LifeItself

Yes, it all happened in Seattle, dear friends, as  this harsh  documentary shows, but the COVID-19 pandemic is like an X-ray machine. It displays all t hat is broken and hidden.     I'll start my detailed explanation of the multiple causes that underlie urban decay in the US from this beautiful quotation by a friend:  Many saints grew in holiness to the point where, by God's grace, they restored around them the original harmony with creation which Adam enjoyed in Paradise. One thinks immediately of St Seraphim of Sarov and St Sergius of Radonezh who befriended wild bears, or of St Paul of Obnora who was beheld surrounded peacefully by forest animals. Even in our own time there are testimonies of monastics living in the wilderness peacefully with wild deer and even mountain lions. Elder Herman is remembered for a gentle ermine who was utterly devoted to the Saint. When asked what he thought of the animals, a recent American monastic elder replied, "They...

11/15/2018. This haze in San Francisco is caused by the fires burning for weeks 170 km to the north. On Nov 17, 2018, air quality in San Francisco was worse than that in Beijing on a bad day. Please don't act with surprise when I say this: The global climate change is real; global warming is accelerating , especially in the northern hemisphere; and the positive feedbacks that will further exacerbate human condition are kicking in with vengeance.  I am stating the scientifically obvious, but I have not made it clear yet just how bad this climate change will be for us humans. For millennia, we have relied on the "free" environmental services that are going away.  These life-giving services are clean air to breathe, fertile soil, mild temperatures, healthy forests and savannas, healthy rivers, lakes, seas and oceans, sufficient rain, full aquifers, clean drinking water, and ample snowpacks.  When you are in China, in the Middle East, or in Central Valley in California, ...

Where are you going, Great Britain? The ongoing vigorous discussion of Brexit seems to be vacuous on both sides of the argument, because it misses the most important physical realities of staying alive in Great Britain, not merely of who gets to stay there. The British Isles consist of some 6000 specs of land with the total area of 315,000 square kilometers (the area of Poland or Arizona). They are inhabited by over 70 million people (roughly twice the population of Poland and over ten times the population of Arizona). My own calculations of Great Britain’s carrying capacity pointed more towards 3 million people, who could be sustained by the local environment. This means that to stay alive the Brits must be a part of a global community; otherwise they will perish. And that’s that. Let me rephrase now: The United Kingdom is a small, overpopulated and rather insignificant country, which thought otherwise and consequently made a rather suicidal choice that would expose its terri...

Tonight, I switched from al Jazeera International to BBC World Service.  It took about twenty minutes before I quit with disgust and switched back. Here's what I saw.  Somewhere at the World Economic Forum in Davos, there was a stage lined with eight armchairs ready for a live BBC program.  Seated on the stage were Christine Lagarde, the current IMF director, a pretty African woman, likely representing the developing world, and several very important looking white men. I started watching the BBC Davos report when Ms. Lagarde made her points:  IMF is now anything but business as usual.  Three IMF economists did a lot of analytic work and arrived at the following conclusions: (1) Extreme income inequality is bad for economic growth , (2) income redistribution is good for growth , and (3) jobs for the masses keep people engaged and are good for sustainable growth . She told us that these points were met with great disbelief and scorn by her IMF colleagues, ...

On May 17th, 2013, Joe Nocera of the New York Times wrote an editorial, Energy Exports Are Good!   In it he follows the classic paradigm of neoliberalism: Let the "markets" decide what will happen with natural gas and let us export it if someone so desires. According to Wikipedia, neoliberalism in economics was originally coined in 1938 by the German scholar Alexander Rüstow at a colloquium that defined the concept of neoliberalism as “the priority of the price mechanism, the free enterprise, the system of competition and a strong and impartial state.” To be "neoliberal" meant that – in the name of liberalism – a modern economic policy was required. So far so good, especially if everything can be traded over infinitely long times (centuries for us) with a perfectly smooth substitution of one resource for another and one product for another.  But this assumption does not hold for depletable resources, whose production does not adjust easily and instantaneously t...

...As sheep, that step from forth their fold, by one, Or pairs, or three at once; meanwhile the rest Stand fearfully, bending the eye and nose To ground, and what the foremost does, that do The others, gath'ring round her, if she stops... Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio , Canto 14 Most economists make it all too easy to bash them. When I think of how eerily detached from reality the main stream of economics is, I also recall the situation with corn ethanol in 2005.  Only two U.S. faculty, Dr. David Pimentel and I, went public against the nonsense that was being propagated throughout the society by the ill-informed greens, scientists, lobbyists, economists, venture-capitalists, lawmakers, and almost everyone in the media.  We were both savaged at the time and for a few more years.  Now everybody shrugs their arms and says pretty much what we were saying all along.  Today, Chapter 2 of the same nonsense, or the "second generation biofuels," is being closed at a g...

For most people the Big Recession of 2009 has never ended.  It has not ended as well for elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, colleges, universities, museums, policemen, firefighters, municipalities, counties, states, and so on. This recession has not ended, yet we see inflation in every aspect of the lives of ordinary people: fuels, food (even the food-like edible substances that masquerade as food in the U.S.), and clothing.  Click on the image to see the original size There is a reason why food and fuels are excluded from the government measure of "core" inflation, which then becomes a game of controlling how fast we print and price new money relative to how fast we improve productivity.  Over the last several decades, the Federal Reserve has become quite good in playing that control game, and the rest seemed OK.  But not this time. So what is different now? Why do the Left and the Right offer such dramatically different solutions to the same p...