Thirty nine years ago (1972), the extremely prescient Limits to Growth was published, basically arguing that the Earth’s finite resources, e.g., food, water, air, etc., created a natural limit or “carrying capacity” to sustainable human populations.  At or near the limits of carrying capacity, population growth must cease, or any growth that occurred would have to depend on concomitant increases in efficiency of resource utilization, rather than in quantitative resource usage, in order for the population to be sustainable into the foreseeable future.  The consequences of exceeding carrying capacity were articulated long ago:

What most frequently meets our view (and occasions complaint), is our teeming population: our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly supply us from its natural elements; our wants grow more and more keen, and our complaints more bitter in all mouths, whilst Nature fails in affording us her usual sustenance.  In very deed, pestilence, and famine, and wars, and earthquakes have to be regarded as a remedy for nations, as the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race.

-Tertullian (De Anima)

I love that quote, not just for the Four Horsemen and the equation of “human luxuriance” with the relief of apocalypse, but also the acute observations about wants growing more keen and complaints more bitter, which aptly describes the effects of activating the endocrine stress axis.

Where in the fandangled world is Edger?

Has there been a kidnapping?

here:

I grew up watching action movies starring the big guys.  Stallone, Arnold and Bruce.  It was always the sign of a serious bad ass when they could kill the bad guy while cracking some witty remark.  But that’s the movies, right.  Nobody is that much of an actual bad ass in real life.  Right?

Wrong.  President Barack Obama is that much of a bad ass that he can kill the world’s most wanted villian and put a cocky trust fund billionaire in his place at the same time.  

Socialization in America, take a bow!  You made the top of the wreck list with the little shaver’s pre-adolescent hero worship.  Can’t you sense the curly ones sprouting?  That’s some milk-fed T talking some Hollywood trash and letting Gawd sort it out, baby.

Keep up the excellent work, liberals.  It’s been fun watching you out-flank the wingnuts on targeted assassination.  You’re really living up to the dream.

The mal-distribution of wealth in the United States is at all time highs.  A 2005 study conducted before the largest financial theft in history showed that (1) Americans overwhelmingly prefer a fairer distribution of wealth, and (2) they don’t know how badly wealth is currently distributed.  Here’s the pdf.

The study’s 5,522 participants were randomly selected from a panel of one million people, and were representative of adult Americans in terms of sex ratio, incomes, political leanings (Bush vs. Kerry voters), and geography.  Each participant was given the same definition of wealth:

“Wealth, also known as net worth, is defined as the total value of everything someone owns minus any debt that he or she owes. A person’s net worth includes his or her bank account savings plus the value of other things such as property, stocks, bonds, art, collections, etc., minus the value of things like loans and mortgages.”

Participants were then given a preference test using unlabeled pie charts showing different distributions of wealth across five quintiles.

Americans Prefer Sweden

For the first task, we created three unlabeled pie charts of wealth distributions, one of which depicted a perfectly equal distribution of wealth. Unbeknownst to respondents, a second distribution reflected the wealth distribution in the United States; in order to create a distribution with a level of inequality that clearly fell in between these two charts, we constructed a third pie chart from the income distribution of Sweden (Figure 1).2 We presented respondents with the three pair-wise combinations of these pie charts (in random order) and asked them to choose which nation they would rather join given a “Rawls constraint” for determining a just society (Rawls, 1971):

“In considering this question, imagine that if you joined this nation, you would be randomly assigned to a place in the distribution, so you could end up anywhere in this distribution, from the very richest to the very poorest.”

Here are the results of the pair-wise preference tests (with labels now added to the graphs):

Meanwhile, Redstate embraces community organizers!!!

Lordy, Lordy, Lord!

Surely end-times are upon us when an economist and major investment fund manager accurately perceives and characterizes reality independent of his wish to make oodles of lucre based on a mark-to-fantasy “model” of reality.  To be fair, Wiki characterizes Jeremy Grantham thusly:

Grantham’s investment philosophy can be summarized by his commonly used phrase “reversion to the mean.” Essentially, he believes that all asset classes and markets will revert to mean historical levels from highs and lows. His firm seeks to understand historical changes in markets and predict results for seven years into the future. When there is deviation from historical means (averages), the firm may take an investment position based on a return to the mean. The firm allocates assets based on internal predictions of market direction.[4]

In his own words, Grantham is an anti-bubble investor:

“For the record, I wrote an article for Fortune published in September of 2007 that referred to three “near certainties”: profit margins would come down, the housing market would break, and the risk-premium all over the world would widen, each with severe consequences. You can perhaps only have that degree of confidence if you have been to the history books as much as we have and looked at every bubble and every bust. We have found that there are no exceptions. We are up to 34 completed bubbles. Every single one of them has broken all the way back to the trend that existed prior to the bubble forming, which is a very tough standard. So it’s simply illogical to give up the really high probabilities involved at the asset class level. All the data errors that frighten us all at the individual stock level are washed away at these great aggregations. It’s simply more reliable, higher-quality data.”[5]

Grantham’s latest newsletter (pdf) is absolutely chock-a-block with dire warnings about the Mother of All Bubbles (hydrocarbon-based human population growth) and what can only be referred to as extreme, anti-orthodox, economic heresy.

A pseudonymous “Mr. Y” extemporaneously raps a brand spanking new national beat poetry of “strategic ecosystems” in the pages of Foreign Policy.  

You can read about this other-worldly national strategic narrative here (pdf).  By my reading, the authors failed to substantively address the hard facts of early twenty-first century life, such as our acceleration toward the concrete abutment of carrying capacity, the fundamental breakdown of debt-dollar discipline in the “new world order,” and our complete inability to predict or control the oily regions of the world, never mind comprehending nuclear half-lives on lively tectonic zones, although to their considerable credit, they do acknowledge some of them.  

Thus, my précis, one of many umpteen equally sensible broth-reducing permutations, goes roughly as follows:

Global national security interests are strategic world values toward environmental prosperity.

It does sound vaguely better than continually, blindly, and destructively lashing out at phantom menaces and “axes of evil” as our dominance ebbs and we bleed to death on faraway sands, but without specifics, it’s about as helpful as a well-played saxophone riff in an emergency room.

I didn’t listen to or read Obama’s ration of shit to appease the left.  He’s clearly in campaign mode, and a known liar to boot.  The wreck list at Kos is full of credulousness and praise and donations, whereas Lambert mocked Booman’s swooning response, and Ian Welsh rolled his eyes and welcomed us all to 1970’s style stagflation.  Msnbc’s Ed Schultz said he hallucinated that he wrote Obama’s speech his-own-goddamned-self.  Woot!   Should I mention that Moe Lane of redstate is finally done with President Obama?  Moe’s now on a steady diet of spinach and fear-factor worms to fight to the finish.  “Oy,” as they say.

Meanwhile, whassup with the cheese-eating surrender monkey-frogs?  Punching “above their weight” in Libya and Cote de Ivoire, and shit.  Damn, French people!  Y’all are going post-colonial apeshit, and shit.  Like a real super-power.  Wasn’t that long ago (9/11, 2001) when my homey Olivier and y’all were tittering in American ivory tower elevators about righteous blowback for American over-reach in the very hour when Americans were being consumed in flames.  To the extent that the official 9/11 story is true, which is probably not very, you were right, Olivier, of course, but still, you’re a fucking savage.

The Obama/Power “Responsibility to Protect (R2P)” Doctrine gets thrown under the police SUVs “vehicularly manslaughtered” in the kingdom of Bahrain, home of the US Fifth Fleet:

Washington (CNN) — President Barack Obama outlined a plan Wednesday to cut America’s imports of foreign oil by a third by 2025 — a response to growing global energy demands and instability overseas.

What a crude little pearl of bullshit.  First, even if Obama wins in 2012 (and why would he want to?), he’ll have been out of office for nearly a decade by 2025.  He might as well say that by 2025, every American will be king of their very own earth-like planet, a perpetual fountain of youth, and stables full of trick-ass ponies.  Dude has no imagination.

Worse yet, he grossly underestimates the magnitude of his “planned” cuts to America’s imports of foreign oil.  And it has less to do with the exigencies surrounding peak oil than the fact of peak oil itself.  We might be able to reduce our imports by only one third by 2025, if (a) we were operating on the gross Hubbert curve, and (b) the United States took the vast majority of the remaining oil leaving everyone else high and dry.

Unfortunately, we’re not going to get all of the oil that’s in the ground (gross Hubbert curve) out of the ground.  We grabbed the good, low-hanging fruit first; and are left with the cruder, more difficult to access, and more expensive to extract and process remnants.  Very quickly oil will become more expensive to extract than it’s worth, leaving us operating on the net Hubbert curve, where the declining limb of production is very, very steep; where 2025 indicates world GDP more than halved due to oil depletion alone.  Hell, Obama may be presiding over a terminal credit collapse even before his first term is over, due to the severe and continuing financial malfeasance.

Obama’s “plan” to cut imports by 2025 sounds a lot like my retrospective “plan” to be among the long-term unemployed.  I forget where I read that Americans are like “super-sized crash-test dummies,” but I’m sure that was part of the plan, too.