Bananas
In the Miguel Angel Asturias novel Strong Wind we are on a hill with the British manager of the banana plantation, somewhere in the Carribean.
"It did have, it did have it's epic hour; but what else can you expect now, it's nothing but cheap exploitation, the dreary exploitation of natural resources, of those individual lands we are looking down at!"
Mr. Pyle agreed with Carl Rose that there had been a moment of adventure, when the plantations were set up, when the machinery went into the jungle; but he could not accept it as a stupid exploitation now.
"The days of adventure were something else, weren't they,really, old John!" Carl Rose exclaimed; "there's a difference between the man who goes into the unknown to bring out beneficial natural resources and the one who follows him in the absurd routine of never getting beyond going along with what's been set up."
They then went off to drink and "do some bowling". Adventure, exploration, a risky undertaking, Manifest Destiny for an Empire of Men! The Great Epic...Jolly good, eh what!
Labels: pathetic white males
posted by troutsky @ 8:06 AM
18 comments
18 Comments:
Here's the link from earlier concerning global warming.
Ah yes, the vested interests seem to have given up denial and are now taking the "why worry be happy" approach.
The problem is, that if the changes in regional weather patterns occur as predicted, then massive upheaval will follow in terms of human existence, mostly in the poorer parts of the world. Food and water shortages will be catastrophic unless massive redistribution of population happens in parallel with weather and climate change.
I can't see the West welcoming the masses from Africa who will be displaced, somehow.
If sea levels rise half a metre, on a global scale that means a huge reduction in arable land available for food production. Until now we've had a food distribution problem, but we are at the population point where total production won't cover demand.
There are massive energy and natural resource savings available just by being smarter with the way we do things. Some of it is incredibly simple yet lost in the noise surrounding the "ideological" debate.
The economic benefits are impossible to ignore and it is only those dinosaurs in the fossil fuel industry that are benefitting from doing nothing.
The elites are certainly taking climate change seriously and are investing accordingly. Water will be the biggest industry (in $ terms) in my lifetime. Of that, I am certain.
Water will be the biggest industry (in $ terms) in my lifetime
Good news for Canada. Bad news for the South West USA...
Btw, Troutsky, I tagged you as a 'thinking blogger' here.
I can already see people worrying about their finances as people die.
"Good news for Canada. Bad news for the South West USA... "
No. Good news for big capital. Bad news for everyone else.
Water will be worth less where it is plentiful.
Why is it that the right wingers know so little about how economics and capitalism works?
My whole post about British Empire overtaken by Al Gore!Just kidding,this warming thing deserves all the attention it gets.Wiser is a thinking sceptic (as we should all be)but I am concerned the debate is muddied by terms.Is it about the percent of "man caused" warming? Is it about a cost-benefit analysis on the economy? Is it a Christian "Lord works in mysterious ways" kind of perspective?
Thanks for the tag, sonia-belle, you are a frustrating but worthy intellectual opponent and always honorable.Cringing jumps to conclusions about your understanding of economics based on to little but he is right that shareholders will benefit at the expense of the less powerfull.
It was an educated conclusion, as I took the time to read his/her? blog, and I note that when challenged elsewhere on your blog there has been no response.
I'll stand by my opinion, and I'll include most of the rightwing blogosphere. Most of their (economic) opinions are given to them by authority figures and don't bear scrutiny or conform to reliable data.
As to the GCC, the right is trying to retain inertia by shifting the debate to irrelevencies. The Gore personality thing is but one.
The real questions should really be over how we deal with climate change. The debate over whether it is happening or what causes it is largely over.
The ethanol thing is also a diversion in macroeconomic terms.
Troutsky
Do note I am not a public acomodation. I can back my material quite well. I also handle dissent in the nature it is put forth.
I do not sugar coat my message to placate utopians. However, I am content to let them enjoy the same freedom of speech as I enjoy myself. I do not go looking for fights and have my own readers to cater to.
Labels: pathetic white males
An acurate description of the blog host and commenters
Is this parody or idiocy?
nOnce again the reliable, perpetual, enigmatic standoff as both cringing and beakerkin "stand by their data" . I guess thats why Joseph Stiglitz and Milton Friedman could go round and round endlessly.
What if we heard all the "evidence" in the Great Trial yet remained unconvinced, perhaps we could go to motive.Why would Exxon spend so much on a dis-information campaign, hiring professional naysayers and the like? That would point to the profit motive. Why would private citizens, scientists, NGOs etc attempt to blame man-made causes? Profit?
Who do you trust more, the one with a self interest or the one without?
I read Wisers link and find it clever and disingenous, creating strawmen and a very plastic logic.
Speaking of strawmen,Beakerkin, I also don't wish to fight.But i will invite my readers to peruse your site and judge for themselves the level of vindictive, nay, venomous vitriol directed at such lumped up generalities as "leftists", the French, or Palestinians. The "message" is a testosterone cocktail with a slice of Franco.
Have you figured out that the real Franco was a vast improvement over the policies you advocate? Original thinking is not your forte, but your kind always over estimates its IQ.
As far as testosterone is correct we consider that a good thing.
Do note I do note that I do not come here looking to berate your kind. History's verdict is allready harsher on your kind than any of my quips. Send my best wishes to the Dodo Bird and the all the other extinct relics.
Yes, I had a look at Beakerkin's site. It's classic wife beater logic on a global scale.
The attacks on "leftists" are almost certainly veiled attempts to disguise their own extremism. There is nothing conservative about them.
Whether it's fascism is open to debate I guess, but in the end, labels are just words. The death toll and the misery of millions resulting from these lunatics is real.
They are everything they see in their enemies, real or imagined.
Sorry about the multiple tags. Someone is playing silly buggers with my blogger accounts.
".Why would Exxon spend so much on a dis-information campaign, hiring professional naysayers and the like? That would point to the profit motive"
.......Philip Cooney, the former chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Cooney publicly answered questions before the House Government Reform Committee about 181 changes he made to three government climate reports, and defended many of the changes.
Questions were raised about Cooney’s qualifications, including that he was an oil-industry lobbyist before working for the Bush administration. He left in 2005 to work for Exxon Mobil Corp.
Note at the bottom of the article from Wiser this....
"Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research has always been funded exclusively by the U.S. government. He receives no funding from any energy companies."
But then I found this.....
In the last year and a half, one of the leading oil industry public relations outlets, the Global Climate Coalition, has spent more than a million dollars to downplay the threat of climate change…
For the most part the industry has relied on a small band of skeptics--Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, Dr. Pat Michaels, Dr. Robert Balling, Dr. Sherwood Idso, and Dr. S. Fred Singer, among others--who have proven extraordinarily adept at draining the issue of all sense of crisis.
Lindzen, for his part, charges oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services; his 1991 trip to testify before a Senate committee was paid for by Western Fuels, and a speech he wrote, entitled "Global Warming: the Origin and Nature of Alleged Scientific Consensus," was underwritten by OPEC.
But wait, it gets worse. The positions advocated by Richard Lindzen, the paid-by-OPEC opinion writer commenting in Newsweek -- he's also written op-eds for a number of other publications including the Wall Street Journal -- appear to be the diametric opposite of those held by Richard Lindzen, the serious meteorologist, when he's writing peer-reviewed scientific texts.
Interesting to follow the money too.
Newsweek is owned by the Moonies and the board includes Warren Buffet whose main investments seem to be in oil and energy industries these days.
Interesting to follow the money too.
Always. But the fact that he's being paid by whomever doesn't neccesarily mean his opinion is wrong. It hurts his credibility, but I still find his comments to be highly reasonable.
Also, most scientists are on the payroll of some organization. If an enviromental think-tank hires a guy who believes the line about global warming, does that make him wrong? Maybe, but both sides have their hands where they don't belong. Makes finding the truth a bit hard.
The fact that the footnote is a clear lie is more troubling tha would otherwise be the case and indicates in and of itself, some malfeasance.
Of the examples you use, if the expert accepted money from an environmental organization that was secretly profiting from a carbon trading scheme for example, then yes there is a conflict but otherwise I don't see it.
It is the profit stream of the payer and their interest in effecting the truth and its dissemination, surely.
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