Mandatory Retirement

According to brookings.edu: 

 "Presidents of the regional Fed banks can serve until they’re 65—unless appointed after turning 55, in which case they can serve for a maximum of 10 years or until they’re 75, whichever comes first."

From pbs.org: "FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker said in a letter to two key senators that pilot fitness is critical to safety, and the agency should be able to create safeguards before raising the age limit to a proposed 67 from the current 65."

Federaltimes.com:

"CSRS and FERS law enforcement officers and firefighters are subject to mandatory retirement at age 57 if they have 20 years of service. An agency head can retain an LEO until age 60 if he finds that the employee’s continued service is in the public interest. The FBI has limited authority to raise the age to 65. While a CSRS LEO can be retained above age 60, it may only do so with the Office of Personnel Management’s permission. A FERS LEO may only be retained with the permission of the president.

Air traffic controllers must be separated from the service on the last day of the month in which they become age 56. However, that requirement doesn’t apply to someone appointed as an ATC by the Department of Transportation before May 16, 1972, or by the Defense Department before Sept. 12, 1980.

Foreign service officers are mandatorily retired at age 65."

 

It's Gotta Be Climate Change

One of the latest and most significant events blamed on climate change is turbulence affecting commercial aircraft. A Singapore Airlines flight from London to Singapore encountered turbulence so serious that about 70 passengers were injured and one died, apparently of a heart attack. US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has said publically that climate change is the culprit for an increasing amount of air turbulence that must affect commercial aircraft at an altitude of 30,000 ft. since that's where they fly. The Transportation Secretary is a graduate of Harvard and Oxford Universities but his fields of study were in politics and economics rather than atmospheric physics.

 “Looking forward into the future, in terms of managing water resources and flood control, we should be anticipating that the wetter extremes will be wetter and the dry extremes will get drier,” said Richard Seager, a climate scientist at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University....

According to the American Psychological Association:    

• Gender-based violence: In 2022, researchers at the University of Cambridge analyzed 41 studies that explored several types of extreme weather events, such as storms, floods, droughts, heatwaves, and wildfires. They found that gender-based violence appears to be exacerbated by extreme weather and climate events. Contributing factors include economic shock, social instability, enabling environments, and stress.
• Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD): Survivors of the 2018 Camp Fire, one of the deadliest and most destructive wildfires in California history, had rates of PTSD on par with war veterans, and they were at increased risk for depression and anxiety, according to a 2021 study from the University of California–San Diego. Survivors of hurricanes and floods suffer similar rates of depression and PTSD.
• Suicide: The economic impacts of droughts lead to increases in suicide, particularly among farmers. Further, authors of a 2018 study in the journal Nature predicted warmer temperatures could lead to as many as 40,000 additional suicides in the United States and Mexico by 2050.
• Aggression: Higher temperatures lead to more aggressive behaviors. A 2021 study published in the Journal of Public Economics found that violent crime in Los Angeles increased by 5.7% on days when temperatures rose above 85°F compared with cooler days.
• Anxiety: Even some Americans who have not been directly affected by a climate disaster are experiencing climate anxiety—an overwhelming sense of fear, sadness, and dread in the face of a warming planet or anxiety and worry about climate change and its effects. A 2020 APA survey found that 56% of U.S. adults said climate change is the most important issue facing the world today. Nearly half of young adults ages 18 to 34 said they felt stress over climate change in their daily lives.  ____________________ Edward Narayan of the University of Queensland in Australia points out that pets are also likely to suffer adverse effects from climate change and that their owners or partners or whatever should be aware of the discomfort faced by tropical fish and birds, as well as dogs and cats. Let's face it, climate change is probably also putting pressure on inanimate factors in our lives. Our automobiles are likely running less efficiently, the color on our television sets may be fading, the songs on the radio just don't seem as great as they once did. This climate change thing is a bear.
  

Demolishing German Industry

According to Tilak Doshi, writing in Forbes:

 "The heavy costs of suppressing the use of fossil fuels while promoting intermittent, weather-dependent renewable energy technologies over the past decade has been disguised and diffused by hidden costs and fiscal transfers to powerful constituencies. But over time, “net zero” climate policies have become increasingly unbearable for ordinary people as they reach beyond the power sector to cover agriculture, transport, homes, and buildings."

This isn't just an accurate picture of what is soon to emerge in the US but also one that describes the current situation in Germany because both countries seem to share some of the same evolving values.

The imaginary climate crisis has been augmented not only by the eco-paranoid but also even more by the corporate/government axis that stands to profit from the supposed remedies. The abandonment of hydrocarbon energy, really impossible at any meaningful level, is more than anything a vast transfer of wealth from one group of industrialists to another. 

 

 

FAO On Food and Climate Change

accessagric.com 

Mr Kaveh Zahedi, the Director of the Office of Climate Change, Biodiversity and Environment at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), of the United Nations has made a trip to Japan to attend an environmental meeting in Tokyo.

He's there to impress the locals with the importance of addressing agricultural policies in the context of climate change. He says: “agriculture is also on the front line of the impact of climate change. It contributes to and is impacted by climate change.” That sounds bad.

If 700 million are facing hunger it looks like more effective agriculture is necessary. But agriculture is part of the increase of climate change so more food will spell less food. Worse still, an FAO analysis has found that the funds needed to combat climate change have decreased.

Mr. Zahedi notes that the Japanese are experienced at doing more with less. His interview seems to be just more climate change boiler plate.

The reality is that localized weather events aren't indicative of climate change, which occurs over an extended period of time greater than even several lifetimes. Floods in southern Brazil don't mean anything in regard to the climate of Europe a century from now. Individuals like Mr. Zahedi and the institutions they represent owe their existence to the climate anxiety that they seek to perpetuate. That's their job, it's how they "earn" a living.

Klaus Schwab To Step Aside As WEF Executive Chairman

The 86 year-old founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum will relinquish a post that he's held for 64% of his life and become chairman of the WEF's board of trustees by January, 2025.

 

 time.com

A German citizen, Schwab was educated in mechanical engineering in both Germany and Switzerland, also receiving a Master in Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 1967.   Schwab was professor of business policy at the  University of Geneva from 1972 to 2003, and since then has been an honorary professor there. He formed the WEF in 1971.

While Schwab was actually a disciple of Canadian Maurice Strong, his tenure in the public eye and continuing attempt to make seminal changes in society  through "stakeholder capitalism" somewhat resembles that of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, an educated physicist, and his "transcendental meditation" and Science of Creative Intelligence, which was also located in Switzerland.

 

 thefamouspeople.com

The difference is that the Maharishi's "TM" is an entirely voluntary movement that attracted celebrities as well as government figures and ordinary people. Naturally, his successes inspired investigations and criticism. The Maharishi died in 2008 at age 90 but many of his ideas are embraced to this day, his books are still available, and educational institutions inspired by his teachings continue to exist, albeit with skepticism. 

In normal human terms, Schwab's existence is likely to come to an end soon. While he oversees an organization that rewards him with serious riches, 1 million Swiss francs annually, the odds that his ideas will continue to percolate long into the future, that The Fourth Industrial Revolution will be easily available, seems poor. While it's inevitable that technology will continue to change, human beings will probably remain, at least physically, the same as ever. Only their ideas and beliefs will be affected by whatever industrial revolution comes along. 

 

Open AI Being Suied For Copyright Infringement

The very substance of artificial intelligence and large language models has come under attack from The Authors Guild, an organization that exists to promote free speech, fair contracts and copyright. They are suing Open AI for using copyrighted material, ie. over 100,000 copyrighted books used to "train" Chat GPT-3. According to Digital Information World, Open AI was well aware of the illegality of what they were doing, deleted the data sets used and the researchers involved in the project are no longer available.

It's not hard to imagine that a successful suit against Open AI and other artificial intelligence efforts might throw a giant monkey wrench into the AI machinery. Certainly the opposing sides might come to an amicable and financially rewarding agreement on the matter but the possibility that negotiations could drag on for an extended period could slow the adoption of what seems to be the greatest invention since beer.

Not everyone sees AI and large language models as an unalloyed blessing. This article by Garrison Lovely points out that nobody can really balance the risk-reward situation if AI is employed as currently visualized.

Open AI update:  News Corp, owner of the Wall Street Journal and New York Post, has reached an agreement with generative artificial intelligence Open AI allowing the use of published news to answer questions and train its system. It could mean $250 million dollars for News Corp over the next 5 years and include cash and credits for the use of the Open AI technology.

It seems as though News Corp, if making use of Open AI, will be regurgitating its own work, as well as that of other publications.

 

Is It Really Climate Change?

Al Jazeera, an alternative on-line media presence with a somewhat different perspective on world affairs, has digitally published an essay on how "climate change pushes indigenous people from their land".

Perhaps the author of the piece and the writer of the headline occupy different offices but the substance of the article and its headline don't reflect the same facts.

While Neil Giardino's article points out the many problems indigenous peoples face, at least those in the Amazon basin, few, if any, are caused by the inevitable changes in climate. In fact, practically all of them are the result of the encroachment of 21st century society, economics and technology. The Ashaninka of eastern Peru, residents of the remote upper Amazon for who knows how long, are rightly devastated that their corner of the world is being over run by loggers, cattlemen, miners and all the other representatives of modernity. The reality is that they and their ancestors far back in time faced and overcame many episodes of climate change. They may not be able to overcome an invasion of technologically superior invaders. No new world culture has done so.

 

 Pachaka Samaniego, right, and her family search for water in the Amazon rainforest [Neil Giardino/Al Jazeera]

Furthermore, like all victims of the colonial era, now in its 532nd year, they have quickly adopted the most useful items of the invader technology. The lady cooks in a modern metal pot, something that the Ashaninka have never been able to produce. Of course no small society has ever been able to produce such items. The European descendants  who live in a place like Minot, North Dakota can't manufacture their own pots and pans either. They buy them from distant strangers. 

Giardino mentions that many of the Amazon indigenous have moved to the big cities in South America, like that was a bad thing. Everywhere, rurals have pulled up stakes and left for the urban mega-cities where they hope to make things better for themselves and their families, at least in economic terms. Climate has nothing to do with it.

The US has had, and continues to have, similar issues with its now tiny indigenous population, once in the many millions, which has been swindled of its land and banished to the least hospitable and infertile areas of the continent, which includes the most dangerous areas of major cities as well as deserts. 

The point is that climate change isn't a real burden on the Ashaninka or the Masai or the Aborigines or the Comanches. In their pre-colonial state they would have been unlikely to have even noticed a cooler winter or a warmer summer. They can't fail to notice the social and economic changes forcing their way into the once pre-technological era in which they lived.