A collection of essays on society, environment, politics and economics written between 2012 and 2014. This is the second book in the Collapse Chronicles which are compilations of blog posts to ClubOrlov. I have a quoted from three of those essays here.
…[U]nder Putin, Russia has stood up to foreign interests and curbed the power of foreign companies in the crucial oil and gas business. And for this the U.S. officialdom will never forgive them. Post-Soviet Russia was supposed to become an impoverished banana republic ruled by a pliant Western-controlled élite and serve as a playground for Western corporations, its mineral wealth there for the taking. The fact that this has failed to happen (largely thanks to Vladimir Putin) is an affront to everything the U.S. stands for and holds sacred.
This, by the way, explains the nature of the U.S. campaign to vilify Putin. He has been singled out for painting with the archvillain brush not because he is a ruthless dictator (the world is full of ruthless dictators that the U.S. likes very much and actively supports, provided they play ball). The reason is that Putin, of all the national leaders out there, actually gave a reasoned, principled response to attempts at foreign political and corporate domination of Russia: something he has called “sovereign democracy.” Now, the word “democracy” gets thrown around a lot but means ever so little (more on that in a moment) but the word “sovereign” actually does carry a meaning: there is a rather short list of nation-states that one can still call fully sovereign, and all of them are, in the eyes of the Washington régime, pariah states: Iran, North Korea, Libya and Syria (formerly). They are all on Washington’s target list for régime change. — The Image of the Enemy
With education, the monkey trap was assembled in stages. First, the value of a college education was inflated to the point where only college graduates could get the remaining good jobs. Next, college education was pronounced a birthright, and financial aid was extended to make it universally accessible, on terms that amount to a lifetime of indentured servitude. Next, the price of higher education was inflated out of all proportion to its value, to cash in on the bonanza of free government-guaranteed money. And so now we have a ridiculously overpriced higher education system that is considered mandatory even though for most people earning a degree no longer guarantees an income sufficient to repay the loans. The obvious solution is to do away with the now-meaningless college degrees and fall back on certificates, licenses, apprenticeships and other ways of getting people directly into the workplace. But that’s long-term thinking, you see; short-term thinking is to make higher education even more mandatory… — Monkey Trap Nation
[At] the 1930 American Communist convention, it was proclaimed that “the storm of the economic crisis in the United States blew down the house of cards of American exceptionalism.” While the USSR surged forward, the U.S. wallowed in the mire of the Great Depression and recovered economically only thanks to the gigantic windfall of Word War II, at the end of which it remained as the only industrial nation that hadn’t been bombed to smithereens, flush with natural resources, and with a new-found egalitarian attitude borne of wartime patriotism and a newfound ability to understand each other thanks to the installation of Dayton, Ohio English as the nation’s official dialect. The U.S. reaped another, much smaller windfall with the peaceful collapse and dismantlement of the USSR in 1990, extending its life expectancy by perhaps a decade.
But now this period is well and truly over: the resource base is depleted, the industrial base is in shambles, and society is rapidly degenerating from a class society to a caste society, with a disappearing middle class, an unbridgeable chasm between the haves and the have-nots and the lowest social mobility of any developed nation. — “American” Exceptionalism
I have been using a System76 Galago Pro for two years and noticed a couple months ago that the battery was discharging much faster than it had before. I did a battery health check and it showed that it was not in great health but not going to die anytime soon.
I contacted System 76 and they agreed with me but said that a new battery would help. So I bought one from them; a very expensive learning experience. I’ll buy any future replacement batteries for some third party provider. Received it promptly at a great shipping cost which I will also try to avoid in the future.
This past Saturday I installed it. It took me two or three times a long as the instructions claimed but I got it done. The new battery was completely discharged so I had it on a charger for about three hours. Then from 100% it went to about 50% in the same 1.5 hours that the old battery was giving me a low battery warning. So it is an improvement but I’m not sure that it is a good as when I first got the laptop which System 76 claimed would last four hours. I think some of their recent ‘updates’ have made for what was poor battery life to be worse. I also read that “Linux has a lot of problems with battery management on laptops at the moment.”
We had rain during the night which would leave my walking routes muddy. Therefor, I canceled the morning walk. The forecast is for more rain and with the cloud cover it looked like that might happen. Probably will not do a mid day walk either with just potty walks for Erik. I needed a rest day so this gave me a good reason to make it today.