Reforms of the political system in the US are needed, because money plays a too important role, and money power is fossil fuel and banking power. That said there is a new trend it seems.
There is a trend that more and more often CEOs of big companies are asked for their opinions on public matters. There is a long history of companies (besides doing harm industrially) making efforts to secure at least their own employees social situation. Whole cities including schools and hospitals have developed around factories like those of Philips in Eindhoven Holland or textile factories and harbour areas.
Mining towns did not add much to the lives of workers
People like Bill Gates is no longer CEO of Microsoft, but still holds a lot of cloud and is also investing in many initiatives that aim to improve the quality of life of people on earth. But Warren Buffet, who has profited from the US drug trade is also consulted like an oracle. It is a trend that may not be worrying, but is simply revealing. It has a clear consequence : If you are a politician and you listen to the CEO’s view, and you propose ideas that align with that view, then you can expect to get support during your campaign. If not you don’t.
Some factories where designed with the welbeing of the workers in mind
One can argue that as long as the opinions of CEO’s and entrepeneurs that can fund candidates is discussed openly it creates a new political arena. One where the image of a company is determined by more than the quality of its products, but also by its desire to create a better society. Because these companies pay into the election cycles it would be logical to expect they choose candidates that further the non-business aspects, which might as well be considered business aspects as happy workers are good for business.
Nestle CEO wants us to pay for water beyond 25 liters. It’s not that it doesn’t make sense, but then who decides how much money ther is to pay for water? The banks? They don’t make it! This is how banks grabbed power in our fossil fuel economy.
A debate amongst industry leaders already happens in Davos and at the Bilderberg meetings, but they are barely public, the Davos event is more like a press spectacle where people can rub up to the icons, in fact it is a mechanism to determin the hierarchy of importance. Davos is more a tool for the banking system to make people believe they can ascend if they obey. All these things go on while the voters in the US as well as those that can’t vote outside hope to get an opportunity to discriminate right from wrong. Even this blogpost is born out of a desire to judge and excert some influence in this world. Maybe CEOs explaining their views can actually be helpfull.
Elon Musk wrote an open letter to the US recently to ask it not to punish VW with fines for it’s cheating on the emissions tests. Instead VW should roll out electric vehicles which would be a natural change aligned with their ambitions and would also reduce emissions. The US EPA took over this advise. This is an example of CEO power, perhaps because Elon’s SpaceX is so important for NASA’s space ambitions.
It used to be that you had to move from being a CEO to becoming a politician, but these days you don’t have to.
The laws we make are supposed to protect us, yet we can see daily that citizens no longer make the laws, companies do, through lobby (sometimes by ideological proxy). Most of our political views are ignored, some are used to get a politician in power, but businesses have a stage every day of the week. Ultimately though it is the adherence to economic principles that puts the biggest stamp on our laws and what activities are enabled.
When we listen to the media we usually listen to a single person’s view, that person is supposed to have absorbed and analysed all the facts and come up with the best solution. For whom? In an environment full of influencers and lobbyists? How can anyone stay sane or prevent getting hyjacked by some special interest?
We can see the FBI advocating the creation of a standard backdoor into iPhones. The discussion is about may individual conflicts that can be identified, so f.i. the right to privacy, the idea of government snooping, the idea government is not watertight, the hackersphere as a threat to anyone, the menace of identity theft. All these memes are being tossed around, but really nobody knows the first thing about what happens to iPhone data.
What becomes apparent is that everyone has a limited sphere of attention and knowledge, everyone is working with the best team available and takes an action that seems the right one from their perspective. Everyone including me is trying to steer a ship that is growing in size and complexity every day. There used to be a few passengers and some cargo, now the ship is slowly turning into an networked coginitive monster, a kind of interlect, or an internet of intellects.
The interlect is the result of millions of people exposing themselves to the online environment, responding to it, adding complexity and functionality to it and being themselves swayed or controlled agents of it. The data on the internet would be stale pretty quickly, but it isn’t just the internet, it is the combination with the human intellects that makes it work. The interlect is a giant mind that thinks because it is facilitating the economic system. We already called it a rogue AI when its principles become dominant in an individual, but viewing it as the source code of the interlect makes it even more potent.
The problem is that slowely we lose sight of the edges of the mediasphere in our lives. We are so exposed that if we use Whatsapp to contact somebody we will be asked on Facebook if we want to befriend that person. This means some code on some server is putting 2 and 2 together and concludes that I would be happier being Facebook friends and I may forget so this is something fun I can safely occupy my time with (befriending , checking the pictures etc.). My person is so well know to algorithms and databases that where I worth it it would be easy to influence my behaviour in profound ways.
Which leader can truely exist outside this evolving economic creation, with added intelligence, infinte memory and ever more sensing capacity. You walk down the street and the surveilance companies may not know their hardware has a backdoor that allows china or chinese AI systems to track me as I go through my daily life. NSA had a catalog of hardware all with backdoors, many VIO phones have hardcoded passwords, meaning your calls (if you use them) are open for anyone from anywhere. That little eye on your smartphone means it is looking to see you face. Banks, always trying to put us in deeper capture, actually hope to introduce face recognition biometric payment.
Those that try to go deepest inside our economy are useless to our survival. They actually strive for things that are bad for us by definition. Economic growth is not a good thing if it drowns our grandchildren. Those that move to the fringes of the economy have no influence on it. Living in a hut in Norway is not going to tame this monster. Only individuals with true freedom in it, that can see that their sense of reality is eroded and their choices when following the rules are all bad options can change things. But how long until the algorithms learn to keep those types out of power.
Physical an biological systems can reach steady state. For instance when global warming happend (4 times before) and life was all but destroyed, our oceans formed hot and cold layers, they stratified so that nutrients in the bottom cold layers could never reach the sunlight that heated the warm top layers. Oceans where dead for millions of years. Our society may reach such a steady state in which no individual will be able to break the economic principles until the whole thing crumbles on a dried out and dying planet.
We need to aknowledge that the rules of ROI, investment of fossil credit, importance of economic growth (over health statistics) the price hiking effect of the profit motive of banks, they should be subject to possible revision at all times. They should be revised, and at the core should be the principle of species survival, not of the free fossil fuel powered market.
For a while we have been wanting to design a wind turbine that does not generate electricity, but instead uses mechanical force to generate usefull things like heat. We recently purchased a set of blades and hub, and are now in the process of building a demo turbine, hoping to show the efficiency and output of this type of wind turbine. Eventually we can sell it as a kit for who needs heat (or cold) in places where the wind can be strong.
Set of blades with a diameter of 2.25 cm (about 7 feet).
Blade hub with 20 mm axle, which is short but long enough for our purpose.
This set of blades should produce about 400 Watt of energy in wind of 9 m/s or 5 Beaufort. The power of the turbine will increase rapidly with diameter and this is supposed to be a small portable version. That said, with some adaptions a 400 W blade set can churn out 3 kW at usefull wind speeds. 3 kW free heat is usefull for many homes in cold places.
This chematic shows the blades that catch the wind, then the rotational torque is transferred to a ‘hot box’ where we will do measurements to relate the temperature rise to the rpm. We have some other scenarios in mind but this will be the basic testing setup. We will use a Raspberry Pi to make measurments during operation.
Human beings are individuals, but in the eyes of some they are tools. Tools to destory products, tools that need to be swayed and conditioned to the task, but tools none the less. What us humans have to remain free individuals is our effort to remain able to escape artificial reality if we would choose to do so. We could visit nature instead of watching disney or going to the zoo. We could find out ourselves what mechanical or electronics one can develop or what chemistry has to offer, with only some reference books. Science is something anyone can do, it only requires focus and self control (which are equivalent). But it becomes more and more difficult for humans to escape becoming used.
Virtual beings are edging closer to reality
One can basically imagine a study that will classify humans in different ability vocabularies that will be assigned a certain safe identity. You have all kinds, to start the job descriptions, then you can be singer songwriter or rapper or sculptor or yoga teacher, even homeless person can be seen as more or less standardized for which there can be a standard approach, with instructions for exploitation. These range from legal to illegal. We see a war on drugs, but we don’t see that the cash flows through big american banks and Wallstreet. These big banks have small subsidiaries with a different name that loanshark in the poor neigborhoods f.i. Industry does not care about human lives, only lifestyle of the owners.
So what does a western human see :
Celebrity culture
All kinds of irrelevant accidents
The scare of terrorism
People living the dream
Their mobile and gaming experience
Reality is already shifting, because while one can see IS crimes on TV, IS also pops up in crime series, where a plausible scenario is spun out. IS being used as entertainment. Reality creeps into the fantasy we watch on TV, and soon who knows what is real.
Simulation and graphical rendering software is creeping into the media streams, so that before long we can not tell what is real and what not. Augmented reality means that you insert images into a video or field of view of a person in such a way that it seems part of the reality people see. It can be totally seamless, 3d and still not really there.
Adding stuff that isn’t really there
Simulation of facial expression and 3d modelling has also passed the treshold of realism. One can take the face of a well known presenter and use it to say anything we want. It can be a lions head, just some person with locator buttons on his/her face to feed the rendering of the face. That is to say, with AI even this changes, and it doesn’t have to be deep AI whatever that means.
So on a standard night you could be emersed in a 3d VR experience in which actors have the faces of your friends and real life events and threats are used to keep you focussed without actually teaching you how to deal with these threats.
If people constantly wear a visual augmentation device it will be used to inject reality also when they don’t notice it. It will allow personalization of the experience of reality.
But wait! The threat may also be a fabrication. Any US or European citizen watchin IS crimes is almost equivalent to the event that some brazilian favela guy you never seen knocks on your door one night, stumbles in and starts elaborating about how the drug gang members killed another gang member, blood everywhere. It doesn’t really matter to our lives.Why do we know about it? Because it gives us something to think about, but really most people are not involved in the reality of IS nor will they have any use for the knowledge of its existence. Next : The defincit, oil prices..
What does it mean to grow up with video and not being able to tell what is real or not?
But what about the real threats? Water shortages, food shortages, oil shortages, climate change. Of course those are not things that will bring profit to anyone, war really is one of the few catastrophies that can make people rich. Real threats don’t sell, although climate change has been selling a lot of solar panels, which is the right response. The threat of our planet warming much more is not communicated in any significant way though. We are cruising for a 6 degree temp increase that will be irreversible, 50% of the people (4 Billion) not having enough water, toxic oceans that breath death over the land..
By now the scenario we will actually see unfold is that problems around the globe will grow due to the continued use of fossil fuels, kept in power by fossil fuel lakeys in western governments, until the window of opportunity has passed. The public will be entertained by all kinds of fantasies in the mean time. Climate politicians will announce victories, but none will be able to do anything significant, because the public is lost, lazy, detached, undereducated etc. etc.
We like reality tv because it teaches us something we can’t learn in our rented appartments or mortgaged houses. If it is a survival show then you can see some just won’t make it. Even if there is fish to catch and fruit to eat or wood to build a shelter. In a group you always have the ones that start organizing and the ones that lay back. In shows with two participants this doesn’t end well on ocassion. Survival requires fitness and focus.
Climate change will make a lot of victims, as is already doing amongst animal species, as the fossil fuel sector is already doing through air pollution. Most of these will fall in the poor countries, as the World Bank predicted a 50% reduction in rainfall in Africa by 2020, and we have already seen war and migration because of changing weather patterns in the Middle East (Syria). In the ‘rich’ (well oiled) economies the risk is that when a calamity strikes (like all out cyber warfare or a fossil fuel obstructing conflict) the people it affects will have very little skills to deal with it, maybe even be totally unrealistic about what to do. Just a bunch of confused tools in a system that ran out of gas.
The capture of facial expressions and transfer to an avatar. Better examples exist.
Perhaps it should be a test that people spend a limited amount of time exposed to virtual reality, soaps, sitcoms, simply because it will become so immersive that there is almost no reason to come out of it. We are entering a new phase in AI research with new devices like glass based massive permanent -no energy- data storage and memristors making the CPU/RAM design obsolete, allowing computers that need no power retain state.
The design of virtual beings will not remain confined to virtual reality, and 3d printing introduces fast and super precise avenues of replicating individual features.
How will people discern super realistic avatars that are inserted in their visual field having all kinds of tailorable properties who’s behaviour is linked to a vast cloud based behavioural control algorithm. Who is to say people won’t fight to keep their avatars alive once they have become emotionally attached to them. What if you switch off and you trigger a revolution for the release of the avatars by confused and emotionally addicted consumers?
Realism is a source of economic loss
Economic forces will push people into their tool mode, where most of their behaviour is economically usefull, which is completely different from either ‘fun’ or ‘benificial’. A sense of reality is increasingly undesirable, like a sense of time is undesirable in casino gamblers. You don’t want people to understand what fossil fuel is doing if you want them to function well in a fossil fuel powered system. The lure of pushing people out of reality into a gamified matrix is real, and at least a large part of westen societies will fall victim to it if we don’t require people to stay at least 60% real.
The aim of some of these blog posts is to give you helicopter view, to look at the world in a way that informs and triggers your inborn sense of self preservation. This may be attempted in a subtle inviting way or in a jarring confrontational way. Most people feel safe in our dutch society, and to many the presentation of a threat is a priori unpleasant. Yet there are many and perhaps some of us are more desensitzed so can consider and discuss them more easily than others. Apart from that we try to unspin some news and show that the desire to earn money causes a lot of information distortion, from oil execs ignoring climate warnings to university professors advocating nuclear energy.
We also think that it is interesting to explore what can be said or concluded about our world, beyond the facts and what some try to make the narrative. There certainly is a big difference between every day lives or the business environment and the likely consequences of innovations we see today, which suggests we exercise our minds a bit more about possibilities and unexpected sideeffects of all human activity and especially scientific research (for profit and non profit). We have nanotechnology, genomics, artificial intelligence and the economic and banking system to name a few areas where serious risks can or are coming from. Man is only as powerfull as his tools, and these tools become more easily available each day. Would it be inconcievable for someone to make a deadly virus in some basement years ago, now it isn’t because the equipment needed is ever smaller and more easily available, as is the knowledge.
A world where some can create an entire environment for others to live in is a strong distortion of the world humans evolved in. The limits and characteristics of human beings become visible. Economic forces play with the needs of people, because making them insecure allows someone to employ them more cheaply. Google really knows every website you visit, and if you use social media we know that there are companies that listen to your mobile when you don’t know, that use your financial data to mine, not because we are paranoid, but because we got offered the job to develop these systems. The cloud is a playground for people to use data about your behaviour for whatever purpose, mainly to entice you to spend money.
One can not be blamed for becoming a bit cynical and basically viewing individuals as very weak and faulty mechanisms, now falling prey to organizations thought up in the minds of the brightest, tested against reality over many years, and persisting because they create advantages for some individuals over others. It used to be the baker that knew you would come in to buy bread because you did not have the tools or skills to make such lovely bread, the baker had his task and you had yours. Now you are expected to work for and spend money on what you think is best for you, and some people you will never see or hear are putting online adds on every webpage you browse and can almost calculate the time it takes before you will buy some product you don’t really need. Complexity is used to make things to hard for you to make a good judgement and simplicity is used to make things to easy for your own good. This is because others want to determine what you decide in a certain way, usually against your own (financial) interest.
We can see that our legal system has fallen prey to the same forces as ourselves. The tenacity and persistence always wins from political generations. We have had climate change in the news since 1912, but every time the awareness grew action was taken to weaken it and sway people to not care about it. Reagan knew, but didn’t want to do anything because the US was just getting used to the oil standard, meaning unlimited wealth as long as dollars where printed. Clinton’s Larry Summers put the thing in overdrive some more. The US legal system has basically gone through ups and downs in terms of its ability to protect citizens, but generally it has been down, because protected citizens are not great consumers. Being a great consumer however does not mean having a great life for such consumer, because you can consume clothes, cars, life insurance, cancer treatment and funeral services. A consumer is simply a ‘destructive endpoint for goods and services’.
What happens to us when the process of getting us to buy certain things becomes automated? What if it becomes flexible, intelligent, persistent without the need for human intervention. Let’s say an airline wants to sell us a ticket to New York. It can insert pictures of New York in our browsing experience. It can do more, it can check what music we like, where we have been recently and insert links to those aspects of our personality in the context of New York in our browsing experience. Say we like Bruce Springsteen, then the airline can actually fund the promotor of Bruce Springsteen to put an add to Bruce in New York in our browsing experience. Offer combined tickets. Today we don’t expect it but it is completely possible we are chased by the same deal when we go shopping in real life. Digital TV allows the adds to be targeted too. Paying for a drink in the cinema may trigger register to print some add on the receipt, etc. etc.
All this happens in a context where the media are putting the fear in us because they need attantion and it is not like they are easy to ignore. Pharmaceutical companies are tracking your use of medicine, insurers are hoping to lean your exact genomic makeup, facebook wants to know what you did today and lobbyists are trying to weaken your position every day of the week, in some cases in a governmental system that is openly corrupt. People are not winning. Right now the majority in the rich countries are not winning because they are pushed out and the majority of people in the world are not winning because they are suffering from climate change without ever even having enjoyed SUVs or Whoppers. They are bombed to bits and if some security firm needs a terrorist they can be turned into one in a heartbeat. Many in Guantanamo Bay where sold to the US, so someone got money by accusing whomever was arrested of terrorism.
How can a human being still prevail in this environment, and how can we ensure human beings still hold the reigns? The second question is easy to answer. Humans no longer hold the reigns, because economic principles and rules are applied and who does not apply them does not qualify for the job. So economics is in no matter who is executing it’s ‘script’. How a human can previal (meaning apply his own moral standard), most likely by isolating himself or seeking an economically uninteresting hideout. As the old italian said in Catch 22 : Move with the regimes, be weak, and survive (all he really needed was some bread and wine). Only today if you do that life on our planet will not survive. The economy has no memory, no vision of the future, it is a process without anyone in control (only people that will ‘save it’), and humans are secondary to its survival.
Instead of constantly allowing the economy to assimilate the latest and newest technology (and supressing whatever reduces its cashflow) and sell it as a pannacea and sign of ‘progress’ we should be more vigilant about what people are allowed to know and own. The most intelligent amongst us want globalization because it feeds this vision of a world where all can live interesting lives in harmony. But this vision creates much suffering and requires us to burn fossil oil that should not be burned. So global community, fine, but not at the cost of the global community. One can pretend that wars come about because of true political differences, but lately they have been happening for three reasons : 1. sell arms 2. control fossil reserves 3. prevent the economic development of oil/gas rich regions (therfore reducing the competition for oil). For arms trading the same rules apply as for any other industry that has infiltrated government with its representatives. It can only be stopped by an organization on the basis of equal consequences for all. However, any attempt will run in fierce resistence from people who want arms sales to continue to parties that protect or can conquer energy resources (nothing changed since Napoleon. War is a racket).
We think that two factors can bring humans back into the game. The first is to replace the energy sources that create the incentives that now shape our consumer economy. The second is to reduce our dependence (emotional and physical) on technology. The first factor is the most important, because it will break the world up in regions that are more autonomous, that are less of a threat to other regions, that will have regional governments with real power instead of puppet governments like that of Australia and Canada today. We need diversity to evolve and adapt, not uniformity in order to push mass produced goods most efficiently. It is not back to the cave but forward to a technological society that serves the human individual.
The US is nearing a new presidential election. With the now regularly used executive power of the POTUS office this is ever more significant. We are likely to see a choice offerd to US voters between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, one that Trump is likely to win by a tiny margin, enough to keep the Sanders camp from revolting, this mysterious 50/50 division we also saw during Bush/Gore. I as a Dutch citizen can have an opinion, I can suffer the consequences, but I can not vote. This is wrong.
How about the planet dufus
Holland has liberals at the helm, then a slavish labour that doesn’t yet understand fossil fuel based economics does not care for workers. As many times before the liberals let the labour slaves propose ideas that will harm them, while sticking to an unreasonable and dishonest pro fossil/banking policy themselves. This is how you maintain power, and as long as whoever challenges you is weak enough to be controled by thrown bones, you can keep that power.
Hunter Biden gas boss in Ukraine
How can the world control this USA that has a core of fossil fuel bankers that remain free and that can seemingly bribe, buy and sway anyone. The planet needs to deal with this domination like an alcoholic needs to deal with his addiction to survive.
Obama aknowledges that ‘foreign observers’ will have a problem with Trump. They should have a vote!
Ok, we zijn exact op dezelfde dag (eigenlijk een week later) op hetzelfde idee gekomen. Lubach laat ons lachen om onze nieuwsdiensten, maar eigenlijk is het diep triest en geeft het nog eens aan hoe wij ons leven laten bepalen door een land waarop we geen invloed hebben :
Everything that works in the US is done in Europe backed by US unlimited funds, like pushing retalin on children that are perfectly healthy. Pharmaceutical goldmine!
Why can’t people in countries that clearly feel the consequences of US policies, that are increasingly dominated by its trade, copyright and privacy rules, not vote and control the direction the country takes. How come this is not recognized as a serious case of tyranny, where even the Dutch prime minister dances to US media ideas and makes jokes at a totally insignificant correspondents dinner, where a guy named Arjen Lubach pretends not to 100% copy the Colbert Report and TV stations continuoisly sell US culture, movies, news. Where the PVV party is most likely sponsored by US groups to polarize society in an ineffective way against islam. We are drowning in US influence, and the only thing we can give back is our DJs and Doutzen Kroes.
Not a product of a US congress approved diet!
All countries that feel the influence of the US should be able to influence who is president there, because as inside the US, outside the US not everyone agrees with the policies. Instead of being so thankfull to get an audience our prime minister should tell Obama and anyone else that it is not friendly to suggest to see all bank transactions (as H. Clinton sneakily tried to), it is not friendly to want to invade everyones privacy. It is not friendly to polarize in Ukraine, it is not friendly to desire to control what we play on the radio or who reads Anne Franks diary that wasn’t even written under US jurisdiction. It is not friendly to allow rampant corruption in a congress that will then sanction actions that not only influence the US, but all citizen of the world.
Global democracy means that if you have people that lobby or import influence to another country, that country gets influence back. Trump can not be fucking our planet up some more just because he can brainwash enough americans. This can’t happen as half the world population is about to experience water shortages unless we implement rigorous green policies that do not allow some assholes with money to keep a destructive party going. We need global democracy for a country with global reach, and we need it now more than ever before.
In our world we are fed with suggestions about reality on a daily basis, by news, adds, thinkers. This blogpost itself is an attempt to change your view about reality, to make it more nuanced perhaps. Everyone with an interest, be it man, woman or a business, has a message that it thinks is usefull to it. Some of these messages ask you to do something, others are anounced actions, others are warning you of factors in your environment you may not yet have identified.
When advocating for a greener, heathier future there is one option, which is to simply advocate a greener healthier future. Talk about trees, the importance of life in our oceans, of alternatives to fossil fuels for instance. This however is only half of the picture. There is a side to our society that fights to protect fossil fuels, and it does so in many ways. There is a side in our society that wants to protect industrial farming, the prodction of harmfull pesticides. The approach to fighting for their interests may move beyond what we are used to in every day law abiding life.
The further we go from the regions with a high standard of consumption like France or Germany, the wilder it gets. A clear and undeniable and stark example is the killing of deforrestation protesters in South America, Africa and Asia. They are shot to dead, more than 40 in recent years. You can be very tree conscious in London, but you can’t stop a luberjack in Colombia from paying 200 USD to a bunch of junkies to go kill an effective protester trying to stop you from making money. The factors above are not real, but you can google it and find a whole bunch of examples. This is just to illustrate things go on in our name ourside the limits of what we would even dream off in our controlled environment.
Is it a conspiracy theory to say that importers of tropical wood not only lobby for weak standards but also kill protesters on the third world end of their trade? It is hard to prove. Many people won’t want to recoginze this as really intended, but there definitely is a causal link between the sale of wood and the death of people protesting the harvesting of wood. The best way to explain it is to say : Follow the money.
Whoever sells a product is responsible for everything that happened to make the sale possible
But what about more elaborate schemes. What about Monsanto creating a Zika-microcephly panic while it is their own larvicide that causes microcephaly. Its a new ‘conspiracy theory’ but it also makes perfect business sense. Monsanto will sell more larvicide the more scared we are of Zika related microcephaly in our babies. The ‘conspiracy’ theory is may simply be an evil marketing strategy. Most people in comfortable lives do not wish to believe companies engage in evil marketing strategies. Yet dishonesty is the main characteristic of marketing, and isn’t it evil to be dishonest? To create an opportunity by liying to the gullible seems to be allowed these days. Caveat Emptor, buyer beware as the slogan of London finance has been. The buyer is responsible for their end of checking if the deal they make is fair.
Putting the resposibility for a fair sale on the buyer opens up opportunities to conspire and exploit
So if one wants to expose for instance Shell, the company that spend 40 mln Euro lobbying the Eurpean Union to weaken climate targets. It spend a tiny grain from it’s profits to ensure future profits. Did it really persuade the politicians of the EU, or did it have to pay them off? Did the politicians have get their job because it was known they could be bought, or should we say swayed. Is it corruption if a politician chooses for the option that enables him to afford other activities. Is it corruption if the politician finds he can hold speeches for companies related to the ones he helped during his/her time in office even though the added value for the audience is really not very significant (take for example Tony Blair). It’s pay later corruption as Herman Scheer called it.
Do we need to see companies as separate? For instance banks. They may compete all they like, they hold the same unfair right to create our money and provide us with credit. We should be doing that. How easy is it to create a villain bank and a good bank and build a narrative around that we are trying to fight the villain banks and should support the good bank while all the time both are cooperating to create the image, always tuning actions so that we never get tired of trying. Trying is so much better than failing and so much more profitable for others than succeeding.
We need to face reality, we all have to earn income and the higher up we are in companies, the more seriously we look at the bottom line. Our fossil scarcity driven economy is about money, and not about human lives. In order to understand it we need to assume organizations that have no name, that are in the ‘network’ and that are driven by mutual financia gain, either directly or in the future. We need to assume sometimes invisible control in order to break systems and mechanisms that are harmfull to us. Crime is very easy, especially where there is superior force and a lot of loot to pay off any help (this is why oil is such a strong industry).
If we don’t want to be responsible for crimes we need to look further than we are allowed by the sales and marketing team. We need to gian total oversight of all the dependent factors in a system before we can conclude whether it is benign and acceptable or intrinsically criminal. It is untrue that we can’t live in a world without such criminal aspects. We can not live in a fossil fuel driven world without them, that is sure because fossil fuels are scarce and fought over. It is impossible to make a world crime free, but we can sure do better than what we have today. The way to improve things is to take conspiracy theories as assuptions of unmentioned cooperation, follow the money (or power) and if it pans out, deal with it justly. Dismissing it as conspiracy should not be the end without investigation because people conspire.
Did Shell buy up all solar cell patents and production factories to delay solar energy? Yes.
Did the Koch brothers fund ‘grassroots’ movements to keep renewables back? Yes
Dit oil companies infiltrate protest groups to trigger criminal acts that would put them in bad light? Yes
Was there a concerted approach to dismiss scientific evidence that smoking was bad for you? Yes
In a news item today one can read that 7 of 10 of the wild boar found in dutch woods is shot annually. That seems like a high number, and hardly sustainable. But what if it was? What if our idea of hunting is wrong, that it is not trying to chance on an unlucky animal and shooting it (a moronic practice in our age) and eating the ‘spoils’. What if hunting has become a dead certain activity where you basically just go out and get a boar (with a gun that really is just a cruel and messy way to slaughter an animal). What if hunting is more akin to the ‘canned hunt’ like we see in Africa?
We know that in some regions of the world it makes no sense to haul in beef from Argentinia if there’s moose all over the place, so hunting can be sensible, but in Holland we have no shortage of meat ! It is one thing to pretend you are brave hunter with your green jacket, but it would be another if you use our nature reserves to kill a protected animal (due to culling laws) and enjoy its meat where this clearly is not the intention we had with nature reserves.
Culling boar can cause the population to spike requiring one to cull them
The line that you can cross is to shoot so many animals that here is so much food that the remaining animals will multiply until there are to many, which you then shoot. So instead of allowing a natural population density to develop you disturb it causing wild fluctuations. Predator-prey models can quickly tell you that this is easily achieved. Apply it to wild boar population, and you can ‘harvest’ boars without anyone thinking you are doing anything but taking care of them. We read that ‘there’s a lot of boar this year due to there bing a lot of acorns’, but maybe those acorns are there because we shot the boars that ate them last year! So the question becomes : Are we farming wild boar on public land without paying the public?
We can now even buy wild boar ham and pate in the supermarket, so there is clearly an industrious side to this ‘hobby’. We have not seen the effects of consumption of this meat, maybe it contains hormones and other substances that influence our behaviour in ways we don’t know (as it is not ham from a totally dominated an abused industrial pig). If hunting takes place on such a scale that the meat ends up like any other kind in the supermarket, then we have a case of extreme organic farming with cruel and unusual slaughter methods. Better just leave those boar alone and take the money out of the hunt.
The natural enemy of wild boar is hunger so culls should be stopped
Not being a killjoy one can also imagine ‘no-huntharvest areas’ next to extended ‘hunt harvest areas’, increasing our nature reserves, where boars are caught and slaughter most ‘humanely’. A shooting range will be offered to the ‘hunters’ to let off steam. Hunting with a gun on a boar really is for cruel childish men.
When you think about it, big game hunting makes no sense at all. Big game, an cool sounding name for lions, tigers and other top predators is not necessary for security. This is because these animals have better options for food than humans. So in the wild these animals will rarely attack humans. Wild animals are hunted to extinciton by spoiled westeners. Poachers are also hunted in some countries, by snipers, as they should be when they threaten an entire species. You can not bring back the Dodo, or the Lion or the Elephant if the last one is shot.
The problem with our economy is that it does not care about things that do not exist, so once a resource is lost, it is never thought about again. We need an economy that keeps track of reserves and introduces a prohibitive cost when a resource is threatened with depletion
It is typical that local communities and even poachers themselves don’t feel good about what they do. Yet the key to wildlife conservation is taking away the domination of economic factors, and this is best done by using renewable energy as a new basis for wealth creation. Renewables that can also be used to revive wild populations.
Not a product of a US congress approved diet!
