Thursday, December 19, 2013

Useful Resources for Seeing the World As It Is

I want to understand the civilization we live in, including its robustness or fragility. This post contains writings and presentations I've found very compelling on this topic, though don't assume I agree with everything in every piece. Each topic gets a blue box and a 'starter' link which is good to read if you only read one link for that topic. To see more links on the topic, click in the blue box to expand it, and click again to contract it.

Notes about this post are at the bottom.  Any constructive feedback is welcome!

Material- and Energy-based Views of Civilization
These papers and presentations look at the physical state of civilization, including resource consumption trends, dependencies, and limits. Some also address how civilization interacts with the natural environment, but other sections cover those topics in more detail. Finance is covered too.

 Starter: Easy to skim by reading bullets at top of each chapter; covers both peak resources and climate change as well as social/political issues; little focus on finance though: Peak Energy, Climate Change, and the Collapse of the Global Civilization
Large-scale Environmental Issues
Several large-scale problems are playing out, any of which by themselves could lead to human extinction: global climate change, ocean acidification, mass extinction, mass irradiation (discussed elsewhere). There are tons of great reports available; these are just introductions to the problems.

 Starter: Massive loss of human-edible fish and breakdown of large foodwebs in the oceans; includes some good historical perspective (great starting point for ocean problems): Ocean Apocalypse
Peak Resources (Energy, Minerals, Water, Farmland, etc)
Starter: Investor Jeremy Grantham on peak resources (oil, fresh water, farmland, etc), unlimited growth, population issues, etc: Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever
Climate Change and Peak Oil as Fundamental 'Arab Spring' Drivers
These two essays, including embedded videos, present the most compelling explanation of the Arab Spring I have found. Peak energy exports and climate change-induced geopolitics are prime drivers of events. This demonstrates that these issues are current and significant issues in our lives right now.

How Oil Exporters Reach Financial Collapse & How Climate Change Primed Syria for War
Fukushima & Nuclear Energy
If someone tells you nuclear fission is safe, cost-effective, and carbon neutral, remember what your parents taught you... just say no.

Starter: 1 month after disaster, Japan raised its limit of 'safe' radiation to 20x the US limit; 310 sq miles still considered permanent exclusion zones (for centuries); lots of Japanese food is contaminated; $0.25-0.5 trillion are estimated cleanup costs (ignores externalities of course); still highly vulnerable to another large earthquake, which could easily send massive amounts of radiation all around the globe: Costs and Consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi Disaster
Large-scale Theft / Fraud Mechanisms & Examples
Broadly, fraud is the abuse of a trust relationship for any kind of gain. Thus, a government like Japan censoring the media so they can't report on Fukushima malfeasance destroying the health of citizens and land represents high-level elite fraud, and a bank pushing its customers into bankruptcy represents more common financial fraud.

 Starter: Excellent analysis of how markets can 'choose for' large-scale fraud (i.e. are not self-correcting); how bailouts are part of the plan all along, not 'unfortunate but necessary emergency measures'; summary article: Nobel prize-winning economist described the root of the financial crisis in 1993 and paper: Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit
Long Term Corporate Disinformation Campaigns
This section contains reports describing large-scale corporate disinformation campaigns lasting at least multiple decades. These are industry-wide or cross-industry attempts to lie to the public about something important, such as effects of their products on people's health or the environment.

Starter: Energy Industry (anti-Climate Change awareness): Dealing in Doubt: the Climate Denial Machine vs Climate Science
Censorship, Surveillance, & Sabotage
Government and corporate internal censorship, surveillance, & sabotage are, among other things, mechanisms for protecting elite fraud schemes perpetrated through a government or with its legal or illegal support, so this is really a subcategory of large-scale fraud and large-scale social control mechanisms. Censorship and surveillance can be used to attack citizen groups, corporations, or government institutions such as Congress, as Hoover's FBI did for many decades. Additionally, surveillance can help gain significant economic advantages for favored corporations who get access to the intel.

 Starter: If Obama had spoken plainly in his January 2014 speech about intelligence 'reforms': What Obama Really Meant Was ...

  • Discusses history of US intelligence agencies blackmailing Congress members, Supreme Court Justices and other judges, and others, and how subtle/difficult to prosecute the influence is; notes how nefariously this influence can prevent elected officials from acting on behalf of their constituents and thus corrupt the whole government: On the Prospect of Blackmail by the NSA
Physical Infrastructure
A common problem many societies in history have faced is they create infrastructure (or capital in general) that they cannot afford to maintain. The more non-remunerative capital they create, the greater the funding gap over time, and since the return-on-investment is negative, either the capital investment is lost or other parts of society are taxed extra heavily to support it.

Also, a special thanks to Strong Towns, a great organization and blog. The 'starter' links below and follow-up research first introduced me concretely to how America has invested poorly on a grand scale. It opened my eyes to the possibility that we may have done so in other ways too.

Starter: Discusses how utterly financially unsustainable much of our physical infrastructure is; it's subsidized by transfer payments and debt but the financial return-on-investment is very negative: The Growth Ponzi Scheme (that's a summary; read the short series: one, two, three, four, five).
Concentration of Corporation Power / Ownership
Starter: Illustrations that many major food and other 'consumer' goods as well as media companies are owned by a very small number of massive companies: The Corporate Clusterfuck ('consumer' goods) and Graphic: How Just 6 Corps Own 90% of The Media (Concentrated media ownership)
Problems with Economics
Starter: Makes the case that, "Economics is the publishing of political agendas that are hidden within known-false assumptions." (or as I like to say: economists are the oracles of our time): From Capitalism To Democracy: From Complexity to Simplicity
History & Study of Civilization Collapse
Lots of once-strong civilizations have disappeared, and we know why in many cases and can draw interesting conclusions and parallels with our own civilization.

Starter: The Seneca effect: why decline is faster than growth
  • Climate change has destroyed many civilizations in the past
  • History of many past civilizations, how they handled large scale problems like climate change, soil depletion, etc, and whether/how they survived: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
  • Analyzes causes of USSR collapse and how it responded based on pre-existing social conditions (home ownership rates, food distribution mechanisms, how inefficiencies lead to resiliency in collapse, etc); compares USSR's collapse with US collapse and how it will respond: Reinventing Collapse by Dmitry Orlov
  • Orlov categorizes different stages or degrees of collapse, how collapse can be arrested or not, and what kinds of resiliency we should consider: Five Stages of Collapse by Dmitry Orlov
  • Analyses of the rise and fall of 8 past civilizations; uses much data to look at what the authors consider crucial variables: population growth/fall, prices, real wages, number of elites and their incomes, state finances, and sociopolitical instability: Secular Cycles by Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov
About the Following Topics
I'm interested in the following topics but haven't researched them as much, so links are thinner.

Risks to the Dollar as Reserve Currency
This is obviously very important to America's foreign policy and wealth but almost never seriously discussed in the news.

Starter: History of economic domination; role of petrodollar in US international power (just browse the table of contents to start - fascinating):  Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (pdf of book) by Michael Hudson  
Food Issues / Food Fraud
Starter: Dramatically reduced human sperm counts seen around the world, tied to GM food. GMO Technology, Glyphosate Toxicity Leaving Men Sterile
Antibiotics and Medicine
Starter: On the rise of highly antibiotic resistant disease; short or non-existent antibiotic replacement research pipeline; how poorly we've managed antibiotics (feeding to animals, overuse in people, etc); discussion of CDC and other gov't responses or non-responses; how the short-term-thinking free-market 'make your money while you can' dynamic leads drug companies to oversell and people/farms to overuse: "We've Reached the End of Antibiotics, Period"
  • I wrote an essay comparing the search and consumption of fossil fuels and antibiotics; we search for the easiest/cheapest first and have now largely run out of easy wins: Parallels between Antibiotics and Peak Oil
  • Describes life before and possibly after widely usable, low side-effect antibiotics; organ transplants, many surgeries, getting tattoos, war, chemotherapy, etc are all affected; how 'more antibiotics' would only buy civilization time to change how it uses them, not allow us to indefinitely continue as we do now: Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future
Trans-Pacific Partnership & Other Global Agreements 
Starter: TPP as threat to popular or national sovereignty; international courts resolve disputes, having priority over national supreme courts; international courts gamed to be staffed by corporate-leaning people; governments compensate corporations for lost profits due to legislation, even when for the general welfare, etc: The TPP, if Passed, Spells the End of Popular Sovereignty for The United States
Housing Issues
Starter: Discussion of how large financial firms profit from housing crash caused by systemic financial fraud; large scale renting and securitization of rental income streams; how high home prices are bad when they result from wealthy bidders displacing common citizens;  How Wall Street Has Turned Housing Into a Dangerous Get-Rich-Quick Scheme — Again
Finance and the Financial System
Starter: A current look at pension problems nationwide and how utterly toast anyone dependent on them will soon be. The 1930s would be too positive an analogy for what this will bring: Nicole Foss: Where the Rubber Meets the Road in America
Large-scale Social Control
Note that 'censorship, surveillance & sabotage', large-scale fraud and probably other categories are subcategories of this one.

Starter: Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman analyze mass media organizations in the USA to understand how they function as a propaganda channels: Manufacturing Consent (a book)
Planned Obsolescence (or forced waste)
Starter: History of designing products to fail; how companies that forced waste dominated their industry; different types of obsolescence: Planned Obsolescence (Wikipedia)
Health Care
There is so much fraudulent behavior in the US health care system, it's hard to know where to start. Rather than understand it and try to get health care in spite of that system, I'm interested in looking for alternatives.

 Starter: Balance billing, where "hospitals knowingly putting people on a surgical team that they can bill at huge premiums to negotiated rates" is not fixed by Obamacare: Another Lurking Obamacare Problem: Balance Billing
Health Issues
Starter: Reviews history and present problems with all manner of toxins in the air, water, food, home, car, etc, and their huge impact (i.e. the huge crime wave that peaked in the late 1980s): Your Body Is a Corporate Test Tube
Geopolitics
Starter: Covers large number of wars America is continuously engaged in; compares US foreign policy to mafia behavior; how 'terror' is ok only when certain parties engage in it: Empire Under Obama, Part 1: Political Language and the 'Mafia Principles' of International Relations (part two, three)
Local & State Police Issues
Items discussing federal police issues are shared in 'censorship, surveillance, and sabotage'.
Starter: Good overview of police problems in the US: The Criminalization of Everyday Life
Education
Starter: Example of allowing students to explore material rather than merely receive it (not as new as article makes out, but a good discussion of it): How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses
Miscellaneous Interesting Articles
Starter: Agriculture vs permaculture; how past societies have protected their land for thousands of years, how we can replicate that; How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Planet – But Not Civilization 
Amusing
Starter: JPMorgan Chase offers career advice over Twitter, and twitter users express their loathing over JPMorgan's fraudulent business practices. Taibbi writes two very good (i.e. scathing and hilarious) articles on it: Chase's Twitter Gambit Devolves into All-Time PR Fiasco and The Winners of the 'Chase Twitter Fail' Haiku Contest
  • Great song about markets, and the singers' descriptions are basically correct (though 'out to lunch' is too charitable to the bankers!): The Market
  • The Millennials: We Suck and We're Sorry (video)
  • Discusses Republican hypocrisy regarding professed Christian beliefs and their actual actions regarding the poor, environment, etc, and finds they meet the textbook definition of Satanists:  A Christmas Speculation
About this post

I don't think of myself as a negative person, even though many of these items focus on problems or negative perspectives. I simply want to understand what's going on around me, and then build a positive, meaningful, healthy life based on that understanding. And anyway, regardless how bad things get, just being aware is an amazing thing, and a great journey. Past and future posts on this blog will focus on my response to issues brought up above (resource issues, environmental issues, social fragility, etc).

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I plan to keep this page updated with references to essays, books, speeches, and other resources which I've found really useful or enlightening.

If I read a cross-posted version, I try to link the original here unless the cross-poster added interesting commentary or the original requires registration.

Some links really belong in multiple categories; you'll see lots of categories have interesting overlap. I include the names of the reports/books/essays so if the links go bad, search online for the title and let me know about it.

My goals with this page are 1) introduce the breadth and depth of problems we face to interested friends & family 2) help me keep track of writings I may want to review or reference in the future; 3) make those writings easy to share, and 4) allow my friends and family to read what I read and judge the ideas even when I can't articulate all the ideas and evidence perfectly. If any strangers benefit - good for you! I believe in 'pay it forward', and I clearly have a lot of paying to do, being very indebted to many thinkers.

The goal of this post is NOT to fully convince you of any particular problem or solution, since that would require a different kind of post, an emphasis on primary research, etc. The goal is rather to introduce the breadth and depth of problems. If you're interested in learning more or are skeptical (as you should be), then some simple web searches will give you a fuller understanding of these topics.

I haven't focused hard on some topics like health care and food fraud, so for those kinds of topics this post acts as a repository of work I'll want to reference later rather than a good intro to the whole topic.

Lastly... there's tons more good work out there than I've managed to put here. I just couldn't wait forever to publish this post as I scoured my lists of saved work. If you want to talk about any of this, I'd love feedback, even (especially) if you disagree with anything.
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