Americans Are Being Prepared For Full Spectrum Tyranny
Published originally on Alt-Net on Thursday, 28 June 2012 02:58 Brandon Smith
Discuss this post at the Geopolitics Table inside the Diner
Totalitarian governments, like persistent forms of cancer, have latched onto the long history of man, falling and then reemerging from the deep recesses of our cultural biology to wreak havoc upon one unlucky generation to the next. The assumption by most is that these unfortunate empires are the product of bureaucracies gone awry; overtaken by the chaotic maddening hunger for wealth and power, and usually manipulated by the singular ambitions of a mesmerizing dictator. For those of us in the Liberty Movement who are actually educated on the less acknowledged details of history, oligarchy and globalized centralism is much less random than this, and a far more deliberate and devious process than the general unaware public is willing to consider.
Unfortunately, the final truth is very complex, even for us…
One cannot place the blame of despotism entirely on the shoulders of globalists. Sadly, the crimes of elites are only possible with a certain amount of complicity from subsections of the populace. Without our penchant for apathy and fear, there can be no control. That is to say, there is no power over us but that which we give away. We pave the road to our own catastrophes.
In the end, a tyrant’s primary job is not to crush the masses and rule out of malevolence, but to obtain the voluntary consent of the citizenry, usually through trickery and deceit. Without the permission of the people, subconscious or otherwise, no tyranny can survive.
As with the oppressive regimes of the past, America has undergone a dramatic transformation, heavy with fear and ignorance. Our tradition of elections has been corrupted and negated by the false left/right paradigm, and the leaderships of both defunct parties now seek only to elevate a select minority of men bent on globalization. Our Constitutional liberties have been dismantled by legal chicanery. Our principles have been diluted by intellectual games of rationalism and moral relativism. Our country is ripe for conquest.
Americans battle over whose side is most to blame; Democrat or Republican, while ironically being disenchanted with both entities. For some people, the thought of holding each party equally accountable, or accepting that they are essentially the same animal, never crosses their minds.
While this irrelevant farce of a debate rages on, the true culprits plotting the demise of our Republic gain momentum, and implement policy initiatives that the public should and must take note of. In the past year alone, many blatant steps towards the Orwellian gulag have been openly administered. A carnival of peddlers and freaks and greasy popcorn overwhelms our senses, but the stench of this cheap circus still tickles our noses, and if we use our eyes for even a moment, certain dangerous trends reveal themselves. Here are just a few recent events that bear a dire warning; the ultimate assault on freedom in this nation grows near… Acclimation To Subservience
Every totalitarian state worth its salt has its own goon squad. The Nazi’s had the “Brownshirts”, the Soviets had the “Militsiya” and the “Voluntary People’s Brigade”, the Communist Chinese have the “Chengguan”, etc. In America, however, all tyrannical measures are given innocuous bureaucratic labels to mislead and distract the masses. In this country, we have the Transportation Security Administration…
The TSA has become the most hated alphabet agency in the U.S. in perhaps the fastest time on record. It has violated the personal rights of more people on a daily basis in my view than the IRS, DEA, and the ATF combined. Clearly, this slobbering demon child of the Department of Homeland Security is being molded for something quite terrible and grand.
When confronted by the public on the use of irradiating and intrusive naked body scanner technology, the agency responded by allowing their blue handed ghoul army to molest our nether-regions. When confronted by state and local governments on their absurd tactics, the TSA threatened economic blockades and airport shutdowns. The organization then began expanding its jurisdiction to bus and train stations and even our highways when it introduced the VIPR program and implemented random roadside checkpoints in Tennessee last year. But, this behavior is nothing compared to what is next on the horizon: a compromise…
Beware of government agencies bearing gifts. The TSA along with the International Air Transport Association has announced a new methodology of “less intrusive” passenger screening measures, in order to address the concerns of the public over pat downs and irradiating naked body scanners. This SOUNDS like a step in the right direction, and a proper response to the grievances of the citizenry. Instead, it turns out to be a refined example of totalitarianism in motion, and a perfect lesson in how the masses can be duped into handing over their inherent freedoms.
Revamped security protocols call for biometric data collection, including fingerprint and retina scans, and a tunnel which combines multiple detection systems into one area (who knows how radioactive this will end up being):
http://travel.usatoday.com/flights/story/2012-06-19/Faster-better-airport-security-checkpoints-not-that-far-off/55693916/1
The mainstream article above makes this development sound like a win/win scenario for everyone, painting biometric data collection as a matter of convenience, but it also reveals the true design of the system; to illicit voluntary subservience:
“The key to speeding up checkpoints and making security less intrusive will be to identify and assess travelers according to the risks they pose to safety in the skies. The so-called riskiest or unknown passengers would face the toughest scrutiny, including questioning and more sensitive electronic screening. Those who voluntarily provide more information about themselves to the government would be rewarded with faster passage…” They enforce destructive anti-personal rights policies then pretend to acquiesce by replacing them with a technocratic nightmare grid which requires the cataloging of our very genetic essence in order to function. The only remaining injustice left would be to apply this grid to the rest of the country outside of the airports and train stations, which I assure you, they plan to do. Militarization
Last week, I covered the disturbing use of armored vehicles (APC’s or urban tanks) in open training regiments on the streets of St. Louis by the U.S Army, despite the fact that all of their exercises could have easily been accomplished on any number of military bases across the country. The action is an obvious attempt to condition the American populace to the sight of military units operating in a policing capacity:
http://www.alt-market.com/articles/866-military-tanks-on-st-louis-streetsbut-why
I received multiple letters from current serving military who stated that in all their years in the armed forces they had never seen such a brash mishandling of public relations or an overstepping of bounds when it came to the restrictions of Posse Comitatus. It was encouraging to hear from military men and women who did not agree with or condone this kind of psyop activity on the part of our government.
Though the St. Louis event is not isolated, I believe it does represent an escalation.
Remember the controversy over the Mayor of Toledo and his refusal to allow 200 Marines to conduct urban combat drills on the public streets of his city in 2008? The media clamored to crucify this public official; one of the few who had any sense whatsoever in his head:
http://voices.yahoo.com/toledo-mayor-faces-backlash-ousting-marines-896105.html
Or the tactical exercises using helicopters and combat troops over LA and Chicago early this year?
http://www.lapdonline.org/newsroom/news_view/50045
http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2012/04/17/city-black-hawk-helicopter-flights-were-just-a-training-exercise/
During each one of these events, city officials and local media attempted to inoculate the public with claims that they were “simply exercises”. This argument misses the point entirely. Whether or not these are “exercises” is not the issue. The issue is that this training could be done ON BASE. Using public streets and running drills within cities is absolutely unnecessary given the vast resources already available to the military, unless, of course, the goal is to BE SEEN by the public and to influence them to view the sight of armed troops around them as “normal”.
Add to this the fact that many of these military training exercises are being conducted in tandem with local police departments, and you have a recipe for the utter militarization of our society, turning peace officers into combat soldiers, and combat soldiers into law enforcement mechanisms; a juxtaposition that will soon lead to unmitigated disaster.
Arms Race Against the People?
When a country is quietly preparing for war, the first signs are usually revealed by a disclosure of armaments. If stockpiling is taking place without a warranted threat present from a legitimate enemy, there is a considerable likelihood of aggression on the part of that nation. America has gone well beyond the psychological process of militarization and has begun the extensive arming of particular agencies whose primary purpose revolves around the domestic.
The DHS, for instance, placed an order for over 450 million rounds of hollowpoint .40 cal ammunition in April of this year:
http://rt.com/usa/news/dhs-million-point-government-179/
And it placed an order for over 7000 new semi-automatic combat rifles chambered in .223 (5.56 by 45mm NATO) immediately after:
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=d791b6aa0fd9d3d8833b2efa08300033&tab=core&tabmode=list&=
While local police through federal programs (like the 1033 Program) are being given millions of dollars in free military equipment, including body armor, night vision equipment, APC’s, aircraft, first aid supplies, weapons, surveillance equipment, Kevlar helmets, gas masks and filters, vehicles, etc.:
http://www.ogs.state.sc.us/surplus/SP-1033-index.phtm
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/06/cops-military-gear/all/
All of this equipment, though issued to state agencies, is still heavily tracked and regulated by the federal government, making it clear that these “gifts” come with strings attached:
http://www.newsherald.com/articles/program-103291-state-law.html
And finally, new FAA regulations will soon allow the dispersion of tens of thousands of predator drones with armament capability in the skies of the U.S. over the course of the next few years: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/feb/7/coming-to-a-sky-near-you/
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/10/nation/la-na-drone-arrest-20111211
Now, anyone with any logic would ask who it is that the government is arming itself and local police to fight against? Al Qaeda? Let’s not be naïve…
The passage of the NDAA and its provisions for the indefinite detainment of ANY person, even an American citizen, under the laws of war has ended the debate over government intent in terms of domestic action. FBI Director Robert Mueller’s admission that he “did not know” if assassination programs would be used against American citizens also heaped evidence on the matter. The bottom line? Our government wishes to label and treat citizens as enemy combatants. Of course they would then organize armaments to follow through on their policy.
Pulling The Trigger
All despotic systems have another distinct similarity; they each began with a series of trigger events which opened the door to tighter controls over the population. The most immediate trigger event for the U.S. is the looming peril of a collapsing economy followed by inevitable civil unrest. With the EU currently in debt shambles, global markets are on the verge of a considerable breakdown. The Federal Reserve response will be predictable; QE3 and massive stimulus all around to mitigate the crisis. This time, though, the go-to Keynesian quick fix will not work in the slightest. In fact, it will make matters more untenable by placing the world reserve status of the dollar at risk.
Everything that has happened so far in the markets this year has been easy to foresee. Alt-Market predicted the economic slowdown around the world and the collapse of overall demand using the Baltic Dry Index as a gauge back in January:
http://www.alt-market.com/articles/540-baltic-dry-index-signals-renewed-market-collapse
We also predicted the accelerated turmoil in the EU in light of the recent election results in France and Greece:
http://www.alt-market.com/articles/765-economic-alert-if-youre-not-worried-yetyou-should-be
If alternative economic analysts can predict these developments despite the manipulated statistics spewed out by the government every month, then I think the government and our central bank has a tremendously transparent view of what is coming down the road in terms of financial distress. I believe the establishment is very well aware of a potential crisis event, economic or otherwise, that is barreling down upon the U.S. I believe the evidence shows that they are preparing for this eventuality in a command and control fashion, without alerting the public to the coming implosion. I believe they will use the despair that flows forth from the fiscal wreckage as an excuse to institute martial law.
Call it “crazy”. Call it “conspiracy theory”. Call it “coincidence”. Call it “fear mongering”. Whatever you like. I find it far more insane to shrug off the strange and twisted behavior of our power structure, and simply hope that it’s all irrelevant to the future. Whenever I run into starry eyed historical romanticists who look back in astonishment at the tyrannies of the past and wonder out loud, “How could those people have not known where their country was headed?!!”, I think of where we are today…
You can contact Brandon Smith at:
brandon@alt-market.com
Lower Oil Prices-Not a Good Sign!
Posted on June 28, 2012 by Gail Tverberg on Our Finite World
Are lower oil prices good news? Not really, if it means the world is sinking into recession.
We know from recent past experience and from common sense that higher oil prices are a drag oil importing economies, since if more $$$ are spent on the same amount of oil, there is less to spend on discretionary goods and services. In addition, oil money sent to oil exporting countries is likely to be spent within those economies, rather than being reinvested in the oil importing company that the funds came from.
Figure 1. A rough calculation of revenue (in 2011$) associated with oil imports and exports, based on 2012 BP Statistical Review data, for three areas of the world: the Former Soviet Union (FSU), the sum of EU-27, United States, and Japan, and the Remainder of the World.
A rough calculation based on 2012 BP Statistical Review data indicates that the combination of the EU-27, the United States, and Japan spent a little over $1 trillion dollars in oil imports in 2011–roughly the same amount as in 2008. Governments have been running up huge deficits and have been keeping interest rates very low to cover up this damage, but it is hard to make this strategy work. The deficit soon becomes unmanageable, as the PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain) countries in Europe have recently been recently been discovering. The US government is facing automatic spending cuts, as of January 2, 2013, because of its continuing deficits.
Furthermore, lower interest rates aren’t entirely beneficial. With low interest rates, pension funds need much larger employer contributions, if they are to make good on their promises. Retirees who depend on interest income to supplement their Social Security checks find themselves with less income. The lower interest rates don’t necessarily have a huge stimulatory impact on the economy, either, if buyers don’t have sufficient discretionary income to buy the additional services that new investment might provide.
Below the fold, we will discuss what is really happening with oil prices, and consider reasons why lower oil prices may be a signal that the world is again headed for deep recession.
Oil Supply is Not Rising Enough
The big issue is that oil supply is not rising enough–and hasn’t been for a long time.
Figure 2. Actual and fitted oil consumption, based on BP 2012 Statistical Review. Fitted trend value of 2.0% is based on 1983 to 1989 actual data; fitted trend value of 1.6% is based on 1993 to 2005 actual data.
When oil supply doesn’t rise fast enough, there are two opposite effects that can take place:
Figure 3. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) and Brent oil prices, in US dollars, based on weekly average spot prices from the US Energy Information Administration.
(1) The most common effect is that prices will go higher. This can be seen in the upward trend in prices in the last eight years.
(2) The other effect is that prices can drop quite sharply, as they did in late 2008. This happens when parts of the world are entering recession, and their demand is decreasing.
It seems to me that this second effect may be happening this time around, as well. The down-leg we are seeing in the prices may have farther to go, as the recession plays out.
One Problem Area: PIIGS Oil Consumption is Declining
If we look at three-year average growth rates for the PIIGS, we find that there is a close correlation between oil growth, energy growth, and GDP growth. Furthermore, in recent years, a growth (or drop) in energy use seems to proceed a growth (or drop) in GDP. Not all of this energy is oil, but for the PIIGS countries, even natural gas is a relatively high-priced import. Recently, oil consumption has been declining sharply, which could imply further economic contraction.
Figure 4. A comparison of average three-year growth rates on three bases: GDP, oil consumption, and total energy consumption. GDP from USDA Research Real GDP database; oil and energy consumption from BP’s 2012 Statistical Review.
Furthermore, data from the Joint Organizations Data Initiative (JODI) shows that recent PIIGS oil demand is down even more. Comparing oil demand for February-April 2012 with February-April 2011, demand is down by 10% for the five PIIGS countries combined. This would suggest that these countries are sliding more deeply into recession.
US Oil Consumption Is Also Shrinking
US oil consumption is also shrinking.
Figure 5. US average consumption of petroleum products, during the months January to April, based on data of the US Energy Information Administration.
US oil consumption shrank by 3.2%, comparing the first four months of 2012 with a similar period of 2011. This is concerning, because based on Figure 5, it looks much like a repeat of the pattern that took place in the 2005 to 2009 time period. Oil consumption was stable during the period 2005 through 2007, then dropped in early 2008 by an amount not too different from the decrease in oil consumption from 2011 to 2012. The bigger step-down in oil consumption came in 2009, after oil prices dropped, and the follow-on effects (reduced credit availability, layoffs) had started. Now oil consumption has been relatively stable in 2009 to 2011, but there has been a step down in consumption in 2012, similar to the step-down in early 2008.
If Oil Prices Stay Down, or Drop Further, Not All Oil is Economic
Oil prices make a difference in a company’s willingness to drill new wells. For example, oil sands production in Canada is quoted as being not economic below $80 barrel, and the West Texas Intermediate price is below that level today. In most instances, existing production will be continued, but new production will be stopped. There are quite a few other types of oil extraction elsewhere (for example, arctic extraction, new very small fields, very deep oil wells, steam extraction outside Canada) that may not be economic at lower prices.
Saudi Arabia makes frequent statements about offering its production to keep prices down, but if a person looks at production patterns in the past few years, they have been highest when oil prices have been highest. Production has dropped as oil prices drop. So a rational person might conclude that oil wells which cannot be operated continuously (of which there are some in Saudi Arabia) tend to be operated when prices are highest, and turned off when prices are lower, thus maximizing profits. As oil prices drop this time around, we can expect Saudi Arabia and others to find excuses to save production until prices are higher.
Countries exporting oil depend on the revenue from the sale of oil, plus taxes on this revenue, to help support country budgets. As oil prices drop, governments find themselves with less money to fund promised public welfare programs. This dynamic can cause lower oil prices to lead to political instability in some oil exporting nations.
Thus, any drop in oil prices tends to be self-correcting, but not until oil production drops, prices of other commodities drop, and many workers have been laid off from work. We saw in 2008-2009 that this kind of recession can be very disruptive.
What’s Ahead?
We can’t know for certain, but the big issue is chain reactions, as one problem causes other problems around the globe. We are dealing with an interconnected international economy. If countries are in financial difficulty, their banks are likely to be downgraded as well. Other banks hold debt of the bank, or of the country in difficulty, or derivates relating to a possible default of the country or bank. If default occurs, these other banks may be affected as well. Thus one default may start a chain of defaults.
Banks that are facing difficulty (inadequate capital, poor ratings), are likely to become more selective in their lending. This makes it even more difficult for small businesses to obtain loans, and may lead to layoffs.
A country which appears to be near default is likely to face higher interest rates, making its cost of borrowing higher. The higher interest costs, by themselves, push the country closer to default.
One of the issues with high oil prices is that the higher prices, especially among oil importers, give rise to a kind of systemic risk that affects many kinds of businesses simultaneously. High oil prices tend to do several things at once: lower the real growth rate, make it more difficult to repay loans, and increase the unemployment rate. All of these issues make it more difficult for governments to function, because governments play a back up role. If workers are laid off from work, governments are expected to compensate laid-off workers at the same time they are collecting less in taxes and bailing out distressed banks. This type of systemic risk leads to the possibility of multiple government failures.
Promises of Future Oil Capacity Growth Aren’t Very Helpful
We keep reading articles claiming that world oil production will grow by some large amount by some future date. One of the latest of these is by Harvard Kennedy School researcher (and former oil company executive) Leonardo Maugeri, called Oil: The Next Revolution. According to the report, “Oil production capacity is surging in the United States and several other countries at such a fast pace that global oil output capacity is likely to grow by nearly 20 percent by 2020, which could prompt a plunge or even a collapse in oil prices”.
Even if the forecast were true (which I am doubtful), the problem is that this is simply too late. We have been having oil supply problems for quite some time–since the 1970s. The rate of oil supply growth keeps ratcheting downward, and the world keeps trying to adapt, with recessions to show for its efforts. (James Hamilton has shown that 10 out of 11 recent recessions were associated with oil price spikes.)
We don’t have time to wait until 2020 to see whether the supposed additional capacity (and production) will actually materialize. We have a problem right now. The downturn in oil prices and the reduction in demand in the US and PIIGS is looking more and more like the current oil price spike (of 2011 and early 2012) may give rise to yet another recession. Based on our experience in 2008-2009, and our difficulties since then, this recession may be severe.
Son of God: Jesus Christ or the Outlaw Josey Wales?
Religion and Censorship remain the Hot Topics inside the Diner in the Guerrilla Free Speech thread, the Fun with Fundies thread and the Christians Debate Christianity thread, amongst others. Below are a couple of my comments on both topics to follow up on the progress in the Guerrilla Free Speech Project.
Anyhow below you will find further thoughts on the Censorship issue in the Blogosphere, followed by a comparison of the relative merits of Jesus Christ and the Outlaw Josey Wales as Saviors for Mankind.
OR 
I think it’s funny anyone is shocked at ilargi’s claim to authority at TAE. I also think it’s funny that ilargi had to assert his authority ’cause no one was sure who was in charge. But someone has to draw the line. Even though it was badly handled IMHO. As WHD says: Let the cannibalism begin!
RE you have chosen to accept all the contrarians (cannibals) on your side of the line. Kudos to you for having the genitalia to invite them all in. I salute you. Warning: It’s really a lot like forming a club out of people who wouldn’t join a club that would have them as a member. Personally I think this is great and admirable. But how are you ever going to reach consensus? Is it going to be the opposite of the scene from Monty Pythons The Holy Grail where everyone screams “We’re all (not) individuals!!”
I doubt we will ever find solutions to all problems. However, by bringing many people together with many different POVs, you see more sides of the same Elephant. You get a better concept of the whole Elephant rather than just its Trunk or its Asshole.
You also do occassionally come up with stuff most people do agree on, like for instance it’s a wise idea to be as self sufficient as possible and not dependent on the Matrix.
I respect Surly and you attacking Group Think 100%. But calling for a higher standard of thinking while still allowing hits below the belt, is that really a higher standard? I agree that professional bloggers like yourself are far and few. Who can maintain a blog these days? To all my twitter twits: ‘Just farted. part of my self immersion in the #NewMethaneAtmosphere. Stinky, but adapt or die!’
You have to be a very dedicated writer to maintain a Blog. I’ve been at it a long time, since before Blogs were even Invented, on the Message Boards that go back to AOL days. Not always on Collapse of course, prior to 2007 and the Failure of Bear Stearns my interests were in other areas. The Collapse wiped out all other interests for me. It makes just about everything else besides your family unimportant, and of course I don’t have a family. Divorced, no kids, live alone. So I am free to spend all my free time writing about the Collapse, and if I’m not out practicing with the Guns or Fishing, that is what I do.
Anyhow, my writing has almost always been done in Dialogue with others, on Message Boards where there was ALWAYS conflict. Give people the anonymity the net offers (at least to each other if not TPTB), they’ll drop the nicities of Polite behavior faster than you can say “Religion” or “Politics” or “Sex”. So if you can’t handle the Low Blows, you just can’t have an Open Debate on the Internet. It’s NOT Robert’s Rules here.
Because I learned this fact of life over about 15 years of Internet writing, I am more comfortable than most people with the Napalm that gets pitched out all the time. You also CANhave good intelligent conversation going on while at the same time over in another Room there is a a Barfight in progress, the Diner is irrefutable evidence of that. So to me, there is no excuse whatsoever for Censoring your Board.
And yet again, as you have mentioned, it comes down to STYLE. On some level people who may have very similar outlooks end up getting into a battle over style.
Case in point, myself and Watson, Gonzo vs Academic. With the exception of the Religious stuff and the Inquisition, Watson and I agree on just about everything else economically speaking. So we occassionally got into arguments just on the basis of our disparate styles here and on TAE. They reach different audiences though, and that is all to the good. Long as the information gets disseminated out to more people this way, it is beneficial.
Apparently Karpatok is upset over grammatical errors in ilargi’s posts. Huh?! Oh yeah, and the Patriarchal Christian tendencies of TAE. Double Huh?! Judeao-Muslo-Christian tendencies is what the modern world is all about. It all goes back to that set of crazy contradictory stories collected from 2000 or so years ago. The same stories you get to pick and chose are true. Is it the part that says ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ or this one: (Moses) stood at the entrance to the camp and shouted, “All of you who are on the LORD’s side, come over here and join me.” And all the Levites came. He told them, “This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: Strap on your swords! Go back and forth from one end of the camp to the other, killing even your brothers, friends, and neighbors.” (Exodus 32:26-29 NLT)
Always good to have somebody well versed in Biblical contradictions Lurking on the Board. 
Karpatok why so serious? Who are you smoking out? I respect your feminist anarchic tendencies but really, is smoking ash and ilargi and stoneliegh out the best you can do? Get a real target. Do you figure that taking pot shots at people on this side of the fence is the best way to show your independent thinking? Reminder to self: Can’t trust those closest to you. I understand you have rage. So does everyone else. Watch UFC. Two guys pounding the shit out of one another should assuage your rage. The patriarchy punching itself. Sounds like a win win. And as a woman aren’t you at least a bit concerned that you’re attacking a site with one of the clearest FEMALE economic voices out there: Stoneleigh? Ah, but you can’t turn it off. Attacking TAE is really just clucking for a fix.
My perception is that Xena has her own Windmills to Slay and her own Axe to Grind, which is fine. I have though recommended to her on at least one occassion so far to Put a Lid on it! This is part of my Job as Chief Mod of the Mod Squad here. Because I do command a bit of respect from Xena, she did in fact calm down her rhetoric some. Her recent stuff I haven’t found objectionable really, it’s mostly been provoked anyhow.
Far as Stoneleigh as a Female Voice haunting the halls of Testosterone here on the Internet is concerned, her presence has been EXTREMELY thin for quite some time here, predating even the Jet Setting Globe Trotting adventure she and Ilargi went on to Oz.
Stoneleigh had some very perceptive insights to offer, most notably her Tag Line of “Multiple claims to underlying Wealth” idea which pops up regularly in her stuff. She’s also quite knowledgeable in the Energy department. However, she no longer writes regularly enough to be called a “Blogger” anymore. You gotta drop on at least one decent article a week to be a real Blogger. She is more like Blogger Emeritus now, occassionally dropping back onto TAE to drop down a new Pearl of Wisdom, but it is quite rare.
Even Ilargi can’t be called a Blogger anymore. How many articles has he authored since they got back? I think I could count them on the fingers of one hand. The only True Blogger on that site now is Watson. Many people in the Commentariat of TAE noted that the Flavor changed some with the passing of the Blog Torch to Watson.
Far as Ilargi is concerned, rather than turning into Blogger Emeritus like Stoneleigh, he’s become Dean Wormer, a Blowhard who pops into the Commentary to Swing around his Tube Steak as the Big Cheese on TAE. He’s made it impossible for me to continue in the Commentariat over there, because I know he will Delete any commentary I make which criticizes him, which of course would be about all of it. LOL.
Anyhow, this is why the Diner exists at all. If it was not for the fact that I have been Banned from so many OPBs, I’d still be out in the Commentariat where I am most comfortable, writing in dialogue with others. In fact here in the Diner, I put up way more stuff every day in the Forum then I do on the Blog itself. I cannot possibly accept the idea of Censorship here, the whole reason for the Diner’s existence was because *I* have been Censored so many times before.
So instead of Censorship, I am a Manager of Napalm. I know every kind, and I am a first class Napalm Artist myself. When the Barfight breaks out here, I shuffle all the folks throwing punches into the Back Room and shut the door while they break the chairs over each other’s heads. It always calms down eventually, though you do sometimes lose some patrons because of it. Can’t help that if you want Free Speech.
But RE some of your best writing yet:
‘My goal is to get all these folks into one Bar and Duke it Out, Mano-a-Mano on the Keyboard so maybe won’t have to resort to using quite so many rounds of Live Ammo, which is going to be in exceedingly short supply down the line here. You can’t do that if you Exterminate anyone who shows up in the Bar with an opposing POV, even if that person has really bad Halitosis and has been off his Meds for few weeks and is ranting on incessantly about the dangers of 2 ply Charmin Toilet Paper.’
Yea, I thought that one was pretty good too. El Gallinazo brings out the best in me.
Speak Free on the Doomstead Diner!
RE
————
God’s solution was to have his own Son, in human form, be killed on the cross for the collective sins of mankind (past, present and future), and have His righteousness transferred to every human being (past, present and future).
HTF does sending your own Son to Earth to be Crucified fix any Sinfulness? Back in those days, people got Crucified as often as J6P gets Foreclosed on today. If Jesus got Foreclosed on today, would this stop any Banksters from further Foreclosures on the rest of Humanity? I hardly think so.
Again, like delivering a set of Principles you can PREDICT people won’t follow and will just end up with a Final Battle for All the Marbles between Good & Evil, this is just a really BAD Plan and not worthy of God. A REAL God would come up with a Better Plan than having His Only Son Nailed to Cross.
A REAL GOD who wanted to solve these problems would have Armed Good People to the TEETH and told them “Go Forth ye Good J6P and SMITE the Evil Pigmen amongst you with your Glocks and AR-15s and Barrett .50 Cals!” In fact that line was in the original Dead Sea Scrolls but was excised when it was translated into Latin.
But Noooooo, instead God sends down a really skinny undernourished Namby Pamby who tells everybody to Turn the Other Cheek to Evil! WTF do you think happens then? Evil People start slapping Cheeks EVERYWHERE! Really Good Plan you got there General God!
I don’t think so. Jesus was a really Good Guy who was preaching a Message of Hope to people experiencing a first class Civilization Collapse of that Era. Sadly, this message doesn’t WORK in the real world and He PREDICTED it wouldn’t work and would just end up with a lot of suffering and a Final Battle for All the Marbles! Son of God though? Poppycock. No Son of God would be such a WIMP and come up with such a Plan DESTINED for Failure. A REAL Son of God would have arrived on Earth Packing some SERIOUS HEAT and armed J6P with enough Firepower to actually DEFEAT Satan and His Minions.
A REAL GOD would have sent the Outlaw Josey Wales to Earth, not Jesus Christ.
RE
Guerilla Internet Free Speech Project
Lively day today on the Doomstead Diner and The Automatic Earth.
The issue of the Banning of Karpatok on TAE resulted in the further Closing of the thread discussing the merits of Banning and Censorship on an Internet Forum by Ilargi of TAE.
Ilargi wrote:
This silly waste of time topic is closed, any additional comments will be deleted.
Clearly this is a matter of Opinion. I certainly do not think the Banning of a member and a discussion of Free Speech issues on the Internet is a “silly waste of time”. Ilargi far as I can tell did not really “lock” the thread though as in make it impossible for people to post in it, he just made clear he will delete any and all comments which refer back to this issue in that thread. Evidence for that is Snuffy posted up AFTER Ilargi declared the thread “Closed”.
What does this mean here now? Well, not only is Karpatok shut out from commentary on TAE, now all the rest of the members cannot even continue to DISCUSS the issue there! ADMIN HAS SPOKEN!
“This person and this issue is DEAD to us here now, purge it from your memory and let us move on to discuss what Admin wants to discuss.”
I have spent most of my years since 2007 when I got my Wake Up Call on the Collapse with the failure of Bear Stearns not as a Blogger with my own Platform, but as a member of the Commentariat, first on the Peak Oil Message Board. I was Purged not once but TWICE on Peak Oil, first as Rogue Economist, then as Reverse Engineer. After that I migrated to Market Tickerwhere I met Peter, and eventually I got Purged there for getting in one too many arguments with Karl Denninger over the merits of Capitalism and frankly carved him up like Thanksgiving Turkey in a couple of them. Then of course is the experience on The Burning Platform, which is somewhat Legendary now in terms of the Battles with Admin and the Napalm that was thrown in the Commentariat on that board. It makes what Karpatok threw at Ashvin on DD look like softballs.
A few people Stood Tall for me when I got Banned, but few indeed, because they got THREATENED also if they continued to discuss “He Who Cannot Be Named”, they ALSO would be sent to the Great Beyond. To his Great and Everlasting Credit (for which he will be rewarded Handsomely in the Great Beyond I am sure), Surly is among the very few who EVER went to Bat for me when I got Banned, and the ONLY one I am sure of who ALSO payed the Ultimate Price and got Banned himself for it.
And so together with Peter,and Surly and a few other friends I had accumulated over time on the net, for quite some time we Holed Up on our own little Yahoo Group of Reverse Engineering, batting ideas back and forth with each other, and accummulating a few other members along the way. Eventually because of again issues with CENSORSHIP being done automatically by Bots that monitor the Yahoo Groups, we finally left that tiny little apartment to move into the Mansion the Peter Built, The Doomstead Diner. Quite a Platform it is as well, I do not think there is a better one on the Net at the moment, and getting better all the time as Peter tweaks it in his Spare Time. He does that, I do what I always have done, which is to pound the keyboard faster than anybody else can discussing the issues of Collapse with whomsoever arrives to take a Meal at the Diner.
Do I have any control over who walks through the Diner Doors to pitch out their own ideas? No I do not, but I welcome them regardless of WHAT those ideas are. Do I BAN them from the Diner if they PUKE all over the Diner Floor? No I do not. Do I APPROVE of what every person on the Diner writes, either in ideas or in Ad Hom attack of another member, including myself? Hell no I do not, but I will NOT BAN them for that.
That is the background to the Banning of Karpatok. Far as I am concerned, it does not matter what she wrote on the Diner or on TAE either (though in neither case could I see anything THAT awful), it was the simple fact she was being SQUASHED LIKE A BUG by ADMIN! How could I let that Stand, when it has been done so many times to me? I could not DO such a thing and remain true to my own principles, no way, no how. I am ADMIN of DD, and a member also of TAE, and so I came to her defense on those pages as well as here on my own Platform. Because I am Admin here, I CANNOT be Squashed like a Bug anymore. I can be deleted as a member from another website, or I can boycott the website, but I can’t be made to DISAPPEAR anymore from the minds and memory of all who read the net. The Great MANSION, nay CASTLE that Peter Built prevents that from occurring now.
I do know to this day that on MANY Forums and Blogs, Contrarian Authors often find their posts Edited or Censored, this is by no means limited to TAE of course. It is particularly bad on MSM websites of course, but it certainly is quite endemic to the Blogosphere as well. You can make statements like “Hey, not Happy here? Set up your OWN Blog dude!” but in fact that cannot be done by most commenters, they just do not write enough to maintain a decent Blog. Even those that do write enough (say minimum one good article a week) will not get much readership, that is not how the Blogosphere works. There are thousands (millions?) of Blogs out there nobody ever reads except the Family Memebrs and Close Friends of the Blogger.
So for the Commenter who just occassionally gets really PISSED OFF at something being said on a given Blog and wishes to express their disgust with the ideas or even the Autor of those ideas, setting up their own blog to do that is not a reasonable alternative. Pondering on this problem today as I worked it through my head, I realized that I have to do more than just go out there and Lawyer for Karpatok. And so I will.
I will be opening up a new Thread in the Kitchen Sink, the Guerilla Internet Free Speech thread. The Kitchen Sink in the Diner I have left open for all to read, and for guests to post in as well, though Guest Posting is previewed before posting. If anyone on any Blog or Forum is getting their posting Edited or Deleted, Copy/Paste it into the GIFS Thread, and I will Publish it. Indicate in the Post the URL of the Board or Blog on which your posting is being Censored.
I will not Guarantee the post you make remains in that thread if it is vitriolic and nasty overall and has no redeemimg social value. LOL. My decision there to make. I will NOT delete it though. I will just move it into the Smokehouse and create a yet DEEPER Dungeon for ABSOLUTE CRAP. It will still be out there for people to read, but they sure will have to dig deep to find it! LOL. You ever try to find a file that you layered six folders deep on your Hard Drive? Forget it.
However, I do not think most Deleted Posting is the result of it being trash without redeeming social value, most stuff gets Deleted simply because the Admin of the site does not agree with the Spin of the Contrarian Author. Perhaps I will be proven wrong on that assumption, only time will tell on that one.
In the Meantime, I will make the Doomstead Diner a “Home of the Free and Land of the Contrarian”, and give anyone who is being Banned or Censored on any other Board or Blog on the Net the opportuity to Speak their Mind on DD. I am declaring a Guerilla War against Censorship on Internet Blogs and Forums here on the Doomstead Diner.
I will ALSO volunteer my services if your complaint is IMHO a valid one to go in an Lawyer for you if you are Banned on any Website, if you get Banned. Caveat there being, I gotta be able to Register myself on the site AND I probably get Banned Myself also, but I will give it the old College Try anyhow.
The MSM represses Free Speech in so many uncountable ways already, and the Blogosphere is about the last place left now where there is some Free Flow of ideas. If the Blogger/Admins ALSO will go and Censor Cotnrarian viewpoints, there is no HOPE here at all that this medium can really allow all to speak their minds in free and open discussion. My MISSION FROM GOD now is to go out in the DEFENSE of anyone who is being Censored or Banned as I was so many times before Peter and I openned the Doomstead Diner for Bizness.
SPEAK FREE ON THE DOOMSTEAD DINER!
RE
Christian Apologetics
Religion, Ethics and Morality have become the subject of Great Debate inside the Diner lately. This generally is the result of a long running series of debates between Ashvin Pandurangi and myself on both of our Forums for Discussion, respectively The Automatic Earth and the Doomstead Diner. Part of a bigger series of debates between Ashvin and myself I discussed in the Holmes and Watson article.
Why on two Blog/Forums which both are mainly concerned with the Economic aspect of the Collapse of Industrial Civilization has Religion become such a Hot Topic of Debate? The reason is of course that Fundamental Ethics infuse all the Economic Decisions ever made anywhere at any time. Religions all concern themselves with Ethics and Morality, and if those in charge of the Economic System and those participating in it are not living up to those Ethics, fundamental questions and answers of a Religious nature are often used to both explain what is going on as well as attempt to offer solutions to it.
This is an EXTREMELY complicated issue on many levels, which also brings to the surface powerful Emotional Reactions in all who participate in such discussions, whether as reader, writer or both. In fact the discussions in this case became so intense that it resulted in the BANNING of one member of both forums from the TAE forum, a Commenter who goes by the nom-de-plume of Karpatok. As of this writing, Karpatok remains BANNED from TAE.
I am a long time contrarian writer on the Internet who has had the experience on MANY occassions of being BANNED for what I wrote on what I refer to as “OPBs”, aka Other People’s Blogs/Boards. It is extraordinarily frustrating for a Writer to be Muzzled in this way, and with very few exceptions such a response from BoardModerators and Admins is UNACCEPTABLE. The main reason the Doomstead Diner exists at all is because without such a platform where *I* am the Admin, I simply cannot consistently get out the message I am trying to deliver.
Not everyone however either has the time, inclination, writing skills, knowledge, money or expertiese to set up a Blog/Forum like DD. In fact without my partner Peter who is the designer of this Platform, I never could have done it myself. I still identify with the plight of the Commenter who gets BANNED from a Blog or Message Board, and when I witness such an event it makes my blood boil. Really, to Ban someone has to take an extraordinary disruption of a Message Board, and should only be undertaken after ALL other means of resolving the issue have failed. This was not the case with the Banning of Karpatok, who although she clearly has her own agenda wasn’t really making all that big a splash on TAE. She certainly isn’t SWAMPING commentary there like I do anyhow. Her posting could have been moved, she could have been marginalized in many other ways besides a Ban.
Free Speech issues aside here, the Debates on Religion, Ethics and Morality continue on here on the Doomstead Diner, to a much greater depth of detail than they are occurring on The Automatic Earth right now. These debates have spawned two extremely detailed threads, Fun with Fundies where the Religion of Christianity is questioned on its fundamental tenets, and Christians Debate Christianity, where Christians question each other on their interpretation of the Bible and the teachings of Jesus Christ.
Both of these threads provide far more reading and detail then I can possibly drop in one article here on the Diner Blog. I encourage all who are interested in such topics to explore both of these threads. Below here in this article, I am including one post I made in Fun with Fundies on the topic of Christian Apologetics, which attempts to rationalize the Religion of Christianity. I will in the future also post an article from one of the Christians on the board outlining some Christian perspective as well.
The Doomstead Diner is a place where we discuss the most important issues of our time, and most certainly Morality, Ethics and Religion sit right at the TOP of such discussion. In the end, just about all discussions run back around to these ideas, even if they just begin with Natural Gas Fracking or a PIIGS default on debt. I believe it is important for anyone who Blogs on these issues to be Up Front and Honest about their Belief Structure, because without that the reader really has no context from where the Blogger is writing. My viewpoint is clear, as you will see I think when you read “Christian Apologetics”. For the rest, join us inside the Doomstead Diner.
RE
Christian Apologetics
As should be obvious already to any readers of this thread so far, I am no big fan of Christian Fundamentalism or “Fundies” as I label the practitioners of this Black Art.
Indicated as well in the thread above is that Watson is BY NO MEANS the first Fundy I have ever gone Mano-a-Mano with, though he is among the best of them. One fellow I ran into who changed his whole life around age 50 to go back to Fundy Preacher Seminary for some fragment of the Baptist Denomination was also Fabulously Well Read in the Bible and Christian Apologetics.
For those of you who do not know what Christian Apologetics are, this represents a very LONG history of trying to present a rational explanation for the tenets of Christianity.
Christian apologetics (Greek: ἀπολογία, “verbal defence, speech in defence”)[1] is a field of Christian theology that aims to present a rational basis for the Christian faith, defend the faith against objections, and attempt to expose the flaws of other world views.
I’ve always found the label for this field of study to be rather ironic, since it carries with it the notion that Christians need to APOLOGIZE for being Christian. Of course, that isn’t the sense the word is being used in here, but you can’t help but make that association.
So anyhow, Watson is a Christian Apologist of the first order, he has clearly been studying this field for quite some time, though I can’t say exactly how long. What first led me to grasp he was a practitioner of this Black Art was all the references he made to Biblical Scholars through history. Nobody is familiar with this stuff unless they have studied Apologetics, and nobody spends a great deal of time studying that stuff unless they are either Fundy or else possibly an Academic who studies Comparative Religions. So Watson had to be one or the other, and for a while I figured it was coming from the Academic side, since he writes in such an Academic fashion and clearly has that kind of background. However, when he went ballistic on me for taking Biblical quotes out of context and mounting his own “In Context” arguments, I realized he was in fact a Fundy, not just an Academic researcher.
Now, why do I refer to Apologetics as a “Black Art”. The reason for that is that you can’t ever argue with a Christian Apologist without them telling you that you haven’t studied the Bible well enough and all the REAMS of stuff other Apologists have written over CENTURIES about every freaking last Chapter and Verse in the Bible.
Really good Fundies who have studied this stuff for a few years can quote Chapter and Verse out of the Bible on almost any topic you can imagine. They don’t even need to Google it, they have it committed to memory. If you have ever had a Verbal argument with a Fundy of this type, you will know that in the course of a debate they will Recite a Verse or Two at incredibly high speed in talking. In the mind of the Fundy, BAM they GOTCHYA! They pulled out of their head the EXACT passage in the Bible that PROVES you don’t know WTF you are talking about and they do.
Ultimate Fundies are people like David Koresh, who did not just have a few hundred verses memorized to demonstrate his points, he memorized the entire freaking Bible, lock stock and barrel. Stories I read from some of his disenchanted followers said they were amazed early on by his ability to recite entire Books of the Bible in Sermons that went on for HOURS, without so much as glancing at the Bible.
So anyhow, in an argument with a Fundie Apologist, unless you have spent at least as much time as they have reading and researching all that was ever written on Biblical Philosophy, they let you know you cannot possibly know WTF you are talking about since you haven’t researched it well enough. Argument over.
So what has occurred here over the Centuries is many Apologists all debating with other Apologists over the Meaning of the Bible, and as a result over the centuries they have come up with marvelously internally consistent explanations for every last thing written in there. If anybody comes up with an alternative explanation, they get jumped on by 50 other Apologists all seeking to show why he is wrong, and somebody eventually does of course.
Now, I clearly have not spent years studying the Bible or Apologetics. I just have a few years of Sunday School to work with and occassionally sitting down to read some Chapters over the years. Not very comprehensive study by any stretch of the imagination. What I am pretty familiar with though is the history of Christianity and the behavior of all the folks I ever met who purport to be Christians. To synopsize that, its a big freaking MESS all the way round. They don’t follow the teachings of Jesus most of the time, and on a historical level the Religion has caused at least as much Grief as it did Helping anybody. All sorts of folks used it for their own ends always.
In our own time here now, the Christian Fundy movement has had all sorts of negative consequences, aka BLOWBACK. The Anti-Abortion aspect probably is the best example there. In response to “Baby Killers”, some Fundies will go ahead and Bomb Abortion Clinics. This is of course a response to the WWJD question that is completely incorrect, but nevertheless it IS the response that comes back here.
Fundies go on and on about the Sanctity of Life, but once born for all practical purposes the vast number of infants born to the poor are left hung out to dry. Then the Fundies feel Guilty about this so they start shovelling out the Food Aid to “help” all these starving kids and the Christian Children’s Fund comes on TV with some big Doe Eyed kid from Nicaraqua who you can “Save” for just $1/day!
None of this bizness of Charity has ever worked very well in anything but the smallest of Communities, and I am not even sure how well it works there either. Well off Haves in the society will occassionally feel Guilty enough to throw some Charity at the Poor, but if it is a persistent problem they become hardenned to it. Certainly once even just 50% or so of the society has fallen into desperate poverty, the Haves just give up on Charity. There are TOO MANY poor people! You can’t feed all of them without bankrupting yourself! this of course represents the negative reaction to the Welfare State and the Taxation that results from that as more and more people become dependent on the Charity of the State.
So, the fact is that all these Christian principles regarding the Sanctity of Life and the value of Charity don’t really WORK in the Ag society that developed before Christianity ever came on the scene at all. You can argue to death that the Principles are Sound and Internally consistent, but they don’t WORK, and they never have, not for 2000 years here. It doesn’t match up with REALITY which includes both Human Behavior and Resource Constraints. Don’t argue that with a Fundy though, they will tell you if you just Love Thy Neighbor and accept Jesus Christ as your Savior, all will be well. If not in This Life, then in the Afterlife. If you don’t BELIEVE that, go read the Words of Jesus and 1000 Apologists for Jesus that will demonstrate to you the TRUTH of these arguments.
It is in a word, Horseshit. It doesn’t WORK, it never worked, and Jesus himself makes the disclaimer it won’t work, but only because not enough people will stick to his Principles. How come Jesus, Son of God and the Pure Virgin Mary could not come up with a set of Principles people actually WOULD stick to? I mean really, with that lineage he should have been able to come up with a Plan that WORKS, rather than one destined for FAILURE with an end result of a Final Battle of Good vs Evil for All the Marbles, right?
I have been grappling with all these questions for pretty much my entire life and taking on Fundies of various kinds through the whole time. I haven’t studied Christian Apologetics, and I never will. Why? Because on First Priciples alone, the whole thing just does not WORK. To spend years reading stuff people have written to APOLOGIZE for the fact it does not work is a waste of time.
RE
Militarization of Amerika
Discuss this article at the Geopolitics Table inside the Diner
Over on Brandon Smith’s Alt-Net blog, today he reported on Military Maneuvers being conducted on the streets of St. Louis, in St. Charles to be specific.
To most of us Collapse Observers, it’s no surprise that Martial Law is coming. However, I haven’t written an article to date specifically looking at the scenarios leading us into Martial Law, or how we will function under it. so it is time for another RE Thought Experiment.
To begin with, I’ve lived about 45 of my 55 years inside the borders of the FSofA. During that time I have seen few Military in uniform out on the Streets right up until the last 2 years or so.
When I was driving the Freightliner OTR, I passed a few Military Columns, but no more than I can count on my fingers and that is with nearly 7 years and 1M miles on the Interstate under my belt. In addition, said columns were just Humvees and Trucks quite normal to the Interstate, just painted Army Green or Camo.
I can NEVER remember seeing the big Armored Vehicles cruising around anywhere in this last 50 years, nor do I ever remember a Newz Report before the last couple of years carrying stories of Military Maneuvers in Civilian areas of the FSofA. Not even in the Vietnam Era do I remember such stories.
Now, why didn’t you ever see them? In order to deploy them overseas, they have to be moved. They also have to be moved from the factories where they are assembled to the Military Bases here in the FSofA where they are stored until deployed in the latest Imperial Adventure.
My best guess on this is the Factories (which are the few Factories still operating inside these borders) are very close to the Bases where the vehicles are first stored. Then upon deployment, they mostly get air shipped out, at least for a short hop to a coastal Naval Base.
By keeping the Military relatively invisible all these years inside our own borders, it kept alive very well the notion that we are a Peaceful People run by solid Civilian laws under a Democracy. Anybody on the other end of one of our deployments of this hardware knew otherwise of course.
Now however, the Military is coming out of the closet here and onto the city streets
From Brandon:
I have to say that this event, which is being labeled a “training exercise”, makes very little sense to me. U.S. Army troops all the way from Maryland running open exercises in armored personnel carriers on the busy streets of St. Louis? I know Maryland is a small state, but is there really not enough room at Ft. Detrick to accommodate a tank column and some troops? Are there not entire fake neighborhood and town complexes built with taxpayer dollars on military bases across the country meant to facilitate a realistic urban environment for troops to train in? And why travel hundreds of miles to Missouri? At the very least, this is a massive waste of funds.
First off, Brandon is right on the mark in terms of all the Military Bases where there are mock towns and cityscapes upon which to run such training exercises. The Military in fact has a Bigger Budget than even Hollywood for setting up these kind of things, and in fact cooperates with Hollywood in making War Glorification films like Blackhawk down and others of the genre. They can put the Blue Squad into SUVs playing Civilian drivers and the Red the Red Squad into the APCs and Tanks to train the drivers on maneuvering around the behemoths with teensy cars on the road. I DROVE a behemoth, 40 Tons worth of Tractor Trailer 70′ long, and I learned to do it in 2 weeks on the grounds of Schneider National in Green Bay, WI. Not to say I was all that great after 2 weeks, I couldn’t back the thing up worth a damn, but I did manage to stay out of trouble in those first few months out on the open road.
So one can safely assume the Military is NOT doing this because they need to train their drivers this way. They’ve been training said drivers for YEARS here and never needed to do this before, so why now? It is all Psychological Conditioning of course, because TPTB are well aware already that they will have to deploy the Military here to retain control as the Economic system spins down.
In reality, the local PTB have a full fledged Preview of what is coming down the pipe here going on over in MENA and now Eurotrashland as well. More and more in all these places the Tanks and APCs out on the streets are becoming an every day occurrence in the attempt to quell and control the unrest from those who are already off the Economic Cliff.
Besides the Heavy Equipment out on the Streets, the Soldiers in Uniform out in civilian areas is also becoming ever more apparent. I wrote about this in my RE’s Excellent Mexican Dental Adventure series. Flying down to the Lower 48 to then drive to the Mexican border around Yuma, there were an extraordinary number of Soldiers in Uniform travelling around on the commercial jets. Said Soldiers were also given First Class Boarding priviledges as well, allowed to Jump the Line of the normal civilians except for the 1%ers who fly First Class all the time. There were also numerous Signs for “Support our Troops” and announcements over the intercom in the airports carrying much the same message.
Again, as with the Maneuvers out on the streets, in all my years of Flying, I NEVER saw so many folks in Camo. If military personnel were flying commercial at the time, they were wearing Civvies, not Camo. They also have their own jets flying people and supplies all over the country all the time, and Military personnel can hop those jets instead of flying commercial. Why are they out there now in Uniform on Commercial airlines? Again, psychological conditioning getting people used to seeing these folks in all the Airports. They aren’t carrying AR-15s yet, but they will be no doubt.
The propaganda is endless, beginning with the “Support Our Troops” meme which goes back forever in time, even before those WWII Posters and Vietnam. This form of propaganda plays on Patriotism by linking your “Love of Country” with the efforts of “your” Soldiers who go out and risk their lives to defend your “Freedom”. In the vietnam Era this one got turned on its head for a while, and returning Vets were actually excoriated for their participation in the War, which of course they had little choice about since Conscription was in effect. The only way out of that was to forego your “Love of Country” and run cross border to Canada. Or else try to get Group W’ed out of the War Effort as Unfit for Service.
As I watched the Video Brandon put up from the St. Louis affiliate of the MSM, another fact struck me which was that the Army Spokesman was Black. We all know the Military takes in the poor folks as Cannon Fodder, but this caused me to go Google up the latest stats on Racial Distribution in the Military.
The first one I came up with was from our friends at the Heritage Foundation, a well known Illuminati Think Tank and Propaganda organ. The Ph.D.s in charge of this study came to the conclusion that it is a MYTH that the military is over-represnted by the Brown Skinned folks. This seemed unlikely to me at first so I kept looking and found this chart of CASUALTIES in the Military since 1980
As you can see, roughly 25% of the casualties are from the major minority populations of the FSofA, and this jibes with population statistics for the country as a whole as well. So in fact if you believe all these Stats, the Heritage Foundation Ph.Ds are correct in their assessment that the current Military is not in fact over-represented by minorities.
So why is it my sense is that I see more Black Spokesmen appearing for the Military here, and what is the real dyamic involved?
The likelihood here is that in an All Volunteer Army where the Army is pretty Selective, they actually pull from more of the Middle Class than they do the Poor. They want folks who basically fit into the Social Norm and buy the Amerikan Dream. Of course no stats are available on how mnay 1%ers go to the Great Beyond in their Military Service, if they even do serve.
Moving into the future in a Conscription scenario, my suspicion is this dynamic changes substantially. In this case the Army needs as many Warm Bodies for Cannon Fodder as it can get its hands on, and the ones least able to Avoid conscription are the Poor and Minority groups.
Which brings us round to the reason I see more Black Spokesman for the Military. This is a propaganda effort softening up this group to accept Conscripition when it comes down the pipe.
Military on the Streets is an inevitable outcome of the Economic spin down for numerous reasons. A major reason is that despite the Militarization of the Gestapo with the RoboCop Riot Gear and their own smaller scale Armored Vehicles, most Big Shity Gestapo forces don’t have the Numbers or the Equipment to handle really large scale Civil Disturbances. Said Big Shities are also rapidly running out of Money to fund these Police Forces, though no doubt by now they are getting back door financing from FEMA. the only organization left still on the Big Gravy Train is the Big Ass Military, and the Centralization idea dictates that when TSHTF in earnest, FSofA Military force will be radically increased in size and percentage of the poulation to try to handle the ensuing problems.
The medium term result of all of this is that for a decent while here once this gets going, we will be living under the same type of Military Dictatorship/Totalitarian State that so much of the rest of the world has lived under for decades here now. the strategies for survival are similar as well, you try to Play Along and Keep Your Nose Clean and not draw the attention of the local Soldiers patrolling your streets. BAU is very difficult though, because there is always somebody setting off a Car Bomb somewhere and you never know where the latest Riot or flash Mob event will break out. Overall, this grinds down the economy in the neighborhood.
This has gone on for a long time in the 3rd World because of the ability to push endless Debt out and refund new Dictators all the time with their bunch of Thugs. Moving into the future here though as the spin down works its way into the Center of NATO and the BAM, they too will be unable to access working Credit to run their Oppression Machine. The Military will then begin to Fracture, much as the Roman Army did in the latter stages of the Roman Empire.
What is difficult to predict of course is how long the period of Militarized Fascism will last before it breaks down into competing factions, or exactly how much of the world will still be left standing after this period is over either. Because of course all this is not occurring in a Vaccum, it will result in Global Wars as well as Civil Violence. best guess for me stil remains around 5 years from the time it really gets going in earnest until the logistics fall apart, locally stationed Troops are not getting deliveries of Food and Fuel rations and most of the Big Hardware is all at the Bottom of Davey Jones Locker.
How do you SURVIVE this period of Extreme Militarized Fascism? Duck and cover baby. If you are of Conscription Age, your choices are either to toss your I-phone into the dumpster and disappear into the Wilderness or else to Volunteer before you get Press Ganged and hopefully get yourself into a fairly safe role as a Soldier of the Illuminati. I highly recommend Cryptography/Intelligence if you are a Math Wizard. I don’t think blowing your foot off with a shotgun will work this go round, that probably just gets you a ticket to the Human Waste Reprocessing Facility in San Antonio.
If you are an Old Fogey, hopefully you can do something Useful to the Illuminati on the Homefront if you also don’t make a run for the Last Bugout in the Mountains. Do the Rosie the Riveter thing perhaps or care for the next generation of Cannon Fodder or be a Farmer or Fisherman. Or just call it a day, consider yourself lucky to have lived as long a life as you did as a beneficiary of the Age of Oil, and take your Last Kayak Trip out to sea. Or finally, you can decide it is time to Go Postal, and take a few of the Bad Guys to the Great Beyond with you. Those are the choices in this Great Morton’s Fork, and all will be taken by somebody.
Best of Luck to each of you with your choice, and as always, I will…..wait for it….
SEE YOU ON THE OTHER SIDE
RE
Play to Win
Watson often likes to use metaphors from Poker when analysing the collapse dynamic, since Poker is his Game. Similarly, I like to use Chess metaphors, since Chess is my game. So I will explore this a bit with this post.
In some regards Poker might be considered the better metaphor, if you accept that there is an element of chance involved in all the decisions being made along the way in the game. If you take into account such things as Natural Disasters like the Sendai Quake or Katrina, you can make the case that some aspects of the collapse are governed by chance.
However, on the Financial level and structural societal level of building an Industrial Culture, no chance was ever involved in that. A series of Moves were made early on in the game to gain a much stronger position for Black here, Black being a representation for the Illuminati/Elite of society. White representing J6P is very much backed into a corner here now and Black controls most of the board.
Conventional tactics can no longer play a Winning Game for White. However, White still does have a few Pieces in play like the OWS Castle, the Boys in Black Pajamas (Anarchists) Knights, and Bishop Bloggers, handling the Keyboard is Mightier than the AR-15 aspect of the Propaganda battle. White also has many more Pawns on the board than Black does, and remember in this Chess game you aren’t limited to 64 Squares and only 8 Pawns. Much bigger Numbers we are dealing with here, but still it is not a random game of Chance, rather a game of Strategy and Position.
What is White to do here? Given the Numbers differential, Sacrificing a few Pawns likely can recapture a portion of the Board. this can give the Castle of OWS room to maneuver, and give the Boys in Black Pajamas Anarchist Knights cover from which to operate. Together, they can hopefully open a Column to Advance a Pawn to the 8th Rank and Queen that Pawn.
Once White has a new Queen on the Board, the advantage that Black has here is substantially reduced. Again though, since we are working with much greater numbers and a Global chessboard, you are really talking about many Pawns being Sacrificed in order for a few Queens to be made in the game.
In Chess or in Poker, there is only one Goal, which is to WIN. No concern in either game about Ethics, Morals or an Afterlife. If you clutter up your betting in a Poker game with thoughts about the fact if you Bankrupt one of the other players his kids might go Hungry, its going to affect your betting. You can’t do that if you want to Win the Game. Simlarly in Chess, if you feel sorry for the other player because he is a bit dimwitted and makes some stupid moves, if you let him go and don’t capitalize on those errors, you also don’t win. You see an Error, BAM you hit him with everything you got and capitalize on the error.
This debate here is of course cluttered up with many arguments about morality and ethics, and because of that developing a Winning Strategy for the Game here, Poker or Chess is quite impossible. Neither game takes morals and ethics into consideration, so they are not good metaphors to use as long as that is part of the argument.
In the final analysis here for me though, because of the nature of the collapse, morals and ethics are becoming ever less a part of the game we play on the World Stage. Clearly, the Illuminati are not sticking to any Code of Law here, so if J6P continues to stick to some abstract set of principles that the Illuminati are NOT sticking to, he is going to lose this battle.
In the creation of a new society and a Better tomorrow, having Good Ethics and a solid Moral Structure is important for the health of the society. Perhaps the biggest problem we have now is that pretty much since Ag became the social meme, we have not had either good ethics or good morality. Unfortunately here, to establish better ones, we first have to Win this Game as it stands, and only unconventional tactics can do that now.
Play to Win.
RE
Holmes and Watson
Occassionally on the internet you encounter people who give a lot of thought to the problems which confront Homo Sapiens going forward here. Such a person is Ashvin Pandurangi of The Automatic Earth. Quite a few others I have run into as well, Steve from Virginia who runs Economic Undertow and Gail the Actuary who runs Our Finite World are some others I have had the great pleasure of engaging in debate on the questions that confront us all. None so much as Ashvin though, who is much like me in the respect he never quits on an argument and obligates himself to responding in great detail and at great length all the time to any and all comers in such discussions.
Over the last few months, Ashvin and I, along with numerous other commenters on the questions we are concerned with have been battling it out, pushing forth our varying perpectives on how best to handle the problems we are confronted with here. Those being the clear and obvious collapse well underway of the monetary system we all depend on, along with the also obvious depletion of global resources not limited to just energy, but water as well, and finally the clear OVERSHOOT of Human Population on the planet.
I have great respect for Ashvin and the philosphy he espouses on the pages of The Automatic Earth. I have never run across anyone else ever on the net who thinks in as much detail as he does about all these questions. At the same time though, I seriously disagree with Ashvin on a few core principles, and that is where the Holmes-Watson stuff comes into play.
Even though Ashvin and myself are in general agreement about the deflationary nature of the monetary collapse and also many of the Fascist outcomes resultant from that, we have some serious disagreements on basic MORAL principles. So regardless of how any discussion we have begins, whether it is with a Greek Default or the validity of OWS Non-Violent Protests or any other manifestations of the spin down, we always get back round to arguing about fundamental postulates about God, Religion and Morality. All to the good there IMHO, because if you cannot resolve those fundamental issues, you got no chance whatsoever of resoving the practical problems which face us now.
We have been working through this inside the Diner and also on the pages of TAE as well. All to the good there also, because it is the most important debate to consider of our time, far more important than whether Obama-sama or Catcher’s Mitt gets dropped into the POTUS spot in the next go round of faux-Democracy.
I do not know if Ashvin and I will ever work out these existentail questions in a way both of us can agree on. I do believe however that it is important to continue the exploration of them in order to find the best pathway possible out of the current mess we are immersed in. A challenge always, and I am extremely greatful that the Internet has made it possible for Ashvin and myself to debate these questions, and for all the rest of you folks also to be a part of that debate. Not everybody writes as much as Ashvin and I do, but IMHO everyone who reads theses Blogs and Forums thinks on the problems quite a bit these days. All to the good again. Be aware. Understand the issues. Figure out your own plans to handle what is coming down the pipe here.. Best of luck to all of you in this endeavor.
In the most recent of the debates between myself and Ashvin, he used the Classic Line of “No SHIT Sherlock!” with respect to a farily obvious deduction I made on how social extermination plans often will play out. This is a most interesting metaphor here, because of the roles both of us play in how we approach these questions, and it will be a metaphor for me from here on in. You see, Ashvin is very much the Button Down Dr. Watson always, and yours truly here is always the somewhat crazed Detective looking for answers. I respect Watson, but I do not think like he does. I think Watson respects me also, but he thinks I am off the Deep End and hopes to save me from myself. So be it.
Below follows the latest in the Holmes-Watson Debate. I expect it will continue in various forms until the Internet Goes Dark. To Watson I say, as always, it is Elementary Sir. LOL.
RE
I thought the whole point of this “thought experiment” of yours was to see what types of economic and sociopolitical dynamics will realistically happen in upcoming years?
No, if you read what Surly has written in this thread and I write all the time, the purpose of the Thought Experiment is to SAVE AS MANY AS YOU CAN.
The principle is thus: We are faced with a Die Off of astounding proportions, at LEAST 50% of the population is going to the Great Beyond here no matter WHAT we do. As I work it out in the TE, if we do not get rid of the vermin running this show, this Die Off is going to be 90% and quite possibly 100%, aka an EXTINCTION LEVEL EVENT. Bold and Caps together doesn’t emphasize this enough. We are at serious risk of the END of Human Sentience. If you value Biblical Morality more than that maybe you risk this, but I do not so highly value morality which makes little sense in this world. “Go Forth and Multiply?” WTF? That is the LAST thing we need to do these days. My moral principle here is to Save as Many as I Can.
We would all choose OMMP if we knew how to do it in a perfect way and one that is in harmony with our personal beliefs/values. But, REALISTICALLY, we know that there are a dime a dozen problematic issues wrapped up in this thing, and I am just pointing out to you one of the major ones that I see. And I know I’m not the only one, because other people have mentioned how it could be co-opted by the Illuminati and what not. I am simply taking that logic a step further and positing that it may already be a part of THEIR master plan to deceive the masses (as always) and warm them up to their faux Orkin Man. If that is true (and I maintain that it is a much more likely outcome than your OMMP with truly righteous intentions), then we are simply playing into their hands when we advocate for it. We are helping to sow and water the psychological seeds that they would like to see fully grown.
Clearly not everyone would choose the OMMP no matter what, that is what you yourself argue all the time. You argue that some principles are so inviolable that in fact it might be better to let ourselves go EXTINCT than to violate them.
I am fully aware of all the risks involved here in any kind of Plan to Manage Death, either Illuminati generated in an IMP or J6P generated in an OMMP. What I am quite certain of now though is that SOMEBODY is going to be managing this Death and the battle before us is all about WHO gets to do the managing here. Most often through history the Illuminati have been the Managers, but not 100% of the time. Evidence of that is in the Reign of Terror of Robespierre and the fact Nicholas and Alexandra Romanoff were filled full of LEAD in a Ruskie Basement and Marie Antoinette’s HEAD went rolling down the Champs d’Elysee like a Bowling Ball. The Elite do not manage the death so well 100% of the time, and occassionally they DO get the short end of the stick here. This is one of those times we have to make sure J6P runs the Death Show, not the Illuminati. In fact there is probably no time in all of recorded history when this was more important, because never before has the risk on the other side been the complete and total anhilliation of the human species, along with probably all other life forms above the level of the Tardigrades.
If we do NOT step up to the plate here and take control of this, then we are in fact going to be responsible for our own extinction. I for one am not in favor of that, so I run my TEs to find a WAY OUT. I don’t like what I see as the only road out here anymore than you do Ashvin, but it is a Morton’s Fork. The signpost up ahead says Mass Death to the left and Extinction to the right. I will go left here.
I don’t think there’s much left to debate down this spiritual road. You are convinced that spiritual truths have zero application to human dynamics in the “real world”, and you are unwilling to do any research about the spiritual perspectives and principles that you casually dismiss.
All of the evil you see happening now and in the future is exactly the same evils that those of faith see, but they have fundamentally different explanations for why it is here and therefore fundamentally different views on what we can do about it.
You and I will say that we knew all this stuff was coming down the pipeline for years, and they will say “oh really? well half this crap was prophesied in the Bible 2000 years ago, and in some cases even earlier…” Even you like to quote Revelation 18 as being relevant to how monetary collapse would go down today.
If you still can’t understand why their faith is critical to what they think is an acceptable course of action and also what they believe will happen in the future, both to them personally and the world as a whole, then there’s nothing more I can say to make you understand that.
You think they’re wrong, they think they’re right, and I think they are a lot more right than you are. That’s all there is to it.
No, that is NOT all there is to it.
I understand well enough why people have faiths of varying sorts, and I understand also well enough IMHO the Christian Faith also.
The problem with about all of these faiths in a world of serious overshoot is they have limited applicability if you want to Save as Many as You Can. I don’t think all those folks who generated up these Faiths were “wrong” in their assumptions when the world was new and resources seemed limitless. Conditions have changed here now though, and for much the same reason that the monetary system we run based on growth will not work, so also the “truths” many hold near and dear to their moral center ALSO will not work.
People do not let go of truths they think are universal very easily, only really when personal survival becomes the name of the game are such truths really tested vor veracity. A few souls will hold onto their truths right to the bitter end, and get Nailed to a Cross for it. The fact they will do that is quite remarkable, but it doesn’t make them Right all the time either.
RE
In the Debtrix, there is no Red Pill
A new Diner, Tao Jonesing contributed his thoughts on the “Debtrix”, a version of the Matrix that Neo was subsumed in for 3 Feature Films.
RE
Discuss this article inside the Diner
In the last forty years, Americans have gone from citizens to consumers, from consumers to consumables. As citizens, we existed to participate in society by producing goods. As consumers, we existed to proclaim our individuality by consuming more goods than our neighbor (who we didn’t know then, and still don’t know now). As consumables, we exist solely to incur debt and be consumed by it.
We are trapped in the Debtrix, coppertops, and there is no escape. There is no Morpheus in this debt matrix (he’s been rebooted as an actor), there is no Neo (another actor), and there is no red pill.
For the vast majority of us, those of us in what used to be called the middle class, our value to the Debtrix is measured by the size of our credit line and our propensity to use it. So make sure to leverage up and spend borrowed money on things you don’t really need or want. But, whatever you do, don’t lose your job because you are unlikely to find it (especially if you damage your credit score).
For those of us without credit, well, our value to the Debtrix is measured by our ability to provide a pool of cheap, temporary labor, primarily to incentivize those with credit lines to produce more in order to keep them. The middle class coppertops will have to increase productivity or end up like you, eating cake.
For those of us at the top of the pecking order, our value to the Debtrix is measured by our complacency in allowing it to persist. The longer we are in the Debtrix, the more time it has to consume our wealth and our humanity (it’s already too late for Charles Munger and this guy, too).
Although the Debtrix cannot be escaped, it can be destroyed through the very means it uses to consume us: debt.
First, stop taking on new debt. This alone will prevent the Debtrix from growing and will even force it to shrink as it fails to maintain the illusion of perpetual exponential growth.
Second, start retiring old debt. If that means selling some of your possessions to pay the debt off, do it. Many of us don’t use or need a lot of what we own. If that means defaulting on non-recourse mortgages, do it. The bottom 90% of households owes roughly 80% of the outstanding household debt, which is about $11 trillion total, of which $8 trillion is mortgage debt. When you include the leveraged side bets the architects of the Debtrix placed on us coppertops paying that $8 trillion back, you’re looking at as much as $88 trillion in total losses for the Debtrix, which would break it. TBTF would become TBTB (“Too Big To Bail”).
The Debtrix cannot be escaped, but it can be destroyed, and when it is, we’ll be citizens again.
Unforgiven
Discuss this article inside the Diner
Surly recently wrote a post inside the Diner in the Usury thread begun by El Gallinazo reviewing the exploits of Pol Pot, Cambodian Cleaner extraordinaire, as a Counterpoint to the Orkin Man meme I use to drive home the nature of beast we have here before us. I suggested he turn the post into a Feature Article for the Blog, which he did. I am compelled however to rexamine the questions Surly does in his analysis, because he does not paint a complete picture here.
Humanity is an Unforgiven bunch overall. We all know where this is leading…no has already led to. War. Actually, Wars since there will be many of them. Precisely how many will end up dead as a result of these Wars I have no idea, other than it will be a big number with lots of Zeros after it. Beyond that, it is not a huge leap to make that our JIT food production and transportation will be compromised by increasing disorder in the society, leading to famine of unprecedented proportions.
Confronted with all of this, I look back at the history of Homo Sapiens and how societies react in these type of situations. This is not the first time this has occurred, though it may be the biggest and the last time. Is there a Way Out of the mess? Yes there is, but it is full of unpleasantness no matter how you cut it. The best you can do is try to find a path that Saves as Many as You Can.
Below follows some of my thoughts on how you go about this, and what the Morality and Ethics are when societies are confronted by trials like this.
RE
I go through this bizness of the Nasty Dictators all the time with Ashvin over on TAE, and certainly it is not an easy position to take on the Orkin Man Idea when you have such nefarious types as Pol Pot in the Terminix bizness.
I am NOT defending Pol Pot here, because he took on this massively counterproductive attempt at social cleansing with tons of wrong ideas and with tons of corruption involved as well. it also was bound for failure because it was undertaken while the Conduits were still functional.
Taking out the Crystal Ball here and looking into the FUTURE though, let’s consider some of the ideas involved in this mess.
Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” included forced evacuations of Chinese cities and the purging of “class enemies, ” a move that would apparently gain favor among participants in this thread. Pol Pot now stood up his own “Super Duper New and Improved Great Leap Forward” in Cambodia, which in itself was new and improved, hence renamed the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea.
On the “Forced Evacuation of Big Shities” question. It wasn’t true for sure in Cambodia, but look at the Mass Death that may occur in the Big Shities if they are NOT evacuated before JIT delivery fails. You could have a 99% Death Rate in those places. If Pol Pot II was running the show and forcibly evacuating people NOW, maybe you only get a 50% Death rate. So here PPII goes down in History as the Mass Murderer of say 3B People. Except if PPII had NOT done this, 6B would have gone to the Great Beyond instead.
It’s obviously a tough call to make for a Political Leader when to pull the plug on the Big Shities and tell everyone they have to EVACUATE NOW. It will inevitably result in a Massive Death Toll. But if you think it will be WORSE if you don’t do it, if you are willing to take the heat as the worst Mass Murderer in all of Recorded History, maybe you do it.
Millions of Cambodians accustomed to city life were now forced into slave labor in Pol Pot’s “killing fields” where they soon began dying from overwork, malnutrition and disease, on a diet of one tin of rice (180 grams) per person every two days, the better to become compost and improve the yields.
OK, here we have mostly agreed that Industrial life is going the way of the Dinosaur and people HAVE to go back to the Land as Farmers at least, if not H-Gs. What is going to happen to Obese J6P when you put him out on the land pushing a plow? Instant Heart Attack! Most people currently used to EZ Living courtesy of the thermodynamic energy of Oil simply are not IN SHAPE to work out in the Fields. Is it PPII’s FAULT these folks are too fat and weak to pull their own weight out there?
And you can’t have a party without the purges… a veritable binge of purges. Up against the wall went the remnants of the “old society” – the educated, the wealthy, Buddhist monks, police, doctors, lawyers, teachers, glasses-wearers all, no doubt. Ex-soldiers were killed along with their wives and children. Eventually the taste for human blood leads to a paranoia of sorts, and why not? Anyone suspected of disloyalty to Pol Pot, including eventually many Khmer Rouge leaders, was shot or bludgeoned with an ax. “What is rotten must be removed,” a Khmer Rouge slogan proclaimed.
Here of course is the EXCESS which occurs in many an Inqusition/Reign of Terror type scenario. There is going to be a lot of BLOWBACK resultant from many people who have lost their comfortable life and who want to see PPII DEAD because of that. He gets blamed for the problems they have; he gets blamed for their loss of economic status in the society. So PPII gets PARANOID, for good reason. People really ARE out to get him. So he starts Killing Them before they Kill Him.
This of course is the Omellette issue Uncle Joe talked about. Its just about impossible to be a manager of massive Die Off without yourself becoming a Target. Yet if SOMEBODY doesn’t get int here and try to manage it, the Die Off is WORSE. Morton’s Fork situation of course.
Now, back in Uncle Joe, Mao and Pol Pot’s era, if they played along with the Iluminati they likely could have avoided all that dieing. Except these guys wanted to Exit the Game early, and to exit it they essentially were cutting off their Noses to spite their Faces. They lost the ability to Trade with the outside world and were attempting to Go It Alone, and this messed up all their in place systems which sorta worked as long as you paid your Vigorish to the Illuminati.
So all of them go down in History as the most vicious and Genocidal Dictators in all of Recorded History, at least in gross numbers if not in Percentages. I still maintain that the Romanoffs were WORSE than Stalin, but that is not really that important here at the moment.
Moving into the FUTURE here, the issue is you cannot even Save As Many as you Can by PLAYING BALL with the Illuminati. Why? Because said Illuminati are Fresh OUT of Cheap Oil to sell you with Loans they hand out to you. So unfortunately here in this Morton’s Fork situation, the social dynamic is likely to produce numerous PPIIs and Great Uncle Joes. Because unless somebody does SOMETHING to try to keep the society organized up, the Dieing will be WORSE than it would be if you have some Dictator FORCING people to evacuate the Big Shities. They aren’t going to do that on their own until it is too late and they all are starving and Cannibalizing each other.
Although the image of banksters and stockbrokers mucking out pigpens and pushing wheelbarrows through knee-deep mud remains a compelling one for me.
You know, I paint all sorts of pictures based on the Spanish Inquisition and the Reign of Terror, but the fact of the matter here is that if you simply took away all their wealth and power and dropped these folks into a Housing Project in Chicago and left them their Shoelaces, Silk Neckties and Gucci Belts, they would all Hang THEMSELVES in short order. So if you want to go about it this way to absolve yourself of a sense of Guilt for lopping off their Heads, I am fine with that one also.
Regardless of the means here, whether it is Sepuku or Capital Punishment, the situation is going to create the BLOWBACK from people who once had power, now removed. They will attempt Counter Revolutions and so forth. So you get forced into a battle here no matter what, and people DIE no matter what.
Practical sort of fellow that I am, I work my way through this dynamic to try to find the pathway with the least pain and the greatest survivability for the typical Slave in our society. The means I see working best is to take the battle to the Illuminati before they get the Death Camps rolling in earnest here. You do have to wait for the Failure of the Conduits though, because as long as the Iluminati have the Big Ass Military and Gestapo organized up and functioning, you stand no chance here. Once those Conduits fracture though, the playing field is LEVELLED.
Then you don’t just get MAD, you get EVEN.
The issues most folks have when confronted with these problems are of Morality and Ethics and how you interpret God in the whole schema. If there is a God, what is he really after here with Homo Sapiens? What does He expect us to do confronted by Mass Death no matter which way we turn here?
For people brought up under Judeo-Christian morality, all the solutions which historically ARE taken are all unnacceptable. War is unacceptable, Fighting Back is unacceptable (Turn the Other Cheek), even passing Judgement on the Guilty is unacceptable (Judge not lest ye yourself be Judged).
In fact few Christians besides Saints follow all the advice of Jesus even in good times.
40 And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also.
WTF does this? Up here in Alaska if you did this in the winter you would freeze to death in minutes. Maybe that worked in the Middle East where its warm all the time but not here. Christians also regularly go to War, regularly charge Usurious Interest and regularly commit Adultery also. So it seems the vast majrity of Christians kind of pick and choose which of Jesus’ Words of Wisdom to follow on any given day.
For most of human history though, this set of principles was never followed by anybody. Certainly not by tribes of Inuit who would practice Infanticide and Abondonment of the Elderly as tribal survival strategies. You can also make a very good case that people who lived with this moral structure lived a lot more in balance with the world surrounding them than Christians or Muslims have ever managed to do.
The real questions of human survival come down to the needs of the many weighed against the needs of the few, or the one.
I personally believe in the existence of an Eternal Soul, and I also believe in Reincarnation, although in my own peculiar sort of way. I’ll explain it in detail at some point, though you might try reading my On the Existence of God article. Actually, that one might be worth a Cross Post on TAE, it certainly got a lot of conversation going on TAE when I originally posted it there.
Anyhow, while encased in your corporeal existence, you are subject to Natural Laws. You personally have survival imperatives, and so does the community you are a part of. The choices you make when confronted with these imperatives can impact your Eternal Soul, but it comes down to Motivations rather than Acts in the end. I discussed this with you already in my example of the Liquor Store robbery Killing versus the Rapist Killing. In one case the Motivation for the Killing is Selfish and Evil, in the other case it Helpful and Good.
On the agregate level of society similar questions arise, Infanticide is one of them. If the purpose of the Infanticide is to provide for the Needs of the Many at the expense of the Needs of the One, the motivation involved is a Good one. I don’t think this impacts negatively on your Immortal Soul, because you are trapped by the imperatives involved while you are a corporeal being.
On a more practical level – what if the baby would have turned out to be an Einstein when it comes to H-G or leading the Tribe? It is possible that the decision to murder the baby in order to spare the more productive member is a grave mistake. Perhaps the short-term risk of Tribal extinction is even worth it. The Tribe will never have enough information at the time of the Act to know that, though. BUT if there’s a possibility they will all suffer in the afterlife or in subsequent lifetimes, then it may be a lot better to err on the side of moral caution.
RE
Derrick Jensen makes a case for resistance using similar logic, that weve tried being nice and it hasnt worked, but with different timing. He advocates more immediate action to avoid the system grinding on another 300 years, or the elite realizing its over and rather than let go of their rule, nuke it all while they hide in bunkers. The effort of such pre-emptive strikes would be justifiable. In your scenario collapse is guaranteed with a short event horizon. I have doubts an OMMP is a “matter of utility,” as El G puts it. Energy of all kinds (psychologic, physical, social, material) will be at a premium in a fast collapse scenario. Efforts may be better directed elsewhere.
I’m not entirely sure of the “Event Horizon” on this. In terms of passing the point where collapse is inevitable, I am sure we have pased that EH. However, I am not sure that at least in some Ringfenced countries BAU might not be possible for another 50 years. So calling in the Orkin Man NOW when we might muddle through a while longer at least here has questionable value, at least for US. For the 3rd world countries who are bearing the most pain right now though, an Orkin Man arrival in the FSofA might take some of the burden off of them. It would of course send the FSofA into a Tizzy of Civil War requiring all the troops currently dispatched over the globe to return home to quell the violence.
In reality here, we have not one but TWO Orkin Men running for POTUS, Obama-sama and Catcher’s Mitt. They are both committed to Exteminating folks outside these borders who are inconveniently sitting on top of OUR OIL! It’s all about who the Orkin Man sets about exterminating.
I know you will claim that’s exactly why we need the OMMP, so we don’t repeat the cycle, but maybe the OMMP perpetuates the type of thinking that sets it up. The likely outcome is there will always be another pigman unless the very nature of dominator culture changes. A global collapse has good odds of achieving that without the need or utility of an OMMP.
I can’t promise an Orkin Man solution to the Illuminati problem will prevent the cycle from repeating itself. The main thing the Orkin Man has to do is prevent an ELE now. So someone who will decommission ALL the Nuke Plants in the country/wold DESPITE the fact that a shortage of Electricity will end up in millions dieing by itself is necessary. An Orkin who MANDATES that the Big Shities are evacuated BEFORE JIT fails is necessary, despite the fact millions more will die in the relocation effort. An Orkin Man who pledges to get rid of all Greedy Parasitical Scumbag Pigmen currently walking the Earth is necessary, despite the fact we may eventually breed up NEW GPSBs.
40 Years ago when 4 were Shot Dead in Ohio by the National Guard on the Campus of Kent State University, we might have still had a CHANCE to correct our behaviors without an Orkin Man Solution. Now it is TOO LATE. We missed the Bus. Now its a dichotomy between MASS DEATH or EXTINCTION. Which one do you choose? Only an Orkin Man can make that kind of choice. The key is to find the RIGHT kind of Orkin Man who Exterminates the RIGHT Vermin. The Orkin Men we have to choose from right NOW are 180 degrees opposite from that.
So now, we are presented with a Morton’s Fork of unprecedented scope in all of recorded history. We have on the one hand the very REAL possibility of an Extinction Level Event, not just for Homo Sapiens but for about every other living creature on the face of the earth with the possible exception of the Tardigrades, who can withstand close to Absolute Zero temperatures and bombardment by Gamma Rays and STILL pop back to life in the right conditions. Sadly for Homo Sapiens, we are not as resilient as the Tardigrades.
On the other hand, the choice is MASS DEATH coming by one means or another here. War, Pesitlence, Famine and Death, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are ready to Ride Herd on Humanity once again now. Which is the BETTER alternative here, Extinction or Mass Death? To some folks, Extinction is a preferable alternative to compromising Judeo-Christian ethics they think are more important than life itself.
If systematic genocide is the last best idea we can come up with, then maybe it would be better to let ourselves go extinct.
First off, it depends how you define Genocide. In the case of the PPII evacuating the Big Shities and in the process killing 3B People, is this genocide if he had not done that and 6B would have died instead? Looked at the other way, PPII SAVED 3B lives!
Far as being better to self-extinguish, I can’t ever buy that one. Always a chance to improve if you are still walking the earth.
All of this just convinces me that it will always come down to a question of moral values in the end. Your cut-throat, last Hoorah Utilitarian morality just doesn’t do it for me…
And your moralism to the point of self-extinction doesn’t do it for me either. We’re even there.
If you believe in an immortal soul, universal reincarnation, multiple universes, or anything of that sort, I think this assertion of yours is plain stupid. Who cares about saving your physical body on Planet Earth if you are risking eternal damnation in a fiery abyss?
Ashvin, YOU are the one who thinks you risk Eternal Damnation for this, not me. If that were true, then generations of Inuit have all gone to Hell for Infanticide and abandoning the elderly to die. Beyond that, every Soldier who ever went to war and killed people ALSO got sent to Hell. I don’t BELIEVE that Ashvin. I believe people like Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon go to Hell, not people who make practical choices for their own survival and that of their tribe.
Not smart, just good – however you want to define that. How can the information that the Infant will be, let’s say, another Christ-like figure not be relevant in your extermination decision?? It MUST be relevant, or else your Utilitarian morality falls to pieces and you have no justifiable leg to stand on.
Yes, and this has been the conundrum of the human condition over the ages, but especially in recent years – we try to make calculated, optimal decisions in the short-term temporal sphere based on extremely imperfect information and then justify them after the fact as being in the best interests of humanity, as if we could have possibly known that. After all, the survival of that Tribe has gotten us where exactly?
The point I try to make Ashvin is that the Tribe I am after did NOT survive. Agriculture and Industrialization rendered this Tribe EXTINCT, or nearly so. We have to REVERSE ENGINEER this tribe back into existence. It’s not going to be easy, and no road for the Squeamish either. You start by getting rid of the most egregious offenders and then attempt to re-educate all the rest. Those who cannot or will not Repent and change their ways will go to the Great Beyond, one way or the other.
I do not see Mass Death as avoidable at this point, and I cannot accept the alternative of allowing what is going on now to end in an Extinction Level Event either. So the only real question for me here is who lives, who dies and how you cut the losses as best you can. The only people who can do that are Orkin Men. I don’t believe there will be ONE Orkin Man of vast power and control like a Mao or Uncle Joe here, I think the society is fracturing too fast for that too organize up now. Rather I think the fractured society will breed up various Orkin Men, all with varying styles and methodology, but in the end all will be responsible for the very same thing, which is MANAGING DEATH.
If YOU were charged with this unbearable responsibility, how would YOU react, what would YOU choose to do? For me, the right meme does not come off the pages of The Bible, it comes from the Pop Culture paradigm of the Old West, personified best by Clint Eastwood in so many films, fromthe Spaghetti Westerns to the Unforgiven. We ARE an Unforgiven bunch as Homo Sapiens, and there really are times when a Stranger needs to Ride into Town and take out the Bad Guys.
This is one of those times, for sure.
RE
The Orkin Man: Which Side Are You On?
Comment on this article here:
The Orkin man is one of RE’s favorite memes, often invoked as a symbol of retribution by the meek against the great. When we watch gangsters confiscate houses with impunity and murder by proxy and a pen (see the story of Norman Rousseau), run the economy into a ditch, commandeered great bonuses and be subject to none of the usual proceedings of justice, it is easy to despair and to look for revenge. This overwritten screed is a meditation upon what has become a thought-provoking thread rife with implications, a thought experiment which, if followed through the course of its own ineluctable logic, obliges each of us to measure where we would fall, and what we would do, in the event TSHTF.
What has actually happened here in this country on these rare occasions when people have stood up en masse to Fight the Power? In a previous lifetime, I investigated and created a documentary about the Battle at Blair Mountain. You will likely not have heard of this, the teaching of labor history having apparently been classified as a Class I misdemeanor here in the FSA. In the largest uprising in the United States outside of the Civil War, in 1921, thousands of miners waged armed warfare in Logan County, West Virginia against mine owners, sheriff Don Chafin, and federal troops, in an effort to unionize the mines.
In Mingo, Logan and McDowell counties, miners worked under incredibly bad conditions, were paid next to nothing, had no freedom of speech or assembly, and were dispatched with impunity by mine guards and local politicos in an atmosphere reminiscent of a third-world dictatorship, or contemporary South Carolina. In 1921, thousands of miners and families were evicted from their tents after having the temerity to join a union. The Miners’ March, as it was called, was set to change all that. The military was engaged, as always, to Protect Property Rights, those most sacred and revered of all rights extended by the Hand of God to the white, male property owners who created the FSA. The miners’ intention was to march to the southwestern coalfields and free fellow miners from abominable treatment at the hands or mine owners.
The miners were opposed by a well-armed contingent of mine guards and State Police with rifles and machine guns. These would eventually be joined by 2,000 regular Army troops armed with airplanes, bombs, and poison gas. The two forces met at Blair Mountain, in Logan County, along the ridge line.
This was the Battle of Blair Mountain.
The battle marked the first time U.S. troops were ordered to bomb civilians. Federal troops squared off against citizen miners, many themselves veterans hardened from recent service in WW I.
The union leader Bill Blizzard eventually surrendered his army in order to avoid further civilian casualties. Blizzard was acquitted in court of insurrection. Future UMW & CIO leader John L. Lewis fought alongside Blizzard at the Battle of Blair Mountain and succeeded in getting recognition for the union 14 years later in southern West Virginia.
One of the songs that sprung up in the wake of these labor troubles with the song “Which side are you on?” It was written by Florence Reece, the wife a union organizer for the UMW in Harlan County, Kentucky, when the miners of that region were locked in a bitter and violent struggle with the mine owners called the Harlan County War. In an attempt to intimidate the Reece family, the local sheriff illegally entered their family home in search of Sam Reece. Sam had been warned in advance and escaped, but Florence and their children were terrorized in his place. That night, after the men had gone, Florence wrote the lyrics to “Which Side Are You On?” on a calendar that hung in the kitchen of her home. She took the melody from a traditional Baptist hymn, “Lay the Lily Low.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Which_Side_Are_You_On%3F)
A Song by Florence Patton Reece
Come all of you good workers
Good news to you I’ll tell
Of how that good old union
Has come in here to dwell
Chorus
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
My daddy was a miner
And I’m a miner’s son
And I’ll stick with the union
Till every battle’s won
They say in Harlan County
There are no neutrals there
You’ll either be a union man
Or a thug for J.H. Blair
Oh, workers can you stand it?
Oh, tell me how you can
Will you be a lousy scab
Or will you be a man?
Don’t scab for the bosses
Don’t listen to their lies
Us poor folks haven’t got a chance
Unless we organize
So the miners organized together to Fight the Power, to take the law into their own hands because the law was an ass. What they got for their trouble was the full response of the state in all of its Majesty and force of arms. Eventually the legal system would catch up. In the fullness of time, union rights would be recognized, at least until after World War II, when the elites mounted their counterrevolution under the banner of “right to work” laws.
In my loathing for the Banksters and their apologists, I take a back seat to nobody. The bailout of 2008, otherwise known as the “banksters coup,” was just the cherry on top of the same toxic milkshake served up as economic and social policy over the last 30 years. The insane clown posse that passes for the modern Republican Party has eyeballed the demographic trends, and pasted together an assemblage of what Drfitglass called “the scattered,raving remnants of the Confederacy for one, last glorious bonfire of democracy.” Combine the wholesale assault of the remnant of the New Deal in an atmosphere of “industrialized political hatespeech,” Fox News, Hate Radio and the Tea Party with its Billionaire backers, and it’s easy to succumb to the desire to want to kill something.
Intellectually I hold with Kunstler’s “lamppost and 40 feet of sturdy nylon rope” as the due for the “masters of the universe “who have ground down our economy and wrecked the ship of state. But personal morality makes looping the first skein of rope over the lamppost morally fraught. On the other hand, one is left with the spectacle of the pigmen rooting among the remains of the economy and the country, like Wu’s pigs disposing of a fresh corpse in HBO’s “Deadwood.”
It is this episode that springs to mind as I consider the “Orkin Man Master Plan” (OMMP) as discussed on the forum of the Doomstead Diner. http://www.doomsteaddiner.org/forum/index.php?topic=477.0
The Orkin man is a favorite device of RE, the invoking of which I have enjoyed since the same since his days on The Burning Platform blog. The Orkin man is an exterminator who cleanses the dwelling of lice, vermin, termites and all manner of infestations. The analogy is clear. The remedy less so.
One poster on Doomsday Diner posed the question, “Who gets to be the Orkin man?” Indeed. Who gets to be the decider? Being the decider has great costs, which turned on a fundamental moral issue, at a time when our moral and spiritual institutions are in decline, church attendance down, and many people utterly and completely unequipped to weigh moral and ethical questions. And as much as I like to give voice to my inner hunchback, there is that “judge not lest ye be judged” morality imbued by a Catholic education and nun-beatings that inflects one’s thoughts, processes and decisions, even decades later.
As I reflected on the more recent exemplars of individuals taking on such a strategy in this country, and after Blair Mountain, my mind skittered to thoughts of Kosovo, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Pinochet’s Argentina, and then settled on the best recent example: Pol Pot whose efforts to form a Communist peasant farming society resulted in the deaths of 25 percent of the country’s population from starvation, overwork and executions. Those Khmer Rouge wanted to return to the land as well, and also wanted to cleanse the parasites, userers and useless eaters from the face of Cambodia. A cautionary tale about the work of idealists who want to remake a society by means of “cleansing” the “parasites…”
It took a while for ol’ Pol to consolidate power– he needed to throw in with Sihanouk to fight the right wing junta the US had installed, then the US had to leave the ‘Nam and Cambodia. But once in power, he began a radical experiment to create an agrarian utopia that would warm the heart of the most doomy doomster. Pol Pot had seen Mao’s Cultural Revolution first-hand during a visit to Communist China, so he figured to go The Great Yellow River Swimmer one better.
Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” included forced evacuations of Chinese cities and the purging of “class enemies, ” a move that would apparently gain favor among participants in this thread. Pol Pot now stood up his own “Super Duper New and Improved Great Leap Forward” in Cambodia, which in itself was new and improved, hence renamed the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea.
Remember Pol Pot’s ringing declaration, “This is Year Zero?” Ah, search your memories. Society was to be “purified.” Capitalism, Western culture, city life, religion, and all foreign influences to be extinguished. Intellectuals, bureaucrats and other glasses-wearers were to push wheelbarrows, the better to repent of their pointy-headedness, and to learn the glories of peasant Communism. Foreigners were expelled, embassies closed, foreign economic or medical assistance refused. No use of foreign languages. Newspapers and television stations were shut down, radios and bicycles confiscated, and mail and telephone usage curtailed. Money was forbidden. (That will kick those usurers in the ass.) Businesses were shuttered, religion banned, education halted, health care eliminated, and parental authority revoked. Thus Cambodia was sealed off from the outside world, almost as effectively as if information were controlled by a small handful of media companies.
Something about that live-or-die thingy tends to bring out the excesses in our revolutionary heroes. I’ll put that in my “Robespierre was overworked and misunderstood” file.
Can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. All of Cambodia’s cities were forcibly evacuated. At Phnom Penh, two million inhabitants were evacuated on foot into the countryside at gunpoint. As many as 20,000 died along the way. Can’t let that stop a man with a purpose.
Millions of Cambodians accustomed to city life were now forced into slave labor in Pol Pot’s “killing fields” where they soon began dying from overwork, malnutrition and disease, on a diet of one tin of rice (180 grams) per person every two days, the better to become compost and improve the yields.
Workdays ran to the 18 hour day, Pol having taken the American South’s “right to work” euphemism to heart. The starving were forbidden to eat the fruits and rice they were harvesting, as that was confiscated by the Khmer rouge and loaded onto their own trucks.
And you can’t have a party without the purges… a veritable binge of purges. Up against the wall went the remnants of the “old society” – the educated, the wealthy, Buddhist monks, police, doctors, lawyers, teachers, glasses-wearers all, no doubt. Ex-soldiers were killed along with their wives and children. Eventually the taste for human blood leads to a paranoia of sorts, and why not? Anyone suspected of disloyalty to Pol Pot, including eventually many Khmer Rouge leaders, was shot or bludgeoned with an ax. “What is rotten must be removed,” a Khmer Rouge slogan proclaimed.
The casualty count rose until Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of Cambodia seeking to end Khmer Rouge border attacks. On January 7, 1979, Phnom Penh fell and Pol Pot was deposed, and a Vietnamese puppet government put in.
Pol Pot disappeared into the jungles of Thailand with his Khmer Rouge remnant and waged guerrilla war against a succession of Cambodian governments for decades, eventually sputtering out and dying of an apparent heart attack before he could be dragged to trial before an international tribunal.
So it matters little who you pick as the Orkin Man, or how good your motives are, or how thorough your efforts at re-education or eradication may be. The role seems to carry some occupational hazards, as if the appetite for blood, human death and destruction carries with it the seeds of insanity.
Although the image of banksters and stockbrokers mucking out pigpens and pushing wheelbarrows through knee-deep mud remains compelling.
But point was that any kind of social engineering, social cleansing, ethnic cleansing executed by a political agenda will inevitably collapse, most often due to its own corruption and increasingly escalating paranoia on the part of the strongman or the secret oligarchy of “deciders.” There is a reason that we are taught from a very early age, “vengeance is mine saith the Lord, ” ”Thou shalt not kill,” and other Biblical admonishments against the taking of life. It could be that this ancient wisdom recalls that wielding the tools of vengeance is simply above the pay grade of us mere mortals. On the other hand, psychopaths recognize no such compunction. But the question remains: what do we do, what action should we take at a time when psychopaths have commandeered the engines of government and commerce, economic or rate with complete impunity and beyond the reach of such justice as still remains?
In response to such musings, RE posted the following:
RE:
Here of course is the EXCESS which occurs in many an Inqusition/Reign of Terror type scenario. There is going to be a lot of BLOWBACK resultant from many people who have lost their comfortable life and who want to see PPII DEAD because of that. He gets blamed for the problems they have; he gets blamed for their loss of economic status in the society. So PPII gets PARANOID, for good reason. People really ARE out to get him. So he starts Killing Them before they Kill Him. //
So all of them go down in History as the most vicious and Genocidal Dictators in all of Recorded History, at least in gross numbers if not in Percentages . . .
Moving into the FUTURE here, the issue is you cannot even Save As Many as you Can by PLAYING BALL with the Illuminati. Why? Because said Illuminati are Fresh OUT of Cheap Oil to sell you with Loans they hand out to you. So unfortunately here in this Morton’s Fork situation, the social dynamic is likely to produce numerous PPIIs and Great Uncle Joes. Because unless somebody does SOMETHING to try to keep the society organized up, the Dieing will be WORSE than it would be if you have some Dictator FORCING people to evacuate the Big Shities. They aren’t going to do that on their own until it is too late and they all are starving and Cannibalizing each other.
We are thus faced with an untenable situation: if any one of us were to put on the Pol Pot T shirt, we would find ouselves in a similar situation, fraught with awful decisions and tinged by paranoia, regions of the mind visited by Joseph Conrad. Far preferable to remember the biblical injunctions that direct our conduct, as Ashvin observed:
Ashvin:
It’s not about what we you and I can justify to ourselves with our personal beliefs. It is what you can get OTHER PEOPLE to accept based on their beliefs. Anyone who truly believes in Judeo-Christian theology cannot accept OMMP any more than they can accept Infanticide, even when they are committed with “good intentions” for some Utilitarian goal. According to them, God is perfect and they are imperfect. God has commanded them to avoid certain Sins, and they must have faith in God’s wisdom no matter what. It is not up to them to decide what sins are acceptable via good intentions or utilitarian calculations.
Quote from: Matthew 7:14-27
14“For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.
15“Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. 16“You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? 17“So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. 18“A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. 19“Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20“So then, you will know them by their fruits.
21“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. 22“Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ 23“And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; DEPART FROM ME, YOU WHO PRACTICE LAWLESSNESS.’
24“Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them, may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25“And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock. 26“Everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. 27“The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell—and great was its fall.”
I’m just using them as an example of people whose beliefs are fundamentally in opposition to OMMP. They will become your enemies… but them and who else? I think you can easily make the argument that most true Hindus and Buddhists will as well. Now we are easily talking about a lot of people. How many people who claim to believe in these Immortal Truths will have the nerve to follow through when your so-called Herd is stampeding against them? I don’t know, probably only a small fraction.
But my point here is that some of them will, and people like me will admire them for doing so. It’s an amazing thing, really, to have that kind of total devotion to some higher power even in the face of what appears to be the likely threat of species-wide extinction. Talk about a small gate and narrow way!
Yet as we abjure violence, the fact is that evil remains. RE remains adamant about proactively taking the fight to the Pigmen:
RE:
Regardless of the means here, whether it is Sepukku or Capital Punishment, the situation is going to create the BLOWBACK from people who once had power, now removed. They will attempt Counter Revolutions and so forth. So you get forced into a battle here no matter what, and people DIE no matter what.
Practical sort of fellow that I am, I work my way through this dynamic to try to find the pathway with the least pain and the greatest survivability for the typical Slave in our society. The means I see working best is to take the battle to the Illuminati before they get the Death Camps rolling in earnest here. You do have to wait for the Failure of the Conduits though, because as long as the Iluminati have the Big Ass Military and Gestapo organized up and functioning, you stand no chance here. Once those Conduits fracture though, the playing field is LEVELLED.
Then you don’t just get MAD, you get EVEN.
In other words, when you observe that the Illuminati are engineering a significant die-off of the “excess” workforce, to bring the earth’s carrying capacity in line with that proscribed by the Georgia Guidestones, what should the meek do? Stand obediently in line at the abattoir, or take the fight to the oppressors? As we all observe every day, there IS such a thing as evil. [There is an entire website (http://www.sott.net/) devoted to the subject of "ponerology" (the study of evil), for those who need a deeper dive into that sort of thing. I confess a somewhat light stomach for learning much more about the rarefied appetites of our elites, the Franklin affair and multiple pedophilia rings being enough to induce projectile vomiting . . .]
The question each of us has to address is, Which side are you on? If you knew that those in control were working to box you into a freight car headed to an unknown future, but which would likely involve Fresh Towels and Hot Showers, would you get on the train or would you take the fight to them? And would you take the fight to them knowing that they controlled all of the vectors and tools of violence with force overwhelming to individual scale? Indeed, our elites have changed the laws to enable the military to operate with impunity here in the “North American battleground” (yes, friends, if you are paying the least bit of attention, we are indeed the enemy), as they have likewise militarized our local police forces, complete with spiffy looking SWAT team suits, armored vehicles. and drones, as the latest invention. We have as our president the only Nobel Peace Prize winner with a personal kill list. So it may be well to say that we’re living in a time where the lessons of history no longer inform what we may be able to infer about the future. All bets are off.
Ultimately, I hold with RE when he says, “save as many as you can,” although we may differ about what that means. As an occupier, I believe that our presence in the streets and withholding our consent is everything that we can do. The community gardening movement is a step toward self-reliance, and teaching others to be self reliant. A self-reliant independent populace is anathema to the powers that be. But even the most psychopathic will find it difficult to dial-up a drone strike against a community garden, unless I miss my bet. Our resistance will be nonviolent, as the state has an utter and complete monopoly of the tools of violence, and a demonstrated increasing bloodthirstiness in applying them. I do not wish to make it easy for them, and have little desire to become a martyr, in a time when even bankster loan officers can murder with a pen and a computer.
Hunter S. Thompson once described himself as a “Road Man for the Lords of Karma.” Since nature, or God bats last, my own view is that through education, self-reliance, and nonviolent resistance we can change a culture. The history of this society guarantees a rain of vengeance and disproportionate response on the part of the minions of the elites, in a road that runs from the Cherokee “Trail of Tears,” though the gulag, through Logan Country through the paddies of Kampuchea to Zuccotti Park. And even if successful, the victors turn into monsters. Changing a society will take generations; generations which we may not have. Our opponents have been at this for many decades; we should not expect the quick fix.
In the coming days, each of us will need to stand up and be counted. At least I know which side I’m on.
Revelation
We have been engaged in many discussions here and on TAE lately regarding how the monetary system collapse will play out and our various philosphies on how this should be dealt with. Embedded in this discussion is my interpretation of Revelation 18 from The Bible.
I have been engaged the last couple of days with debates inside the Diner and on TAE, and have not had time to write another feature. Tonight I went back to look for an Oldie but Goodie, and Fortuna has it the very first one I turned up quotes that very passage from Revelation 18 also. This post was written originally as one of my Frostbite Falls Daily Rants on The Burning Platform, directly after I received the news of the Death of my mother a little over a year ago now.
For those of you also currently involved in the Goodness Gracious! Great Wall’s on Fire! discussion on TAE, this post also has more of my thoughts on the value of Gold and Silver in a Collapse. All in all, a fortuitous post for me to dig up tonight, and I am not sure it was coincidence that I found it as the very first one I turned up.
It was the Finger of God.
All that is written in there remains as true today as it was then.
RE
Discuss this article inside the Diner
You might have noticed its been more that the 2 days between the rants I usually do as max. Reason is yesterday my Mom Passed into the Great Beyond. I have been arranging to fly down to the lower 48 to attend the Funeral and tidying up stuff I have been procrastinating on before I leave, like my TAXES. So I haven’t spent the usual time writing. I do have the monetary analysis I wrote before I got the news of her Death which I will include in this rant after I write just a few of my feelings about this. Not sure when I will write the next rant.
My Mom was 82 on her Death, and the last few years were very difficult. My sister bore the greatest burden for this, and to her credit she enabled my mom to avoid going into a Nursing Home, and she died in her own bed in her own place in her sleep. Since she retired at 65, she has ben living on Social Security and a Pension from the CA Franchise Tax Board. She had a couple of Cancers which required expensive operations to keep her going, and medications to control her BP and Heart issues. I am grateul for the extra years she got, my mom was always there for me, a big supporter even with all my odd choices. I am very sad I will not see her again in this life, but I still do wonder what the purpose was for her to keep going these last 10 years or so, beyond the fact it made me happy to talk to her and reminisce with her about times gone by.
So now she is gone, along with my Dad the Pigman who Passed into the Great Beyond a couple of years ago. Grandparents all long since gone, I am now Next Up in the Generational Trip to the Great Beyond, and by no means do I expect I will be making it to anywhere near 80. Frankly, if I make it to 60 these days I will be surprised.
Mom’s Passing leaves me a whole new set of problems,because like me Mom watched her pennies and she left me yet ANOTHER tidy sum of Toilet Paper to deal with. To most folks inheriting a bunch more money would probably seem to be a good thing, to me it just puts me in another quandary. How can I get rid of it in the best way here before it goes worthless? I have enough money and preps already, I just don’t need any more, but now I have a whole LOT more to deal with. Its times like this that make me REALLY hate money. I WISH the whole fucking concept never was invented. It WAS though, and I am stuck with dealing with it.
I would of course give every PENNY of it just to see my Mom one more time, but not as she was in these last 10 years or so. I want to see my mom again as she was when I was a child, a healthy young woman with all her faculties. That will not happen in this life though. I will see her again that way in the Great Beyond, when my turn comes to pass. I believe that, and it comforts me to believe so.
Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust. We all live a while on this Planet, and Death comes to us all in the end, some sooner, some later, all the while you live your life is sacred. But it cannot and does not ever last forever and as a species,we must insure the survival of the young here, not the old. The Sanctity of Life is in our Species, not in the individual Lifespan.
At this point, my money will all go to my school. I hope I can get rid of it fast enough to help the school grow. It’s the only really important thing left for me now. Everything I have accumulated, everything I have left to give, it all goes to the School. I go in Peace with this idea.
RE
Although the most lively stories these days in the MSM are with respect to the ongoing Nip Nuke Apocalypse and the rapidly expanding War in the M.E., there are equally important things going on in the monetary system devolution, so I thought I would briefly touch on them here to stay abreast of the entire Collapse Picture.
As has been expected for a while, the Portuguese Goobermint is collapsing and their debt is being rapidly downgraded by the ratings agencies. Besides the Portuguese, apparently also the Canadian Goobermint is in trouble. What does it really mean though to say one of these Goobermints is “collapsing”. At least so far, the Politicians in these countries aren’t being run outta town on a rail, and the structures of their Goobermints are sort of intact. Just what is happening here is that these legislative bodies are losing the aility to govern effectively. They are running out of money and slicing and dicing their budgets isn’t working to keep them solvent.
Because Goobermint tends to be a Whipping Boy for its inefficiency and profligacy, all these Goobermints are being BLAMED for the problems. However, doesn’t it strike anyone as a slightly INCREDIBLE coincidence that virtually every Goobermint on the PLANET has the SAME problems at the SAME time here? The problem does not lie with the Goobermints, it lies in the Monetary system they all depend on to function, and they mostly do not control it.
During the time of Credit Expansion prior to Peak Oil, the CBs could always keep expanding Credit, which of course means somebody else has to take on Debt to continue this expansion. This is how the money supply increases to match increasing population during a civilization expansion. As the Private Sector began to slow in its debt accumulation and/or begins to default on the debt, the Public Sector in ALL countries has had to pick up the slack to keep those ever increasing GDP numbers coming out. Otherwise you get a monetary contraction and deflation. At the Critical Point of Peak Oil, all expansion of credit had to stop, including Goobermint expansion. At least Credit & Debt that you might have a reasonable expectation of being paid off on anyhow. With the collapse in the Private Sector of the Dot Com Bubble and then the RE Bubble, Goobermint has had to take on ever more debt to keep the ILLUSION of Growth continuing. This has been the case since the mid to late 1990s, Jesse over on Café Americain has noted this as well. For at least the last Decade, the Private Sector has not been creating enough new jobs to absorb all the working age people looking for jobs. So Goobermints took up the slack, issuing still more Debt to be able to hire still more Goobermint Workers. They could not raise enough money to do that through Taxation, because the Private Sector was already choking and not growing.
Goobermint Debt was considered a “safe” investment until the need to issue so much of it went hyperbolic. So now, the CBs who CREATE the money to lend don’t even want to lend it to Goobermints anymore, and the only Goobermints with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of credit are those TBTF countries that are in a symbiotic relationship with the TBTF Banks. The smaller countries are having Austerity Budgets rammed down their throats from the IMF to be eligible for any NEW loans to rollover their old ones, but they simply cannot afford to do it.
The FSofA currently is not really subject to this problem, because at least to fund Da Federal Goobermint, the Illuminati Cabal personified in Da Fed will print as much as needed for running this level of Goobermint. The State and Local Goobermints are in a much bigger Pickle of course. Like the smaller countries, these Goobermints are also going to rapidly become unable to govern their communities.
Despite the commodities speculation with Hot Money provided to the TBTF Banks, all across the board you are seeing a rapid DEFLATION of the credit system. Money is not being loaned to Small Biz, nor is it being loaned to Small Goobermints. As they fail, more people will be unemployed, reducing their purchasing power further, reducing tax receipts further. This is DEFLATION. If you just focus your nose on the Commodities Markets, you are going to jump up and down pointing to INFLATION, but this is not an accurate description of what is occurring here. What is occurring is a credit collapse, now at the Nation State level in smaller economies. Its going to take out of circulation more of the money individuals need to buy the commodities, and it will force another crash here in those prices as inventories build and they are hoarded by people with access to credit to buy them. That would be the Super Rich of course.
This action is the Backdrop to the more intensive Collapse scenarios being played out in Nippon and the M.E. The BIS/Fed Cabal is committed at this point to providing Infinite Liquidity, and this is Levitating the Markets across the globe right now. The problem here is that the marginal utility of this hyperbolic debt increase is NEGATIVE now, so all that is occurring as more debt is issued is that its value decreases. Debt money is being POURED into Sinkholes in Japan to try to clean up the Tsunami Mess and into Military enforcement in the M.E. to try to maintain control. Its going to crash the system, just it is impossible to say precisely when or how this crash will manifest itself.
The one thing you can say with reasonable certainty is that those in control of the monetary system will try to maintain value in the paper they issue. So at some point here infinite printing will stop. Infinite printing debases ALL the currencies and will crash the trade, which is the source of sieving wealth. It seems unlikely to me that a complete crash would be engineered, because rebooting with an entirely new currency would be close to impossible. Rather what seems likely is that the massive printing will continue until weaker currencies explode into hyperinflation, driving all remaining trade into the currencies left standing. As I see it, the Yen and the Euro are the weakest of the major currencies right now. The Yen because of the massive Debt to GDP ratio the Japanese have along with their Nuke problems; the Euro because it is a poorly designed currency to begin with based on a lot of nothing. Once these currencies collapse, it will strengthen the Dollar, and then only after that will massive printing stop in the dollar, and deflationary collapse in this currency be allowed to occur. This consolidates all the wealth into a single currency. At this time, some revaluation of the Dollar might be undertaken, possibly trying to underpin the value with PMs. That will be difficult to do, because the absolute value of the PMs themselves is in question when measured against energy resource. What is a Gold Coin worth against a Gallon of Gas when you really need the Gas to get to work but it is very hard to come by?
Clearly in this environment of energy scarcity, the value of Gas relative to Gold will go up, but of course this quickly prices out of the Gas market virtually everyone, which makes keeping the whole infrastructure running of pumping oil and refining it unprofitable. The Gas disappears from the market, and then you cannot buy it at ANY price, no matter how much Gold you have.
You get a similar problem with Food once the Gas disappears from the market. Food production and distribution will decrease with the decreasing availability of Gas, so Food then starts to skyrocket in value relative to the Gold. Again, you run into the problem that most people are priced out of buying food relative to Gold here, so even if the currency is based in PMs, they will have problems. As with all the M.E. Countries right now where people live on $2/day, once the food scarcity problem moves its way into center, NO MONEY, PM based or otherwise will buy much food. At this point in a monetary system collapse, only the Food itself holds real value. This is why in the time of Babylon when their market collapsed that there were no buyers for Silver and Gold in the marketplace. They likely had reached the Peak of their ability to provide food throughout their civilization, and as it disappeared from the marketplace everything else lost its value, INCLUDING the PMs. A civilization expands so far based on its ability to engineer a Food Surplus, all other trades in the civilization are subservient to it. Once you hit Food Deficit, the value of everything else falls to Zero almost immediately. Let us review the critical passage from Revelation 18 on the Fall of Babylon to understand this better:
8Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her.
9And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning,
10Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.
11And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more:
12The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thyine wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble,
13And cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men.
14And the fruits that thy soul lusted after are departed from thee, and all things which were dainty and goodly are departed from thee, and thou shalt find them no more at all.
15The merchants of these things, which were made rich by her, shall stand afar off for the fear of her torment, weeping and wailing,
16And saying, Alas, alas that great city, that was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold, and precious stones, and pearls!
17For in one hour so great riches is come to nought. And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off,
18And cried when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, What city is like unto this great city!
19And they cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and wailing, saying, Alas, alas that great city, wherein were made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! for in one hour is she made desolate.
20Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets; for God hath avenged you on her.
21And a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone, and cast it into the sea, saying, Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all.
Because our Civilization and our Food production and distribution schema is now GLOBAL, our increasing inability to provide enough food WORLDWIDE to all the people living on the planet is rendering everything else WORTHLESS. All of the poorest nations on earth are getting hit first here, and they will take the hardest hit first in terms of die off. War, Humanitarian Crisis, call it what you will, the simple fact is that it is becoming impossible to produce the food in the quantities we did because it is impossible to keep upping the energy production to grow the food and distribute it. So EVERY poor nation on Earth is starting to EXPLODE here in internal violence, because each one of those places has its Haves and Have Nots. The Have Nots have nothing left to lose here, and unlike for the Hebrew Slaves in the time of Moses, for the most part they cannot all get together and walk away into the desert. There is nowhere left to GO.
Here in the developed countries, we are not facing this yet, nor will we until the Oil flow to our refineries falls below a critical level. If there is sufficient die off in the poor countries fast enough and the oil resources from those countries can be secured to move oil this way, it could put off the day we face this crisis a while longer. However, it seems unlikely that with so much disruption in the M.E. that we will be able to move that Oil out of there, so the disruption here will follow in fair short order.
For certain,the attempt is going to be made to drop in NATO “Peacekeepers” in places like Libya that still have some exportable Oil. Unlikely we will waste Peacekeeping forces on a country like Syria, which has no exportable Oil. If our Peacekeepers are successful in Libya (and Saudi Arabia of course eventually), we might get a few more years here of Plenty in the Supermarkets. Not a whole lot of years though under any circumstances, and the fact that the monetary system UNDERPINNING, which is Food Surplus, is falling apart means that all the currently functioning money of any kind will fall worthless.
What is likely to replace this in the developed countries with still functioning Goobermints? Some sort of Rationing is likely, as in the FSofA where the food market and the energy markets are controlled by a few corporations like Monsanto, Conagra, Krafft, Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell, and British Petroleum, you will likely see a very explicit merger of Goobermint and Corporations in the Fascist Model. For most places it will be early impossible to escape this model. You have to be very far from the center of this to escape it, I hope I am far enough. Small communities with good resources and hard working people may be able to make it through this maelstrom. That is my great HOPE anyhow.
RE
Capital Controls
Discuss this Post at the Economics Table inside the Diner
Simon Black’s “Sovereign Man” Blog gives me tomaine poisoning anytime I go over there to Dine, so mostly I avoid it. However, one of his posts appeared a couple of days ago on Zero Hedge on the topic of Capital Controls, which with the current insolvency of about all nations and banks are likely to be implemented in force in many places quite soon.
Simon lists a few forms of Capital Cotrols you can expect to see coming down the pipe here
- Setting a fixed amount for bank withdrawals, or suspending them altogether
- Forcing citizens or banks to hold government debt
- Curtailing or suspending international bank transfers
- Curtailing or suspending foreign exchange transactions
- Criminalizing the purchase and ownership of precious metals
- Fixing an official exchange rate and criminalizing market-based transactions
Why do countries drop down CCs? Basically because when a monetary system is crashing and banks are going insolvent in a given country, anybody who HAS any money is trying to GTFO of Dodge and take their money with them on the way out the door.
Who does this generally apply to? Not J6P who has little saving to take out of the country anyhow. It’s the wealthy who make this run for the fire exit. Shipping Magnates in Greece, Real Estate Developers in Spain, yadda yadda.
Simon characterizes CCs as the one of the worst forms of Goobermint Theft imaginable:
Establishing capital controls is one of the worst forms of theft that a government can impose. It traps people’s hard earned savings and their future income within a nation’s borders.
Simon is trying to make this sound like a Common Man’s Problem, but it’s not, it’s a Simon problem. See, Simon likes to run around the world extracting what wealth he can everywhere he goes, and he wants to be able to keep all the money regardless of WTF happens in any given country he is running a Biz in.
These days, Simon is no doubt quite worried about Assets and Bank accounts he has over in Eurotrashland, though one suspects most of the Bank Accounts are in Switzerland where they are slightly safer than they are in say BNP Paribas.
He ALSO is investing much of his hard earned Cash in Chile, where he just “picked up” an 1100 Acre farm, no doubt for pennies on the dollar from some poor farmer behind on his mortgage.
Besides this, Simon recommends having money in a foreign bank account, having PMs in a secure jurisdiction and have a place to GO overseas with your loot when things swirl down the toilet in your neighborhood.
The problems with Simon’s advice should be obvious now. Exactly which Foreign Bank would you pick to safely deposit your money? In Europe for example, when those banks go Belly Up, the LAST Depositors who might see any of their money are the foreigners. Far as Gold goes, Simon himself mentions that one of the typical forms of Capital Controls is the confiscation of PMs, so I am not sure how having them protects you all that much once the Nation States are in such dire straights they have to try to keep anything worth anything insed their borders. Far as having a place to GO is concerned for the average Pigman, where do you PICK? Simon seems to think Cheeeelay is a great spot, where he is neighbors with Speedy Gonzalo Lira. Exactly why these guys think the Chilean Goobermint is so much more trustworthy and dependable than the FSofA one or any of the Eurotrash ones is beyond me. How many times has that Goobermint turned over in the last 40 years?
What about for J6P though? Are Capital Controls really that bad for him?
Not really, because he isn’t leaving the country anyhow, and preventing Pigmen from leaving with their wealth is good for him. Since he has no Gold in the basement safe, its no skin off his nose if Gold is confiscated from Pigmen. You also prevent foreigners from taking wealth out of assets they “own” in a country, like say farmland. If the Chinese say bought up all of Iowa, without Capital Controls they could just take “their” corn and ship it over to China.
Who does the Wealth of a Nation really belong to? Does it belong to individuals who sieved out wealth over the years from a Nation into their own Bank Accounts, or does it belong to all the people of the nation from whom the Wealth was sieved to begin with? The wealth came from THEIR labor and the resources of the land THEY live on. Why should some foreigner be able to remove this wealth with no control on it by the Nation?
Of course, it remains quite unclear just how much “wealth” is left anywhere under the conditions of extreme overshoot, and equally unclear where a Pigman should go to escape the oncoming Capital Controls likely to spring up everywhere.
The carefree life of Simon Black jetting around the world First Class, holding multiple passports and not paying Taxes in ANY jusrisdiction is coming to a close here, but Simon doesn’t want to see this end. He really doesn’t want to farm the 1100 Acres he bought in Chile, and if he HAS to move there permanently he likely hopes Da Chilean Goobermint will recognize his Title and will allow him to run his Estate as a Feudal Kingdom, hiring poor Chilean Peasants to plow HIS land.
The Capital Controls are coming, and every Pigman website from Zero Hedge to the Daily Capitalist will complain about them and tell you how horrible they are. They sure are horrible…for PIGMEN! They can’t go and jump ship with all the MONEY when the Titanic goes down.
RE
It starts: the government’s plan to steal your money
Simon Black on June 12, 2012June 12, 2012
New York CityThere are consequences to being flat broke.
There are consequences to investing any level of confidence in a financial system underpinned by debt and the creation of paper currency.
There are consequences for ignoring reality and pretending that everything is normal.
This is one of them: European officials yesterday flat out admitted that they were discussing rolling out a series of harsh capital controls across the continent, including bank withdrawal limits and closing down Europe’s borderless Schengen area.
Some of these measures have already been implemented sporadically; customers of Italian bank BNI, for example, were all frozen out of their accounts starting May 31st upon the recommendation and approval of Italy’s bank regulator. No ATM withdrawls, no bill payments, nothing. Just locked out overnight.
In Greece, the government has taken to simply pulling funds directly out of its citizens’ bank accounts; anyone suspected of being a tax cheat (with a very loose interpretation in the sole discretion of the government) is being releived of their funds without so much as administrative notification.
It’s no wonder why, according to the Greek daily paper Kathimerini, over $125 million per day is fleeing the Greek banking system.
European political leaders aim to put a tourniquet on this wound in the worst possible way.
So what are capital controls?
Simply, capital controls are policies which restrict the free flow of capital into, out of, through, and within a nation’s borders. They can take a variety of forms, including:
- Setting a fixed amount for bank withdrawals, or suspending them altogether
– Forcing citizens or banks to hold government debt
– Curtailing or suspending international bank transfers
– Curtailing or suspending foreign exchange transactions
– Criminalizing the purchase and ownership of precious metals
– Fixing an official exchange rate and criminalizing market-based transactionsEstablishing capital controls is one of the worst forms of theft that a government can impose. It traps people’s hard earned savings and their future income within a nation’s borders.
This trapped pool of capital allows the government to transfer wealth from the people to their own coffers through excessive taxation or rampant inflation… both of which soon follow.
The thing about capital controls is that they’re like airine baggage fees; ultimately, all governments want to do it, they’re just waiting on the first guy to impose them so that they can shrug their shoulders, stick it to the people, and blame ‘industry standards’.
Moreover, capital controls were a normal part of the global economic landscape for most of the 20th century, right up to the 1970s. It’s been a long time coming for governments to return to that model.
Since the inception of this letter, it has been a constant theme for us to talk about the increasing threat of capital controls. Your money, your savings, your livelihood are all under attack by insolvent governments, and it’s critical to take steps to reduce your exposure.
When European financial leaders all openly admit that they’re making plans to establish continent-wide capital controls, it really begs the question– what additional warning sign does one need?
The dominos have already started falling. Iceland. Ireland. Greece. Spain. Portugal. Italy. Cyprus. Soon even France and the rest of Europe. And it will come to the United States as well. There are over 15 trillion reasons why.
So what are the most critical steps to take now?
1) Buy precious metals and store in a secure jurisdiction.
Holding gold and silver overseas is a great way to (a) ensure your savings is protected against inflation, and (b) ensure that your precious metals cannot be confiscated in the event that gold ownership is criminalized in your home country.
I strongly recommend Singapore, Hong Kong, and Abu Dhabi as three potential safe jurisdictions for your gold and silver.
2) Open a foreign bank account.
For funds that need to be maintained within the financial system (as opposed to precious metals), make sure you have a safe home for your money abroad in a safe, well-capitalized bank.
3) Have a place to go overseas
Economic turmoil brought on by governments stealing people’s savings generally goes not bode well for social stability. If things get hairy, you’ll want to have a place to wait it out. And you don’t want to be deciding on the location while you’re packing your bags.
As an example, I’ve picked up an 1100-acre farm in central Chile that won’t skip a beat when the financial system implodes. The sovereign debt bubble does not affect whether or not my trees will bear fruit or my vegetables will grow.
Usury
Discuss this Article inside the Diner
The Illuminati has this wonderful attitude toward morality. They teach us by the age of 5 that violence against others is wrong. That stealing is wrong. By the age of 15 – killing and counterfeiting is wrong. And they are correct ………. except for the little exception that they reserve the right to do all of these things themselves. Violence is called the police and law. Stealing is called taxes. Killing is called capital punishment and war, and counterfeiting is the fractional reserve system and central banking. When we do it, it is a crime. When they do it, it is God’s work and societies redemption. Nice scam if you can pull it off. They’ve been doing well for at least 6000 years in some locales. Our world is a psychopath’s oyster.
You get all these alternative media spokesmen such as Max Keiser and the mythical Tyler Durden touting precious metals as currency, stating that fiat currency is the root of all evil. Well, the USA for one was on the gold standard from Hamilton’s first Bank of the United States until FDR pulled his little racket in 1933 when he outlawed gold for Joe and Jane Bagodonuts. But a history of this period indicates that it was no monetary Eden, because the snake in Eden is not fiat paper but the fractional reserve banking system. But do you hear Durden decrying the near infinite expansion and rehypothecation of credit? Well, not when it inconveniences him. When the CME raises the margin requirement on the gold contracts by one percent, he reacts like his novel’s namesake character when he was about to be castrated. And outlawing naked CDS’s? Well forget it. Worse than child abuse. Zero Hedge is not about to lead us into the Promised Land.
But the true reptile in the Garden seems to be fractional reserve banking. This is where certain crony capitalists are permitted to counterfeit money they don’t have. It purportedly began as overt fraud by the goldsmiths in 16th century Italy. At least in those days justice was swift and brutal when a bank run exposed the deceit. An occupational hazard that Jon Corzine believes himself, with good reason, to be immune to. I am sure we all know here that when you go to your local bank to get a loan to buy that hot new red sports car, the bank just makes up the money out of thin air and puts some electrons in your account. In theory, there was a time when they were suppose to have at least 10% of the counterfeited money either in stock equity or deposits, but this has been watered down to zero in the last 15 years. So the ratio to counterfeit becomes infinite.
Back in the mid 1700′s the colonies were issuing their own interest free scrip money and their economies were going great guns with hardly any inflation. The English Crown and the Bank of England were pissed at this because they were not getting their bankster cut of every transaction, so they outlawed colonial scrip at the point of a gun. The colonies went into an instant and severe depression. As Nicole Foss likes to say, money and credit is the SAE 10-40 of the economy’s engine. No money and the engine seizes up in a couple of blocks. Ben Franklin, an undisputed genius, stated bluntly on several occasions that by far the greatest reason behind the American revolution was the outlawing of colonial scrip. The truth was that the direct taxation on items such as tea was small potatoes. The Boston Tea Party was just a price fixing scam by some local jokesters. Of course they can’t teach this in the high schools as it might raise some embarrassing questions from students who haven’t had their brains shut down with fluoride, Ritalin, aspartame, MSG, or SSRI soma, assuming there are any left.
But even if you outlawed the banks from doing fractional reserve, would this end the problem? Well, as a plumber I use to buy a lot of stuff at the supply company. I always paid my tab on the first of the month, but they gave you an option to let it ride for a 2% monthly fee. This is de facto fractional reserve banking by a hardware store. Upon a little thought, the serpent is actually the concept of interest itself, otherwise known in previous centuries as usury. My Mac OS dictionary has the following definition.
usury |ˈyoō zh (ə)rē|
noun
the illegal action or practice of lending money at unreasonably high rates of interest.
• archaic interest at such rates.
Well excuse me, Mac dictionary, but the archaic definition of usury was interest at any fucking rate. Winston must have dropped that down the memory hole.
Strangely enough, both the Vatican (in previous centuries) and Mohammed got this little fact about basic economics 100% right. Interest, i.e. usury, is the dark side of the force.
Waste Based Society III: Solutions and Alternatives
Are there viable solutions and alternatives to the Energy intensive Waste Based Society we currently live in, which do not entail a return to Paleolithic levels of technology? Diner and TAE Commentariat member A. G. Gelbert outlines a myriad of technologies which might be employed to maintain a higher technological base for society.
RE
Discuss this article inside the Diner
Solutions and Alternatives to the Waste Based Society
by A. G. Gelbert
We are cursed with a rather effective propaganda machine that defends the status quo and works mightily to provide allegedly iron clad arguments exposing our desperate dependence on fossil fuels and the enormous debt we owe to them for our ‘wonderful civilization’. The media has cleverly weaved fact and fiction to present plausible arguments against the practicality of going cold turkey on fossil fuels and 100% on renewables. Not one word about the fact that fossil fuels are easy to meter and conveniently provide a constant revenue stream for the rich along with governmental control of a populace that simply cannot move or function without daily use of fossil fuels ever seems to be mentioned. Not one word about how renewables cannot be metered or taxed easily and how that feature gives everyone a large degree of independence aand flexibility in disaster situations to help themselves or a less fortunate neighbor is mentioned. On the other hand, the continuous and vociferous denial of the link between fossil fuels and environmental problems, regardless of scientific concensus on this very real link, never seems to go away either. The actual history of the industrial revolution involving some very brutal measures to coerce humans to abandon horses, as only one of many coercive measures, for tranportation and farming are always ignored and replaced with a stream of pejorative comments about horse dung in big cities. People did not want to get rid of their horses! I am not simply talking about city ordinances and fines targeting horses. Right around 1865 a big push began to sell farm machinery. Amazingly, a huge horse plague hit the U.S. that year that killed a massive amount of horses. No explanation beyond “Civil War stress” blarney was ever given. These horses were not just city horses in population centers but out in the country as well.
The move to horseless carriages began on the farm with steam power and hydrocarbon lubricants. The automibile came later along with the bone cancer. Bone cancer from the original automoblie fuel, benzene, is seldom mentioned by the media and apparently is considered no big deal in comparison to horse shit odor. Moving on to the early 20th century, Rockefeller has a waste product in his refinery cracking towers (after separating all those great heavy and light lubricants) called gasolene and he talks Henry Ford into modifying the carburators to run on it. Of course the ‘minor’ problem with benzene fuel may have helped make the switch. There were electric cars on the road at the time. Cleveland had wind generators creating electricity at that time! You’ll never guess what happened to them and the electric trolleys all over many towns in the USA. So, enough of that. Everyone here knows how predatory capitalism attempts to game the system to achieve price control and a monopoly. Once much more efficient and sustainable technologies are shoved aside by hook or by crook, the distorted and mendacious meme that our current technology is the result of friendly capitalist competition in the ‘free market’ is pushed. Predation occurs followed by propaganda versions of history. That is the real history of the industrial revolution in regard to our choices of energy production. Renewables got squeezed out, not because they couldn’t compete favorably, but because the pollution and health costs of fossil fuels got ‘externalized’. Along the way, the independence of the mostly agrarian American in energy production and use was crushed.
A love afffair with the car was fostered to the point that in the late 1920′s more Americans had cars than flush toilets. Of course they were better off, ecologically speaking, without flush toilets, but the point is the job of selling Americans on fossil fuels was a done deal by that time. So please remember that nobody was doing us any favors, like the media wants to claim; they were selling us something in order to concentrate wealth and power in a few hands. They were using us as a cash cow to the point of introducing planned obsolecence, rampant consumerism to keep the factories going and simultaneously thwarting moves to sustainability like Henry Ford’s plan to make cars out of hemp plastic in the early1940s. We like new stuff and are always looking for the latest model year of the car or whatever because we have been manipulated by experts to do so. It has absolutely nothing to do with our health, well being or happiness. Bernays really messed us up. Fast forward to the present where the witches brew of ecological harm brought about by industrialization has caught up with us. And NOW, all of a sudden, we just can’t live without all this ‘wonderful’ energy packed fossil fuel economy.
Methinks somebody wants to slap a guilt trip on the chumps so they agree to clean up the mess even though the media keeps claiming there isn’t really that much of a mess. We, the masses, are accused of being wasteful pigs that bred like rats thanks to fossil fuels.
Where to begin? How about the fact that family size has been decreasing, not increasing, througout the industrial revolution? That’s right. The numbers were baked in by 1800 and the wars slowed them down a bit. Louis Pasteur and Lister did a hell of a lot more to create our present population ‘problem’ than fossil fuels. Most of the key scientific advancements in medicine were not exactly high tech and fossil fuel dependent. A human makes it past 5 years of age and he has a huge chance of living out his 3 score and ten. It was the enormous reduction in infant mortality brought about by antiseptic procedures that caused the population explosion, not fossil fuels. It’s a stretch to say that fossil fuels alowed people to obtain clean water to wash their hands before delivering a baby, but I’m sure the media verbal contortionists would toss it out there to further muddy the waters of historical truth.
The much touted plumbing advancements that require machinery and factories powered by fossil fuels, while they did reduce disease in population centers and prolonged life, were setting us up for more fossil fuel use through improper humanure handling. I maintain that the main cause of our population explosion is knowledge of disease microbes, their propagation methods and our changes in hygiene as a result.
Edward Barnays
What about all this waste we now produce that we have been folded, spindled and mentally mutilated through Freud’s nephew Wall Street amygdala reptilian brain control propaganda? They set us up and now WE are the bad guys? They want us to shop till we drop and WE are the problem? And how much ‘waste’ do WE actually produce on a carbon footprint basis compared to the global 1%?
Well, Senator Bernie Sanders stated recently that less than 1% of the U.S. owns about 40% of the assets (I’m not talking about income increases although they have gotten the lion’s share over the last ten years as well). Yes, I know he talks about banks too but he mentions those 400 or so elite families every now and then. Now figure the carbon footprint of those people and compare it with the rest of us. All those endless films about diapers, milk gallons and so on used in our middle class lifetimes with the obligatory landfill mountains thrown in are nothing compared with the horrendous and gigantic amount of crap these families generate. Isn’t it amazing that when it comes to pollution and wasteful habits, we are ‘all in this together’? No attempt is made to segregate out the worst offenders. On the contrary, the poor and middle class are constantly demonized as being irresponsible useless eaters. It’s all quite Orwellian on the part of the media.
But yeah, we do waste and we have a waste problem that is real so let’s talk about it.
Waste can certainly destroy a society, species or most of the ecosphere if, as many point out, we continue with the ridiculous paradigm that we can industrially do multi-generational damage to the life support systems humans depend on and not define this as suicide. It’s almost like our nuclear nuts and oil fetish fucks have morphed us into a mass version of the heaven’s gate cult. Those people thought they could hitch a ride on a comet by commiting suicide. Every single step in industrializaton has, for anyone willing to do the TOTAL math, NOT been ecospherically cost effective. The fact that a small group of humans has temporarily benefited at the expense of the overwhelming majority of humans and all other earthlings right now, not to mention the obvious acceleration in environmental degradation promising a super bleak future, seems to go right over the heads of way to many otherwise intelligent people.
Just like the heaven’s gate cult, people are addicted to a dream that never was, PERIOD. All talk about this and that from our youth and how much fun we all had and how nostalgic we are for those nicer times is the exact same phenomenum of a drug addict longing for his first high. LISTEN UP! We are a function of the ecosphere. We DO NOT, despite all the best propaganda efforts of our scientific community, understand the mechanism of the ecosphere sufficently to tinker with it, let alone wantonly pollute it with “externalisms”. EXTERNALISMS!? That’s just some economist bullshit! There are NO externalisms inside the life bubble called the ecosphere; it just takes a while to catch up with you when you mine, bomb and toxify with chemicals NIMBY areas for a few centuries. We are there and yet our scientific community and our financial community and our political wheeler and dealer con-artists with their new techno death toys and ‘miracle’ GMO crops and drug after drug to replace patent expirations, new ripoff scams, more war profiteering and emotional button pushing divide and conquer racist crap just DO NOT GET IT (or maybe they do get it and are insanely trying to make hay out of it).
The people in charge of our dysfunctional clusterfuck are akin to that psycho Whiteapple that led the heaven’s gate cult. They will not change to a sustainable paradigm because THAT requires subordination to the reality that we are a product of the ecosphere and the humble acceptance that we do not understand it yet so, until we do, we must henceforth emulate natural processes of cradle to grave recycling in all industrial technology and outlaw destructive activities like war or perish. No, they prefer to insanely reduce the world population by environmental collapse in the ridiculous la-la land elite hope that then the ecosphere will cure itself and they can continue their merry resource extraction paradigm as if nothing happened. It won’t work because these reductionist morons in power with their scientific priesthood of techno nut balls are so full of pride from all their tremendous ‘contributions’ over the last two centuries that they cannot see the monstrous downside of the technology explosion and that, yes, technology can be developed and used in an environmentally friendly manner. They don’t want to do the work. They are supremely irresponsible and supremely greedy and incredibly stupid.
Instead of doing a rethink, they are just flooring the accelerator and increasing their propaganda blitz.
I am not against technology. Since about 1970 we have had the knowledge to use technology to produce an environmentally friendly and sustainable society free of poisons in food and industry in the scientific literature. It has been deliberately supressed time and time again. Imagine what it cost to cover the country with roads and power lines. Well, decentralized power, food and transportation would cost a hell of a lot less. It’s total bullshit that we can’t do this or that we are ‘hooked’ on oil or nuclear or natural gas. We could have switched away decades ago. In the 70s NASA used solar panels to bring electricity to a Navajo community which was not served by the local electric utilities in a southwestern state. It worked great and the utilities went ballistic. They wrote to NASA requesting the solar panel project be stopped because, even though those areas targeted by NASA were not adequately served by the utilities, the fossil fuel free energy would ‘force’ the utilities to lower their rates. NASA stopped the project.
The planet earth DOES NOT have an energy crisis. For you engineering types out there, just do the math on the energy required daily to lift trillions of tons of water vapor out of the rivers, lakes and oceans and deposit this at higher elevations in the form of rain and then try to tell me about how much it COSTS (ZERO!) and how we are running out of energy. What the planet earth has, is a HUMAN GREED AND STUPIDITY crisis among the 1%. But suppose we could dispense with all the agenda laced perjorative propaganda about renewables, agree to clean up the planet and eliminate fossil fuel, nuclear and any other kind of poisonous technology because we have no other choice?
Can it be done? Yes. Will it be done? Probably not. I just heard today (June 11, 2012) on the Thom Hartmann show that phytoplankton replacement in a bay in Maine has dropped 500% over a period of a decade or so. The phenomenum has now been confirmed as occurring globally. Phytoplankton produce approximately 50% of the oxygen on this planet through photosynthesis. They are not regenerating adequately because increased ppm of CO2 (now 400 ppm) is acidifying the oceans and killing them. Can the elite be so insane that they plan to meter our oxygen? I hope not. At any rate, we must accept that the fossil fuel economy is not an exercise in fun conveniences or a requirement to maintain ‘civilization’; it’s killing our oxygen supply now as well. We must switch to renewables.
In regard to available energy to maintain some level of ‘civilization’ with renewables, when I mentioned the world evaporation energy example, I wasn’t alluding to energy collection through hydroelectric power (although dams certainly help as long as salmon runs aren’t thwarted), but using this vast amount of energy available free to shed light on the scientifically bankrupt view of quantifying energy by using bomb calorimeters like we did in college and energy mass per mole in rapid oxidation. Nature has never done it that way. Everything in our culture always wants to scale up a process or else judge it as wanting. That is assbackwards from a sustainable biological process point of view. In our bodies, the reason we have enzymes lowering the energy of activation in myriad chemical reactions occurring per second is to keep us from overheating and/or rapid ph changes that would kill us but the fact is that the enzymes accomplish a task with less energy than a straight forward math computation of the chemical reaction energy requires.
Capillary processes in us are unconcerned with “stream head’” like scientists or engineers are when they want to build a dam yet they work just fine manipulating Bernoulli forces to use the absolute minimum energy needed to move that blood so the heart pump doesn’t have to work as hard against vessel friction and pressure changes. In our techno-love affair, everything we do is geared to centralized and maximum power. For example we really do not need a lot of stream head to power a house because we can gradually pump water up to a reservoir in our house to give us electricity on demand. But the techno math says you need X amount of head for Y amount of kilowatts. That’s only true if you need all of that all the time. Sure, not everyone lives by a river or a stream but that is simply a small example. A giant Sequoia pumps over one hundred gallons of water hundreds of feet up every day through transpiration. The tracheal elements can stretch water molecules 27 atmospheres as long as the vacuum holds. The technology to make artificial tree water pumps has been around for decades but our society is STUCK on the energy density per mole fixation like a teenager that wants a hot car to ride to school instead of a small electric rechargable scooter.
Have you heard about the roaring forties? That’s an area of latitude in the oceans of the southern hemisphere that is always turbulent. They alone could power the world’s energy demands after a ten year installation of wave and undersea current power collection systems that are already being deployed off of England and Scotland. In regard to corrosion issues with sea water and maintenance of deep water (massive pressures to deal with), I only ask that you consider technology equivalence hurdles that have long since been surmounted in nuclear power plants (the ultimate in corrosion challenges including hydrogen embrittlement that is not present with sea water) and oil undersea pipelines (pump sea water to a land reservoir and start the power cables from there as a cost effective low maintenance option). At present, ocean oil rigs (which are mostly metal) have sacrificial anodes placed on them so electrolysis in most areas is thwarted. The anodes are replaced as they are used up. And remember all we have learned through space exploration about metallurgy, high temperature insulation during re-entry and don’t forget microwave power transmission technology. We can do all this stuff. It’s really not as hard as putting a robot vehicle on Mars or building a space station in orbit.
It’s telling that Einstein described the photoelectric effect at the very beginning of the 20th century but the US government has had to be dragged kicking and screaming to develop solar panels (we only did it when we needed them in space) but it spent a fortune on the development of the bomb in the 30s while a large part of our populace was going hungry.
Have you ever wondered why the oil lobby never attacks nuclear power but spares no expense to demonize renewables with disingenuous propaganda and mendacity? Think about that a while. If you come to the conclusion that the nuclear power plants were put out there to make bomb material and get you to pay for it and were never, ever considered a viable alternative to fossil fuels for the production of electricity or a serious source of oil lobby competition, you win the prize.
There is also no excuse whatsoever for not using solar and electric power to run every single ship in the ocean. It would be child’s play to switch all automobiles and trucks to full electric as long we had geothermal, wind, tide and ocean current derived power 24/7, not to mention solar panels.
Do you know what oil tankers do after they offload the oil? They fill huge portions of the holds with sea water (for ballast) and then dump it when they get back to reload with oil. This massive pollution goes on day in and day out. We have a guaranteed continuous oil spill as long as we have a fossil fuel ocean tanker economy.
As for fertilizers and food production machinery requiring a massive amount of fossil fuels to feed 7 billlion humans, the fact is that using decentralized permaculture with humanure (after appropriate and low tech local processing to avoid disease pathogens) along with greenhouse technology for nordic climates can replace the fossil fuel required to run tractors, make fertilizer and insecticides and herbicides. I mention farm machinery because there is increasing evidence that plowing needs to be replaced by non-plowing with perennial crops in order to stop the massive top soil loss and lowered nutrition of crop yield (they look the same but don’t have the same nutritional content). Other posters here are up on humanure and they are right. I recommend anyone repulsed by this to think again. Feces are an inseparable part of being human and it’s high time we stopped with this Victorian idiocy of seeing it as bad stuff; it’s part of our salvation as a species. An added plus with humanure through the avoidance of chemical fertilizers is no more ocean dead zones and massive top soil degradation. Also the energy and water savings in not pumping human waste to be treated with chemicals (made with fossil fuels) in a sewage treatment plant would save billons of dollars.
Examples of how renewables can switch us off of fossil fuels quickly: www.euronews.com/2012/05/27/germany-breaks-solar-energy-record www.euronews.com/2012/06/06/solar-plane-completes-maiden-intercontinental-flight www.euronews.com/2012/03/05/sea-solution-to-future-energy-needs www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/renewableenergy/3535012/Ocean-currents-can-power-the-world-say-scientists.html
Pelamis wave power device that looks like a giant snake: www.weirdlyodd.com/10-renewable-energy-sources/
Zero energy balance hotel: www.euronews.com/2012/05/16/go-green-get-growing
I think this can be done in TEN years, not forty: www.euronews.com/2012/05/18/in-40-years-every-home-every-building-will-be-a-power-plant-says-jeremy-rifki
Growing food and the fossil fuel ‘requirement’ is a dependency created by the fossil fuel industry but we CAN shake that dependency without mass starvation and depopulation: www.greenlivingtips.com/articles/85/1/Fuel-and-food.html
“The strategic goal of biofuel is to supplement or even replace fossil fuels, the amount of which is constantly and rapidly diminishing.” haitireconstruction.ning.com/page/biofuel-1
I’ve already mentioned my views on the population explosion and its causes but I wish to point out how the oil lobby has tried to make fossil fuel brownie points out of it.
Remember the green revolution of the 60s, 70s and 80s that supposedly caused the population explosion? The numbers are in. The yields are not statistically different with all the fossil fuel fertilizer, herbicides and insecticides than without them. The green revolution is a lie fostered by, you guessed it, the fossil fuel lobby. Their only valid claim is the fuel for machinery which now turns out to lower crop nutrition from top soil plowing degradation. This degradation is caused by a combination of chemical fertilizers and plowing (bare soil tends to blow away when dry or erode when wet) which leaches the soil of trace minerals needed to produce nutritious and tasty as opposed to bland crops. The way things stand right now, agricultural guidelines in the U.S. state that it’s okay to lose 4 tons of top soil per acre per year from ‘modern’ farming techniques. The government claims it is the price we pay for high ‘yields’. Are you comfortable with that? I’m not. Considering top soil regeneration takes over 100 years, I cannot believe we are doing anything but losing massive amounts every year.
And last but not least, the militaries of the world are the most voracious users of fossil fuel. We sure as hell do not need them to keep 7 billion fed and clothed. The U.S. Navy, in particular, has the top spot as fossil fuel user AND polluter.
We need gradual, decentralized trickle charge or slow pumping energy storage systems for sustainable humanity. Anything else is not viable for the planet. If we want to zip around at high speed and be able to have instant this and that, yes we have an energy crisis. If we want to emulate biological processes and eschew the love affair with higher energy density per mole of fossil and or nuclear poisons killing the planet, we don’t have an energy crisis.
Nature paces everything; so should we.
All that said, there is the 1% with their hubris and arrogance and there is the rest of humanity. The agenda of the 1% is a tad different from the rest of us. I agree the knockdown is coming. The people controlling the levers of innovation and adaptation in our governments and the elite parasites that own them want this knockdown so it will come. I maintain that the false notion of a causal relationship between a large population and a polluted, unsustainable, fossil fuel dependent human society is the driving force behind this elite desire for a knockdown. The elites are the only truly unsustainable population on this earth because of their mega-carbon footprints. So, in true Wall Street Orwellian fashion, they blame the bulk of the 7 billion humans for THEIR piggery and slavish dependency on fossil fuels. The 1% that owns our governments loves the predatory resource extraction paradigm despite the fact that some of them probably suspect that it will cause a population knockdown, not from lack of fossil fuels, but from environmental collapse. Billions of humans dying is considered a good thing by the 1%. They think it will solve the world’s environmental problems and provide a more manageable population of slaves. The 1% probably grumble about minimum gene pool diversity species population required in order to perpetuate homo sapiens. The 1% think robots will take care of all the ‘important’ work while medical technology available to the 1% will provide them with 150 year plus lifetimes. They are wrong and they are the cancer that is destroying humanity.
There’s a way to clean up this world and live sustainably. Killing off several billion is a straw man. It’s typical elite bullshit adding two an two and getting whatever answer keeps them in the catbird seat. The media will continue to block the truth from the people 24/7.
I apologize if I tried to cover too much ground here but this situation we are in has matured for well over a century and we need to see how we got here to understand, if we survive, how to prevent a new set of snakes from selling us snake oil in the future.
Feel free to pass all or any part of this rant with or without attribution. Everything I wrote can be researched free on the internet if you want to post links about horse plagues, NASA correspondence with utilities, Henry Ford and hemp plastic, Rockefeller chicanery, U.S. solar panel development reasons, Americans starving while the bomb was being developed, Bernays propaganda tools, etc.
A.G. Gelbert
Collapse of the New World Order
Recent post from Diner Mark N at the Economics Table inside the Diner, synopsizing the failing Plans of the Elite running the New World Order.
RE
Discuss this article at the Economics Table of the Diner
RE wrote:
I don’t know if these guys are truly Brain Dead and Stupid or if they are really Smart and just so locked into a paradigm they can’t grasp the truth here. Or if it is as El G suggests, they are Wickedly Brilliant and this is part of the Master plan. I will pick Door Number 2 on this one Monte.
I will take door number one. The elite are brilliant at theft and domination, but they have blind spots. How do you think any of the Rothschild’s would fair if dropped off in the Alaskan wilderness to survive for three weeks with no supplies. I do not believe in there is any satanic tricks or secret powers these guys have and I am sure they would starve like any other soft suburbanite.
I know that the Illuminati had a grand plan, a New World Order if you will. I am quite sure that the whole of the earth was to come under complete corporate domination, selling us EVERY SINGLE good or service we would ever use from the cradle to the grave. With super computers monitoring every single communication sent or received, thought crime immediately punished. We can see they are quite close to Global Governance and currency now.
The world however does not always cooperate as any fallen Emperor could attest. The Illuminati converted their empire to run on fossil fuels with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. The magical energy gains from oil in particular made the New World Order the crowning achievement of all previous empires. As the men of science worked on zero point energy, fusion or whatever new energy was to follow fossil fuels, something went terribly wrong. Human ingenuity failed to conquer the laws of thermodynamics and the laws of nature.
Starting in the late 1960’s technological advancements other than computer science for the most part started to slow. More alarmingly for the Illuminated ones glorious plans, DECAY and ROT started appear in the countries that were under their complete control. It now appears that the engine of the NWO, the global banking system, is FAILING. The very ability to have an industrial civilization will be lost. The ability to feed the global population will be lost. When all these systems fail it will be as if a mighty dam has broken. Unless the Illuminati have magical powers or alien allies they will be scattered by the raging torrents. Just like every single other empire that has fallen so shall this empire fall. The structural support of this empire has been rotting away since peak oil per capita hit in 1979. The foundation is rotten and we will see it fall.
Mark N
Rewilding: Take it to the Hoop!
Doomstead Diner is happy to welcome Peter Michael Bauer, Urban Scout as one of our Cross Posting Authors on the Diner. The Urban Scout is devoted to the concepts of Rewilding and Primitive Living.
RE
Discuss this article at the Rewilding Table in the Diner
Rewilding: Take it to the Hoop!
May 24th, 2012 | Posted originally on Urban Scout by Peter Bauer
Me and Grandma Fin and our Root Sisters
In preparation for Lynx Vilden’s Stone Age Immersion program, I need to gather 5lbs of dehydrated wild plants. I know I could gather and dry wild greens (most berries are not ripe yet), but they won’t give me the calories I need out there in the woods. I wanted to get some roots and pound them into flour for a starch. For years now I have known and interacted with Finisia Medrano (aka Tranny Granny) over the web. So much so that when I hear the words “roots” I think of them synonymously with her and “the hoop”. This was a great excuse for me to stop “suckling the teet of babylon” long enough to get a glimpse of life of the hoop, as she has always emphatically encouraged all rewilders to do. After spending a few days on the hoop, I am finally starting to understand why she carries such a passion for this life.
For thousands and thousands of years, traditional “hunter-gatherer” people lived and worked in specific nomadic circuits across the land known as “hoops”. These hoops are routes on the earth with various camp sites along the way in which the people have tended the wild to create an abundance of food at each stop. Grandma Fin, as people affectionately call her, is someone who discovered remnants of the old hoops and… never left. She has catalyzed the rewilding movement to reclaim the spirit and root gardening techniques of the hoop. Her enthusiasm, passion, sense of humor and light-hearted fierceness have inspired and continue to inspire more and more people to get on the various hoops and return to a life of tending the wild gardens of native plants.
On the Table, food is always Underfoot
I drove six hours down from Portland, out to the desert where Grandma currently resides. As we got closer, I noticed that nearly every house we passed is abandoned. There is no industry out there but a few cattle ranches. It is too spread out to be a “ghost town”–it’s much more a post-apocalyptic runway. We arrive at dusk. Half of the camp is heading out to set rat traps in the bushes of this wasteland. Everyone in our culture hates rats. You don’t need special permits to trap and eat them. Grandma says there are too many of them and they eat the seeds and roots of the plants we want to tend. The first part of tending our garden is thinning the over-run animal population of rats. Rats which they will skin, cook and eat if and when they catch them.
In the morning we get up early to head up to “the table”. Tables are a geological phenomenon where a hill or mountain has a flat top, giving it the appearance of a tabletop. I am familiar with most plants of the west side of the cascades. Out in the desert, up on the table, everything but the sagebrush looks foreign. Our first stop to dig is not far from camp. I learn my first plant: yampa. The peanut-sized root bulbs are sweet, nutty and delicious. We lazily gather yamba for thirty minutes, stopping to chat and make jokes. My pockets are over-flowing with them. I am begining to notice that yampa is like a ground cover up there: you can’t take a step without walking on it. Grandma says this table is around seventeen square miles.
Old School
Old School
We move on to digging Luskh (pronounced looksh), a lomatium known commonly as “breadroot” or “biscuitroot”. Then coush (pronounced cow-sh) another lomatium. Then frittilaria, various greens, and a teeny-tiny potato-like root that I can’t remember the name of. In a just a few lazy hours of digging, we had gathered enough starch for days of eating. Grandma fin is sitting by me and my friend Thor. My friend Potlatch is a few feet away, digging down deep for a luskh. The rest of the gang, the real root diggers or “hoopsters” as they are jokingly called, are scattered around with some digging, some laying on the earth and staring up into the sky. Grandma cracks jokes here and there, then lays down some heavy shit: this is a garden that is thousands of years old. The only reason it exists is because it’s too rocky to farm, graze cattle on, or build. The rocks are considered worthless. The river valley just several feet below the table is a grassy, cattle grazing field now. The whole valley was an easy to dig garden just a hundred or so years ago. Civilization’s settlers released pigs onto the land, and those pigs destroyed this indigenous garden. Grandma looks at Potlatch. He’s begun to peel the inedible bark layers off the roots. Her eyes fill with tears. She says that this is what she lives for: seeing those little piles of root scraps scattered across the Table. My eyes fill with tears of grief and gratitude. In this seeming desert wasteland of apocalyptic abandonments, we’re literally sitting on top of something more valuable than a gold mine. It’s breath-takingly beautiful, hopeful and so very sad, all at the same time. It’s lonely out here she says. Where are the women and the children?
The roots are dug with a digging stick known as a Capun. In the old days, people would make these sticks from carefully fire-hardened wood. These days, in order to dig out these hard-to-get-at roots, we’re using titanium. We live in an interesting time where modern tech is sometimes needed just to live a more simple life. If we could replant the valley, we would not need titanium capuns. As civilization collapses, as gas gets too expensive, the cattle ranches will dwindle and the root diggers will move down to replant, to rewild those valleys. At some point the titanium capuns will be buried and forgotten in an easy to dig, river of abundance. For now, we find a balance in using new tools to bridge us back to the old ways.
Here is Grandma Fin demonstrating how the titanium capuns are used:
After taking a midday nap (life on the hoop is a crepuscular existence) we head out in the SUV to scout for more locations. We stop and get out at a possible camas patch, but there is nothing. The land has been trampled by cattle. At the end of the field a single tiger lily is just starting to bud out. “Kill it!” They shout. My heart stops. Are they really going to kill a rare species like this? The tiger lily was once much more populated than it is now. It was a food source for humans, which means it grew in many places. Now, it is very rare. How could they do that? As they pull up the root bulb I feel like I should say something but I hold back. Then I see it: tiny rootlets stuck to the main bulb. Dozens of them. We dig a dozen or so holes and drop in a few rootlets in each one. Next year, there will be more than just one Tiger Lily, there will be many. At that moment, things clicked and I started to understand on a fundamental level what I already have read and know. Tiger Lillies are endangered because they are no longer eaten. If there is no one there to tend the plant, to help it along, it will die out. Just as we humans will die out without the plants to help us along. It’s not the killing that is destructive, it’s how you go about killing that matters.
The best example of this is the harvest season for most of these roots. Once the flower has gone to seed, and the seeds begin to fall, it’s the best time to harvest the root. When you pull the root out, you plant the seeds at the same time. Grandma calls this “the reach around”. Life on these hoops is defined and maintained by the reach around. This was a principle that I have read many times in modern books on sustainable hunter-gatherer land management, but reading about it wasn’t enough. There is a mindset and experience of tending the wild that needs cultivation. After over a decade of rewilding, I haven’t felt that anywhere other than on the hoop. Not at a permaculture class, not at a skill-share, not even with my friends playing out in the woods. Perhaps it’s because, on the hoop, you are not starting from scratch. You’re building on what the wild has already provided, and what the Native cultures left in the land as their legacy. On the hoop, I felt an immense support already there from the earth. You don’t find that when you’re planning your permaculture garden. The hoop is a permaculture garden. One that has been there for thousands of years and survived the encroachment of civilization by living up on the tables – the fringes, where civilization doesn’t deem important. Out on the hoop I tasted freedom, and like the roots we dig, it was bittersweet.
Click to Purchase
You really haven’t even begun to rewild until you’ve gone out on the hoop and spent some time with Grandma Fin. This story is really just one big plea for you to join up with Tranny Granny and get your asses on the hoop! My only regret was that I couldn’t stay longer. I promised Grandma that I would return, with reinforcements.
Read Finisia’s autobiography to learn more about her story: “Growing up in Occupied America.” Friend her on Facebook and send her a message.
Idiots, Geniuses and Psychopaths
One thing all the media have in common is to refer constantly to how frigging stupid the technocrats and politicians such as Bernanke and Obama are. The NY Times (hypothetically – I haven’t read the (toilet) paper of record in years) does it subtly and demurely. The polite “alternative media” such as Chris Martenson may do it politely but less subtly. The blunt alternative media (TAE) says it bluntly. The snarky alternative media (Zero Hedge) says it with continuous sarcasm. But, in their own individual styles, they all say the same damn thing – that the Status Quo technocrats and pols are de facto idiots steering the global economy through sheer cowardice, lack of imagination, and stupidity into the jagged rocks.
Doomstead Shelter-in-Place vs. Bugout and Rewilding: The Debate Continues
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Below follows a debate currently ongoing in the Rentier Debt and the Collapse of Debt-Based Finance on Gail Tverberg’s Our Finite World blog. Gail’s original article is also reposted here on the Diner directly before this one.
The debate pits the concepts of Shelter in Place on a Doomstead vs. Planned Bugouts/Rewilding in remote areas. This is always a source of lively discussion inside the Diner here as well. You can visit one of our many threads on this subject at the Doomsteading Buffet inside the Diner. Whichever paradigm you consider best or are currently pursuing, you will find information of interest at this buffet.
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Gail Tverberg says:It is very hard to find a place far enough outside of Dodge to go to. Most people have to make a living now, as well. So for many people, the answer is clear–they cannot do things too different than what they have been trained for, and are doing already. Even people who have their choice (for example, retired people) often want to be near family members, and this limits what they can do as well.
So I think adapting (a little) in place is probably all most people can do. It is not clear this approach will really “work” if changes come quickly, but as a practical matter, for most people, it is all they can do.
One thing everyone can do is be more appreciative of the things we have now–heated and air conditioned homes, vehicles, ability to travel, grocery stories, and many other modern conveniences.
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Jan Steinman says:Gail, I think this is a common delusion that isn’t very helpful.
I can buy the “near to loved ones” argument, and I can understand the “need to support my family” argument, but I know LOTS of people who have a family and still manage to live very lightly, very directly, very healthily, and very happily, making their living directly on the earth.
Indeed, it is those who think they don’t have a choice who are most unhappy.
It is really quite possible to quit your job, sell most of what you have, and take up with an organic farm somewhere. For the most part, they’ll be happy to feed and house you in exchange for your work — work that is really a free education in future living. This is the “underground railroad” out of the mess we’re in.
It may not be possible for 300 million Americans to do so, but it is certainly possible for those who wish to do so, precisely because so many people are either ignorant or in denial.
So, let’s say one is neither ignorant nor in denial, but they just can’t bring themselves to “jump off the cliff” of civilization. Grow food. Or at least get started learning how to do so. You can trellis beans on an apartment balcony. You can plant corn in the front yard of a suburban house. You can go work an allotment on the weekend.
Each day, with each choice, ask yourself, “Is this taking me closer to a sustainable future?” You won’t be able to say “yes” every time, but if you at least ask the question, you’re on the right path.
“One thing everyone can do is be more appreciative of the things we have now…”
While I understand the sentiment — and even indulge in it from time to time — I prefer to be disdainful of what we have now, while seeking a more direct form of happiness.
My appreciation of civilization is at a lower, more basic level. I appreciate dimensional lumber for free at the landfill. I appreciate being able to order seed from across my bioregion — even while refusing to buy it from across the continent. I appreciate books, and grudgingly, the Internet. I appreciate living off the fat of civilization, even while knowing that as more are forced to do the same, it will get more difficult to do so.
I preach an unpopular gospel that does not jibe with appreciating the finer points of civilization:
learn to appreciate the simplest gifts of life, and you’ll lose your taste for the complicated ones.
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Justin Nigh says:Amen. I’ve never understood the statement “I’m bored” because, how could anyone be bored when there’s so much on display in nature at all times?
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reverseengineerre says:“It is very hard to find a place far enough outside of Dodge to go to. Most people have to make a living now, as well. So for many people, the answer is clear–they cannot do things too different than what they have been trained for, and are doing already. Even people who have their choice (for example, retired people) often want to be near family members, and this limits what they can do as well.”-Gail
When you have Significant Others in the mix as most do, removing yourself from civilization (at least to the extent that is possible at all right now) can be very problematic. chances are all your SOs do not agree with you collapse is imminent, and they may be right.. Evenif they do agree it is coming down the pipe, they don’t want to give up the Air Conditioning and the SUV just YET.
If you currently are one of the Lucky Ones who still HAS a job, QUITTING it seems to most people COMPLETELY psychotic. How many Actuaries do you suspect would give up their 6 figure job with an Insurance Company to go dig up Beets on an Organic Farm, even if they KNEW collapse was just around the corner from their own actuarial analysis? Not many of course, so they will stay with it just one day or one hour too long, and the hese out thWindow will shut on them..
Anyhow, for those who do try to straddle the Two worlds as I do, there is a 3rd Option, the Planned Bugout. In a PB, you pre-identify places you can get to with better long term survival potential than the probably quite densely populated place you currently live. You prepare yourself with the right skills and you prepare by making connections in the way places. They exist all over the lower 48, I hiked almost all of them in my youth. In Appalachia, in the Smokey Mountains, there are places to run and hide when TSHTF. In the Rocky Mountains there are also, and in the Bayous of Lousiana as well.
Are any of these perfect retreats? No they are not, and they will have their own sets of problems also when TSHTF, but they are way better than the Big Shities will be. Becaue in fact most of the population looiving in those places will never leave them, not on this side of the Great Divide anyhow. They will wait one day too long to get out, and then like with Katrina, they all will not be able to exit fast enough before the Cat 5 hits.
Anyhow, IMHO anyone who does not prep for a Bugout if/when it becomes necessary is a fool, or simply one who doesn’t even want to try to survive the aftermath of this Civilization Collapse.
No more A/C? No more Jet Skis? No more Hawaiian vacations? No more Facebook? No more Lindsay Lohan? Who wants to live in that world, right?
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Gail Tverberg says:
You are very right about the significant other issue. If you are single, you can do as you choose. But if you have a significant other, it makes a difference. It is pretty much necessary to find a solution that “works” for both of you.
There are also very real differences in options available to people living in different countries. In the USA, we have quite a bit of farmland, and a tradition of “picking up and moving to another place”. But in much of the rest of the world, this is not the situation. A person in, say, Japan, will probably not find any organic gardening communities nearby, even if they want one.
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Jan Steinman says:
Reverse Engineer, I respect your approach, but disagree with it. But I’m glad you’re doing something, which is more than 99% of the sheeple are doing! And who knows; you may be right.
I think your “bug out” approach works well in the face of a crash. But what happens if there is no discernible crash? What happens if, day by day, week by week, year by year, things continue to get worse and worse, but not bad enough to trigger the “bug out” reflex?
The “bug out” approach works well if the water is boiling when you’re dumped into it. But in the “boiling frogs” scenario, there’s going to be a lot of skeletons next to bug-out bags, surrounded by piles of freeze-dried food wrappers, taken by surprise by the surprise ending that never came.
This is not an event, folks — it’s a process.
But none of us has a perfect crystal ball. If civilization’s demise is event-like, then the “bug out” people will do quite well afterward, surviving on dead people’s stuff. And, grasshopper-like, they get to “enjoy” civilization while it lasts, while the “ants” who undergo voluntary privation in preparation simply end up deprived. Am I somewhat close to your point-of-view here?
Although the “transition in-situ” approach may carry some additional risk in a sudden crash, but it has vastly better potential in a “boiling frogs” scenario.
Also I’m taking a karmic approach. Two of us have been living on a thousand a month for fifteen years. Before that, I was making mid-six-figures. I suppose I could have continued that way, while preparing for a “bug out.” But in those fifteen years, I have not involuntarily supported oil wars through my taxes, my carbon footprint has been minuscule, and I’ve bought a sum total of perhaps 20 gallons of gasoline. (Haven’t found a biodiesel chain saw yet…)
And you know what? I don’t feel deprived at all! I milk goats every morning. I plant lots of trees and seeds. And I only see a TV once or twice a year, while visiting relatives. Life after the crash (that is yet to come) is good!
One final thought: there is going to be a heck of a culture shock for the bug-out crowd, no matter how prepared they feel with one foot still in the Unreal World. Those who embrace the real world of physical limitations today will simply shrug and carry on.
Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. I will miss the Internet, though…
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wildcatter says:I agree that trying to operate with one foot in each world is the best solution while trying to keep your job as long as possible. However the very real problem that is happening now regardless of say financial system collapse is that people are already losing their employment. This is what i call getting kicked off the train. Since central banks around the world are currently just managing contraction the day that you personally get swept up in it via job loss all of the sudden you are thrown into the new world of needing to provide for yourself in a very untraditional manner.
From my experience there are very few jobs today for the unemployed and it crosses ALL industries now short of maybe federal government jobs. Once you get kicked off the train you are lucky to get an interview much less a job that pays anywhere near what you used to make even if you land one. Also many peoples extended families are finding themselves unable to help out much cause they are getting squeezed too. So really forget about financial system collapse, what people need to be preparing for is extremely long term unemployment. In almost every case this is all that will matter in our personal situations. I believe many of us will find ourselves without work before the dollar or the U.S. banking system collapses. If you do make it until that point that is great but for a large majority of us I see unemployment as the single greatest threat to our existence in the BAU world in the near to medium term.
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donsailorman says:You are quite right: Unemployment is going to become the biggest personal trouble and social problem of the next twenty years. To keep unemployment rates down, real GDP growth of at least 3% (and perhaps more) is an absolute necessity. I think there will be little if any real GDP growth in the future, and as oil and other fossil fuels become more and more expensive, I expect real GDP growth to turn negative.
Much of current U.S. unemployment is structural, i.e. due to people living in the wrong place or lacking the right skills to get a job. Currently there are about two million job openings in the U.S., and businesses would very much like to hire people to fill these jobs. But they cannot get the skilled workers that they need, even with very high salaries and good packages of benefits. IMO, the binding constraint on oil production is now the limited number of petroleum engineers and chemical engineers. Also, there are not enough highly skilled welders in the U.S. (or the world) to make the critical welds on oil and gas pipelines that are being built and that are being planned.
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wildcatter says:
Honestly i believe the structural argument is a MSM and wall street narrative that was manufactured to explain what they dont understand. That is there is not enough economic growth to accompdate hiring these so called jobs that cant be filled. After WWII there were many unskilled workers that found work simply cause there was so much demand for labor and economic growth to accomodate hiring at any cost.
We saw the same thing in the 90′s where people that had no background in computers were trained as programmers or re-tooled as network admins etc. remember the old saying if you had a pulse you could get a job? This was the reality in corporate america back then. The truth today is companies are finding they dont actually need to hire people because again we are simply managing contractioin at all levels even in the private sector. So they post these jobs in anticipation of a “return to growth” someday but it doesnt come so they go unfilled. Add this to the fact that people currently with good jobs are no longer incentivized to take risk and leave their jobs even for slightly more money due to the extreme uncertainty.
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donsailorman says:
You raise some good points: Most of today’s unemployment is “cyclical” rather than structural in nature. Exceptionally strong aggregate demand can shrink the number of structurally unemployed. By the way, there were a great many unemployed vets in the U.S. in 1946, 1947, and 1948; they used to come as tramps to our household, where my mother always gave them ham and eggs and all the toast they could eat. For the economy as a whole, 1949 was the first really prosperous year after the end of World War II.
There is an “iron law” in economics that says real GDP growth is prerequisite to lowering unemployment rates and that vigorous growth (say more than 4% per year) is needed to get unemployment down to frictional rates. (There are three main kinds of unemployment–frictional, from people changing jobs, cyclical due to lack of GDP growth, and structural, due to a mismatch between worker location or skills and jobs that are open.) Much structural unemployment is due to people being stuck in the wrong place. For example, the Iron Range of Minnesota has a high rate of structural unemployment because a lot of people live there in cheap houses and get by on welfare, minimum wage jobs, disability payments, etc. They cannot afford to move to, for example, the Twin Cities or to North Dakota, where the jobs are.
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reverseengineerre says:
“Reverse Engineer, I respect your approach, but disagree with it. But I’m glad you’re doing something, which is more than 99% of the sheeple are doing! And who knows; you may be right.
“I think your “bug out” approach works well in the face of a crash. But what happens if there is no discernible crash? What happens if, day by day, week by week, year by year, things continue to get worse and worse, but not bad enough to trigger the “bug out” reflex?”-JS
I disagree with your approach as well JS, which of course is what makes the whole process of noodling out just what to do here for a given individual or family group an interesting problem to work out.
First off, as WC mentions,the moment you lose your job and your McMansion is in foreclosure and creditors are hounding you for a student loan that never will be wiped off the books is the moment the Crash has come for you. You probably are eligible for your 99 weeks on the Dole, and if you really are serious about staying inside the system you might blow your foot off “accidentally” with a shotgun and collect SSDI.
On the other hand, the day you lose that job can be your Day of Liberation as well. That is the day you are given license to go Walkabout, as the Aussies put it. The day you get to walk into the Mountains one last time and kiss Industrial Civilization goodbye for yourself, forever more. No cell phone, your creditors are NOT going to track you down out there. Long as you have not Gone Postal before leaving, they won;t be sending the Dogs after you.
Insofar as the SO issue is concerned, this is obviously easier for the Solitary Man, but families can do it also. Recently on recommendation from Ben in discussion at the Diner, I visited a website of a family living the Nomadic Life in a Teepee. 2 year old and 5 year old children in tow. You should be hooked up with someone of similar mindset to pull this off of course, but isn’t that who you should be married to anyhow? When you lose your job also, your family is just as off the cliff as you are. What do you do as alternative here? Drop your kids off at Child Protective Services for a life in the Foster Homes meat grinder because you can’t afford to care for them anymore?
In looking at your own choice of a shelter in place Doomstead, the problems with this are myriad once the social collapse reaches a critical mass. As in Argentina, Doomsteads are subject to regular Home Invasions. It is unlikely that if many people are off the financial cliff that you will safely be able to Milk your Goats.
Besides this is the problem of Property Taxation, which is the minimum form of Goobermint Confiscation you will face as things get worse. You may currently have income enough to pay your taxes, but what happens when the taxes go Up and the Investments you have from your 6 Figure years disappear in an MF Global theft? What happens when the bigger Goobermint structures break down and the local Sherriff and his cronies or a band of ex-national guard decides to make your neighborhood their fiefdom? You only truly own what you can Protect and Defend yourself, and unless you have a small army, you cannot protect a Doomstead.
Finally, the reality for more than 50% of the population is that they can’t afford to buy a Doomstead with Goats and Chickens and a permaculture garden. They are in debt up to their eyeballs and can’t unload the McMansion except in a short sale which nets them nothing. They probably have only a couple of months worth of Savings and little to nothing saved in an IRA. The choice you made 15 years ago in truth is not available to them at all. Perhaps they can go to work as a Serf on somebody else’s Doomstead, but who wants to be beholden to a petty Landlord in this version of neo-Feudalism?
While such a choice is not generally available to most people with limited eans, the Planned Bugout is avaialble to nearly all who are healthy and willing to commit to learning how to live the primitive life. In the Diner, we discuss the myriad ways in which you can prep up for this and not have to instantaneously depend on knapping Stone Tools and so forth, though that is worthwhile to learn.
During WWII, the French Resistance to the Nazis began with one man who left for the woods the day the Nazis rolled their tanks into his little town. He was just one man, and his neighbors considered him nuts. In time, their were 20,000 members of the French Resistance living in those woods. In the face of Fascism, you cannot protect your property and you are subjugated to the whim of the State. If you do not smell the stink of Fascism here already, you must have a bad sinus infection. It has only just begun as well.
You want some CHANCE at Freedom? When the Big Show comes to a Theatre Near You, run away. Run away far and run away FAST. Run into the deep Bayou where no Tanks can roll. Or like the Swiss and the Pashtuns of Afghanistan, run into the Mountains. Preferably really BIG Mountains. The Great Wall that God built to protect the Independent souls of the world.
RE
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Rentier Debt and the Collapse of Debt-Based Finance
Posted originally on Our Finite World on June 8, 2012 by Gail Tverberg
At the Age of Limitsconference near Artemis, Pennsylvania on May 25-28, I was asked to speak on rentier debt and the collapse of debt-based finance. This is a somewhat difficult subject, so I decided to talk about the subject more generally–how growing debt fits in with economic growth and growth of energy supplies, and how inability to keep increasing this debt makes any existing tendency toward collapse worse. In this post, I would like to share this presentation with readers.
Slide 1Let’s start by talking first about a subject fairly far removed debt–the difference between the systems created by nature and systems created by humans. The reason why I bring this difference up is because if we were only dealing with natural systems, there would be no need for debt. It is only when we start dealing with man’s systems that debt becomes an issue.
Natural System vs. Humans’ Growth Based System
Slide 2 – Natural system vs humans’ systemWe all know what the natural system looks like: the combination of birds, animals, trees, the sky, the many tiny organisms, the soil, rocks, and everything else in the world that is present without man’s intervention. Human systems represent things that humans make, such as trucks and roads, and cars, and buildings, and electrical transmission systems. In a way, all human systems are interconnected, so we can think of them as one big system, created by humans.
Slide 3. Natural systems don’t growNatural systems don’t expand in size over time. Individual plants and animals grow and mature, and in the process become larger. But then they die, their bodies decompose, and eventually different organisms grow. Rocks decompose and form soil. This soil erodes, but, in time, it is replaced with new soil through the erosion of rocks.
There can be an expansion in the number of one type of animal, but eventually these animals will tend to eat too many of their prey, and the number of predators will drop, to stay in line with the amount of their food source. There can be a shift in mix of types of plants and animals, but the change is in the mix, not a long term growth in the overall quantity of plant and animal life.
Natural systems don’t need any assistance from humans. They have been around for billions of years. There is no need to finance anything.
Outsmarting the Natural System
Slide 4. Human systems are very differentIn the natural system, each type of plant or animal produces more offspring than is needed to replace itself. The normal order of the natural system is such that only the best adapted plants or animals relative to the particular surroundings will survive. Many of the offspring do not survive to maturity.
Humans, since the earliest times, have had difficulty with this arrangement. Humans, because of their intelligence, have found ways to outsmart at least part of the “survival of the fittest” arrangement that would keep our numbers similar to those of other primates, such as gorillas or chimpanzees–probably fewer than 1,000,000 humans in total in the whole world.
Well over 100,000 years ago, humans discovered the use of fire, and the fact that fire could be used in many ways–to cook food so that new types of food could be eaten, and so that more nutritional value could be extracted from food that was eaten, to keep warm, and to drive animals from one area to another, so that animals could be more easily killed and eaten. In the same time-frame, humans began using spears to better kill prey. About 35,000 to 45,000 years ago, humans learned to hunt with dogs, and thus increased the amount of prey they could kill.
This pattern of finding ways around natural limits has continued to this day. The use of farming, starting about 10,000 years ago, allowed a great expansion in population. The use of trade to import food from a distance further increased the number of humans who could live on the earth. There were numerous other discoveries, including burning peat moss, and the use of water power and wind power, before coal was brought into common use in the 18th century. In the 20th century, the petroleum use surpassed coal. There were also many other advances that helped humans avoid natural limits–for example, the discovery of antibiotics, and the widespread use of electricity.
At the bottom of Slide 4, I have represented the long-term pattern of growth by a line that gradually slopes more and more upward, as we move to later periods. Even in the earliest period, there was some upward slope, but this may have been offset by setbacks. The amount of growth gradually increased, but still was not particularly evident to those living at the time, because of inherent fluctuations. The greatest growth has come in the last 100 years.
Slide 5. Reasons human system is growth basedThere are two basic reasons why human systems are growth based:
(1) Humans find ways to get around “survival of the fittest”.
(2) Entropy–Whatever humans build eventually falls apart. Humans have to keep to keep building more, just to stay even. Even advances like discovering antibiotics and herbicides have to keep being repeated, or nature finds ways around our advances.
The combination of these factors means that humans have been, and continue to be, on a constant growth tread-mill. There have been examples of small societies that have managed to keep populations flat for relatively long periods, and there have been many societies that have collapsed while others have expanded. The overall aggregate impact of human has been, however, has been one of gradual growth in numbers and material wealth.
Graphic Representation of Natural System and Humans’ System
Slide 6. Humans’ system started out as a tiny part of nature’s system.Slide 6 shows my view of how very early humans fit in with the natural system, back in the days before man discovered fire and spears and learned how to hunt with dogs. Humans were part of the natural system, just like other animals. Their population was no doubt relatively low, and stayed low, perhaps varying with climate change and food availability.
Slide 7. Humans’ system grew to overwhelm nature’s systemSlide 7 shows my view of what humans’ system looks like now. It has grown in size, so that in many places it overwhelms the natural system. Humans’ system takes resources from nature, and sends its pollution back to nature. Thus it is tied to the natural system, whether we recognize the situation or not.
The Nature of Growth
Slide 8. World population growthIf we look at a graph of world population, we see that growth has been particularly evident in the last 100 or 200 years.
Slide 9. Nature of growthIt appears to me (based on GDP statistics of Angus Maddison for the last 2000 years) that prior to the use of fossil fuels, most of the growth was simply population growth, as humans were able to increase their food supply. It was not until fossil fuels were added that there was a big increase in standard of living.
Slide 10. Growth provides many benefits.Economic growth of the type we have had since the growth in the use of fossil fuels provides many benefits. If the economy is growing fast enough, there is rising demand for homes, so home prices tend to rise. The prices of individual stocks rise, and there are more jobs available, some of which pay well. Governments find that the taxes that they collect rise, even without raising the tax rate. This helps governmental stability.
Slide 11. What is needed for a growth-based system?How can humans’ system be made to grow? Clearly one thing that is needed is increasing amounts of materials from the natural world; another is a way of transforming these materials into goods and services that people want or need.
A less obvious thing that is needed is a way for people to be able to pay for the goods and services, in advance of the time that they earn the money to buy these things. This is where “rentiers” come into play. Rentiers provide the credit that allows people to buy goods and services that would normally require a large accumulation of wealth.
Debt was first used about 5,000 ago, back in the days of early agriculture, according to David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. At that time, large temples acted as purchasers and sellers of goods and services. People brought goods to the temple to sell, and also bought other goods. The temples kept running tabs. Those who bought more than they sold were in debt.
Rentiers and Debt
Slide 12. Who/ what are rentiers?Rentiers are enablers of debt. They allow people to buy things that they couldn’t otherwise pay for. Rentiers include banks and other parts of the financial system.
There have been rentiers for 5,000 years, but the growth in rentiers has been greatest since World War II. The need for debt is greatest when one wants to increase the rate of growth.
Think of the United States after World War II. The world had come through the long economic depression, and things were finally looking better after World War II. The soldiers were coming home again, and would soon be unemployed. If only citizens could afford to buy new cars and new homes, there might be jobs for these returning soldiers.
Slide 13. Non-government debt growth after World War II.Government debt had been ramped up prior to World War II (allowing it to buy tanks and airplanes and to employ more soldiers), and now was being paid down (not shown on Slide 13). If demand was to be kept up, and even raised, private citizens and businesses needed to be encouraged to go into debt, allowing citizens to buy things like cars, refrigerators, and new homes. Slide 13 shows that non-government debt was ramped up after World War II. This stimulated the economy because it allowed more people to buy “big ticket” items, and helped ramp up job growth and energy use.
Slide 14. World Energy ConsumptionIf we look at a graph of world energy use (from my post, World Energy Consumption Since 1820 in Charts) we see that world energy consumption really began to rise after World War II–that is, the same time non-government debt was being added.
Slide 15. Per capita energy consumption since 1820The growth in energy consumption since World War II is even larger on a per-capita basis. Most of this growth was in fossil fuels–in oil and natural gas, and, recently, in coal. Without fossil fuels, our per capita energy consumption in 2012 would be below that in 1820, and our lifestyles would be much different.
Slide 16. World population grew at the same time as non-governmental debt and energy.Slide 16 shows that if a person looks at a graph of world population growth, there is a very distinct upward “bend” after World War II. This is precisely the time that energy use grew rapidly, and debt use grew rapidly.
How Debt Growth Works – And Eventually Doesn’t Work
Slide 17. How the debt-based system worksThe basic way our financial system works is that when a person or business or government needs money, that money is loaned into existence. This allows a business to expand, or a person to afford to buy a car or home that he or she had not saved up money for. What happens is that increasing debt allows demand to be higher than it would otherwise be, so that natural resources (including oil, gas, and coal) are extracted more rapidly than they otherwise would be. This allows what we measure as the “economic growth” rate to be higher than it would otherwise be.
There are a couple of catches with this system:
1. The money to repay the debt is not loaned into existence at the same time the principle is loaned into existence. As long as the economy is growing fast enough, this is not a problem, because economic growth allows future production to be enough higher than current production to pay back debt with interest. But if the economy ever slows down, there is a problem.
2. The process of increasing extraction of natural resources through the use of increased debt doesn’t work indefinitely, because at some point resource extraction starts getting constrained, and pollution becomes more of a problem.
Slide 18. Our debt-based system depends on growthSlide 18 illustrates the way that a growing economy helps to make repaying debt easier. With a growing economy, the size of the “economic pie” grows pretty much every year. This growth means that even if a fixed amount of debt plus interest needs to be paid back, relative to the growing base, it is less of a problem. It is easy to see this situation for a government, but a similar situation exists for individuals. If the economy is growing, on average, people will find themselves getting promotions and will find new jobs available when they lose old ones, so that, for example, repaying home loans tends not to be a problem.
Clearly, the reverse is true if the economy is shrinking. Even if the economy shows zero growth these is a problem, because there is not enough to growth to cover the interest. If interest rates are lowered to almost zero (do very low interest rates sound at all familiar?), the inability to cover the additional cost relating to paying back interest, but even this becomes burdensome.
It might also be pointed out that with a flat or shrinking economy, it becomes more and more difficult to pay for promised social programs, such as social security retirement programs and unemployment programs. These programs become a larger portion of a stable or shrinking pie, and thus become harder and harder to fund. European countries (which have been very generous with their social programs) are having particular difficulty with these problems now, as well as difficulty with repaying their debt.
Slide 20. Humans’ system can’t keep growing foreverThe reason why growth in resource extraction cannot continue forever is related to Figure 20, whch I also showed earlier. At some point, resource extraction becomes constrained. Higher demand for oil tends to lead primarily to higher prices for oil, rather than to much more oil actually coming out of the ground. Pollution of various kinds, including carbon dioxide pollution, becomes more and more of a problem.
Everything I can see says we started reaching the point where oil resources became restrained about 2004 – 2005, when oil prices started going up, and oil extraction did not rise by much. Since that time, world oil extraction has grown very slowly, constraining economic growth. The 2008-2009 recession seems to me to be very much associated with this constriction, as are the debt problems we are now seeing around the world, especially in Europe.
Slide 21. Slowdown occurs when oil prices riseThe reason why an economic slowdown occurs when oil prices rise relates to the fact that oil is used for necessities–growing food and for commuting to work. A rise in oil prices does not result in a rise in families’ incomes, especially in oil importing countries, which is what the United States and most of Europe are. A family will tend to cut back on discretionary spending, such as going out to restaurants, or buying a new car, or buying a more expensive home.
As a result, there will be layoffs in discretionary industries–for example, restaurants, car manufacture, and home building. People in these industries will be laid off from work. Some of those laid off from work will default on loans. Value of homes will tend to fall, as few people are in the market for a move-up home. Government spending on unemployment claims will increase, at the same time that tax revenue drops (or flattens) because fewer workers are employed. Governments find themselves in increasingly distressed financial condition, because they cannot afford to pay promised benefits, and their debt burden gets higher and higher. If this all sounds like the economic news of the last few years, in both Europe and the United States, it shouldn’t be too surprising, given the high price of oil, and our the dependence of our economies on oil.
Problems with the Rentier Debt System
Slide 22. Issues of the debt-based systemThe biggest issue with our debt-based system is the system tends to collapse, once adequate growth to sustain the whole system occurs. We appear to be rapidly approaching this point. It will also collapse at a closely related point-—when the amount of debt becomes so high that the governments cannot afford to pay the interest on debt, and keep up other programs.
Another issue is that as the economic condition of people in oil importing counties is reduced, governments of these countries find themselves less able to collect taxes, at the same time they would like to stimulate the economy. Promised retirement programs also become harder to fund. This means that the governments of oil-importing economies will find themselves under increasing tendency to collapse, as high oil prices lead to recessionary tendencies.
Another issue of the rentier debt system is that too much money is transferred to the finance system and to those collecting interest (as opposed to paying interest). People at the bottom of the economic order find themselves barely able to make ends meet, and borrow to try to cover necessities. The interest rates these individuals are charged are far higher than the interest rates paid by borrowers who are deemed more “credit-worth”, such as governments.
Another issue is that as the price of oil rises, too much money is transferred to countries involved with oil extraction, at the expense of oil-importing countries. This transfer of funds to oil exporting nations tends to depress the economies of oil importing nations. There are theoretical ways that the funds of oil exporting nations might be recycled, but increasingly, these countries find that they need these funds to pacify the demands of their own populations, so that recycling occurs less.
What Is Ahead?
Slide 23. Some possible impacts of defaultsWe have already talked about some of impacts that are already occurring–financial systems under stress, with some countries appearing to be near default. The question is what may happen next.
If there are defaults in one or two countries–say Greece and Spain–the financial problems seem likely to spread to banks in other parts of the world, through derivatives and through banks carrying debt relating to the defaulting countries. There also seem to be any number of countries in weak condition–for example, Egypt–and the problems of these countries may worsen as well.
Another likely outcome would seem to be that new loans will become less available. If a particular country has recently defaulted and seems to have no way of paying for new oil imports, they may have difficulty getting loans. But even those not directly involved with defaults may find it much more difficult to get loans, because the financial condition of banks will be worse, and some banks may fail. A reduction in available loans will tend to lead to economic contraction, and make any tendency toward collapse worse.
We can speculate on all kinds of other things that happen. I will not elaborate on the Items shown on Slide 23, except to say that cheap oil has enabled a lot of what we have today–an international trade system that allows the formation of large countries, and that allows large countries to interact to a much greater extent than a few hundred years ago. There would seem to be a possibility that most of the advances of the last few hundred years will disappear as the availability of cheap oil disappears.
Can we solve our problems by getting rid of rentier debt?
Unfortunately, no. We are now reaching resource limits, primarily in oil, but also in other resources, such as fresh water, and also with respect to pollution. Humans were on a growth trajectory to reach these limits, with or without rentier debt. Rentier debt allowed us to reach these limits faster than we might otherwise have reached them.
Now that the bubble has been inflated, and we seem to be near collapse, getting rid of rentier debt won’t really “fix” the situation. It is basically too late. The future direction would seem to be contraction, and this will almost certainly eliminate most rentier debt. Our task now would seem to be to deal with all of the dislocations that occur when defaults occur and to develop new financial system(s) that can handle continued contraction.
Homo Sapiens is a part of nature and follows the same general set of rules as well. the main recent difference is that as top of the food chain predators, we became SOOO successful that all checks and balances on total population were rendered moot.
As Gail has noted, once Homo Sapiens learned to control Fire, there was a large expansion in numbers, but it levelled out. Simple control of fire was not enough to overcome the rest of the checks on total population. Only once Agriculture came on the scene did the relentless Exponential growth begin in earnest.
The problem of course has been vastly exacerbated accessing the thermodynamic energy of fossil fuels, which vastly increased food supply and also enabled moder medicines that combat diseases. So we are in vast overshoot now in the absence of the energy inputs, which means a substantial Die Off of Human Population is imminent.
The main questions now revolve around timelines, which few Pundits are willing to commit to. Dmitri Orlov for instance will define 5 Stages of Collapse, but he won’t predict how long it will take to get to Stage 5. Gail will present many charts and graphs, but she won;t make a prediction how long the whole game takes to collapse either. We all KNOW by now its going to collapse (with the exception of a few Cornucopians who think Cold Fusion or Zero Point Energy is just around the corner), but in the absence of knowledge how long it will take just defining the parameters for the Collapse does not provide the individual with a great tool to handle it.
The problem is this: If it is going to take 50 years or more for the Collapse to completely manifest itself, you may be better off continuing BAU in your life if you are one of the ones lucky enough to still be eployed or have Investments you live off of still paying off. On the other hand, if a Sudden Stop is imminent with complete collapse of the Banking System, hanging on to BAU is not a good plan. In this case, you need to GTFO of Dodge NOW, before the Lights go Out in your Big Shity and before JIT delivery of Food stops.
You can try to Straddle the Two Worlds, as I do. Live in a low population zone but continue to work inside the system as it functions now. It still remains unpredictable though how a rapid collapse would affect even low population zones like where I live. In any event, you must in some way if you expect to SURVIVE what is to come here to make some decent PLANS for it. This is what we engage in Daily on the Doomstead Diner.
For those of you interested, today I posted up a Grand Unified Theory of Collapse on the Diner Blog.
http://www.doomsteaddiner.org/blog/2012/06/09/grand-unified-theory-of-collapse-gutoc/
We also have an interesting thread in progress inside the Diner Forum on the Social, Philosophical and Religious implications of Collapse.
http://www.doomsteaddiner.org/forum/index.php?topic=468.0
New inputs are always welcome in trying to figure out how to negotiate what is coming down the pipe here.
RE (Note to Gail: Very comprehensive piece overall, I will repost it on the Diner Blog)