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Flint, Michigan, the city portrayed as the embodiment of a rust belt city abandoned by deindustrialization in Michael Moore’s allegorical documentary, Roger & Me, has recently become a morality play of a different sort as it captures national headlines highlighting a controversial series of decisions creating a major public health crisis that threatens the health of Flint’s children.

After numerous complaints of the rising costs of the City of Detroit’s water and sewerage system, which the city had been dependent on for decades, the City of Flint’s controversial, non-elected, state appointed emergency manager decided in 2013 to switch from Detroit’s water system, and obtain water for the city from the Flint River until an alternative source could be developed. The decision insured, if nothing else, that banks and bondholders to which the city is indebted, would be paid.

The decision ended up being a tragic mistake of major proportions. After the switch was made in April 2014 problems soon developed because the Flint River’s water proved to be highly corrosive, releasing lead from the old plumbing fixtures in Flint’s homes, factories, and schools. The water was so corrosive that the local GM engine plantswitched their plant’s water system to another supplier because the automaker was concerned that the Flint River water would corrode their auto parts.

Tragically, the situation could have been avoided if the state had followed the EPA mandate to install corrosive preventative measures when lead levels in drinking water exceed recommended levels. State officials further undermined the state’s integrity and the public’s confidence by claiming they were not required to install mandatory corrosive controls.

As lead levels rapidly rose to levels far exceeding the U.S. EPA’s recommended lead levels in public drinking water, Flint residents complained of malodorous, darkly colored water flowing from their home faucets, hair loss, headaches, and itchy eyes.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Nuclear Radiation, Kierkegaard, and the Philosophy of Denial

January 13, 2016

Nuclear Radiation, Kierkegaard, and the Philosophy of Denial

shutterstock_217225549

It used to be, and indeed children are still taught in schools, that the advances that have been made in the last five hundred years (antibiotics, electricity, computers etc) resulted from the application of Science and its overthrow of dogmatic belief.

All ideas are put to the question in the auto da fe of experiment: Galileo’s observations versus the Inquistion’s biblical earth-centric world view and so forth. But over the same period, the power of belief (in Jesus, Marxism, Allah, perhaps ‘Economics’) has continued to flourish alongside the supposedly observation- based, empirical philosophy that we call Science.

Belief is strictly about what we cannot know but I am not going down the Dawkins black hole on this one since there are certainly some very odd things that science cannot explain. But I want to apply the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s approach to something that Science can explain and has: the health effects of ionising radiation.

Kierkegaard said of belief that it becomes stronger the more impossible and threatened it is. And this seems to be rapidly coming true in the case of nuclear energy. The torture imposed on logic, reason and observational data by the advocates of nuclear power has now reached the level of clinical psychosis.

A psychosis is a thought disorder in which reality testing is grossly impaired. There is so much evidence that nuclear power kills, causes cancer, mutates populations, reduces fertility and kills babies that only a mad person would continue with the belief that it is a good thing and should be pursued no matter what the cost in money and death.

And as they move to even greater levels of psychotic delusion they present two new survival strategies which make it brilliantly clear that the proponents of nuclear are off their heads.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Study Finds The ‘Era of Climate Science Denial Is Not Over’

January 8, 2016

Study Finds The ‘Era of Climate Science Denial Is Not Over’

These think tanks produce reports, hold conferences, write books, go on television, produce columns and blogs and generally and liberally splatter the public discourse with talking points.

You’ll have heard their manufactured doubt everywhere. “CO2 is great for the planet… fossil fuels are good… climate scientists are wrong… the world has been hotter in the past… cutting emissions will kill the economy.” That sort of thing.

But there has been speculation that as the world continues to break heat records, and as oceans rise and the science sends ever more clear and urgent signals, that the focus of these think tanks will shift away from attacking the science to discussing policy.

Now a new study published in the journal Global Environmental Change has declared unambiguously “the era of climate science denial is not over”.

Dr Travis Coan, of the University of Exeter, and Dr Constantine Boussalis, of Trinity College Dublin, analysed 16,000 articles, reports, transcripts, letters, reviews and press releases from the websites of 19 conservative think tanks, mainly based in the U.S, who work on climate change.

In the study, Boussalis and Coan discuss how commentators had been speculating about an end of climate science denial for more than a decade.

Analysing documents from 1998 until mid-2013, Boussalis and Coan found that think tanks had in recent years been focusing less on policy and more on attacking the science.

In a blog post for The Guardian, Coan told me:

In our view, meeting the challenges posed by organized climate skepticism requires accurate and systematic information on what these organizations are saying.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

UK MoD denies tabloid reports RAF ‘ready to shoot down’ Russian planes over Iraq

October 12, 2015

UK MoD denies tabloid reports RAF ‘ready to shoot down’ Russian planes over Iraq

© Daily Star / The Sunday Times

UK media allegations that RAF pilots in Iraq had been authorized to shoot down Russian fighters in case of imminent threat have prompted a response from Moscow. Britain’s military says there is “no truth” in the reports.

TrendsIslamic State

The initial report was published by The Daily Star and The Sunday Times. It claimed that an “unidentified source” in the British military told the media that Royal Air Force’s Tornado GR4 involved in Operation Shader in Iraq against Islamic State from now on are going to be armed with ASRAAM (AIM-132) short range air-to-air heat-seeking missiles to be prepared to “to shoot down Vladimir Putin’s jets,” The Sunday Times reports.

So far, the RAF jets took off armed with “500lb satellite-guided bombs only,” but as the source in British Defense Ministry put it, “in the last week the situation has changed. We need to respond accordingly.”

British pilots have been allegedly instructed to avoid contact with Russian aircraft.

“The first thing a British pilot will do is to try to avoid a situation where an air-to-air attack is likely to occur — you avoid an area if there is Russian activity,” an unnamed source from the UK’s Permanent Joint Headquarters (PJHQ) told the Sunday Times. “But if a pilot is fired on or believes he is about to be fired on, he can defend himself. We now have a situation where a single pilot, irrespective of nationality, can have a strategic impact on future events.”

“No one knows what the Russians will do next. We don’t know how they will respond if they come into contact with a Western jet,” the source said.

4 Charts Show Why This Rally Will Become a Rout!

September 3, 2015

4 Charts Show Why This Rally Will Become a Rout!

There’s a reason why I warn you to get out of a bubble a little early rather than a little late. It’s because the first wave down tends to happen in a matter of a few weeks or months, sometimes days. It’s fast and furious.

I know this because I’ve studied every major bubble in modern history – all the way back to the infamous tulip bubble in 1637, when a single tulip cost more than most people made in a single year! And what I’ve seen in each case, without exception, is that bubbles do not correct in nice stair steps when they’re coming off their highs. They burst, crash, collapse, clatter, clang – however you want to say it!

When the bubble deflates, it typically crashes 50% minimum to as high as 90%. But it’s that first wave down that can wipe out 20% to 50% right off the bat!

Below I have four charts that make the argument for me.

They show the 1929 bubble burst… the 1987 crash… the 2000 “Tech Wreck”… and the latest of 2015 from the Red Dragon itself – China’s Tsunami.

In each case, the fact that these bubbles were destined to burst were only obvious to the few that weren’t in denial. Most give into the bubble logic that new highs are the new norms. They think: “This time is different.” It’s not! It never is.

It’s always hard to predict exactly when bubbles will peak and crash. It’s like dropping grains of sand on the floor. A mound will build up – becoming like a Hershey’s kiss that grows more narrow at the top. At some point, one grain of sand will cause the avalanche. Who knows which grain of sand that one will be!

Here are those charts. Like I said, they speak for themselves!

What does that tell you!? EVERY bubble bursts. Bam, pow – no exceptions! So hopefully you understand why I keep harping on about this.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tomgram: Naomi Oreskes, Why Climate Deniers Are Their Own Worst Nightmares

June 18, 2015

Tomgram: Naomi Oreskes, Why Climate Deniers Are Their Own Worst Nightmares

When I go out with my not quite three-year-old grandson, his idea of a good time is hide-and-seek. This means suddenly darting behind a bush too small to fully obscure him or into a doorway where he remains in plain sight, while I wander around wondering aloud where in the world he could possibly be. In this, there’s a kind of magical thinking and denial of reality that has great charm. When similar acts of denial are committed by adults, when they refuse to see what’s right before their eyes — the melting sidewalks and roads of India, the emptying reservoirs of parched California, the extreme rain and flooding in parts of Texas and Oklahoma, the news that last year was a global heat record for the planet and this year isalready threatening to be another, or that Alaska just experienced its hottest May ever, or that 13 of the 14 hottest years since temperatures began to be recorded took place in this century, or that a supposed post-1998 “pause” in the planetary warming process was a fantasy — the charm fades fast. When you discover that behind this denial of reality lies at least $125 million in dark money, it fades even faster. In just three years, unidentified conservative sources have poured that eye-popping figure into a web of think tanks and activist outfits dedicated to promoting climate denial (and not even included in that amount are the vast sums that Big Energycontinues to contribute to the promotion of denialism, as it has done since the 1980s). In other words, some of the most powerful and profitable interests on the planet are determined to deny reality with a ferocity meant to confuse the public and put a damper on any moves or movement to save a planetary environment that has long nurtured humanity. It’s a charmless spectacle.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

In Denial: We Pursue Endless Growth At Our Peril

May 29, 2015

James Steidl/Shutterstock

In Denial: We Pursue Endless Growth At Our Peril

A requiem for planet Earth

As we’ve been discussing of late here at PeakProsperity.com, humans desperately need a new story to live by. The old one is increasingly dysfunctional and rather obviously headed for either a quite dismal or possibly disastrous future. One of the chief impediments to recognizing the dysfunction of the old story and adopting a new one is the most powerful of all human emotional states: Denial.

I used to think that Desire was the most powerful human emotion because people are prone to risking everything in their lives – careers, marriages, relationships with their family and close friends – pursuing lust or accumulating 10,000 times more money and possessions than they need in their desire for “more.”

Perhaps it was my own blind spot(s) that prevented me from really appreciating just how powerful human denial really is. But here we are, 40 years after the Club of Rome and 7 years after the Great Financial Accident of 2008, collectively pretending that neither was a sign warning of the dangers we face — as a global society — if we continue our unsustainable policies and practices that assume perpetual growth.

Economic Denial

In the realm of economics, the level of collective denial gripping the earth’s power centers is extraordinary. Perhaps that should be of little surprise, as we’re now at the height of the largest set of nested financial bubbles ever blown in world history.

The bigger the bubble(s) the bigger the levels of denial required to sustain their expansion. These bubbles are doozies, and that explains the massive and ongoing efforts to prevent any sort of reality from creeping into the national and global dialog.

To understand this pattern of avoidance of unpleasant realities, consider the behavior of cities — even entire nations — which cannot bring themselves to talk openly about their state of insolvency, let alone do something about it.

The Burden of Denial

April 9, 2015

The Burden of Denial

It occurred to me the other day that quite a few of the odder features of contemporary American culture make perfect sense if you assume that everybody knows exactly what’s wrong and what’s coming as our society rushes, pedal to the metal, toward its face-first collision with the brick wall of the future. It’s not that they don’t get it; they get it all too clearly, and they just wish that those of us on the fringes would quit reminding them of the imminent impact, so they can spend whatever time they’ve got left in as close to a state of blissful indifference as they can possibly manage.
I grant that this realization probably had a lot to do with the context in which it came to me. I was sitting in a restaurant, as it happens, with a vanload of fellow Freemasons. We’d carpooled down to Baltimore, some of us to receive one of the higher degrees of Masonry and the rest to help with the ritual work, and we stopped for dinner on the way back home. I’ll spare you the name of the place we went; it was one of those currently fashionable beer-and-burger joints where the waitresses have all been outfitted with skirts almost long enough to cover their underwear, bare midriffs, and the sort of push-up bras that made them look uncomfortably like inflatable dolls—an impression that their too obviously scripted jiggle-and-smile routines did nothing to dispell.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

TIGHTEN THOSE CHIN STRAPS FOLKS BECAUSE HERE COMES A RAPID UNSCHEDULED DISASSEMBLY (RUD)

January 27, 2015

TIGHTEN THOSE CHIN STRAPS FOLKS BECAUSE HERE COMES A RAPID UNSCHEDULED DISASSEMBLY (RUD)

Please stick with this piece dear reader for it does not end on the same path from which it starts.

Being a child of the 50’s and 60’s, it comes as no surprise to anyone from that era that I’m a bit of a space buff. From the moment I saw my first televised rocket launch I was hooked and have never fully recovered from my childhood obsession. Beginning withProject Mercury and the suborbital flight of Alan Shepard in 1961, followed shortly by the three orbits of John Glenn, then progressing through Project Gemini where America practiced the space skills needed to eventually land on the moon and culminating with the Apollo Program and (supposedly) several trips to the moon, one thing they all had in common was the seriousness of everyone involved. Going to space was serious business performed by serious people. There was no joking around because failure wasn’t an option.

Who can forget the early years watching stern (mostly baby faced) engineers hunched over their monitors at the Launch Control Center in Cape Canaveral (Kennedy) and Mission Control in Houston, nearly all wearing the standard dress uniform of white short-sleeve shirt with tie along with the mandatory plastic pocket protector, headsets firmly affixed to one ear while the other was left open to hear those around them.

There were always several huge loose leaf binders at their side, dog-eared and well thumbed, complete with handwritten notations and addendums. And of course, endlessly pacing the back of the room or moving from one monitoring station to another, there was the Mission Director riding herd over his minions. There was no doubt by anyone in that room who the man in charge was and where the buck stopped.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Six Myths About Climate Change that Liberals Rarely Question – Transition Milwaukee

November 26, 2014

Six Myths About Climate Change that Liberals Rarely Question – Transition Milwaukee.

Myth #1: Liberals Are Not In Denial

“We will not apologize for our way of life” –Barack Obama

The conservative denial of the very fact of climate change looms large in the minds of many liberals. How, we ask, could people ignore so much solid and unrefuted evidence? Will they deny the existence of fire as Rome burns once again? With so much at stake, this denial is maddening, indeed. But almost never discussed is an unfortunate side-effect of this denial: it has all but insure that any national debate in America will occur in a place where most liberals are not required to challenge any of their own beliefs. The question has been reduced to a two-sided affair—is it happening or is it not—and liberals are obviously on the right side of that.

If we broadened the debate just a little bit, however, we would see that most liberals have just moved a giant boat-load of denial down-stream, and that this denial is as harmful as that of conservatives. While the various aspects of liberal denial are my main overall topic, here, and will be addressed in our following five sections, they add up to the belief that we can avoid the most catastrophic levels of climate disruption without changing our fundamental way of life. This is myth is based on errors that are as profound and basic as the conservative denial of climate change itself.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Peak Oil: So How Do We Prepare? – Peak Oil Matters

November 21, 2014

Peak Oil: So How Do We Prepare? – Peak Oil Matters.

The economic effects of peak oil are as obvious as they are frightening. The most immediate effect is to increase oil prices, and this has its own effect of slowing the economy down. There was a period in which Saudi Arabia could modulate the world’s rate of oil production by turning up the flow, but even that is a thing of the past. Oil prices jump up and down in response to rumors and temporary conditions — the worldwide economic slowdown has tamped them down a bit over the past few years — but the overall pattern is a steady price increase, all other things being equal….
We should understand that peak oil has probably already occurred, and we will be spending the rest of our lives, and our children their own lives, dealing with the consequences.
But we avoid the long term relevancies. There was plenty of oil yesterday and there will be enough today to maintain a modest lifestyle, and we all hope that there won’t be another big oil shock very soon….How do we prepare? [1]

A nice summary of where we are, what we face, and a question for which there is not much of an answer at the moment. In and of itself, that’s a problem.

Dispute over facts aside, another problem the author cites is likely to be an even more difficult challenge in our attempts to prepare for a transition away from fossil fuel dependence.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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