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Author Topic: Power Structures in Human Society: Pros and Cons Part 1  (Read 14733 times)

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AGelbert

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    • Renwable Revolution
View From the Catbird Seat PART 1 of 2 parts
« on: December 02, 2013, 01:03:17 am »

View From The Catbird Seat   


Agelbert NOTE:Originally published about a year and a half ago. Since the  ATTITUDE of the greedballs among the 1% hasn't changed much, if at all, I have updated it and am republishing it. Now it is even more urgent for the 1% to understand the "nature" of their "nature". :evil4:

What is the 1% and the 1% wannabes up to these days as we approach the event horizon of accelerated environmental collapse? Well, they appear to be building hidey holes.
Quote
The secret world of doomsday shelters

Snippet 1

Quote
Unlike 1950s-era fallout shelters and newer aboveground "safe rooms," meant to protect against storms and home invasions, bunkers are buried at least 6 feet under, in part to shield occupants from nuclear radiation.
You can buy a bare-bones shelter for $38,000 uninstalled or spend tens of millions of dollars — and a surprising number do — on a lavish, custom-made subterranean sanctuary.

Bunker builders cite a long list of client fears, from war and terrorism to megastorms and epic earthquakes. But the customers themselves aren't talking. "Secrecy is their defense," says shelter manufacturer Walton McCarthy, of Radius Engineering in Terrell, Texas. Shelter owners don't want neighbors and strangers pounding on the entry hatch in an emergency, he explains.
Also, many have installed shelters without building permits. While city and county authorities may disagree, McCarthy maintains that his prefabricated shelters fall outside building codes.

"These have no foundations, so technically don't come under building code. They're self-contained and are not hooked up to the grid."

b]To sidestep nosy neighbors and building authorities, contractors may disguise the projects as swimming pool installations. "The hole is dug on Friday," McCarthy says. "We get there Friday at 5, by Monday it's in, and the neighbors can call whoever they want."[/b]

For those of you that read my post on the rich and their NBC (Nuclear Biological Chemical) filtered doomsday shelters, I was kidding about the filter duration but I wasn't making their existence up.

Snippet 2

Quote
McCarthy entered the field in 1978 as a young mechanical engineer, designing and making concrete shelters, then steel and now fiberglass. He wrote the “U.S. Handbook of NBC Weapon Fundamentals and Shelter Engineering Design Standards.” And he reports that his business generates $30 million to $45 million annually through the sale of 50 to 100 shelters a year. Radius sells to businesses, homeowners, churches and government. Most of the shelters hold 20 people or more and can sustain life for one to five years. Half are sold in the Washington, D.C., area.

The smallest Radius shelter, an eight-person unit, costs $108,000. Here's what you get:

A ribbed, composite cylinder 12 feet wide, 11 feet high and 24 feet long; with no metal parts, it's meant to be undetectable by radar or thermal-detection devices.
Your shelter comes with a diesel-powered generator, a toilet and septic tank, a kitchen, plumbing, air filters, a ham radio, a shower, a DVD player and TV, bunks and furnishings. Radius sells preserved food separately.
Shipping is extra — about $10,000 from coast to coast, for example — and installation is an additional $20,000 to $25,000. And then there's excavation: The shelter requires a hole 25 feet deep, so it's too big to fit under a home.

You too, can imitate the greedy, calloused and selfish rich. For a sum most middle class folks can afford, you too can purchase some pie in the sky (or is it a mole in the hole?):


Snippet 3

Quote
Vivos plans as many as 20 community shelters of various sizes in the U.S. and says six are now under construction. Its sells fractional ownerships in the projects. Buying into a 944-person underground facility near Omaha, for example, costs $25,000 per person. This rendering shows a plan for “a typical” Vivos community bunker. // © Vivos
http://realestate.msn.com/-the-secret-world-of-doomsday-shelters



View From the Catbird Seat

Are those that contributed most to our polluted world and dog-eat-dog insane predatory capitalist mindset really stupid enough to believe they can survive the environmental collapse?

After about a year and half of pre-engineering, I switched to aviation and obtained pilot and flight instructor certificates. It was 1967 and I firmly believed their was a bullet in Viet Nam with my name on it so I joined the Air National Guard in the hopes of dodging it.  I scored well on the Air Force test that reminded me of those IQ tests they gave us in Kansas when I was a kid with lots of box shapes and pattern recognition type questions so I was given a wide range of job choices. I chose "Link Trainer Technician" because it was aviation related and, being an 11 month school, would teach me a lot about electronics.

I was turned down because I am nearsighted. Even though it was obviously corrected to 20-20 (It's rather difficult to get a pilot's license without proper vision), they claimed my glasses would inhibit my ability to work in enclosed places in the trainer while servicing electronics assemblies. I said I'd get contacts but to no avail. I didn't want to do the grunt work of aircraft mechanic or loading bombs or bullets on fighters so so I ended up training at Lowry AFB in Denver training in the dual AFSC (Air Force Specialty Code) of Intelligence Operations Specialist/Photo Interpreter (16 week school) after basic training in Lackland AFB.

At Lowry I learned how to kill millions of living beings of all sorts with atomic bombs. There was this bombing encyclopedia with radar cross sections of every city in the entire world (USA included). We would figure the megatonnage out to make sure we killed as many of the "enemy" as possible (e.g.  two air bursts of 5 megatons spaced about 25 miles apart do more damage than a single 15 megaton air burst). All this was top secret stuff of course but most of that info is declassified now and available on the internet so I'm free to talk about it. 

We learned how to spot infrastructure resources from aerial photography (oil refineries and bridges were a favorite) and how best to "take them out". I was an atheist at the time and had accepted the view that human males fight over land, stuff and women whenever they thought they could take one or more of those "items" away from the other guys.

Hey, I was raised by an Army officer. Being a cardboard **** was mandatory in my daddy's world view. Those who have read any of my current thoughts know I woke up to the bankruptcy of such a narrow mindset decades ago. Anyway, this is how I learned interrogation techniques (e.g. Mutt and Jeff - good cop bad cop) and what NBC filters are.

The US Government has LOTS of excellent underground facilities equipped with years of human survival need supplies and NBC filtration. So does Russia. The Swiss have some super doomsday shelters as well complete with modern hospital equipment. All the "first" world countries probably have callously taken steps to protect the decision makers among them. I say "callously" because underground hospitals with the latest equipment don't just sit there while people on the surface excluded from the catbird seat get average to poor health care, just for starters.

They don't just throw a bunch of canned beans in a hole and leave it at that; these facilities are constantly maintained and the supplies and equipment upgraded.

No, I can't prove it. I am extrapolating from my observations of rich people in the thrall of egotism greed and hubris.

Yep, I have some personal experiences with rich people. No they aren't at the elite decision making level (although I did personally met with one of their lackeys, General Westmoreland, for a brief one way conversation about not pissing upstream when he learned I had written home about hazing at West Point) but I can relate to you what I believe is a common mindset among the rich and you will see what I mean.

I have an older sister who became a millionaire in the stock market. She also claims to be a Christian. She's a world class hypocrite that embraced "prosperity preaching" from televangelist con artists. She is quite willing to pray for all those poor and donate a tax deductible (of course!) pittance every now and then but firmly believes it's their fault for being poor and prosperity is a mark of "God's blessing". She would run naked over a frozen lake to pick up a nickel. I learned some time ago that my old man abused her sexually when she was 13 so I try to make amends for her "a liberal is someone that has never been mugged" worldview.

The bottom line for her is that she was used so she used any damned thing out there, including religion to "get hers" though she won't admit it. Daddy was a predator and he passed it on to his oldest daughter (in a different form; she never abused her children). I say without a hint of sarcasm or humor that I hope God has mercy on her.

Nevertheless, she is still a hypocrite and is, through her embrace of the status quo, complicit in the harm being visited on the biosphere. Her concept of good stewardship is limited to her bank account. Her pro-war stand is revealing about how Orwellian mainstream "Christianity" has become. I once sent her an article in protest of the Iraq war of a two year old girl screaming in terror at a checkpoint in Iraq where our soldiers had just killed her parents and there was blood all over the place. She sent me a picture of her two year old grandaughter.  :(

My Friend Steve the Millionaire

My other experience with a millionaire is with a fellow named Steve who was a high school classmate. His dad had a chain of department stores. Though we weren't friends in high school, Steve became my friend later in life during my atheist period. Steve liked to play monopoly, eat Oreo cookies and drink milk in his $400,000 house (1970s).

He was sure about everything and uncertain about nothing. He had a pair of Bull Mastiff dogs in his back yard and a collection of weapons (and a room just for them) that was quite impressive. He bought my old man's Army 45 because he liked having some "stopping power" available at all times (He "carried").

If you get the impression he was an arrogant, overbearing prick, then you are wrong. He was actually quite low key and affable in his mannerisms. As to his phallic symbol worship, you would never know it from his demeanor and voice. He was soft spoken and never cross in facial expressions. He could discuss any topic, no matter how different from his world view with aplomb.

He was also a henpecked husband who's wife Bonnie (another former classmate of mine) was a real handful. She made no effort to hide the fact that she had the hots for me and Steve made no effort to hide the fact that he had the hots for my former wife. Eventually that ended the friendship because wife swapping was never my thing and I would not hear of it. Bonnie and I had almost been an item before she married but I had my own rules about messing with married women and I managed to keep them.

But I digress. Steve, when he was winning at monopoly would say, "Money makes money". At other times when we discussed problems of wealth distribution in society he would say that, if all the wealth was evenly distributed, within 5 years present wealth distribution of the most money at the top with peanuts at the bottom would be established again because, you see, that is the proper social equilibrium of humanity, etc.

I would remind him that unethical practices like the 150% markup on cost (or more) that he would brag about to me in the department stores weren't right when the poor were the main targets. He would say that the poor would do exactly the same thing in his shoes (To his credit, he never got angry or tried to spin my charge as being false, envious or vindictive. Steve was wrong but he wasn't a hypocrite). By the way, I got a great discount on a TV and TV table from him so I didn't exactly have clean hands then.

Steve was born with a silver spoon in his mouth but never doubted that he was just lucky even though he held the conflicting view that the rich have some innate money making skill that the rest of the populace don't share. I guess he resolved this obvious logical conflict with the firm belief that the rich train their kids to be rich and that's why the rich get richer and mostly stay rich.

Those that scratch their way up like my sister are loathe to admit that luck, not smarts or God's favor are the main ingredients in their upward mobility. Of course neither of these two individuals are criminals in the Walls Street model. They both actually worked hard and played by some rules. But both of these types of millionaires share a biosphere killing worldview. EndisNigh brought to our attention here at the Doomstead Diner some quotes from Craig Dilworth in "Too Smart for our Own Good" humanity's basic problem of refusing to recognize that the average human has serious cognitive impairment in dealing with multigenerational biosphere harming technologies and other threats that are not immediate.

The rich are the worst offenders because they have gained a short term, but actually quite temporary and artificial, high standard of living at the expense of everyone, including their own future offspring's health. For the poor and many of us in the middle classes throughout the world, it is not rocket science to know the system cannot be improved by tinkering or minor adjustments here and there. No, the "growth is better forever" insanity must be properly labelled as such.   

Continued in Part 2
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

 

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