#civilisation decline

[wotfigo]

Three Graphs; China Economy, Europe Economy & Japan Economy. Down, Down Deedle Down.

wotfigo; Temember that the "Economy" Means jobs, standards of living, education, health care, quality of housing. All these aspects of life are declining in most countries. We are watching the demise of the Middle Class. The situation continues to worsen.

China; 

Europe, 

Japan,

[wotfigo]

Economic Collapse: USA Jobs Report. Most Jobs Are Low Paying Service Work.

• That Screeching Sound Is The Market Losing Momentum (MarketWatch) The much-awaited Non-Farms Payroll Report didn’t produce any positive result for bulls. The report on Friday showed 192,000 jobs vs. 206,000 expected and the prior report was revised higher to 197,000 from 175,000. The unemployment rate remained at 6.7% vs 6.6% expected. Inside the numbers though conditions weren’t that rosy. In fact, looking at Janet Yellen’s “dashboard,” many data points weren’t positive including: declines in wages from 0.4% to 0.0%; only 1,000 new manufacturing jobs created; temporary Help came in at 29,000; retail was just 21,000 and leisure and travel was a mere 29,000 — not to mention that in combo these jobs are dominated by low-wage paying part-time work. Plus, underemployment, the labor participation rate and the long-term unemployed numbers are still bothersome. Overall the report is dovish for the Fed, as these data points were so weak the Fed is less likely to raise interest rates any time soon. So, why the market decline? Bulls are too complacent and too many sectors were overstretched. Social Media and Biotech are two sectors exemplifying this condition. These sub-sectors in turn spilled losses over to larger parts of the market, notably the NASDAQ 100 (down 2.33%) and other major markets like small-caps. However, overseas markets for the most part were able to avoid much of the selling.

[wotfigo]

The Mayan Elites Called For More Human Sacrifices To Forestall The Ongoing Decline Of Their Civilisation. So Too Do Our Elites.

The fundamental problem with issues such as Climate Change and Ecological Degradation is that they stem from a core problem, the exponential growth of human demands upon the earth, and thus the only solution is an end to that growth. With the industrialized human societies having spent the past two centuries developing a tight fit to the exponential growth facilitated by fossil fuels, an end to that growth will require wrenching changes to how those societies are structured and operate. Such changes, while producing great concern to the general populace, will be extremely threatening to those that have succeeded under the current societal arrangements. These are the rich and powerful that have most control over media organizations, as well as other determinants of social reality such as the school system and the workplace. To help affect the creation of social reality in their favor, they have created many so-called “independent” think-tanks, and hired public relations groups, to help create a perception of uncertainty on subjects such as climate change and to gain more access for skeptics to the media22,23.

Just as it may have made sense for the Mayan elites to call for more sacrifices to forestall their societies downfall, rather than accept the reality in front of them, it may make sense for the current elites to call for the magic of the “invisible hand” of economics and the wonders of human technology, rather than accept the current reality that so threatens their own wealth and privileges. The longer they practice such conscious ignorance, the more they stand to be accused and attacked, the more such ignorance will be seen as beneficial. Once the media spell is broken, and the duplicity of the elites understood, the wrath of the general populace may be truly horrific. The search for others to “pin the blame on”, and ongoing extensions to the means to monitor and control society, are completely rational actions in this context. If even the members of the police and armed forces come to blame the elites for not taking the actions required to stave off calamity though, nothing may save the rich and powerful from a brutal denouement.

Hence the desperate need to keep control of the construction of social reality, and have the general population live in a mental world made up more of misleading hallucinations than actual reality. Such a state can be maintained for lengthy periods of time, as has been the case with the North Korean population who have for decades existed in a social reality more made up of fantasy than reality. Many commentators also give significant weighting to the inability of the East German authorities to block the television signals from the much more prosperous West Germany in undermining the basis of the communist state. Those that consider the internet to be a democratizing antidote to media concentration and control both misunderstand the ongoing concentration within media 24,25,26 on the internet, and the ability of authorities to block sources they find threatening. Also, as has been shown by the details provided by such whistle-blowers as Snowdon27, our new connected age may make the tracking of dissident opinion-formers much easier for the authorities.

From; http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-03-13/the-creation-of-society-s-shared-hallucinations

[wotfigo]

End Of The Fossil Fuel Age: Royal Dutch Shell Oil Production Declines Dramatically Despite Increasing Investment In Looking For Oil.

Blue=investment (I assume in €), orange=production (in Mbd).

Shell production has fallen off a cliff. And that’s despite investments having gone through the roof and beyond.

You see that investments went, in just 10 years time, from €10 billion to €45+ billion. While production has fallen even much steeper than the UK North Sea patch, they lost 2/3 of production from 2004 to 2011. In my humble view, that’s insane!

Shell has decided to wind down its investments. It has figured out that no matter how much capital it was throwing at the wall, nothing stuck anymore.

In 2015, Shell will pay more in dividend than it generates in cash!

And while that can be seen as simply a business decision, or even merely a way to make investors happy, you do have to wonder what the future holds for what has been one of the biggest global companies for a long time – and for its investors -.

• Shell to cut investments by 20% in 2014

• They put their Alaska projects “in the freezer”, at a cost of €5 billion

• They quit a gas-to-liquids (i.e. diesel) plant in Louisiana

• – from last year – Shell wrote down €2 billion in US shale assets (not sit on them for a while, or try to sell them, just write off as a clean loss)

Moreover, Shell is urged to keep out of the Arctic too by principled investors. So where should the company turn to make a buck?

Now, I don’t know about you, but when I go through numbers and data this way for a few hours, I get a queasy feeling that maybe things are not nearly as positive as we are made to think (or should I say even worse than we already figured), and not just decades from now, but in the near future. If a company like Shell essentially starts to wind down its core business, in the sense that business has been focused to a large extent on exploring as much as producing, what does that mean? Investors may hold on to shares a while longer because they’ve been promised large(r) dividends, but why hold on after that?

And of course, as Shell goes, so do Exxon and BP and all the other former greats. And with them the carbon that built our world. It wasn’t just carbon, it was increasing amounts of it. And cheap. Here’s thinking that over the next decade, or two, you’re going to be keeping your oil company alive in the same exact way, and for the same exact reasons, that you keep your bank alive. And the lifestyles of its executives.

From; http://www.theautomaticearth.com/debt-rattle-feb-25-2014-bombshell/

[wotfigo]

I Have Come To Hate The Word "Sustainable".

wotfigo; Overabused By Corporations & Overused By Governments The Word "Sustainable is now meaningless. Nothing on this overpopulated planet is "sustainable" any longer.

Sustainability Sucks

I confess to wanting to get your attention because I have something to say about sustainability.  Mostly I want to talk about the word "sustainable" which falls under the same banner as "green" and "eco" and "natural" these days, even though I may agree with many of the specific practices people are labeling as "sustainable."  After all, several large agribiz companies now purport to be practicing "sustainable business" and "sustainable agriculture" and, quite frankly, they have been sustaining many of their (in my opinion) bad practices for quite some time.   As one of my former students pointed out, "Even crappy stuff can be sustained for a really long time."  Fair enough.

Beyond the technical meaning that comes with being able to sustain something over a period of time, there is the overuse problem.  The words sustainable and sustainability have been employed by so many businesses, organizations and individuals in wildly different ways - perhaps in too many ways - that they have ceased to contain any agreed-upon meaning.  It seems that most users of those terms are generally referring to more environmentally-friendly practices or products.  Sometimes sustainable implies a smaller carbon footprint or negative environmental impact.  At any rate, it's not always clear what users of these words are intending to convey without further inquiry.  In fact, I tend to ask people exactly what they mean by "sustainable" when I catch them using it, effectively annoying them with the prospect of having to be clear and specific with their language.  I'm not popular sometimes.

There is the problematic U.N. definition of "sustainable development" which I absolutely love to unpack and dissect, language geek that I am.  That version says that sustainable development is "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." (United Nations. 1987."Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development.").  First of all this definition fails to differentiate "needs" from "wants" which is a very sticky wicket indeed.  It also seems to insinuate that simply maintaining what we have now so that the next generation can have the same is, well, good enough.  I happen to think that's pretty lackluster and we can actually do much better than that.  Plus, most people I know are complaining about the "now;" are we sure that's what the next generation even wants?  The U.N. definition seems pretty anthropocentric, but then again, we are human.

From; http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-11-27/sustainability-sucks

[wotfigo]

Europe's Declining Energy - Oil Production 2000 to 2013

wotfigo; Civilisations need energy to run themselves.This graph explains why Europe's economy & civilisation is struggling. There is no more economic growth for Europe with struggling energy supplies.

Graph from; http://peakoilbarrel.com/world-crude-oil-production-geographical-area/

[wotfigo]

300 Years Of Economic Growth Is Coming To An End.

Graph; World GDP & CO2 Emissions since the year 1000

The dogma that holds that growth is the normal state of economic affairs, after all, did not come about by accident. It was the result of three centuries of experience in the economies of Europe and the more successful nations of the European diaspora. Those three centuries, of course, happened to take place during the most colossal economic boom in all of recorded history. Two factors discussed in earlier posts drove that boom:  first, the global expansion of European empires in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries and the systematic looting of overseas colonies that resulted; second, the exploitation of half a billion years of stored sunlight in the form of coal, petroleum, and natural gas.

Both those driving forces remained in place through the twentieth century; the European empires gave way to a network of US client states that were plundered just as thoroughly as old-fashioned imperial colonies once were, while the exploitation of the world’s fossil fuel reserves went on at ever-increasing rates. The peaking of US petroleum production in 1972 threw a good-sized monkey wrench into the gears of the system and brought a decade of crisis, but a variety of short-term gimmicks postponed the crisis temporarily and opened the way to the final extravagant blowoff of the age of cheap energy.

From; http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com.au/2013/10/the-one-option-left.html

[wotfigo]

Here's This Subject Again: Taking From the Marginal (Poor) Periphery To Prop Up The (Wealthier) Central Core

Photo; Cheap housing Paris suburb.

In our economic systems, we see this in Europe, where a few weeks ago it was claimed that the recession was over. And while that may be sort of true according to some specific dataset, and some specific timeframe, recessions don't of course happen in spreadsheets and datasets, they happen to real people in real streets. And if you would ask the people in the countryside in Greece or Portugal whether they feel the recession is over, we all know what the answer would be.

The core part of their nations may be suffering a bit less, but that's only because the peripheries suffer more. This is a general pattern. Money today can only be made by taking it away from other people, who - paradoxically or not - don't have any to begin with. Our economies only managed to "grow" in recent decades, since about the late 1970's, because we borrowed from ourselves to buy products produced by people working for wages only a fraction of our own, and when borrowing from ourselves was no longer a viable option, arguably 10 years ago, though 30 years might ultimately prove a better estimate, we started borrowing from our own futures and those of our children. While the core, the financial and political system, which had accumulated by far the biggest part of the debt, escaped the blame and often even fortified itself by taking more and more away from the periphery.

Which is why it's nonsense to claim Europe's recession is over. Granted, it's a timely claim, given that in Germany, Angela Merkel faces federal elections on September 22, and we never should have expected anything but rosy numbers to come out and support her bid, but it makes no rational sense. Germany's numbers may look sort of alright, even if you have to wonder how much that has to do with that same election, but we've already seen acknowledged pre-election - in a clear sign of how confident Merkel is - that Greece needs another bailout, and there's no way Portugal will not need one; Merkel and the ECB are just waiting for the politically least damaging timing to announce the next phases. And the Italian and Spanish populations have been forced through the austerity wringer so tightly any meaningful definition of the term "growth" won't be applicable for a long time, if ever, to their societies.

We will see advanced stages of the hypothermia analogy play out globally in the remainder of this year and into the next. In Europe, it will initially reach center stage in the usual suspects around the Mediterranean. What's more, a new member of the club, one with - coincidentally or not - a long strip of Mediterranean coastline will come to the fore. France. Ironically, the Eurostat report that tried to make us believe the recession is over also claimed - as a crucial part of the overall claim - that France is recovering, and even showed a positive growth number of 0.5%. We're moving into theater of the absurd territory here again.

From; http://theautomaticearth.com/Finance/the-global-economy-suffers-from-hypothermia.html