DoomwatchTM vs. Timesizing®

Collapse trends - July, 2000
[Commentary] ©2000 Philip Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

7/29/2000  omens (no one predicted this level of stupidity in the year 2000) -
  1. Board decision on evolution roils an election in Kansas, by Pam Belluck, NYT, front page.
    [Kansas hasn't learned a damn thing since the 1920s.]
    ...The frenzy is the upshot of a vote last August by the Kansas Board of Education, which removed evolution as an explanation for the origin of species from the state's science curriculum. The decision, a 6-to-4 vote with conservative Republicans in the majority, reverberated around the country, where other states have faced recent battles between evolution and creationism.... Now, 5 of 10 board seats are up for election, and in 4 of the 5 there is a primary face-off on Aug. 1, with conservative Republicans who favor the new science standards being challenged by moderate Republicans who oppose them..\.. Tens of thousands of dollars have been raised, some from out of state, whereas previous board candidates raised only a few hundred.... Democrats are switching their party affiliation just to bote for school board candidates in the Republican primary.... Kansas's highest-ranking Republicans - the governor and a U.S. senator - have...endorsed opposing candidates in their own party....
    [Overburdening the 2000-year-old Bible for all the latest scientific answers rolls on.]

  2. Abortion ban kept as plank by the G.O.P., by Robin Toner, NYT, A9.
    Republicans fought passionately today over abortion, with the anti-abortion forces easily prevailing, as the platform committee make its way through a document intended to balance the party's core conservatism.... Abortion rights supporters tried to remove the platform's abortion plank, which called for a ban on the procedure, and tried to insert a provision declaring that the party recognized differing views on the issue.
    [Sounds reasonable, but -]
    Both amendments were overwhelmingly defeated in subcommittee votes, and later by the full [GOP platform] committee, in a debate that highlighted the party's continuing fault lines.
    [The Republican Party continues its formation of the circular firing squad and its flight from intelligence and privacy and separation of Church and State.]
    ...Meribelle Bolton of New Mexico declared: "You have to understand that many of us are under a higher authority thatn the Congress of the United States, the Supreme Court or any state. I am under the authority of the Creator of the universe, and He is pro-life - always has been, always will be." [our capitalization - ed.]...
    [Kate's opinion - "When government starts getting into women's vaginas, to me that's a form of rape." And as many say of rape, it's essentially a power trip. These are poor dumb people who have always been excluded from power, and now they've found a way to feel important and even superior on an unarguable, religion-based basis. And they're pushing it for all they're worth. They have a personal relationship with the Ground of All Being (Tillich) and they know what that Supreme Being suddenly has believed for all time now that (only in the 1950s) a Swedish scientist invented x-ray movies that can show the inside of a pregnant woman. Never mind the dangers of 100% certainty. Never mind the unimaginable carnage that goes on in nature every day, day after day. Never mind humanity's desperate need to shift from quantity to quality as we surge beyond six billion in world population. Never mind the invasion of privacy, the disruption of lives, the forcing of parenthood on unready people, the ongoing costs of unwanted children and the low-quality adults they become. This woman and her buds KNOW that the Creator of the universe is, always has been, and always will be, pro-life (and in particular, absolutely against abortion). This is the mentality that gave us prohibition - that's giving us the drug war and its spiralling prison population, costs, and downstream social deterioration - that gave us the Salem witch hunt in the 1690s. If these people don't want abortions, OK, let them not have one. But let them not dictate to a diverse and increasingly crowded national and world population. Let them rather bolster the positive alternatives, such as freely available contraceptives in all varieties, and a reform and easing of the adoption procedures in this country, so ridiculously redtape-ridden that thousands of Americans look to adopt in Latin America or China rather than run the gauntlet here.]

  3. A G.O.P. overhaul of primary season is killed by Bush - No big-states-last plan - His campaign voiced concern he'd be handicapped in a 2004 re-election run, by Adam Clymer, NYT, front page.
    ...The plan, designed by the Republican National Committee after this year's nominations were settled in March [fully 5 months before the now mere showcase primaries], was intended..\..to allow voters in all states to cast primary ballots that actually counted.... Under the plan, the smallest states would have held their primaries in February, small states in March, medium-size states in April and big states in May....
    [Mitigating consideration - This plan would only have continued the disproportionate weight of the earliest states. It would hardly have allowed voters in all states to cast ballots of equal weight. The only thing that would do that is to have all the primaries on the same day, and that brings up the thought that maybe they should all just be pushed back to where they presumably started before some states got greedy - regular primary day in mid-September. That would have the tremendous advantage of sparing us the boredom of current 12-month and lengthening campaigning.]
7/28/2000  omens - 7/26/2000  omens - 7/26/2000  omens - 7/24/2000  weekend omens - 7/22/2000  omens -
  1. Kuwait: No to parties, Agence France-Presse via NYT, A4.
    Foreign Minister Sheik Sabah al-Ahmed al-Sabah ruled out the setting up of political parties, saying a party system would damage the emirate's unity....
     [That's the bad news. Kuwait will thus bar itself from exploring the vital concept of "loyal opposition" - and freeze its further evolution as a political socioeconomy. But the good news is -]
    Kuwait is the only Persian Gulf monarchy to have an elected Parliament...
     [But more freeze-framing -]
    ...although women may not vote.
     [All of which goes to prove that the world is not primarily different geographic zones, but different evolutionary time zones. Many of the Arab states are still back in the eighth century when it comes to social evolution. That's where most of us were in the heyday of the feudal system with Charlemagne and friends. Some of us are still there. In the mind-boggling diversity that is America today, there are still religious sects that have strict gender-role distinctions, such as certain German sects like Mennonites and Hutterites, and certain pockets of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) such as Saints of the Principle, the "Principle" being the practice of polygyny (one man - several wives), underground and never completely vanished.]

  2. U.S. resists war-crimes court as Canada [complies] - Up north, a wish that the U.S. would stop trying to thwart a bold idea, by Barbara Crossette, NYT, A4.
    [Let's cut to the chase and set the stage from the pointer blowout "Battle over international court" on A2 -]
    Canada ratified the treaty creating the International Criminal Court and announced that it was the first nation to have brought its national laws in line with the new tribunal, while the United States fought to prevent Americans from falling under the court's jurisdiction.
    [But it isn't "the United States." It's just that idiot Jesse Helms. Back to A4 -]
    ...America will not join the court in the foreseeable future because the Senate Foreign Relations Committee - especially its chairman, Sen. Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina - has warned that its members will never approve the treaty....
    [It's high time that North Carolina voters entered the 21st century and got rid of that dinosaur. Don't it strike you as just a bit nuts that anybody who opposed offering our jugular to communist China by freezing us into "free" trade with them got branded "isolationist," while this clown Helms goes on and on keeping the USA out of every good international treaty he can, and nobody has the huebos to call him isolationist and tell him off? We repeat, it's time North Carolina voters smartened up and ditched that dinosaur. And by the way, good for Canada!]

  3. Judge backs Yesmail.com, Bloomberg via Boston Globe, C1.
    ...A unit of Andover, Mass.-based CMGI Inc. will be allowed for now to keep an Internet watchdog from branding [it] a "spammer." A federal judge in Chicago declined to drop a judge's order that bars the Mail Abuse Prevention System LLC [MAPS] from listing Yesmail.com as a company that sends unsolicited bulk mailings over the Internet.
     [Of course, now these morons have made a big stink in court to bar MAPS from telling it like it is, everybody is much more aware of their spamming than if they'd just shut up and accepted their billing.]
    US District Judge Blanche Manning declined to throw out the restraining order while agreeing to hear future arguments over whether to grant an injunction. MAPS's catalog, called the Realtime Blackhole List of alleged spammers, is monitored by thousands of Internet service providers that block the spammers from sending or receiving e-mail.
     [Thanks a million for wasting our time on more spam, "Judge" Manning. Spam, and a few other things like tying up the Internet with entertainment, should be completely banned, so we can optimize it for what it excels in, global information posting and retrieval.]

7/21/2000  omens - 7/20/2000  omens - 7/19/2000  omens -
  1. Your funds - Windfall awaits in tax measure, by Charles Jaffe, Boston Globe, C4.
    While the public has been focused on legislation that could wipe out the marriage penalty and end the estate tax, a lesser-known tax bill would be a windfall to virtually everyone who own mutual funds. The mutual fund shareholders tax relief bill...would allow fund owners to exclude up to $3,000 in capital gains per person...received from funds in which they reinvest those gains, rather than taking the cash....
    [Just what we need - more tax breaks for concentrated wealth while we pile the taxes on circulating wealth via sales taxes and value-added taxes (VATs). As Milton Friedman says, you get more of what you subsidize and less of what you tax. That means this is going to give us amore widening of the income gap and splitting of America, and less economic dynamism to support the hugely concentrated investment capital that depends on that economic dynamism to retain its value - in other words, less stock solidity and more stock bubble. Brilliant.]

  2. Leaving environmental law alone, editorial, NYT, C28.
    ...Last October a federal judge in West Virginia ruled that the practice \of dumping\ the soil and rock above a coal seam...into hollows and streambeds...violated the Clean Water Act, which says that mining and other wastes cannot be used as "fill material" in waterways. Instead of defending the law, the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] proposed to change the definition of "fill material" to eliminate that part of the rule barring the use of waste. This in effect gives the Army Corps of Engineers, which issues fill permits under the Clean Water Act, the authority to bury streams and estuaries with waste..\.. Today is the final day for public comment on [this environmentally destructive] proposed rule change....
    [Looks like the "fox is in the henhouse" and the current captains of the EPA need to be shown the door.]
7/18/2000  omens - 7/14/2000  omens -
  1. [straining to keep Americans feeling on top -]
    Child poverty, violence, death fall to 20-year low, report says - '...But even with teenage pregnancy...we have the highest rate in the developed world.', by Dale Russakoff, Boston Globe, A3.
    ...The report, "America's Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being," compiled by the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, reflects intensifying national attention to what is now the largest generation of children in American history. At 70.2m in 1999, the number of Americans under 18 is now larger than it was at the peak of the baby boom in 1964, although it is a much smaller proportion of the total US population.... The improvements were only incrementally better than last year's results, but reflected steady gains over five or more years in most categories.... Perhaps the most unqualified successes came in child immunization adn decreased teenage pregancy
     [Is this like the "progress" we've been making with the big liberal grocery list of goals and issues? Conservatives are backwards and liberals are scattered, non-strategic and inefficient, and despite the Ted Kennedy's and their lists of random liberal goals, we keep losing ground as a society and an economy - with prosperity for the well-to-do - no trick to that - and longer hours, flat pay and falling benefits for everyone else.]
    The statistics...documented wide disparities by race and income.... Despite the progress, the United States remains well behind the rest of the industrialized world and even some Third World countries in some categories, according to US and international studies.
    ...The Children's Defense Fund, which champions low-income families, said that child poverty is no lower today that in 1980 - before the crack cocaine epidemic, recessions,and AIDS devastated inner cities. "To have the 1980 child poverty rate in a time of record, sustained prosperity [or is it? - ed.] has to be viewed as a failure," said Susanne Martinez, the group's senior VP for policy. "We should not be bragging about that."... Analysts of all persuasions said improved conditions could foster a healthier and less dependent generation.
     [Red flag = "dependent generation"??!]
    ...The United States lags behind more than 20 countries in infant mortality [7.2 infant deaths per 1000 live births in 1998] including Singapore, Israel, and most of Europe. Similarly, while the rate of firearms deaths of US adolescents has declined markedlyl since its peak in 1994, it still [towers over] the rate[s] in Israel and New Zealand.... Among industrialized countries, according to a recent UNICEF report on child poverty, the U.S. has the second highest percentage of children living in households with incomes below 50% of the national median. Mexico's rate was 26%; the U.S., 22.4%. Sweden was the lowest, with 2.6%....
7/09-10/2000  weekend omens - 7/06/2000  omens -
  1. [Qiki]
    Bleak earnings forecasts from tech firms hit stocks - Nasdaq falls 129 as Dow, S&P follow, AP via Boston Globe, C4.

  2. Fungus considered as a tool to kill coca in Columbia - Questions over ecology - Washington and Bogota work on developing a powerful biological herbicide, by Tim Golden, NYT, front page.
    [More twisted ramifications of our self-flagellating drug war - the failure of "Prohibition revisited" - instead of learning from our successful approach to combat nicotine by not criminalizing it but taxing it for its costs, and pushing its costs back on its users and manufacturers.]

  3. The danger point - Earth's warming speeds up, op ed by Bob Herbert, NYT, A27.
    ...In the last 25 years, the rate of warming further accelerated, to about three times [the] rate of increase [from 1860-1975, to] 0.35 degrees Fahrenheit per decade.... Later in this century, using median projections, not even the worst projections, a third of [e.g., the Everglades, will] be gone - drowned under water - if we don't act to stem the buildup of the greenhouse gases [from e.g. car and truck and bus and industrial emissions]....

7/05/2000  omens -
  1. Misery index of UN panel finds Africa is worst off, by Barbara Crossette, NYT, A7.
    ...The Human Development Report examines the availability of schools, clean water and medical care, and whether people can play a role in politics.... This year, 30 of the 35 countries at the bottom of the index were in sub-Saharan Africa.... At the other extreme, the countries with the highest human development indicators are, from the top,
    1. Canada
    2. Norway
    3. the United States
    4. Australia
    5. Iceland
    6. Sweden
    7. Belgium
    8. the Netherlands
    9. Japan, and
    10. Britain....
    [So where's France? And what accounts for its absence in the top 10? Anyway, the new insight from all this is -]
    "Human rights are not [a result] of development," said Mark Malloch Brown, the development program's administrator, in an introduction to the report. "Rather, they are critical to achieving it...." This year's report, which was issued last week, calls for the increased collection and more effective use of statistics to aid in promoting human rights by quantifying more effectively the conditions under which many people live....
     [What was that quote about "if you can't quantify it, it doesn't exist"?]

  2. [And a case in point of Africa's "worst-off-ness" -]
    Zimbabwe's woe: It's the economy - A top problem for a new Parliament: high joblessness - [photo caption:] ...Unemployment in Zimbabwe stands at nearly 50%, and poverty has surged in the last decade, by Rachel Swarns, NYT, A6.
    [Ah, a prime candidate for the Timesizing solution to integrate the population in the poverty-solving project, share what little market-demanded employment there is, implement continuous training right in the workplace, optimize and maximize the consumer base, and achieve maximum healthy and ecologically sensitive economic growth. No mixed-blessing outside "rescues" required.]

  3. [A dose of our own "medicine"? -]
    Europeans are setting merger sites on US targets, by Andrew Sorkin, NYT, C4.
    The conventional wisdom has been that European companies, newly emboldened by a common currency and economic growth at home, would use Wall Street style tactics in crossborder deals unifying the Continent [such as] Vodafone AirTouch's $183B acquisition of Mannesmann [although] Spain's largest telephone company, Telefonica, tried to buy the Dutch telephone operator Royal KPN in May, but was foiled by the Spanish government...over political concerns. A privately proposed merger between Telefonica and British Telecommunications was also thwarted..\..
    But not following the script, European companies have increasingly set their sights on acquisition targets in the United States first [such as -] Said Donald Meltzer, co-head of gloabl mergers and acquisitions at Credit Suisse First Boston in London, "You go where you can do the deals...and acquiring control is still easier in the U.S.".... And European companies that want to increase their size quickly are inclined to go after American companies, which are usually much bigger, before looking at their neighbors....
    [This is stupid because it erodes Europe's insulation from America's greater instability. Europe, with its worktime sharing (shorter workweeks, longer vacations), is stabilized by its employees' greater leverage - which translates into a stabler consumer base. American, with the longest workweeks and the shortest vacation in the developed world, is constantly damaging its consumer base with downsizings. But spending good Euros for volatile American companies is going to infect Europe with American instability - raising the question, Why bother to unite Europe into a countervailing power in the first place if you're going to do that??! Also, as a side issue, the general merger picture looks like this -]
    Overall deal-making [had] a record-breaking first quarter of $1.121 trillion [with American activity at] $568 billion \although\ the global market for deals in the April-June quarter fell by 32% to $760B..\..according to statistics released today by Thomson Financial Securities Data, which tracks mergers and acquisitions. Most of the decline can be attributed to activity from deals in the U.S., which fell to $324B.... European activity remained relatively [stable] at $298B compared with $303B in the earlier quarter.
    Nonetheless, global activity for the first half of the year surpassed previous results....
    As Wall Street banks jockey to rake in the most deals...Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and Goldman Sachs [are] in a virtual tie at the top.

  4. ["Oh nooo, Mr. Bill!"  Not more lawyers!]
    Battle of the graduate schools - Law gains edge on business, and no one knows why - The tight labor market and desperate employers? The strong economy and its alternatives?... ...Or is it popular culture, after 'L.A. Law' and the Simpson trial?, by David Leonhardt, NYT, C1.
    [Naaa, the kids look at the Internet shakeout and ask themselves, "Who makes money even from BAD news?" - (or maybe especially from bad news!). Besides, it's the skills market that's tight, not the labor market. Labor is in gross and growing surplus all over the world. That's the whole effect of inrushing robotization and automation without any automatic way to reduce worktime per human to compensate. And employers in general still aren't "desperate" enough to raise pay, set up training programs, quit mass layoffs, quit targeting 50-60-year-olds, or quit raising their job requirements. They just want more visas so they can scoop in more low-wage pre-trained youngsters from overseas. And as for " low unemployment," at around 4% it's still twice what we regarded as alarmingly high 50 years ago and it's not counting today's problem anyway - desperate people working megahours at multiple low-pay part-time jobs - under-employment. So let's cut the hype. It's really getting old. This is just a "boom" for the rich, the insulated, and those who keep themselves too busy to let the here&now emptiness of their lives sink in.]
7/02/2000  ominous qiki - 7/01/2000  ominous qikis -
  1. ["Bad, but..." -]
    Weak 2nd quarter drags stock indexes down for the year, by Robert Hershey, NYT, B1.
    [But -]
    ..\..The Federal Reserve continued to try to slow the economy.... "We clearly did deflate a good portion of the speculative bubble called the Internet," said Ned Riley Jr., chief investment strategist at State Street Global Advisers in Boston.
     [A better plan would not be to deflate the bubble but to solidify it. Only a non-cosmetic approach like Timesizing can do that, because it reverses the uncontrolled centripetal forces on wealth.]
    ...Investment money has to go somewhere and this time the beneficiaries tended to be drug and other health care companies, real estate investment trusts and utilities. Stocks of semiconductor companies also climbed....
     [In short, we're still just playing the shell game - "here are 3 cup-shaped shells - we place the pea under one, slide them around and mix them up - now guess where's the pea?" Investment money in a state of uncontrolled concentration is still suctioning the markets away from its own necessarily gargantuan investments -1928 revisited. And investment money may indeed "have to go somewhere" but "under the mattress" is also "somewhere" - and that's what happened in 1929. The real trick is to centrifuge wealth out of Wall Street and into wages so some of these sectors actually have sustainable and maybe even growing markets, to really secure and solidify these massive infusions of investment money and minimize the incentive for just stuffing it all under the mattress, as throughout the Depression. Work sharing à la Timesizing accomplishes that.]

  2. U.S. farmers still planting biotech crops - Only a slight dip in use of gene-altered seeds, by David Barboza, NYT, B1.
    ...Genetically altered crops were planted on about 69m acres of American farmland last spring. That compares to about 71m acres planted with the crops a year ago....
    [How quickly agribusiness embraced this how-briefly-tested technology despite its how-long-term implications! As the country song on HillBilly at Harvard said yesterday morning, "...Rich men believe their own lies...."]

For earlier collapse stories, click on the desired date -
  • Jun 16-30/2000.
  • Jun 1-15/2000.
  • May/2000.
  • Apr/2000.
  • Mar/2000.
  • Feb. 16-29/2000.
  • Feb. 1-15/2000.
  • Jan./2000.
  • Dec.16-31/99.
  • Dec.1-15/99.
  • Nov/99.
  • Oct/99.
  • Sep. 16-30/99.
  • Sep. 1-15/99.
  • Aug. 16-31/99.
  • Aug. 1-15/99.
  • July 15-31/99.
  • July 1-14/99.
  • June 16-30/99.
  • June 1-15/99.
  • May 16-31/99.
  • May 1-15/99.
  • Apr.16-30/99.
  • Apr.1-15/99.
  • Mar.16-31/99.
  • Mar.1-15/99.
  • Feb/99.
  • Jan 16-31/99.
  • Jan 1-15/99.
  • Dec/98.
  • Nov/98.
  • Oct/98.
  • Sep 16-30/98.
  • Sep 1-15/98.
  • Aug/98 and before.

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