The USA Oligarchy-Austerity-Schadenfreude Thread

[Bruce Dazzling]

Source.

[justdrew]

Texas judge, caught on video, now confesses to beating disabled daughter
Hillary Adams told KRIS-TV that she posted the video late last month after years of abuse by her father, Aransas County Judge William Adams.

“Waiting this long to publish it has enabled me to look at it with hindsight and not be so caught up in the passion of the moment,” Hillary Adams said. “I think we do, my mother and I, we do need to try to move on past the anger and just concentrate on getting counseling and help.”

“It happened years ago… I apologized,” the judge recalled, adding, “It’s not as bad as it looks on tape.”

“Wow, that is a perfect example of his making light of the situation,” Hillary Adams told the station. “He is a shining example of the way he would treat us. I just can’t believe he would say something like, he doesn’t think it’s a big deal.”

She claimed Judge Adams administered the beating because he did not approve of her illegally downloading music and games.

“She has had ataxic cerebral palsy from birth that led her to a passion for technology, which was strictly forbidden by her father’s backwards views,” Hillary Adams wrote of herself in the video’s description.

The man in the video can be seen repeatedly using a belt to whip the girl in the legs.

“Bend over the fucking bed!” he shouted.

“Stop! Stop!” she screamed.

“Lay down or I’ll spank you in the fucking face!” he warned. “Didn’t I tell you to take that fucking thing off the computer!”

At one point, Judge Adam’s then-wife Hallie Adams took over the spanking duties. When she refused to give the belt back to the judge, he returned with another one.

“I’ll beat you into submission,” he said as he continued to deliver blows. “You want to put some more computer games on? You want some more? Fucking computer. I didn’t even want one in the goddamn house. See all the problems they caused?”

In all, the girl is seen taking at least 20 licks over a 7-minute period.

The disturbing YouTube video has been viewed almost 700,000 times after it became a popular topic on the social media website Reddit.

Reddit users have launched a vigilante campaign against Judge Adams, posting personal details and having pizzas delivered to his house. The local law enforcement has been flooded with phone calls since a “Don’t Re-Elect Judge William Adams” page was created on Facebook.

“We were made aware of the video last night, and there is an ongoing investigation,” police Chief Tim Jayroe told Slate Wednesday.

For her part, Hillary Adams is now trying to curb the unexpected fury of the Internet.

“It is my wish that people stop threatening my father and start offering professional help,” she tweeted. “That’s what he really needs.”

[Pele'sDaughter]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45145370/ns ... rKzSHJdBuE

WASHINGTON — The ranks of America's poorest poor have climbed to a record high — 1 in 15 people — spread widely across metropolitan areas as the housing bust pushed many inner-city poor into suburbs and other outlying places and shriveled jobs and income.

New census data paint a stark portrait of the nation's haves and have-nots at a time when unemployment remains persistently high. It comes a week before the government releases first-ever economic data that will show more Hispanics, elderly and working-age poor have fallen into poverty.

In all, the numbers underscore the breadth and scope by which the downturn has reached further into mainstream America.

"There now really is no unaffected group, except maybe the very top income earners," said Robert Moffitt, a professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University. "Recessions are supposed to be temporary, and when it's over, everything returns to where it was before. But the worry now is that the downturn — which will end eventually — will have long-lasting effects on families who lose jobs, become worse off and can't recover."

Traditional inner-city black ghettos are thinning out and changing, drawing in impoverished Hispanics who have low-wage jobs or are unemployed. Neighborhoods with poverty rates of at least 40 percent are stretching over broader areas, increasing in suburbs at twice the rate of cities.

Once-booming Sun Belt metro areas are now seeing some of the biggest jumps in concentrated poverty.

Signs of a growing divide between rich and poor can be seen in places such as the upscale Miami suburb of Miami Shores, where nannies gather with their charges at a playground nestled between the township's sprawling golf course and soccer fields. The locale is a far cry from where many of them live.

Spreading poverty
One is Mariana Gripaldi, 36, an Argentinian who came to the U.S. about 10 years ago to escape her own country's economic crisis. She and her husband rent a two-bedroom apartment near Biscayne Bay in a middle-class neighborhood at the north end of Miami Beach, far from the chic hotels and stores.

But Gripaldi said in the past two years, the neighborhood has seen an increase in crime.

"The police come sometimes once or twice a night," she said in Spanish. "We are looking for a new place, but it's so expensive. My husband went to look at a place, and it was $1,500 for a two-bedroom, one bath. I don't like the changes, but I don't know if we can move."

About 20.5 million Americans, or 6.7 percent of the U.S. population, make up the poorest poor, defined as those at 50 percent or less of the official poverty level. Those living in deep poverty represent nearly half of the 46.2 million people scraping by below the poverty line. In 2010, the poorest poor meant an income of $5,570 or less for an individual and $11,157 for a family of four.
Story: Seattle superhero Phoenix Jones loses day job after arrest

That 6.7 percent share is the highest in the 35 years that the Census Bureau has maintained such records, surpassing previous highs in 2009 and 1993 of just over 6 percent.

Broken down by states, 40 states and the District of Columbia had increases in the poorest poor since 2007, and none saw decreases. The District of Columbia ranked highest at 10.7 percent, followed by Mississippi and New Mexico. Nevada had the biggest jump, rising from 4.6 percent to 7 percent.

Concentrated poverty also spread wider.

After declining during the 1990s economic boom, the proportion of poor people in large metropolitan areas who lived in high-poverty neighborhoods jumped from 11.2 percent in 2000 to 15.1 percent last year, according to a Brookings Institution analysis released Thursday. Such geographically concentrated poverty in the U.S. is now at the highest since 1990, following a decade of high unemployment and rising energy costs.

Demographic shift
Extreme poverty today continues to be prevalent in the industrial Midwest, including Detroit, Grand Rapids, Mich., and Akron, Ohio, due to a renewed decline in manufacturing. But the biggest growth in high-poverty areas is occurring in newer Sun Belt metro areas such as Las Vegas, Riverside, Calif., and Cape Coral, Fla., after the plummeting housing market wiped out home values and dried up construction jobs.

As a whole, the number of poor in the suburbs who lived in high-poverty neighborhoods rose by 41 percent since 2000, more than double the growth of such city neighborhoods.

Elizabeth Kneebone, a senior research associate at Brookings, described a demographic shift in people living in high-poverty neighborhoods, which have less access to good schools, hospitals and government services. As concentrated poverty spreads to new areas, including suburbs, the residents are now more likely to be white, native-born and high school or college graduates — not the conventional image of high-school dropouts or single mothers in inner-city ghettos.

The more recent broader migration of the U.S. population, including working- and middle-class blacks, to the South and to suburbs helps explain some of the shifts in poverty.

A study by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found that the population of 133 historically black ghettos had dropped 36 percent since 1970, as the U.S. black population growth slowed and many blacks moved to new areas. The newest residents in these ghettos are now more likely to be Hispanic, who have more than tripled their share in the neighborhoods, to 21 percent.

Just over 7 percent of all African-Americans nationwide now live in traditional ghettos, down from 33 percent in 1970.

"As extreme-poverty neighborhoods emerge in more places, that is shifting the general makeup of those populations," said Kneebone, the lead author of the Brookings analysis.

New 2010 poverty data to be released next week by the Census Bureau will show additional demographic changes.

'Sense of powerlessness'
The new supplemental poverty measure for the first time will take into account non-cash aid such as tax credits and food stamps, but also additional everyday costs such as commuting and medical care. Official poverty figures released in September only take into account income before tax deductions.

Based on newly released estimates for 2009, the new measure will show a significant jump in overall poverty. Poverty for Americans 65 and older is on track to nearly double after factoring in rising out-of-pocket medical expenses, from 9 percent to over 15 percent. Poverty increases are also anticipated for the working-age population because of commuting and child-care costs, while child poverty will dip partly due to the positive effect of food stamps.

For the first time, the share of Hispanics living in poverty is expected to surpass that of African-Americans based on the new measure, reflecting in part the lower participation of immigrants and non-English speakers in government aid programs such as housing and food stamps. The 2009 census estimates show 27.6 percent of all Hispanics living in poverty, compared with 23.4 percent for blacks.

Alba Alvarez, 52, a nanny who chatted recently in Miami, said she is lucky because her employer rents an apartment to her and her husband at a low rate in a comfortable neighborhood on the bay. But her adult children, who followed her to the U.S. from Honduras, are having a tougher time.

They initially found work in a regional wholesale fruit and vegetable market that supplies many local supermarkets. But her youngest son recently lost his job, and since he has no legal status, he cannot get any help from the government.

"As a mother, I feel so horrible. There's this sense of powerlessness. I wanted things to be better for them in this country," Alvarez said. "I (recently) suggested my youngest go back to Honduras. It's easier for me to help him there than here, where rent and everything is so expensive."

[Bruce Dazzling]

Texas judge, caught on video, now confesses to beating disabled daughter
Hillary Adams told KRIS-TV that she posted the video late last month after years of abuse by her father, Aransas County Judge William Adams.

“Waiting this long to publish it has enabled me to look at it with hindsight and not be so caught up in the passion of the moment,” Hillary Adams said. “I think we do, my mother and I, we do need to try to move on past the anger and just concentrate on getting counseling and help.”

“It happened years ago… I apologized,” the judge recalled, adding, “It’s not as bad as it looks on tape.”

“Wow, that is a perfect example of his making light of the situation,” Hillary Adams told the station. “He is a shining example of the way he would treat us. I just can’t believe he would say something like, he doesn’t think it’s a big deal.”

She claimed Judge Adams administered the beating because he did not approve of her illegally downloading music and games.

“She has had ataxic cerebral palsy from birth that led her to a passion for technology, which was strictly forbidden by her father’s backwards views,” Hillary Adams wrote of herself in the video’s description.

The man in the video can be seen repeatedly using a belt to whip the girl in the legs.

“Bend over the fucking bed!” he shouted.

“Stop! Stop!” she screamed.

“Lay down or I’ll spank you in the fucking face!” he warned. “Didn’t I tell you to take that fucking thing off the computer!”

At one point, Judge Adam’s then-wife Hallie Adams took over the spanking duties. When she refused to give the belt back to the judge, he returned with another one.

“I’ll beat you into submission,” he said as he continued to deliver blows. “You want to put some more computer games on? You want some more? Fucking computer. I didn’t even want one in the goddamn house. See all the problems they caused?”

In all, the girl is seen taking at least 20 licks over a 7-minute period.

The disturbing YouTube video has been viewed almost 700,000 times after it became a popular topic on the social media website Reddit.

Reddit users have launched a vigilante campaign against Judge Adams, posting personal details and having pizzas delivered to his house. The local law enforcement has been flooded with phone calls since a “Don’t Re-Elect Judge William Adams” page was created on Facebook.

“We were made aware of the video last night, and there is an ongoing investigation,” police Chief Tim Jayroe told Slate Wednesday.

For her part, Hillary Adams is now trying to curb the unexpected fury of the Internet.

“It is my wish that people stop threatening my father and start offering professional help,” she tweeted. “That’s what he really needs.”

Here's the most recent comment on the Youtube video:

"I like when how he left the room she stopped crying...I got far worse....where has parenting gone where kids get to tell parents when and where they get to do...HURRAY FOR HIM!!! Why wait 7 years later to kick up a fuss!!!"

[justdrew]

Texas judge, caught on video, now confesses to beating disabled daughter
Hillary Adams told KRIS-TV that she posted the video late last month after years of abuse by her father, Aransas County Judge William Adams.

Abusive Texas judge claims child abuse victims are ‘fantasizers’
By David Edwards | Wednesday, November 23, 2011

An Aransas County judge, who was caught on tape brutally beating his daughter, has been suspended by the Texas Supreme Court.

Judge William Adams (R) agreed to a suspension without pay while the State Commission on Judicial Conduct investigates the allegations against him, according to The Associated Press. The clerk of the Texas Supreme Court made the suspension official Tuesday.

The judge has not admitted any “guilt, fault or wrongdoing” in agreeing to the suspension.

Adams admitted earlier this month that he was the man in the video seen administering about 20 lashes with his belt to his daughter Hillary Adams, but argued, “It’s not as bad as it looks on tape.”

“Yeah, that’s me,” he later told a local TV reporter. “As you can see, my life’s been made very difficult over this child.”

The suspension comes as attorney David Sibley filed another complaint against the judge for manufacturing laws and claiming the testimony of child abuse victims are never believable.

“Judge Adams created nonexistent law stating that children are ‘fantasizers’ and the statements of children amount to ‘no evidence’,” Sibley wrote in the complaint filed in Aransas County Court at Law Tuesday. “The child’s statements were corroborated in several ways and were believable.”

The attorney added: “Specifically, he concealed the fact that a primary care giver was homicidal, suidical, hallucinatory, psychotic, heavily drugged, etc.”

“The Order signed by Judge Adams that there was no evidence or no investigation is a bald face lie. He is a liar.”

[thurnundtaxis]

Of course something like this would happen, such practical usage of this "food product" is a large part of our national zeitgeist now:

Woman Pepper Sprays Other Black Friday Shoppers

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A woman shot pepper spray to keep shoppers from merchandise she wanted during a Black Friday sale, and 20 people suffered minor injuries, authorities said.
The incident occurred shortly after 10:20 p.m. Thursday in a crowded Los Angeles-area Walmart as shoppers hungry for deals were let inside the store.
Police said the suspect shot the pepper spray when the coverings over the items she wanted were removed.
"Somehow she was trying to use it to gain an upper hand," police Lt. Abel Parga told The Associated Press early Friday.
He said she was apparently after some electronics and used the pepper spray to keep other shoppers at bay.
Officials said 20 people suffered minor injuries. Fire department spokesman Shawn Lenske said the injuries to least 10 of them were due to " rapid crowd movement."
Parga said police were still looking for the woman.
The store remained open and those not affected by the pepper spray continued shopping.

http://news.yahoo.com/woman-pepper-spra ... 09506.html

[crikkett]

^^^Gee, I wonder where she learned that behavior.

[JackRiddler]

Woman Pepper Sprays Other Black Friday Shoppers

SNIP

The store remained open and those not affected by the pepper spray continued shopping.

Oh thank God, the shoppers' triage system works. The terrorists lose again!

PS - Can we find a way to blame this on Occupy?

.

[thurnundtaxis]

^^ Jack! what the hell are you doing sitting around posting on the internet?!

GET OUT AND SHOP, GODDAMMIT!!!!

[82_28]

There's gotta be more to this increasingly chaotic/idiotic "black Friday" bullshit. For instance, I am employed, but wouldn't even dream of venturing out into the retail wilds to buy one single thing today for any reason -- other than beer and food or something. In fact, I know of no one besides people who work in the retail and service industries who even ventures into these dens of stupidity. Maybe it's because I'm a dude and I always normally wait until maybe a day or two before Xmas before I put on appearances of putting any thought into gifts. But that theory doesn't hold either. My lady's not a dude and she doesn't give a shit either.

So I ask, doesn't it seem like THE STORIES (pepper spraying, tramplings) of this craziness follow some kind of a "narrative" line or a line of annual suggestion and all the people, a critical mass of people follow the script -- buy into the waning hype? The media, church, government and retailers all act like this because of the fact the holiday exists and it's "just the way it is". When in truth, the holiday wouldn't even be that big of a deal were it not for all four entities conspiring in an act of symbiosis that must exist lest the empire collapse every given calendar year.

I mean, where the fuck are these people getting the time and money to blow on this bullshit? I don't have it. And what's so important about it? It's like in the doldrums of winter, all revenue streams dried up back in the day and thus Christmas had to be commercialized like a smelling salt to an unconscious victim and thus it was. And on and on and on did the scam of capitalism march, fulfilling its own prophecies. Knowing what I, you and everyone else knows about the "shopping season", December makes or breaks many if not most companies. Thus the entire year is banked on December being its saving grace.

I'm off to head to the mall with my lady to see what she has to put up with today! No shopping, just observation and people watching. . .

[Jeff]

[justdrew]

[justdrew]

Black Friday turned into Red Friday for Jerald Newman, 54, who was out on Thanksgiving evening shopping with his grandson. Consumers prepped themselves for long lines in retail shops, but Newman didn’t think he’d have to brave for a police assault.Newman was shopping at a Wal-Mart store in Buckeye, Arizona late Thursday night along with thousands of other Americans who congregate to celebrate consumerism in a post-holiday bargain hunting binge called Black Friday. Newman says he became overwhelmed by the crowds at the Wal-Mart he was shopping at, so he attempted to lift his grandkid into the air to avoid a mob of violent shoppers. To free his hands, Newman says he placed a video game into his waistband and tried to launch the youngster out of the crowd. Police suspected the man of shoplifting, however, and took him down. Hard.Cell phone cameras began rolling shortly after a police officer swept the legs of Newman, dropping the man to the ground, where he promptly hit the concrete floor of the shopping center face-first. As he laid motionless and silent, cops mounted the man while a pool of blood began to spill out into the store.“Get that on camera. See how fucked up that is,” a bystander is heard yelling at the cops.David Chadd, 24 of Las Vegas, caught the whole thing on his iPhone 4S. He tells RT that hundreds of people were in the entertainment section of Wal-Mart for games that the store only kept six copies of apiece. “People were getting trampled,” says Chadd.“You would have thought there was a cure for cancer in this box,” shopper Skyler Stone adds to a local Fox affiliate. “I mean people were literally going insane."Chad says that police had already handcuffed Newman without incident and were walking him though the store when a cop “hooked the leg of the man and grabbed [him] by the shirt and slammed him face first into the ground.”“The man was instantly knocked out and gushing blood,” adds Chadd, who said that Newman remained unconscious for around ten minutes.“Are you sure that was necessary for shoplifting?” another bystander is heard asking the cops in Chadd’s clip.“Why did you throw him down so far? All he did was shoplift and you threw him down like that?”“He didn’t even shoplift. He just put it under his shirt so he could get out,” responds another customer. To the Fox station, another shopper says that Newman was clearly not trying to shoplist.“Someone call 9-1-1,” another patron jokingly yelled at the cops.“All of a sudden, you see this little boy run up and wailing and yelling, ‘Grandpa, Grandpa,’ and crying his eyes out,”Stone adds to KSAZ.“The worst part was seeing his grandson in tears when he saw his grandfather unconscious on the floor with blood all over,” Chadd adds to RT.After he regained consciousness, Newman was transported to a local hospital; after, he was charged with his alleged crime.The Buckeye police chief has defended the actions of the officers and says that the cell phone footage doesn’t do justice to the entire incident; store surveillance cameras didn’t catch the event on tape. Because force was used in the arrest, however, an investigation will open up while the officer remains on the force.

[Pele'sDaughter]

http://news.yahoo.com/conn-money-manage ... 48786.html

Conn. money managers claim $254M Powerball jackpot

A trio of wealth managers from Greenwich, one of the most affluent towns in America, claimed a Powerball jackpot worth more than a quarter of a billion dollars Monday off a $1 ticket.

Greg Skidmore, Brandon Lacoff and Tim Davidson came forward as the winners of the $254.2 million jackpot and the trustees of The Putnam Avenue Family Trust, which they formed to help manage the money after Davidson bought the winning ticket at a Stamford gas station.

A lawyer who spoke for the group at a news conference said they contacted him immediately after the Nov. 2 drawing and came forward after making plans for the money. He said the trust will take the after-tax lump sum of $103,586,824.51 cash and a significant amount will go to charity.

"Obviously, everybody is extremely excited," said Jason Kurland, the group's attorney. "These numbers are huge. This is going to benefit many people."

Davidson bought a single Quick Pick ticket at the Shippan Point BP gas station in Stamford. A computer chose the random numbers of 12-14-34-39-46, Powerball 36.

The jackpot was the largest ever won in Connecticut and the 12th biggest in Powerball history. The largest previous lottery jackpot in Connecticut was $59.5 million in June 2005.

The three men work at Belpointe, an asset management firm in Greenwich that provides investment advice, much of it to wealthy individuals, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company manages $82 million, according to the SEC.

Skidmore, the company's president and chief investment officer, is a former member of the U.S. sailing team who was once an Olympic hopeful, according to the company's website.

Davidson's online biography says he grew up in Switzerland, France and the United Kingston and started his career in financial markets in 1979 with a French bank. He has worked in New York, Paris and London and is a senior portfolio manager and wealth adviser.

Lacoff, the site says, co-founded Belpointe and owns others businesses and properties on Connecticut's shoreline, including companies that manage the assets of individuals and institutions.

They sat stoically at a conference table sipping bottled water as Kurland answered questions, declining to describe the trio's relationship with one another, how they came to purchase a $1 ticket together or what they would do with the money, except to say that Connecticut charities would benefit from the windfall.

"From the first conversation I had with them, it was very philanthropic," he said. "Charities was definitely, probably No. 1 on their priority list."

As they were leaving the news conference, Skidmore stopped at the microphone to identify himself and his partners and said, "And it feels good," before leaving the room.

Lottery officials had used billboards across the state to urge the ticket holder to come forward as the weeks went by without a winner.

Kurland said the group called him the day after the drawing.

"They thought they were the winners, and then, that night, I think, one of the local TV stations had the numbers, and the Powerball number was wrong on the TV screen, so that put them into a little bit of a tizzy," he said. "But the news, to their credit, corrected it a few hours later, and they were confident they had it."

Ranjit Singh, manager of the BP gas station, said lottery officials called the station at about 10:30 a.m. Monday to announce that the winning ticket had been sold there. The station receives $100,000 for selling the winning ticket.

Singh said he didn't know the winners and doesn't remember selling the winning ticket.

"We're really happy," Singh said. "Christmas is a little early."

[Jeff]

This is very good. Do read it all.

Pepperspraying the future
by John Michael Greer

A whiff of pepper spray rising from a suburban big box store, a breathtakingly absurd comment by an American politician, a breathtakingly cynical statement from a Canadian minister: three scraps of data sent whirling down the wind unnoticed by most of today’s disinformation society, which are also three clues to the exceptionally unwelcome future the industrial world is making for itself. Let’s take them one at a time, in reverse order.

On Monday, as a new round of climate change talks got under way in Durban, Canadian environment minister Peter Kent confirmed earlier media reports that Canada will refuse to accept any further cuts in its carbon dioxide output under the Kyoto treaty. Since Canada is one of only two countries on Earth that uses more energy per capita than the United States—an impressive feat, really, when you think about it—you might be tempted to believe that there was room for some modest cuts, but that notion is nowhere in Kent’s view of the universe. Those same media reports claimed that Canada was preparing to extract itself from the Kyoto treaty altogether; Kent dodged that question, but as Bob Dylan sang a good long time ago, you don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.

The week before, in a debate among candidates for the GOP’s presidential nomination, Newt Gingrich responded to a question about oil supplies by insisting that the United States could easily increase its oil production by four million barrels a day next year, if only those dratted environmentalists in the other party weren’t getting in the way. This absurd claim was quickly and efficiently refuteded by several peak oil writers—Art Berman’s essay over on the Oil Drum is a good example—but outside the peak oil blogosphere, nobody blinked. Never mind that the entire United States only produces 5.9 million barrels a day, that it took twenty years for the Alaska North Slope fields (peak production, 2 million barrels per day) to go from discovery to maximum output, or that the United States has been explored for oil more thoroughly than any other piece of real estate on the planet; the pundits and the public alike nodded and went on to the next question, as though a serious contender for the position of most powerful human being on the planet hadn’t just gone on record claiming that two plus two is whatever you want it to be.

All of which brings us inevitably to a Los Angeles suburb on Thanksgiving, where a woman seems to have peppersprayed her fellow shoppers to get a video game console to put under her Christmas tree.

To be fair, the situation seems to have been a bit more complex than that sounds at first hearing. If you’re still thinking of Thanksgiving Day in America in terms of lavish turkey dinners and visits from relatives, think again. Nowadays it serves mostly to mark the beginning of the year’s big shopping season, and stores on the cutting edge of American marketing open their doors Thanksgiving night to give shoppers their first shot at whatever overpriced gewgaws the media has decreed will be the hot item this year. The store where the pepper spray incident happened was one of these. There, the mob that formed, waiting for the sale to start, turned unruly; there was apparently shoving and shouting, and then the pepper spray came out. According to witnesses, the woman who used it incapacitated enough of the competition to get to one of the video game consoles that were the center of the agitation, hurried off with it to a checkstand, bought the console and got away. Twenty people, some of them children, needed treatment by medics at the scene.

A fair amount of self-important clucking in the American media followed the incident, though I don’t think anyone quite had the bad taste to point out that at least this year nobody was trampled to death by mobs of shoppers—yes, this happens every few years. Stephen Colbert, as usual, landed one in the bull’s-eye by pointing out that the incident would make a great video game. He’s right enough that I wouldn’t be the least surprised if Black Friday, in which shoppers punch, spray, stab, and shoot each other to get choice gifts for Christmas, turns out to be the hot new video game sensation next year and, no doubt, inspires pepper sprayings and tramplings of its own.

What all these three news stories have in common is that they display an attitude—it could as well be described as a belief, or even a religion—that treats the satisfaction of short term cravings for material goods as the only thing that really matters. The shopper with her pepper spray, the politician with his absurd claim, and the government with its blind disregard for national survival, each acted as though getting the stuff is all that matters, and any obstacle in the way—whether the obstacle was other shoppers, the laws of physics and geology, or the fate of Canada’s future generations—was an irrelevance to be brushed aside by any available means.

In recent years, there’s been a fair amount of intellectual effort devoted to the attempt to prove that this is inevitably how human beings will act, and this effort has had an influence well beyond the borders of, say, cognitive neuroscience. Glance over anything the peak oil blogosphere has to say about the absurdity of today’s public policies on energy, the environment, or the economy, for example, and it’s a safe bet that somebody will post a comment insisting that this is how human beings always behave. In point of historical fact, though, this is far from true. The popularity of the monastic life across so many cultures and centuries is hard to square with such claims; it has not been uncommon for anything up to ten per cent of the population of some countries and times to embrace lives of poverty, celibacy and discipline in a monastic setting. Clearly, whatever drives push our species in the direction of the satisfaction of short term cravings are not quite as omnipotent as they’ve been made out to be.

...

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2 ... g-future-0