Nicole Foss In Australia: It's No Use Trying To Build A Better Dinosaur
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Artwork: Ilargi for The Automatic Earth The Nicole Foss 2013 tour of Australia is well underway, and since I'm not there, it's a bit hard for
[See the full post at: Nicole Foss In Australia: It's No Use Trying To Build A Better Dinosaur]Though I will never understand, … why every single one of Nicole’s lectures doesn’t attract 10,000 or more listeners and spectators.
I understand why.
The majority has been “captured” by the “system”.
As Nicole said,
The whole idea, especially for young people, is to convince them to be engines of credit expansion:
There is so much more that I could quote that I agree with.
However, it would be talking to the choir.I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Nicole and having satisfying discussions.
~~~ Since I’m learning, I reserve the right to change my mind.~~~Ilargi said “Globalization is sort of harmlessly alright when it’s limited to stereo’s and fancy cars and phones. Those things you don’t need in order to survive. “
Unfortunately, many people today think that is the only way to survive. They’ve lived most of their lives that way and think it is normal and can’t or unable to see anything different.
Gotta love those people who tell us to change our lifestyles, lower our carbon footprint, etc etc etc and then they hop on a plane and fly to the other side of the world. Kudos to Rob Hopkins of the Transition Town movement who stopped flying years ago. I don’t see that it has hindered his work in any way.
Helen –
Did you listen to the interview? I did. Nicole didn’t talk about lowering carbon footprints, she spoke about finance and effectively trying to get ordinary people to realize that they’d better start claiming some of the real wealth before their claims vanish.
Reminds me of a student answering a question in class without actually reading or understanding the material. Said student ends up looking silly. Doesn’t help the credibility of the atta-boy for whoever Rob Hopkins is, either.
To wit: neither Nicole nor I have ever told anyone to lower their carbon footprint.
And we don’t tell people to change their lifestyle in order to save the planet, but to save their own asses.
Yep. No carbon footprint reduction that I heard of, either, probably because it doesn’t work.
Simply not going into debt and realizing how outrageously overpriced cars and houses are, takes care of much of the footprint.
On the other hand, people who are vaguely aware of something being wrong will always tell you you’re not “doing anything” about it. No matter how much you try to explain that paying down debt (and almost hopelessly avoiding getting into it again because everyone else is causing the inflation by taking on debt and “doing something”) and saving (*gasps*what’s saving, that’s like what old people living last century did, no?) takes most of your time and you don’t have enough resources to “do something”, the “do something about it” meme is prevailing. I wonder about many transition movements made with debt…and with indebted people…how long will they last.EDIT: There was a Guy who preached lowering carbon footprint for everybody (except for him, because in his case, he was trying to burn it as fast as possible to save the Planet, go figure). I think he went down under for a visit also. Maybe that’s the Guy or P[strike]h[/strike]erson that’s being referred.
EVERYONE Should Understand That Business Insider Is A Lame Fed Mouthpiece https://chartistfriendfrompittsburgh.blogspot.com/2013/04/everyone-should-understand-that.html
“And we don’t tell people to change their lifestyle in order to save the planet, [ but to save their own asses “]
Bravo, there Ilargi! And the last half of that sentence is the key. My friend, THAT is the incentive element that will fix it all!
Let pain bring about change. It’s a harsh, but natural solution.
Pain at the pump? Well, gas consumption is falling. Pain at he grocery? Garden supplies and seeds soaring. When consumption is less affordable, it will ultimately be reduced…like it or not. Two by four, meet side of head.
Free, Underground, Alternative, Shadow, Local or what ever you want to call them, markets, will find equilibrium eventually.
The power of Voluntary Association.
Now, if all the holy anointed interventionists, alchemist social mechanics and special interests would just get out of the way, the process could begin. It will happen anyway, so why stall it?
” ~~~ Since I’m learning, I reserve the right to change my mind.~~~”
Excellent, JAL. More often the better, way I see it! It’s a sign of advancement in the scheme of things.
More I learn, the less I “know.”
I have been trying to make changes to my attitude and reduce complications in life in order to prepare for a more disconnected future.
I have been doing so since 2005 or so, explaining to anyone who is interested why.
One thing I have noticed is my considerable fatigue, kind of emotional fatigue at being the Cassandra of my peers. There’s a big hit on your social fitness at the present because people do quite often feel a great deal of subconscious unease about the current way of life. One thing they don’t want is the “red pill” – (hope I have the colour right). They don’t want the danger or futility crystallised in the way Nicole does because it might just remove their remaining mojo, their remaining impetus to continue day to day, and of course, damage their current social fitness as well.
You have to be strong already to take on this level of dislocation.Anyway I have fatigue, so I’m slowing down a bit, but I’m not stopping.
Anyone else get this?
James
James,
I am reading the translation of a Swedish book “Let the Right one” about a boy of 15 who falls in love with a vampire who is 12 years old (or 200, take your pick).
I learnt an awful lot about vampires and of how people who have been bitten, and survived the experience, go on to become vampires and zombies themselves. All almost quite new to me. Quite enthralling stuff.
Your reflections on life as a “Cassandra” have a lot in common with life as a vampire. People are afraid that you might “infect” them and that it will bring permanent bad luck to their household if they should become like you. Quite understandable really. 🙂
Thanks Nassim!
I think this subject is worthy of more consideration and I made noises about writing a TAE article about it. I feel I have a better grip of the emotional side of things than the technical, but I’m not very confident of my voice so the article never got written.
Because of my location, I have met Stoneleigh and Ilargi on more than once occasion and count them as good friends, they both understand very well the psychological barriers to change.
I think you need two toolkits in order to make the necessary changes in your life to cope with the future, that which helps you understand the bigger picture, the trends and the approximate reasons why collapse is happening, and the toolkit which helps you manage your own reaction and grieving process and understands where others stand in their understanding, their investment level in the current paradigm, and their ability to change direction.Because neither I nor my family have the ability to really change to a more sustainable lifestyle, I’m concentrating on reducing my (our) discretionary spending and getting mentally prepared so that I can be someone who prevents over-reaction in other and helps them understand what’s happening in a structural sense rather than relying on narratives from the media.
Hi Folks,
Telegraph, By Andrew Oxlade 12:00PM BST 15 Apr 2013
‘Win win’ for house prices as 1m prepare to buy, say economists
The Ernst & Young Item Club today predicted improvements for the property market, with a million buyers poised to buy.Britain’s property market is a “win-win” scenario in 2013, the influential Ernst & Young Item Club said in its spring forecast today.
It said incomes would edge higher, largely thanks to the rise in the personal tax allowance for most Britons, and predicted that mortgage affordability would improve, with the impact “multiplied” by the Chancellor’s new Help to Buy scheme.
The first phase of the Help to Buy scheme began earlier this month. The Item Club, an independent group of economists, said that with £3.5bn of government funds paying 20pc of the purchase price, the scheme could underpin 100,000 mortgages worth £200,000 each.
The report stated: “We think one million families will move house in the coming year, a sharp increase from the recent level of 800,000, driving higher house prices, additional housing-related spending, and ultimately construction.”
With Help to Buy, those with a 5pc deposit can get an extra 20pc of deposit as a loan from the Government when buying a newbuild home for up to £600,000. The loan is interest free for five years and carries a low rate of interest after that, starting at 1.75pc but rising each year ahead of inflation.
etc.
But in their editorial they question this optimism:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/telegraph-view/9996408/%5DWin-win-forecast-for-house-prices-may-be-built-on-shaky-foundations.html
It said incomes would edge higher, largely thanks to the rise in the personal tax allowance for most Britons, and predicted that mortgage affordability would continue to improve, pushing up prices.
Home loans are becoming cheaper chiefly because of the Bank of England’s Funding for Lending Scheme, backed by the Government, which is offering £80bn of loans at rates as low of 0.25pc, to banks and building societies. The result has been a fall in mortgage rates, and the Bank is predicting more declines to follow.
…
Rates remain at rock bottom and quantitative easing helps keep mortgage costs pinned down. Demand, therefore, is clearly being supported, by the State if nothing else.On the supply side there are clear constraints. Government forecasts suggest the number of households in England will grow from 21.7m in 2008 to 27.5m in 2033, which implies an average 232,000 homes must be built each year to keep up with demand.
But the most recent figures from the Home Builders Federation show permission was only granted for 45,000 homes in the final quarter of 2012. This was a vast 66pc improvement on a year earlier but the total falls short of a theoretical target of 58,000 required to match projected demand.
Of course, measuring these forces of supply and demand can only ever be theoretical. The notion of a restricted number of places to live on an island nation with an attractive standard of living is compelling for those selling the story of rising house prices.
But history shows the danger of believing the forces of supply and demand can be coordinated into a forecast. In Japan, an island state more densely populated than the UK, the population grew from 123m to 128m between 1990 and 2011 – two decades that saw Japanese house prices plummet.
(Bold in text added)
$200k (australian) mortgage? We got £200 sterling mate! That’s $295,540 (as of 18/4/13) of yer Ozzie dollars! Owzat!
Excuse me if I sound a little mad, but its seems the only suitable response in this current reality. I have a sneaking suspicion that these house prices will be kept high come what may (at least in official statistics) as a way of siphoning off every spare penny (as Illarhghi has pointed out) into the [strike]military-industrial[/strike] housing-government complex (well they got rid of the government-housing complex after all). The delusion and fear of ‘not having your own place’ will trump any affordability issues; these people both young and old, will pay through the nose until they are jobless, penniless and on the streets. And even then they will moan if house prices start to come down… Its more than predatory, its a national psychosis.
L,
Sid.Hi Carbon,
The very definition of madness is being outside of the consensus reality of the society that your are [strike]obliged[/strike] forced to participate in. It is very difficult trying to think differently without that psychological conditioning of wanting to conform kicking in. The only way I have found that is remotely useful IMHO, is to consider oneself as an early explorer in new territory. You are marking out new ground and exploring new ways of being. It seems like the hardest thing, but in actual fact it is what humans have done throughout their history. Its only the dumbing down process of mass education (you know being herded into just one age group, controlled with bells and whistles, threats of violence and exclusion, i.e. your average concentration camp experience) that prevents everyone going off and doing their own thing. And it takes energy to swim against the tide; its exhausting. And its why so many people end up compromising in their efforts, and often get quite negative when confronted with the truths that they already know; often the most un-hearing are those who have already heard. They know the score, have felt the pain and exhaustion and just don’t want any more of it. I have seen a lot of this in such movement as the Transitions Towns thing, where people just get burnt out trying to deal with it. They end up instead fighting some more familiar battle to do with a re-assuringly familiar political or environmental agenda, rather than have to radically restructure their own neurons (which is why teenagers are always tired btw – their brains are working overtime – that and your two year old, who is doing much the same thing. Maybe you should join him/her in his/her exploration of their world on their terms – who knows you might actually discover a few things if you can get over the stuckness of your own world view – I bet your toddlers not sleep deprived! – sorry hope that doesn’t sound patronising)). That’s the weird thing about the human brain, it is infinitely reconfigurable, if we let it, and don’t allow other’s opinions of what we’re doing stop us.
Even if the great god TEOTWAWKI doesn’t strike, at least you can say you led an ‘interesting life’… :cheer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stOoC-Ikx7A
We Shall Not Cease From Exploration – T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) reads the concluding lines of Little Gidding – The fourth and final poem of his Four Quartets:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always —
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.L,
Sid.Hi Chartist,
That sure looks ominous:
&
Hope you don’t mind me showing the charts directly.
Thanks,
L,
Sid.As well as gradually getting their country homestead in order with her like-minded husband over the past 5 or 6 years, my sister has recently been focusing on ‘inner transition’. And in sharing this, she has been finding some receptive audiences. She has just blogged one of her most concise statements:
https://transitioncornwall.com/2013/04/17/earth-day-2013-death-and-life/
Up river from Cornwall, in Brockville, ON, I’ve been tagging articles with similar concerns as ‘coping’:
Thanks Sid
I think you have described my situation quite well, except that I can make my own internal transtion just fine. When I learned about oil depletion in 2005 ish, I joined the dots with the end of the growth economy – something most people seem unable (or unwilling) to do.
It’s the effort of thinking differently to the prevailing opinion which is tiring. You know, when you meet someone, discuss financial collapse (they call it recession) and they can only see growth and “restarting the economy” as the light at the end of the tunnel, while we might see a restart of business as usual in the current paradigm to be one of the worst options, which would bleed away the last of our resources without producing sustainability, and which would widen the gap between rich and poor.
Now you know you are messing with somebody’s noodle when you tell them that “recovery” would be a disaster and a whole new way of thinking which addresses declining energy and resources fairly is our only hope, and that probably means relocalisation and a redefinition of what we think we need in life.
That’s when you become Nassim’s infectious Cassandra – (see Nassim’s comment below) You can see the pain of their cognitive dissonance.Incidentally I was one of three or four people who registered our city as a transition town. I have seen several rounds of transition participants burn out and leave, and now I can’t participate either because of the toddler care. But, due to the hard work of others, the transition town has morphed into an urban food collective where volunteers grow vegetables for a box scheme. That’s good, and a whole lot more practical than the peak-oil talking shop that it once was.
James
James,
I’ve shared previously my positive experience with The Work of Byron Katie. From her and it I learned that everything is perfect, everything happens for me (not to me), the past and future don’t exist, what’s not my business or your business is God’s business (or, simply, reality), and that stressful feelings are signals to question the thoughts behind them and turn them around. In short, I learned to love reality.
Katie’s form of inquiry has been the path to freedom, clarity, sanity, happiness, peace, and understanding for me. I use it on my relationships as well as thoughts about big-picture context of the sort discussed here. It’s simple enough that a child can do it, and it’s not unnecessarily wrapped in spirituality or the like.
Her first book, Loving What Is, is a great place to start, as is her web site (or The Work web site), where you can see videos of her facilitating people doing The Work. My favorite of her books is Question Your Thoughts, Change the World, though they all have been helpful.
I’ve also found it easy to share, which might appeal to you.
I agree on the need to build up ones cash position in order to get a hold of one of the few chairs that will be available when the music stops. The question I have is, “Where does one find a safe place to store their cash and in what form? Are T-Bill accounts at Schwab or Fidelity safe? Cash accounts are MF Global certainly were not. Cash on deposit at banks are not cash, so where does one safely park their “cash” and still be able to access it when the banking holiday’s are declared, or when accounts are frozen (as in Cyprus)? Any ideas?
Cliff,
First, there’s investing in hard goods that you will need down the line, tools, maybe some land (property makes sense only if it will allow you to produce basic needs, food, wood, water, shelter, that sort of thing, and not just one of them). As for “money”, the backyard bank is good for the first batch. One needs to be creative about how to make one’s deposits there water- and fireproof etc., but it can be done. We don’t explain how here, because that alone would make the backyard a less safe bank. T-bills can be good if the backyard becomes too small (the government won’t default on them), but not when kept in custody of a large financial institution: like any and all investments, having them under one’s own control, within arm’s reach, is vital.
Hello! I have been reading your excellent blog over this past winter & thought it time to speak up. I am a mother of three children, ages 2, 3 1/2, and 5 living in the N. Plains of U.S. in South Dakota. We are in the NW area of the extreme drought when you look at all that red on the drought monitor, so have no illusions about the severity of climate ‘change’ and the implications. I have been desperately trying to find any forum or network of ‘awake’ parents to communicate with, but my findings have been pretty limited, as in none.
I try to follow the information on the economic side of things, but must admit, a lot of it goes over my head. The housing market is very expensive, but we managed to find a rental house when we moved here about 2 1/2 yrs ago, with the intention of buying this year. We have decided against it, instead working to eliminate debt, per advice given here. (Plus, I find the ‘zombie’ house next door to be a little ominous, as well the for sale signs everywhere on over-priced houses.)
We have reduced most debt, with apprx. $10,000 in medical bills remaining, but I’m not sure if I should use a large portion of my remaining ‘savings’ to pay that off, or just keep up w/monthly installments.
Because of renting, we aren’t free to do as much as we’d like as far as gardening, and could barely grow a tomato last summer with the heat/drought anyway. Even though we can’t really dig in at our current location, we do subsist through hunting/fishing, have good practical skills, and extensive tools, but really worry about many things regarding the children. I have many questions, but will spare you for now. I have learned a lot reading here, so just wanted to take the next step, though not sure how much insight I have to offer to the discussion.
Thank you again for this forum!Welcome Badlands,
And don’t be a stranger about what you might contribute. We are certainly interested in your story, in what you’ve done and why, in your neck of the woods. I don’t know that we have a lot of Dakota around here. And don’t be shy about asking any questions you think you might want to ask. Plenty of “awake” parents (to an extent, of course).
I for would would really really like it if you could expand on what Nicole says in the couple of paragraphs in bold where she says “Nobody has a printing press and is generating physical currency. What they’re doing is monetizing debt”.
Could you explain what is going on between the government, the Fed and the banks? So the Fed is not printing money, it is buying Treasury bills. This is different… how? What is it buying its T-bills with?
The Fed is a bank. All the big players have accounts. Imagine you are one of them, and you own 100 billion in treasury bills. The Fed comes to you one day and says “gosh I’d like to buy those treasury bills from youu, and in exchange, I’ll give you 100 billion dollars.” You agree.
How does the Fed pay you? It credits your account at the Fed with 100 billion dollars.
Where did it get this “money” from? It didn’t. It just changed the numbers in your account – in the “up” direction. That’s the Fed’s super power. It can credit anyone’s account with any amount it feels like.
Of course the rules of the game require the Fed to account for all this crediting.
Now then, as the seller you *could* use this money to buy stuff with. You could withdraw this money from your account, and buy buildings, or bribe congressmen, or whatever. Or you could keep it at the account at the Fed. $1 in new credit money in your Fed account spends exactly the same as the green FRN in your pocket that you earned selling apples on the street.
Of course, by crediting your account with $100 billion new dollars of “credit money” the Fed instantaneously reduces the value of dollars everywhere by some percentage. More credit money is “out there” now, and no new things were created. That devaluation is why people call it “money printing” and they object to it.
Like a starving man eating his own excrement to gain nutrition, no bureaucracy can live in a medium of its own waste.
Conversely, I’ve been trying to cut down on the carbon hysteria, co2 is a non-isolated variable in a stochastic system, with the greatest number of coupled variables being unknown unknowns, hence no predictive qualities may be attached to its atmospheric concentration alone.
Its a greenhouse gas, for sure, inside a greenhouse. The planetary atmosphere is vastly complex, randomly chaotic and not as predictable as a greenhouse. Since atmospheric co2 has risen another 10ppm in the past ten years, now approaching 400ppm, but the global temperature has not risen in this period [or in fact at all since the ending of glaciation], the elementary greenhouse-hypothesis seems questionable.Moreover the anthropogenic element is non-falsifiable and not causally determinable. The rapid rise in atmospheric co2 since the industrial age is anomalous by paleo-atmospheric standards, but not necessarily caused by industry or deforestations, or not provably so under scientific scrutiny of falsifiability. For the convenience of urban civilization and ecosystemic integrity, atmospheric co2 probably shouldn’t rise above 500 ppm during this interglacial period, unless other variables require it to.
Back in the cretaceaus atmospheric co2 was presumably above 3000ppm, yielding a rich tropical biosphere, but solar intensity was 10% lower too, and atmospheric oxygen much higher, and there were mechanisms in place which prevented aquatic ph-forcing by carbonic acid, since there are hard-shelled aquatic fossils aplenty from that period.Climatology is a hopelessly politicised pseudo-science with no reliable predictive functions but is nonetheless used as powerful tool of social control. The political demand for scientific ‘consensus’ in predictive climatology is fallacious and unscientific, consensus is a political term only. The methods of research funding by green-industry profit incentives compromise scientific integrity.
Of more immediate concern than carbon footprints is the artificial cloud coverage [possibly involving chemtrails, welsbach seeding, ionospheric/stratospheric heating via microwave resonance] which now regularly appears overhead and is clearly caused by the intense airtravel around the large airport here.
On trailly days, the dimming-effect of this artifical cloud coverage easily reduces solar radiative intensity by 10%, diminishing the effectiveness of all photosynthesis, and if prolonged and global in scope, inducing an autonomous rise in atmospheric co2, in conjunction with a collapse of terrestrial and aquatic foodchains [aggravated by cumulative metallic contaminant toxicities and soil ph-forcing], more quickly and with greater certainty than temperature-coupled feedback trajectories solely dependent on atmospheric trace gasses [co2, methane, water vapour].Shifting local weather patters or global climate change, as witnessed, are not entirely unrelated to the massive clandestine weather modification/geoengineering programs going on everywhere, invalidating all measurements of coupled variables and rendering all climate models obsolete.
However, there remain perfectly good economic reasons to advocate sustainable energy development, relocalised food production and ecosystem preservation which have nothing to do with atmospheric constituents or climate, insofar as those also maintain or increase economic and cultural wellbeing locally, if not globally.
Downsizing is a challenge, but I’m so glad I moved to a rural area in Costa Rica some 20 years ago, where most of my neighbors still know and practice the basic skills that kept them going for centuries. Fortunately a few friends and other like-minded families have joined the effort here at Pueblo Verde. We don’t need much to keep us warm, but beach wear is handy to cool off after a day turning the compost piles.
More and more people are saying different versions of this blog.
More and more people are feeling the consequences of the actions of the central banks.Ron Paul & Jim Rogers: “There’s More Chaos To Come”
Here is three minutes of clarity from Ron Paul and Jim Rogers…”I would expect that there is going to be a lot more chaos still to come.” – Ron Paul; “They won’t take our bank accounts…they will take our retirement accounts.” – Jim Rogers
correction:
THEY are already taking our retirement accounts by keeping interest low and by printing more money.
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