Pirate Equity; Ransacking the World

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Hello. I’m from your neighborhood private equity company, and I’m here to help you.

“Private equity,” “hedge funds” and “wealth management” are the current euphemisms for what insanely wealthy people do with astronomical sums of money in pursuit of ever more astronomical sums of money. All the terms used for the practice could  be replaced with the more honest, “piracy,” were it not for the fact that piracy is against the laws of every civilized country, whereas the wholesale ruination of private companies and public institutions is universally legal and lavishly rewarded. Continue reading →

Unthinkable Things

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[A beach house in Rodanthe, North Carolina succumbs to risings seas. Unthinkable?]

We are faced today with any number of situations that are at first glance incomprehensible, that are so far outside our experience and prior knowledge that they are, in a word, unthinkable. For example:

A recent study examined what would happen in three large Southern cities if a multi-day power blackout occurred during a multi-day heat wave. Such blackouts have doubled in number in the U.S. since 2015, while the number and severity of heat waves has been steadily increasing. If the concurrence occurred in Phoenix, according to the study, half the city’s population, nearly 800,000 people,  would need emergency-room care for heat stroke and heat-related illness. Phoenix has 3,000 emergency-room beds. The study estimates that 12,800 residents of the city would die.

This would be a mass casualty event worse than the deadliest weather event in U.S. history, the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, in which about 8,000 people died.

12,000 dead in a single city from hot weather? Unthinkable. Continue reading →

Artificial Reality and Virtual Intelligence

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Why would anyone interact with a real human when they can talk to me, the epitome of artificial intelligence?

Just two years ago, the high-tech world held a coronation for the Next Big Thing — virtual reality. People in the near future, one billion of them in just a few years, said Jeff Zuckerberg of Facebook, would be spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars to buy clunky, helmet-mounted viewers with which to enter virtual reality, where they could talk with Greek philosophers, walk with dinosaurs, learn how to deal with structure fires, interact with each other as avatars, and on and on. Its uses were infinite, it would transform life as we know it. As a testament to its prospective world domination, Zuckerberg renamed his trillion-dollar company Meta, for the Metaverse, the virtual reality accessible through those helmet thingies.

The hype was hysterical.

Continue reading →

Insurance Companies: Another Endangered Species

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Hurricane Ian, which savaged south Florida last year, was the nation’s second most costly hurricane in history, exceeded only by Katrina. There’s more where that came from.

It’s not just Florida that is being submerged by rising water due to climate change — the entire property-insurance industry in the Gulf Coast states is going under too. Because hurricanes have for years been increasing in number and power, damage claims are overwhelming insurance companies. More than a dozen large regional insurance companies in Florida and Louisiana alone  have recently become insolvent, leaving tens of thousands of people without protection from future damage.  

Most people with claims against bankrupt insurance companies get paid — eventually — because insurance companies have two kinds of insurance against financial failure. One is reinsurance, a policy taken out by an insurance company to cover extraordinarily large claims. The cost of that kind of insurance has been skyrocketing worldwide because of climate change, and is expected to double in Florida this year alone. Continue reading →

And the Band Plays On

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Play louder, guys! I can still hear people screaming….

The Trump cult is doing for today’s America what the orchestra did for the passengers on the Titanic during its final hours: providing a distraction for people who are in extreme peril. They strut across the political stage, juggling shiny objects — abortion bans, book bans, drag-queen bans, gun-law bans, transgender-sports bans, immigrant bans, critical-race-theory bans, on and on — and many Americans, far more people than agree with them or follow them,  are thus distracted from reality. Continue reading →

The Politics of Extinction

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Today’s Republican Party is practicing the politics of extinction, pursuing activities and policies that will lead to its destruction — unless and until the decent but cowardly majority members of the party rise up against the minority of evil and stupid people who have declared themselves to be its leaders.

It’s important to remember that Donald Trump holds no office in the Republican Party. In the past, all our ex-presidents have, when termed or voted out of office, retired. They take up painting, or charity work, they build their library, and they shut the hell up. Even MAGA lunatics such as Herschel Walker and Dr. Oz had the grace to dive quietly into obscurity when their political heads were handed to them. Trump, on the other hand, defeated and disgraced,  acts like he is the head of the party and the party acts the same. But the party plan, which is the legally enforceable constitution of the party, does not provide for any such office. It defines a national committee that is the governing board and a chairperson who is its executive. Those people exist, but they are being  ignored.    Continue reading →

Our health is the price of industrial capitalism

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The dramatic rise in young adult cancer rates are the latest warning

Guest Post by Nate Bear/Do Not Panic!

Aerial View of Coal Fired Power Station in Winter

The mass media has been so firmly captured by the progress narrative it can be difficult to find out the true state of our civilisation. We’re all living longer and getting healthier, right? National Geographic’s January cover story would certainly have you believe this, crowing about how modern medicine and technology means we’re all going to be skydiving into our 90s. On the ecological front, a breakthrough in nuclear fusion technology, reported breathlessly by what seemed like every media outlet on the planet, means we can stop worrying about climate breakdown, right? Wrong. There is no breakthrough.

So often we’re led to believe we live in a time that doesn’t exist. Yet this propaganda serves a very useful purpose—if we’re placated by believing these fairy-tales, we’re hardly likely to agitate for change. We just have to let our rulers get on with it and we’ll be living in full health until we’re 120 in no time, of course for the time being we still have diseases and stress and that’s why products like Amanita mushroom gummies can totally help in this area.

In the real world however, a bit of research confirms things aren’t so rosy. Global life expectancy has declined year-on-year for the first time since 1959 because our rulers allowed a virus which has more in common with HIV than a cold to establish itself in global circulation. (The lies told by our rulers about just-a-cold-covid are very long and can be seen here). Excess deaths in 2022 and early 2023 continue to be way above pre-pandemic baselines, sometimes even the highest they’ve ever been – despite the fact the pandemic is supposedly over. Yet judging by the silence in the media you’d think we successfully beat covid.

[Click here to read more]

The News About Fake News? It’s Fake.

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For some time now, serious researchers have been looking into the realities of how much disinformation is on the Internet, how effectively it is spread, and what its effects are on politics, events and people. A major addition to this growing body of work has just been made by a paper by three European academics published in the journal Social Media + Society. (Here is a link to the study; it contains scores of links to other studies that support the findings I am summarizing here. 

Some of its findings: Continue reading →

The State of our Afflicted Union

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This is not your granddaddy’s Dust Bowl. This is the other day, in the Texas Panhandle.

On Tuesday, the leader of the free world will mount the dais in the U.S. House of Representatives to describe the state of the Union. He will speak of a country recovering from a pandemic, an economy roaring back from near-recession, and he will assure us all that it will soon be 1950 again in America.

Meanwhile, more and more thinkers and writers — and fewer and fewer political “leaders” — are pointing out, often with barely restrained panic, the multitude of growing existential threats rising against not only this country, but the industrialized world. Continue reading →

Now I Lie Until You Sleep

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A harmless lie? That might be an oxymoron.

One of the reasons our society is on its last shaky legs might be that when our children are very young, we start lying to them. All of us do.

First we fill their little brains with nonsense about Santa Claus, the fat little dude in a red suit who, using flying reindeers pulling a sled, delivers Christmas presents to 124 million households (that’s just in the US) in a few hours on Christmas Eve. He lands his sled on the roof, we tell the little cherubs, and brings the presents down the chimney. 

“Really?” they ask, a tiny sliver of skepticism appearing. “Really,” we assure them, “See? He ate the cookies we left him.” Continue reading →