John Day
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Richard Heinberg has a very good look at our societal adaptations over history to resources, and our ability or inability feed ourselves and grow our societies, cultures, religions, armies, and so on.
For every complex and thorny problem, there is a simple and direct solution (which is wrong).
We have lifetimes of grinding effort, every day, every meal, every need of ourselves and our families and friends ahead of us.
Somebody could just start pushing big red buttons and end it all.“Holmgren’s al-right with me,
Holmgren sees the way it should be,
Holmgren knows a good thing.
Plant that bell and let it ring”Sung to the tune of “Home Grown”, by Neil Young
I was at this show.
🙂@ Diogenes
What to have in the way of firepower, varmint guns, plinkers, hand guns, hunting rifles, assault rifles, etc. is a fairly personal choice, based largely on life experience with/without guns, culture and subjective feelings.
I don’t think we all have to feel the same, be the same, or even agree, here.
I think there are lots of right and wrong solutions along the way.
🙂We’ve all been struggling with what comes next, and nations and multinationals have too.
There is a lot of testing for what might be the right war, the Goldilocks war, and nothing is really measuring up. All too risky for irreversible damage, going into the time of much less.
The US has been preparing Americans for a variety of wars, and China is doing so, and Japan, and Taiwan. Korea is still at war. The mideast looks played out. Iran looks like a bridge too far.
The war has to be a big excuse for global economic collapse, and it has to be a transition into a steady-state or contracting global economy.
The war has to be bad enough to justify a command economy, like the USSR had, but everywhere.
If the US can’t go to war with Russia, China, Iran, etc. then the best scapegoat has got to be North Korea.
North Korea has nukes, missiles, motive, means, and has even been built up as having a cyber-warfare unit. There is information out there that Japan’s atomic bomb program in WW-2 was located in North Korea, and that the Russian EMP warhead technology may have been supplied to North Korea long ago.
The perfect nuclear attack on the US is supposedly an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) device directly above Kansas. More than half the US grid would be knocked out. (It is something like 5 grids, not counting Hawaii, as I recall.)
This means none of the major economic powers has to be destroyed, and the risk of excess damage to “winners” is eliminated.
The damage has to be “just right”, Goldilocks style.
Everybody in the gated-community set gets thrown under this bus, as do all the retirements in the world.
There will be lots of martial law, and the internet will get high levels of overt policing of thought crime.
The resources required to keep the underclasses fed and jailed will get cut way back, and the under-the-bus gated-community set will have their hackles up for class war.
Concentration camps?
The economy of this country, stripped to bare essentials, really needs about 40% of the workers it has now, right? So much of it just takes flows of capital and goods from around the world to keep the burgers flipping and strip-malls from closing.
Something big can be used to get the first 50% reduction in use of resources and fuels in the USA.
Can anybody find a better scapegoat scenario than North Korea lobbing an EMP nuke at the continental US?
Cuba? I don’t think the Cuba thing worked out 50 years ago, and it’s too late now.Thanks Nicole,
I’ll send this out tonight.
To SteveB and Dr Diablo, I’ll say that picking technical faults with this essay is an immature ego-defense mechanism, which might reduce cognitive-dissonance in the short term, but probably not even that.
Embrace this truth.
There is no easy way out.
I’m creating a kitchen garden, where there was not one before last winter.
The whole back yard. It is a lot of continuous hard work. Permaculture takes decades to arrange. You eat from somewhere else in that time, and probably after.
All the permies I know, serious farmers in Texas and Hawaii, eat over half their food from grocery stores.
Get to work. Work hard.
Know what this is about. It is not academic.@ Diablo,
Lots of species, dominant and non-dominant, have gone extinct.
It’s somewhere between possible and inevitable.
Calling timing is the tough part, huh?
We all suffer and die.
We are now facing a paradigm shift, and it is worth shaking ourselves pretty deeply, uprooting our presumptions, as we wander into this thing.
No amount of preparation is enough.
No redoubt is safe.
We are in this together, and cannot ignore the suffering of “others” abstractly.
I’m working, and meditating, reading, gardening, biking, opening the windows.
I am still completely dependent upon this voracious global economy for my needs, as are all of those who I love.
Tough spot we are in, compadre…Thanks for the reply, Nicole.
I helped arrange your talk in Austin, May 2010, and biked over to the Unitarian Church to chat in the courtyard ahead of the talk.
I truly wish you and New Zealand well, and that general area is the region that we liked best. We did not make it to the North Island on our bike tour.
My “final” move to Kohala, Hawaii, after working there 3 times before, which Jenny and I made New Year’s Eve 2012, did not work out, because of clinic financial stresses. I was not able to see 1.5 times as many patients each day, despite working 11 hr “8 hr days”.
We moved back to Austin and I planted a kitchen garden.
This is sure not ideal, but our family members have needed us a lot since we have returned, and would have missed our help if we were still in Kohala.
Can’t run away, so gotta’ learn and do wherever life may deposit you.
Aloha,
JohnWhat might be the next global financial scheme to replace the current one, when it pukes its last blood?
There is a lot of scurrying for gold lately, but I’m not very imaginative.Motueka is OK. We bike toured the circumference of South Island in Jan/Feb 2006, the tail end of our 9 month bike/backpack world tour, mom, dad and four teenage siblings.
The weather is nice. The Kiwis seemed pretty much oblivious to troubles in the world, and very positive that things were all working out OK.
I was looking at New Zealand as a haven for my family, and interviewed for a job in Christchurch. The finances wouldn’t come close to working…
That site doesn’t look very arable. There are apples, grapes and kiwi fruit grown fairly close… There’s goat cheese sometimes.Can we as a species evolve past the point where our numbers are controlled by sociopathic elites, somehow a separate race, who we slavishly follow, to slaughter and be slaughtered by the “others”, who are actually just like us?
(It’s a run on sentence and a rhetorical question. Sorry…)
Here is a salute to the Shanghai Cooperation Council.
May their trade without US dollars burgeon, and may their group of multilateral trading partners grow rapidly.
May the US dollar, the Fed, and the ECB collapse soon, and may this bring an end to exponentially-growing-debt-based-fiat-money.
Gotta go pray to the aliens, or something.
It was nice to see that Vladimir Putin went to a spiritual retreat with his guru on a remote island with a Russian Orthodox monastery.
May he be the working hands of a benevolent and compassionate universe, or at least keep taking the non-military moral high ground.Hi Ilargi and Stoneleigh,
I’m personally fine with Stockman, Zero Hedge, Keiser, Yves Smith, Simon Black, Charles Hugh Smith, and a host of others.
I sure do appreciate the vast screening which you must do to present so many good articles and essays.Thanks Ilargi,
It’s funny that the tables have turned, or that I see it that way, as Russia has a moral foreign policy, and the US embodies the “Empire” of Star Wars.
As for me, I’ve been working to make a garden since November. I have veggies, deeply dug and amended soil (so much work!), drip watering, fruiting trees, perineal plants, and some grapevines.Yes, thanks a lot, Ilargi.
I don’t say that often enough.
This comes from that place where you see the tsunami coming, stand there and explain the fact, knowing that the act dooms you.
Saving one’s self is futile and temporary, anyway, huh?How long until our economy is largely dedicated to mitigating climate volatility effects to keep us alive? Room for entrepreneurs, huh?
@ Rapier
ZH started much smaller than it is now. When I started looking at it in spring of 2008, it was seemingly smaller than TAE, but by fall of 2009, ZH had a lot more firepower. Something happened. ZH was suddenly posting news before Google News. ZH had funding, personnel, connections. Something big had happened. Funds from somewhere.
The bent is somewhat Libertarian, but the Tyler Durdens don’t seem to have ulterior motives that I can discern. It may well be that ZH readers are watched by the NSA, in some way. TAE readers must be tarred by that same brush.
Here’s the mother lode of 5 sigma from the mean news: http://www.rense.com
I gotta be on a special bad list for looking at Rense, you too, now.@ Pipefit
Referring to Holmgren’s “nested scenarios” in his Crash on Demand essay, there is little that individuals and small groups can do, other than exercise the “Lifeboat” option of making little permaculture sites, requiring as little external input as possible, and buffering water, fuel, food and currency a bit.
With peak cheap fuel a memory, and consequences inescapable, we should look at the forest. Each dying tree has a story, too, of course.@ Viscount St. Albans
In August 2008 I had been reading TAE for about 6 months, and this other site called “Zero Hedge” for about the same, and I wondered why the hell gold was going DOWN, when obviously people should be fleeing to gold for safety.
Later that year it was apparent that JPM had massively shorted gold, and ships full of gold had gone to Saudi Arabia.
“My” analysis was confirmed, but markets were revealed as deceptive scams.
I went to Hawaii to work for a few months later that year, then early 2009, too.It is up to individuals and small cohesive groups how to live on 10% of the current fossil fuel use. It is important to realize that 10% won’t begin to cover the embedded/invisible fossil fuel use in the products that we use.
Keep your nice steel gardening tools in good repair.This article from last month, from Paul Craig Roberts, about the hows and whys of gold fixing, is particularly revealing in the current context.
It is all coming apart.
Duck-and-Cover!
David Holmgren has the third part of his Crash on Demand essay out, scanning our possible paths forward.I think that’s succinct, Ian. I’ve enjoyed visiting Thailand since 1988, and “politics” there is like a somewhat damped civil war. There is live ammo being used agains separatist groups in the South, and the Bangkok elites don’t want any rural farm-trash having a say about anything.
The populists who are elected by rural Thais are corrupt, but populist.
The corrupt but elitist groups can never get a real majority, however they run the Emperor franchise.
He’s a really long-lived king, and his eldest son is despised as scum.
It will get way worse when King Bhumibol dies.@Professorlocknload
It is the buffering capacity for solar which is so very expensive, not the panels or inverters. The buffering capacity is above 75% of the long term cost.
Your utility company takes a conservative financial position with you. If you want to have solar on your roof, they will buffer for you at a cost where they make a risk-free profit for that service. You might price your buffering capacity in nickel-iron “Edison cell” batteries. Beutilityfree.com has good deals on Chinese made nickel iron batteries. They last essentially forever if you change the potassium hydroxide electrolyte each decade, and use distilled water.
I put together a modest system with these, for Hawaii, where the sun shines and you never need air conditioning. It was educational.
Lead acid batteries are a temporizing measure, not really a plan.
It looks like a long energy descent.
Conservation is the low hanging fruit, huh?I’m attending the permaculture design course in the back yard again tomorrow.
“Farm Forth”, as my friend, Randy likes to say.
🙂
Good work again, Nicole.Thanks so much Nicole, for presenting a deep and nuanced view of the developments over time in the Icelandic financial crisis.
Most of what I have read has been “horse race” style reporting.
“Iceland is winning by showing backbone!”
It’s nice and it’s what we all want to see, but this version rings truer.@ Bluebird,
How do paradigms shift? Who starts that process?
Yes, it is a smallish percentage who see the global cheap oil Ponzi collapsing, but it is not so hard to see that oil will run out. The poor can see what they have not. A majority of Americans and plenty of Europeans and Asians can see that fuel and food and rent have gotten expensive.
There is a certain resonance to growing a food garden. I can’t claim that for bike commuting. At least doing something, and being seen, will begin the process of normalization of the activity for others.
Supposedly 5% who openly change paradigms can start that process along.
Anyway, it’s easier to change before the harshness forces it in a regimented way.
Sudden, regimented change is not always survivable.
I remember when, by the early 1980s, everybody agreed that energy efficiency and high mileage were good.
Understanding global Ponzi schemes, global elites, the JFK assassination, the suspension of laws of physics on 9/11/01; all of these can be chosen as markers for the kind of mind that can look into a future of “degrowth”
This site (blogspot incarnation) really got me looking at financial collapse issues in the spring of 2008.
Thanks Ilargi and Stoneleigh (Nicole)!Oops, Powerdown essay link.
(This essay posits a really Buddhist worldview, ya’know?)
To be less hypothetical, we can all start engaging in “powerdown”, the voluntary reduction in energy use. There are lots of aspects to it, and as I became a bike-commuter in 2006, I began to conceptualize my needs and travel activities differently. Powerdown is a process, upon which we can voluntarily embark, and in a number of ways. I’ve dug up the back yard a foot deep and taken out all the stones, and I’ve planted a winter garden.
I’m a baby boomer with 4 adult kids in higher education.
My wife and I work hard, and the kids work hard.
We all have low expectations for the future.
Eat real food. Be active in productive labor, like food gardening.
Death is the easy part.Rapier, Jon Stewart is in agreement with what you say here. He lets the “conservative” elites paint the background, while he provides the accents, and takes the pope’s side, too.
He’s at his deflationary best here.
“When Worlds Collide” might be the follow-on to “Parallel Universe”, but when will those worlds collide?
Hugh Hendry has been a perma-bear, and he’s right, and we all know it, but what is he seeing, which makes him publicly and overtly change his tack completely?
This is an investing tactical change, not a strategic change of view, as I take it.
This is, as I read his twisted-tongue-in-cheek, a limited-term capitulation to the ability of central bankers to blow one more big asset bubble for a couple more years.
The other option is that they can’t, and we get collapse sooner, much sooner. YMMV.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-12-06/hugh-hendry-throws-bearish-towel-his-full-must-read-letterHi Sid,
Sorry, I don’t have much time of my own to get online, just a little in the late evening.
The extent of arctic ice in the spring isn’t much of an indicator, since it expected to be near maximum extent. September tells the story of thinning and weakening and breaking up.
It’s a lot thinner, even now, than it was when we went to discotheques in tight bell bottoms.
It might be all broken up in a few Septembers.
Hard to tell, huh?Canada has another big problem. Vast swarms of pine beetles have crossed over from their ancient containment West of the Rockies, and are consuming the boreal forest, which has never known them, and is defenseless.
This is because the winters have gotten a little warmer.
One must really wonder about who intended what in this drawn out fiasco of squeezing out all the blood before applying the tourniquet.
We were told that the Russian oligarchs would be caught with their pants down and all their ill-gotten gains in far away, remote, inaccessible Cyprus would be forfeited to shore up the poor little country.
This would prevent the ECB from taking the whole loss. The ECB was reported to hold a lot of bank bonds from Cypriot banks, and Cypriot government bonds. Maybe they still do. Later we heard and heard and heard that details couldn’t be worked out, until they finally fell back on just letting the poor bank collapse naturally, and let the chips fall where they may…
However, by then we were hearing that the nasty Russians got their assets out through English branches.
Just who gave whom a reach-around here? (Please forgive my indelicacy)
How many more details will we slowly get, of how the little people got sucked dry when their representative appeared to protect them, but somehow did nothing of the sort?Hey, I’ve been enjoying your wisdom since you were 4 months old.
Here is more of the meme of “Global Financial Collapse Might Avert Global Extinction” (definitive answers in next 2 decades, stay tuned).
Professor Guy McPherson, at Nature Bats Last makes it really clear in the second little video, the one with the 3 undersea pictures:How does one create alternatives?
It is very difficult,and needs to already be in process.
Going back down the economic ladder, to places where people eat from their gardens and don’t have so live without industrial fuel, food and technology, is the key (I think).
Oh, and you have to be directly useful to the community of resourceful poor people you have gone to join.
Speaking the language helps.There is a reference even older and more perplexing than the Limits to Growth thesis, and it’s not actually different, but comes at it from a very different angle.
Some of the greats were involved in this project, but sadly, they are mainly known for their later efforts, which really don’t make the same point at all. This was brilliant in 1972.
I keep thinking about mitigation, and I’m often led back to the idea of very warm garment, which are still comfortable, and can be worn in house or bed, when temperatures are cold, by skinny-old-ladies.
I just don’t have any fresh ideas.
Things can be done with Peltier junctions as heat-pumps, and there are some special fibers which might be used as heat transfer channels, by these things are pretty speculative, compared to wool and goose-down.
Jimmy Carter was very unpopular when he appeared on TV in a sweater, urging Americans to turn down their thermostats that winter.
Ronald Reagan borrowed from the future, sold out Social Security, “proved deficits don’t matter”, and claimed that “happy days were here again”. He was a “good president”.
Maybe warm, comfortable and inexpensive clothes can be a policy priority.
Some kind of warmers for wrists and ankles could just be thermal mass, heated on the stove, to keep hands and feet warm, but that seems cumbersome.I don’t think Barak Obama was allowed to get where he is without having multiple kill-switches attached.
He can’t really do anything independent of his masters.
FDR could.
Different days back then.
We’ve had hints all along of the kind of scandals which could eject Obama faster than the bullets that got JFK.
I’m sure there are bigger things than that to pop the top on.
No surprises from Obama.
He shrinks the economy while supporting the top 0.01%.
He lives, and prospers.
At least we can see that.After an intense 3 days of difficult choices and complexities of packing order, a 45 ft shipping container is packed for rural Hawaii, including a 13 year old Chevy (Toyota) Prizm and an ’87 Isuzu P’UP diesel long-bed pick-up , both with under 90k miles and a lot of fixing-up.
Also a complete off-grid solar power set-up, with 10 kWH of Edison cells is in there, and 5 55 gallon Kikkoman soy sauce shipping barrels of food grade plastic, and other forward-looking tidbits.
I’m optimistic that it and I will get there.
I’m flying back for Christmas on 12/21/12, late flight from Kona.
If the world ends that day, I am going to stand there and be a pain-in-the-ass until they credit my card for the flight.
