[garob]

Excellent essay Illargi.

Apart from the security services and the military industrial complex there is another aspect I would like to highlight though: Our growth based economies have run out of room for growth, and our highly leveraged financial system has run out of collateral.
Ours is literally a system based on “grow or die”, the situation is about to get desperate, it is truly late in the day.
So there you have it, in a single word: Lebensraum!

It is not about options, NATO si truly Das IV Reich, its mission to secure real estate to expand into, for Wall Street, The City of London, and all of the rest. And where & what else than “Drang nach Osten”, into the most valuable piece of real estate there is left: Russia!

War is coming. We will never see the beast of international finance lie down and die voluntarily. The beast demands to be fed, regardless of the consequences ..

[garob]

“Ironically (and there’s lots of irony in the story of our tragic species), we produce more food per capita today than ever before”
We don’t really produce anything.
Modern agriculture is just another extraction business: We extract nutrients from the soil and truck it to the consumer in the form of food.
We supplement the loss of nutrients by shipping supplements from far away places and apply to the soil as fertilizers.
All of these fertilizers, most notably phosphorus, constitute an extraction of non-renewable material, and is thus in no way different from extracting oil.
All nutrients are subsequently lost when being flushed down the drain in that modern contraption: The Water Closet.
A true “killer application” if there ever was one.
A wonderful solution to the problem of hygiene in crowded places.
With the inevitable unintended consequences.
Not an irony, more a full on tragedy.

[garob]

“It implies we may have to do with less, and that’s not what we’re hardwired to do”.
It wouldn’t matter if we changed our minds and did with less, on the contrary: Doing so would crash the financial system instantly.
How could it be otherwise, who would lend money and carry risk if there wasn’t a remuneration in the form of a future dividend?
I.e. a future that needs to allways be bigger than the present?

To change this would need a totally new system, something that cannot be achieved by individual action.

[garob]

Really impressive!
The chap in the middle is checking his smartphone, Paris 1954!

[garob]

“What will stop them?”
Now that was an easy one.. Like everywhere in nature flows stop when pressures equalize, i.e. when life becomes equally miserable on all sides of the fences.
Which may not be so far off. Some even root for that outcome.
Eventually a lot of people will be left rueing the day they strayed, strayed so far from their own ones.

[garob]

So Nigeria is the next domino? What a potential megadisaster!
But wait a second: Illargi has a solution: Let them come to Europe! Say, 100 million of them to begin with, that would take at least some of the strain. For a while, anyway.
Surely Europe is under some sort of moral obligation, beeing the only destination reachable from Africa by rubber dingy. Add to that the rest of the MENA-countries, say, another 300 million, and all is set for, well, what?
Sorry about the sarcasm, but as you are claiming to be “The Real Futurists” I think you have lost an important bit of the plot lately.
You may be familiar with “Liebigs law of minimums”. In agriculture the implications are that none of the mayor nutrients can be substituted, neither N, P nor K.
But the modern world has another, just as important component that can not go missing if we are going to avoid agricultural collapse: Credit.
With deflationary debt collapse imminent, and I fully concur with The Automatic Earth that this is what is around the corner, modern agriculture goes down with it.
No credit for seeds, nor fertilizer, the mentioned N, P, K, equals no food. As in nothing to eat.
Now there might be huge questions concerning our modern agricultural practices, but for now it is all we have got.
What is coming up the pike is a Malthusian collapse of unimaginable magnitude.
We will be faced with the proverbial lifeboat dilemma: There are 75 people onboard the lifeboat already, which is designed for 35. Now, there is a sighting of another 50 people out at sea, 100 meters dead ahead: What to to?
Surely the moral thing to do is to haul them on board, at least our sainthood is preserved while we all drown.
I had carried a bit of hope that there would be vestiges of European civilization surviving the bottleneck the human population is heading for, but I am increasingly doubtful.
And like it or not: The only result of an overshoot is collapse, morals be damned.

[garob]

OT with regard to the situation in China, but nevertheless: Thanks for your balanced assessment of the situation in Ukrania a couple of days ago.
Interesting 45min interview with Russian Foreign Minister on Bloomberg today:
https://www.bloomberg.com/video/ukraine-as-close-to-civil-war-as-possible-lavrov-Mxqx9qdZR8OCC1fmUTGbyA.html
He comes across as a very sane man compared to his western peers. It is indeed not the Russians that pose a danger to peace.

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