Another perspective on the depression

The Depression Has Come - Let's Finish the Job, Right

The New York Times made my day when it reported on the state of the economy and world trade on January 3, after the first business day of the new year. We won't see a corporate media headline of "Depression Cuts Greenhouse Gases Drastically" or "This is What Petrocollapse Looks Like" very soon because not enough people see the interconnections of history's trends on energy and limits. But I'll take what I can get for some winter good cheer.

With the Earth's climate at the tipping point to spin the planet into overheated mass extinction, some of us are thankful for the economy's collapse. "The worst slowdown since the Great Depression," said the New York Times (Business Day, Jan. 3). While it's true some kinds of environmental protection slacken when times are rougher for certain industries, on the whole there's a direct relationship between consumption and ecological destruction. Another relationship is between increased consumption (and work and debt) to unhappiness, mental illness and diminished social cohesion.

In addition to climate concerns and society's pathologies, we need to terminate our dangerous reliance on petroleum, coal, natural gas, uranium other metals and poisons that have built up our toxic house of cards. There are positive trends, such as dam removal and the radicalization of America's top climate scientist, James Hansen.

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Clearly, "alternatives" such as those as well as urban food gardens, pedal power produce-hauling, and more veganism need to begin in ernest.

These methods for local self-sufficiency and sustainable food and freight were laughed at by most of the "mainstream" until now. Now they make more sense to anyone questioning buying a car or shelling out scarce dollars for expensive, long-distance hauled food.

To pursue these strategies now, to strip the car and oil industries of "earnings," will accelerate the fall of the corporate petroleum state. Its days are numbered, prompting a call for the proactive dissolution of the U.S. (Culture Change Letter #221). There's more to be done to finish the job of this oil-shock induced Depression, for more positive outcomes than we'll get if we cling to yesterday's economic system. It's too fantastic this week anyway, but what about ceasing 90% of the "Defense" budget to help bring an end to the deadly economic system heating the climate? We cannot foresee how soon collapse will be able to run its course to put the self-serving weapons industry mostly out of business.

But we can rejoice in the fact that


Who would have thought just six months ago that widgets and other pollution boxes would start to dry up so soon, with much fewer freighters from China now coming to the U.S.? "Maybe there's a god after all," said a street person priding herself on consuming less and less new stuff .

Celebrate! "The manufacturing sector (of China) had contracted for a fifth consecutive month... the steepest decline in its history." Thank you gods and goddesses!

These developments occurred because of peak oil and peak money. Praise be to petrocollapse.

More wonderful news from the same edition of the Times: "November Chip Sales Slipped 10%" (from Reuters). Shucks, the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition must be in tears. Of joy.

Liebig's Law of the Minimum states that growth is controlled not by the total of resources available, but by the scarcest resource (limiting factor). This concept was originally applied to plant or crop growth, where it was found that increasing the amount of plentiful nutrients did not increase plant growth.

Liebig's Law has been extended to biological populations (and is commonly used in ecosystem models). For example, the growth of an organism such as a plant (GG: or a civilization) may be dependent on a number of different factors, such as sunlight or mineral nutrients (GG: or oil). The availability of these may vary, such that at any given time one is more limiting than the others. Liebig's Law states that growth only occurs at the rate permitted by the most limiting.

Marge: I'm worried about the kids, Homey. Lisa's becoming very obsessive. This morning I caught her trying to dissect her own raincoat.
Homer: I know. And this perpetual motion machine she made today is a joke! It just keeps going faster and faster.
Marge: That's it: we have to get them back to school.
Homer: I'm with you, Marge. Lisa! Get in here.
In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

Using sophisticated brain imaging techniques, the researchers found that they can predict people's simple decisions up to 10 seconds before they're conscious of making such a choice.

"It seems that your brain starts to trigger your decision before you make up your mind," said the study's lead author, John-Dylan Haynes of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany. "We can't rule out free will, but I think it's very implausible. The question is, can we still decide against the decision our brain has made?"

In this experiment Haynes and his colleagues found that two regions of the brain responsible for even higher-order decision-making - the frontopolar cortex and the parietal cortex - were activated even earlier when people were asked to press a button with either their right or left hands.

Employing both functional magnetic resonance imaging and pattern recognition statistical techniques, the researchers were able to predict which button people would choose before they made their conscious decisions - as much as 10 seconds early, "an eternity," Haynes said.

Haynes believes that delay suggests the absence of free will as most people define it.