[John Day]

The situation might be changing as the US backs from the brink and says Russia was not involved, probably a mistake by the rebels, to shoot down MH-17.
This is a big backpedal.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-22/us-state-department-confident-mh17-mistakenly-downed-separatists-finds-no-direct-lin
Maybe London will be impartial in it’s reclamation of black box data for the world to analyze.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-22/mh-17-black-boxes-will-be-analyzed-uk-whose-prime-minister-compares-russian-aggressi

[John Day]

Oh, here’s The Bountiful Sprout, which some friends of mine have been working on for years, and is a going concern.
https://localfoodmarketplace.com/bountifulsprout/
There are set pick-up times and places, and the farmers and eaters coordinate for money and food to show up for the rendezvous. There are other ways to do this, and deliveries can be arranged.

[John Day]

An eBay for food near you? Craigslist for veggies?
This can work, if people participate.
🙂

[John Day]

Thank You, Ilargi.
I will hold your offer in consideration.
I think off grid makes sense within a lifeboat context.
Actually moving to Hawaii (the island, not the archipelago) after working there 3 times, and with the move paid for, was the impetus for my project.
Guess what, I had to move back less than a year later, on my own nickel, due to the little rural clinic I worked at having to run through more elderly patients than could be done properly. It was different than before, but I was the same, so I failed to make the transition, despite being networked with really good people in an ideal place, and welcomed by the small community. The federal government basically mandated that each doctor see 1.5 times as many patients daily as I had before. I worked 11 hr “8 hr days”, but fell short of that mark.
To me, the story of transitions is more important than the story of Edison cells, but it is less satisfying, to be sure…
It looks like I’m in Austin, Texas, bike commuting 28 miles per day, to a clinic that took me back, and I’m grateful, and learning the ins and outs of permaculture-style gardening where I am. I got to the ideal place, but had no time for growing, just work and it fell short, despite all involved having goodwill and good relationships.
I hear people think they can get out of markets before a crash, but find that their transitions don’t work as anticipated.
It seems like there are lots of ways for that to happen in the lesson which is life.
Aloha, my teacher…

Cloudhidden,
Than you, my friend. I suspect I will be working in “green sand” and bone meal when I dig up the summer garden in mid October, when it is a little cooler. I do want to see what the soil analysis tells me. I don’t see that the picture I tried to post showed up. Jungle of 7 foot tomato plants was in the middle of the garden. I hope to get enough veggies to always have fresh, in season, and some to donate.
Perhaps then I may transition to something larger, but therein lies the rub…

🙂

[John Day]

Ilargi,
I’m honored, but my study to put together an off grid solar rig with 1200W of panels and 10kWHr of nickel-iron batteries is mostly summarized in what I wrote above. This very modest system cost about $12k, and I looked for good deals on the right parts.
I completely agree with conservation being the first several steps.
Embedded energy in our tools is of massive importance. I’m sorry to say that the titanium in my nice commuter bike has a huge environmental cost. (I got it used, but I’m still responsible.)
Here’s a pic of the summer garden with 7 foot tall tomato plants.
I just sent off a soil sample. I’m getting a lot of foliage and not much fruit, so I suspect I’ve got deficiencies.
I just moved in here last summer and began the digging for the garden last fall.
I have lots to learn. It will take me awhile. I’m not a slow learner.

[John Day]

alan2102
Buffering capacity is what is lacking for massive shift to wind and solar.
Batteries to hold that much electricity are just too vast to be created.
Would you as a person buy enough battery to run an electric dryer or oven?
You shouldn’t.
Lead acid batteries have crap for life and crap for duty cycles. Deep discharge that sucker once and it’s about 35% of what it was.
Nickel iron batteries need a lot of expensive nickel, but last forever(ish). Thanks Thomas Edison!
Lithium ion batteries are also expensive,and also run into availability and cost issues around lithium. All the variations on super-capacitors are cool, with carbon nanotubes and stuff. I don’t see what has been promised for decades, not yet…
One way around part of the buffer issue is to massively overbuild solar farms, and just not tap all the voltage as current when demand is lower.
Even a 3 times overbuild produces no electricity at night.
Radical conservation is the low-hanging fruit, and each of us is equally free to investigate and practice that art.

[John Day]

@Carbon Waste Life Form,
Thanks for the kind remarks.

@Raleigh,
It’s hard to model sociopaths without looking at the whole game-change that happened when hunter gatherers were overrun with hierachical societies with priests and generals.
Those priests, generals and psychopaths may be seen as the “free-riders” in the essay, and they make the farmers and artisans work harder, generally whipping them through fear and the “alienation of labor from capital”, where workers focus on one job, creating one of the many things they need to live , and rely on the system set up by free-riders for the rest of their needs.
Sociopaths didn’t exist as a subspecies or separate breed in hunter-gatherer groups, where everybody was versatile and multi-talented. They are specialists. Their numbers are poorly represented in expansions, and they try to avoid collapses like the plague, because they cannot survive without free-riding.
Ordinary workers can be taught to live under sociopathic rules, as we now see in this late stage of the Kondratiev Wave we are in, approaching collapse, from lost productivity, and increased free-rider drag.
Be versatile. Be cooperative. Be fair. Be networked. Grow a garden. Ride a bike, and think about your lot without utility services. It’s a lot, but I think we approach another “selection event”.
Be prescient, friends!

[John Day]

Dr Diablo, Carbon waste life form, alan2012, and Ilargi,

“Where’s the flaw?”.
Initial assumptions always have to be scrutinized.
Comments point to diversity, which is not addressed in the essay.
North America had been ravaged by disease, with massive population loss, when many Europeans arrived; South America, too. “Clovis Civilization” did have advanced agriculture, and the early waves of humans to the Americas also did kill off the large land mammals that had not evolved along with humans, and were unwary.
There are implications for learning as a culture(s) over time.
The argument about the high reproduction and aggressive strategy winning out is a “yang” argument. It goes together with patriarchy, patriarchal-god religions, and males controlling both female fertility and the decisions regarding aggression/war.
If history contains long periods of both yang (male) and yin (female) social organizations, there is a certain recognition-bias evidenced here for the periods where yin is overrun by yang.
We do know that when women control their own reproduction, birth rates fall to or below replacement, in modern societies. Could something like this have been the case in pre-Columbian American societies? “Yes”, of course, it could. Looking at the traditions of menstrual houses, where women spent their menstrual periods together, gives a clue. Women who live together tend to coordinate their cycles. If they spend time separate from men, there is a powerful organizing principle at work in the yin realm. We need to look at the development of female traits, not merely male traits.
Male bias alert in this essay!
The “prophet” and “follower” are interesting postulates, but don’t necessarily really look at the myriad of human dispersal patterns. The Polynesian expansion cast out people in boats when population exceeded the carrying capacity of an archipelago. Skills of finding land by the flight of birds, movement of waves, and reading stars, as well as fat stores and upper body strength for rowing were paramount. There are biases for intelligence(s), strength, fat stores, and physical endurance in pioneers.
We should not get stuck on “prophet” and “follower”. There are so many variants in hard times, and so many cults get killed-off, so there is negative selection there (David Koresh, Branch Davidians exemplify).
I suspect that periods of cooperation and competition amplify, and even develop through building successful trait-complexes, a wide variety of wiring templates that we can be born with.
Vastly important here is that these templates are FLUID. We develop our brains as growing and branching patterns, based on how we interact with our environments as children. More complex “enriched” environments create more branching and complexity.
Fear and pain can make very powerful pathways in a brain, edging out complexity to favor simple survival against threat.
Anger and fear acutely drop IQ by 30 points. Complexities dissolve, replaced by simple drives to action.
You may have experienced such immediate clarity. I have. It gets all messed up later, as complications of actions arise.
Those of us who visit this site have already self-selected for complexity of analysis. We are in a certain 5% of population who have that constitution.
One trait that we value, which is not addressed in the essay, is the drive to precognition as a survival advantage.
It seems that precognition can involve many different individual abilities, and certainly groups of them would help much more, if they reached a critical mass in the brain, able to drive actions by complex reasoning and inspiration, as opposed to brainstem-level drives to dominate through sex, violence and control of people, animals and resources.
At particular points in history, where population booms are followed by sharp “selection event” contractions, we must accept that the selection process will bring the kind of complexity that makes simple analysis fail, much as bond and equity markets fail to respond to fundamental analysis. There are too many variables at work. Simplified analysis is incorrect analysis. Seeing what happens is the final arbiter.
I vote for more power to yin traits of networking and consensus, insight, and prescience.
I see so much in life among real human groups, and half of it in this analysis.

[John Day]

“I need industrial strength tranquilizer, a shot of Old Crow and a glass of Budweiser, to help survive inflation with falling pay.
It takes industrial strength tranquilizer, a shot of Old Crow and a glass of Budweiser, to help the workin’ man through the workin’ day.”

Austin Lounge Lizards, from “Stagflation” days, excellent Texas swing.

[John Day]

Yes, Ilargi, I have had that feeling of looking out on our world as if through the eyes of memory, looking at a thing that was, but is dead. It is as if a future “me” is in my body, knowing what comes to pass, and looking out of my eyes at the tragedy, which does not yet know itself.
I first got the feeling in 2006, and I have it all the time now.

[John Day]

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.

Want to Change the World? Read This First

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.

[John Day]

“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.
🙂

[John Day]

Thanks Ilargi.
Same truth again.
How can this keep being so un-obvious to folks?
😮

[John Day]

@ 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.
🙂

[John Day]

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.

[John Day]

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.

[John Day]

@ 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…

[John Day]

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,
John

[John Day]

What 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.

[John Day]

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.

[John Day]

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.

[John Day]

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.

[John Day]

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.

[John Day]

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?

[John Day]

How long until our economy is largely dedicated to mitigating climate volatility effects to keep us alive? Room for entrepreneurs, huh?

[John Day]

@ 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.

[John Day]

@ 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.

[John Day]

@ 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.

[John Day]

@ Raleigh,
All good links.
Thanks.

[John Day]

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.

[John Day]

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!

The Hows and Whys of Gold Price Manipulation

David Holmgren has the third part of his Crash on Demand essay out, scanning our possible paths forward.

Crash on Demand: Pathways

[John Day]

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.

[John Day]

@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?

[John Day]

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.

[John Day]

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.

[John Day]

@ 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)!

[John Day]

Oops, Powerdown essay link.

Powerdown: Let’s talk about it

[John Day]

(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.

[John Day]

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.

[John Day]

“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-letter

[Author]

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