08-21-2021, 02:05 AM
(08-20-2021, 08:38 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 20-Aug-2021 World View: Multiple massive events
FullMoon Wrote:> What are the feelings of the readers about how close we are to
> something more life changing than the pandemic? We've had what
> could be seen as multiple massive events in a short period of
> time. We're at the end of the era and it's not here yet but
> really, we can feel it now and it's a part of our daily lives.
> Just 2-3 years ago it wasn't half this bad. It's happening fast
> and getting faster. Please John give your estimation on the speed
> of the unravelling because it's uncomfortably quick now. Thank
> you
I wish I could tell you something that will make you less anxious, but
let's face it, if that's what you want then you're asking the wrong
person.
As I've been saying for a long time, we're headed for a global
financial crisis and a world war. The timeline and the scenario
cannot be predicted. All that we can say is that the probability that
it will begin "this year" increases each year.
Still, you've raised an interesting point that I've noticed and other
people have noticed as well. There's a kind of "quickening," where
the world is deteriorating more and more quickly, and crises are
worsening and occurring more and more frequently. Since you've asked
the question, it's worthwhile to give some of the reasons why it's
happening.
I see the Unraveling as the depraved behavior of economic, cultural, religious, political, and administrative elites who have a stake in ethical behavior yet choose unethical behavior as shortcuts to achieving what they want or maximizing their take (higher rents, bigger dividends, asset appreciation, higher profits, more bureaucratic power, sweetheart deals with corrupt officials, corporate expansion, tax cuts, regulatory relief, and greater indulgence). I look at the Enrob -- excuse me, Enron -- scandal as a prime example of executives operating with no integrity, caution, or conscience because of their position. I look at the financial and real estate frauds as a prime example of a speculative boom that devours capital, a Ponzi scheme with some construction behind it. Politicians of both Parties are culpable, so let's not make this into a partisan blame-fest. I look at the infamous succession of televangelists fleecing people while winning the sympathy of politicians because the flock of those wolves-in-clerical-garb capable of impoverishing themselves can be delivered to the politicians who win their support. (If one can con people for their cash one can also con people for their votes). I look at educational 'experts' who promote No Child Left Behind as a means to prepare youth for dead-end jobs in retailing, food service, domestic toil, and farm labor as an objective due to the underinvestment in industrial plant and equipment.
Corrupt behavior by the Little Guy does not break the system. Someone taking a $20 from the till isn't going to break his employer... but he is likely to get caught due to accounting controls. Street crime usually has poor people as victims, and in a plutocratic order, nobody is more expendable than the poor except for street crooks. The big crooks have the power with which to circumvent accounting controls, and they have the authority to stop anyone from investigating them. It might not be as blatant as Lars Thorwald killing a dog who snoops in the flower bed in which he buried some damning evidence in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (Hitchcock has his way of dark humor, suggesting the cliché "curiosity killed the cat" even if the "cat" in this case is a kitten-sized Yorkshire terrier (I think that is the dog breed), but it is easy to fire anyone who might suspect something. (It's wise to act stupid in so corrupt a circumstance if one wants to keep his job).
Television pushes overt, partisan propaganda as objective reality and uses means to strengthen its emotional impact without adding more truth. Thus on FoX News, very much a 3T phenomenon, a common practice for setting up a politicized story denouncing a non-rightist (Clinton is terrible! Obama is terrible! Bernie Sanders is terrible! Biden is terrible! Critical race Theory is horrible!) is to lead in with some violent crime so that viewers can already be angry when they see the story. The violent crime may be local news far away, but anyone who gets a large amount of such stories is getting manipulated.
The speculative boom devours wealth while creating the illusion of prosperity. When people start to recognize it for what it is -- a sham -- then the whole edifice of financial and marketing legerdemain collapses. The recent underinvestment in plant and equipment has ensured non-growth in industrial jobs that pay solid salaries.
Quote:The core reason is that the Silent generation is now gone. These
people lived through WW II, and they saw war, famines, massive
homelessness, political forces driven by sheer insanity. When they
came of age in the 1940s and 1950s, they created institutions like the
United Nations, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and the
Green Revolution to make sure that the mistakes that led to WW II
would not be repeated. The Silent generation ran those institutions
and made sure that they succeeded.
The Silent built institutions as "me too" participants in a GI-built world. The fault is that they founded few new industrial businesses. They did form professional practices (which can churn a profit), broadcasters, real-estate partnerships, government contractors (Ross Perot), fast-food chains (Dave Thomas), and oil-wildcatters (T. Boone Pickens)... maybe a hobby-like winery. One effect is that we have a big gap in businesses in a certain stage of the business lifecycle -- those that are vibrant with innovation and already profitable, businesses out of the infancy stage that are starting to be big employers but are not in the decline phase in which bureaucratic rigidity stifles innovation. The companies that the Silent formed either did not create large numbers of jobs unless those jobs are dead-end jobs. As for the Green revolution, that was Norman Borlaug, a GI.
Quote:The generational Crisis era (Fourth Turning) began in 2003, which is
when the people in the Silent generation almost all disappeared, all
at once. The Boomers had already created a tech bubble in the late
1990s, and the Gen-Xers got revenge by creating the subprime mortgage
real estate bubble, which began to explode in 2007. That was also the
year when the counter-terrorism efforts in the war in Iraq were
successful, with George Bush's "surge."
The subprime mortgage bubble happened about eighty years after the bubble of the 1920's... and the crash came almost eighty years later. What generation was disappearing just in time for the subprime mortgage bubble? The GI's the last living adults who remembered the last bubble of the 1920's and who blocked any repetition of such so long as they had influence in government, media, and employment. They effectively suppressed any repetition of their childhood nightmare, whatever their political position. They could still convince their juniors that they had seen it before, that it turned out badly, and anything much the same would turn out much the same. Eighty years is the time necessary for the extinction of mass memories. GI-built institutions were seen no longer as the cause of overall wealth and social sanity; they were (after the GI's were gone) entities to be milked for personal gain and power.
Quote:Barack Obama was the first Gen-X president, and it was one disastrous
policy after another. He couldn't close Guantanamo prison, but he
released the jihadists that are now returning to lead al-Qaeda. His
rollout of Obamacare was the biggest IT disaster in history. On the
day of the launch, so many people had lied to him that he didn't even
know that the entire system had crashed hours earlier, and was not
operational for months.
I realize what you think of Obama... the historical assessment is that he pushed the economic measures that kept an economic downturn from becoming a full-blown depression. You can say what you want about Obamacare, but the early bugs are gone. You might not like its spending priorities -- but that is simply your values which are those of an ideological minority.
So what really went wrong? Political results are never so neat and clean as is perfect. The concept of Too Big to Fail will almost certainly lead to "Too Corrupt to Survive". Obama saved economic entities that would have the cash with which to fund right-wing political campaigns against his political allies and stick us with such political sludge as Senator Ron Johnson and Governor Kristi Noem. Nothing quite works as intended.
Our political institutions were not made for bureaucratic behemoths capable of buying the elected officials; it was made for yeoman farmers and small shopkeepers who could get little good from the Government directly. Corporate farmers are squeezing the small-scale family farmers out by using economies of scale in everything from water supplies to the costs of compliance with labor laws and taxes. Giant defense contractors have a vested interest in wars for profit. Big Business used to prefer small government, but it has found that Big Government can offer huge profits from crony capitalism. The system that best serves bureaucratic behemoths is fascist corporatism in which the State is the ally of the rich and the oppressor of the workingman.
End of rant.
Quote:Those are just a few examples of how things have changed since the
generational Crisis era began in 2003. Here are some other examples:
- Public debate in almost every country in the world is growing
almost out of control. Central banks around the world are preventing
a crash for as long as they can by pumping trillions of dollars of
printed money into the banking systems.
- The world population is growing so quickly that more people are
being pushed into starvation and poverty. I always refer to this as:
the population is growing faster than the food supply.
- It used to be that there would be only one or two humanitarian
crises going on at the same time. But today, there are over a dozen
humanitarian crises. Covid has made this worse, but the number
growing before the pandemic because of increased starvation and
poverty.
- The last few years have seen huge refugee crises in Asia, the
Mideast, Europe, and America. These are caused by the same starvation
and poverty.
- The same starvation and poverty has resulted in local clashes and
riots that have the potentional of expanding.
- Since Biden has become president, he has turned decision making
over to millennials like AOC who are sabotaging America. The result
is open borders, floods of illegal immigrants from dozens of
counrties, spreading Covid and bring jihadists into the country;
massive street crime in cities across the country; and now this
unmitigated disaster in Afghanistan.
- China is suffering severe demographic problems, and Xi Jinping is
under pressure to do something, especially about Taiwan. He cannot
afford to wait much longer.
The central bankers can prevent crashes from spiraling into full-blown depressions, but they cannot mitigate the bad behavior of elites who can get away with seemingly anything.
Zero population growth is one of the most effective ways in which to prevent an acceleration in the depletion of resources and the emission of even more greenhouse gases. People in the industrial West are at the point at which further consumption of stuff has a near-zero return on expenditure. How many PC's do you need? How many stoves? How many blenders? How many "idiot screens"?
If you think refugee flows are floods now, then contemplate the consequences of anthropogenic global warming, when the seas inundate prime farmland now densely populated as possible with peasant farmers who supply the huge quantities of food necessary for several billion people, or when desert belts shift into what are now non-desert areas. I have seen conflicting models of how precipitation will shift (temperatures have less controversy). Will western Texas, now a marginal zone for grain production, become drier as the Hadley Cell moves farther northward or will monsoon conditions develop that bring more rain? .
Quote:So if the question is: why do things keep getting worse, and do so
more and more rapidly, I would name two core reasons in this
generational Crisis era: the survivors of WW II (Silent generation)
have disappeared, leaving decision making in the hands of idiot
children, and the population is growing faster than the food supply.
The problem is more that we have people more adept at selling nonsense than in solving problems. Our economic system gives the biggest advantages to pathological narcissists, if not outright sociopaths.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
