Thursday, February 1, 2018

Asteroids and Financial Markets


There have been quite a few asteroids in the news recently as our improving space-based detection systems reveal the precarity of life on Earth as objects zip past us at alarming speeds.

Life is precarious. Yet the revelation of our utter contingency has not made us value life more but rather seems to coincide with the growth of a death-cult.

The death cult is everywhere we look. It is a logic of government that extracts and exploits with no regard for future consequences. The death cult is rationalized in scientific creeds that falsely represent precarious life as robust, individualized, atomistic and brook no contradiction.

Hence, it is hardly surprising that our medical practice is as likely to kill, as save, you.  Indeed, this difficult truth is illustrated in a recent news article acknowledging that chemotherapy and radiation may produce more harm than help:
Lagnado, Lucette Jan 30 2018 Chemo: More Help or Harm? The Wall Street Journal, pp. A9-10.
The brute unwillingness to acknowledge life's precarity by our medical-radiation-chemical industries is surely our death sentence, albeit a likely protracted affair and one that will be fraught with conflict because some institutions still produce resistors committed to formally espoused values, such as the medical industry's formal vow to protect life. 


The circulation of the logic of the death-cult is not restricted to the aforementioned industries. The logic of unsustainable extraction and exploitation permeates our so-called impartial financial markets.

I read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and realized he was not blind to the forces of market corruption. Morality is key to his idealized market.

Of course, his idealized market has never been realized on a national scale and trust and morality in markets seem to be far more precarious than life itself.  For example, Reuters is reporting that rampant fraud in financial markets remains in the form of "spoofing" years after post-recession financial reforms:
Michelle Price (2018, January 29). U.S. authorities due to make arrests in futures 'spoofing' probe: sources. Reuters, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-cftc-arrests/u-s-authorities-due-to-make-arrests-in-futures-spoofing-probe-sources-idUSKBN1FI19J

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. authorities were set to arrest several people on Monday in connection with a federal investigation into so-called spoofing and manipulation in the U.S. futures market by three European banks, three people with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.
Spoofing is a form of FRAUD that is easily enacted when high-frequency traders can operate more quickly than the average speed of market transactions. The biggest and most powerful financial oligarchs have super-fast computers located in close-proximity to exchanges and specially-developed algorithms that enable market scalping and financial warfare.

I documented these strategies of extraction and dispossession in my recent book Crisis Communication, Liberal Democracy and Ecological Sustainability (sorry- priced outrageously by the publisher). My argument can also be found in this essay The Biopolitics of Transactional Capitalism

What I argue in these publications is that life has no value at all beyond its brute exploitation for key societal institutions. This condition is not driven by a new logic. Slavery has often been pursued by human civilizations. Yet, in the past wealth was primarily produced through the productive capacities of people (in land and in factories) so life's biological necessities could not be utterly disregarded.

The ascendancy of wealth-production mechanisms that do not rely directly on life for exploitation - as illustrated by the spoofing of high-frequency trading - signifies a de-vitalization of extraction.

De-vitalized extraction is the step before extraction from death itself, a practice illustrated in death bonds (see explanation here https://www.investopedia.com/articles/bonds/08/death-bonds-portfolio.asp), as well as in certain "medical" applications that profit industry while increasing suffering and death.

The death cult circulates everywhere. It is not simply entrenched in our military-industrial complex. It circulates powerfully in many other institutions and its expressions of utter disregard for sustainable life seem to be growing exponentially.

I cannot help but wonder whether this utter disregard, this growing detachment from the limits of our materialities, is being driven by some foreknowledge of impending doom.

I know this seems foolish to imagine that wanton disregard is being fueled by foreknowledge, but I find it otherwise hard to understand why humanity would have ceded to the death cult so absolutely.

I am truly perplexed.



9 comments:

  1. The world, and human race, is in a state of collective karma now. The world is so radioactive, it will destroy our dna based genome in 2 to 3 generations. All we can do, is atone. Our consciousness will go to another part of the universe.
    One would think, that in our final days, we would give-up the death-cult mania. We would have compassion, for our children. We would see that the ego is a complete delusion. We would give-up on the anger, fear, hate, and anxiety and live out our few days, with nurturing, and some sense, that we are in this together. We would see the survival of the fittest paradigm, is total bullshit.
    It does not apply anymore. If we would have worked, together more in sustainable communities, it might not have happened. If we could have risen up, against the generals and oligarchs a generation or two ago, it may not have happened, maybe we could have had a shot at that asteroid.

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  2. Why do people smoke pot, and tobacco continuously? It is, obviously, killing them. Why do fanatical religious groups, yearn for armageddon? Why do people support huge military apparatuses, that only make them less safe, and poison everything? Why do people wupport governments, that are destabalizing societies, making large amounts of people desperate, and making things generally far more chaotic, and unsafe? I think you are right majia. There is an underlying irrationality there that psychotic generals, conmen, politicians, oligarchs tap into. There are a lot of mass killings going on in this miasma.

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  3. I think it is because everything is poisoned. There is some underlying organic, disruption of our brains, that is making us crazy. Look at all the birds, with plastic stuck in their guts. Most of us, born before 1995 breathed tetraethyl lead constantly. We all, have been effected by the massive, introduction of sythetic chemicals and radionuclides,  into the biosphere since 1945.
    Since the industrial revolution, our air has been flooded with radium and other heavy metals, from fossil fuel burning. I think our underlying physiological weakness and neulogical deteriotation,  from poisoning, have made us much more vulnerable to exploitation by stock market frauds, and their bought crony politicians. Exploitation by psychotic, evil monkey generals, by evil murderous oligarchs. Putin, for example is raiding his old-aged pension funds, to finance his own personal nuclear energy company, Rosatom. He is absconding with the funds,  to build dangerous, unstable nuclear reactors, all over the world. All over the world, in third-world countries that do not need them, nor can they afford them.

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  4. Neurobiology of suicide


    Abstract

    Objective

    Suicide is a major public health concern as each year 30000 people die by suicide in the USA alone. In the teenage population, it is the second leading cause of death. There have been extensive studies of psychosocial factors associated with suicide and suicidal behavior. However, very little is known about the neurobiology of suicide. Recent research has provided some understanding of the neurobiology of suicide, which is the topic of this review.
    Methods

    Neurobiology of suicide has been studied using peripheral tissues such as platelets, lymphocytes, and cerebrospinal fluid obtained from suicidal patients or from the postmortem brains of suicide victims.
    Results

    These studies have provided encouraging information with regard to the neurobiology of suicide. They show an abnormality of the serotonergic mechanism, such as increased serotonin receptor subtypes and decreased serotonin metabolites (e.g. 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid). These studies also suggest abnormalities of receptor-linked signaling mechanisms such as phosphoinositide and adenylyl cyclase. Other biological systems that appear to be dysregulated in suicide involve the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis, and neurotrophins and neurotrophin receptors. More recently, several studies have also indicated abnormalities of neuroimmune functions in suicide.
    Conclusions

    Some encouraging information emerged from the present review, primarily related to some of the neurobiological mechanisms mentioned above. It is hoped that neurobiological studies may eventually result in the identification of appropriate biomarkers for suicidal behavior as well as appropriate therapeutic targets for its treatment.

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  5. Maybe the asteroid will come. Maybe it will not. There will be major reactor fuel fires and meltdowns, in the next 5 years. The catastrophes will make people beg for an asterois, to give us quick escape from misery.

    Teri

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  6. I would try to get people to listen, about fukushima. Some would say, "We could all die from a meteor, tomorrow, why should I worry about Fukushima?" Well, Fukushima is still going on. As bad as ever. Hundreds of dangerous old reactors, still opened, generating massive waste. Spewing tritium.
    The guys on easter island , probably had no  ancient memory of asteroids. They were just nuts. Sounds like more bs memes from the KOCH AND MERCER minions, to get people to accept these turds exploitation, domination, and genocide.  Remember when trumpo, said he would clear the swamp. He then hired millionairs and billionair, scumbag psychos of the worst and most detached variety. He said he could not work with commoners or poor people. Trumpo has been bankrupt 4 times, at taxpayers expense. Cannot even think of a more brazen, ignorant, corrupt, weasel and criminal.  https://www.opednews.com/articles/Why-the-Majority-of-Americ-by-Jim-Hightower-American-Capitalism_Corporations_Taxes_Trump-Cruelty-180203-813.html

    Hardcore pathological liar. 

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  7. The altright, trump, remind me of the aliens in Steven King's Dreamcatchers. Only this time they won!

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  8. Trump will bring in 20 or 30 million Japanese and Chinese laborers, to build a few thousand small nuclear reactors. The Japanese will be used, to build a hundred or so new, large reactors. Trump will also subcontract a few thousand, Russian nuclear asses, to build more nuclear bombs. That is how Trump operates. A supreme, liar and criminal.

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