Nature Does Not Grade on a Curve

There is one and only one solution for averting the worst of climate change and for adapting to the level of crisis already locked in:

1. Greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

2. Stop destroying carbon and nitrogen sinks.

3. Rebuild sinks on a mass scale.

That’s a fact, and everything else is a lie.

Especially, any version of “we can meet the horrors of capitalism only by doubling down on it”, like advocacy of the infinite evil of geoengineering, is not just a lie but part of the campaign of destruction.

We see how a “progressive” blog like this offers no alternative, no way forward, nothing but doubling down on every lie and mistake.

The view from the Hermitage; our fate was sealed decades ago.
We didn’t listen, or rather, we didn’t act.
I just can’t wrap my mind around us destroying the environment, and life, on the single most beautiful planet known to exist.
If that picture of earth rising, taken from the moon, had no effect; then nothing will…
And yes, nature doesn’t grade on a curve; thank the gods…

We do not have capitalism – the rich do not want it. Capitalism says if you fail, you lose money. That did happen after 2007-2008.

Well unless the Priest-Kings come in and institute Gorean City-State system till such time we culturally/socially/psychologically understand that making death bets is fundamentally stupid and people doing so must be killed to purge that evil from the tribe, we simply have to go through the die off.

Enjoy your hobbies while you can. Make your “I warned you assholes” statements, but above all enjoy life now.

Grading will always be arbitrary, therefore, no grades is the best option. Equal pay and no grades.

Replace extrinsic rewards with intrinsic rewards. You do it for the love of it.

The extrinsic rewarding is coercing. Intrinsic is purely voluntary. With intrinsic, you’re internally motivated to achieve, whether it be learning in an academic setting or truly creating & innovating in a career.

We need to become creators again and own the development of something from start to finish rather than being hidden in a cube somewhere unsure as to how we’re contributing to the overall cause whatever that overall cause is.

We’re too disconnected despite our electronic hyperconnectivity. It’s a paradox. The more hyperconnected we are electronically, the less connected we are in the physical world.

If there is any creation or innovation, it increasingly takes place in the virtual world. If this is evolution in our midst, then our future is looking more and more like a dystopian nightmare, but, we’ll never know it because that ability to have context will have been evolved out of us. Our future existence will appear as perfectly normal and not a nightmare at all.

There is something better than capitalism, we left it long, long ago. It is called anarchism. Not the political kind, but the natural state. Anarchism is not something we can create, it just “is”.

You can live in anarchism right now; it is a place of total acceptance and action-without-action.

There is no need to wait for the world to change.

Now we have neither capitalism nor democracy, only the fables of both as bedtime stories. Unfortunately, there IS a monster under the bed. Sweet dreams, all.

I listen to Guy McPherson who predicts human extinction by 2030. I think he is an optimist. We have three unrestrained nuclear core meltdowns spewing radiation at “unimaginable” levels. If you look at the videos of the explosions you can clearly see the spent fuel pool being blasted quit high into the air as its contents are atomized. There are learned engineers who call BS on the Hydrogen explosion and say it was a criticallity event They did manage to video one pile of corium (melted fuel rods and such) before it killed the camera. It was white hot and truly looked like the gates of hell.
Sometimes what is not in the news is what is truly important. Why is this not the lead in every story out there? This could be an event where we at least bring the best and the brightest together and make a half-assed attempt to save humanity.
But we are being denied that because those who make mad cash off this industry like all the other polluters don’t want to give an inch. If we all have to die, well at least they didn’t have to share their toys with the like of us.

Speaking of the merger of politics, news & entertainment, this move would coronate the finality of it. Russia Today would be better, imo, and more appropriate. If he made it RT versus Fox, Liberals will finally have to be institutionalized.

Obama helped set this all up. He embraced The Media & Holllywood like no other POTUS before him. He greased the skids for this Unholy Alliance and now Trump will make it complete in the image he prefers.

These pillars should be separated just as banking & investing should be separated just as church & state should be separated.

Once upon a time, but no longer because they just won’t listen to reason, I warned my wife’s family that by not respecting the importance of the separation of church and state and its true & proper intent and instead supporting the evisceration of that barrier, you bring about your own demise. I told them, it may be Christianity now, but what if in 20 to 30 years Islam becomes the majority and then, because you eliminated the separation of church & state, you have Sharia Law as The Law of the land.

Same holds for the merger of news, politics and entertainment. Now we have the political/news/entertainment version of Sharia Law — Trump.

God help us all. I don’t know if I can stand 4 to 8 more years of this. I may have to go back to making money again. The Horror! The Horror!

Frustrated With Sean Spicer’s Press Office, Trump Considering Bringing In Fox News Producers

Ian,

One thing I’d be careful of is using electoral parliamentarianism as equivalent to democracy.

Democracy is fragile and is more often combined combined with oligarchy or autocracy as civil elements in society vie for power and shares of wealth.

Electoral Republicanism as equal to democracy is a common misunderstanding perpetuated by the oligarchy to retain power against the populist masses. Democracy is equal submission of all to a certain order where there is equal opportunity to implement (and change) the rules which apply to all citizens equally. The rules of a civilization, or rules of interacting ( hopefully peacefully) with other civilizations are developed scientifically and democratically.

A combination of sortition and rotation would be an alternative, however would likely lead to civil war in many locations, as once capitalist wealth is obtained ( through whatever means) the use of violence to retain it increases.

See:

Guaranteed Rotation in Office: A ‘New’ Model Of Democracy, Chiara Lepora
Against Elections: The Case for Democracy, David Van Reybrouck
Democracy Through Multi-Body Sortition: Athenian Lessons for the Modern Day, Terrell Bouricius

https://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/pdfs/ober/090704.pdf

I do not know how to make our leaders pay any attention to us and our concerns. Letters, calls, emails seem to do little. So, now, I’m not only feeling tired but depressed.

Do most people think that there will some major miraculous new technology? Or just that they’ll have enough to make it into some bubble domes with breathable air and clean water? Or think nothing beyond the immediate future?

Only too glad to be bamboozled by the likes of Trump and that ilk?

You can kill it, when you some better… the present system is worse.

Back in the cave clan days, the bear was declared an asshole and got his ass evicted. Then the incompetent chief was declared an asshole and got his ass evicted (after a few scapegoated spirit men were evicted but the clan eventually realized the chief was just blowing smoke to buy time). Then Jesus arrived and was declared an asshole by Romans and Hebrews looking for a scapegoat, but Jesus’ followers said that God intentionally wanted him declared the asshole because everybody is an asshole.

This may have confused things a bit. Maybe we need to go back to knowing who the real assholes are.

Capitalism kills itself over and over… that one of its strong points.

Deciding what to grade on the curve does not grade on the curve, that’s the gag.

Oh, I think AGW is real, and that many people are going to suffer, who could have been spared that suffering by wiser action from The Powers That Be.

I merely doubt it will end the human species, or even its technological civilization.

@IBW

But after one spends 54 years watching the doom never come, one can become skeptical of apocalyptic predictions.

I note here that the Limits of Growth base prediction that leads to collapse and a mass “die-off” are right on track, some 40 years later:

https://makewealthhistory.org/2014/09/15/the-limits-to-growth-report-still-on-track/

Ian’s car metaphor is apt–even when the car is speeding toward the cliff, at that moment everything is “fine” even though anyone who bothers to look can see that you’re heading towards a very bad end. While Limits to Growth doesn’t predict the eradication of humans, it does predict that by 2100 there were be 50 % fewer humans on the planet, who may be poorer than today (just like in previous collapses) and while “civilization” may not end, a lot may be lost.

Me, I wondered if US would survive Ronald Reagan’s election back in 1980, and the more I have seen, the more I fear I was right.

Waitaminnit–Peter and I agree on something?

Holy Ascended Madoka, the world is coming to an end! 😛

@IBW

You must realize that to get to the Apocalyptic Terror we are seeing the A must be the predominant cause of AGW. Without it there are no dirty pipeline capitalists or evil oil barons to target only poor Mother Earth.

Over twenty years of hearing dire predictions and seeing few actual predicted effects while CO2 concentrations passed 400ppm makes the connection with GW seem weak. This is good news because many climate scientists claimed we had lost the war when we passed 350ppm and were doomed to experience extreme irreversible temperature increases.

Sometimes nature grades on a pass-fail basis, where “pass” means survive till the next pass-fail test, and “fail” means die. Sometimes for individuals or families or communities at whatever scale or entire species. One never knows which future set of tests is one’s Darwin Finals.

If one feels confident that present and future further warming is already irreversible, how does one decide how far one wishes to believe it will go? If one believes the earth will keep heatering up for a while, how does one justify believing that the Big Heat Rising will stop short of Condition Venus? Clearly it is just a matter of hope and taste.

For those who choose to hope that Canada will warm up to tropical/subtropical but not keep warming up any more than that, there are perhaps some subjects that future-preparation Canadians might want to learn about.

Since the Candian Rockies are big enough to generate their own local mountain climate in a greater tropical setting, just as the Andes do now; perhaps certain Canadian learners-for-the-future should begin learning and practicing various legacy and renewing Andean Indian methods of horticulture for growing food in the future Andes of the North.

In that spirit, here is a cluster of sub-articles about Inca Terrace Farming.
http://imgarcade.com/inca-terrace-farming-diagram.html
And here is another, with other links in other directions as well.
https://anthrome.wordpress.com/2011/03/26/article-the-character-of-incan-and-andean-agriculture/

I have also read that there are two fairly big but very shallow lakes in Northwest Canada . . . Great Bear and Great Slave. If global warming makes Northwest Canada tropical/subtropical, perhaps an agro-system the Aztecs invented for living in their cluster of lakes might allow Canadians to grow food in Great Bear and Great Slave Lakes . . . at least around the edges. And that technique is . . . chinampa. Here is a set of “chimampa images” with an URL showing where each image was lifted from. Some of the URLs are just photograph grab-bags, but others link to specific sites with specific articles about chinampa. Here is the link to that whole bunch of lookable URLable images.
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0LEVyX38xdZKCAAhXhXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTExZzQ0YmY1BGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDVUlDMV8xBHNlYwNzYw–?p=chinampa&fr=sfp

The Internet should be up for a few to quite-a-few more years before it suffers brownouts and blackouts on the way to going dark permanently as a declining ecosystem forces social collapse to go-dark the many grids which keep the Internet alive. Why not use the few remaining years to find and learn interesting future-survival information on the Internet now?
Canada might also want to send apprentices to Incastan and Chinampastan and other such survival zones of solar-human-powered horticulture to learn it for real and bring it back to Canada for other Canadians to learn when the tropicalization of Canada’s climate convinces them that they are good and ready to learn it now? If that makes sense to Canadian future-preservationists, they might want to pick and send apprentices fairly soon while travel and return is still possible.

There are slackers in the world. Is that fact attributable to democracy or capitalism?

The label doesn’t matter, what matters is this System, whatever you want to call it, evinces that. However, an interesting phenomenon, and I think credit expansion has a lot to do with this, is that clever slackers like Donald Trump have managed to become filthy rich by getting others to do everything for them. Somehow. Miraculously. These glorified slackers like Donald Trump are robbing America blind and they’re celebrated as successes when actually they are the worst of losers.

Pay attention to this wording, people. Tom is talking Jim Crow Alt-Right Clap Trap. Remember, in the Deep South after the Civil War, Whites partially took back the Confederacy by enacting laws that basically made it illegal to be Black. Vagrancy Laws, for example. If you didn’t have a job, you were a criminal. You were sent to prison and forced to provide your label for free while incarcerated. You were a slave, once again. Tom’s language is in the very same sentiment as the Jim Crow Laws.

Donald Trump, Kleptocrat/Slacker In Chief, is engaging in a Class War using the Fascist Autocratic Power of the Executive Branch, and this Class War he’s waging will disproportionately affect Black people. And Obama and his ilk set this up. Once again, Trump was not possible if not for Obama. He has his part in this. I said at least six years ago, maybe more, that Obama was setting Black people up for a huuuge fall. That he was going to make Black people the modern day equivalent of The Jews and now we see Trump is going to make that come to fruition.

This is going to end BADLY. Really bad. There is no other way. Trump will have to be physically removed from office. The Mainstream Media is trying its best to contain this madness and play it as politics as usual. Trump, imo, has Crossed the Rubicon. He needs to be locked up and so too do his henchmen including Sessions and many others. The Mainstream Media is trying its best to cover this necessity over, but let’s face it, at this point it really is a necessity.

Are there no Sophie Scholls out there?

The Rediscovery Of Sophie Scholl

Go to web site to see visuals/diagrams.

https://makewealthhistory.org/2014/09/15/the-limits-to-growth-report-still-on-track/

THE LIMITS TO GROWTH REPORT – STILL ON TRACK
Even among environmentalists, it’s standard to insert the words ‘now discredited’ in front of any mention of the Limits to Growth report of 1972. The criticisms tend to be drawn from a hatful of recurring objections, most of which would never be made by anyone who’s ever actually read the book.

Among the most common is that the authors predicted global collapse by the end of the century, and lo, we are still here. But even the most casual glimpse at the report’s graphs shows that to be an ill-informed comment. The graphs run to 2100, not 2000. That objection is 85 years too early, and yet it’s notable how often it comes up. If you see it, you know the author is either too lazy to read the book or is deliberately misrepresenting it.

The actual projections in the book – and they are projections, not predictions – so far bear up pretty well. There have been a number of studies tracking them against the real world data as they come in, some of them from the updates to the report itself, others done independently. The latest came out last week. It’s from the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, and it points out that in the Limits to Growth report, industrial society basically peaks around 2015.

So with a year to go, is that peak likely? Are we at the beginning of the end?

Well, so far the model has proved pretty accurate, the data tracking the ‘business as usual’ projections fairly closely in many instances, though not all.

ltg-scenarios

What’s interesting is not just the straightforward projections, but the interplay between them. This is the bit that’s harder to predict, and that reveals how smart the model actually is. And here are there are worryingly accurate signs too. For example, the model attempted to show the connection between the economy and declining resources. At the beginning of the scenario, in the 1970s, around 5% of capital would be allocated to the resource sector. As the easy to reach resources were used up, and the overall stock declined, it would take more capital to acquire resources.

Specifically, the Limits to Growth model suggested that capital would start to drain into resources once the resource stocks reached the halfway point. We’ve done that on oil – as detailed in Jeremy Leggett’s book Half Gone. And as projected, an increasing slice of capital investment is now going to resource extraction. As I wrote about last week, 20% of US investment is going to fossil fuels. Even during the Second World War, when fossil fuels were a major national priority, they never commanded that kind of share of capital.

That represents an opportunity cost too. If it’s taking more capital to keep resources flowing, that leaves less for other things, such as maintaining existing facilities and infrastructure. This is what drives the peak and decline in industrial production per capita, which the LTG report puts around 2015. Services per capita go into decline in similar fashion, while the pollution from industry (including CO2) leads on to falls in food production in due course. This begins to affect the death rate from around 2020, with a fall in global population beginning around 2030.

As always, and this counters another common and unfounded objection, this isn’t about ‘running out’ of resources. It’s about the cost of extracting them, about the energy return on energy invested.

Of course, you can only see a peak in the rear view mirror, so we’re not going to know whether 2015 is the peak of industrial society until well afterwards. But after 40 years of ignoring the warnings, are we sure we still want to leave it to chance?

@TomontheBeach:

Or, have the poor failed capitalism and democracy?

Do you also ask why the poor failed that wonderful Roman Empire too? Or say, the Dacians, Etruscans, Ptolemaic Egypt, Hittites, Myceaneans, Mayan, Toltec, Ingapircans, or Khmer?
Heck, I’ll bet given your blame-the-poor tirade you don’t point any fingers at ordinary citizens of the former Soviet Union for failing their wonderful system.

There are reason that social scientists consider that the intrinsic ‘moral character’ (for lack of any better word) of any population is constant (they admit that certain conditions may favor certain *behaviors*, seen as good or bad, but assume that people everywhere at any time start from the same mixture of good and bad, wise and foolish, in all of us). That’s because if you don’t, you end up with “just so” stories that explain nothing and predict nothing (i.e. Rome was great when it was “moral”–killing a million people in Gaul, a rapine economy, and gladiator games and having women and children fight each other to death for spectacle apparently doesn’t make one ‘immoral’) but fell apart when became “immoral” (the people who make this Cecile B. DeMille argument apparently don’t seem to realize that Rome was not only *Christian* when it collapsed, but that no other religions were tolerated). Assume human beings are the same everywhere at any time, and then look for reasons why and now they are motivated to act either destructively or constructively.

In non-state societies, like Native American groups, you might be able to “blame” ordinary people as their leadership’s power to coerce behavior was very weak. Although “blame” is a harsh word–like everyone, their self-destructive choices were just doing what seemed to make sense in the short term, but which had disastrous consequences in the long term (like us, today, with climate change!). Overhunting for the deerskin and beaverskin trade with Europeans, for just one example, depleted their environments so that it ended up making some of the Southeastern tribes eventually *dependent* on the Europeans for food! Similarly, getting paid (by the English, in particular) to capture (Indian) slaves greatly exacerbated warfare between the tribes which essentially wiped out whole tribes (including virtually all the indigenous peoples of Florida). Such actions–which made sense to the participants at the time–left the surviving Native Americans more dependent on their European “friends” and also without potential allies when their former friends turned foe.

In state-level societies, all the behaviors you see (and decry) are essentially being driven by decisions made at the top. I worked many low-pay jobs in college and when I was young, and they taught me that all workplace behaviors are the result of management incentives. This includes all the behaviors that management laments; although the management was too stupid to see it, management was those behaviors too. It’s the same in all the cases you cite. What, you’re telling me that people spending a large fraction of their incomes is NOT being encouraged mightily to do just that by the tobacco and alcohol multi-million dollar industries? Spending money one doesn’t have for things (like IPhones) one doesn’t need isn’t also being massively encouraged by multi-million dollar ad campaigns? As for dropping out of high school, as people who graduate *college* finds it only saddles them with huge debts with no better job prospects that’s hardly much worse a choice, and 16-year old girls who have sex wouldn’t be a problem if we had widespread contraception and abortion services available and weren’t being indoctrinated to believe that having an abortion was akin to murder. Both those last points are directly the consequences of decisions made at the very top of our social hierarchy.

I’m going to agree with “filafreshcrew”, “tomonthebeach” is the worst part of all the problems society has. False narratives of history, propaganda of the worst kind.
When the corporations decided to stop negotiating with their work force, and delegitimize the power of many standing as one, the race to inequality was inevitable.

An interesting viewpoint, but one which I can’t say makes much sense.
Nature grades on survival.
That’s the ultimate curve.
Live and reproduce – no matter how – and you pass.
There’s no such thing as a “A” vs. “D” in Nature – both are “survived and reproduced”.

You know, many many people ask me what I would do if I could turn back time. The answer always depends. For example, my answer five years ago is different than it is now.

My answer now is, if I could turn back time or go back in time and change one thing, what would it be. Easy. I would travel back to early 1945 and secretly place the birth control implant Nexplanon in Mary Anne MacLeod Trump so Donald Trump would never be conceived.

What would you do?

Like Mother, Like Son

Donald Trump’s life is akin to a satirical version of The Omen starring Gregory Peck. He’s Damian all grown up. Somebody check for The Mark of the Beast on his scalp beneath the yet to be identified furry pelt he calls his hair.

>An interesting viewpoint, but one which I can’t say makes much sense.

D, for not reaching correct answers – and imagining you are a teacher, when you not.

@StewartM,

Did Rome fall because the variable of integrity, culture-wide, was at a low ebb? In other words, is it when corruption is accepted as a cultural norm (it’s not what you know, but who you know) that empires are most likely to fall? Yes, integrity is just one of many variables, but I’d think a critical one which most often trickles down from top leadership.

Dumping capitalism and/or democracy is as unlikely to make things better as it is to happen at all. My comments were meant to highlight that economic and social systems do no account for individual character. In so doing, I got some ad hominems and stale lectures on slavery, Jim Crow, and a lot of other ancient history linked to poverty in the past.

Because those evils persist is not proof that they are causing modern wage stagnation, globalization, robotization, and other factors that have dampened individual and national economic wellbeing. So, here is my suggestion. We might begin trying to fix our corrupt governance and economic wellbeing by reinventing corporations.

Corporations are a pervasive and corrupting force in our society, our economy, and our governance. In addition to generating wealth for shareholders, they also generate lobbyists who promote legislation that disadvantages society but enriches shareholders and campaign coffers. The invention of modern corporations has unleashed ruthless, too-big-to-fail monsters, that futurists predict will eventually supplant all states and governments.

Corporations are equal opportunity exploiters who, thanks to our courts, share the same rights as human beings, but lack social awareness and concern for mankind (unless, of course, they are stock holders). A privileged few sitting on corporate boards rationalize rampant wage slavery by hiding in the deep woods of corporate entities that assert their duty to maximize shareholder ROIs. Even our own government (via the Federal Reserve) has supported such notions as have large segments of our elected officials in Congress and the WH.

Governments cannot change the character of corporations any more than they can change the character of individual people. However, they can constrain the undesirable behaviors of both. Reinvent US corporations, bust their trusts (again), and strip them of their court-assigned civil rights. Corporations are not people. It was a moral lapse to stipulate otherwise.

jackiebass, “I don’t recall who is responsible for the quote but they said democracy and capitalism can’t exist together.”

Doing a little googling, I think it was said most recently by Yanis Varoufakis. But one should always take Varoufakis with several grains of salt. He tends to be elitist and his idea of reform is often a better functioning Establishment.

More likely, you may have been thinking of Noam Chomsky’s “Can Civilization Survive Capitalism?” subtitled “Capitalism as it exists today is radically incompatible with democracy” from March 5, 2013 at alternet. I am not a big fan of Chomsky although I do agree with the subtitle.

http://www.alternet.org/noam-chomsky-can-civilization-survive-capitalism

Lawrence Rupp,
What is the source of your claim that about 20% of investment is now being used for fossil fuels?

Except that you don’t need to outrun the bear, only enough people that the bear satisfies his blood before he gets to you.

Smash capitalism and death to America, sure I agree, but even then the coming disasters will kill countless and we will socially decide who gets to take one for the team. Even in a disaster conditions, social reality tends to be more real and significant than the physical one.

Another thought occurs to me . . . as the global warms, winter snowpack in Canada will become as unreliable as winter snowpack is becoming in America. Buncha snow may fall in winter, then all get melted and run away at once in a late winter/ pre-spring flash flood flash thaw.

So . . . how might Canadians retain more water diffusely spread around all over the landscape? Reflood every marshland and swampland which was ever drained for agricultural purposes. Every marshland and swampland is a bunch of water-in-place, slowly recharging the groundwater reserves under it.

Then also too, encourage the return of millions of beavers with their millions of beaver dams. Plant beaver trees along every little stream, creek, brook in Canada; most especially along every little stream etc. downstream from the mountain snowfall zones. That way, some of the water released all at once by the winter snowfields melting all at once every spring will be trapped further downstream by the millions of beaver dams . . . allowing for some water storage in place for people to make a local survival living from.

Just some thoughts.