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Tag Archives: Economic Growth
Still on Track for the Collapse of Modern Civilization
Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil, Pollution
6th Mass Extinction, Climate Change, CO2 Emissions and GDP, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Economic Collapse, Economic Growth, IPCC, Mass Die Off, Methane Time Bomb, MIT's Climate and Energy Outlook 2014, Money = Energy, Ocean Acidification, Professor Jonathan Overpeck
Two recent pieces of scientific evidence really hammer home the predicament of modern industrial civilization, and they have to do with the fact that our globalized, just-in-time economic model is hopelessly wed to carbon-based energy. Once one understands this, then there can be no delusions about why we are on such a catastrophic trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions. As was explained in a previous post, GDP is fundamentally and directly linked to CO2 emissions. Below, two graphs(click to go to source) illustrate this fact:
It's not really about evil fossil fuel companies, although they do certainly exert enormous political clout and do conspire to protect their business model by doing such things as spreading doubt on climate change science, but as with all corporations, externalizing social and environmental costs is endemic to the profit system and the coercive forces of competition in capitalist markets.
Firstly, there is the graph submitted by Professor Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist for the past 30 years, Professor of Geosciences and Atmospheric Sciences, and Co-Director Institute of the Environment, Univ. of Arizona:
This clearly shows we are firmly on track for hitting 3.2-5.4°C warming by the end of the century or sooner. This kind of rapid warming is incompatible with most life on Earth. To get an idea of what the world will be like at 3°C once lag time catches up to real time, we can look back 3 million years ago in the Pliocene Era when CO2 levels were similar to today and temperatures were 3°C warmer:
The northern hemisphere was free of glaciers and icesheets, beech trees grew in the Transantarctic mountains, sea levels were 25 metres higher [Climate Dynamics, 26, 249-365], and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were 360-400 ppm, very similar to today. There are also strong indications that during the Pliocene, permanent El Nino conditions prevailed. Hansen says that rapid warming today is already heating up the western Pacific Ocean, a basis for a coming period of 'super El Ninos' [Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 103, 39, 14288-93]…
…The collapse of the Amazon is part of the reversal of the carbon cycle projected to happen around 3 degrees, a view confirmed by a range of researchers using carbon coupled climate models. Vast amounts of dead vegetation stored in the soil – more than double the entire carbon content of the atmosphere – will be broken down by bacteria as soil warms. The generally accepted estimate is that the soil carbon reservoir contains some 1600 gigatonnes, more than double the entire carbon content of the atmosphere…
…Three degrees would likely see increasing areas of the planet being rendered essentially uninhabitable by drought and heat. Rainfall in Mexico and central America is projected to fall 50 per central. Southern Africa would be exposed to perennial drought, a huge expanse centred on Botswana could see a remobilisation of old sand dunes [Nature, 435, 1218-21], much as is projected to happen earlier in the US west. The Rockies would be snowless and the Colorado river will fail half the time. Drought intensity in Australia could triple, according to the CSIRO, which also predicts days in NSW above 35 degrees will increase 2 to 7 times.
With extreme weather continuing to bite – hurricanes may increase in power by half a category above today's top-level Category Five – world food supplies will be critically endangered. This could mean hundreds of millions – or even billions – of refugees moving out from areas of famine and drought in the sub-tropics towards the mid-latitudes. As the Himalayan ice sheet relentlessly melts with rising temperatures, the long-term water flows into Asia's great rivers and breadbasket valleys — the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra, the Mekong, Yangtse and Yellow rivers — will fall dramatically. If global temperatures rise by three degrees, and that's becoming the un-official target for western governments, water flow in the Indus is predicted to drop by 90 per cent by 2100. The lives of two billion people are at stake.
As the Arctic continue to warm, melting permafrost in the boreal forests and further north in the Arctic tundra is now starting to melt, triggering the release of methane, a greenhouse gas twenty times more powerful than CO2, from thick layers of thawing peat. The West Siberian bog is estimated to contain 70 billion tonnes of CO2. Prof. Sergei Kirpotin, a botanist at Russia's Tomsk State University, says: "There's a critical barrier… Once global warming pushes the melting process past that line, it begins to perpetuate itself." The West Antarctic ice sheet would likely to irreversibly melt.
At 5-6°C:
Five degrees
• Five degrees of warming occurred during the Eocene, 55 million years ago: breadfruit trees grew on the coast of Greenland, while the Arctic Ocean saw water temperatures of 20C within 200km of the North Pole itself. There was no ice at either pole; forests were probably growing in central Antarctica.
• The Eocene greenhouse event was likely caused by methane hydrates (an ice-like combination of methane and water) bursting into the atmosphere from the seabed in an immense "ocean burp", sparking a surge in global temperatures. Today vast amounts of these same methane hydrates still sit on subsea continental shelves.
• The early Eocene greenhouse took at least 10,000 years to come about. Today we could accomplish the same feat in less than a century.
• At the end of the Permian period, 251 million years ago, up to 95% of species were extinct as a result of a super-greenhouse event, resulting in a temperatures rise by six degrees, perhaps because of an even bigger methane belch than happened 200 million years later in the Eocene.
• One scientific paper investigating "kill mechanisms" during the end-Permian suggests that methane hydrate explosions "could destroy terrestrial life almost entirely". Acting much like today's fuel-air explosives (or "vacuum bombs"), major oceanic methane eruptions could release energy equivalent to 10,000 times the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons.
Another valuable website worth reading describes, degree by degree, the changes that will happen to the Earth from anthropogenic global warming. Due to the unpredictable nature of the internet and web pages disappearing, I have saved that essay as an entire screenshot here.
Keep in mind that the IPCC, an institution that has consistently underestimated the effects of anthropogenic climate change, states that in order to stay below 2°C of warming, emissions will have to be 40-70% lower than they were in 2010 by 2050 and at zero by the end of the century, "or could possibly even require taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, a controversial proposition." As the Keeling Curve grows ever steeper year after year, the Hail Mary of a techno-fix inevitably becomes the only option left. However, concomitant with the CO2 problem is the acidification of the oceans which will require a miracle solution as well. As was explained in a previous post, if all emissions stopped yesterday, we would still be locked into a warming of 2.65°C.
The second important piece of information is a recent MIT study:
Above graph, from MIT's Climate and Energy Outlook 2014, shows a drastic rise in global energy consumption by fuel type.
If CO2 levels were to double to 800ppm:
If carbon dioxide levels reach 800 ppm, ocean pH is projected to drop another .3 to .4 units (Today we have measured a decline of .1 pH units from 8.2 to 8.1 in the last century) – one of the scenarios projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by 2100 –raising levels of hydrogen ion, H +, 100 to 150 percent (Orr et al., 2005). As this happens and it will take "tens of thousands of years" for the chemistry of the oceans to return to pre-industrial levels, at least that is what the Royal Society of Britain proclaims. – link
We're already seeing massive die-offs of oysters and scallops from an acidification (PH-decline) of 0.1PH, but what would happen at a drop of 0.3-0.4 units(150+% more acidic than at the beginning of the industrial revolution)?:
"…we found that reef development ceased below pH level 7.7… Ultimately, what we observed was that the diversity of reefs progressively declines with increasing CO2. At concentrations similar to those predicted for the end of this century at a 'business as usual' emissions scenario, the "coral reef" observed was depauperate and lacked the structural complexity of present healthy tropical coral reefs. These changes are simply due to ocean acidification, i.e., even without the projected +2°C warming of the oceans associated with rising greenhouse gases. The 0.5° warming we have already observed in the tropics in the last 50 years has already caused mass coral bleaching events and declining coral calcification." – link
Ocean acidification could trigger economic devastation
…The authors of the report, released today from the Third Symposium on the Ocean in a High-CO2 World, review the current science on the effects on marine organisms, and write that there is a "medium confidence" level that shellfish harvests will decline. There is also a medium confidence level that economic damage will result from impacts on coral reefs, with tourism, food and shoreline protection suffering. The size of this is unclear but one estimate is for $1 trillion in damage from coral loss alone.
How larger species will fare as oceans acidify is less clear. The report gives only a "low confidence" rating to the idea that top predators and fin fish catches will be reduced. But any losses in this area could hit hard the 540 million people whose livelihoods depend on such fisheries.
Scientists also have a "very high confidence" that the ocean's capacity to take up carbon decreases as waters acidify. So even larger cuts in human greenhouse gas emissions than currently envisaged may be needed to meet targets set to limit global warming as a result, the authors write….
…The report authors also say that the acidity of the oceans could increase by 170% by the end of the century, corresponding to a drop in surface ocean pH by 0.32. This occurs under a pessimistic scenario of high human emissions. Since the industrial revolution, surface ocean pH has dropped from 8.2 to 8.1. As pH is a logarithmic scale, the increase in acidity since the industrial revolution could reach around 170% under this scenario.
Under lower-emissions scenarios, this decrease would be around 0.07. But current emissions show no sign of dropping to those necessary to achieve such a goal, cautions Riebesell.
"If you look at current trajectories we're no way below the [high emissions scenario]," Riebesell says. "Of course we hope the human race is smart enough to learn at some point and turn the wheel round." – link
As long as the shelves in the local grocery store are filled with relatively cheap food, the television is broadcasting the usual "bread and circus", water is flowing from the faucet, and other creature comforts of industrial civilization are on tap, homo economicus will blithely ride into the dark future of mass extinction, tectonic shifts of the biosphere, and the collapse of an unsustainable lifestyle.
CNN is running a program of their newscasters' family roots. Why do I feel like this is a slick PR campaign to put a main street face on the mainstream media? Sorry, but I still don't trust them and we're still on track for the collapse of modern civilization despite all their smug smiles.
A Walk Along the Beach of Doom with Benjamin Franklin
Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud
Benjamin Franklin, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Growth, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Greenwashing, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil, Security and Surveillance State, Thomas Malthus, War for Profit
"When the well's dry,
we know the worth of water."
~ Benjamin Franklin
From Luke's Journal:
I've just returned from a salvaging expedition into the heart of what was known as Los Angeles, a vast megalopolis once teeming with millions of people and home to Hollywood movies and TV, hallucinogens for the masses. It is now known as celluloid cemetery. The air was still this evening and off in the distance I could hear the desperate screams of those who had been exiled from our underground colonies.
I've got all the public libraries mapped out on my tracking device so that I can hit them up for rare books not archived on our historical databases. Paper books never died because a lot of data has been lost over the years due to grid failure, floods, fires, and arson. A very well-preserved collection of writings by Benjamin Franklin, a true renaissance man of his time, caught my eye as I rummaged through piles of books strewn knee-deep across the floor. Inside the dusty tome I saw the brief essay 'Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind' and read it on the spot. Franklin says, "But not withstanding this (population) increase, so vast is the Territory of North America, that it will require many ages to settle it fully…" A mere 215 years after those words were published, America officially went into overshoot. Thomas Malthus is said to have credited Franklin for discovering the 'rule of population growth' which states that when agriculture increases in arithmetic progression(2, 3, 4, …), the population grows in geometric progression(2, 4, 6, …), eventually outpacing the means to feed everyone. Neither Malthus nor Franklin foresaw the discovery of fossil fuels, which fueled the population explosion, or its horrific side-effect of climate change which would act as a catalyst for the spread of virulent diseases and pathogens such as the African Flu Pandemic of 2029, otherwise known as The First Great Culling. Two-thirds of the global population were wiped out. Subsequent pandemics of varying origins and lethality picked away at the remaining 2.5 billion, leaving a few hundred million survivors scattered across the globe. The construction of vast subterranean cities began several decades ago once the world knew that industrial civilization would never be able to survive runaway climate change above ground. Today no one is allowed to have more than two children. Population is strictly monitored by the technocracy which severely punishes those who break this law; no one wants to be banished to the outside where life is short and brutal.
Franklin must truly have been rolling in his grave at the end result of his expansionist dreams for America: a pockmarked landscape of fracking wells, oil spills, and toxic waste dumps; a corrupt government of corporate sock-puppets; a military that had become a malevolent industrial complex seeking war for profit and destroying fledgling democracies wherever they appeared; an agricultural system of factory farms and frankenfood; a self-proclaimed "free press" of corporate mouthpieces and shills; and a population of citizens that had been reduced to mindless consumers incapable of critical thought. And I think he would be utterly distraught to find that his name had been reduced to a popular idiom by the dumbed-down masses — "it's all about the Benjamins." Knowing what a grotesque monstrosity this country would become, he surely would not have declared America's cause to be 'the cause of all mankind' — wasteful consumerism, monopoly capitalism, and the tyranny of the corporate state. When he was studying dinosaur bones in northern Kentucky back in the mid 1700's, I'm sure it never crossed his mind that the human species would soon suffer the same fate, becoming the next hapless victim to sink into a tar pit of its own making. Franklin would have said, "It's inconceivable such a technologically advanced society as this would not look at the scientific evidence and take action at once to preserve life and liberty." But after witnessing what an irredeemable abomination his Republic had become, he would most likely say, "My God, the only recourse remaining is to clear the entire system with near-term-extinction."
Walking with the tortured spirit of Benjamin Franklin along the Beach of Doom where anoxic ocean waves wash plastic debris and dead jellyfish ashore, I explain to him that the seeds of our destruction were planted long ago with the expansionist mindset of the first European settlers. The Indians and buffalo were systematically wiped out, all the virgin forests were chopped down and converted to lumber, and the rest of America was laid wide open for exploitation by the construction of a transcontinental railroad. Technology and the power of fossil fuels only intensified the process; this country never looked back, expanding to foreign shores for control of evermore resources and spreading the same logic and belief system of capitalism throughout every inch of the Earth until there was no place further to go. The system started to cannibalize itself after hitting peak oil, turning inward to burn dirtier, more marginal energy resources and starving the masses whose share of the economic pie kept shrinking while a tiny few gorged themselves on ill-gotten wealth and delusions of grandeur. In its final days, this con game measured everything only with a monetary scale. If there was no profit to be earned, then real solutions to the grave threat of anthropogenic climate change, like "powering down", were summarily discounted. America and the world had ideologically boxed itself into a death trap called capitalism. No one realized or refused to realize that all the perceived gains in infrastructure, technology, social institutions, and other complexities of industrial civilization would soon fade into oblivion at the hands of an uncaring climate radically and thoughtlessly altered by mankind's activities. In the end, it was all phantom wealth stolen from nature and built off her back by burning trillions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere. The system's only available avenue was to rush headlong into the dark void of misery, death, and extinction while spinning quixotic tales of "sustainable growth", "renewable energy", and geoengineering fixes. Cooperation on a planetary scale to lower greenhouse gases could never be accomplished under a capitalist system, nor would the arms race amongst nations which requires a constant investment of highly dense energy to develop technologically superior weaponry. After knowing for decades that it was far too late to escape the carnage of climate chaos, those in positions of power felt compelled to ignore the facts and keep the gas pedal pressed to the floor, leading all of humanity over the cliff.
"He cannot complain of a hard sentence, who is made master of his own fate."
~ Johann Friedrich von Schiller
Our Consumptive Madness
06 Wednesday Nov 2013
Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Pollution
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Capitalism, Carrington Event, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Democracy, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecocide, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Growth, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, George Mobus, Greenpeace, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Overpopulation, Planetary Tipping Points, Robert MacNeil, Robert Scribbler, Russian Arctic Drilling, Security and Surveillance State, Terence Mckenna, The Elite 1%, unwashed public
The question of whether the human species is smarter than yeast is answered daily as the ecocidal and homicidal activities of industrial civilization continue apace. I learned a few days ago that September 2013 was the warmest in recorded history, and this morning I read that 2012 was a record breaker for GHG emissions:
"The laws of physics and chemistry are not negotiable," said Michel Jarraud.
"Greenhouse gases are what they are, the laws of physics show they can only contribute to warming the system, but parts of this heat may go in different places like the oceans for some periods of time," he said.
This view was echoed by Prof Piers Forster from the University of Leeds.
"For the past decade or so the oceans have been sucking up this extra heat, meaning that surface temperatures have only increased slowly.
"Don't expect this state of affairs to continue though, the extra heat will eventually come out and bite us, so expect strong warming over the coming decades."
Speaking candidly about the prospects of the industrialized world being able to reduce its GHG emissions and avoid catastrophic warming, the only three living diplomats responsible for leading past and present UN global warming talks had this to say:
"'There is nothing that can be agreed in 2015 that would be consistent with the 2 degrees,' said Yvo de Boer, who was UNFCCC executive secretary in 2009, when attempts to reach a deal at a summit in Copenhagen crumbled with a rift between industrialized and developing nations. 'The only way that a 2015 agreement can achieve a 2-degree goal is to shut down the whole global economy.'"
Another study explains that not even the supposed eco-friendly state of California is likely to meet its GHG reduction targets by 2050. So you see, the 'radical ecoterrorists' were right all along. Industrial civilization has to go, or we go. The improbable list of actions needed to preserve any semblance of humanity was recently laid out by George Mobus. But as you know, even if we stopped everything right now, there is still a lot of pent-up manmade global warming in the pipeline from past industrial activity that will wreak havoc for millennia to come, as Robert Scribbler points out:
"…we've already released enough greenhouse gasses to at least return Earth to climates not seen in 3.6 million years. In this respect, the Baffin Island study adds to research conducted at Lake El'gygytgyn showing that levels of CO2 comparable to those seen today resulted in Arctic temperatures 8 degrees Celsius hotter during the deep past…
…Most likely, we are headed to at least the temperatures last seen during the Pliocene, in which global averages ranged 2-3 degrees Celsius hotter than the present and during which oceans were 25-75 feet higher. Unfortunately, these are the long-term consequences we have probably already locked in. But without rapid reductions in carbon emissions to near zero over the coming decades, we can expect far, far worse outcomes."
Russia recently answered the concerns of environmentalists over Gazprom's drilling plans in the Arctic by summarily arresting numerous members of Greenpeace and charging them with piracy. This is a high-profile case illustrating that ecocide is embedded and enforced within the system of capitalist industrial civilization. A further example of the system's omnicidal nature is the construction of nuclear-powered ice-breaker ships by Russia to plow through the waters of the Arctic:
"Russia has started building the world's largest universal nuclear-powered icebreaker capable of navigating in the Arctic and in the shallow waters of Siberian rivers. The unique vessel will further increase Russia's dominance in the region…
…Powered by two "RITM-200" pressurized water reactors the "Arctic" is being built to generate 175MWe. Its efficiency and power allows the new model to crack ice fields 3 meters thick…"
Then you have Canada racing towards eco-apocalypse with its tar sands, and America exporting its coal into the maws of China and elsewhere as well as fracking the countryside into toxic wastelands, but of course the disease has spread globally. As Michael T. Klare clearly stated after weighing the PR propaganda with observable reality:
"…The result is indisputable: humanity is not entering a period that will be dominated by renewables. Instead, it is pioneering the third great carbon era, the Age of Unconventional Oil and Gas…."
Delicate ecosystems are ground up into commercialized and commodified pulp and fed into the machine of capitalism, lost forever in the fumes of our consumptive madness. A rash of mass wildlife deaths is occurring this year to further evidence the fact that industrial man is pushing the planet to the brink. It appears we may be reaching more tipping points in ecological breakdown:
Giant Oarfish Wash up in California
Bees Turn Up in Parking Lot
Manatees Threatened by Algae
Pigs Dumped in Chinese River
Dolphins Die of Virus on East Coast
Moose Die-Off
Robert MacNeil once observed, "Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World." Our global self-destruction is not visible to the Television-hypnotised masses when they look out their window, but for the few environmentally conscious beings amongst us, the destruction is as personal and painful as wartime torture. How depressive it is to see the natural world being chewed up and spit out at such an alarming rate. We are part of the environment and its death is humanity's suicide. Some hope for a super-Carrington event that would leave the machine dead in its tracks, but then there is the problem of those hundreds of nuclear plants scattered around the world like the bomb-rigged vest of a terrorist.
A sociopathic economic system that crushes democracy, decency, and justice in the name of growth and profits has led to the catastrophe we now see unfolding. When the masses are dumbed-down to mere 'consumers' and powerless to make meaningful change, then those sociopaths at the helm of the ship are free to pull us all down into the black hole of war, famine, disease, and extinction.
Last Man on Earth
Albert Einstein, Arnold J. Toynbee, Capitalism, Climate Change, Clyde Kluckhohn, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Dystopic Future, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Economic Growth, Extinction of Man, Generational Amnesia, Mass Die Off, Nuclear War, Planetary Tipping Points, Post-apocalyptic Future, Radioactive Waste, Survivalism, Techno-Optimists, unwashed public
An achieved goal of capitalist industrial civilization was the systematic reduction of nature to a simple component of the economy. Landscapes of rivers, lakes, forests, and meadows were replaced by the concrete, steel, and asphalt of cityscapes. The build-up of toxic wastes and byproducts of industrial civilization were seen merely as external problems to be solved via engineering and technology. In the grand narrative of material progress, industrial man put himself at the center of the universe, the lead actor and hero who would always survive and triumph. He saw no problem with the complete subjugation of the wilderness, taking more from the land than was given back, and reducing biodiversity to a shell of its former self in the name of economic growth. The dominant mindset was summed up thusly…
"…nature is a malignant force with useful aspects that must be harnessed, and useless, harmful ones that must be shorn of their power. They spend their energy adapting nature to their purposes, instead of themselves to her demands. They destroy pests of crops and men, they build dykes and great dams to avert floods, and they level hills in one spot and pile them up in another. Their premise is that nature will destroy them unless they prevent it…" ~ Clyde Kluckhohn
In the collective consciousness of industrial civilization, man was exempt from falling victim to the 6th mass extinction. The future narrative of people in the modern age never included:
…that they would be among the last humans to walk the Earth.
…that their children would not live long enough to grow old.
…that all cultural, artistic, and scientific achievements of the human species would soon be forgotten in time, no longer practiced and appreciated.
Cocooned away from the elements as they were, few city dwellers noticed the creeping deterioration of the planet's biosphere. Their artificial world, filled with the digital screens of computers, televisions, electronic billboards, and sundry other micro-computer devices, kept the public preoccupied with a constant stream of infotainment, celebrity gossip, sports, and political spectacles. The popular line of thought was that the natural world was too resilient to collapse from man's activities; periodic efforts of environmental remediation would be all that was needed to keep business-as-usual afloat. Generational amnesia cast a false sense of security over the unwashed masses. Rivers and streams, once teeming with fish and aquatic life, were now laden with toxins, heavy metals, and plastics. Moose and bison no longer roamed the fragmented wilderness; the remaining few were set aside for bioengineering experiments in a last-ditch effort to save them. The whole web of life with all its keystone species from microbes and insects to large terrestrial and aquatic mammals was unravelling. Pests, viruses, and pathogens ran rampant in the new disorder of the planet. Scientists talked of tipping points, but no one really knew when such red lines in biospheric stability would be crossed or if they had already been breached. Like a runaway freight train, industrial civilization had indeed passed many tipping points long ago. Few thought there would be such an abrupt downward spiral, seemingly without warning. The first law of thermodynamics was being realized on a system-wide scale.
Modern man was thought to have been infinitely adaptive and clever, but the linear-thinking that dominated the culture was riddled with too many blind-spots to prevent its inevitable downfall. As long as the same economic system and mode of living persisted, no amount of new technology would solve the root problems. Since the mid 1970's, the industrialized world had been living beyond the total carrying capacity of the Earth for decades and even created a day to recognize the transgression which would arrive a few days earlier each year. Various reports of imminent catastrophe were published, but to no avail. Everyone had their mental crutch to fool themselves into believing that the day of reckoning would never come. Some, like the fanatical zealots of religion, rejoiced that the end was upon us while others were paralyzed with fear and despair. The all-pervasive mainstream cult of money worship, consumption, and economic growth gave rise to other doomsday cults who heralded the end of time.
Mother nature took no prisoners; there was no escaping her ironclad laws. Mass starvation, war, and pestilence rapidly whittled the human population down to small pockets of survivors, but then even those few post-apocalyptic tribes soon declined and disappeared until the day arrived that only one human walked the Earth. One lone human survivor out of the billions that once were.
He survived the pandemic that wiped out roughly three-quarters of the global population. He survived the nuclear meltdown and craziness of the food wars and nuclear terrorism. And thus far he survived climate chaos by constantly moving. MRE's were mass-produced for the general public and stored in most cities when the agricultural system started to show signs of imminent collapse. Even after all these years, the last human still found these warehouses of preserved food to be an invaluable source of sustenance, supplementing his diet with the occasional cockroach, rat, or wild pig.
How did the last man on Earth spend his time when not scavenging for food, water, and other essentials? He was on a search to find other humans of course. How could he have known that he was the sole survivor? Without electricity, there no longer existed any sort of global communication system. The one solar-powered/hand crank shortwave radio he had in his backpack had yet to pick up any signals, but he would religiously take it out every night to scan the frequencies for an hour or two. To break the deathly silence of the world, he would occasionally play the assorted music files that were on his wind-up mp3 player. He especially loved their sound inside the expansive corridors of old libraries he visited during his trek across the continent. With his life always in jeopardy, he found that a good book was the best form of escapism; compromising his health and safety with mind/mood-altering drugs was not an option in a world devoid of hospitals and medicine. And sex? Well, you'll have to use your imagination for that. He certainly did. Such solitude, a prison cell of solitary confinement spanning the entire planet, would have driven most to madness and suicide, but he handled the loneliness day by day and with stoicism.
In his early years, he experienced a taste of working at a 9-5 job, driving a car and flying on jumbo jets, but he didn't miss any of it really. He had been one of those who had read extensively about the unsustainability of the global economy and about the nature of ecological overshoot and collapse, and he had prepared for it. He held no illusions of a new civilization being reborn out of the ashes of capitalist industrial civilization. Capitalism, he knew, held too tight of a grip on modern man, and the psychological barriers of the masses prevented them from seeing the end of everything concerning the human experience …forever. As the weeks, months, and years passed by and he grew older, he began to reconcile with the idea that he was very likely the last person left alive. No need to leave any more messages on roof tops, in vacant parking lots, or over the empty airwaves. No one was listening. No one was coming. There really was no prospect of growing old gracefully in this new reality. He had yet to find some small pocket of unpolluted land that did not register on his Geiger counter. So he made a pact with himself and the pistol he carried that when his health and strength no longer allowed him to eke out an existence, he would not be alive when the wild dogs came for him.
Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder."
~ Arnold J. Toynbee
The Dysfunction of Man & The Persistence of Time
6th Mass Extinction, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Growth, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Gaia, Lord Byron's 'Darkness', Mass Die Off, Massive Attack - Teardrop, Overpopulation, Techno-Optimists
In his hubris, mankind went about subduing, indexing, commodifing, and exploiting all of Earth. He paid very little heed to the consequences of the shrinking richness that once characterized the natural world. Everything had a price since money had become the sole criteria by which all things, animate and inanimate, were valued. From the anthropocentric perspective, if it didn't serve people in some way or another, what good was it? If need be, man could use his superior intellect to fix or outright replace what he had permanently destroyed. "A better life through technology" became the law of the land. Just as with the accepted tenet of never-ending economic growth, there was the unquestioned belief of technological solutions for all manmade problems brought on by industrial civilization. Hence, bees dying from a chemically saturated environment could be genetically modified to survive in our toxic soup. Extinct flora and fauna could be brought back to life with bioengineering. Where we would put such resurrected organisms in a world overloaded with humans, other than in zoos or other tiny cutouts of artificial habitat, was a question never answered.
Man became so assured of himself and his technological abilities that he began to lose track of the steadily mounting environmental assaults promising to make Earth uninhabitable for all but a few heat-loving bacteria like thermophiles. In fact many denied outright that such dangers even existed. And those whose livelihood depended on maintaining business-as-usual were more than willing to pay public relations experts who could mold popular thought in favor of such a suicidal path. Most of the truly eco-aware humans, whose numbers were so small as to be inconsequential, spent all their time refuting the ignorance and propaganda of the masses, but to no avail. How could any root causes and solutions ever really be identified if the vast majority were kept at each other's throats? The climate change deniers fought with the scientists; the capitalists fought with the environmentalists and steady state/degrowth alternative economists, the conspiracy theorists fought with the realists, and ad infinitum. Thus consumed with dissension the human species raced over the cliff of eco-apocalypse and human extinction.
She does not measure time in years, decades, or even centuries, but in millennia. She watches unamused by the tragicomedy of humankind. She is unmoved by the self-inflicted suffering and death that is and will be wrought by our own self-serving behavior. Gaia patiently awaits the extinction of man.
…The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp'd
They slept on the abyss without a surge—
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expir'd before;
The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them—She was the Universe."
~ Lord Byron, excerpt from 'Darkness'
Reckless Terraforming of the Earth and 'The End of More'
Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Consumerism, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil, Pollution
Chris Martenson, Christina Tey, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Economic Growth, Environmental Collapse, Kevin Moore's 'Burn Baby Burn', Kevin Moore's 'The Easy Way', Mark A. Cochrane, Mass Die Off, Norman Pagett, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Peak Water, Resource Wars, Social Unrest, The End of More, Your Medieval Future
Hello fellow realists. I haven't spent much time in the last 14 months at Chris Martenson's Peak Prosperity site, but I just listened to a podcast he made with climate scientist Dr. Mark A. Cochrane who gives an informative talk on extreme weather, the mangled jet stream, the overly conservative IPCC, the global climate debt, and other interesting topics on climate change. It's worth your time. Martenson had originally relegated the talk of climate change and even Cochrane's own climate change thread to the "Controversial Topics" forum at PeakProsperity.com, but Martenson has apparently become more accepting in the last year of the near 100% scientific consensus of climate change. Being a money man, it's no surprise that Martenson would be nervous and reluctant to speak out on what capitalist industrial civilization is doing to the life support system of every living thing on the planet. To say that human-induced climate change is a "challenging issue" is perhaps the understatement of the millennium. The environmental conditions will continue to change and degenerate for the next 1,000 years even were we to halt all GHG emissions today. I'm sure homo economicus will find ways to profit from the eco-apocalypse just as he has profited from hunger, war, the prison industrial complex, the frantic exploitation of even dirtier and more dangerous fossil fuels, and every other ill that has befallen man. Thanks to Mike at DamnTheMatrix for originally posting this podcast.
[Warning on Dr. Cochrane's statement that water vapor is the "main culprit" in causing global warming: See the comments section of this post.]
I'm currently reading the book "The End of More"(aka 'Your Medieval Future') which, if I remember correctly, had the working title of ScareCities, apparently in reference to what is going to happen to all the megacities of the world as we fall down the cliff of peak net energy and suffer a thousand cuts from a climate thrown out of balance. When I'm done with the book, I'll post a review of it. It's turning out to be a real page-turner. You can download the kindle book here for the U.S. and here for the UK. The authors state that the purpose of their book is to explain the evolutionary history of modern man and how he "has used all his ingenuity and his fighting skills to bring energy, food, water, and other natural resources to the brink of exhaustion."
Here is an excerpt:
Kevin Moore is a frequent visitor here and leaves very erudite and informative comments. He's written a few books that we may want to look into as well. Here are the links to a couple of them:
Does the lady on the cover come with the book? 🙂
The Easy Way
The CFR and Their Deranged Vision for Arctic Exploitation
18 Thursday Jul 2013
Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Military Industrial Complex, Pollution
Arctic Ice Melt, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Council on Foreign Relations, Dianne Feinstein, Eco-Apocalypse, Economic Growth, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Imperial Brain Trust - Council on Foreign Relations, Inverted Totalitarianism, Lawrence H. Shoup, Mass Die Off, Military Industrial Complex, Richard C. Blum, Security and Surveillance State, The Elite 1%, Wall Street Fraud
Before I get into a particular discussion on the new business opportunities afforded by a rapidly melting Arctic, I need to preface it with a short explanation and history of who wrote the article in question and what this group's agenda is. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) was established after the First World War to formulate and plan the imperial ambitions of the U.S. as the world's new superpower. The CFR is composed of top officials in the banking, manufacturing, commerce, and finance industries, as well as lawyers, university bureaucrats, and public figures from the media networks. CFR meetings are often held in secret. The primary funders of the CFR have been The Ford Foundation, the federal government, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Foundation. There exists a revolving door between positions held in the CFR and those in the government. The CFR represents the U.S. financial oligarchy and the wealthy elite of America. Lawrence H. Shoup wrote a seminal book on the CFR entitled 'Imperial Brain Trust – Council on Foreign Relations'. I have a link to it under "Notes and Documents' on the left side of this website. A quote from page 278 of that book best summarizes what the CFR is truly about:
A recent article by Shoup puts some familiar faces to the CFR with Democratic Party politician Dianne Feinstein and her husband finance capitalist Richard C. Blum, both members of the Council. In the following selection from that article, you can see how environmental protection is subverted for the financial interests of the power elite:
So now we go to the ecological catastrophe unfolding in the Arctic which the CFR and the ruling class see as simply another doorway through which capital accumulation can be carried out via environmental exploitation. The title of the CFR's article is 'The Coming Arctic Boom' published in the July/August 2013 edition of their journal 'Foreign Affairs'.
In this deranged essay, the CFR gushes over the busine$$ opportunitie$ afforded by such a once-in-a-lifetime event as the melting of the Arctic:
[My comments are highlighted red and in brackets]
Yeah that's who forms foreign policy for this country. The Mack Truck of climate chaos is barreling full speed ahead with mankind straight in its path, but all Homo Stupidicus can see are dollar signs.
Doomer
Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Military Industrial Complex, Neo-Colonialism, Peak Oil, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud
6th Mass Extinction, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Growth, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Mike Sosebee, Military Industrial Complex, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Peak Water, Resource Wars, Security and Surveillance State, The Elite 1%, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud
This grimly humorous video comes from Mike Sosebee. A small percentage of us just can't drink the kool-aid and prefer cold, hard reality over the myth telling and Madison Avenue song-and-dance of capitalist industrial civilization. The entire American hologram is dependent on the masses buying the illusion that all is well. Don't look behind the curtain. There's a mountain of corpses and ecological horrors hiding behind that thin veneer of our self-reassuring stories… stories about our corporatocracy democracy, our corporate scripted independent news media, our resource-plundering 'freedom fighting' military, our exploitive and destructive wealth-building economy, our move towards a "green-washed" sustainable lifestyle, etc. As commenter Dopamine says, we're on "a dopamine drip line, a natural morphine intravenous of belief that obscures the less rewarding reality of your existence. That humans are going to turn things around is another belief assuaging the fact that our families have to spend the next hundred years walking through a minefield from which many will not emerge, and for those that do make it, there awaits a planet wasted… And we are completely unable to avoid this perilous journey because our brains quickly substitute a "feel good" fantasy whenever we venture too far into the darkness of our reality. We will walk into the darkness surrounded by pink unicorns, omnipotent Gods, visions of unspoiled paradises, the overflowing font of fusion and so on…"
Although colonizing and enslaving foreign lands and people have always been the modus operandi of this country, I'm sure the elites who founded America never could have imagined that their 1% successors would be able to manipulate the social discourse and behavior of nearly 400 million with consumer goods called TV's and computers, nor could they have imagined the future Malthusian conditions that would eventually end not only the brief experiment of America, but the entire human experience on planet Earth. When Easter Island became uninhabitable, the rest of the planet never noticed, but now the human footprint will be felt in every nook and cranny of Earth for millennium. Paleontologist Louise Leakey, granddaughter of famed archeologist and naturalist Louis Leakey, uses the analogy of a roll of toilet paper to effectively illustrate the brief but devastatingly influential reign of mankind over the planet.
…To put the history of life on planet earth into a time perspective, imagine unrolling a toilet roll down a hillside. If there are 400 sheets of tissue paper in the roll, then the very first life in the oceans is seen at sheet 240. The age of the dinosaurs begins at sheet 19. Dinosaurs in their many forms and great diversity are around for 14 and a half sheets. Dinosaurs are extinct by the end of the Cretaceous, 5 squares from the end, making way for the mammals. Our story and place on the timeline as upright walking apes begins only in the last half of the very last sheet. The human story as Homo sapiens, is represented by less than 2 millimeters of this, some 200,000 years.
Our own individual lifetimes cannot be depicted on this final sheet of the toilet roll as it would be too thin a line, yet we have been witness to more change to the planet, to the diversity of life, global climate and natural habitats in this same time period. We are undoubtedly the cause of the sixth mass extinction event that the planet has seen in its history…
"Doomer", as in someone concerned with apocalyptic scenarios of global collapse, is definitely a term of modern usage reflecting the growing unease of the population. People who eschew the word "collapse" in favor of "decline" seem to be hoping that the road ahead will be gentle, predictable and somewhat manageable rather than violent, erratic, and uncontrollable. With homo economicus locked into the infinite growth mantra, there appears to be no other outcome other than a sudden crashing into the fast-approaching wall of environmental limits. The aftermath will be as unrecognizable as the mangled metal of a 100 MPH car crash rather than the slow deterioration and failure of a heavily driven automobile. Oh but that's too horrible of a thought for the masses to entertain, especially since it threatens our tranquil dreams of white picket-fenced homes with well manicured lawns. Things will be as they always have been, with only minor changes or uncertainties. The dopamine drip line is not in danger of running dry any time soon, and as things deteriorate more and more, the dosage of self-delusional drugs will be increased, lest the population starts to wake up from their stupor. The religious fanatic and mass murderer Jim Jones doesn't hold a candle to the psychos at the helm of capitalist industrial civilization.
We Are All Cogs in the Bone-Crushing Wheel of Capitalism
05 Friday Jul 2013
Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Neo-Colonialism, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud
Beyond Growth or Beyond Capitalism, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Disaster Capitalism, Eco-Apocalypse, Economic Growth, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Green Capitalism: the God that Failed, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Kyle Prindiville, Leon Kuhn, Richard Smith, Slavoj Žižek, The Delusion of Green Capitalism
Two important papers on capitalism by Richard Smith were published in the last few years explaining how capitalism, due to its structural mechanisms, cannot be reformed in any way to make it "sustainable". In Smith's papers, Green Capitalism: the God that Failed and Beyond Growth or Beyond Capitalism, four primary dictates of capitalism illustrate that no matter how herculean the effort to "green the economy", whether through energy or other areas, the end result of inexorable environmental destruction as well as incredible social inequality are inevitable.
1.) "Grow or die" is a law of survival in the marketplace:
In capitalism most producers… have no choice but to live by the capitalist maxim "grow or die." First, as Adam Smith noted, the ever-increasing division of labor raises productivity and output, compelling producers to find more markets for this growing output. Secondly, competition compels producers to seek to expand their market share, to better defend their position against competitors. Bigger is safer because, ceteris paribus, bigger producers can take advantage of economies of scale and can use their greater resources to invest in technological development, so can more effectively dominate markets. Marginal competitors tend to be crushed or bought out by larger firms. Thirdly, the modern corporate form of ownership, which separates ownership from operation, adds further irresistible and unrelenting pressures to grow from owner-shareholders. And shareholders are not looking for "stasis"; they are looking to maximize portfolio gains, so they drive their CEOs forward.
"…relentless and irresistible pressures for growth are functions of the day-to-day requirements of capitalist reproduction in a competitive market, incumbent upon all but a few businesses, and that such pressures would prevail in any conceivable capitalism. Further, I contend that, given capitalism, the first result of any serious reduction in economic output (GDP) to get production back down to some reasonably sustainable level, would be to provoke mass unemployment. So here again, there will never be mass public support for de-growth unless it's coupled with explicit guarantees of employment for redundant workers, which are unacceptable to capital and would require a socialist economy…"
2.) Maximizing profit and saving the environment are inherently in conflict:
"…Corporations can embrace pro-environmental policies but only so long as these boost profits. Saving the world, however, would require that profit-making be systematically subordinated to ecological concerns…"
"Most of the economy is comprised of large corporations owned by investor-shareholders. And shareholders, even those who are environmentally-minded professors investing via their TIAA-CREF accounts, are constantly seeking to maximize returns on investment. So they sensibly look to invest where they can make the highest return. This means that corporate CEOs do not have the freedom to choose to produce as much or little as they like, to make the same profits this year as last year. Instead, they face relentless pressure to maximize profits, to make more profits this year than last year (or even last quarter), therefore to maximize sales, therefore to grow quantitatively…
In the real world, therefore, few corporations can resist the relentless pressure to "grow sales," "grow the company," "expand market share"– to grow quantitatively. The corporation that fails to outdo its past performance risks falling share value, stockholder flight, or worse… And if economic pressures weren't sufficient to shape CEO behavior, CEOs are, moreover, legally obligated to maximize profits — and nothing else…"
3.) Consumerism and overconsumption are built into capitalism:
"…consumerism and overconsumption are not "dispensable" and cannot be exorcised because they're not just "cultural" or "habitual." They are built into capitalism and indispensable for the day-to-day reproduction of corporate producers in a competitive market system in which capitalists, workers, consumers and governments alike are all locked into an endless cycle of perpetually increasing consumption to maintain profits, jobs, and tax revenues. We can't shop our way to sustainability because the problems we face cannot be solved by individual choices in the marketplace. The global ecological crisis we face cannot be solved by even the largest individual companies. Problems like global warming, deforestation, overfishing, species extinction, the changing ocean chemistry are even beyond the scope of nation states. They require national and international cooperation and global economic planning. This requires collective bottom-up democratic control over the entire world economy. And since a global economic democracy could only thrive in the context of a rough economic equality, this presupposes a global redistribution of wealth as well."
4.) The masses are dependent on the market:
"Capitalism is a mode of production in which specialized producers (corporations, companies, manufacturers, individual producers) produce some commodity for market but do not possess their own means of subsistence. So in a capitalisteconomy, everyone is first and foremost, dependent upon the market, compelled to sell in order to buy, to buy in order to sell, to re-enter production and carry on."
To illustrate a case study in how impossible it is for even an "environmentally conscious" corporation to be sustainable, Smith discusses Ray Anderson and his company Interface, Inc.
Saint Ray Anderson and the limits of the possible:
"…CEO Ray Anderson has probably pushed the limits of industrial environmentalism as far as it's humanly possible to go in an actual factory operating within the framework of capitalism. Ray Anderson is everybody's favorite eco-capitalist and he and his company Interface Inc. have been applauded by virtually every eco-futurist book written since the 1990s as the eco-capitalist example to emulate. But what Ray Anderson's case really shows us is the limits of the possible, especially under capitalism. For after almost two decades of sustained effort, the goal of "zero pollutants" is still as unreachable as ever at Interface Inc. It is not in the least to diminish Ray Anderson's sincerity, his passionate dedication, his efforts or his impressive achievements. But the fact is, according to The Interface Sustainability Report of 2009, Interface has "cut waste sent to landfills by more than half while continuing to increase production," "reduced greenhouse gas emissions by more than 30%," "reduced energy intensity by 45%," while "over 25% of raw materials used in interface carpet are recycled and biobased materials in 2007," and non-sustainable materials consumed per unit of product have declined from 10.2 lbs/yd2 in 1996 to 8.6 lb/yd2 in 2008. Read that last sentence again. Make no mistake: These are impressive, even heroic industrial-environmental achievements. But if after more than fifteen years of sustained effort, the most environmentally dedicated large company in the United States, if not the entire world, can only manage to cut non-sustainable inputs from 10.2 to 8.6 pounds per square yard of finished product, to inject a mere 25% recycled and biobased feedstock into its production process, so still requiring 75% of new, mostly petroleum-based nonsustainable feedstock in every unit of production, then the inescapable conclusion must be that even the greenest businesses are also on course to "destroy the world." So if the reality is that, when all is said and done, there is "only so much you can do" in most industries, then the only way to bend the economy in an ecological direction is to sharply limit production, especially of toxic products, which means completely redesigning production and consumption – all of which is certainly doable, but impossible under capitalism."


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State Poet Laureate Visits Clark
May 1, 2017 11:49 am by Luc Hoekstra Views: 8
The 2016-2018 Washington State Poet Laureate visited the Clark library for a poetry reading on Wednesday as part of his statewide tour to promote awareness and appreciation of poetry.
"Vancouver is a little like one of the homes we lived in," Poet Laureate Todd Marshall said at the beginning of his reading. Marshall opened by reading a poem called "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers".
"I try to memorize a new poem every month," Marshall said. "I just repeat it over and over until it saturates into my brain. Claiming what language you want to take with you is a really important gesture."
Marshall read some poems by the Bard of Sherman Avenue, Tom Wobker. After, he read poems from his new anthology, "WA 129".
"It is my belief that the work of the humanities opens us up to lives other than our own," Marshall said. "When I was 19 and in college, I had a wonderful teacher who turned me onto what words can do."
The job of the poet laureate is not an easy one, Marshall said. "It's not a job where you rest on laurels. You work on outreach and awareness."
Over a dozen community members and students gathered to listen to Marshall read for an hour. Marshall gave out two books at the event, one to an audience member that correctly answered poetry trivia, and one to the first person to ask him a question.
Marshall said he is inspired by what he reads, his everyday experiences and the occasional "gift" of inspiration.
Marshall ended the event by reading a few of his own, untitled, poems.
Author: Luc Hoekstra

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


AuthorHouse, 20 бер. 2014 р. - 390 стор.
Jillian Becker, whose first three books were novels, has also written short stories, criticism, and numerous articles which have been published on both sides of the Atlantic. She has lectured at universities and schools and to learned societies, police, and military specialists; and has broadcast on radio and television in England, the US, Canada, Europe, the Middle East and Africa on terrorism and related subjects. The PLO cements and enhances the reputation she established as an authority on terrorism with her famous work Hitler's Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang. A unique study of a terrorist organization from inception to demise, it was published in seven European languages and Japanese, was chosen as Newsweek (Europe) Book of the Year 1977, and was serialized in major daily newspapers in Britain, Norway and Japan.


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Aspira Review – Get Paid To Take Campground Reservations From Home
Published February 27, 2019 By Anna T. This post may contain affiliate links. Regardless, I only recommend sites I've researched and/or used and trust.
Aspira are the providers of a suite of technology and service solutions for government agencies overseeing national park land and private organizations with RV parks and campgrounds. They hire work at home agents to take calls from outdoor adventure seekers and set up reservations.
According to their website, they are one of the biggest players in the camping reservation industry, with eight offices worldwide and more than 1000 employees.
Working for Aspira
Most of the remote jobs on Aspira's website are in reservation licensing and sales, but they also hire remote customer service representatives. The two jobs differ quite a bit in terms of responsibilities. For example, customer service reps don't have to sell on the phone, but they have to deal with people who have had trouble of some kind and found a reason to complain, which might lead to uncomfortable conversations.
As for the reservation job, from what I can tell it's a pretty standard call center gig. In most jobs like this you have to use a script a lot of the time, helping people make purchasing decisions, and walking them through their options. The general focus is on handling your calls quickly and efficiently while keeping the customer experience in the forefront of your mind at all times.
Aspira Pay Rate
Unfortunately, the hiring site has no concrete information about salaries. I did some digging around and found several different numbers, some of them contradictory. The highest rates I saw were around $11 per hour, and the lowest were around $8.
It's likely that the starting pay is on the lower end of that spectrum (starting you off at minimum wage for your state), and if you stay on long enough, you might get a raise or two.
Scheduling with Aspira
Comments from current and former employees make it seem like there's some degree of schedule flexibility, but their hiring site states a requirement of at least 25 to 29 hours a week for remote call center jobs, and you have to make yourself available on weekends.
Aspira is looking for people with strong communication skills, basic internet proficiency, and a typing speed of 20 to 30 words per minute.
Additionally, though I couldn't find it mentioned anywhere on the hiring pages, you will most likely need a quiet place to work where you won't be interrupted. If this isn't possible for you, we do have a list of work at home side gigs/jobs where background noise doesn't matter.
The technical requirements, taken directly from the website, are as follows:
Standard phone line. First choice is POTS/Analog phone landline. We can accept some cable/digital providers. Please, no cell, satellite or VoIP providers.
High Speed internet connection and be able to be connected directly to the vendor's modem by Ethernet cable.
Direct wire to modem and phone line accessible to your intended work station.
Have a desk top monitor that is not an all-in-one computer, tablet, laptop or TV.
No need to use your personal computer. We supply equipment with preloaded programs needed to train and work, including a dial pad and headset for phone calls, keyboard, and mouse.**
Aspira Application Process
I couldn't find anything about the hiring process on their jobs page, but I found a couple of older comments from former employees that mentioned a phone interview and then an in-person interview at the nearest HQ.
I used Glassdoor, and Indeed to find comments on Aspira from former and current remote employees.
There were a lot more positive than negative comments on both sites, but there wasn't much consistency in the opinions. Some people loved the management and work atmosphere, for example, while others had huge complaints about problems in those areas.
My guess is that different offices have their own management styles, and how well you're treated may depend on which office covers your area.
Everywhere I looked, I saw people complaining a lot about the pay, which is apparently quite low. Obviously that's a big problem, but it's a fairly typical issue for remote call center jobs. Most just don't pay you a lot of money, unfortunately.
Overall, assuming you can overlook the wage issue (and maybe you can't, which is totally understandable) this seems like a decent opportunity that compares favorably to most other jobs in this niche.
There were quite a few happy workers posting reviews for this company, and that's not always true with positions involving phone work.
If you like the sound of everything above, and want to become an Aspira call center agent, go here to read more about the company, and see if they're currently hiring in your area. Good luck!
Are You Looking For Even More Remote Jobs?
My e-book, How To Find REAL Work From Home Jobs, contains 150 legit companies, specific instructions on finding work at home jobs yourself, and also many, many resources you can trust for searching/following.
Last Updated: April 2, 2019 Filed Under: Phone Jobs


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Chef Hosts
LIVE STREAM Shopping
Our Chef Hosts
Get to know Justin-
Justin Fields was born in New York City. Growing up in the Bronx, he was influenced by the hustle and bustle of NYC. From a young age he had a very creative personality, getting involved in art classes, reading comic books and emulating artists of the time. The multi-cultural environment mixed with his love to eat would be the building blocks of his culinary journey.
Justin attended the Culinary Arts program at Bergen Technical High School in Hackensack NJ. This is where his appetite for culinary success began. Upon graduation in 2000, Justin enrolled into the Culinary Arts program at JWU in Providence, RI. During his schooling Justin moved to Maui, Hawaii for an internship to work at Roy's Kahana Bar and Grill. He left the mainland with nothing but a suitcase, a plane ticket and a desire to make it to the top.
Taking his career even further, Justin decided to continue his education with JWU and received his BA in Restaurant Management in 2004. After finishing his BA, Roy's Restaurant was the #1 opportunity on his radar, and he landed a position as sous chef trainer in Philadelphia. Ultimately becoming Chef Partner of Roy's Sarasota in December of 2008.
That is when a new path presented itself in 2013. As a result of his immense creativity and talent, he transitioned to Corporate Chef / Research & Develop world. Within 4 years he was promoted to Executive Chef / Director of Research and Development, playing an integral role in building brand recognition for multiple concepts. Chef Justin added an international presence to his arsenal in 2020 becoming the culinary lead for multiple international concepts, expanding his brand coverage and global cuisine knowledge.
Get to know Chef Clay White-
Chef Clay White is a born and raised North Carolinian. He became passionate about cooking while watching and learning from his grandmother as she cooked every meal for his family. He fell in love with food and food preparation at an early age. Although life took him in a very different direction, his passion for food was always there. ChefClay is a Desert Storm Veteran having served honorably in the United States Army until he got out in the early 90's. He and his wife moved to Moore County in 1997 and fell in love with the area.
ChefClay graduated with honors from culinary school and is a Former Culinary Instructor at Fayetteville Technical Community College where he taught Global Cuisine, Garde Manger, Purchasing, Wine appreciation, Menu Design, ServSafe and others. ChefClay is also a certified ServSafe Instructor and Proctor offering private classes in Moore and surrounding counties.
Recently ChefClay completed the level one Court of Masters Sommelier and is studying for Certified Specialist of Wine (CSW), the Certified Wine Expert (CWE) and the Certified Sommelier (CS).
KCBS/NCBS Certified Judge/Table Captain and has a Competition BBQ Team.
Get to know Sarah Okano Mansfield Pierce-
My passion is rooted in the joy that comes from preparing and sharing food. I am a self-taught cook, with years of guidance from my Japanese mother, Sumiko and grandmother, Yoko, who came to this country before the second world war. These two talented women showed me the value of working by hand with the ingredients local to your home. They knew how to avoid waste and to deploy one's imagination with ingredients you have on hand. I grew up between a New York City apartment and a farm in Vermont where my father taught me how to milk a cow, make butter, drive a tractor and make maple syrup. Both my parent's lifelong journey in the making and sharing of food, at the table we still sit at, is rooted in my consciousness. I have cooked professionally for over 40 years, almost always in unusual capacities. Some examples include cooking for months in a tent camp for fisherman in the Alaskan Bush, out of Avon rafts for The Nature Conservancy donors on rivers in Montana, for 100's of families bringing prepared food to their doorsteps in Denver, Colorado and for the past 5 years cooking meals that are made fresh and vacuum sealed for the 100's of guests we take to our high camp at 11,000 feet on the Grand Teton in Wyoming. Eating healthy, delicious food from only the best ingredients, has always been essential to my life as the mother of four children and for keeping our clients at The Mountain Guides feeling their best on long, strenuous days in the mountains.
Cookbook description and price
Okano's Kitchen Season 1 with Eat This TV
$17 including shipping in the US
Hot off the press!! Okano's Kitchen has produced a special edition cookbook for it's first season in 2021 with Eat This TV. The 36 page workbook includes all 49 recipes showcased in season one. It includes special tips and tricks for Samurai Bread. The recipes have been tested in my home kitchen for my family and friends over a lifetime and for 1000's of clients at Jackson Hole Mountain Guides. The recipes that are titled "Mountain High" are meals we have served for the last five years at 11,000 feet on the Grand Teton.
Order your copy today at www.okanoskitchen.com
Samurai Bread Mix
Order your Samurai Bread kit today as see on all the Okano's Kitchen/Eatthis.tv episodes!
Go to https://www.okanoskitchen.com/ to order yours today.
Regular Kit includes 2 mixes and a handmade bread pan from Vermont. Each mix makes 2 loaves of Samurai Bread. $44 per kit, shipping included within the US
Chef Shelly Meyer
Chef Shelly Meyer began cooking professionally in 2000 catering for elite clientele in the Arabian Horse Industry.
She once cooked an upscale plated dinner successfully for 75 people, in a horse barn, with only a portable grill. She explains it's times like those that teach you how to handle any adversity and find solutions to challenges.
In 2005 Shelly and husband Brad opened Bradley O's Steakhouse in her hometown of Hamilton, Montana.
Each recipe was created or approved by them before it went on the menu. After 10 years, they retired from the brick-and-mortar restaurant and Shelly started as a Private & Personal Chef. Even after years of experience, enjoying cooking so much, she decided to go through culinary school and get her certification. Receiving rave reviews, Chef Shelly has been a Private Chef for very notable clientele, business moguls, movie stars, professional athletes, etc. Shelly cooks mainly wild game at home that's harvested by her husband. She developed a vast array of flavors and techniques that pair best with game. Chef Shelly began offering farmed game to her clients after realizing they were looking for this option.
In 2020 Shelly began commercially manufacturing her Made In Montana seasoning blends. Montana Flavor 2 Savor spices are successfully sold wholesale to multiple Montana retailers, and nationwide through their website.
In 2021, Chef Shelly Meyer became a TV Host on the national Roku channel, Eat This TV
Jennifer Bajsel
Jennifer Bajsel, local DFW chef and owner of the successful company Getting Saucy, began her professional cooking career in 2011. Bajsel, who started as a home cook over 20 years ago is known for creating high-quality, flavorful dishes that cross international borders. Getting Saucy, Jennifer's company, was created in 2014 to deepen her culinary experience. Through her expansion of culinary knowledge she has become a food advocate. She understands the complexity of the American food system and how important it is to return to eating "real" food. Through her company, Bajsel currently offers both chef prepared meal delivery service as well as boutique catering services.
Diane Henderiks
As one of America's most versatile, experienced and educated culinary professionals, Diane Henderiks is on a mission to teach new levels of cooking and eating well – while enjoying every minute of it! She has appeared on Good Morning America, Fox & Friends, ABC News, The CBS Early Show, The Chew and many other media outlets. With her background as a Registered Dietitian, Certified Personal Trainer, and chef, Diane provides a wealth of knowledge for the home cook. Following her respected culinary and nutritional expertise makes it simple to take ordinary ingredients to new culinary heights. She makes it easily doable to whip up amazing dishes with her creative, healthy recipes. "Any dish can be revamped to be good for you, it just takes a little education and finesse!" Her message rings true. Diane has the distinct honor of being featured in both Shape Magazine and the New York Times and is also is a proud member of Les Dames d'Escoffier.
Diane is creator and host of the television show "Fresh to Frozen and Back", the first of its kind show teaching how to prepare fresh meals, freeze and defrost them properly, then bring back to the table at a later date. It is currently airing on ROKU, Amazon FireTV, Altice media and Public Broadcasting Network. She serves on the advisory board for the American Vegetarian Association, the Hudson County Community College Culinary Arts Institute and the Culinary Council for Chefs Society, an organization focused on educating the public about the health benefits and flavors of Korean fermentation and cuisine. She is an active member of the American Dietetic Association, International Association of Culinary Professionals and Women Chefs and Restaurateurs. Diane also has a strong passion for her work with non-profit organizations including Autism Speaks, Warriors in Motion, the Boomer Esiason Foundation and the Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation and the organizations resident guest chef for JBJ Soul Kitchen, a non-profit community restaurant that serves paying and in-need customers. In her day to day business Diane nourishes clients via Diane Daily Dish, her prepared meal delivery service at The Jersey Shore. She finds contentment in mornings at the beach with her dog Sydney, cooking at home and spending time with family.
Matthew Alexander
Throughout my career people have often asked me "What dish are you known for?" or "what is your specialty?" For many Chefs, this is a simple, straight forward answer. However, unlike many chefs, my answer is more complex.
On a more personal level, I was adopted from Bogota, Colombia. I consider myself one of the luckiest people in the world because I was adopted by 2 amazing people, my Mom and Dad. They provided me with unconditional love and support my entire life.
For people who haven't been adopted, they may find it hard to understand the void of NOT knowing where their biological make up is from. This void had plagued me my entire life and was reflective throughout the constant changes in my personality growing up. I felt as if I was always in search for "myself".
Fast forward to February 2018 when all of my life long questions were answered.
I was re-united with my birth mother in Bogota, Colombia. I cannot put into words the emotion that I felt throughout this journey. This journey of reuniting filled the void of searching for "myself."
You may be asking yourself how does this translate into my career or the food I cook? Since the inception of my career I've always wanted to arm myself with the knowledge of cuisines from around the world. I would get bored easily after mastering one style and would just move onto the next. It was much like my personality when I was an adolescent, always changing trying to find that "one thing" to define me.
I took it upon myself to do pro-bono work at ethnic restaurants. This opened the door for me to continuously practice recipes from different cultures and traveling the world to gain hands on experience. This is why there is not one style or dish I am known for. I am complex and diversified with my cooking. The plethora of experiences that I have been through are all put together in one unified recipe.
All of this is the reason why at Sabor de Arte we are not limited in what we offer or what we can do for you!
The Gadget Queen Susie Hassan
Host, Creator, Executive Producer at Gadget Queen TV Show on Eat This TV Network/ On Air Personality QVC Home Shopping
Chef Lee
Millennial professional Chef Lee Wright combines his knack for eating and cooking locally with his love of water and snow skiing and action and adventure as he travels the world and shows us how to EAT, SKI, LIVE! Come along on with Chef Lee on this global TV series to eat locally, explore mightily, live boldly, and discover your balance!
© COPYRIGHT 2021. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED BY eatthis.tv


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Juri Rappsilber (born 1971) is a German chemist in the area of mass spectrometry and proteomics.

Career

Rappsilber studied chemistry at the Technical University of Berlin, University of Strathclyde, and with Tom Rapoport, Harvard Medical School. In 2001, he earned his Ph.D. in Proteomics jointly from EMBL Heidelberg and the Goethe University Frankfurt working in the laboratory of Matthias Mann on the mass spectrometric analysis of protein complexes, externally supervised by Michael Karas. He followed Mann to the University of Southern Denmark and completed a postdoctoral fellowship before starting his independent career at IFOM - FIRC Institute for Molecular Oncology, Milan in 2003. In 2006, he joined the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology in the Institute of Cell Biology at the University of Edinburgh. In 2009, he became a senior research fellow of the Wellcome Trust, in 2010 he was appointed Professor of Proteomics in Edinburgh. Since 2011, he has been Full Professor and head of the Chair of Bioanalytics at the Technical University of Berlin.

Research

Rappsilber's interests are focused on combining chemistry and computer science with biological mass spectrometry to expand the current knowledge on how cells work. His lab is working on novel methods for identifying and quantifying the interactions and the accurate sites of interaction of proteins with other proteins, DNA and RNA. As a central tool they have pioneered crosslinking mass spectrometry. Technologically, they bridge organic chemistry, protein & nucleotide chemistry, molecular biology, separation sciences, mass spectrometry, data visualisation, programming and machine learning. Their vision is to reveal the dynamic structure and interactions of every protein in a cell, in a time-resolved manner.

Awards

 2021 Elected EMBO Member
 2009 Senior Research Fellow of the Wellcome Trust
 2005 Marie Curie Excellence Fellow
 2001 Marie Curie Fellow

References

External links

 Website at Unifying Systems in Catalysis (UniSysCat)

Academics of the University of Edinburgh
Academic staff of the Technical University of Berlin
Technical University of Berlin alumni
Goethe University Frankfurt alumni
German chemists
German biochemists
Mass spectrometrists
Living people
1971 births
Members of the European Molecular Biology Organization

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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Advent waiting at the edge
by Susan Rose Francois
For more Advent reflections, go to our sister publication, Celebration.
This article appears in the Advent feature series. View the full series.
Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash
The season of Advent waiting begins Sunday, at least for those tuned into the rhythm of the liturgical year.
In our culture, of course, the anticipation of Advent can sometimes be drowned out by the sheer volume of Christmas decorations already on display, not to mention the sounds of Christmas carols and the activity of Christmas plays, parties, and other holiday events already filling the calendar. It can be difficult to ground and center oneself in Advent in the midst of it all, and yet that is the invitation of these next four weeks.
Ordinary time is over. The recitation of turmoil and woe of the end times in the end-of-the-year liturgical readings has finished. One church year ends, and we stand waiting on the edge of the new.
The invitation of Advent is not to simply wait passively for the joy of Christmas. Rather, the Scripture readings for the first Sunday of Advent call us to "Be watchful! Be alert! ... Watch!"
These days, when we truly seem to be on the edge in more ways than one, staying alert and watchful is easier said than done. The news cycle is filled with a never-ending stream from which we want to avert our eyes: missile launches, bullying actions and language from public figures, undocumented families facing the threat and reality of deportation, and tax laws aimed to benefit corporations and the rich on the backs of the poor, elderly and vulnerable.
We might be excused for wishing to focus on the shiny, pretty Christmas lights instead of the heartbreaking realities all around us. And yet these are the times in which we find ourselves, and these are the times in which we are called to be watchful.
German theologian Dorothee Sölle, who was a teenager during the turmoil of the Second World War and Nazi Holocaust, challenges us to resist the privilege of closing our eyes to these realities and instead to choose to look through God's own watchful eyes. In The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance, she poignantly asks: "How do we get from worldly grief to the grief that is of God? That is the theological question about the resistance of people in the rich world. We are at once overeducated and underpowered. We have knowledge that has no consequences for action and makes us helpless."
Our Advent task is not only to be alert and watchful, but to prepare the way for the incarnation of love in our midst — to act. In the literal and figurative deserts of our wounded and weary world, the second Sunday readings say we are to "make straight in the wasteland a highway for our God!"
Small acts of love can prepare the way and help us move from helplessness to action: visiting a sick friend or family member, contributing to a local toy or food drive, or making gift choices in line with our values, such as supporting small businesses or alternative giving. More people tend toward such acts in these weeks before Christmas, and I have to believe that such a critical mass can help tip the balance, if only in the belief that another way is possible.
Alert and watchful, we can also prepare the way for God's justice and mercy by using our power as citizens. Writing and calling upon our legislators and government officials to act for the common good over special interests can also be an Advent act of love.
When we pray Mary's Magnificat this season, especially on the third Sunday of Advent, we should be stopped in our tracks. "He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty." That is God's way, not the way "the powers that be" seem to prioritize the rich and powerful over the people made poor and vulnerable. The Magnificat is a prayer of resistance perfect for these times of Advent waiting on the edge, focusing as it does on the way we could (and should) order our lives together.
Advent is not a time to despair or become overwhelmed by all the turmoil and woe, but rather, watchful and alert, to prepare God's way joyfully. In the midst of it all, the surprising call we hear on the third Sunday of Advent, Gaudete Sunday, is to rejoice: "Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. In all circumstances give thanks ... Test everything; retain what is good. Refrain from every kind of evil." We are invited to rejoice, even as we stand on the edge, recognizing that life itself is gift in all circumstances and that our actions, no matter how small, can make a difference.
On the one hand, this message is so simple, and yet life can seem so very complicated even on the best of days. We know the promise of the good news, yet like Mary, on the fourth Sunday of Advent, we find ourselves pondering, "How can this be?"
Mary's question to the surprising news of the angel Gabriel always comforts me. I find myself with lots of questions; the biggest one these days is how to be the presence of love in such a mixed-up world.
Advent gives us the much-needed opportunity to pause, step back from the chaos, and wait on the edge during these in-between times. Lately, I have found comfort and challenge in the words from the end of "The Beautiful Not Yet," a song by Carrie Newcomer and Chloe Grace.
There's a stirring,
There's a sweetness,
At the edge of in between.
I feel it nearly trembling.
The restlessness,
The quickening,
The almost but Not Yet.
Although the songwriters use the imagery of spring rather than winter, for me, their song puts the perfect words to the mixed-up feeling of joy and anxious anticipation of waiting on the edge.
It's messy, it's beautiful, and the presence of love is worth waiting and preparing the way for, not only in the season of Advent, but always.
[Susan Rose Francois is a member of the Congregation Leadership Team for the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace. She was a Bernardin scholar at Catholic Theological Union and has ministered as a justice educator and advocate. Read more of her work on her blog, At the Corner of Susan and St. Joseph.]
This Christmas, embrace the 11th Commandment: 'Thou shall not be alone'
Even at Christmas, it's not calm and bright for everyone
Pick up the phone. It may be a call from the helpless babe of Bethlehem.
Becoming a supporting character this Christmas
Simbang Gabi novena strengthens faith of Filipinos
Spirituality | Advent waiting at the edge
Robert F. Kennedy's Gospel example
Walking the labyrinth in Lent
Praying with women in the Bible
Cracking in the light
A call to ecological conversion


As part of our ongoing Governance Improvement programme, we are establishing the Institute of Medicine to oversee training and professional activities in Internal Medicine and its specialties.
We are now seeking applications from Fellows of RCPI for two significant clinician leadership roles in the Institute of Medicine.
Those successfully appointed will lead the establishment of a new structure for General Medicine within RCPI to improve the delivery of training and education in General Medicine specialties.
The Foundation Dean will be responsible for overseeing all matters of the Institute of Medicine in its dual role as a training and professional body. The Dean will work with the support of the Institute Board and Committees.
In their first year in this role, the Foundation Dean will work on the design and development of the Institute of Medicine with the aim of establishing the Institute by October 2019.
One year as Immediate Past Dean (October 2022 – 2023) – to provide guidance to the new Dean and remain as a member of the Board for this year.
Applications must be submitted to Emma Cuddihy, Programme Manager, Governance Implementation no later than 5pm, 31 August 2018.
Reporting to the Dean, the Director of Training and Education will be responsible for the oversight and development of postgraduate education for Basic and Higher Specialist Training programmes across 16 specialties in general medicine.
The Director will take over the existing role of Chair of the ICHMT and will work closely with the Foundation Dean on the design and development of the training structure within the Institute of Medicine.
This is a three-year post. The expected time commitment for this role is one day per week.
As part of our ongoing Governance Implementation programme, we are establishing a new Institute of Medicine to act as the training and professional body for General Medical specialties in Ireland.
The aim is for the Institute to be in place by October 2019.


District Health Boards are changing the way they manage their IT infrastructure by moving to the Government-mandated Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model.
All the country's DHBs can benefit from this managed and hosted solution as it increases security and reliability while reducing the risk of critical outages. DHBs can choose from one of three approved panel providers, namely Datacom, IBM or Revera.
The National Infrastructure Platform (NIP) programme supported DHBs with the planning for their move to IaaS.
NIP closed on 30 June 2017 after successfully delivering all artefacts. The programme team worked with 12 participating DHBs and two regional entities, and delivered a document suite comprising 13 white-paper-style guides each focused on a key area. The guides continue to support DHBs transitioning to IaaS, as well as helping project teams make decisions, solve problems and ensure all key areas of an IaaS solution are considered.


From its beginning, the story of cordless portable power tools has seemed a lot like an arms race. Competing manufacturers offered one tool after another, each with more power, bigger batteries and performance features that increasingly rivaled comparable corded tools. But users paid the price in bulkier, heavier, often more awkward tools. Today, new technology may be reversing that trend.
Major power tool manufacturers have capitalized on new lithium-ion battery technology to develop smaller, lighter tools that offer surprising performance for their size. This new class of tools is typically powered by compact and lightweight 10.8-volt battery packs, and we suspect many professionals overlooked these tools thinking they must be anemic compared to industry standard 18-volt ni-cad-powered workhorses. Now, a number of these compact tools are being marketed as "12-volt-max" units because the 10.8-volt battery packs can develop 12 volts of peak power. So, is this just a marketing gimmick, or can you get professional performance from a compact tool? To answer that question, we took the new DeWalt DCF610 12v cordless screwdriver for a spin.
The new cordless screwdriver from DeWalt is just one of a small family of compact power tools all powered by the same 12-volt maximum power lithium-ion battery pack. Professional users of DeWalt's full-size cordless line will smile when they see the size of these new tools, which are all dwarfed by their 18-volt brethren. But before we dismissed the tools as something for the DIY market, we couldn't help but notice some intriguing features.
First off, the DeWalt tools stand on their own – literally. Most of the 10.8-volt/12-volt max tools on the market have battery packs in the grip, making it necessary to lay the tool down on its side. The DeWalt's battery is at the bottom of the hand grip. Not only does that mean the driver stands upright, it also seems to improve balance and makes for a smaller, more ergonomic handle, especially if you have smaller hands.
Many tools now come with lights, but often they are shadowed by the chuck and don't really put illumination where you need it. DeWalt figured out a way to put three LED lights around the chuck, so there are no shadows and three times the light compared to single-LED units.
The chuck itself is improved with a one-handed feature that makes it a snap to remove or install a bit with only one hand. And when you don't have any hands to spare, a belt clip makes it easy to hang the tool from your belt.
OK, it's got whistles and bells, but can it shoot screws? The answer is yes, indeed. With 15 clutch settings plus full power coupled with surprising speed and battery life, this tool clearly outperformed previous 10.8-volt units we've used and made us seriously question why we needed to carry the extra weight of a conventional 18-volt unit to do the same job.


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Employers sign up for Aston job exchange
Aston University's Students Guild has set up a Job Shop to help students find term-time work. University policy stipulates that students should not work more than 15 hours a week, but the student Job Shop is now a popular point of call for students and employers willing to operate within this rule.
Students who register stipulate the kind of work they would like and are sent an email when suitable work comes in. Katie Lomas, the student's union vice-president for welfare who manages the Job Shop, expects the service to grow as employers come to regard students as an all-year-round, rich source of casual employment.
Many Aston students find work in telemarketing, which develops communication and team-working abilities. Other vacancies coming into the Job Shop are more suited to students doing particular degrees. For example,a local engineering firm requested a student with engineering skills to help out, while a number of firms have asked for language students to work with them as translators at the nearby National Exhibition Centre. Some of the work on the other hand, is more unusual. "Not so long ago,'' says Katie Lomas, "the NEC wanted students who could rollerblade."


Is expansion finally happening in the swine industry? In the past few weeks I've talked with a lot of gilt suppliers, builders and equipment suppliers and I think the answer is a resounding – YES. Many gilt suppliers are telling me of very strong sales with many of the gilts destined for new breeding site projects. There are many new breed-wean units currently under construction (generally 2500-5000+ plus in size) and permit hearings on-going for new units to be constructed beginning next spring.
In addition to expansion there are several smaller production systems and mid-sized breed-wean units being sold and/or offered for sale. Producers with cash are looking to expand and in some instances older producers with limited family interest by the next generation are selling while there is strong interest in their production capacity.
In almost every case, pigs from the sow units are destined for facilities located in the upper mid-west with access to corn and soybean meal at relatively cheap prices and a cropping system that benefits from the application of the accumulated swine manure. In the case of new ownership, the expectation is improved production and or conversion of production to a size that fits economically with the buyers' needs.
All of this spells massive infusions of capital into pork production. The big concern by many of us who work with producers on a daily basis – will there be ample shackle space in the fall of 2016? Steve Meyer has written about this already but I'm not sure every producer has put enough thought into this possible limit on our productive capacity.
We know PEDv knocked our productivity about 5-6% this year from what it would have been. What will production look like in late 2015 and 2016, especially if we manage to limit the impact of PEDv? We routinely talk about 30 pigs/mated female/year now as an attainable goal. Are we closing smaller breed-wean units and very low productivity units fast enough to offset the productivity that many units are now obtaining and the productivity being added by the new units under construction?
I know some of the new units are backed by pig purchase contracts. What is different about these contracts versus the contracts in place in 2006-2008 to prevent the contract failures that occurred then? Back then (seems like a long time ago) many weaned pig sale contracts were broken when the pig buyers lender said 'enough' and refused to lend any more money to pay for pigs that would only lose money at slaughter. A lot of lawyers have been busy sorting out this fall-out and we really don't want to have to go thru it again.


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Pour un Enseignement Pluraliste dans le supérieur de l'économie
PEPS Worldwide
The PEPS Manifesto
Hi there !
PEPS-Économie (Pour un Enseignement Pluraliste dans le Supérieur en Économie / For a Pluralistic Teaching of Economics in Higher Education) is a group of students in Economics from Bachelor to PhD unsatisfied with the teaching they were exposed to, which they deem too far from the real world, insufficiently pluralistic in terms of schools of thought, methodologies and towards other social sciences. We then created the PEPS-Économie initiative in 2010 to ask for a change in the way economics is taught on the basis of these three pluralisms. Check out our PEPS Manifesto and the presentation we gave at the PowerShift 2013 in the PEPS Worldwide section for more information !
More than 10 years ago, a student movement started in France against "autism" in economics, and spread in other countries. The Post-Autistic Economic Review (PAER), now the Real World Economic Review, was founded afterwards. The history of these movements is summarized here: http://www.paecon.net/HistoryPAE.htm.
Nowadays, the crisis has shown how much things have stayed the same. We deem that the crisis is also a crisis of the discipline and its teaching: the weaknesses in the economics curricula and the way economists are educated can be considered one cause of the crisis amongst other.
We wrote several articles in newspapers and journals between 2011 and 2013. They can be found in the section Nos textes. We translated them into English, especially our survey on undergraduate teaching in France (we have reviewed more than 50 curricula !) and our proposal for a concrete alternative. For a very short version, check out our English brochure : From terrible to terrific undergraduate economics curricula and our INET conference paper.
Don't hesitate to contact us for more information !
The PEPS team.