Refuse the Debt

The Fat Thing

I’ve just watched the first two episodes of the 4-part HBO special called The Weight of the Nation and it is pissing me off.

The Genetics of Obesity

The entire first episode was dedicated to telling us how complex a problem the American obesity epidemic is. Expert after expert, scientist after scientist, doctor after doctor all doing these intricate studies, spending millions of public dollars on lab analysis, imaging, computer models; talking about the genetic and evolutionary components of what drives people to overeat.

I hold an advanced degree in biology. I have studied evolution, behavioral genetics, and social evolution with some of the founders of those fields and as an officially certified expert, I am here to tell you that there is no (as in zero) genetic component to the fat problem in America. It is a one hundred percent cultural issue.

How can I say this with such confidence, flying in the face of all the televised experts I just watched? Simple. Look at France. Same genetics, no obesity epidemic. Look at America 50 years ago: same genetics, no obesity epidemic. The genetics does not change over those timeframes. It takes thousands, tens of thousands of years for any kind of significant changes to take place in a genome. As a people, Americans in 2012 are for all practical purposes 100% genetically identical with Americans of 1960.

Rebuttal #1: The fat issue is cultural.

It’s Complicated

It’s not complicated.

All throughout the show so far, doctors keep telling us how complex the overweight/obesity issue is. Interspersed with all the intricate studies, lab-work, and epidemiology, the implication is clear that we are supposed to be seeing the issue of overweight-ness and obesity as some kind of illness with complex causes.

But this whole mindset is the actual cause. To be sure, there are a lot of complex results of overweight and obesity, both at the level of the overweight individual and at the level of the collective healthcare system that is tasked with dealing with (and paying for) all of the many systemic effects of obesity.

But the actual cause of obesity is fantastically simple: people are eating too much and not exercising enough. Period.

There was one sequence where the fat experts went after the hypocrisy of the diet providers, saying that the purveyors of diets have no real incentive to solve the fat problem because if they did, they would no longer be able to make a living. True enough. But talk about people in glass houses. Many of these fat experts are getting paid public money to study all the “complex” causes of the obesity epidemic; what happens to their salary if there were no such epidemic? What happens to their salary if the problem is a relatively simple one: people eating too much food and not exercising enough?

Every time these fat experts talked about how complex the causes of obesity are, I wanted to throw something at my TV. Every time they emphasized the evolutionary, and genetic components of obesity I wanted to throw something at the TV.

I applaud the producers of this special and HBO for putting it out there. The American obesity problem is a serious problem. A simple problem, but a serious one. There are way too many fat people in America, and it’s getting worse.

The fat problem is difficult, but not complex.

Rebuttal #2: The fat issue is simple.

The first episode of the special is all about causes and consequences. I have no quarrel with their characterization of the consequences, but the causes are simple as stated above. The second episode is about what to do, both at the level of society and at the level of the individual.

My prescription is simple (but not easy). Step one is to admit that there is a problem. And for all its flaws, the existence of this series at all is a massive step in that direction. For all my complaints about it, I think it will do more good than harm. So thumbs up on that. But I also think that the real underlying cause of the obesity problem (as well as the economy problem, but that’s another post) is the cultural swallowing of unreality that is being promulgated by those relatively few who profit from it to our collective detriment. As long as there is a giant food industry that profits massively from people over-eating and a giant healthcare industry that profits massively from people being overweight, there is going to be an incentive for those industries to do what they can to maintain the status quo. Whatever their public service announcements say, McDonalds and Kaiser want you to be overweight. And they have a lot of money to spend on studies the result of which is marketing that promotes obesity.

Step two is also simple and difficult: fat people have to eat less and exercise more. There really is not anything else to do about it. There is no magic pill, no expensive machine, no surgical procedure that is going to save the day. It’s hard to discipline your addictions, but it’s a simple issue with a simple (not easy) solution: fat people have to eat less and exercise more.

The only thing that is going to motivate fat people to eat less and exercise more is their awareness of the real consequences of being fat. So again, I applaud the producers of The Weight of the Nation for helping to make this problem more visible.

Economic Science

In the infinite mystery of Is, there is no way for a presumed separate point of view (that would be what you and I call ‘I’) to know ultimate Truth. Since the ultimate Truth of any thing (or everything) minimally requires its apprehension from all points of view in space and time, no one point of view, limited to its here and now, can know it. Every point of view is inherently ignorant.

Science is not immune to this limitation on knowing Truth. Science is a method of creating narratives (stories) that describe phenomena. There is good science and bad science.

Good science starts from presuming its inherent ignorance and goes on to methodically create useful narratives. A useful narrative is one which accurately and repeatably predicts the future based on a set of starting conditions.

Bad science creates narratives that describe past phenomena without any predictive value. Bad science is not inherently less (or more) Truthful than good science. Bad science is merely useless.

Conventional economics is a set of narratives about past phenomena which has -- except in the most simple and artificial cases -- no ability to accurately and repeatably predict future phenomena. If conventional economics is any kind of ‘science’, then it is bad science; conventional economics is useless.

Incidentally, because of human proneness to cargo-cultism, many people think that a narrative with the ability to accurately and repeatably predict the future based on a set of starting conditions is the definition of Truth. This conceptual error can be cured by either doing good science or taking some acid. Or both.

Greece

The government of Greece borrowed a lot more money than their economy can repay. They borrowed that money mostly from banks in other European countries. Now Europe is proposing to create more European debt to “bail out” Greece by “giving” them money to give back to the European banks, which would only be stupidly circular, except that above and beyond the amount that Greece owes, they still also have to fund their government.

“The structure of the deal puts the IMF/EU/ECB clearly in control of the finances of Greece so they have replaced some sort of Czar with the bureaucrats of the Troika and the country no longer will control its own finances as they traded away their sovereignty for cash. In fact, an escrow account will be set up for Greece which will be controlled by the Troika and Greece is being forced to change their Constitution pledging to pay their creditors before providing any money for the country. A quick study of the math reveals that Greece will get about 19 cents on the Dollar and the rest of the money is the sovereign nations of Europe paying back their banks with the money they have supposedly lent to Greece. Greece is now nothing more than a conduit for the nations of Europe to pay back their own financial institutions.” [Source]

So the deal basically says that Europe is going to borrow money to lend Greece money and 80% of that money is going to Europe’s banks and 20% is going to fund Greece.

But that level of funding for Greece means crushing austerity for the Greek people and at the same time, the rest of Europe is bailing out its own banks via piling more debt on top of Europe’s and Greece’s already too much debt, and they are paying a 20% premium on that bailout money to Greece.

And all of this makes sense for exactly whom?

In a nutshell, Europe is creating new debt and paying an extra 20% and the Greek people are going to live in a hell-realm so that a handful of fat bureaucrats can keep their jobs.

Whether or not the European taxpayers should bail out the European banks at all is a question I’ll leave to another time, but even if one believed this was a good idea, it would clearly be better for them to give the money directly to the banks and skip the 20% premium to Greece.

On the other side of the picture, the Greek people would be FAR better to default on their debt, leave the Euro, devalue the reinstated Drachma, and start rebuilding their economy from the base of an incredible advantage they would have in the tourism industry and whatever exports they brought to the market with a local currency that was very cheap against the Euro.

So it’s far better for the European people for Greece to default and leave the Euro, and it’s far better for the Greek people for Greece to default and leave the Euro. If Europe directly bailed out the European banks that are holding Greek debt, it would be a wash to the banks. So the only tiny group of players in this drama who are benefitting from the farce of “bailing” Greece out are the bloated eurocrats — the people whose jobs and twisted little fiefdoms depend on shoring up the terminally flawed Euro.

Right, business as usual then.

RE: Social Fractals and the Corruption of America

Please see this excellent article by Charles Hugh Smith

Hi Charles,

I recently had an insight about what appears to me as the fundamental driving force beneath the corruption that you wrote about in your article today. It’s not a new insight in any way — there have been many people who have said this in one way or another, and it is the essential basis for the whole concept of “sound money” but it hit me in a decisive way recently.

If you consider that the primary “fabric” of society, the sum total of our relationships with everyone, is a web of energetic exchange that we all participate in by working, employing, bartering, buying, selling, etc. … And if you accept that money is a representation of energy whose utility is in making the exchanges of energy that underpin society more convenient by both storing energy as well as providing a standardized unit of account and value for all work and property in energetic terms…

Then if you simply run a thought experiment about what would happen to the nature of exchange — again, the “fabric” of society, and most significantly, our RELATIONAL landscape — if you allowed the supply of money to be massively manipulated such that it no longer represented the sum total of real energy (whether stored in the form of “real capital” or potential in the form of “work”) available to be exchanged.

I believe that fractional reserve banking, in and of itself, inevitably leads to the forms of corruption that you write about and that we can observe in the US and the world in general. By systematically misrepresenting the energetic “content” of money, by turning the basis of our relational exchange into fraud, you create an uncertainty and sense of wealth scarcity while simultaneously creating a playing field that incentivizes people to game and exploit each other in order to horde a larger and larger share of an uncertain pie for their own security.

Where the very nature of relational exchange has itself been made fraudulent, how can a society built on that foundation be anything other than fraudulent?