Well, I have been following this a bit (Libya, not US pundits of the New Left) and according to my impression, the 3 major war criminals were, in this order per suspected number of civilan dead:
1. Gadaffi regime, in trying to suppress popular dissent,
2. Gaddafi, in giving personal order to get all N-words out on the Mediteranean, northbound. In Libyan craft, meaning they used the most unseaworthy and old they could get and crammed them full,
3. NATO, in the usual rate of misfiresx during the aerial bombing.

They span about the range from 1000-2000 kills each; this might be higher, but I have seen little suspecting it is MUCH higher. Russian television reports other things (70K excess dead; the sky will be the limit[de:]), but, well, they would, wouldn’t they?

Most civilian casualties caused by the “rebels” occurred during the Siege of Sirte. That may be half of the total butchery caused by them. Decidedly paramilitary — if not militioid — lynch mobs occurred on both sides (as is rarely not the case in any entrenched civil war). However, though individually the most cruel acts of war, the dead care prety little one would assume, and numerically these essentially civilian-on-civilian cruelties do not usually account for much of the total civilians killed though.
(No, they didn’t even in Rwanda; the terminology there may be “paramilitaries” or even “militias”, but for practical purposes they were more formidable than the standing military forces of Rwanda and Burundi combined.)

At any rate, my rough figures are that civilians together make up one-third of the total surplus dead in the 2011 Libyan War. The rest was armed personnel as it seems. About half regular, half irregular forces. Probably >80% Libyans.

Considering it cynically, there is one good thing about it at least:

NATO had to intervene at some point in that there uppity sandnigger thang. Not just the West, NATO; the military arm of the West, which is an entity similar but by no means the same. They had to say “hello, we still exist and are FUCKEN DANGEROUS to mess with”, lest the world only talks about BRICS and I<3I).

A few outside people gambled the West only had one shot militarily; we were right as far as it seems, but the evidence was strong enough to go out on a limb. There were (and still are) odds and bits in the news that suggest that for purposes of waging major war, the West is and will for some time remaind Winchesterd.

“Nervi belli pecunia infinita.”
Cicero, January 1st, 43 BC

Bunker-busting uranium-tipped mothers-of-all-cruise-missiles don’t just materialize in the skies over Fordow if you want it so. The First Law has something to say about the frail pipe dreams of imperialists. It demands a hearing.

(Maybe the Friedmanist BS about Capitalism preventing war NOT has something for it after all — Capitalism may simply be ultimately too expensive and ruinous to be favorable to long-term wars. Free enterprise has racked up the cost of ordnance way. For the price of a single squadron of top-rate air superiority fighters you can get a nuclear aircraft carrier — though without crew, comestibles and weaponry; fuel’s presumably included tho. Compare to WW2. Compare to Feudalism — make it, say, a unit of horse and a castle.)

Now, imagine NOTHING had happened in Libya — Brother Leader crushes the “rats”, razes Bengazi, sells some oil to us, kills some niggers for us, and builds a new city, monument to his potency.

Everybody’s content. No pesky Son They Got Alive to spill the beans in public, how Europe paid Libya to help solving[it:] the immigration problem.

Until it turns out that the Arab League would be about as hard-assed about Syria as it is now, considering that (to them) higher motives come into play — namely the Sunni-Shi’a power game. Meaning NATO would be very much pressed not to let things get worse in Syria, lest its rep among the powers-that-are-to-be among sandniggers be totally screwed. For NATO, it would be a lose-lose situation. For the rest of the world, it would be more of a nightmare come true: Essentially, it would be a NATO-vs-Russia proxy war even more so than Libya (Gaddafi bought weapons from Russia and sold oil to the West, after all). Right next door to Israel and Fatahstan. With Russia supporting the guy that at least the likes of Sharon and Netanyahu certainly preferred as enemy de rigeur to some elected evil they didn’t know — and vice versa. For as regards keeping down any Pali ambitions, the Assad cvlan and most Israeli governments were partners-in-arms after the 70s. And as regards special treatment for Western tourists terrorists tourists or whatnot, Bashar al-Assad was a man the Western powers-that-be could always blindly trust.

Essentially: if NATO had to go to war against some Arab dipshit dictator making deserts and calling them peaces — and it was pretty likely it would have decided to do so at some point — it better be Moammar than Bashar.

In other news, the decay of Capitalism As We Know It progresses as expected. Right now it looks like it will very much try to latch onto the one-attractor branch. The waves seem to decrease in amplitude. This can only be certain after the next major slump for one thing, and for another, we do not know anything about the temporal variation of the attractor (DAX 6Kish, DJIA 12Kish, etc), except that it is not likely to rise.

It does not matter,
Whether 60%, or 70%, or 80%
Of the Greeks
Do not want a New Drachma.
We need it anyway,
That New Drachma!

At best, we get it before summer,
When last year’s harvest runs out
And this year’s is not ripe yet.
Then it can devalue,
That New Drachma.
By 60%, or 70%, or 80%.

And in the streets of Athens
The dead of hunger will rot,
τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι.
Just like in the streets of Buenos Aires,
Back when they devalued the Peso.

It’s also good for economic growth,
For Orthodox Christians
Don’t burn their dead.
The coffin makers will thrive.
And because in Greece
There’s so few trees,
Germany’s forest owners
Will also prosper.

They will rejoice,
The poor, the old, the sick and the children,
They will rejoice
To have died
To save us.

And it is not as if
It were anything new:
That a German commands
And Greeks starve.

They will meet death
With a smile on their face,
For they know:
A little bit of slimming down
Is healthy for a people,
A little bit of competition
Never harmed the economy.

“… after all it is not my generation that has fucked up the world economy.”

“Considering I have not laid and will not lay her, my interest in her sex life is actually rather limited.”

“Did anyone ever tell you that you smelt weird? Not bad or gross, just slightly unpleasant and utterly unusual.”

“First, I like her; second, it is plain obvious that by dissing your ex he’s only trying to get in your pants.”

“For posteriority: do not try and drag your creditors into your moneymaking schemes, if these are as likely to backfire as usual.”

“Has anyone in the audience read the paper titled ‘Destabilizing Social Networks‘ yet?”

“IONO what’s worse: your constant lecturing on my supposed stupidity, or the fact that those websites you sent me as inspiring pep talk were, in fact, built by rank Nazis.”

“I quit.”

“It is great to see that that idiot professor of yours has been able to teach you something other than not understanding the Lotka-Volterra equation: unwarranted arrogance.”

“KILL THAT FUKKEN PIG OF A SOCIOPATH LEADER AND ALL HIS FUKKEN GENERALS!”

“True to the point. She certainly has most thorough knowledge of the thawra. As is already evidenced by the fact that the comments at her YT videos are 100% German, 0% Arabic.”

“Well put. Now, would you kindly shove your tongue down my throat?”

“With regard to your erstwhile prediction: was there a specific date or event at which you turned into a parody of yourself, or was it more gradual, and if so, how long did it take?”

“You obviously love this thoroughly traumatized tomcat very much, but fussing about him is not gonna make him any less traumatized.”

It’s not immediately obvious, but yes, they do shake hands, and no, the protesters are not bought.

Too much austerity, and you can’t even keep the cops employed. In such situations, it usually becomes a more or less invisible tug-of-war between civic forces and the military. Having read Luttwak’s Coup is a must for anyone who wants the civic side to prevail in such a situation.

There will, of course, always be a week or two of warning time, when you can stock up on legumes and grains. But the whole mess — call it Capitalism or The System or whatnot — is dangerously close to the edge.

It may fracture in 2012 or it may shatter in 2014.

Any case, in one year one week and a day’s time people will look back on the 13th b’ak’tun and surmise this or that. And they will draw deep and profound insight upon that.

And still they won’t be able to prevent the wicked shit that’ll go on 2015ish.

It is supposable that humankind (or at least the “civilized” part) will emerge into cooling-down years, 2017 or so, much humbled. I may then not be alive. But in any case, it ought to be interesting to see how it progresses from thereon. Great things are afoot for the next year either way, what with the Occupy thingy having reached critical mass and economical conditions not looking especially bright. The seed of revolt has essentially spread anywhere the last half-year or so.

10000s are revolting against Putin. The € is openly speculated[de:] to be close to fragmenting. That about says it all. Nothing is sacred anymore; nothing is safe anymore. It’s all left open to chance; no powers-that-be can guide or direct anymore.

As a matter of fact, I concede that I am a bit astonished that the indices seem to have stalled at quite exactly K_Capitalism. I’d have wagered it would be a bit below, say DAX 5500, DJIA 11000, N225 8000.

This does not occur often, a spot-on landing so soon. IONO what to think of it. I would be less surprised by DAX 7500 than this. I can hardly believe it’s gonna be stable, but the behaviour would of course have a severe effect on the expected (Q2/2012 most likely) downfall. It would very much alter its pattern, perhaps even make it un-2008ish — and 2008 was very 2000ish, nice and straightforwardly mathematical, even a physicist could understand it.
(Or would it? It will be interesting to see which attractor prevails — the overall decay of Capitalism, or whatever forcing stopped it at K)

BTW I was wrong twice. Winter ain’t coming. Which is funny considering the aforementioned 24th Cycle.

After September there was some weirdass month — Septober or something — which lasted 6 weeks. Then we had a half-month Octember, and spot on December 1st, November started. And we have been having a nice and proper November ever since. Cold, sometimes very much so, rainy, a bunch of good storms, a few unempathic flakes of show or pails of hail one day or two.

The “autumn” months were characterized by a prolonged drought this year. This bothered nobody really though, and in any case it was quite expected (the colder half of the solar cycle tends to be dryer too, of course). What is more surprising is that we had, in a perfect Cfb climate, at the start of the upward leg of a weak solar cycle, as much as 13 °C in late November. Not one day or two — as a matter of habit. It was nice, though it makes you wonder how the hot years will turn out to be. Strange to think we might not be seeing snow in these lands for a long, long time. Perhaps there will be abundant snow this winter, and the next, and that after the next. But it’s just as likely that there won’t be significant snow any winter in these parts for the next 30 years or so. We had some very cold winters the last years, everything except the human factor was forcing towards cold. Looks like it has changed once again, and next time the short-term forcings converge on cold again, the human factor might prevail.

We shall see.

(c) BILD

“The army would need to run border surveillance so that nobody tries to smuggle € out of [Greece]. [...] [The Greek government] would need to rule by emergency powers [...] Wire transfers would need to be outlawed [...] international air and rail traffic would need to be prevented.”
– Some German professor releasing 1000 years’ worth of stench from his undies[de:], probably Nov 6th, 2011 or a bit earlier.

People will starve. They always do.

The “fun” thing is that people hereabouts really think this’ll do a lot of good for tourism.

In the meantime, lean back, cozy and warm in your secure First World dwelling, sip some champagne and watch a movie:

Of course all this can never hurt us. A professor told me so. He studied economy. He knows all about it: if we all just tighten our belts, growth will literally explode and expand beyond Jupiter, nay, Alpha Centauri. Straight into infinity.

Humans, as always, are the weakest link. So for the sake of Growth, let’s get rid of the maggots already, shall we?

Three millennia of warfare. 60 years of peace. Well so much for that, then.

Europe, this is a bucket:

Kick it already, you bitch.

You know you want to.

FUN FACT: If a Greek professor (or indeed any professor, or person) gave such advice as that quoted above regarding Germany, he’d fulfil that country’s definition of that often-quoted but usually-misunderstood crime called high treason[de:]. Which in the hierarchy of crimes ranks just one peg below actual murder.

Ah, the academics we have. Not changed a bit.

EVEN MORE FUN FACT: Technically it’s not even Greece that is broke, but another country starting with G.

Howse “Why Regime Debts Are Not State Debts (and Neither Are Corruption Debts)” (UN, 2007)

Sproul “Why Zimbabwe Collapsed and the US Didn’t Despite Neither Having ‘Solid’ (i.e. fossil) Money” (UCLA, 2003)

Hutchinson “Most Overlooked Use of the Word “economics” in the History of Knowledge” (Yale/AMNH, 1948)

The present global economic woes, at least, should be largely solvable based on this.

After all is said and done, burn everything. Dump the ashes into the wind from some high and stormy place. I only want a single thing to remain. A chunk of good rock, say Alta quartzite or some fine dacite. Onto which, with large Latin letters, shall be inscribed an epitaph. Dump this rock in some desert place. It’s not like I would care anymore, or that there would be a point in anyone caring about me.

And the epitaph shall be thus:

I HOPE YOU ALL DIE SCREAMING

Perhaps - but it used to be more likely 2 weeks ago - there will be a major crash soon. Say DAX 4-4.5K. But if so, a rebound to DAX 6Kish is almost a given.

In general I’d guess there will be a tendency to stay with high volatility and major swings, but remaining roughly in the DAX 5-5.5K corridor.

That all, however, only if self-similarity is as high as it might indeed be. It would be stark. Extremely. But it has been in the past.

Probably a geometrid. Dunno if I saw this species last year already.

Speaking of Stark: Winter is coming in the North. Next week’s protests will not last through it, despite kicking up some major shit. They need not: winter is coming.

Some species of fruit trees are brimming this year. The walnut of my old folks is bearing heavier than ever. Other species didn’t give a good harvest though. But the general feeling is one of cornucopia. There are bark beetles everywhere, even in town; I have never seen the likes of it. And judging from the swarms of green lacewings and Harmoniae aphids had a boon year too. There were few butterflies and not more bees than usual, but I saw many strange (to me) moths.

A girl I know says it’s gonna be a tough winter. But if you’d now her, you know she’d say that no matter what.

I am not sure, at least regarding climate. But it may be the first for long where there is much more hurt than the cold. The chances for it going smoothly economically and socially are not high.

Alternatively, we’d get decreasing oscillations closing on around DAX 6K.

But I don’t think this is too likely. Carrying capacity is not globally stable it looks like.

Thus, in the more likely general scenario — still 2 attractors instead of the DAX 6K one — a major crash in perhaps Q2-Q4 (Q1-Q3?) 2012 is almost a given. Say DAX 4K or less. Possibly as little as DAX 2K, though anything less than 3K is unlikely. Still, even the latter would mean another nominal loss of half the global wealth within barely more than a year (with the main “correction” of “values” taking place within a few weeks).

People ought to smell the coffee then, and be in the right mood to do something about it. Who knows if they will? It’ll likely be their last-but-one major chance, and the one after will be before half-decade and against more severe externalities.

Presuming the above is based on correct analysis of the data at hand. The pattern is fairly characteristic though.

If these are sufficient proxies, China can save the world economy 0-1 more times.

It will be interesting to see whether humans will be forced to suspend their disbelief of the things they will encounter, or whether they can uphold it until they are gang-raped by reality, thermodynamics and evolution.

Even though the data are rough (as in “it has been a rough ride”), extrapolating the Hang Seng from the 1990s’ values yields a current level of 25K[*]. Extrapolating it from 1990-2007, about the level of the present overshoot (i.e. 23.5K).

For the DAX, the corresponding values are about 12-13K and about 8K, respectively. The zenith of the present overshoot was 7.25K.

For the DJIA, it is 20-21K, 15K and 12.5K.

(For the N225 this does not work for obvious reasons.)

[*] This is the expected value if Capitalist/Marxist economic theories are correct. The divergence from expected value is 6% for the Hang, 42% for the DAX, 39% for the DJIA.

You can now calculate a now-many-sigma event each represents. But only if you believe economy follows a Gaussian distribution of probability. Otherwise “3σ” is gormless technobabble.

The crazyshitness quota is quite high[de:] these days, as you have heard. If they will talk of the 21st century world revolution afterwards, we’re already in it. It is quite unlikely that this can be stomped out anytime soon. Particularly since the hottest years of this decade are yet to come (remember the temperature curve lags about one year after the radiation curve).

As a side note, 2013 is the year of the scheduled Federal elex. However, in one week the legal basis to hold Federal elex will simply evaporate[de:] until, well nobody knows really. It’ll be the first “cold” coup in Germany (the Executive power rejecting the Jurisdictional power’s checking-and-balancing — NB: “Executive” is not quite correct because the German gov’t doubles as legislative and traditionally controls the rest of it to a certain extent).

The stock index corridor of disinterest until further notice is:

DJIA 12.5K — 12K
DAX 7.5K — 7K

Until they leave this range robustly, nothing interesting is bound to happen macroeconomy wise. The direction in which they leave this range is likely gonna be fairly representative of the next half-dozen weeks or so[de:]. Speed and volatility are not reliably indicators though; even when the general direction has stabilized, the whole world economy will not be stable. (It will not be for several years methinks. Or at least I have been unable to find many data that refute this hypothesis.)

As of 2011, about the worst known eating habits in the known Biosphere.

It really looks uncannily like V-fib, rarely have I seen such a prolonged period of this, and so clearly.

It is likely to follow suit if the others ditch, but it doesn’t look like it’s gonna rise significantly and sustainably anytime soon. Meanwhile, there is suspicion (borne out by hard physical data) that the dick that fuks you, Shima, is gonna be long, hard and dark. Yet it is notable that the locality is perhaps the one on the entire Earth where such a massive fuckup can happen without crass consequences (think hordes of ragged people with festering sores wandering through an otherwise abandoned and ruined megacity).

A lot of people — even many nuclear “experts” as it seems — still seem to mentally treat nuclear fuel like any old chemical fuel. But it won’t be so easy to dispose of. Even most bacteria die from eating it, and it cannot be thinned down and flushed down the drain and rot and become mostly harmless, and while you can burn the shit you really really shouldn’t.

We will have decades of shit ‘n’ giggles with that one. Not gonna be like the three worst hydrocarbon disasters in the history of Mankind, which are largely forgotten and amazingly ameliorated just 10 years after (at least if the two cases for which we have data are an indication).

And then there is this and consequently that to be seen below. As I said above, the crazyshitness quota is quite high. Or make it batfuckingshitinsaneness quota [de:]:

I have never come across anything comparable to this, nor have I heard of such a thing. 100Ks of Germans subscribe to it — this one video has >160K views alone, and the comments suggest most of the early adopters actually believed it at least partly (the more recent comments are mostly trolling though). Plus, it’s all over the conspi blogosphere.

Large mass delusions tend to involve several 100s to a few 1000s of people. To hit the 10K is quite rare and requires some sort of special FX. IONO how many people fell for the Monkey-man of Delhi or Spring-heeled Jack, they might be in the same order of magnitude. But these two were less abrupt, more drawn-out phenomena like the all-time favorites Fan Death and Shrinking Dick Syndrome, which are in a strictly scientific sense already hard to distinguish from some of the more unhealthy clothing traditions.

Of course, it all cannot be discounted. Maybe we will get some false-flag detonation of a nuclear weapon there and then. In this case, Berlin will be fucked, Germany will be fucked, Europe will be fucked, it’ll be mayhem, people will survive by sheer luck and then wish they hadn’t etc., so it’s not something to worry about anyway. We’d be screwed six ways to Sunday and there’ll be nothing to do about it.

OTOH it may be all bogus. But in this case it may be the largest and most virulent mass delusion since the “Angels” of Mons or perhaps the Fatiman Sun “Miracle”. Both of which happened almost 100 years ago, happened at the height of World War 1, and if anything involved less people than this here shit.

So we’re pretty much fucked either way. It’s about time they start adding shit to the water to cure the peeps of their madness. You need heavy-duty shit though, compounds that really do drastic things to one’s brain chemistry. Potassium cyanide might just about do the trick…

In any case it’s not normal — by any meaning of the term –, it’s not healthy, it just shouldn’t happen. Meaning that either on June 26th, 2011, or some time not long thereafter, we’ll be in for a very rude awakening. The collective state of mind is like a ripe pear that could by no means stay on the tree any longer, and is now descending towards the pavement below. It is not clear where it splashes, but a splash of some sort seems inevitably. These things don’t just cure themselves.

100000s of my compatriots spontaneously going mad as it seems, and more than just slightly so. We may say the shit has now officially hit the fan.

“Tartan!”
– “conrebbi”, June 13th, 2011