Who Owns the Air and Water?

John Champagne

Who owns the biodiversity of the planet? Is the distribution of these and other valuable natural resources an issue of public concern?

I think that natural resources ought to be owned by all, and those who take or degrade them should be made to pay a fee to the owners, the people at large, as compensation. This could mean that the amount of paving or pollution in the world can be kept within limits acceptable to the people simply by raising the fee when the reality, (in terms of actual pollution levels or extent of paving, for example), exceeds the level endorsed as acceptable by the people.

Conversely, when people say that pollution or paving is less of a problem than the fees designed to discourage them, then the fees should be reduced.

In either case, the reality is brought into accord with the expressed will of the people. The natural resources, owned by the people, are not taken or degraded beyond what the people consent to.

The value of natural resources has been roughly estimated to be about 33 trillion dollars per year. Equal distribution of this amount of money to all people on earth would mean that no one would live in abject poverty.

The role of government as re-distributor of income becomes superfluous when equal ownership of natural resources becomes a reality. Government can be made very small. A system of payment for use is consistent with libertarian principles. We can adopt libertarian principles as the basis of our government and society with the assurance that it will not lead to environmental lawlessness and the degradation and destruction of natural resources and environmental quality.

This will help a lot of people to come over to the libertarian side, I think. This free-market system, with equal ownership of natural resources combines essential elements of both capitalism and communism, We can achieve this by marrying green and libertarian philosophies.

The SynEARTH.network takes advantage of the web publishing tools developed for Web Logging–Weblog–Blog. We make use of ManilaSites hosted by Weblogger developed by Userland. Weblogs are becoming a phenomena of interest on the Internet even to the traditional press.

Digital Renaissance

Henry Jenkins
MIT Technology Review

Tom is a writer I recently encountered at the Alas Babylon yahoo group. He posts just using his first name so don’t know much about him other than he writes interesting things.

Then everything includes itself in power
Power into will, will into appetite,
And appetite, a universal wolf
So doubly seconded with will and power
Must make perforce a universal prey,
And last eat up itself.

-William Shakespeare

The Bush-Putin Axis

Tom
Alas Babylon

It is all beginning to fall into place, and it is unnerving, but it makes perfect sense in strict, Machiavellian game-theory logic. BRRR!

Consider: Last year, when Vladimir Putin visited Bush, everyone ridiculed Bush’s apparent naivite for claiming that he had found a “soul mate” in Putin.

Well, he has.

Bush and Putin have a lot in common: they both despise democracy and human rights, they both have a predilection for military force, and they both have roots in the “secret police” of their respective countries–the CIA and the KGB. Both also are contemptuous of environmental protection as well.

But consider further: Putin has everything to gain, and nothing to lose, from entering into an alliance with Bush. And vice versa. Putin’s country is in economic freefall; his southern flank is full of militant muslim guerrillas; and he desperately needs the infusion of capital that US oil interests could readily supply in return to access to the Caspian Basin–one of the last three huge oil reserves left on the planet (along with Iraq and Saudi Arabia).

And the Bush Regime–already a front for Big Oil–craves total control of all three oil reserves, so that Americans can continue to buy SUVs while we dominate the world oil market and export scarcity to the rest of the world.

So this is why Putin has given Bush permission for the US military to build staging bases in Uzbek and Armenia, and why he looked the other way when Bush canned the ABM treaty, despite strenuous Russian objections in the past. It is why Bush has procured Russian cooperation and support in an attack on Iraq–to remove another obstacle to total domination of the most plentiful oil fields. It is also why Bush has abandoned the policy prohibiting the use of nukes on non-nuclear nations–what better way to terrorize them into submission to the Big Two (Bush and Putin) with their combined nuclear arsenals? And what better way for Putin to gain US support in safeguarding and upgrading its own nuclear arsenal?

As I say, it all makes perfect sense in Machiavellian logic. It simply means that the Oil industry now controls both Russia and the US, and will soon control Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the Caspian basin; then it will take out Iran and North Korea in order to keep China–the only remaining threat to US-Russian world domination–at bay. Afghanistan was subdued first because (1) it is already devastated, and made easy pickings for a quick (proclaimed) victory; (2) it stands right in the path of an oil pipeline from the Caspian Basin to the Persian gulf–something Russia never would have tolerated if their nation had not been flat broke and needed the oil revenue.

This is the hidden agenda behind the so-called “War on Terrorism.”

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower

a book review by Tom
Alas Babylon

I would like to recommend, for those interested, a dystopic novel of an energy-starved, corporate-dominated near future that I found quite interesting, realistic, and inspiring: Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower”

The plot involves a young teenage girl, Lauren, who lives in a gated suburb of LA in 2525. Social order is disintegrating all around, but her family and neighbors are hanging on to their suburban lives by an ever-dwindling thread–for around the walled-in suburb, random gang violence and starvation reign supreme.

Then the unthinkable but inevitable happens: the wall is breached, and a mob of drug-crazed punks invades the suburban enclave of fragile order, burning down all the houses and killing everyone they find–but Lauren and two of her neighbors, Harry and Zahra, manage to escape–in part, since Lauren has shown pragmatic foresight in planning for this eventuality, by packing a backpack with basic necessities (including weapons) for survival in the crazy, disintegrating world outside.

The three of them then join a vast swarm of impoverished refugees walking north on the all-but-empty California freeways, in desperate hopes of finding a place to live and a job in northern California, the Northwest, or Canada, where the weather is cooler, land and jobs (presumably) more plentiful, and population less dense. This swarm of refugees all prey on one another to survive, shooting and stealing as they go, some even resorting to cannibalism, and dodging the few armed trucks that still drive by.

Here is where the book gets very interesting. Lauren is a strong minded character who starts recording a series of sustaining maxims, in free verse, in a little diary she calls “Earthseed: The Book of the Living.” Through these maxims, she becomes the leader of a kind of sangha, a group dedicated to practicing her maxims. (The maxims themselves appear at the start of each chapter).

The maxims themselves constitute, in my view, a very creative blend of engaged Buddhism and survivalism. Their major “theological” premise is as follows:

All that you touch,
you Change.

All that you Change,
Changes you.

The only lasting truth is
Change.

God is
Change.

This is, of course, the first of the Three Dharma Seals of Buddhism:
Impermanence. Lauren’s “God” is neither benign or malignant, but simply Change itself–As she says in another verse,

A victim of God may
Through learning adaptation
Become a partner of God…

Or a victim of God may
Through shortsightedness and fear,
Remain God’s victim,
God’s plaything,
God’s prey.

As a consequence, Lauren and her group practice an ethos which combines compassion (since “Kindness Eases Change”) with hardheaded practicality. She is willing to kill–but only when it is her only alternative to being killed; never out of simple predation. And when her group encounters other refugees, they first demonstrate their own good will, and develop ways for the strangers to establish their trustworthiness, and then they welcome them in–and as their nomadic community grows larger, they protect each other more efficiently from the human predators all around them, and they collaborate to buy or find food and supplies as they go. Finally, of course, after long struggles and hardships, they reach some rural land in northern California, owned by the (now slaughtered) sister of one of the group members (who becomes Lauren’s husband), and there they finally establish their “Earthseed” ecovillage.

My favorite of the verses–which is the embodiment of Lauren’s emerging ethic for dealing effectively with a chaotic world, is as follows:

Your teachers
Are all around you.
All that you perceive,
All that you experience,
All that is given to you,
or taken from you,
All that you love or hate,
need or fear,
Will teach you–
If you will learn.

God is your first
And your last teacher.
God is your harshest teacher:
subtle,
demanding,
Learn or die.

To which I can only say, “Amen.”

I recommend the book, as a potentially useful guidebook to our chaotic future.

P.S. Don’t bother with her sequel (“Parable of the Talents”) for there, Octavia Butler ultimately shies away from the relentless apocalyptic vision of “Sower,” and ends up portraying a world more or less restored to normal, as if the oil crisis were somehow temporary.

TKW-> Not necessarily a bad thing if she suggests a plausible mechanism for overcoming the Fossil Fuel Depetion-Over Population Crisis.

Daan Joubert is well known in South Africa as a financial analyst and Gold expert. He has recently joined CommUnity of Minds as an occasional contributing editor. Earlier pieces include What Can We Expect for the 21st Century? , What a Dream! and most recently Strong Dollar and Weak Gold ?

Beware the Moses Syndrome

Daan Joubert
South Africa

Exodus 17:3 But the people were very thirsty and continued to complain to Moses. They said, ìWhy did you bring us out of Egypt? To kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?

 

A hint of things to come?

People will be people It is not original to say that people are funny.

Not, ìFunny. Ha! Ha!”, but ìFunny. Huh? Wow?

People at times tend to behave in very unpredictable and surprising ways. Jump into a river to save a drawing man and, after a successful struggle to get him to the side he might say, ìThanks for saving my life, bud. But, but . . . my wallet is gone! With a lot of cash in it! You must have taken it!” and suddenly you are under attack or have to defend yourself later in court

Give a friend 10 tips on the stock market, 9 of which make a really good profit while one suffers a loss. Now, 5 years later, standing with a group of friends around the coals with some meat sizzling on it and each with a beer in the hand, and the conversation turns to investments. When your old friend takes his turn to tell a tale, which one of the ten tips is remembered and exhumed for the entertainment of the group? You guessed right!

Or perhaps it is not a guess, you know from the knowledge that comes with experience!

Tell someone about this nice small place on the Florida Gulf coast, away from the crazy holiday crowds only to hear later that, ìYou made us sit through the worst hurricane in 15 years! We were terrified and you should see what the car looks like. I will never take your advice again. In fact, my wife wants me to say you are no longer welcome.

And each reader probably has similar tales to tell. Just look at what happened to Moses when he led the Israelites out of a state of abject slavery in Egypt and on their way to the Promised Land. Scarcely into the desert and the new kinds of hardship that had to be endured – not at the hands of their Egyptian oppressors, but because of one of their own – on their way to the land of milk and honey, and suddenly the complaints and personal accusations became deafening.

This fundamental truth about human behaviour carries a message for most readers.

Some of the readers here might be gold bugs to some degree. Some may even have been gold bugs for most of their lives, since that happens to be the nature of the beast. Most gold bugs are committed to a deep and lasting interest in gold from an early age, inherited from their fathers perhaps, or at least from very early during their investment careers.

Relatively few people are late converts to gold bug status. If one wasn´t bitten early on, and probably became infected for life, the incessant media campaign of ìGold is dead” soon drives all rational thought out of one´s head. Thereby proving the truth of one of Goebbels´, the Nazi minister of propaganda, favourite quotations, which says that if one repeats any message, even a lie, often enough, most people come to believe it.

While some readers here might be gold bugs, they are relatively scarce through the whole population. They tend to be spread around, as it is not practical for gold bugs to gather in the same suburb or on the same estate or to belong to the same gold bug club around the corner and down the street, where they can easily meet with similar kind and spend the time talking about the topic of common interest. No; gold bugs as a rule live surrounded by a community where ìgold” has really become a four letter word.

In this respect the internet has really come to the rescue of the gold bug.

No longer does the bug have to sit passively and wait for the monthly delivery of the Gold Bug Newsletter that enables him to vicariously become one with a community of kindred spirits and thus, briefly, relieve his feelings of isolation Such vital contact, from someone who offers some very necessary commiseration with the latest setback for gold and for the investment portfolio, and who rejoices with the gold bug when the price of gold goes up $5, is essential. For a gold bug who, compelled by circumstances to live among people who scoff at gold and who subscribe to the belief that the yellow metal is merely a barbarous relic, such contact, even vicariously, supplies vital emotional support.

Now, with the information age, anyone really interested in gold no longer have to be passive and patient and enduring. He or she can become active on the internet, joining those special forums frequented by other people with an interest in gold and thus able to enjoy discussions on gold related matters, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A daily fix that quickly becomes addictive! What glory; what bliss!!

However, the increased mutual psychological support that flows from these forums have a potentially negative effect. Long ago, the average gold bug tended to briefly mention the matter of gold in his usual conversation circle at work or around the barbecue only on those infrequent occasions when the Newsletter gave him true courage to speak out on behalf of his favourite metal. Generally this would be just a comment in passing about the gold price picking up a little, or of money lost on a mine that has closed down, that is only rarely picked up and responded to by the others, except, perhaps, with a smirk, ìYou and your gold. It will still cost you your pants.”, before the topic is changed to something of wider interest to the others in the circle. (No longer Amazon or Pets.com, of course.)

But now the daily fix at the forums has girded the gold bug´s loins and outfitted him with a lance and gave him the courage and the convictions to become a Warrior for Gold. To go on an individual crusade to persuade the sceptics and the media-indoctrinated that Gold is Good and it represents True Wealth and its time will come. Soon. Very soon.

This message now becomes a daily staple in the circles of conversation, until, inevitably, the level of frustration among the sceptics rises far enough to forcibly eject the gold bug from their circle. Or at least manage to limit his utterances to the standard mantra of, ìThe day for gold will come. If you are not invested you will be sorry!”, tolerating this much, but not one word more, out of camaraderie and loyalty for old friendships – and some compassion with his presumed affliction.

It is this change in behaviour that now creates the risk of the Moses Syndrome that could come to strike – and do so with a good deal of surprise and discomfort – at all Gold Bugs. And more at some than others, depending on how vociferous his Warrior for Gold cause was promoted and how many feathers were ruffled in the process.

And, very much so, by how much the gold price has risen, while other markets tumbled.

The Moses Syndrome As illustrated by the quote above, the Moses Syndrome is a condition that affects people when they believe that someone else carries responsibility for the difficult situation in which they find themselves.

Us gold bugs have a near monomaniacal and obsessive infatuation with gold. Almost to the exclusion of all other markets – dare one say to most interests shared by the common herd? – although we do acknowledge quite often that the gold price will only get under way once Wall Street has collapsed, or when the dollar is taking its deserved beating or when the US interest and money markets are sinking under all the injudicious corporate and other debt unloaded on the system during the past few years.

Which means that when the price of gold eventually gets going, it will not matter whether the other markets – with Wall Street prominent among them and probably leading – falls at the same time, or before gold starts rocketing or much later. In the minds of all the ìothers”, the two kinds of events will be inextricably linked. ìThe market in which MY money is invested collapsed because gold took off.”, or ìMy house is now worth much less because of the gold price.” And this soon leads to the corollary thought that, ìGold took off because the gold bugs have been promoting it for so long!

In a world where the repetition of any message a sufficient number of times develops a magical effect on people out of all proportion to the truth of the statement, it will be easy for this conclusion to be reached.

And suddenly the drunk with joy (only joy, one hopes!) longtime Gold Bug to his great consternation finds that he is being ostracised from his circle of friends; banished and even worse, attacked. Because he now carries the blame for the devastation that has hit the other markets and thereby also the 401k´s of his erstwhile friends. There financial future and hopes for an uneventful trouble-free retirement has been punctured by HIS promotion of the gold cause. It is all HIS fault!

It will be a day of great celebration to all Gold Bugs when their belief in and commitment to gold is vindicated by a rise in its price to a ìproper” level, generally seen to be more than $400 and perhaps even $600. (That is, if the dollar a that time still buys more than •100,  and is trading at less than $1,50 to the Euro, else the price of gold could have risen substantially higher than this in dollar terms.)

Suffering the syndrome Yet it will truly also be a sad and sorry day when he finds that he has to sit all alone in the corner of the pub, silently staring into his beer, trying hard not to hear the lamentations about the crashing markets going on around him and the occasional cuss words coming his way, blaming him for the state of affairs. In fact, it might be best to celebrate quietly at home; pubs could become dangerous places to well known Gold Bugs. Care should even be taken at home, as a celebration that becomes too rowdy and joyful while others sit in sack and ashes, might invite a few rocks through the windows.

Optimists might say this need not be so. The gold price truly can recover to its natural level without other markets suffering traumatic experiences. Optimists can believe what they want, but reason tells me that for gold finally to break free of the (golden?) shackles that bind it, will require more than mere improving demand for the metal. For the latter to be successful in cutting gold loose, the new buyers will need pockets as deep as the ones that are ranged on the side of the shackle makers and fitters.

And these are pretty deep on their own, but they probably also have the advantage of a really large and deep back pocket that will come into play if there is any indication that a rising price of gold is bad for US national security.

No, gold is more likely to break free when there is a panic in the other markets. When it becomes clear to the hefty investors world wide who play the international currency and other large markets that no fiat currency is safe any longer. That wild, rumour driven fluctuations can and might wipe them out while they risk some sleep and that their beds will feel a lot safer if they have at least part of their wealth in gold.

That is when gold will finally break loose and, of course, when the Moses Syndrome hits out at the unsuspecting yet quite delirious Gold Bugs. And when they find out to their deep grief that it is no fun at all celebrating alone.

Conclusion Some thought will show that human nature practically dictates that the Moses Syndrome will rear its head when the price of gold begins a sustained rise. At the very least it will be born from envy that the Gold Bug is making lots of money while all other markets stagnate. It will be exacerbated by a feeling of disgust, firstly at the Gold Bug for being proven correct after all this time and, secondly, at oneself for finally not listening to him.

Whichever way it goes, Gold Bugs had better prepare themselves for a more lonesome life than they had enjoyed before gold took off. Friends will become acquaintances at best, and many former acquaintances will no longer speak with him or even acknowledge his now affluent existence.

And there is of course one other factor that applies to many Gold Bugs. For some reason it would appear that Gold Bugs were among the more vociferous groups that warned of dire happenings at the start of year 2000. Many people stocked up on tinned beans and spam on the advice of the Y2K warnings. When they now have to dig into these stores because the same people who were once proven wrong about Y2K this time happened to be right about gold – and thus responsible for the difficult financial circumstances that make spam and beans a dish to look forward to – their desire for revenge will feed with every mouthful they take.

So, Gold Bugs be warned. Beware the Moses Syndrome! Beware gold rising!!

© 2002 Daan Joubert All rights reserved

Jay Hanson (the Paul Revere of the fossil fuel depletion-over population crisis) as well as many first rate energy scientists see no solutions. Hanson fears a die off in which billions of humans could die with only a small nucleus, perhaps as few as 10-40 million humans,  surviving as new hunter-gatherers.

Dieoff? I Don’t Think So!

(1) The rich (OECD) 19% of the worlds population (1.1 billion) consume 75% of the worlds energy.

(2) The non-rich (NON-OECD), 81% of the worlds population (4.6 billion) consume 25% of the worlds energy.