Paul Craig Roberts" Christmas Column 2017: The Greatest Gift Of All

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

Dear Donors, thank you for your support in 2017. Although you have kept me working yet another year, I find it encouraging that there are some Americans who can think independently and who want to know. As Margaret Mead said, it only takes a few determined people to change the world. Perhaps some of you will be those people.

 

My traditional Christmas column goes back to sometime in the 1990s when I was a newspaper columnist. It has been widely reprinted at home and abroad. Every year two or three readers write to educate me that religion is the source of wars and persecutions. These readers confuse religion with mankind’s abuse of institutions, religious or otherwise. The United States has democratic institutions and legal institutions to protect civil liberties. Nevertheless, we now have a police state. Shall I argue that democracy and civil liberty are the causes of police states?

Some readers also are confused about hypocrisy. There is a vast difference between proclaiming moral principles that one might fail to live up to and proclaiming immoral principles that are all too easy to keep.

 

Liberty is a human achievement. We have it, or had it, because those who believed in it fought to achieve it. As I explain in my Christmas column, people were able to fight for liberty because Christianity empowered the individual.

 

The other cornerstone of our culture is the Constitution. Indeed, the United States is the Constitution. Without the Constitution, the United States is a different country, and Americans a different people. This is why assaults on the Constitution by the regimes in Washington are assaults on America that are far worse than any assaults by terrorists. There is not much that we can do about these assaults, but we should not through ignorance enable the assaults or believe the government’s claim that safety requires the curtailment of civil liberty.

 

In a spirit of goodwill, I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a successful New Year.

 

Paul Craig Roberts

The Greatest Gift For All

Christmas is a time of traditions. If you have found time in the rush before Christmas to decorate a tree, you are sharing in a relatively new tradition. Although the Christmas tree has ancient roots, at the beginning of the 20th century only 1 in 5 American families put up a tree. It was 1920 before the Christmas tree became the hallmark of the season. Calvin Coolidge was the first President to light a national Christmas tree on the White House lawn.

Gifts are another shared custom. This tradition comes from the wise men or three kings who brought gifts to baby Jesus. When I was a kid, gifts were more modest than they are now, but even then people were complaining about the commercialization of Christmas. We have grown accustomed to the commercialization. Christmas sales are the backbone of many businesses. Gift giving causes us to remember others and to take time from our harried lives to give them thought.

The decorations and gifts of Christmas are one of our connections to a Christian culture that has held Western civilization together for 2,000 years.

In our culture the individual counts. This permits an individual person to put his or her foot down, to take a stand on principle, to become a reformer and to take on injustice.

This empowerment of the individual is unique to Western civilization. It has made the individual a citizen equal in rights to all other citizens, protected from tyrannical government by the rule of law and free speech. These achievements are the products of centuries of struggle, but they all flow from the teaching that God so values the individual’s soul that he sent his son to die so we might live. By so elevating the individual, Christianity gave him a voice.

Formerly only those with power had a voice. But in Western civilization people with integrity have a voice. So do people with a sense of justice, of honor, of duty, of fair play. Reformers can reform, investors can invest, and entrepreneurs can create commercial enterprises, new products and new occupations.

The result was a land of opportunity. The United States attracted immigrants who shared our values and reflected them in their own lives. Our culture was absorbed by a diverse people who became one.

In recent decades we have lost sight of the historic achievement that empowered the individual. The religious, legal and political roots of this great achievement are no longer reverently taught in high schools, colleges and universities or respected by our government. The voices that reach us through the millennia and connect us to our culture are being silenced by “Identity Politics,” “political correctness” and “the war on terror.” Prayer has been driven from schools and Christian religious symbols from public life. Constitutional protections have been diminished by hegemonic political ambitions. Indefinite detention, torture, and murder are now acknowledged practices of the United States government. The historic achievement of due process has been rolled back. Tyranny has re-emerged.

Diversity at home and hegemony abroad are consuming values and are dismantling the culture and the rule of law. There is plenty of room for cultural diversity in the world, but not within a single country. A Tower of Babel has no culture. A person cannot be a Christian one day, a pagan the next and a Muslim the day after. A hodgepodge of cultural and religious values provides no basis for law – except the raw power of the pre-Christian past.

All Americans have a huge stake in Christianity. Whether or not we are individually believers in Christ, we are beneficiaries of the moral doctrine that has curbed power and protected the weak.

Power is the horse ridden by evil. In the 20th century the horse was ridden hard, and the 21st century shows an increase in pace. Millions of people were exterminated in the 20th century by National Socialists in Germany and by Soviet and Chinese communists simply because they were members of a race or class that had been demonized by intellectuals and political authority. In the beginning years of the 21st century, hundreds of thousands of Muslims in seven countries have been murdered and millions displaced in order to extend Washington’s hegemony.

Power that is secularized and cut free of civilizing traditions is not limited by moral and religious scruples. V.I. Lenin made this clear when he defined the meaning of his dictatorship as “unlimited power, resting directly on force, not limited by anything.” Washington’s drive for hegemony over US citizens and the rest of the world is based entirely on the exercise of force and is resurrecting unaccountable power.

Christianity’s emphasis on the worth of the individual makes such power as Lenin claimed, and Washington now claims, unthinkable. Be we religious or be we not, our celebration of Christ’s birthday celebrates a religion that made us masters of our souls and of our political life on Earth. Such a religion as this is worth holding on to even by atheists.

As we enter into 2018, Western civilization, the product of thousands of years of striving, is in decline. Degeneracy is everywhere before our eyes. As the West sinks into tyranny, will Western peoples defend their liberty and their souls, or will they sink into the tyranny, which again has raised its ugly and all devouring head?

There Is No Such Thing As A Former Marine

Authored by Dan Caldwell via The Daily Caller,

“Thank you for your service,” that’s the purpose of Veterans Day, to tell those who wore the uniform that we appreciate them. Of course, the focus is on military service. But what often goes overlooked are veterans’ valuable contributions and service to the nation in civilian life.

Nearly 20 percent of our nation’s police officers are veterans. Close to 400,000 veterans own businesses that create opportunity and benefit their local communities. Tens of thousands have become teachers, transforming young lives by sharing their knowledge and devotion to duty.

Veterans also represent their neighbors and fellow citizens in state legislatures and the halls of Congress.  Even though less than 2 percent of Americans served in the military during Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, currently 14 percent of state legislators, on average, and more than18 percent of the U.S. Congress are veterans.  It’s worth noting that these are historically low numbers, but fewer Americans are joining the military today due to the smaller size of the military in the post-Cold War era. And the most recent generation of veterans is stepping up, last year, more than one-third of all veterans running for national office served after 2001.

Military service imparts valuable life lessons, as author JD Vance, who served as a Marine, puts it, “We think of the Marine Corps as a military outfit, and of course it is, but for me, the U.S. Marine Corps was a four-year crash course in character education.”

We are blessed that so many of our nation’s 18.5 million veterans use that education to continue to serve the country out of uniform.

For me, my character education began on November 13, 2005, when I stepped onto the yellow footprints at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego. Over the next 13 weeks, I faced fear, exhaustion, and uncertainty. I was forced to push myself beyond all logical limits. Boot camp broke me down then built me back up better and stronger. The drill instructors had done their job. When I left, I was a Marine, indoctrinated in love of Corps and country.

After 4 years and a deployment to Iraq, I returned to civilian life, but like those before me, dedication to service and my commitment to our country didn’t end. Gen. John Kelly explains, “One day, you’ll get out of the Marine Corps; you’ll put your uniform up, but you’ll never not be a Marine.”

That’s why I joined Concerned Veterans for America. Our group is made up of veterans from all branches. We’ve served in conflicts spanning from World War II to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and now we have rallied to serve again as active citizens. We fight to preserve the freedom and prosperity we sacrificed to defend.

As veterans, we bring a unique voice to the public square. We know the price of freedom, and around the world, we’ve seen what happens to societies when it is absent. We understand how truly fragile freedom is.

I am grateful to all veterans who, through public service, activism, and volunteer efforts, make their voices heard and help the country they fought for to become even better and worthier of their sacrifices. During these divisive times, it’s comforting to know our country can depend on those who have proven themselves capable of selfless service.

So, this Veterans Day, let’s pause to thank veterans for their service to our nation both in and out of uniform.

*  *  *

Dan Caldwell is the executive director of Concerned Veterans for America. Caldwell served in the United States Marine Corps and is a veteran of the Iraq War.

Watch Live: Today's Once-In-A-Century Solar Eclipse

Experiencing a total solar eclipse is rare. And a solar eclipse that emcompasses the entire Continental US is even more rare. Which is why people from across the US will take a break from work and school and go outside for a glimpse of a total eclipse that"s expected to last just two minutes and 40 seconds.

The eclipse is expected to make landfall near Depoe Bay, Oregon at 10:15 local time and it will eventually pass into the Atlantic Ocean in South Carolina around 3 p.m. Eastern Time. Anyone who misses out on this year"s eclipse will have to wait seven years until the next one in April 2024.

In total, the moon will cast its shadow over the U.S. just a little longer than the duration of a feature movie, 1h and 33 minutes.

Observers outside the direct path of the total eclipse will still see a partial eclipse, where the moon covers just part of the sun. The next total eclipse over parts of North America won"t be witnessed until April 2024, then crossing from the south west, from Mexico, to the north east, towards Canada.

Luckily, for those chained to their desks, NASA has several livefeeds that will be monitoring the eclipse as it crosses the US.

According to Statista, the last eclipse to touch any part of the US occurred in July 1991, with only Hawaii experiencing it. The experience for locals was hampered by poor weather. But today’s event is even more rare, Statista explains, because it will cross the US from the Pacific to the Atlantic coast – the first to do so since 1918.

“The last total eclipse within the contiguous 48 United States occurred on February 26, 1979.

The "cosmic ballet" today is going to be the first one since 1918 where the path of darkness will cross the Pacific and Atlantic coasts as well as the first that will make landfall exclusively in the U.S. since independence in 1776.”

The eclipse’s 70-mile wide path of totality, an area where the moon will completel block out the Sun, plunging the area into darkness for a few minutes, doesn’t pass through any major US cities. However, nearly 200 million Americans live within a day’s drive of the eclipse, so towns and national parks in the 12 states within the path are bracing for a massive influx of visitors.

You will find more statistics at Statista

Not sure when to start watching? Check out the eclipse timeline below:

Doug Casey On The End Of The Nation-State

Authored by Doug Casey via InternationalMan.com,

There have been a fair number of references to the subject of “phyles” in Casey Research publications over the years. This essay will discuss the topic in detail. Especially how phyles are likely to replace the nation-state, one of mankind’s worst inventions.

Now might be a good time to discuss the subject. We’ll have an almost unremitting stream of bad news, on multiple fronts, for years to come. So it might be good to keep a hopeful prospect in mind.

Let’s start by looking at where we’ve been. I trust you’ll excuse my skating over all of human political history in a few paragraphs, but my object is to provide a framework for where we’re going, rather than an anthropological monograph.

Mankind has, so far, gone through three main stages of political organization since Day One, say 200,000 years ago, when anatomically modern men started appearing. We can call them Tribes, Kingdoms, and Nation-States.

Karl Marx had a lot of things wrong, especially his moral philosophy. But one of the acute observations he made was that the means of production are perhaps the most important determinant of how a society is structured. Based on that, so far in history, only two really important things have happened: the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Everything else is just a footnote.

Let’s see how these things relate.

The Agricultural Revolution and the End of Tribes

In prehistoric times, the largest political/economic group was the tribe. In that man is a social creature, it was natural enough to be loyal to the tribe. It made sense. Almost everyone in the tribe was genetically related, and the group was essential for mutual survival in the wilderness. That made them the totality of people that counted in a person’s life—except for “others” from alien tribes, who were in competition for scarce resources and might want to kill you for good measure.

Tribes tend to be natural meritocracies, with the smartest and the strongest assuming leadership. But they’re also natural democracies, small enough that everyone can have a say on important issues. Tribes are small enough that everybody knows everyone else, and knows what their weak and strong points are. Everyone falls into a niche of marginal advantage, doing what they do best, simply because that’s necessary to survive. Bad actors are ostracized or fail to wake up, in a pool of their own blood, some morning. Tribes are socially constraining but, considering the many faults of human nature, a natural and useful form of organization in a society with primitive technology.

As people built their pool of capital and technology over many generations, however, populations grew. At the end of the last Ice Age, around 12,000 years ago, all over the world, there was a population explosion. People started living in towns and relying on agriculture as opposed to hunting and gathering. Large groups of people living together formed hierarchies, with a king of some description on top of the heap.

Those who adapted to the new agricultural technology and the new political structure accumulated the excess resources necessary for waging extended warfare against tribes still living at a subsistence level. The more evolved societies had the numbers and the weapons to completely triumph over the laggards. If you wanted to stay tribal, you’d better live in the middle of nowhere, someplace devoid of the resources others might want. Otherwise it was a sure thing that a nearby kingdom would enslave you and steal your property.

The Industrial Revolution and the End of Kingdoms

From around 12,000 B.C. to roughly the mid-1600s, the world’s cultures were organized under strong men, ranging from petty lords to kings, pharaohs, or emperors.

It’s odd, to me at least, how much the human animal seems to like the idea of monarchy. It’s mythologized, especially in a medieval context, as a system with noble kings, fair princesses, and brave knights riding out of castles on a hill to right injustices. As my friend Rick Maybury likes to point out, quite accurately, the reality differs quite a bit from the myth. The king is rarely more than a successful thug, a Tony Soprano at best, or perhaps a little Stalin. The princess was an unbathed hag in a chastity belt, the knight a hired killer, and the shining castle on the hill the headquarters of a concentration camp, with plenty of dungeons for the politically incorrect.

With kingdoms, loyalties weren’t so much to the “country”—a nebulous and arbitrary concept—but to the ruler. You were the subject of a king, first and foremost. Your linguistic, ethnic, religious, and other affiliations were secondary. It’s strange how, when people think of the kingdom period of history, they think only in terms of what the ruling classes did and had. Even though, if you were born then, the chances were 98% you’d be a simple peasant who owned nothing, knew nothing beyond what his betters told him, and sent most of his surplus production to his rulers. But, again, the gradual accumulation of capital and knowledge made the next step possible: the Industrial Revolution.

The Industrial Revolution and the End of the Nation-State

As the means of production changed, with the substitution of machines for muscle, the amount of wealth took a huge leap forward. The average man still might not have had much, but the possibility to do something other than beat the earth with a stick for his whole life opened up, largely as a result of the Renaissance.

Then the game changed totally with the American and French Revolutions. People no longer felt they were owned by some ruler; instead they now gave their loyalty to a new institution, the nation-state. Some innate atavism, probably dating back to before humans branched from the chimpanzees about 3 million years ago, seems to dictate the Naked Ape to give his loyalty to something bigger than himself. Which has delivered us to today’s prevailing norm, the nation-state, a group of people who tend to share language, religion, and ethnicity. The idea of the nation-state is especially effective when it’s organized as a “democracy,” where the average person is given the illusion he has some measure of control over where the leviathan is headed.

On the plus side, by the end of the 18th century, the Industrial Revolution had provided the common man with the personal freedom, as well as the capital and technology, to improve things at a rapidly accelerating pace.

What caused the sea change?

I’ll speculate it was largely due to an intellectual factor, the invention of the printing press; and a physical factor, the widespread use of gunpowder. The printing press destroyed the monopoly the elites had on knowledge; the average man could now see that they were no smarter or “better” than he was. If he was going to fight them (conflict is, after all, what politics is all about), it didn’t have to be just because he was told to, but because he was motivated by an idea. And now, with gunpowder, he was on an equal footing with the ruler’s knights and professional soldiers.

Right now I believe we’re at the cusp of another change, at least as important as the ones that took place around 12,000 years ago and several hundred years ago. Even though things are starting to look truly grim for the individual, with collapsing economic structures and increasingly virulent governments, I suspect help is on the way from historical evolution. Just as the agricultural revolution put an end to tribalism and the industrial revolution killed the kingdom, I think we’re heading for another multipronged revolution that’s going to make the nation-state an anachronism. It won’t happen next month, or next year. But I’ll bet the pattern will start becoming clear within the lifetime of many now reading this.

What pattern am I talking about? Once again, a reference to the evil genius Karl Marx, with his concept of the “withering away of the State.” By the end of this century, I suspect the US and most other nation-states will have, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist.

The Problem with the State—And Your Nation-State

Of course, while I suspect that many of you are sympathetic to that sentiment, you also think the concept is too far out, and that I’m guilty of wishful thinking. People believe the state is necessary and—generally—good. They never even question whether the institution is permanent.

My view is that the institution of the state itself is a bad thing. It’s not a question of getting the right people into the government; the institution itself is hopelessly flawed and necessarily corrupts the people that compose it, as well as the people it rules. This statement invariably shocks people, who believe that government is both a necessary and permanent part of the cosmic firmament.

The problem is that government is based on coercion, and it is, at a minimum, suboptimal to base a social structure on institutionalized coercion. Let me urge you to read the Tannehills’ superb The Market for Liberty, which is available for free, download here.

One of the huge changes brought by the printing press and advanced exponentially by the Internet is that people are able to readily pursue different interests and points of view. As a result, they have less and less in common: living within the same political borders is no longer enough to make them countrymen. That’s a big change from pre-agricultural times when members of the same tribe had quite a bit—almost everything—in common. But this has been increasingly diluted in the times of the kingdom and the nation-state. If you’re honest, you may find you have very little in common with most of your countrymen besides superficialities and trivialities.

Ponder that point for a minute. What do you have in common with your fellow countrymen? A mode of living, (perhaps) a common language, possibly some shared experiences and myths, and a common ruler. But very little of any real meaning or importance. To start with, they’re more likely to be an active danger to you than the citizens of a presumed “enemy” country, say, like Iran. If you earn a good living, certainly if you own a business and have assets, your fellow Americans are the ones who actually present the clear and present danger. The average American (about 50% of them now) pays no income tax. Even if he’s not actually a direct or indirect employee of the government, he’s a net recipient of its largesse, which is to say your wealth, through Social Security and other welfare programs.

Over the years, I’ve found I have much more in common with people of my own social or economic station or occupation in France, Argentina, or Hong Kong, than with an American union worker in Detroit or a resident of the LA barrios. I suspect many of you would agree with that observation. What’s actually important in relationships is shared values, principles, interests, and philosophy. Geographical proximity, and a common nationality, is meaningless—no more than an accident of birth. I have much more loyalty to a friend in the Congo—although we’re different colors, have different cultures, different native languages, and different life experiences—than I do to the Americans who live down the highway in the trailer park. I see the world the same way my Congolese friend does; he’s an asset to my life. I’m necessarily at odds with many of “my fellow Americans”; they’re an active and growing liability.

Some might read this and find a disturbing lack of loyalty to the state. It sounds seditious. Professional jingoists like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, or almost anyone around the Washington Beltway go white with rage when they hear talk like this. The fact is that loyalty to a state, just because you happen to have been born in its bailiwick, is simply stupid.

As far as I can tell, there are only two federal crimes specified in the US Constitution: counterfeiting and treason. That’s a far cry from today’s world, where almost every real and imagined crime has been federalized, underscoring that the whole document is a meaningless dead letter, little more than a historical artifact. Even so, that also confirms that the Constitution was quite imperfect, even in its original form. Counterfeiting is simple fraud. Why should it be singled out especially as a crime? (Okay, that opens up a whole new can of worms… but not one I’ll go into here.) Treason is usually defined as an attempt to overthrow a government or withdraw loyalty from a sovereign. A rather odd proviso to have when the framers of the Constitution had done just that only a few years before, one would think.

The way I see it, Thomas Paine had it right when he said: “My country is wherever liberty lives.”

But where does liberty live today? Actually, it no longer has a home. It’s become a true refugee since America, which was an excellent idea that grew roots in a country of that name, degenerated into the United States. Which is just another unfortunate nation-state. And it’s on the slippery slope.

5 Old-Fashioned, Overlooked Ways To Save Time And Money

No doubt, technology can help save you time and money. Remember when you used to have to wait until after 7 p.m. to call long-distance because it was cheaper? Now, though, we can talk to our loved ones anytime we like!

But technology can’t do everything as cheaply or as quickly as we would like to think.

Here are five ways you can save time and money by doing things the old-fashioned way:

1. Turn off your phone.

My mother was quite a talkative person, but she would sometimes take the receiver off the hook. That’s good advice, even in the days of smartphones and cell phones. If you allow the phone to dominate your life, you literally could spend 24 hours of every day answering emails, sending texts, and chatting on Facebook. Whenever you really need to get something done and you find that you are constantly interrupted by your phone, turn it off.

2. Organize your life.

Spending a few minutes to make out lists, organize your closet into business and casual clothing, and write down important reminders (and put them on the fridge) will save you more time and money than you can imagine!

3. Know the difference between needs and wants.

Warren Buffett once said that if you buy things you don’t need, you will soon find yourself selling the things you do need. Be certain that you are buying (or paying for) what you need first.

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Do you have a gym membership that you pay for each month, but that you only use a half dozen times a year? Do you really NEED a rice cooker when a pot with a lid works just as well? Yes, “wants” are nice to have, but if you find that you are short on cash every month, perhaps it’s time to prioritize your needs and wants. Our ancestors were great at this, weren’t they?

4. Put your kids to work.

Many parents make the mistake of thinking that when they do everything for their child, they are showing them that they are loved. “They will have to work their whole lives, let them be kids now,” we hear.

Unfortunately, this will end up costing parents tons of time and money. Children might feel more loved, but they also will spend their entire lives feeling entitled to this sort of treatment. Show your children real love by teaching them that everyone needs to work and pull their weight. No, you don’t have to send them out to the fields to hoe weeds, but when I was only five, I made my own bed, dressed myself, put my dirty clothes in the hamper, got my own breakfast (cereal and milk), and did simple chores after school such as feeding the dog and putting the mail on the kitchen table.

5. Keep it simple.

I have a confession to make: I don’t own a food processor. Amazing, but true — although I did buy a used one once. At least in my case, I found that the effort and time it took to take it apart and clean it was far more time-intensive than if I used a simple knife to cut food. A blender and a knife does almost everything a food processor does for far less money and effort. This isn’t to say that I don’t love kitchen gadgets, but many of them cost a lot of money and are time-intensive.

What would you add to our list? Share your thoughts in the section below:  

The Death Spiral Of Financialization

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Each new policy destroys another level of prudent fiscal/financial discipline.

The primary driver of our economy--financialization--is in a death spiral. Financialization substitutes expansion of interest, leverage and speculation for real-world expansion of goods, services and wages.

Financial "wealth" created by leveraging more debt on a base of real-world collateral that doesn"t actually produce more goods and services flows to the top of the wealth-power pyramid, driving the soaring wealth-income inequality we see everywhere in the global economy.

As this phantom wealth pours into assets such as stocks, bonds and real estate, it has pushed the value of these assets into the stratosphere, out of reach of the bottom 95% whose incomes have stagnated for the past 16 years.

The core problem with financialization is that it requires ever more extreme policies to keep it going. These policies are mutually reinforcing, meaning that the total impact becomes geometric rather than linear. Put another way, the fragility and instability generated by each new policy extreme reinforces the negative consequences of previous policies.

These extremes don"t just pile up like bricks--they fuel a parabolic rise in systemic leverage, debt, speculation, fragility, distortion and instability.

This accretive, mutually reinforcing, geometric rise in systemic fragility that is the unavoidable output of financialization is poorly understood, not just by laypeople but by the financial punditry and professional economists.

Gordon Long and I cover the policy extremes which have locked our financial system into a death spiral in a new 50-minute presentation, The Road to Financialization. Each "fix" that boosts leverage and debt fuels a speculative boom that then fizzles when the distortions introduced by financialization destabilize the real economy"s credit-business cycle.

Each new policy destroys another level of prudent fiscal/financial discipline.

The discipline of sound money? Gone.

The discipline of limited leverage? Gone.

The discipline of prudent lending? Gone.

The discipline of mark-to-market discovery of the price of collateral? Gone.

The discipline of separating investment and commercial banking, i.e. Glass-Steagall? Gone.

The discipline of open-market interest rates? Gone.

The discipline of losses being absorbed by those who generated the loans? Gone.

And so on: every structural source of discipline has been eradicated, weakened or hollowed out. Financialization has consumed the nation"s seed corn, and the harvest of instability is ripening in the fields of finance and the real economy alike.

6 Tricks To Saving Time & Money In The Garden (No. 3 Would Trim HOURS From Your Work!)

Image source: Pixabay.com

Whether you’re a new gardener, or a long-time student of the land, there are many things you can do to cut back on inputs and save time and money in the garden.

In fact, there is a growing movement of gardeners who have found great success in shifting more and more of the work in the garden onto natural processes, taking hints from natural ecosystems such as forests, grasslands, marshes and savannas, which maintain healthy “gardens” of immense biomass with no human inputs whatsoever.

It turns out we can mimic these natural systems in the garden to virtually eliminate weeding, controlling pests, fertilizing and if you desire, even planting. Here are a few of the main ways we can do this:

1. No tilling. The fact is that tilling is an outdated gardening method. New research, along with the direct experience of countless farmers and gardeners around the world, indicates that tilling to temporarily set back weeds and/or loosen the soil has the exact opposite effect in the short term: stirring up the seed bank and bringing more weed seeds to the surface to germinate, while destroying the soil structure and decimating microbe and earth worm populations that are so vital to soil health.

2. Mulch and solarize. As mentioned above, the only truly effective way to kill weeds without disrupting your other plants is to smother them. Sheet mulching is my preferred method, which is simply smothering the weeds with alternating layers of carbon and nitrogen rich material, starting with a layer of cardboard (with no shiny labels or tape, etc.), and finishing it off with a nice thick (4 to 6 inch) layer of mulch.

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My first gardening mentor once told me that the first 3 rules of gardening are: mulch (for weed suppression), mulch (for evaporation prevention), and mulch (for soil organic matter and microbe health). Another technique is to first “solarize” an area to prepare it for garden beds, which entails covering the area with a black tarp for 1-3 months during the warm season to cook the weeds to death. Once the tarp is removed, it’s important to reestablish a healthy soil food web with compost, compost teas, and of course, mulch!

3. Minimize weeding. Over the past 13 years, I have done very little weeding in my garden, or in my landscaping company. Yet, my clients’ gardens and my own gardens have very few weeds, and the “volunteer” plants that do grow in my gardens are ones that usually benefit the other plants around them. If I do see some aggressive quack grass or similar coming up, I simply smother it with a good sheet mulch (see below) and then never have to deal with it again. Trying to pull grass, and many other weeds, is absolutely futile, as you’ll quite often only encourage their regrowth by splitting their roots up so that they can come back as many different plants, like a garden dominating hydra. Weeding can also contribute to soil disturbance and soil structure disruption, leading to more weed seeds germinating, and less water and nutrient holding capacity.

Image source: Pixabay.com

4. Build rich soil. Weeds are often a response to poor soil structure, soil compaction and nutrient deficiencies, so building your soil by adding organic matter via green manures, ground covers, compost and compost teas, along with chop and drop techniques, will make a less-than-ideal growing situation for many species of weed, particularly if you keep a constant cover crop and/or heavy mulch on the garden (including on pathways!). When a soil is healthy, with a diverse ecosystem of microbes, and is high in organic matter, there is little-to-no need for ongoing fertilization, and much less watering is needed. Plants also will be much healthier, of course, and will get fewer disease and pest problems.

5. Use a diversity of plants. Growing only a few different types of plants is a sure recipe for pest problems and inefficient nutrient cycles. Growing only a few types of annual crops, for example, means your garden will be full of only shallow roots, all competing at the same soil depth for the same nutrients, while creating an easily accessible buffet for pests to get out of control, and limiting habitat and supplemental food for predators of these pests. Planting a variety of perennials with deeper root systems will create a more efficient nutrient cycle, bringing nutrients and moisture up from deeper down and competing less with your annuals, while also providing habitat and food for predators such as lacewings and parasitic wasps. Using more perennials, including edibles and medicinals, means less replanting year after year, as well, and often leads to earlier harvests in the spring of things like perennial onions, or perennial greens like Good King Henry.

6. Minimize direct pest control. Notice that I’m not saying to stop trying to control pests. What I’m advocating is to minimize direct interventions such as spraying pesticides. When you kill pest populations, not only are you usually also killing their predators, you’re ensuring that their predators don’t have time to build up their populations so that they can establish themselves and take the burden of having to control pest populations off you. Instead of trying to kill all the things eating your plants, try to identify what they are, and then, find out what eats them, and what habitat and food requirements that predator has. For example, slugs are a common pest on greens such as chard or lettuce, and they just happen to be a favorite food of frogs. Most frogs require a pond, and shade and hiding places that are created from large plants, logs and other structures in the garden.

There are many other things you can do to minimize inputs of time, money and energy in the garden, many of which are intuitive and simple once you start. The key is to slow down, observe and strive to understand the natural processes at work in the garden so that you don’t spend your time fighting an uphill battle that simply leads to needless work and unnecessary expenditures.

What advice would you add? Share your tips in the section below:

Is This The First Sign Of A Technology Dump And A Neo-Luddite Era?

Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

Are we on the verge of a rebellion against technology?

Yesterday I was taken aback when I noticed an elderly Wal-mart greeter amusing herself with a fidget spinner.

What the hell is a fidget spinner? It’s a toy you just spin with your fingers.

It’s the hottest selling summer entertainment item that retails between $2.99-$8.99 depending on wether it lights up or makes noise.

To compare, last summer the over-hyped fad was Pokemon Go which was a ho-hum attempt at the first virtual reality game which turned out to have multiple technology problems such as being underdeveloped for rural areas and worldwide server crashes.

Why does the fidget spinner trend matter? Because it doesn’t involve any technology at all. It’s as low-grade technology wise as playing with a hula-hoop or yo-yo.

The trend peaked my interest as I believe we’ve reached the end game of the social media and app crazes of the past 10 years. Social Media IPO’s have slowed down to nil.

Why would we need another iTech item when we’ve got too many flooding the market already?

At a time when companies are replacing low-skilled workers with robots and kiosk machines, it’s not promising for their business models for customers to turn their backs on technology. Which is exactly why I’m predicting it’s going to happen.

We are no longer living in an era where people are adopting technological advancements; rather it’s being imposed on us. When pushed too far towards the direction of technology the equal and opposite reaction would be to turn a generation into neo-luddites.

The Dark Side Of Independence Day

For most people, the 4th of July is all about great barbecues, ice-cold beer and stunning fireworks displays. However, as Statista"s Niall McCarthy notes, for an unlucky few, the holiday has a dark side...

You will find more statistics at Statista

Last year, 4 people were killed and thousands more were hospitalized due to accidents involving fireworks.

According to Journal of Surgical Research data published by Vox, young men and teenage boys are far more likely than anyone else to get injured by fireworks. Last year, they accounted for 61 percent of all hospitalizations. In 2016, 1,300 hospitalizations were caused by firecrackers, 900 were attributed to sparklers, 500 were from Roman candles, and 400 were caused by bottle rockets.

As the infographic above shows the toll inflicted by fireworks every month in the U.S. between 2006 and 2010. New Year"s Eve resulted in 1,515 visits over those four years but that has nothing on Independence Day. The spike in July stands out like a sore thumb with over 15,500 people hospitalized due to fireworks over the same time period.

"Nobody In Power Is Paying Attention To How Close We Are To The Edge"

Authored by Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

As our politicos creep deeper into a legalistic wilderness hunting for phantoms of Russian collusion, nobody pays attention to the most dangerous force in American life: the unraveling financialization of the economy.

Financialization is what happens when the people-in-charge “create” colossal sums of “money” out of nothing — by issuing loans, a.k.a. debt — and then cream off stupendous profits from the asset bubbles, interest rate arbitrages, and other opportunities for swindling that the artificial wealth presents. It was a kind of magic trick that produced monuments of concentrated personal wealth for a few and left the rest of the population drowning in obligations from a stolen future. The future is now upon us.

Financialization expressed itself in other interesting ways, for instance the amazing renovation of New York City (Brooklyn especially). It didn’t happen just because Generation X was repulsed by the boring suburbs it grew up in and longed for a life of artisanal cocktails. It happened because financialization concentrated immense wealth geographically in the very few places where its activities took place — not just New York but San Francisco, Washington, and Boston — and could support luxuries like craft food and brews.

Quite a bit of that wealth was extracted from asset-stripping the rest of America where financialization was absent, kind of a national distress sale of the fly-over places and the people in them. That dynamic, of course, produced the phenomenon of President Donald Trump, the distilled essence of all the economic distress “out there” and the rage it entailed. The people of Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin were left holding a big bag of nothing and they certainly noticed what had been done to them, though they had no idea what to do about it, except maybe try to escape the moment-by-moment pain of their ruined lives with powerful drugs.

And then, a champion presented himself, and promised to bring back the dimly remembered wonder years of post-war well-being — even though the world had changed utterly — and the poor suckers fell for it. Not to mention the fact that his opponent — the avaricious Hillary, with her hundreds of millions in ill-gotten wealth — was a very avatar of the financialization that had turned their lives to shit. And then the woman called them “a basket of deplorables” for noticing what had happened to them.

And now the rather pathetic false promises of President Trump, the whole MAGA thing, is unraveling at exactly the same time that the financialized economy is entering its moment of final catastrophic phase-change. The monuments to wealth — especially the stock and bond portfolios and the presumed value of real estate investments — will surrender to a process you might call price-discovery-from-Hell, revealing their worth to be somewhere between little and nothing. The accumulated monstrous debts of persons, corporations, and sovereign societies, will be suddenly, shockingly, absolutely, and self-evidently unpayable, and the securities represented by them will be sucked into the kind of vortices of time/space depicted in movies about mummies and astronauts. And all of a sudden the avatars of that wealth will see their lives turn to shit just like moiling, Budweiser-gulping, oxycontin-addled deplorables in the flat, boring, parking lot wastelands of our ruined drive-in Utopia saw their lives rendered into a brown-and-yellow slurry draining clockwise down the toilet of history.

Nobody in power in this country is paying attention to how close we are to that epic moment — at least, they’re not talking about it. If the possibility of all that even occupies some remote corner of their brains, they surely don’t know how to prepare the citizenry for it, or what to do about it. The truth is that societies respond emergently to major crises like the imminent unraveling of our financialized economy, often in disorderly and surprising ways. I suppose we’ll just have to watch the nauseating spectacle play out, and in the meantime enjoy the Russian collusion melodrama for whatever it’s worth — probably more than a ticket to Wonder Woman or the new Tom Cruise Mummy movie.

Putin Warns Of "Hot War" And Nuclear Holocaust: "I Don't Think Anyone Would Survive"

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

With tensions among the world’s super powers mounting in places like Ukraine, Syria, North Korea and  most recently Qatar and Iran, it may only be a matter of time before someone pushes the red button.

When they do, all bets are off, and as we’ve learned from the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in June of 1914, once the trigger is pulled there’s no going back and hundreds of millions of lives, perhaps billions, will hang in the balance.

Considering that Russia is closely allied with Syrian President Assad, has a direct interest in maintaining control of Ukraine’s former Crimea region, and its ties to Iran, ignoring the possibility of a global war in coming years could be a devastating oversight.

We are, in fact, at war right now. But just as was the case from the 1960’s through the end of the 1980’s, it is a “cold war.” There have been no direct troop engagements that we know of between the Russians and the United States. But look to cyber space and it should be clear that there is a battle taking place on a daily basis. Moreover, as we’ve previously reported, nuclear war may well be on the horizon, because the confrontations taking place on the geo-political stage are no longer just talk.

Action has already been taken by both sides:

Putin and the Russian people believe the U.S.’s actions are going to lead to a nuclear conflict initiated by the United States.  The leadership of the U.S. is made up of politicians who began their careers as Marxist-Socialists.  Traitors now have their fingers on the triggers of the nuclear warheads, aided by “yes-men” of the general staffs who will not remember their oaths to the Constitution of the United States and the American people.  They will ignore that these charges take precedence above any orders given by a petty, dope-smoking, Marxist community organizer of dubious citizenship who was “emplaced” into office to destroy the country.

Instead of statesmen and diplomats, we now have self-interested, politically-motivated belligerents backing Russia and other nations into corners and pushing them toward war.  How long the war of words will be continued is unknown; however, when the missiles begin to fly you can be certain of something.  You can rest assured that the men who spoke those words will be in bunkers and other safe places and out of harm’s way…paid for by the American taxpayer.

Full Report: Nuclear War Is On The Horizon: “This Is Not Just Talk… Action Has Been Taken”

Indeed, those who push the buttons will likely be in bunkers well before the missiles hit their targets. That’ll likely be the case on both sides.

For the rest of us?

Vladimir Putin has made clear how it will play out:

The Putin Interviews between the Russian leader and the Oscar-winning director, which will be screened on Showtime, were shot between summer 2015 and February this year and give an extraordinary insight into one of the most powerful men in the world.

 

Stone asked Putin whether the US would be ‘dominant’ in the event of a ‘hot war’ between the two nuclear powers.

 

‘I don’t think anyone would survive such a conflict,’ Putin said.

Earlier this year the hacking collective Anonymous issued a frightening warning about World War III, highlighting the fact that while we are all busy enjoying the good times, elite Deep State insiders are planning for what comes next:

All the signs of a looming war on the Korean Peninsula are surfacing… we’re watching as each country moves strategic pieces into place… but unlike past world wars… although there will be ground troops the battle is likely to be fierce, brutal and quick.

It will also be globally devastating on the environmental and economic levels.

…

This is a real war with real global consequences… With three super powers drawn into the mix… Other nations will be coerced into choosing sides.

…

The citizen will be the last to know…

Video

And because the citizen will be the last to know, now may be a good time to review your nuclear war preparedness strategies and stock up on survival essentials that should include FDA approved anti-radiation pills and NBC rated tactical gas masks.

The elite will have plenty to go around in their bunkers, but you can be 100% assured that none of the supplies they’ve been stockpiling for the last decade will ever make their way to the general population.

Prepare accordingly.

Americans Are Taking More Time Off Work

The United States, unlike many other industrialized countries, has no statuary agreement on taking paid vacation. Meaning: There is no law telling employers the minimum number of days they need to give their employees off work - that are also paid for.

However, as Statista"s Dyfed Loesche notes, Project:Time Off, which is sponsored by the U.S. Travel Association, has good news: After two decades of almost steady decline the average days of vacation have risen by 0.6 days year-over-year to 16.8 days in 2016.

You will find more statistics at Statista

"Despite this encouraging sign, taking time off continues to be a challenge in America’s always-on work culture," the authors of the latest report conclude. Still, in 2016, 662 million vacation days were left unused, four million days more than 2015.

Taking time off doesn"t just profit the individual workers who is said to become more productive after being able to recharge their batteries. According to the project"s estimates, "the jump in vacation usage from 16.2 to 16.8 days delivered a $37 billion impact to the U.S. economy."

Time Crystals Are Real — and What They Can Do Might Change Everything

(ANTIMEDIA) When I first heard the term “time crystal,” the science fiction geek in me reached out to the universe to confirm that something so cool could actually exist. And the universe responded by bestowing peer-reviewed studies by two different teams of physicists. I just wanted to know that time crystals were real; I had little concern for what they actually were or the revolutionary application in which they may play a pivotal role.

As I looked into it, I started seeing phrases like “non-equilibrium state of matter” and “discrete time-crystalline order in a disordered dipolar many-body system.” My enthusiasm didn’t wane, but I did find myself frequently sighing and scratching my head.

The first hurdle I had to overcome was the fact that the two different research teams had created time crystals using two completely different processes and materials. The Harvard-based team had used a synthetic diamond to create an artificial lattice. The Maryland team had used a chain of charged ytterbium ion particles. Obviously, I had no idea what either of these meant. I just knew that the end result was a time crystal, which my imagination rendered as some kind of glistening, iridescent, Escher-like gem hurtling through a wormhole at the speed of light.

Not quite. More like a low-energy quantum state that repeats itself in both space and time.

The idea for time crystals was first proposed in 2012 by physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, who spoke theoretically of a space-time, four-dimensional quantum phenomenon that would break the “time-translation symmetry.” See, there they go again with their arcane phrases.

According to Wilczek, “The spontaneous formation of a time crystal represents the spontaneous emergence of a clock.”

Time crystals are an entirely new state of matter that can repeat their atomic structure in time and maintain oscillation without energy. This has major implications for the still-nascent field of quantum supercomputing, which many see as the next generation of computers.

Quantum supercomputers will use the quantum phenomenon of “superposition” in the form of qubits, rather than the traditional 1s and 0s of today’s computers. Because quantum computers will operate at the atomic level, where particles can exist in two different places simultaneously, it is believed qubits will be able to function at an exponentially accelerated rate. Many scientists believe this will allow complex calculations to be performed thousands, perhaps millions, of times quicker.

The unique non-equilibrium nature of time crystals could make them an ideal testing platform for quantum applications. And this has scientists very excited because quantum supercomputers are the holy grail for computer scientists right now. When Time magazine listed nine ways quantum supercomputers will change human life, the list included everything from safer airplanes and better drugs to discovering alien planets and hyper-personalized Big Data. That’s quite a range. Let’s hope it catapults renewable energy models, as well.

So, do I feel like I understand time crystals? No, not really. And, to be honest, researching them has kind of taken the romance out of my imaginary construct. But someday, when I’m piloting a quantum supercomputer-run dirigible amid the rings of Saturn, I will look back and thank myself for the effort.

Creative Commons / Anti-Media / Report a typo

Art Cashin And "The Myth Of The Good Friday Market Crash"

For those looking toward the end of the week, today is "pro-forma" Wednesday, because this is a four day week as U.S. equity markets are closed for Good Friday. And, as Art Cashin writes in his overnight note, as "every year, the Good Friday close produces lots of erroneous theories about why we close. So, once again, we offer the explanation we wrote a few years back"

The Myth Of The Crash That Caused The Stock Market To Close On Good Friday – In the over five decades that I’ve been in Wall Street, each Easter season sees the re-blooming of an old – and erroneous – myth.

That myth contends that the NYSE opened on a Good Friday and the terrible Black Friday crash occurred. Thus, chastened and shaken, the Governors vowed never to open on a Good Friday again. It never happened.

Thanks to the nice folks in the NYSE archives we were able to establish a few facts. Records clearly show the NYSE closed on Good Friday as far back as 1864. Before 1864 records on the subject are a bit harder to find but there is high likelihood that the Exchange closed on Good Friday all the way back to 1793. (It was founded on May 17th, 1792 so Good Friday would have already passed that year.)

There was a famous and terrible Black Friday crash in Wall Street but it was primarily in the gold market. It came about when the “corner” on gold that Jay Gould and Jim Fisk had constructed (with some help from President Grant’s brother-in-law), collapsed. That occurred on September 24th, 1869, a little late in the year for Good Friday. You will also note from the search of the records that the NYSE was closing on Good Friday at least five years earlier and probably, much, much longer.

Lastly, for some unexplained reason, the NYSE stayed open on three Good Fridays. On April 8, 1898, the Dow closed down a half point. That’s hardly a crash. On the other two, April 13th, 1906 (a Friday the 13th) and March 29th, 1907, the Dow actually rose.

Tolerant Left: Berkeley Antifa Cowards Pepper Spray Elderly Trump Supporter And Egg Homeless Advocate

Angry unemployed children, AKA Antifa, held another Trump protest today in Berkeley, CA. It"s Trump"s fault of course that they took out 6 figure student loans and haven"t been approached by numerous employers to put those English majors to work.

Unlike the UC Berkeley riots which shut down a Milo Yiannopoulos speech, several Trump supporters showed up today to counter-protest the Antifa idiots - resulting in civil discourse.

Just kidding, an elderly Trump supporter and a homeless advocate were attacked:

Elderly Trump supporter pepper sprayed by Antifa girl at a Berkeley rally. Girl runs away like a coward. #Berkeley #Antifa ???? pic.twitter.com/TWjPjiArWR

— ZeroPointNow (@ZeroPointNow) March 5, 2017

Berkeley Antifa throwing eggs at Trump supporter holding up "House the Homeless" sign. #Berkeley #Antifa pic.twitter.com/w4PpyUo3XM

— ZeroPointNow (@ZeroPointNow) March 5, 2017

Note the same guy in a green hat in both videos. Some have suggested he may be a paid agitator... 

Who are the Nazis?

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Angry Protesters Demand That Trump "STOP Attacking Women, Muslims, Immigrants, LGBTQ+, Journalists..."

Following yesterday"s "Day Without Immigrants Boycott" in which immigrants all around the country were encourged to skip work/school, shut down their businesses and/or boycott restaurants and retail stores, America"s disaffected, millennial youth have decided that they too would like to participate in an anti-Trump protest whereby they could exercise their skills in extreme laziness while also extending their 3-day weekend to 4 days...BONUS!

Deemed the "Strike4Democrary", anti-Trump protesters took to the streets all around the country today to demand that Trump "STOP attacking and victimizing women, Muslims, immigrants, racial and ethnic groups, the LGBTQ+ community, working families, journalists, and all who offer criticisms of the Administration’s policies including the U.S. judicial branch", among other things including the following:

Strike4Democracy’s message to the Administration and Congressional leaders is clear:

• STOP the authoritarian assault on our fundamental, constitutional rights, the very principles that have truly made America great;


• STOP attacking and victimizing women, Muslims, immigrants, racial and ethnic groups, the LGBTQ+ community, working families, journalists, and all who offer criticisms of the Administration’s policies including the U.S. judicial branch;


• REALIZE that America’s true strength lies in the values of inclusivity not exclusivity.

As citizens and supporters come together to register their deep dissatisfaction with the President and the current administration’s unconstitutional, inhumane policies and behavior, February 17th marks a heightened effort to provide a beacon for those who share our concerns and who search for a way to “do something.” Together we speak with one voice. We say:

• NO to attacks on our marginalized communities


• NO to attacks on the sovereignty of indigenous peoples


• NO to attacks on constructive critics within and outside government


• NO to attacks on our constitutionally guaranteed rights


• NO to attacks on our environment


• NO to attacks on working families


• NO to attacks on public education

Of course, none of the alleged "attacks" associated with the Trump administration above were supported with actual examples of such offenses...you should just trust them.

Meanwhile, apparently the "Action Plan" to get through to Trump once and for all included skipping work, avoiding "purchasing anything" and "occupying public space."

Genius plan, if we understand it correctly...

EU Parliament Committee Votes To Give Robots Rights (And A Kill Switch)

Submitted by Jake Anderson via TheAntiMedia.org,

Foreseeing a rapidly approaching age of autonomous artificial intelligence, a European Parliament committee has voted to legally bestow electronic personhood to robots. The status includes a detailed list of rights, responsibilities, regulations, and a “kill switch.”

The committee voted by 17 votes to two, with two abstentions, to approve a draft report written by Luxembourg MEP Mady Delvaux, who believes “robots, bots, androids and other manifestations of artificial intelligence” will spawn a new industrial revolution. She wants to establish a European Agency to develop rules for how to govern AI behavior. Specifically, Delvaux writes about how increased levels of autonomy in robot entities will make usual manufacturing liability laws insufficient. It will become necessary, the report states, to be able to hold robots and their manufacturers legally responsible for their acts.

Sounding at times like a governmental whisper of Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, the report states, “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.”

The rules will also affect AI developers, who, according to the report, will have to engineer robots in such a way that they can be controlled. This includes a “kill switch,” a mechanism by which rogue robots can be terminated or shut down remotely.

The report acknowledges that robots and automation continue to intrude on the human workforce while noting that in certain instances — the cleanup of industrial waste and toxic pollutants, for example — this will be advantageous. However, Delvaux does not believe robots will completely replace humans in the near future; she believes they will work together.

Despite this optimistic note, she issued a stern warning:

“Ultimately there is a possibility that within the space of a few decades AI could surpass human intellectual capacity in a manner which, if not prepared for, could pose a challenge to humanity’s capacity to control its own creation and, consequently, perhaps also to its capacity to be in charge of its own destiny and to ensure the survival of the species.”

The report also notes the “potential for increased inequality in the distribution of wealth and influence.”

This echoes a different warning issued by Stephen Hawking, who believes the combination of capitalism and automation holds the potential for emboldening a globalist oligarchy with disastrous levels of human inequality. An automated, machine-based economic system, Hawking believes, may pose a bigger existential threat to humans than the malevolent killer robots depicted in popular science fiction films.

“If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed,” Hawking states.

“Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.”

Will Delvaux’s European Agency of robot regulations do anything to help curb economic inequality? Likely not, but it sounds as if at least some European leaders are taking seriously the idea of a sea change in robotics and artificial intelligence in the coming decade. The question that remains is how viable it is to think government can or should constrain exponentially advancing artificial intelligence with regulations.

The next step for the report is the full house, where it must receive a majority of votes to be ratified.

Caught On Tape: Massive Explosion At Mexico City Fireworks Market Kills 29

A sprawling fireworks market outside Mexico City exploded Tuesday killing at least 29 people and injuring scores more. Ripped from the script of a Naked Gun movie, the scene of the disaster was anything but humorous...

At least 60 people have been hurt in an explosion at a fireworks market near Mexico City, local media report. https://t.co/WiHVYAj7l3 pic.twitter.com/T24satoqga

— CNN (@CNN) December 20, 2016

As WSJ reports, according to state and local officials, this is the third time in 11 years that the market was destroyed by explosions.

The San Pablito market is one of Mexico’s largest for fireworks, and does particularly booming business around the country’s Independence Day on September 16 and during the Christmas season celebrations, which begin Dec. 12 with the Feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s patroness.

The previous explosions, which also destroyed the market, occurred in the days leading up to the Independence Day celebrations in 2005 and 2006.

The head of Mexico state’s pyrotechnical association told digital publication Animal Politico last week that the San Pablito market was the safest in Latin America, its stalls sufficiently spaced to “prevent a chain reaction in the case of a spark.”

We know this is a terrrible disaster, and our condolences go out to those who lost someone, but we just can"t help ourselves... "nothing to see here, move along..."

How Did Native Americans Keep Time Without A Watch (Or Calendar)?

Artist: Patrick Rahming

In today’s modern world, it is easy to tell time. There are clocks on buildings, billboards, cell phones and microwave ovens. Then there’s the old-fashioned grandfather clock in the hallway.

But what if you didn’t have a watch? What would you do then?

And if you didn’t have a calendar, would you know when winter was coming? When it was the appropriate “time” to plant? To harvest? How old you are? How long would it take for you to “forget” to mark down a day or several days, or several weeks, thus obscuring even your age?

Native people had certain signs that they relied on and they actually had a very good sense of “time” — even though it differs from what we would consider time today.

White Man’s Time Clock

For many tribes, the clock – the one the Europeans used and brought to America — was a strange thing that was not easily understood. Some tribes thought that since the clock moved on its own and that it sometimes made sounds, it was a living thing.

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The simple truth here is that indigenous people considered time to be a part of the natural cycle of life. The belief was that there was a correct time or best time for everything and that nature itself would send the signal to let a person know when that was. A clock, divided into so many tiny fragments, seemed ridiculous and inconceivable to them. What difference could it make if one planted corn on this side of the 12 or that side of the 12?

A popular meme says that when an old native person was told about daylight saving time, he shook his head and said that only a white man would think he could cut off the bottom of a blanket, sew it to the top of a blanket, and then think he had a longer blanket.

Time Signals

Before European contact, indigenous people found that nature imparted a natural order and rhythm to their lives. Sunrise and sunset marked the typical day, with the noon sun being the dividing part between morning and afternoon.

Almost all tribes had some sort of marker for the spring/summer/fall/winter equinox. For the Pawnee, they knew that when the sun rose over a particular crest on Corn Mountain, it was time to hold their Thunder ceremony. The Bighorn medicine wheel told the Lakota when to travel to meet with others for their annual Sun Dance, which is held in and around the summer solstice.

Many tribes simply assigned names to certain seasons or months to keep track of how old a person was. The exact day was of less importance to native people than the time of the year. For example, according to the Lakota, if you were born in the time of trees popping, you were born sometime in late December through January. Native people felt this was distinction enough.

Artist: Michael Gentry

Native people also had a tendency to measure by nights, rather than by days. Indigenous people would say they traveled for “x” number of moons rather than by days or suns. Some tribes also used “moons” to indicate months. For example, March would be called the Moon of Sap Running by the Lenape.

Still other tribes marked their time through winter counts. Regardless if you were born in June or December, you were born in the “Winter of Four Crows Killed.” Usually some important event would mark the end of the year, which the entire year was named for. You could be born in May and you would still refer to your birthday as the Winter of Four Crows Killed.

Hunting, Planting and More

The natural cycles of nature also helped to organize task-based plans. For tribes who planted crops, they used signals such as the size of oak leaves to let them know that it was time to plant. The Crow tribes knew that when chokecherry trees blossomed, it was the right time to plant tobacco. Snow deeper than the ankle was a sign to most tribes that long-range hunts were finished for the year.

New Solar Oven Is So Fast It’s Been Dubbed “Mother Nature’s Microwave”

Tribes that planted crops often used that cycle as their means of telling time. For example, they might remember that they were born when the corn was gathered or that they were married with the flower buds of the squash.

Spring equinox compelled West coast people to travel to the sea to catch sardines or to gather shellfish. After a few weeks, they knew it was then time to move back inland to collect acorns, grasses and other nuts or seeds.

Water collection, or knowledge of where one could obtain water, was crucial to many Pueblo tribes. Many tribes stored water in clay pots and then buried them in the ground for later use. How would you know when it was time to collect water from the remaining pools if you did not know what season it was or how long it would be before the rains would come again? Most Pueblo tribes used a calendar stick to mark time. One person would mark off each sunrise on a stick, 30 days per stick. Each stick was saved until there were 13 sticks. Their lunar cycle was one of 13 months to a year. In this method, they knew, almost to the day, when the rains would start and how many sticks they had to make their water last.

Sometimes, it seems as if native people still run on “Indian time.” If you have ever attended a powwow and saw that the Grand Entry was supposed to occur at noon, but didn’t actually happen until 1:30, you have experienced “Indian time.” The hour or minute was, and in some cases still is, of little importance. Did the job get done properly? Then it was a job well-done — and done in perfect time.

Have you ever had to tell time without a watch? Share your tips in the section below:

Learn How To ‘Live Off The Land’ With Just Your Gun. Read More Here.