Doug's Darkworld

I have decided to resume blogging on a daily basis, well, a workweekdaily basis. There are a number of reasons for this, the main ones being that my life is very busy and stressful these days and I’m having a hard time putting together the long polished posts I was trying to produce. Also this will let me cover more topics and stay more on top of current events, plus it will encourage me to write more. I love to write. So instead of writing on Yahoo Answers on a daily basis, I might as well write here where I can get feedback from readers. Lastly this will give me more of a chance to blog on topics that readers suggest. So I’m definitely open to suggestions. Well, legal, reasonably polite suggestions. Granted the quality of my posts will go down a bit, but it’s a blog, so I think I and my readers can live with that.

Moving right along, the economy. I found an interesting article in the East Bay Express about an economist, John Williams, who thinks the government is lying about the economic figures it produces. That’s certainly been my suspicion for quite some time. I remember back in the early eighties when the government announced the end of a recession as the “index of leading indicators” started to rise.  They neglected to publicize that they had changed how the index was calculated to get it to do that. Or in the early nineties I saw a program about an accountant who had begun to wonder about the low inflation rate since his morning coffee kept getting more expensive. So he carefully tracked for five years every single thing he spent money on. And his conclusion was that inflation at least in regards to items that people buy on a regular basis in their lives was running about twice the published figures.

I’m not an economist, but it certainly stands to reason that the government would lie, anyone who thinks the USA government is telling the truth about almost anything is deceiving themselves. It’s certainly not debatable that the middle class has been losing ground since the late seventies, and the greatest upwards transfer of wealth in history has been going on since the early eighties. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I certainly think people should be prepared for the worst. That will be the topic of tomorrow’s post. See, this new format is working already.

In a related topic, last weeks baffling market plunge has yet to be explained. If we can’t even explain something like this, how can we predict the future? We can’t, but the point I would like to make here is that the financial markets have grown so large and so complicated and so computer driven that no one really knows what is going on.  I would say this is a recipe for disaster, at the very least it’s an indication that very bad things could happen very quickly and that complacency about the health of the economy is misguided. The other point being that all sorts of aspects of our society have become complex computer driven systems that no one really understands. Since there’s evidence that some previous civilizations have collapsed when their maintenance costs grew so large and complex that no one understood them, again, not reassuring for the “don’t worry, be happy” crowd.

On the plus side there’s so many exciting things going on in science and space exploration I don’t even know where to start. Massive galaxy collisions, escaped giant black holes, taffy on Mars, relativity, and new developments in cosmology have my brain drooling. I’m finally starting to understand how relativity effects us on a  day to day basis, it’s not just an arcane theory with no bearing on real life. I mean, clocks on the ISS run at a different speed than identical clocks on the ground, how cool is that? And with my new daily format, I can rant on all of these topics!

Lastly, I’ve gotten even more into old photographs if that is possible, and now I can post even more of them. Like the picture above of a woman watering her garden in Berlin in the weeks right after the surrender of Germany. And she’s not growing petunias, getting enough food can be a big issue when war rages, something Americans have forgotten in their safe little lives. I’m sure this woman would have laughed if you’d told her five years earlier than in 1945 she’d be growing vegetables to feed her family in the ruins of Berlin with Russian troops marching in the streets. Such is life, such is history, such is the future … and I plan to keep blogging as we march into the unknown no matter what.

Have a great week everyone, blog topic suggestions welcome.

(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s not being used for profit, its use here in no way interferes with the copyright holder’s commercial use of the image, and it’s entirely possible that it is a public domain image. It’s part of a recently discovered trove of post war Berlin pictures and was obtained from this fine site. )