and Obama’s former communications director Anita Dunn is now on the Transcanada dime, producing TV ads in support of the pipeline.  It’s a classic example of the kind of influence peddling that knows no partisan bounds. As the activists at Credo put it: “It’s a betrayal of the commitments that so many of us worked so hard for, and that Dunn herself played a huge role in shaping as top strategist on the 2008 campaign and communications director in the White House.”

Credo’s Elijah Zarlin, who worked with Dunn back in 2008, wrote that attack on her. He was the guy who wrote all those emails that got so many of us coughing up money and volunteering time during Obama’s first run for the presidency, and he perfectly exemplifies those of us on the other side of this divide — the ones who actually believed Dunn in 2008, the ones who thought Obama was going to try to be a different kind of president.

On energy there’s been precious little sign of that. Yes, the Environmental Protection Agency has put in place some new power plant regulations, and cars are getting better mileage. But the president has also boasted again and again about his “all of the above” energy policy for “increasing domestic oil production and reducing our dependence on foreign oil.” It has, in fact, worked so well that the United States will overtake Russia this year as the biggest combined oil and natural gas producer on the planet and is expected to pass Saudi Arabia as the number one oil producer by 2017.

His administration has okayed oil drilling in the dangerous waters of the Arctic and has emerged as the biggest backer of fracking.  Even though he boasts about marginal U.S. cuts in carbon emissions, his green light to fracking means that he’s probably given more of a boost to releases of methane — another dangerous greenhouse gas — than any man in history. And it’s not just the environment.  At this point, given what we know about everything from drone warfare to NSA surveillance, the dream of a progressive Obama has, like so many dreams, faded away.

The president has a handy excuse, of course: a truly terrible Congress. And too often — with the noble exception of those who have been fighting for gay rights and immigration reform — he’s had little challenge from progressives. But in the case of Keystone, neither of those caveats apply: he gets to make the decision all by himself with no need to ask John Boehner for a thing, and people across the country have made a sustained din about it. Americans have sent record numbers of emails to senators and a record number of comments to the State Department officials who oversee a “review” of the pipeline’s environmental feasibility; more have gone to jail over this issue than any in decades. Yet month after month, there’s no presidential decision.

There are days, in fact, when it’s hard to muster much fire for the fight (though whenever I find my enthusiasm flagging, I think of the indigenous communities that have to live amid the Mordor that is now northern Alberta). The president, after all, has already allowed the construction of the southern half of the Keystone pipeline, letting Transcanada take land across Texas and Oklahoma for its project, and setting up the beleaguered communities of Port Arthur, Texas, for yet more fumes from refineries.

Stopping the northern half of that pipeline from being built certainly won’t halt global warming by itself. It will, however, slow the expansion of the extraction of tar sands, though the Koch brothers et al. are busy trying to find other pipeline routes and rail lines that would get the dirtiest of dirty energy out of Canada and into the U.S. via destinations from Michigan to Maine.  These pipelines and rail corridors will need to be fought as well — indeed the fights are underway, though sometimes obscured by the focus on Keystone. And there are equally crucial battles over coal and gas from the Appalachians to the Pacific coast. You can argue that the president’s people have successfully diverted attention from their other environmental sins by keeping this argument alive long past the moment at which it should have been settled and a decision should have been made.

At this point, in fact, only the thought of those 900,000 extra barrels a day of especially nasty oil coming out of the ground and, via that pipeline, into refineries still makes the fight worthwhile. Oh, and the possibility that, in deciding to block Keystone, the president would finally signal a shift in policy that matters, finally acknowledge that we have to keep most of the carbon that’s still in the ground in that ground if we want our children and grandchildren to live on a planet worth inhabiting.

If the president were to become the first world leader to block a big energy project on the grounds of its effects on climate, it might help dramatically  reset the international negotiations that he allowed to go aground at Copenhagen in 2009 — the biggest foreign policy failure of his first term.

But that cascade of “ifs” depends on Obama showing that he can actually stand up to the oil industry. To an increasingly disillusioned environmental movement, Keystone looks like a last chance.

Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, founder of the global climate campaign 350.org, a TomDispatch regular, and the author of a new book, Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.

Copyright 2013 Bill McKibben

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President Obama turned 52-years-old on August 4th this year. Michelle, his wife, will be 50-years-old next January, 17th.  Their children, Malia and Sasha, are aged 15 and 12 respectively.

Thus this family of four are all sufficiently young to be alive when the consequences of burning all this oil will be very painfully obvious, when all the power and money in the world will come to naught.

So it strikes me that young Malia and Sasha should be shown where Planet Earth’s master circuit-breaker is located.  Would be such a shame to leave the lights on when there’s no-one at home.

North America burning bright - an image from NASA.
North America burning bright – an image from NASA.

On country, bees and life!

Today is our first anniversary of living in Oregon.

In many ways, it’s difficult to comprehend that we have now lived in our house a few miles from Merlin, OR, for a full year.

There are so many different, wonderful emotions associated with our move from Arizona to Oregon, of moving into a property quite unlike anything that Jean and I have ever lived in before, of seeing our dogs so happy with their surroundings, of being immersed in Nature, and so much more.

But rather than waffle on about everything in general and nothing in particular, I just want to write about the several acres of grassland that slope down from our house towards Bummer Creek, flowing North-South through the Eastern part of the property.

Wild deer feeding on the grass.
Wild deer feeding in the North-West corner of about 5 acres of our grassland.

Having mown the grassland a number of times in the Spring musing that there must be better ways to spend your time, a few weeks ago we came across an article about not mowing lawns.  It was on the Mother Nature Network website and here’s how the article started.

Get off your grass and create an edible lawn

What would happen if you stopped watering, fertilizing, pesticiding and mowing your lawn?

By

Care2.com

Tue, Apr 20 2010 at 1:46 PM

lawn530
Americans currently spend more than $30 billion, millions of gallons of gasoline, and countless hours to maintain the dream of the well-kept 31 million acres of lawns. An estimated 67 million pounds of herbicides, fungicides and insecticides are applied around homes and gardens yearly. Commercial areas such as parks, schools, playing fields, cemeteries, industrial, commercial and government landscapes, apply another 165 million pounds.

Lawn grasses are not native to the North American continent. A century ago, people would actually pull the grass out of their lawns to make room for the more useful weeds that were often incorporated into the family salad or herbal tea. It was the British aristocracy in the 1860s and ’70s, to show off their affluence, that encouraged the trend of weed-free lawns, indicating one had no need of the more common, yet useful plants. Homeowners were encouraged to cultivate lawns that would serve as examples to passers-by. These types of lawns also lent themselves to the popular lawn sports, croquet and lawn tennis. From the 1880s through 1920s in America, front lawns ceased to produce fodder for animals, and garden space was less cultivated, promoting canned food as the “wholesome choice.” Cars replaced the family horse and chemical fertilizers replaced manure.

It has been estimated that about 30 percent of our nation’s water supply goes to water lawns. In Dallas, Texas, watering lawns in the summer uses as much as 60 percent of the city water’s supply.

Next, a newsletter from The Xerces Society mentioned bee feed wildflower seed mixes from a company called Sunmark Seeds in Portland, OR.  A call to them quickly produced the answer about what we could sow to help our local bees.

Hi Paul:

Upon further searching I did find 2 mixes that might fit what you are looking for.  They are attached.  The Bee Feed Mixture would be $36 per lb.  The Honey Bee Flower Mixture would be $38 per lb.  The price is a little higher but you would need a lot less.  It is suggested 6-12 lbs per acre.   You can still add the clover at $5 per lb and you should add 1 oz per lb of wildflower seed.  There is still the option of the Knee High Low Profile mix which would be a little less at $30 per lb but the seeding rate is higher at 8-16 lbs per acre.

I have attached a spec sheet on all three mixes.  Please let me know if you have any further questions.

Patti Shearer

Sunmark Companies

503.241.7333

 Sunmark Seeds

Decision made. Three pounds of Bee Feed Mix to sow on a half-acre area as a test before we do all five acres next Spring.

Thus not so much later a box arrived with our Bee Feed Mix and the next afternoon saw Jean and me marking out the test area and scattering the seed.

3 lbs of wild flower seed for next Spring's bees!
3 lbs of wild flower seed for next Spring’s bees!

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Hand-scattering the seeds with Dhalia keeping an eye on things.
Hand-scattering the seeds with Dhalia keeping an eye on things.

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It’s been an amazing year with plenty of challenges as we learnt to be rural people; yet another thing the dogs were able to teach us!  However, the joy of living in such beautiful surroundings will last for ever.  And more or less picking up on the theme for the week, the sharing, caring community of neighbours around us doubles that joy.

Jean and I consider ourselves two very lucky people. And no more mowing grassland! 🙂

Patterns and ripples.

It’s not just the climate change that is unsustainable!

Early in yesterday’s post I wrote:

My post last Monday, The lure of patterns, appears to have resonated far and wide.  In the sense of many echoes reinforcing the perilous nature of our present times and the desperately uncertain decades ahead.  Tomorrow I shall be writing specifically about those echoes.

Those echoes, as I chose to call them, were kicked off by a recent item on the blog Economic Populist.  The item was called Maps of Economic Disaster and had some sickening information.  Such as:

Today 15% of Americans live in poverty.  Below is a county map showing the previous year’s poverty rate and we see once again the South has high concentrations.

povertymap

People are living on the edge.  People living in liquid asset poverty is a whopping 43.9%.  This means 132.1 million people lack the savings to cover basic expenses for three months if they lose their job, have a medical emergency or some other sort of crisis.  The below map** breaks down that percentage state by state.  Pretty much half the country is living on the edge, paycheck to paycheck.

** I’ve not included that map but it may be seen here.  However, I did want to republish the closing map.

Finally, the next map shows how income inequality has grown in United States over time.  The gini index is a measure of income inequality, the higher then index gets, the worse income inequality is. If there is ever a map which shows the the destruction of the U.S. middle class, it is this one.

[N.B. The following map is an automated GIF so just left-click on it to see the sequence.  That sequence is essentially a coloured graphical image of each year, from 1977 through to 2012.  Don’t struggle with it.  All you have to note are the changing colours.  More colours towards the green end of the spectrum indicate a worsening gini index, i.e. a worsening measure of income inequality. ]

Gini map

America is clearly in dire straights and the above maps it all out.  Why then has this government, this Congress not put wages and jobs as jobs #1 is a good question.  Why America hasn’t outright revolted, demanding this government do so is a better one.

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George Monbiot.
George Monbiot.

Let me now turn to George Monbiot, a British writer known for his environmental and political activism.  WikiPedia describes Mr. Monbiot, in part, as:

He lives in Machynlleth, Wales, writes a weekly column for The Guardian, and is the author of a number of books, including Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain (2000) and Bring on the Apocalypse: Six Arguments for Global Justice (2008). He is the founder of The Land is Ours, a peaceful campaign for the right of access to the countryside and its resources in the United Kingdom.

On his own website, he offers us this:

Here are some of the things I love: my family and friends, salt marshes, arguments, chalk streams, Russian literature, kayaking among dolphins, diversity of all kinds, rockpools, heritage apples, woods, fishing, swimming in the sea, gazpacho, ponds and ditches, growing vegetables, insects, pruning, forgotten corners, fossils, goldfinches, etymology, Bill Hicks, ruins, Shakespeare, landscape history, palaeoecology, Gavin and Stacey and Father Ted.

Here are some of the things I try to fight: undemocratic power, corruption, deception of the public, environmental destruction, injustice, inequality and the misallocation of resources, waste, denial, the libertarianism which grants freedom to the powerful at the expense of the powerless, undisclosed interests, complacency.

Here is what I fear: other people’s cowardice.

There was a recent essay concerning the UK’s energy strategy posted by George Monbiot published in the Guardian on the 22nd October.  It is also on his website.

The essay opens, thus [my emphasis]:

Fiscal Meltdown

The government is betting the farm on a nuclear technology that might soon look as hip as the traction engine.

Seven years ago, I collected all the available cost estimates for nuclear power. The US Nuclear Energy Institute suggested a penny a kilowatt hour. The Royal Academy of Engineering confidently predicted 2.3p. The British government announced that in 2020 the price would be between 3 and 4p. The New Economics Foundation guessed that it could be anywhere between 3.4 and 8.3p. 8.3 pence was so far beyond what anyone else forecast that I treated it as scarcely credible. It falls a penny short of the price now agreed by the British government.

Mr. Monbiot’s essay concludes:

An estimate endorsed by the chief scientific adviser at the government’s energy department suggests that, if integral fast reactors were deployed, the UK’s stockpile of nuclear waste could be used to generate enough low-carbon energy to meet all UK demand for 500 years. These reactors would keep recycling the waste until hardly any remained: solving three huge problems – energy supply, nuclear waste and climate change – at once. Thorium reactors use an element that’s already extracted in large quantities as an unwanted by-product of other mining industries. They recycle their own waste, leaving almost nothing behind.

To build a plant at Hinkley Point which will still require uranium mining and still produce nuclear waste in 2063 is to commit to 20th-Century technologies through most of the 21st. In 2011 GE Hitachi offered to build a fast reactor to start generating electricity from waste plutonium and (unlike the Hinkley developers) to carry the cost if the project failed. I phoned the government on Monday morning to ask what happened to this proposal. I’m still waiting for an answer.

That global race the prime minister keeps talking about? He plainly intends to lose.

NB. I edited out the links to a comprehensive set of references to make the essay easier to read off the screen.  But all the facts reported by Mr. Monbiot may be seen here.

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Just two more or less random pieces of writing that have graced my ‘in-box’. Nothing scientific about my selection; just the sense that they are representative of the reams and reams of articles, essays and reports coming in on an almost daily basis from right across the world showing an ever-increasing credibility gap between the peoples of many nations and those who purport to serve those peoples in their respective Governments.

Frankly, I can’t even imagine how or when we will ‘transition’ out of this present period.  But one thing I am sure about. This schism between us, the people, and those who govern us is unsustainable!

Fascinating times! (I think!)

Need to go and hug a dog!

Come here, Hazel! I need some loving!
Come here, Hazel! I need some loving!

The power of sharing.

“Minds together do not just bind together, they find together.”

My post last Monday, The lure of patterns, appears to have resonated far and wide.  In the sense of many echoes reinforcing the perilous nature of our present times and the desperately uncertain decades ahead.  Tomorrow I shall be writing specifically about those echoes.

Today, I wanted to spend a little time reflecting on dogs and communities!  After all this blog is called Learning from Dogs!

In Monday’s post I opined that the future may well see a return to people re-evaluating and re-energising the benefits of local communities.  Now when it comes to communities, there are no better examples than dogs and, so many thousands of years before dogs, grey wolves.  These species have an incredibly strong social structure.  I mean, of course, the pack.  It’s a shame that the expression ‘pack of wolves’ or ‘pack of dogs’ has such misplaced negative connotations.

Before dogs were domesticated, as in when they first evolved from the grey wolf, they shared with wolves a natural pack size of around 50 animals.  There was a very strong social cohesiveness within that pack yet a very ‘light’ status differential between those dogs having pack status and the mass of the pack group.  Ditto with wolves.

In fact there were (still are) just three status roles: Mentor/Monitor/Nanny.  Or has been described previously on this blog: Alpha/Beta/Omega roles.  Even within the domesticated dog, thousands upon thousands of years later, those social instincts are alive and well.  Many followers of Learning from Dogs will know that Pharaoh, him of the Home Page, now an elderly German Shepherd is a Monitor or Beta dog.  I could write about this aspect of dogs for hours!

Pharaoh being a monitor for young Cleo.
Pharaoh being a monitor for young Cleo.

So back to us funny old humans.

I closed last Monday’s post off with three predictions:

  • That the power of internet communications will allow more people, more quickly, to find their soul-mates wherever they are on this planet.
  • That the realisation of how dysfunctional many Governments are, of how truly poorly they serve the majorities of their citizens, will lead to mass rejections of these so-called Governments’ policies.  Such rejections predominantly peaceful, as in taking the horse to water but being unable to make it drink.
  • That there will be a new form of localism.  At two levels.  Literally, people geographically close to each other creating 21st C. versions of local communities.  Virtually, those local communities linking to other like-minded communities right across the world resulting in highly effective and innovative learning, accelerated common-sense, (call it wisdom if you wish), and extraordinarily efficient and sustainable ways of living on this planet.

Patrice commented:

Dear Paul: I like your predictions. They will play some role. But maybe somewhere in the bushes only. I think predictions of the future beyond the next 12 months are obsolete.

Jeremy remarked: (and do click the link and read some of Jeremy’s fantastic poetry)

I am hoping for a new localism. I see signs of this in the local food movement and a growing concern about factory farming, for one thing. I think people are really scrutinizing where their food comes from, where their medicines are made, and I think there also is a dawning awareness of how we are living on the backs of exploited third world workers (and poorly paid service workers here at home). I do see signs of these things permeating the consciousness of many people and leading them to want to become more “local.”

Alex said:

Your predictions are good, and I liked the one of communities from different parts of the world working with each other… that was creatively brilliant.

(Click on their names to see three wonderful blog sites, by the way.)

So my idea of a return to an era of localism, but a 21st C. version reflecting the way so many millions of us are connected electronically, wasn’t immediately rejected.

Patrice recently published a post called Devils In The Details.  I mentioned in a comment to that post that I would be referring to it in this place.  Patrice replied [my italics]:

Very good, Paul! No doubt you will bring more common sense to one more of these interesting collaborations you bring together! Internet debates! A long way from the paleolithique cave!… But still the same idea. Minds together do not just bind together, they find together.

I found that last sentence so powerful that it was used as the sub-heading to today’s post.  Then Alexi Helligar commented:

The word consciousness, breaks down to con+scious+ness, which literally means together knowing or shared knowledge.

Adding in a subsequent comment:

In other words: Without society there is no consciousness. The sages of old knew this. Why has it been forgotten?

So right before my eyes (and yours!) we are seeing the power of ‘finding together‘.

Finally, just on the spur of the moment, I did a web search under an entry of ‘early caveman social structure’.  Guess what!  One of the top search returns was an essay by an Erik D. Kennedy under the title of On the Social Lives of Cavemen.  From which jumped off the screen:

Human beings are no strangers to group living.  Call it a family trait.  Our closest animal relatives spend a good bulk of their time eating bugs off of their friends’ back.  While I’m overjoyed we’re not social in that manner, I’m less pleased that we’re not social more to that degree.  In study after study, having and spending time with close friends is consistently correlated with happiness and well-being.  And yet, the last few decades in America have seen a remarkable decline in many things associated with being in a tight-knit social circle—things like family and household size, club participation, and number of close friends.  Conversely, we’ve seen an increase in things associated with being alone—TV, commutes, and the internet, for example.

This trend is quite unhealthy.  It’s no surprise that humans are social animals—but it may be surprising that we’re such social animals that merely joining a club halves your chance of death in the next year—or that living in a close-knit town of three-generation homes can almost singlehandedly keep you safe from heart disease.

My goodness me, this sharing idea may be core to a healthy society in ways that we need to return to.  Erik’s essay goes on thus:

That particular case—of Roseto, Pennsylvania—is mentioned by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers.  In 1950’s Roseto, the incidence of heart disease in men over sixty-five was half the national average (and suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, and serious crime were also basically unheard of[ii]).  Bewildered doctors searched for solutions in genetics, diet, exercise, and geography, but finding nothing, reached the conclusion that it was the close-knit social life of the community that kept its residents so healthy. Dinners with grandma, friendly chats between neighbors, and a precocious level of civic involvement were the driving factors in the health of a town that nothing but old age could kill.

The happiness and health I’m describing are not, however, ingredients to a long-lost elixir of well-being.  This sort of paleo social life occurs in cultures large and small all over the globe.  America just happens to be an enormous exception (and the one that I live in).  The whole reason Roseto was an outlier is because it was a town whose inhabitants more or less collectively moved from rural Italy to the middle of Pennsylvania over a few decades.  This was basically an Italian village in the American countryside, and it stood out because Italy’s social culture was remarkable compared to America’s—and that was in the 1950’s.  America’s social culture has only deteriorated even further since then.  We’ve lost a lot, but my thesis is a positive one; we have as much to gain as ever.

So if wolves and dogs naturally settle into packs of 50 animals, what’s the optimum ‘pack’ size for humans?  Dear Erik even offers that answer:

Along with that urban emigration came a shrink in residents per household and a widespread decline in community and organization engagement.  This isolation has been taxing on our physical and mental health, and the reason has been clear from the beginning: it’s not good for man to be alone.

So we’ll spend more time with other people.  Fine.  But who should we spend our time with?  What kind of groups should we hang out in?  And how big of groups?  The simple answer is: as long as you’re pretty close to the people you’re with, it hardly matters. Piles of research back up what is essentially obvious from everyday experience: that the more time you spend with people you trust, the better off you are.  That’s not to discourage actively meeting new people, but seeing as though close friends push us towards health and happiness better than strangers, there does appear to be a limit on the number of people you can have in your “tribe”.

And that number is about 150, says anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who achieved anthropologist fame by drawing a graph plotting primates’ social group size as a function of their brain sizes.  He inputted the average human brain size into his model, and lo and behold, the number 150 has been making a whirlwind tour of popular non-fiction books ever since.  Beyond being the upper bound for both hunter-gatherer tribes and Paleolithic farming villages,  it appears that everything from startup employee counts to online social networks show this number as a fairly consistent maximum for number of close social ties.

You really must read Erik’s essay in full; it really ‘spoke’ to me and maybe it will do the same for you.

So no other way to close than to say that of all the things we can learn from dogs, the power of sharing, of living a local community life, may just possibly be the difference between failure and survival of us humans.

Dogs and man should never be alone.
Dogs and man should never be alone.

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I'll say it again! Dogs, and man, should never be alone!
I’ll say it again! Dogs, and man, should never be alone!

The lure of patterns.

Is this present era really coming to an end?

Somewhere in my aged brain cells is the memory of having heard that humans are great lovers of patterns.  In other words, patterns are deemed to be very important for the progress and evolution of homo sapiens.  Of course, it is not just humans who learn from patterns; I’m sure most of the animals who live around us are great pattern matchers.  To support that proposition, anyone who has owned a dog or cat will have spotted how quickly they learn patterns.  (As an aside, some months ago our puppy German Shepherd, Cleo, work me at around 4am because she needed to go outside for a ‘call of nature’.  I now get woken every single night variously between 2am and 5am for Cleo’s benefit!)

The British mathematician G. H. Hardy who lived from the last quarter of the 19th Century well into the 20th Century, reputedly said (and I cheated and looked it up!):

A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

So why has this post opened with the theme of patterns?  Because, call it coincidence or what, within the last couple of weeks there have been three articles, each from very a different source, predicting that the present levels of inequality in society are both unsustainable and the beginning of the end.

First, on Michael Robert’s blog there was a post eleven days ago about global wealth inequality. From which I quote:

Global wealth inequality: top 1% own 41%; top 10% own 86%; bottom half own just 1%

—–

Just 8.4% of all the 5bn adults in the world own 83.4% of all household wealth (that’s property and financial assets, like stocks, shares and cash in the bank).  About 393 million people have net worth (that’s wealth after all debt is accounted for) of over $100,000, that’s 10% own 86% of all household wealth!  But $100,000 may not seem that much, if you own a house in any G7 country without any mortgage.  So many millions in the UK or the US are in the top 10% of global wealth holders.  This shows just how little two-thirds of adults in the world have – under $10,000 of net wealth each and billions have nothing at all.

This is not annual income but just wealth – in other words, 3.2bn adults own virtually nothing at all.  At the other end of the spectrum, just 32m people own $98trn in wealth or 41% of all household wealth or more than $1m each.  And just 98,700 people with ‘ultra-high net worth’ have more than $50 million each and of these 33,900 are worth over $100 million each.  Half of these super-rich live in the US.

Michael Robert’s essay closes:

All class societies have generated extremes of inequality in wealth and income.  That is the point of a rich elite (whether feudal landlords, Asiatic warlords, Incan and Egyptian religious castes, Roman slave owners, etc) usurping control of the surplus produced by labour.  But past class societies considered that normal and ‘god-given’. Capitalism on the other hand talks about free markets, equal exchange and equality of opportunity.  But the reality is no different from previous class societies.

Secondly, just last Friday I was drawn to an essay on, of all places, The Permaculture Research Institute blog.  The essay, by Chris Hedges (**), was called On Inequality and the Collapse of Globalization.  Chris Hedges opened his essay, thus:

The uprisings in the Middle East, the unrest that is tearing apart nations such as the Ivory Coast, the bubbling discontent in Greece, Ireland and Britain and the labor disputes in states such as Wisconsin and Ohio presage the collapse of globalization. They presage a world where vital resources, including food and water, jobs and security, are becoming scarcer and harder to obtain. They presage growing misery for hundreds of millions of people who find themselves trapped in failed states, suffering escalating violence and crippling poverty. They presage increasingly draconian controls and force—take a look at what is being done to Pfc. Bradley Manning—used to protect the corporate elite who are orchestrating our demise.

We must embrace, and embrace rapidly, a radical new ethic of simplicity and rigorous protection of our ecosystem—especially the climate—or we will all be holding on to life by our fingertips. We must rebuild radical socialist movements that demand that the resources of the state and the nation provide for the welfare of all citizens and the heavy hand of state power be employed to prohibit the plunder by the corporate power elite. We must view the corporate capitalists who have seized control of our money, our food, our energy, our education, our press, our health care system and our governance as mortal enemies to be vanquished.

The PRI editor’s preamble to the Chris Hedges essay included a couple of videos that he recommended watching.  One was a talk by Robert Reich: How Unequal Can America Get Before We Snap?

The other one was a recent TED Talk by Richard Wilkinson (his profile is here).

Mr. Wilkinson explains that for the majority of people there is an instinctive feeling that societies with huge income gaps and corresponding high levels of social inequality are somehow going wrong. He charts the hard data on such economic inequality and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart: ergo, the very real effects on health, lifespan, and even such basic values as trust.

Just 16 minutes long, it’s a very revealing talk.  Do watch it.

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The final, third piece of the pattern was me coming across an essay on the blog DeflationLand, not a blog I had come across before, on the same day that I saw the PRI article.  This essay, published just two days before the PRI article, was about patterns; the patterns of the centuries.  More specifically, how the characteristics of a century generally evolve to a new culture within the first 10 to 15 years of the following century.  It was a most interesting proposition and, to my delight, I was given permission to republish that essay here on Learning from Dogs.  So here it is.

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Why I stopped worrying and learned to love the currency collapse

For the past 300 years, the historical pattern has been for the era marked by a century to continue into the following century by fourteen or fifteen years. Let me explain.  Everyone knows that the 19th Century, its uprightness, its optimism and sense of purpose, the halcyon days of British Empire, came to an end with World War I, starting in 1914 and building to a nasty crescendo by 1916.  The 20th Century had arrived, and it had some real horrors in store for us.

Germans before Kraftwerk
Germans before Kraftwerk

But if we return back another hundred years, we notice that the 18th Century ends in 1815 with the final defeat of Napoleon, that final project of the Enlightenment and of the French Revolution.  With the Congress of Vienna in 1814-1815, we have a new Europe along the lines of Metternich’s plan, and the 19th Century at last is here.

"Sorry, guys. My bad."
“Sorry, guys. My bad.”

In 1713 and 1714, we have the Treaties of Utrecht, Baden, and Rastatt, bringing an end to the era of Spain as a major power, and the rise of the Habsburgs.  Louis XIV dies in 1715, after reigning for 72 years.  The Baroque period is over, and we are now firmly in the 18th Century.

War of Spanish Succession
War of Spanish Succession

We still live in the 20th Century.  Nothing much significant has changed in our lives in the past twenty years.  Symptoms of a deeper rot are appearing here and there, foreshadowing a larger crisis, but the crisis itself has not arrived yet.  We still live in an era of Pax Americana, the old republic very much a strained and tired Empire now, with the U.S. Dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

That is going to change.

The next task for History is to dismantle the untenable structures and institutions put in place by late Modernity, which have been extended now as far as they can go.  Our debt-based monetary system will collapse, our unbacked fiats will be worthless.  The debts and unmeetable obligations will all default.

There are ironies and great contradictions as the former home and hope of Liberty becomes viciously unfree and increasingly despotic.  Our leaders no longer govern, but try instead to rule us — they are less legitimate with each passing day, their laws corrupt or worse.  They are nearly finished, and will be swept away with the tide.

Just as in 1914, the internationalist system will break down, dashing the hopes of the would-be first-world nations.  We will probably have a pretty good war as well, or many local ones worldwide.  These transitions tend to involve war.

Deflation first — it clears the way for the complete loss of faith and hyperinflation that will follow.  The next big wave down in the financial markets is the battering ram.  The U.S. national debt is about faith, so is quantitative easing, and so is the very idea of magical coins that could ever be “worth” a trillion dollars.  When this faith breaks, in concert with loss of faith in perpetual growth and unlimited cheap energy, then things will move very, very quickly.

There is nothing any of us can do at this point, except navigate the rapids as well as possible, and to stay out of the way of a dying empire, which is still very dangerous in its death throes.  We are actually very privileged to be alive and witnessing this next transition, to what we do not know just yet.  But what an honor to live at this time, not in ignorance but with an existential resolve to come out of it alive and much the wiser.

Ass Americana.
Ass Americana.

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** Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author and former international correspondent for the New York Times. His latest book is The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.

I am neither a scientist nor a historian; just someone who has lived in and observed the world for coming on for 60 years.

So you have to understand that my prediction is hardly worth the ‘paper I write upon’ (which certainly dates me!).  But, undaunted, here are my predictions for the 21st Century:

  • That the power of internet communications will allow more people, more quickly, to find their soul-mates wherever they are on this planet.
  • That the realisation of how dysfunctional many Governments are, of how truly poorly they serve the majorities of their citizens, will lead to mass rejections of these so-called Governments’ policies.  Such rejections predominantly peaceful, as in taking the horse to water but being unable to make it drink.
  • That there will be a new form of localism.  At two levels.  Literally, people geographically close to each other creating 21st C. versions of local communities.  Virtually, those local communities linking to other like-minded communities right across the world resulting in highly effective and innovative learning, accelerated common-sense, (call it wisdom if you wish), and extraordinarily efficient and sustainable ways of living on this planet.

What do you think?

The midnight ride of Paul Revere

The awakening for what is ahead of us.

The ride of Paul Revere is a famous poem by Longfellow, as in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  It commemorates the American patriot Paul Revere who on the 18th April, 1775 rode furiously across Middlesex County, Massachusetts spreading the alarm that the British were approaching.

Spreading the alarm throughout Middlesex County, Massachusetts.
Spreading the alarm throughout Middlesex County, Massachusetts.

As the website The Paul Revere House explains here:

In 1774 and the Spring of 1775 Paul Revere was employed by the Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Massachusetts Committee of Safety as an express rider to carry news, messages, and copies of resolutions as far away as New York and Philadelphia.

On the evening of April 18, 1775, Paul Revere was sent for by Dr. Joseph Warren and instructed to ride to Lexington, Massachusetts, to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock that British troops were marching to arrest them. After being rowed across the Charles River to Charlestown by two associates, Paul Revere borrowed a horse from his friend Deacon John Larkin. While in Charlestown, he verified that the local “Sons of Liberty” committee had seen his pre-arranged signals. (Two lanterns had been hung briefly in the bell-tower of Christ Church in Boston, indicating that troops would row “by sea” across the Charles River to Cambridge, rather than marching “by land” out Boston Neck. Revere had arranged for these signals the previous weekend, as he was afraid that he might be prevented from leaving Boston).

On the way to Lexington, Revere “alarmed” the country-side, stopping at each house, and arrived in Lexington about midnight. As he approached the house where Adams and Hancock were staying, a sentry asked that he not make so much noise. “Noise!” cried Revere, “You’ll have noise enough before long. The regulars are coming out!” After delivering his message, Revere was joined by a second rider, William Dawes, who had been sent on the same errand by a different route. Deciding on their own to continue on to Concord, Massachusetts, where weapons and supplies were hidden, Revere and Dawes were joined by a third rider, Dr. Samuel Prescott. Soon after, all three were arrested by a British patrol. Prescott escaped almost immediately, and Dawes soon after. Revere was held for some time and then released. Left without a horse, Revere returned to Lexington in time to witness part of the battle on the Lexington Green.

I mention all this simply because when John Hurlburt recently sent me a guest post his email opened with these words: “Thanks for the call.  Hopefully, we are beginning to turn a global corner. Here’s a slightly modified version of “the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere”.”

So with no further ado, here is John’s essay.

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Random Thoughts

The United States is a two hundred-year-old modern experiment in Democracy.  Democracy is an inclusive government by a majority of equal citizens.  Oligarchy and plutocracy are forms of government by the few rich people.  Both have historically ended in chaos.  Our hearts and our souls are deeply saddened by the ignorance and lack of compassion of a technologically enhanced corporate struggle against the earth and humanity.

Dualism is divisive.  We’re butting heads over false equivalencies which have very little if anything to do with the true nature of a global environmental, cultural and economic melt-down.  People who believe that money makes the world go round either don’t know much or don’t care at all about the realities of physics.

Sooner or later, fundamentalism self-destructs as a result of a failure to adapt to change. The longer we continue to push Nature’s envelope, the longer it’s going to take the earth to recover. Our hope is that we won’t destroy human culture and the sustaining crust of mother earth in the process of regaining our balance.

Most animals live primarily by instinct.  Humans have added discernment.  Today is the tomorrow we dreamed of yesterday. Who knows if we’ll get another opportunity to do what we are still capable of doing as a species today?  Unfortunately, the last thing that many Americans truly cared about was when the “Twinkie” factories temporarily shut down.

It is far better to live into solutions then it is to live with problems.The spiritual energy of life is as warm and welcoming as the sun. The first step is to accept that Nature requires life to adapt.  We need to see the integral vision beyond ourselves and live into that vision.

What we can’t accomplish alone we can accomplish together.

Ne cede malis!

an old lamplighter

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Fabulous words, as I’m sure you’ll agree.  Oh, and if you like me didn’t understand that Latin expression ‘Ne cede malis’, it means yield not to misfortunes.

Let me close with that Longfellow poem.

Paul Revere’s Ride

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,–
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm.”

Then he said “Good-night!” and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man-of-war;
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon like a prison bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.

Meanwhile, his friend through alley and street
Wanders and watches, with eager ears,
Till in the silence around him he hears
The muster of men at the barrack door,
The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet,
And the measured tread of the grenadiers,
Marching down to their boats on the shore.

Then he climbed the tower of the Old North Church,
By the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,
To the belfry chamber overhead,
And startled the pigeons from their perch
On the sombre rafters, that round him made
Masses and moving shapes of shade,–
By the trembling ladder, steep and tall,
To the highest window in the wall,
Where he paused to listen and look down
A moment on the roofs of the town
And the moonlight flowing over all.

Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead,
In their night encampment on the hill,
Wrapped in silence so deep and still
That he could hear, like a sentinel’s tread,
The watchful night-wind, as it went
Creeping along from tent to tent,
And seeming to whisper, “All is well!”
A moment only he feels the spell
Of the place and the hour, and the secret dread
Of the lonely belfry and the dead;
For suddenly all his thoughts are bent
On a shadowy something far away,
Where the river widens to meet the bay,–
A line of black that bends and floats
On the rising tide like a bridge of boats.

Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,
Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride
On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere.
Now he patted his horse’s side,
Now he gazed at the landscape far and near,
Then, impetuous, stamped the earth,
And turned and tightened his saddle girth;
But mostly he watched with eager search
The belfry tower of the Old North Church,
As it rose above the graves on the hill,
Lonely and spectral and sombre and still.
And lo! as he looks, on the belfry’s height
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight
A second lamp in the belfry burns.

A hurry of hoofs in a village street,
A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,
And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark
Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet;
That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.
He has left the village and mounted the steep,
And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep,
Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides;
And under the alders that skirt its edge,
Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge,
Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides.

It was twelve by the village clock
When he crossed the bridge into Medford town.
He heard the crowing of the cock,
And the barking of the farmer’s dog,
And felt the damp of the river fog,
That rises after the sun goes down.

It was one by the village clock,
When he galloped into Lexington.
He saw the gilded weathercock
Swim in the moonlight as he passed,
And the meeting-house windows, black and bare,
Gaze at him with a spectral glare,
As if they already stood aghast
At the bloody work they would look upon.

It was two by the village clock,
When he came to the bridge in Concord town.
He heard the bleating of the flock,
And the twitter of birds among the trees,
And felt the breath of the morning breeze
Blowing over the meadow brown.
And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket ball.

You know the rest. In the books you have read
How the British Regulars fired and fled,—
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
From behind each fence and farmyard wall,
Chasing the redcoats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load.

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,—
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo for evermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

Let there be lions.

The power and logic of nature.

In yesterday’s post Autumn ramblings, I mentioned:

There’s been a couple of posts that I want to refer to because they underline the fact that humans are so prone to forgetting that we are of the wild, from the wild and connected to the wild.

The first of those posts was a recent essay by Patrice Ayme under the title of Rewilding Us and is republished on Learning from Dogs with the kind permission of Patrice.

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Rewilding Us.

REALITY IS WILD & FEROCIOUS. IGNORING IT IS INHUMAN.

And Presents A Civilizational Risk.

Princeton is freaking out. Flesh devouring aliens are lurking out in the woods, threatening academia’s fragile thoughts. Krugman:

‘From the Princeton Town Topics, which used to be all about (a) parking (b) deer:

A growing population of coyotes in the wooded area bordering the Institute for Advanced Study has motivated the Princeton Animal Control Advisory Committee to recommend that sharpshooters be hired to help handle the problem. “There is a big pack over at the Institute Woods,” officer Johnson said this week. “I’m having a lot of complaints that they follow people around.”‘

You Can’t Always Eat Who You Want
You Can’t Always Eat Who You Want

The “Mountain Lion”, is a relative of the Cheetah (erroneously put in the cat family, felis, until last year or so). It has 40 names, in English alone, and is found from the American Arctic to Patagonia, from the sea shore to the high mountains. The weight above is that of the female. Males are heavier (typically up to 100 kilograms). The heaviest puma shot in Arizona was 300 pounds (136 kilos).

The lion/cougar/puma is capable of jumping up twenty feet from a standstill (yes, 6 meters; horizontally, 14 meters). It is capable of killing a grizzly (pumas and ‘golden bears’ were famous for their naturally occurring furious fights to death in California). The feline’s crafty method consisted into jumping on top of the bear, and blinding him with furious pawing. Top speed: 50 mph, 80 km/h. (By the way, there used to be pure cheetahs in North America, recently exterminated by man. I propose to re-install the Asian cheetah in the USA, in a sort of cheetah diplomacy with Iran.)

The philosophical question here is: what is this world all about? Is it about living on our knees, or ruling among animals and wilderness?

Why would Princeton panic about small canids? Because they don’t obey the established order?

Coyotes are totally clever, and not at all dangerous (being so clever). They have very varied voices, when in packs. Going out and shooting them is really primitive, and misses the main point of having nature around. That is: to teach humility, and teach the richness of our planet, visit hearts with emotional diversity, and minds with complexity.

Bears and Mountain Lions are a completely different matter. They are both extremely clever too, but can be very dangerous.

Running and hiking in the Sierra, I got charged by scary bears several times. I view this dangerosity as a plus, but it never loses my mind, and I got scared nearly out my wits more than once.

Once, in a national Park on the coast, I literally ran into two large lions in 30 minutes! Then I got charged by a large elk before he realized I was not a lion. Other high notes were finding a bear cub on the trail in the near vertical mountain side, on the way down, as dusk was coming.

Another high point was the large bear by the trail, who was lying like a bear rug, at 9pm, in an apparent ruse to let me approach until he could jump at his prey, as he did, before realizing that I was not a deer, something that obviously infuriated him. He was torn between making the human into dinner, and the instinct that this would turn badly for him.

In Alaska I was charged by a moose with her progeny… although I did not go as fast as an experienced mountain biker who happened to be there too, the anti-grizzly cannister in my hand emboldened me to succeed in a circuitous move  to proceed towards my distant destination, something facilitated by the calf’s crash into some obstacle, drawing his mother’s concern. Mountain running often requires to proceed, no matter the obstacles in the way, when one is too far to turn around.

Bears know rocks, they have been hurt by them, and so they fear airborn rocks (throw the rock on something noisy, to impress; I had to hit, with a very large rock, a charging bear directly, once; it fled; it was killed by rangers later after he caused a flesh wound to somebody else; some will find all this very violent; well, it is, that’s part of the whole point).

Mountain Lions are better charged and/or, roared or barked at. They fear insane behavior.

In general making lots of noise helps, with bears and lions. I don’t have clever tricks to suggest for bathing safely in the murky icy Pacific. Although I assume that the presence of sea lions bobbing on the surface placidly is indicative of the absence of an obvious white shark prowling… In any case the pacific is so cold, you will probably die of cardiac arrest before you are devoured.

In Africa, there are about 500,000 elephants. 25,000 to 30,000 are killed, a year, to send the ivory to east Asia (China, Vietnam). So African elephants may disappear. This is beyond tragic, it’s irreplaceable. Elephants understand people’s gestures, without any learning (they apparently learn to use trunk gestures among themselves). One is talking about extremely intelligent animals here. (In contrast, chimpanzees have great difficulties understanding human gestures.)

Intelligence and culture are dominant among apex mammals. That’s what makes them so superior. Washington State had the smart idea to shoot full grown adult male mountain lions. Thus mountain lion society and culture collapsed, uneducated teenagers took over, and incidents with humans exploded (something about the quiet macho society!).

A Japanese specialist of chimpanzee intelligence who happens to have a bear in his lab, found that the bear did not underperform chimpanzees on mental tasks (that’s actually a problem with bears; being so clever, they can be unpredictable, one can never know what they have up their sleeve, like the one who mimicked a bear rug, above, or one who drove a car in Tahoe). A number of social mentally advanced animals (sea mammals, parrots) use advanced languages.

So what are my recommendations? The Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies ought to realize that, if it wants to become really brainy, it ought to give our fellow species a chance. They are part of what make our minds, in full.

Elephants and rhinoceroses used to be all over Europe and North America. They ought to be re-introduced right away, using Indian and African species (rare camels too; later, thanks to genetic engineering, part of those could be replaced by re-engineered ancient species, such as the Mammoth). Lions and leopard like species ought to be reintroduced too.

It can work: in the San Francisco Bay Area, there is an impressive population of mountain lions.  I had many close calls (in the most recent incident, a few weeks ago, a lion peed an enormous and dreadfully smelling amount on a trail I was making a loop on, obviously to show me he owned the territory, a total wilderness reserve a few miles from Silicon Valley… especially at dusk).

However, the lions are extremely good at avoiding people (although one got killed by police in downtown Berkeley in the wee hours of the morning). They will all be collared in the next ten years, to find out what is going on. With modern technology (collars!) and sophisticated human-animal culture, there is no reason why extremely dangerous, but clever species could not live in reasonable intelligence with humans.

So rewilding is possible. It’s also necessary. Why? So we humans can recover our hearts, and our minds.

Whether we like it or not, we are made for this wild planet. By forgetting how wild it is, by shooting it into submission, we lose track of the fact human life, and civilization itself, are much more fragile than they look.

And thus, by turning our back to the wilds, we lose track of what reality really is. Worse: we never discover all what our minds can be, and how thrilling the universe is. We are actually bad students who refuse to attend the most important school, that taught by reality itself.

Rewilding is necessary, not just to instill a mood conducive to saving the planet, but also to remake us in all we are supposed to be.

Expect Evil, And Don’t Submit.
Expect Evil, And Don’t Submit.

These are the times when, once again, the plutocratic phenomenon is trying to take over. That’s when the few use the methods of Pluto to terrorize and subjugate the many (to constitute what is variously named an elite, oligarchy, or “nomenklatura“, or aristocracy, that is, a plutocracy).

And how is that possible? because the many have been made into a blind, stupid, meek herd (I refer to Nietzsche for the condemnation of the herd mentality).

How do we prevent that? Nietzsche advocated the mentality of the “blonde beast“. That meant the lion (and not what the Nazis claimed it was; few were as anti-Nazi as Nietzsche). Why lion? Because lions are domineering. I learned in Africa that one could go a long way with wild lions, as long as one gave them respect, and time to get out of the way. However, disrespecting a lion means death.

Lions don’t accept to live on their knees. When abominable forces from the giant Persian theocratic plutocracy put the tiny Athenian democracy in desperate military situations, Athenians fought like lions. And democracy won.

Yet, 150 years later, when fascist, plutocratic, but apparently not as abominable, Macedonian forces put Athens in a difficult situation, Athenians surrendered. They did not fight like lions. Democracy would not come back to Athens for 23 centuries (and only thanks to the European Union).

We will not defeat plutocracy if we do not rewild ourselves. First. Let there be lions.

***

Patrice Ayme

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What I read in Patrice’s essay is this.  Man is, by definition, part of nature.  Yet man, uniquely of all the natural species on this planet, has contrived to ‘evolve’ a set of beliefs that run counter to the core integrity of nature.  Perhaps more accurately put: sections of modern man have evolved this way.

I have a background piece on Learning from Dogs called Dogs and integrity.  Here’s an extract:

Dogs:

  • are integrous ( a score of 210) according to Dr David Hawkins
  • don’t cheat or lie
  • don’t have hidden agendas
  • are loyal and faithful
  • forgive
  • love unconditionally
  • value and cherish the ‘present’ in a way that humans can only dream of achieving
  • are, by eons of time, a more successful species than man.

And have poetry written for them:

Inner Peace

If you can start the day without caffeine,

If you can always be cheerful, ignoring aches and pains,

If you can resist complaining and boring people with your troubles,

If you can eat the same food every day and be grateful for it,

If you can understand when your loved ones are too busy to give you any time,

If you can take criticism and blame without resentment,

If you can conquer tension without medical help,

If you can relax without liquor,

If you can sleep without the aid of drugs,

You are probably the family dog!

Those words apply equally to all the animals on this planet; all of Nature’s animals. In other words, integrity must be and has to be the one and only framework within which we live.

The second post I referred to is on Alex Jones’ wonderful blog The Liberated Way.  The post is called Nature Deficit Disorder.  Here is the text of Alex’s post.

I occasionally read sad stories in my local media of senseless cruelty against wildlife around my town of Colchester: the smashing of barn owl eggs; people suffocated badgers by closing their den up.  People have no opportunity to expose themselves to nature, and thus connect with nature, some experts call “Nature Deficit Disorder.”

Technology, far from liberating, enslaves the individual to a relentless need for entertainment and personal validation, backed by demands of television, homework, cellphones and money earning.  Many view nature as a health and safety risk, so that it is either managed or avoided.  The situation is best illustrated in a satirical YouTube video called“The discovery of the last child in the woods.”

The solution is simple: expose yourself to nature.

The indigenous Native American expresses a connection to nature in this video:

Here is that video.  Watch it without interruption.  In less that 3 minutes it spells out everything that we humans have to relearn about the world we live in; the world we are part of.  The integrous world we must fight for. Fight for as lions!

When all the trees have been cut down,
when all the animals have been hunted,
when all the waters are polluted,
when all the air is unsafe to breathe,
only then will you discover you cannot eat money.
~ Cree Prophecy ~

EMF exposure.

A warning of the dangers of cell phones and the like!

Yesterday, I simply ran out of time to write to write a more personal post for today.  So I looked at some of the news items that I had collected recently and two jumped out as being both deeply connected and worthy of posting.

The first was an item that was seen on Natural News a little more than a couple of months ago.  It had the title of EMF exposures destroy health and well-being, claims panel of top international scientists.  The link to that article is here.  It opens, thus:

(NaturalNews) Nearly 8 million people worldwide die from cancer on an annual basis. Cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death, killing almost 17 million people in 2011; both of these statistics are spiraling out of control. Now three top scientists, Dr. Panagopoulos of the University of Athens , Associate Prof. Johansson of the Karolinska Institute, and Dr. Carlo of the Science and Public Policy Institute, are sounding the alarm bell.

Leaders in their respective fields, Panagopoulos, Johansson, and Carlo, claim electromagnetic field (EMF) exposures significantly below international safety levels exposures are destroying the public’s health and well-being.

Recent study findings

This latest study concluded the present standard of measuring EMFs, Specific Absorption Rate (SAR), to be totally inappropriate. SAR measures the heating effect of EMF based technologies like microwave ovens, cell phones, cordless phones, Wi-Fi and the like. But countless studies have brought to light adverse biological effects at radiation levels significantly below levels where a thermal effect is detected.

Please do go here and read the full article.  Because as one reads from the closing advice, as below, whom these days isn’t being affected?

Basic EMF protection

Reducing personal exposure to EMFs is a fairly easy endeavor. Basic EMF protection can be achieved by:

• Texting instead of talking with cell phones
• Setting cell phones on airplane mode when not in use
• Clearing the bedroom of electrical devices
• Replacing Wi-Fi with a hard-wired connection

Taking these simple steps is well worth the effort; the power to reduce EMF exposure and the adverse health effects that stem from them are truly right there at your fingertips.

The second was a specific warning for women [my emphasis, Ed]:

Multifocal Breast Cancer in Young Women with Prolonged Contact between Their Breasts and Their Cellular Phones

Abstract

Breast cancer occurring in women under the age of 40 is uncommon in the absence of family history or genetic predisposition, and prompts the exploration of other possible exposures or environmental risks. We report a case series of four young women—ages from 21 to 39—with multifocal invasive breast cancer that raises the concern of a possible association with nonionizing radiation of electromagnetic field exposures from cellular phones. All patients regularly carried their smartphones directly against their breasts in their brassieres for up to 10 hours a day, for several years, and developed tumors in areas of their breasts immediately underlying the phones. All patients had no family history of breast cancer, tested negative for BRCA1 and BRCA2, and had no other known breast cancer risks. Their breast imaging is reviewed, showing clustering of multiple tumor foci in the breast directly under the area of phone contact. Pathology of all four cases shows striking similarity; all tumors are hormone-positive, low-intermediate grade, having an extensive intraductal component, and all tumors have near identical morphology. These cases raise awareness to the lack of safety data of prolonged direct contact with cellular phones.

Strongly recommend you read the case reports.

This is a definite No! No!
This is a definite No! No!

So all you lovely ladies with your cell phones, mobile phone, smart phones, et al.  Don’t carry them in your bra!

And watch this!

Truth, Justice, Sanity and Brotherhood.

plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

“The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing.” Apparently an epigram by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr in the January 1849 issue of his journal Les Guêpes (“The Wasps”). Source.

Both the heading and the sub-heading to today’s post reflect strong connections to Chris Snuggs.  Chris has featured previously several times on Learning from Dogs and, I’m sure, my association with Chris has been mentioned.  An association going back too many years to the time when Chris invited me to run a course on sales and marketing for the students at the French Institute ISUGA in Quimper, France.  It became a regular event and Chris and I got to know each other well.

Chris has his own blogsite Nemo Insula Est from where one learns this about him:

A retired teacher, I am very worried about the state and future of the world. One thing may help, a determination to communicate and state the truth as one sees it, which is what I seek to do. I try to see things objectively; my horror of being brainwashed or motivated by some dogma or partisan viewpoint is absolute.

I salute the free press which has a good record of unearthing nepotism, corruption, dishonest and lunacy. However, the nepotists, the despots, the corrupt, the dishonest and the lunatics often have a lot of power, money and therefore influence. This allied to the fact that the lumpenmass is too busy toiling away to survive and often shrugs its shoulders in hopelessness means that the aforementioned get away with it.

Anyway, enough of me waffling on!  In my email in-box earlier today was an email from Chris offering me a couple of links to his posts on Nemo Insula Est.  One was very funny and one was decidedly less so.  The latter is being republished here today, with Chris’s permission.  It is called The State of America.

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The State of America

A Blog post from the “Daily Telegraph” on October 3rd, 2013 by:

Ghislane400

I haven’t got time to verify all of these statistics, but I assume they are accurate. I have added some from Nicholas Kristoff at the end.

As far as I understand, the only reason the USA is not totally bankrupt right now is because the rest of the world keeps lending to it, believing that it is “too big to fail.” Many countries and Empires in history have believed they are too big and important to fail, France being yet another one ………. On that point, see:  “The Life Cycle of a Democracy”, which is rather sobering!

After DECADES of bad decisions, America is now dangerously in debt!  Obama has crippled America since he was re-elected, and his ineptitude is highlighted by the facts below: 

  • 30 years ago the US national debt stood at about one trillion dollars.  Today it stands at almost 17 TRILLION DOLLARS!
  • About 40 years ago the TOTAL debt stood at about 2 trillion dollars, today it is more than 56 TRILLION DOLLARS!  
  • At the same time as they have run up all of this debt, their economic infrastructure and their ability to create wealth has been completely gutted.  Since 2001, America has lost more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities and millions of jobs have been moved overseas. 
  • Their share of the global GDP declined from 31.8% in 2001 to 21.6% in 2011.
  • The percentage of self-employed Americans is at an all time low whilst the amount of them on benefits is at a record high.
  • During Obama’s first term, the federal government accumulated more debt than it did under the first 42 U.S presidents combined.
  • If they started to pay off the new debt accumulated under Obama at the rate of $1 per second, it would take them 184,000 years to pay it off.
  • Every hour of every day, the federal government steals more than 100 MILLION DOLLARS from their children and your grandchildren.
  • America has dropped in global economic competitiveness for the past 4 years running. 
  • According to “The Economist”, America was the best place to be born in 1988; now they tie for 16th place.
  • There are fewer Americans working in manufacturing today than in 1950, despite the fact that their population has doubled since then.
  • In Detroit alone, there are over 70,000 abandoned buildings.
  • When NAFTA was pushed through American Congress in 1933, they had a trade surplus with Mexico of 1.6 billion dollars.  They had a trade DEFICIT with them of 61.6 billion dollars come 2010.
  • Their trade deficit with China was 6 MILLION DOLLARS in 1985 for the entire year.  In 2012 their trade deficit with China was 315 BILLION DOLLARS.  This is the largest trade deficit between nations in the history of the world.  
  • America also loses half a million jobs to China annually. Fewer than 65% of all men in America have jobs. 53% of American male workers make less than $30,000 a year! Only 7% of all non-farm workers in the States are self-employed.  This is an all time low.
  • 146 million Americans are either ‘poor’ or ‘low income’.  49% of them live in a home that receives benefits from the federal government, according to the U.S Census Bureau. One in every 6 Americans is on Medicaid and Obamacare will add another 16 million to the Medicaid rolls; this will be a total of 73.2 million come 2025. This will increase liabilities of 38 trillion dollars to Medicare over the next 75 years, which equates to $328,404.00 for every single household in the United States.
  • Of the 56 million Americans collecting Social Security benefits now, by 2035 that will soar to an astounding 91 MILLION!  That is a 134 trillion dollar shortfall over the next 75 years.
  • Americans on Social Security Disability exceed the population of Greece, and those on food stamps exceed the population of Spain.
  • 45% of all children in Miami now live in poverty, more than 50% of all children in Cleveland live in poverty, 60% of all children in Detroit live in poverty.  
  • More than 1 million public school students in America are HOMELESS.  This is the first time in American history this has ever happened.
  • Since Obama got back in, those Americans on food stamps have risen from 32 million to 47 million.  That number exceeds the combined populations of Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Colombia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming!

What a spiffing good job Obama is doing of bankrupting America!  Anyone would think he hates the States!  Seriously, anyone who voted for him owes an apology to the children of America, for whom a terrible country full of debt has been created by the biggest clown one could imagine.

AND, from Nicholas Kristoff in “The New York Times”:

  • The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.
  • C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.

POSTSCRIPT:

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on on-going financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that “the buck stops here.” Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.

Want to know who said that, and when? ……

Senator Barack Obama on March 20, 2006.

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Just a footnote on that level of US inequality reported by Nicholas Kristoff using an extract from a recent post on Learning from Dogs: Our broken ways:

OK, that’s enough ‘copying’ from me so please go and read more about the plight of those poor billionaires.  But if the NYT and Paul Krugman will forgive me, here’s the paragraph towards the end of the Krugman essay that makes me sick [my emboldening]:

The thing is, by and large, the wealthy have gotten their wish. Wall Street was bailed out, while workers and homeowners weren’t. Our so-called recovery has done nothing much for ordinary workers, but incomes at the top have soared, with almost all the gains from 2009 to 2012 going to the top 1 percent, and almost a third going to the top 0.01 percent — that is, people with incomes over $10 million.

(Patrice Ayme has a parallel essay on this topic.)

There will be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, who share my view that this dimming of America’s historic beacon of truth and justice is a failure not just for the United States of America but for the rest of the world.

It seems appropriate to remind all you dear readers as to why I write this Blog.  Most easily encapsulated in what appears on my Welcome page:

Dogs live in the present – they just are!  Dogs make the best of each moment uncluttered by the sorts of complex fears and feelings that we humans have. They don’t judge, they simply take the world around them at face value.  Yet they have been part of man’s world for an unimaginable time, at least 30,000 years.  That makes the domesticated dog the longest animal companion to man, by far!

As man’s companion, protector and helper, history suggests that dogs were critically important in man achieving success as a hunter-gatherer.  Dogs ‘teaching’ man to be so successful a hunter enabled evolution, some 20,000 years later, to farming,  thence the long journey to modern man.  But in the last, say 100 years, that farming spirit has become corrupted to the point where we see the planet’s plant and mineral resources as infinite.  Mankind is close to the edge of extinction, literally and spiritually.

Dogs know better, much better!  Time again for man to learn from dogs!

Pharaoh, as with all dogs, is an integrous creature – man has much to learn from him, and all dogs.

Each and every one of us must fight for truth, justice, sanity and brotherhood!

Heads I win: Tails you lose!

How the foreclosure crisis was a boon for the super wealthy.

For some time now, must be quite a few years, I have subscribed to Yves Smith’s Naked Capitalism blog.  I do so for a number of reasons.

Thus it was that a few days ago I read with a mixture of anger and disgust an article about the consequences of the foreclosure crisis on the wealthy.  Within a few hours of me requesting by email permission to republish that article on Learning from Dogs came the reply from Yves granting such permission.

Try not to get too angry!

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SUNDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2013

How the Foreclosure Crisis Made the Rich Even Richer

This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 53 donors [now well over 400, Ed.] have already invested in our efforts to shed light on the dark and seamy corners of finance. Join us and participate via our Tip Jar or another credit card portal, WePay in the right column, or read about why we’re doing this fundraiser and other ways to donate, such as by check, as well as our current goal, on our kickoff post.

It’s a welcome departure to see Adam Davidson’s weekly column in the New York Times, which usually puts a happy face on how the 1% are winning the class war in America, have a guest writer look at the other side of the story.

Catherine Rampell has a short but compelling piece on how the foreclosure crisis was wealth transfer from lower and middle income families to the rich. Her points are simple: the typical person who lost their home wasn’t a greedhead who bought too much house or refied to buy flat panel TVs and go on cruises (if you hang out with mortgage types, you’ll get a big dose of profligate consumer urban legend). The people who were like that (and there were some) for the most part were in subprime loans that reset in 2007 and 2008 and were in the early wave of foreclosures. The people who’ve lost their homes in later foreclosures were overwhelmingly people who had the bad fortune to buy late in the housing bubble (so when the bust hit, they had negative equity and couldn’t use lower rates to refi into cheaper payments) and took economic hits as a direct result of the crisis (hours cuts and job losses; other people who were hurt were in the more typical “shit happens” categories, like suffering medical problems, with their situation made much worse by their inability to sell or refinance their home).

Rampell’s contribution is to look at the phenomenon of investors, both big and small, and how they’ve bought properties at foreclosure and then flipped them. Separately, Josh Rosner recently released the astonishing statistic: that sales of owner-occupied properties showed only a 1% gain in the last 12 months. The gains that have been driving the indexes were all in investor owned properties. Some flipped to other investors. In hot markets, local investors have been doing “mini-bulks,” acquiring small portfolios to sell to private equity investors, some without renovating them, others with modest fix-ups. Others sold them to homebuyers.

Rampell uses the example of a couple who believed that renting was throwing away their money, and had the bad luck to buy a moderately-priced fixer-upper in early 2007. Each wage earner saw their income drop and unable to get a loan modification, they lost their home. Their $309,000 Seattle home went to an investor for $155,000 in the summer of 2011. That investor just sold it to a homeowner for $290,000, not far below what the hapless couple paid for it. But the new buyer paid all cash.

Rampell tells us:

Of the 87,062 foreclosures in the last five years that were bought by corporate investors and have been flipped, about a quarter were sold for at least $100,000 more than what the investor originally paid, according to [an online real estate listings site] Redfin (Although it’s impossible to know how much investors spent on upgrades or renovations.)….

The boom-bust-flip phenomenon is just one of the most obvious ways that research suggests the financial crisis has benefited the upper class while brutalizing the middle class. Rents have risen at twice the pace of the overall cost-of-living index, partly because middle-class families can’t get the credit they need to buy. That means “landlords can raise rents with impunity,” says Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin. And according to a report by David Autor, the M.I.T. economist, job losses during and after the recession were concentrated in midskilled and midwage jobs, like white-collar sales, office and administrative jobs; and blue-collar production, craft, repair and operative jobs. Employment for higher-skilled workers, on the other hand, has grown substantially.

There is a second way foreclosures have served as a wealth transfer to the capitalist classes. Foreclosures don’t necessarily result in evictions. Banks often leave properties in a “zombie” state, starting foreclosures but not completing them, leaving the owner who thought he was foreclosed on still on the hook for property taxes. Another variant which is much less damaging is to leave the homeowner in place. I recently met an investor who is acquiring homes in Atlanta. The day after he buys a house, he goes to introduce himself to the former homeowner to see if he can work out a deal to keep them in place as tenant. In the overwhelming majority of cases, he can. “They were paying $1100 on their mortgage and the bank wouldn’t give them a mod. I’ll let them rent for $700, which is way above what they’d have gotten if they wrote the principal down to the price at which I bought the house. And I tell the tenants I’d be happy to sell the home to them.” We didn’t discuss details, but it sounded as if he’d be willing to structure rent to own deals (where part of the rent would go to a down payment on the house).

He was clear that his business depended on what he saw as value destroying behavior by banks. He described how he’d recently bought a home and when he went for his usual visit to the house, a well-dressed black man met him and invited him in, saying he’d be out in 30 days and assumed it wasn’t a problem. The new owner saw the house was in impeccable shape. He chatted with the owner a bit and found out he was a bodybuilder with a high-end training business. He asked the homeowner: “You look like you take good care of yourself and the house. You’d been paying on time. What happened?”

The trainer told him that he’d bought the house at the peak of the cycle for $160,000. The house was clearly now worth way less. He tried to get the bank to modify it to a principal balance of $100,000. The bank wouldn’t consider it. “So I bought a house which is comparable to this one for $50,000 and gave this one up.”

In this case, the homeowner had enough cash to arbitrage himself. The investor told me he’d bought the foreclosed home for $40,000. Had the bank cut a deal for $100,000 (and who knows, the homeowner might have accepted a higher number), it would have come out way ahead. But that also assumes that the bank owned the mortgage. It’s pretty much a given that the bank was a servicer, and as we’ve seen again and again, servicers don’t have the incentives or the infrastructure to do mods. So investor in the mortgages lose, homeowners lose. The winners are the banks as inefficient looters (the money they skim off the servicing is chump change relative to the damage done by negligent and predatory servicing) and the investors who profit by picking up the pieces. This is isn’t a well-functioning economic system, it’s rentier capitalism. And it’s looking more and more like a doomsday machine for what remains of the middle class.

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Can’t add anything polite to this!  Except, to say it’s a very long way from integrity!