Here’s a little bit of a twist on some conventional analysis.
Let’s start with a trend. The baby boomers are getting older. Their kids have departed (most of them). It’s time to downshift towards prepare for 20-30 years of “active retirement.”
How? They need to get their ravaged finances in order, by cashing out of their biggest investment, their home. And since this trend will be both huge and will occur very quickly, it’s going to have profound effects on the US housing market. Specifically, three things:
The market for bigger homes will decline sharply. It’s important to not be the last one out before the prices soften or crump.
The market for smaller homes for couples will improve markedly (there aren’t nearly enough homes in the current housing stock to support this shift). Most of these will be in suburbs (boomers aren’t going back to the city).
Many of these new purchases will be to nearby communities that are less expensive (reversing the trend that drove up prices in towns with great school systems — putting even more pressure on #1 above).
A reader sent me this in response to the piece I ran yesterday on the five largest carbon polluters. It makes the point even stronger. Basically what this is telling us is that 90 corporations in the whole world are responsible for two-thirds of the climate change causing pollution. Think about that for a second: there are seven billion! humans and to maintain the profits of a few thousand individuals, the entire planet must suffer. One has to ask also, why is it I only find these stories in the non-U.S. press
This essay by Noam Chomsky hits the target, as anyone who travels outside of the U.S. knows. When you are outside of the country it is easy to see how much everything is motivated by fear, and how often fear is used by politicians, particularly Theocratic Rightist politicians, to manipulate public opinion. Fox News is built on the premise of scaring people. This is an excerpt from the just released 2nd edition of Noam Chomsky’s ‘Occupy: Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity,” published by Zuccotti Park Press. Reprinted from Truthout.org. with permission. Noam Chomsky is amongst the world’s most cited living scholars. Voted the ‘world’s top public intellectual” in 2005, he is perhaps best known as a critic of all forms of social control and a relentless advocate for community-centered approaches to democracy and freedom. Over the last several decades, Chomsky has championed a wide range of dissident actions, organizations and social movements. In this excerpt from the just-released expanded edition of the Zuccotti Park Press book, ‘Occupy: Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity,” Chomsky speaks with Free Speech Radio News about media control, fear, indoctrination and the importance of solidarity.
Ever since former Booz Allen Hamilton contractor Edward Snowden started revealing national Security Agency documents earlier this year there has been renewed debate about what is the proper balance between public and private sector roles and participation in the intelligence community. This is an issue, which, in recent years, has periodically come up, but has not received the same critical scrutiny in the sustained way the role of private military and security contractors operating in Iraq or Afghanistan has.
But with the advantage of hindsight there were warning signs long before Snowden appeared on the scene. For example, consider an article published in a past issue of the Brown Journal of World Affairs (Fall 2011). The author is Armin Krishnan, a visiting assistant professor of security studies at the University of Texas at El Paso and author of the book War as Business.
The first thing to note is that he is not, per se, opposed to privatizing some functions of the intelligence community which, traditionally, have been held to be an “inherently governmental” function and, thus, only to be performed by government workers. He writes, “The outsourcing of intelligence gathering is not necessarily a problem in itself and is certainly nothing new in the United States. The U.S. government has a long history of reliance on contractors and private companies in the field of intelligence.”
That said, he still thinks intelligence outsourcing has gone too far. Among his reasons:
The trend toward intelligence privatization and outsourcing is a cause for concern for many reasons. First, it breeds corruption and gross inefficiency. Second, it has resulted in massive abuses of civil liberties and human rights. Third, it weakens the quality of intelligence products, as national intelligence becomes dominated by private interests with strong incentives for biased reporting. Fourth, it creates difficulties for the control and oversight of intelligence activities, as it is more difficult for the government to monitor contracted companies and private companies have less obligation to turn over information to congressional oversight bodies. Fifth, in the long term, it will cause a loss of core competencies and expertise to the private sector, especially as it concerns technology.
What this message is about: Concerns about civilizational collapse and human extinction in the foreseeable future are rising and moving from the fringes into the mainstream. Many who share these concerns are understandably prone to despair and cynicism. What are the various life-serving ways to confront and respond to these daunting realities?
Acknowledging real end-times possibilities
Co-evolution of Life and Death
Dear friends:
An increasing number of people are coming to the conclusion that there's a non-trivial chance that civilization will collapse – or, more terminally, that the human species will die off – within the next few hundred years, thanks to climate chaos and/or many variously related threats.[1]
These extreme but no longer “crazy” views are drifting towards the mainstream. Quite in addition to the many apocalyptic movies, novels, and music – the R.E.M. anthem “it's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine” being exemplary – former Vice President Al Gore recently suggested that civilization might not survive the next 100 years – and two separate New York Times op eds by Roy Scranton and Samuel Scheffler (below) recently explored the philosophical and psychological implications of human extinction.
These cultural phenomena are the tip of an iceberg of disturbed collective consciousness increasingly haunting the minds, hearts, and spirits of ordinary citizens who really don't want to think about it or talk about it.
For years writers seriously concerned about climate change and peak oil have been pioneering ways to address these emerging realities head-on, with varying degrees of pessimism, practicality, positive vision, and spiritual inspiration. Some of the many voices I know of in this choir include:
“Assassination Market” Website: Are the “Bad Guys” Actually the “Good Guys,” and Vice-Versa?
Some have said Bitcoin is at the center of a revolution in the world economy. The jury is still out on such claims, but using Bitcoin to enable killing unpopular public figures and politicians seems, at the very least, to be sending a signal from the peasants that the princes and kings of the world may not be hearing, to their own peril. The first Bitcoin-enabled killing of a loathed public person, were it to come to pass, would for sure get their attention. But what if this and other Assassination Market web sites were to select their targets even more creatively, say the CEO of Monsanto or the CEO of Merck, producer of Vioxx, which killed tens of thousands, or the CEOs of Wall Street, such as Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan or Lloyd Blankfein, of Goldman Sachs, who both have impoverished millions, or an oldie-but-goldie war criminal such as Henry Kissinger, whose machinations condemned millions to death and maiming in the Vietnam era? Bringing together crowd-funded economic compensation with unrequited moral outrage via a Bitcoin platform could be the ticket for making the work days (and nights) of the private security teams protecting such individuals a great deal more challenging.
Perhaps the “bad guys” establishing such sites are really the “good guys” given the nefariousness of these and other targets they offer Bitcoin-sourced compensation in exchange for assassination. Such initiatives provide a real possibility – or probability? – at real justice that the rigged and bought-off criminal justice refuses to provide even a chance at giving. Such musings can be expected to arise and form as self-evident rationales much more frequently as the criminals in the C-suites continue to endlessly get away with enormous illegalities and financial crimes. Bitcoin could end up being the peasant's extremely pointed and lethal but anonymous pitchfork.
“A bitcoin-based crowd-funding website has raised almost £50,000 as a bounty to anyone willing to assassinate chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke. Along with Bernanke, the website is collecting bounties for Jyrki Tapani Katainen, the prime minister of Finland; Francois Hollande, president of France; Barack Obama, president of the US, James Clapper, the US director of national intelligence, and Keith Alexander, head of the NSA. However it is Bernanke who has attracted by far the highest amount of bitcoin donations, currently standing at 124.14, which at today's market value is just over £48,500. The next highest bounty is for Obama, which is 40.26 bitcoins (£15,740) followed by Alexander with 10.49 bitcoins (£4,100) and Clapper on 1.97 bitcoins (£770).”
