10 things you shouldn't share on Facebook

SHOOT: I can think of a few others, but some may not agree, and I think it is also age and person specific. I don't think one should put photos (especially as your profile) of yourself snogging someone. I also think one should try not to broadcast to everyone relationship status. Schoolkids might like this, but especially attractive women might find they become harassed fairly quickly. The obvious one is never say something that could embarass you if brought up by your boss.

clipped from computer.howstuffworks.com 10: Personal Conversations The wall is there for all to see, while messages are between the sender and the receiver, just like an e-mail. Personal and private matters should never be shared on your wall. You wouldn't go around with a bullhorn announcing a private issue to the world, and the same thing goes on the Internet. This falls under the nebulous world of social networking etiquette. clipped from computer.howstuffworks.com 9: Social Plans Sharing your social plans for everybody to see isn't a good idea. Unless you're planning a big party and inviting all the users you're connected to, it will only make your other friends feel left out. There are also some security issues at stake here. clipped from computer.howstuffworks.com In 2009, a case of an employee caught lying on Facebook hit the news. The employee asked off for a weekend shift because he was ill and then posted pictures on his Facebook profile of himself at a party that same weekend. The news got back to his employer easily enough and he was fired. clipped from computer.howstuffworks.com 7: Company Information clipped from computer.howstuffworks.com 6: Photos of Your Kids clipped from computer.howstuffworks.com

Baxter facility in Orth-Donau may have allowed super virus to originate

The company that released contaminated flu virus material from a plant in Austria confirmed Friday that the experimental product contained live H5N1 avian flu viruses.

We have no evidence of any reassortment, that any reassortment may have occurred,” said Andraghetti.

SHOOT: The evidence [may be] in the H1N1 virus now sweeping the globe that contains traces of bird flu, pig flu and human flu.

clipped from www.torontosun.com People familiar with biosecurity rules are dismayed by evidence that human H3N2 and avian H5N1 viruses somehow co-mingled in the Orth-Donau facility. That is a dangerous practice that should not be allowed to happen, a number of experts insisted. Accidental release of a mixture of live H5N1 and H3N2 viruses could have resulted in dire consequences. While H5N1 doesn’t easily infect people, H3N2 viruses do. If someone exposed to a mixture of the two had been simultaneously infected with both strains, he or she could have served as an incubator for a hybrid virus able to transmit easily to and among people. That mixing process, called reassortment, is one of two ways pandemic viruses are created. There is no suggestion that happened because of this accident, however. “We have no evidence of any reassortment, that any reassortment may have occurred,” said Andraghetti. On Friday, the company’s director of global bioscience communications confirmed what scientists have suspected.

Crazy but true - why not to get a swine flu vaccine

SHOOT: Quite a tough choice here. Either swine flu will use you to improve itself and become deadlier, or the vaccine itself will make you seek. Bottom line, don't get vaccinated.
What you can do to boost your immunity:

- get sun on skin [Vitamin D]
- get enough sleep
- handle stress
- exercise
- eat healthy
- practise good personal hygiene

clipped from dprogram.net Do not take seasonal flu vaccine if you are told that it could help prevent this brand new Swine Flu variant. It won’t do a thing to prevent this flu. What it will do is serve up new genetic material to the Swine Flu virus that I have dubbed Spanish Flu 2, the Sequel. The Spanish Flu variant will use the gene sequences in the vaccine in humans to develop more of the changes that make the virus more readily infect humans. We do not want to give this virus more human genetic material so that it will infect humans more readily person to person. This is what vaccinated individuals do for pandemic strains.

50 percent of all jobs in America will eventually be either in the healthcare industry or the government

From the Secretary of Health and Human Resources’ own lips, the United States is now spending $2.5 trillion on health care, about 17 percent of GDP.

Truth is, we have close to a 10 percent admitted unemployment at this time, with the actual rate much higher if you include discouraged workers no longer seeking employment. Unemployment will get worse. A lot of good folks are collecting severances or unemployment checks, which have expiration dates. This means consumer spending, which accounts for 70 percent of GDP, is not going to rise much any time soon. Comparative corporate earnings reports that we hear “beat expectations” are beating pathetic expectations, not robust expectations.

SHOOT: Hence the psychology of a recovery is crazy. We have a precedent for this, it happened in 1929. It has yet to sink in that 2009's Depression will be worse. More money lost, a bigger interconnected system leading to systemic failure, more people, and fewer farms and other resources to turn to in the aftermath than there were in 1929 + far more mouthes to feed. Then there is also pandemic flu to add to the mix.

clipped from 3.bp.blogspot.com clipped from dprogram.net Back in the Great Depression of 1929 through the 1930’s, we saw a similar Zig-zag pattern. There was a crash in 1929, followed by a nice rally, but then the most devastating part of the market collapse followed into the 1930’s. That Bear Market was a Supercycle degree wave (IV). The current Bear Market is one degree larger, which means it should be worse. There is great risk to the status quo political structure of governments internationally should this Bear Market follow the Zig-zag pattern. That is why gold is an attractive component investment for diversified conservative portfolios, as it has been considered a monetary equivalent throughout the ages, surviving the rise and fall of fiat currencies of nation state powers. Fundamentals are a mess at this time in the U.S. economy, regardless of all the hoopla nonsense we hear from the mainstream financial press, who hope to jawbone this economy to health, so their ratings rise.

In one month, Israel will decide whether to attack Iran or not

SHOOT: Should the talks fail, a military strike looks very probable.

clipped from dprogram.net Washington has given Iran until next month to open talks on resolving the nuclear crisis, although hopes of any constructive engagement have dimmed since the regime’s crackdown on pro-reformist protesters after June’s disputed presidential elections. Ehud Barak, Israel’s Defence Minister, last week reiterated that a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities was still an option, should the talks fail. Israeli officials estimate that a raid on Natanz and a nuclear facility at Arak, in central Iran, would set Iran’s nuclear programme back by two to three years. An Israeli official said that Iran had poured billions of dollars over three decades into a two-pronged “master plan” to build a nuclear bomb. He said that Iran had enriched 1,010kg of uranium to 3.9 per cent, which would be sufficient for 30kg of highly enriched uranium at 95 per cent. About 30kg is needed to build one bomb.

Hands up if you believe "the worst is behind us"? If your hand is up you're clearly part of the majority of crazy people out there

Kunstler: When The Long Emergency was published in 2005, I said then that the greatest danger this society faced would be its inclination to gear up a campaign to sustain the unsustainable at all costs -- rather than face the need to make new arrangements for daily life. That appears to be exactly what has happened, and it didn't happen under the rule of some backward-facing, right-wing, Jesus-haunted crypto-fascist, but rather a "progressive" party led by a dynamically affable young man unburdened by deep cultural allegiance to Wall Street. Barack Obama has been sucked in and suckered. "Change you can believe in" has morphed into "a status quo you will bend heaven and earth to hold onto."

We're prisoners of our wishes, living in a strange dream-time, oblivious to the forces gathering at the margins of our vision, lost in a wilderness of our own making. Anything can happen now.

SHOOT: The problem is that the 'Change you can believe in' was something no one wanted to believe in.

clipped from kunstler.com A broad consensus has formed in the news media and among government mouthpieces and even some "bearish" investors on the street that "the worst is behind us" in this tortured economy.  This view is completely crazy.  It will only lead to massive disappointment a few weeks or months from now, and that disappointment might easily transmute to political trouble.  One even might call the situation tragic, except a closer look at the sordid spectacle of what American culture has become -- a non-stop circus of the seven deadly sins -- suggests that we deserve to be punished by history. The reason behind this mass delusion is not hard to find: it's based on wishing, especially the wish to retain all the comforts, conveniences, luxuries, and leisure that had become normal in American life.  These are now ebbing away in big gobs for most of the population -- while a tiny fraction of the well-connected pile on ever larger heaps of swag, enjoying ever more privilege.

El Nino is back - which means fewer hurricanes, more fires

At present, forecasters do not expect this El Niño to equal that of 1998, but it may be the second-strongest, and concerned groups, from international insurance companies to commodity traders, to aid agencies such as Oxfam, have begun to follow its progress anxiously. Its potential for economic and social impact is considerable.

The last El Niño was in 2006-07 and, at its peak, sea surface temperatures averaged about 0.9 degrees above normal. But this is a stage which has already been reached by this one.

SHOOT: More droughts in South Africa. This winter has definitely been colder than the last, in Johannesburg at any rate.

clipped from www.independent.co.uk A new El Niño has begun. The sporadic Pacific Ocean warming, which can disrupt weather patterns across the world, is intensifying, say meteorologists. So, over the next few months, there may be increased drought in Africa, India and Australia, heavier rainfall in South America and increased extremes in Britain, of warm and cold. It may make 2010 one of the hottest years on record. The cyclical phenomenon, which happens every two to seven years, is a major determinant of global weather systems. The 1997-98 El Niño combined with global warming to push 1998 into being the world's hottest year, and caused major droughts and catastrophic forest fires in South-east Asia which sent a pall of smoke right across the region. Professor Chris Folland, of the Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, said: "We are likely to see more global warming than we have seen in the past few years, which have been rather cool. In fact, we are already seeing it."

Swine flu passes 1000 mark, spread in Australia and South America is fastest, autumn likely to see second, deadlier surge

In the US, the cities of Seattle, Chicago and New York are badly hit, but the towns of the Mid-West remain relatively unaffected. "Even in the cities of the Mid-West we are not finding much yet. It will come in the autumn."

SHOOT: Compared to Australia and South America, South Africa seems to be missing the swine flu. My gut says it's not being reported. It's interesting that the UK is the highest incidence country in Europe. Probably because it is a hub of airline based traffic.

clipped from www.independent.co.uk The global death toll from swine flu has topped 1,000 as the virus sweeps around the world. Latest figures published by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in Stockholm show 1,012 deaths had been reported up to yesterday. Peers yesterday praised the British Government for stockpiling anti-viral drugs like Tamiflu sufficient for half the population and negotiating advance purchase agreements with pharmaceutical companies to supply a vaccine against swine flu for the whole population. But the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee criticised the late launch of the interim National Flu Pandemic Service last week, which had been due to be delivered and tested in the spring. Professor Angus Nicoll, head of the Influenza Programme at ECDC, said Britain remained the hardest hit country in Europe for three reasons.

Will US Cowboy tactics work against Iran, a nuclear armed state?

SHOOT: The answer is pretty obvious. The USA needs to make friends, not incite resentments. Granted, the Arabs have extremeists that aren't interested in negotiating, but you can always attempt to negotiate with those who will. The USA is no longer in a position to dictate terms, but that said, we will probably see stability and peace increasingly eroding as global economic conditions worsen, and opportunities for mischief improve.

NYT: Mr. Obama’s aides, in return, worry that the Israelis are trying to force action too soon by shortening their estimate of how long it would take Iran to manufacture a weapon. In fact, no one knows how quickly it might be able to do so, but it has already solved many of the technological problems.

clipped from www.nytimes.com One of the Iran experts who testified last week, Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institution, cautioned that Iran was so porous it could circumvent an oil cutoff, and that the potential for confrontation would be high. “The Iranians are not terribly good at capitulation,” Ms. Maloney said. “This is a regime that tends to believe the best defense is a good offense.” The White House has been extraordinarily tight-lipped about its Iran strategy, and has not publicly discussed the legislation. But already it has become part of the behind-the-scenes maneuvering with Israel. Israeli officials have argued in recent weeks that the American unwillingness to confront North Korea more forcefully as it develops a nuclear program was evidence that the United States might be willing to tolerate an Iranian nuclear weapons capability. “The question we have to face,” one American diplomat said, “is whether any sanction at this point can really deter them, given how close they are now.”

Pneumonic plague emerges in China, town sealed - but what is it?

Pneumonic plague is the second most virulent and second least common form of plague (after septicemic plague), caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. Typically, pneumonic form is due to a secondary spread from advanced infection of an initial bubonic form. Primary pneumonic plague results from inhalation of aerosolized infective droplets and can be transmitted from human to human without involvement of fleas or animals. Untreated pneumonic plague has a very high fatality rate.

Pneumonic plague is a very aggressive infection requiring rapid antibiotic treatment within around 24 hours of infection.

Early treatment of pneumonic plague is essential. To reduce the risk of death, antibiotics must be given within 24 hours of first symptoms.[1] Streptomycin, gentamicin, tetracyclines, and chloramphenicol are all effective against pneumonic plague.

Antibiotic treatment for 7 days will protect people who have had direct, close contact with infected patients. Wearing a close-fitting surgical mask also protects against infection.[1]

Without treatment, the mortality rate from pneumonic plague approaches 100%.[2]

Pneumonic plague is spread through the air and can be passed from person to person through coughing, according to the World Health Organization. It is caused by the same bacteria that occurs in bubonic plague — the Black Death that killed an estimated 25 million people in Europe during the Middle Ages.

While bubonic plague — which is usually transmitted by flea bite — can be treated with antibiotics if diagnosed early, pneumonic plague is one of the deadliest infectious diseases. According to the WHO, humans can die within 24 hours of infection.

The WHO's spokeswoman in China, Vivian Tan, said China reported the first death and 11 other cases to the organization on Saturday.

SHOOT: It really does seem as though Mother Nature has started targetting the human race, saying: 'It's time to drastically thin the numbers of this species now...'

clipped from news.yahoo.com BEIJING – A second man has died of pneumonic plague in northwest China, in an outbreak that prompted authorities to lock down a town where about a dozen people were infected with the highly contagious deadly lung disease, a state news agency said. The World Health Organization office in China said it was in close contact with Chinese health authorities and that measures taken so far to treat and quarantine sickened people were appropriate. The man who died Sunday was identified only as 37-year-old Danzin from Ziketan, the stricken town in Qinghai province, the official Xinhua News Agency said. Danzin was a neighbor of the first person who died, a 32-year-old herdsman whose name was not given. Another 10 people, mostly relatives of the first deceased man, were infected and undergoing isolated treatment in hospital, Xinhua said in a report late Sunday. "People are so scared. There are few people on the streets," Han said by telephone.

Online social networks 'creating shallow friendships'

SHOOT: It can but it can also enhance them. Like alcohol, it depends on whether you allow the tool to do all the work, or whether you take the baton after the introductions, and step into the real world.

clipped from www.sowetan.co.za LONDON – The head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales is concerned that excessive use of emails and cellphone text messaging is creating shallow friendships. Archbishop Vincent Nichols also said this was undermining community life. He said popular social networking sites led young people to form “transient relationships” which put them at risk of suicide when they collapsed. The sites encouraged children to place an excessive importance on the number of friends they had instead of the quality of their relationships. – Reuters

Global warming may be good news for the Sahara

SHOOT: Warming means that air can hold more moisture. If it is on average hotter, some forests may die out, creating a hothouse effect. Good for grasslands, bad for forests. Still, it is good to see that the periphery of the world's largest desert is beginning to sport a green verge. Good for Africa's prospects perhaps.

clipped from news.nationalgeographic.com Emerging evidence is painting a very different scenario, one in which rising temperatures could benefit millions of Africans in the driest parts of the continent. Scientists are now seeing signals that the Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall. If sustained, these rains could revitalize drought-ravaged regions, reclaiming them for farming communities. This desert-shrinking trend is supported by climate models, which predict a return to conditions that turned the Sahara into a lush savanna some 12,000 years ago. The green shoots of recovery are showing up on satellite images of regions including the Sahel, a semi-desert zone bordering the Sahara to the south that stretches some 2,400 miles (3,860 kilometers). The study suggests huge increases in vegetation in areas including central Chad and western Sudan. "The water-holding capacity of the air is the main driving force," Claussen said.

IEA acknowledges mistake: "Energy crunch risk is real and imminent"

SHOOT: I have been saying for some time and on numerous occasions that any recovery will be crippled by a concomitant rise in energy prices. The recession and stockpiles of crude are creating a distortion of reality, making it seem that we are awash in crude, but the reality is that beneath the veneer of disappearing demand [a temporary problem] is the permanent fixture of depleting fields.

A 'recovery' will remove this delusion, but by then there will be no room to manoeuvre with bailouts and surplus cash as there was in 2008/9. We wasted that opportunity by re-investing in industries [auto, credit markets, suburbia] that have no future. The next crunch is months away, and we will just have to sit with chronic economic conditions [alternately hyperinflation and deflation, associated with a given: unemployment] and the social and civic disruptions - severe - that these entail.

Independent.co.uk: "The earlier we start, the better, because all of our economic and social system is based on oil, so to change from that will take a lot of time and a lot of money and we should take this issue very seriously," he said.
There is now a real risk of a crunch in the oil supply after next year when demand picks up because not enough is being done to build up new supplies of oil to compensate for the rapid decline in existing fields.

The IEA estimates that the decline in oil production in existing fields is now running at 6.7 per cent a year compared to the 3.7 per cent decline it had estimated in 2007, which it now acknowledges to be wrong.

"If we see a tightness of the markets, people in the street will see it in terms of higher prices, much higher than we see now. It will have an impact on the economy, definitely, especially if we see this tightness in the markets in the next few years," Dr Birol said.

"It will be especially important because the global economy will still be very fragile, very vulnerable. Many people think there will be a recovery in a few years' time but it will be a slow recovery and a fragile recovery and we will have the risk that the recovery will be strangled with higher oil prices," he told The Independent.

*What is "peak oil" and when will it be reached?

This is the point when the maximum rate at which oil is extracted reaches a peak because of technical and geological constraints, with global production going into decline from then on. The UK Government, along with many other governments, has believed that peak oil will not occur until well into the 21st Century, at least not until after 2030. The International Energy Agency believes peak oil will come perhaps by 2020. But it also believes that we are heading for an even earlier "oil crunch" because demand after 2010 is likely to exceed dwindling supplies.


*With global warming, why should we be worried about peak oil?

There are large reserves of non-conventional oil, such as the tar sands of Canada. But this oil is dirty and will produce vast amounts of carbon dioxide which will make a nonsense of any climate change agreement. Another problem concerns how fast oil production is declining in fields that are past their peak production. The rate of decline can vary from field to field and this affects calculations on the size of the reserves. If we are not adequately prepared for peak oil, global warming could become far worse than expected. - Steve Connor, Science Editor

clipped from www.independent.co.uk The world is heading for a catastrophic energy crunch that could cripple a global economic recovery because most of the major oil fields in the world have passed their peak production, a leading energy economist has warned. Higher oil prices brought on by a rapid increase in demand and a stagnation, or even decline, in supply could blow any recovery off course, said Dr Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the respected International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris, which is charged with the task of assessing future energy supplies by OECD countries. In an interview with The Independent, Dr Birol said that the public and many governments appeared to be oblivious to the fact that the oil on which modern civilisation depends is running out far faster than previously predicted and that global production is likely to peak in about 10 years – at least a decade earlier than most governments had estimated.

WHO says world swine flu death toll is 816, but recent updates from South America raise these numbers to 950

IOL.co.za: South Africa had 480 recorded cases of the influenza A H1N1 virus - better known as swine flu - by Friday, said the National Institute for Communicable Diseases.

It was a lot of cases, and most involved youngsters, but "we are not seeing severe illness", said the institute's deputy director Lucille Blumberg.

Nobody was known to have died from the virus in South Africa, she said.

She reiterated previous advice that there was no need to be tested and that not everybody needed treatment. - Sapa

SHOOT: South Africa claims to have 480 recorded cases, but then you have our deputy director Lucille Blumberg saying there is no need to be tested. It's a bit like saying, 'we don't want to know because then we'd have to report it'. I believe in a few months we'll see that there has been under-reporting and under-surveilance of this, and it will catch authorities here by surprise.

clipped from www.google.com WASHINGTON — Fifty-one more swine flu-related US deaths were reported in the United States over the previous week, bringing the toll to 353 in the country worst affected by the global pandemic. The CDC also announced in its Friday report that it was no longer publishing the individual confirmed and probable cases, or its aggregate total of cases from the 5O US states, its territories and the capital Washington. As of Monday, some 816 people infected with swine flu had died, according to the World Health Organization. With the new US figures, plus recent updates to death tolls in Latin America, the region in the midst of winter that has been hardest hit by the virus, the global toll is closer to 950. Unlike seasonal flu, which usually hits elderly people the hardest, the A(H1N1) virus has mostly infected the young.

How are people getting AIDS from chimps and gorillas?

The woman hasn't yet shown any sign of a compromised immune system – the hallmark of AIDS – but tests on laboratory-cultured human cells suggest that the virus can replicate in the same white blood cells as other strains of HIV.

SHOOT: I'm not sure why people can't eat fruits and vegetables and grains - why do they have to prey on other animals that can't be a natural diet choice for us? It's not natural for us to be consuming in the way we are, hence these new diseases.

clipped from www.newscientist.com A new strain of HIV has jumped from gorillas to humans. So far, only one person, a 62-year-old French woman from Cameroon, has been found to be infected with the virus, which closely resembles strains of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) recently discovered in western gorillas in the wild. "It would be surprising if there aren't some more" human cases, says David Robertson, a bioinformaticist at the University of Manchester, UK who analysed the virus's DNA along with colleagues in France. "We don't think this is a direct gorilla-to-human transmission." Until 2004, the infected woman lived in a suburb of Cameroon's capital city Yaoundé, where she didn't come into contact with apes or eat their meat – SIV's primary route to humans. This means that she probably acquired the infection from another human, likely through sexual contact.

The View from my Bicycle [COLUMN]

World, Interrupted

What do you spend the bulk of your time doing? How much of your time is spent having 1 on 1 conversations or experiences with someone you love. In other words, having a meaningful, constructive interaction with someone personally important to you, and achieving a positive outcome? I don’t know about you but I’ve been having very little.
Unfortunately, because we have a number of distractions – like television, the radio, movies and music, oh and internet too – when our interactions with people don’t go well we’re comfortable seeking comfort, solace, amusement, distraction, in some sort of media fulfillment. Using phones, or computers…but it’s not very fulfilling is it.
How much, after all, are the heart strings really soothed by someone ‘poking’ you or ‘liking’ a message you post on Facebook. How much do you achieve when you get a ‘nice’ sms?

So it’s not surprising then, if the bulk of our experience of work is firsthand – real, and the scraps go to personal relationships, that the latter [based on emails, sms and facebooking] isn’t really going to thrive. And we are the poorer for it. It’s also easier to let go of a ‘relationship’ based on emails [no real interaction] when, let’s be honest, it can’t be nourishing either party. But in our relationships we might find out truths about one another
- we’re selfish
- we don’t listen
- we don’t care about anything besides ourselves
- we’re always busy with something else
- we’re not there for each other

We might not one to hear those things, but they’re true, and we could all reap the benefits from paying attention to these things, and saying, “Heck, I’m going to be unselfish, I’m going to listen and try to care about stuff I need to care about…and get busy on the things that matter beyond work. Things like health, and fitness, and the emotional context of those around me. I’m going to be there for someone else, and encourage them to be there for me.”
Instead of saying this, we hope for a few breadcrumbs off facebook, a few nourishing quotes from the latest flick, the odd morsel of voyeurism in a book, or a soapie, or gossiping about someone elses misfortune.

So it is easy for me to imagine, against this background, how hypothetical critical issues may be. If we can’t even care about our own issues, how to start with issues of global tenure? How to even know what’s worth focusing on? Work dominates everything that we do [and if we’re honest, it’s not really the work, it’s the money we get for the work we do]. It stands to reason then that our ADD attention spans will never be fixed, never be tuned, in short we can never pay attention or respond to the issues of our time while we still have jobs to do. And hence our issues broaden in scope and intensity, since despite knowing about them, no one responds to mitigate. We’re either to depressed or habituated to ignoring what irks us, or we part of a conventional wisdom that skips like so many stones over the shallowest pools of existence. Maybe we add ‘God’ to the mix, and that gives credibility to us having ‘depth’ or ‘substance’ or being redeemed. Think so? If God walked into the room right now, he’d say, “How dare you speak on my behalf. First get real about your life, then come to me. Because I happen to live in the real world, you don’t.”

But nothing happens. People don’t change, and Nature insists on it. For some time now we have insisted on a bizarre set of circumstances. We insist on remaining car dependent. We insist on maintaining a lifestyle based on credit [buying a house and a car and other stuff with borrowed money]. Millions did this for a long time, and now that system [known as Capitalism, and the major players in this game, theoretically a ‘free market mechanism’ are known as ‘pigs’ or ‘fat cats’.

Unfortunately the worst playerz of the ponzi schemes and swindles managed to break the system [naturally in favour of themselves]. Everyone thinks we can just tighten a few screws and get the machine up and running good as new. Reheheheaaallly? No. That’s what we may want, but there’s a problem. Nature has drawn a line in the sand. When I say Nature I really mean the laws of nature, the laws of the universe. For example, gravity applies equally to you whether you believe in God, blow-up pig balloons, Yoda or the Easter Bunny. Those sort of laws are saying that the ideas people want to perpetuate – like fiat currency, and credit cards, and car loans, and property markets – those laws are now saying: quite jumping up and down. Just because you got off the ground doesn’t mean the law of gravity was suspended in that particular instance. It just means you jumped. Now you’re back on the ground. Try jumping again and pretending gravity doesn’t exist – we’ve got all day.

Ofcourse, people are very smart and think they can worm their way around the laws of nature. Technology see? But Nature says no. Even with technology you can’t make something out of nothing. Energy happens to be quite a tough nut to crack. We’re starting to get it though: that you can’t get energy out of nothing. Or you can, but we are quite far away from understanding or manipulating cold fusion, so the conventional law of the universe applies – you can’t get something out of nothing [like credit cards, property markets, oil pumped out of the ground] forever. Infinite growth is not possible. We – the average person – say, we can, and we will.

The solution to this impasse, in terms of nature, is twofold.
1. kill jobs
2. kill the unemployed

When you’re earning a salary you don’t care about forests in Brazil or swine flu or emissions. You care about getting the best holiday deal for yourself. You care about when your next paycheque comes out. Paycheques of course demand that company profits grow, and company profits depend on people’s demands growing, and growing demand implies suppliers who can supply. Cheaply. To our infinite wants. Somewhere along the line the equation has to break down. We’re now at that point on the line. Maybe you don’t think so. Well, look around.

Our response, typically, is to look at the current scenario and simply say: “When will it be over.” Nature, on the other hand, is glancing at us swarming over the countryside, going, “When will this be over?” The answer is on its way, but ‘over’ will takes several years to become clear, and we’ll only recognize it as the end of an era after it has happened, in a rear view mirror. If we’re around for the luxury of a perspective like that, that is. Even so, I feel the gut feel that we’ve over extended our credit – as a species – is beginning to sink in. As it does we will begin to cast stones of blame. Goldman Sachs? Yup, they’re to blame. But all of us have participated in the con called Capitalism and infinite growth, and getting rich, and using credit cards. The future that we’ve borrowed against has arrived. How much do you owe?