John Day
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Ilargi and Friends,
There is actually a purpose to the Congress of Parties 21 meeting, and it is to agree to the narrative, the terms that will be used as the world proceeds through the collapse modeled in The Limits To Growth in 1972.
It was a good model, the “standard run” and we have not been able to deviate from it as a species. The “You are here” line on the projection of trends in time is set at 2011 in the graph at this link. https://www.ecoglobe.ch/scenarios/e/adx0.htm
Scroll down a few. It’s big. Go forward 4 years. That is the downturn of food-per-capita, services-per-capita, and industrial-output, also known as “global economy” or “Gross Planetary Product”.
Now, scroll down this page a little to the graph of Gross Planetary Product.
https://www.voxeu.org/article/shrinking-planetary-gdp
It peaked in 2014 and is on the downturn. It is exactly the same graph and every political player in Paris knows it well.
Again, COP21 served to agree on the language, framework and excuses that global ruling and financial elites will use going forward into financial collapse and species (us) die-off, without having to tell the truth, which would just be way too much for us to bear.
It is like Bretton Woods that way. I’m sure there were lots of side deals done, too.
What our rulers are really good at is not what needs to be done for the good of the most people and most living things. The powers they have are powers of destruction, and the threats of destruction to coerce.
Look for more destruction of countries that are near the brink, and more weakening of democracies by flows of desperate refugees, and especially more divide and conquer.
(Grow vegetables. How’s it goin’ with the Greeks beta-testing this new global economy?)@Stone Lodge
What we as individuals can do for a brief moment in time is to learn to grow vegetables, and maybe get a little place with a propane tank, well and some solar panels. Get a diesel tank and some pink diesel for a small tractor and people of like mind with good backs.
Well, it’s likely too late for anything but digging and planting the garden. It takes a few years to actually work that out.Russia’s Dollar Exit Takes a Major New Step (ever nearer, the Gold Ruble… 🙂
https://journal-neo.org/2015/12/05/russias-dollar-exit-takes-major-new-step/Black Friday, Steely Dan
How does ISIS oil, and Iraqi Kurdish oil find it’s way to Israel ? It’s 77% of Israeli oil demand in-total.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-28/isis-oil-trade-full-frontal-raqqas-rockefellers-bilal-erdogan-krg-crude-and-israel-c
Lebanese American Journalist, Serena Shim, reporting on weapons flows from Turkey into Syria, got warned, got overrun by a cement truck going the wrong way on a one way, got taken to a hospital, where she “died of a heart attack”. This was in Turkey.
“Accident” says Turkish government.
“Hybris War to Break the Balkans” Greece figures in. Pipelines, railroads, refugees. Turkey is a hub for so many flows.Letting in Families, women and children is better than letting in nobody.
The basic humanitarian action is to stop funding wars covertly. Only Russia seems to actually believe in a policy that extreme.
Turkey is really , really pushing limits right now, making enemies in all camps.
The House of Saud is on increasingly shaky ground, too.
The US really needs to stop being a hegemon, and Israel needs to really stop putting the US up to that, and return to pre-Nakba borders.I sent a 0.25 Troy oz. Mexican gold bullion coin by registered international mail to Pireas Solidarity Clinic yesterday, after purchasing it at $1170/oz + 8% at a local dealer, here in Austin. The tracking number supplied doesn’t work on this perfectly legal form of asset transfer, but the software tells me it can’t track my package to Greece, so it recognizes it.
Financial geurrilla charity? I worked a lot last month, and still have kids in college and that $15,000 of credit card debt. I can’t buy things for myself until that is paid off, but I have a little wiggle room to do this, with the same charity we helped together this summer.
(I know it has been 5+ years since I contributed to Automatic Earth and Nicole’s trip to Austin, but I have excuses.)The First Question to Ask After any Terrorist Attack: Was it a False Flag?
https://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/11/the-first-question-to-ask-after-any-terror-attack-was-it-a-false-flag.htmlColor Revolutions, covert movement of mercenaries and arms from one war zone to another (Libya to Syria), kettling of millions of refugees, then release of the stampede against another region to create a crisis-of-change, disinformation, obscuration of the real actors and their aims are all “innovations” in modern warfare. Change is set in motion, creating crises and “not letting them go to waste”.
Guess what. This is how our rulers really respond to climate change, peak oil and the Kondratieff Cycle. (Make sure everybody in your family has a space-blanket, like the boy in the picture)Secretary of the Imperial Military, Ashton Carter, says Russia and China may threaten the international order (Empire) and that the US will uphold (enforce) it.
“Agile”, “sustainable” and “innovative” is how the US will uphold the order, according to Carter.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-08/defense-secretary-suggests-putin-might-nuke-america-says-us-will-defend-internationaRight now Turkey is a very important regional enforcer for NATO, but things are breaking down and the Erdogan government has sold everything the state owned into global neoliberal economic networks. This is not working out for the new Ottomans.
“For the government, it is a horror scenario, because if Assad doesn’t go, Erdoğan goes. Simple as that! So what Russians are doing is terrible for the AKP government.”Gordon Duff, USMC combat veteran and editor of Veterans Today puts the Russian airliner crash into focus. It is elites talking to each other and trying to stampede each other’s herds. He provides some background.
https://journal-neo.org/2015/11/09/the-crash-coming-into-focus-hebdo-and-much-more/The Vinyard of the Saker has this excellent article about the “Hybrid Warfare” being carried out in the Balkans, Mideast and former Soviet states (Ukraine, with a particular focus on the crisis being focused on the Balkans, referred to by Angela Merkel in her “We’d sure hate to see war break out there again” statement in the third to last article.
Andrew Korybko’s Interview With Serbia’s “Geopolitica” Magazine (English Exclusive)
There need not be a dichotomy here. These positions are complimentary, not mutually exclusive.
Clearly, the destabilization of Syria by pumping in money and the hijacked stockpiles of Libyan weapons is the core root of the suffering. Over 10% of the population of Syria has been wounded or killed in the last 4 years. This is done secretly by the US, Turkey, the House of Saud, Israel, etc, for many selfish reasons, and with no thought of human suffering as anything but a useful tool.
We should embrace our best human qualities, rather than fight on the terms of the sociopaths who rule us. Embracing what is best in humans is the only personal choice which can lead to better human existence.
We need to be clever and spontaneous against our sociopathic owners, but we lose if we emulate them to fight them.Hi Ilargi,
How do I donate to that clinic we donated to this summer? Eleni suggests that over trying to get money to Lesvos right now.
My research indicates that there is more a lack of facilities and aid workers than a lack of money. Turkey opened the floodgates, and is reportedly providing large inflated dinghys with outboard motors. Those are being destroyed on the shore, and locals are collecting the motors.
So, again, who can I send a check to at the volunteer clinic in Athens?
Thanks, John@(Tea for the?) Rototillerman
At least your air conditioners are safe from the scrap metal thieves for awhile.Hey Ilargi,
I just “met” Eleni Tsig…. from Athens, through an email friend, and mentioned your trip to Greece, and that I sent some money to help.
She says she was one of the folks helping you get around and donate.
We must all be in the same “karass”.
That sure is a confirmation of some kind. 🙂Glyphosate tampons, a new cause of cervical cancer?
or: “Is your womb Roundup-Ready?”
Too weird, really…@V.Arnold
I placed myself in the role of a recent ISIL recruit speaking to another ISIL grunt in confidence.
The story about ISIL soldiers cutting off their beards and heading for Turkey covers part of that attempt at humor. The story about the EU negotiating with Turkey for freer passage into the EU concludes the background stories.
The hasty vignette I inexpertly presented was to draw attention to the 2 stories which make it plausible.Man, I can’t stand these Russian bombs, and Hezbollah and Iranian tanks are coming. Let’s just cut off our beards, slip into some Nike warm-ups, go back home to Turkey, then emigrate to Germany.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-10-16/humiliation-complete-isis-fighters-cut-beards-and-run-away-russia-iran-closeISIS Fighters Could Gain “Legal” Entry into EU, Thanks to Europe’s New Schengen Visa Deal for Turkey
Financial collapse is still our best hope, then, right?
The only way to burn less carbon is the same as always.I am so proud of you both, Ilargi and Nicole.
You have entered the suffering of another human, and remained there in body and heart, which is the true load-sharing, not superficial signals of condolence. Those are to relieve the “well-wisher” of any actual responsibility.
I know the difference, and I am truly appreciative when I see this form of realized human compassion
You will never fear your own deaths…Syrian refugees enter and transit Russia easily, though it costs, arriving at the Norwegian border, where pedestrians are restricted, vehicles are permitted, and drivers carrying refugees are subject to human trafficking charges.
The solution is to ride a bike across this Arctic border. It’s legal.
Bikes are piling up on the Norwegian side.
🙂
They should keep those bikes, really…
https://tribune.com.pk/story/955501/fleeing-war-syrian-refugees-bike-across-arctic-border/Yep, we should all have useful trades, AND tend our gardens.
We have become “alienated” from the products of our labor.
We can be “intimate” with them, and ourselves in our kitchen gardens.
It’s instructive of an approach to the paths we travel in life.
I have a day job/calling/career, as a family medicine doc in a community clinic.
Trying to be a whole human. 🙂Aquarian Revolutionaries
Water Bearers,
First, the song, of course (background music…):
Our species is entering a revolutionary time again, like the Agricultural Revolution, like the Industrial Revolution in vast implications for us, and necessarily including a stewardship of all planetary life.
The physical and cognitive processes and organizations that we have developed in the Industrial Age have consumed half of the available fuel, the easier half, and have multiplied our numbers by 10, feeding, clothing, sheltering and watering us in variously zoo-like cities.The skills and methods we must employ in this transformation are different from the skills and methods we see at the apogee of industrial civilization, which surrounds us, and has informed us.
The good news is that what we are now enmeshed in is inefficient and counterproductive in meeting our human needs. We can meet our needs better and use the efficiency “dividend” to explore our way into a more living world, an ecosystem which we support and which nurtures us. This is a process of gradual transformation, of learning, exploring, of working together, experimenting, and making best use of experimental results, especially when we are initially disappointed.300 years ago, the transition from burning forests to coal in England, did not conjure the vision of automated factories spitting out Toyota Camrys. It really could have gone differently.
Right now, our human needs are being substituted for, not met. That’s the illusion of consumerism. Our need for food is substituted for with industrial foodlike products, which are addictive, but do not satisfy our requirement for the micronutrients we get in fresh, living plants. When we eat plants, we get the benefit of modern selection for market attributes, not nutrition or even really flavor (but looks). Tomatoes grow faster and are evenly red. The gene for even redness excludes a gene for rich flavor. People don’t know that the unevenly red tomatoes are always more flavorful. They are. Try. Don’t refrigerate them. That kills flavor, too.
These fruits and vegetables are bred to get bigger , faster and bear more per acre, with lots of irrigation and chemical fertilizer input, and they have correspondingly less of commonly measured nutrients, probably less of what we don’t measure, but crave, too.
We are led by our cravings to buy what does not satisfy our cravings. We keep consuming and stay hungry, unsatisfied. The pictures of “perfect” women on the magazines at the check out are there to make real women feel uncomfortable in comparison, and to buy what is advertised to remediate their inferiority. They are sold another lie. It’s all like that. Our whole economy is lying to harness our efforts to a machine world that will never satisfy us.
Our satisfaction will kill this economy.We can band together to develop satisfying lives. It’s been done before.
The technology is not the key. Our humanity is the key.
We can grow food in a vegetable garden, and realize our transformation by just this process. This alone chips the paint off the facade of consumerism, because we realize that we can occasionally buy food this fresh and nutritious at a farmer’s market, but we can’t purchase the transformation it has triggered in our persons to grow the plants and accept the harvest from them.We can share and refine our concepts of the world, and realize that what we have been handed as an absolute is merely a current prevailing conceptual framework. It’s pretty new and about at it’s end, at the same time. Capitalism requires exploitation, which is valued, but it has to end, since the exploitation is hitting bounds like over fishing, loss of old growth forests, California’s desertification, oceanic acidification, global warming, and the air in Beijing.
It’s over. We can see that. We can take individual steps to meet and do projects with friends and family, instead of spending on a credit card to be passively entertained for awhile. We have to stop taking habitual steps further into a world of lies and distraction (and that hole we are about to step into).
The initial tools are already in our hands, and the concepts already have names, and people are already making these transformations. We can read about it in so many different disciplines. The time has come for these ideas, making them powerful.The fear of changing is thrown at us by the dying system, and it is a lie.
The dying system says we must remain hungry and desperate and sleepless and sick and irritable, because it is what supports us.
We will involuntarily change when the dying system dies a little more. It’s better if we go into this time making our own decisions, trying things out that are not products-for-sale. We can try all the various kinds of food gardening. It’s interesting, engaging, surprising, and there is reward, then more reward. It is a naturally rewarding process, which fulfills us and informs us of our actual human nature.
We become different. We become networked with others who are transforming. We have other transformative ideas. We experiment. Some things that “don’t work out” actually open broader doors than we knew existed.
In the process of gardening we become part of the change of the seasons, and we see our garden transforming, flowing like a river through time, building up the soil in our beds, supporting this group of plants, then that group which likes to follow it, and another which helps fix nitrogen into the soil, while still feeding us. It is a complex dance this garden succession and rotation river, flowing through the seasons and years and steadily improving garden beds.We have learned that the complex ecosystem of bacteria within us is important to our health and well being, and the complex ecosystem within living soils is important to the health of plants, food gardens, and is intimately linked to our own “microbiomes” when we garden and eat fresh produce.
At this moment in time, we have the benefit of vast knowledge. It is sort of staggering, but we can find paths into the knowledge, like this short Geoff Lawton video about a 2000 year old food forest in Morocco/ This is a really long term embodiment of stewardship, wisdom and peaceful coexistence to show what nature exists within us as a seed, ready to grow.
To bring on the Aquarian Revolution we need to seek truth, speak truth, explore the complexity of living relationships, with our own bodies and spirits as the probe. We need to love. We need all these things, and we can do all of this ourselves, alone and in collaboration with friends and family, and we will benefit at every step. We don’t need to fear a step which is already common, and which benefits us.
That fear of the first step and the second step is projected into our minds by the gasping machine which needs to contain us, as it lumbers toward a cliff.
Don’t look. Don’t step out onto the broad plateau. It’s too big. You’ll be exposed.
Look! There’s somebody I love, smiling gently, walking this way.
Maybe I can step out for just a hug. This thing is going fairly slowly. I can get back in.“Sale of indulgences”, indeed!
I sent $500 to International Medical Corps for Syria, though I’m in debt and just got $900 of work done on the old Toyota van (more debt).
I’m so much more fortunate. Unspeakably so.
I have choices and can take initiative.The Limits to Growth shows different overshoot scenarios, based upon differing amounts of renewable and non-renewable resources, but looks at the aggregate global trend.
I believe that collapse experiments are being imposed upon regions that have various weaknesses. In the Mideast, war is brought down upon water-stressed societies, and humans are forced to flee for their lives.
Greece, the most oil dependent economy in Europe, is getting “economic hit man” type resource extraction treatment.
This seems like an elite experiment in “controlled demolition”, doesn’t it?
Grow a kitchen garden and see the future of less each day.Thank You, Ilargi,
Dealing with the emotional drain, the compassion, and sometimes anguish, accepting it into one’s heart, is the heroic way.
Bless you and bless your Mom.It looks like bankers will be content if they can just keep stepping this thing down for awhile.
A long while, lots of steps…@Greenpa,
“Give me a reason to think this is not already going on.”
Word of mouth, perhaps?The easiest thing is to be an “early adopter” in the wave of population reduction.
I think I have a lot of work to do for the first wave.
Maybe I’ll get to be in the second wave.Russia Moves to Protect Her Arctic Interests.
Good North Polar view map of military and territorial claims, too.Taking Gallium with antibiotics to reduce bacterial resistance.
Diabolical!
I’ll be interested to see how practical this proves to be.Wow, what a vast compilation of evidence of overshoot!
It looks like governments, central banks and hedge funds are preparing for a financial and social shock. I suspect that anything COULD be the trigger, but with the magnitude of this, I suspect one powerful interest group will trigger collapse in the realm of another, through financial attack and/or cyber attack. The US and China are getting that close now…
The group that killed JFK and RFK (likely JFK Jr.) is still in power, and they have much, much more control over everything than has ever before existed.
It depends upon the continued flow of cheap energy.
We can’t say anything to the owners, or to their representatives, who meet behind those closed doors.
We all die. They die too. Nobody gets into the top tier of politics without a remote control and a kill-switch.Speaking out boldly is something we more or less expect here, but we are among a minority-view group. We can cruise along for a long time without affecting a larger group, but that doesn’t mean we are not building the foundation for a paradigm shift. 2/3 of people will absolutely do what everybody else is doing, but there are times when the paradigm shifts, as it did after the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. Americans flipped from supporting the war to rejecting the war. That base had been built for over 5 years by reviled students who really did not want to be drafted into that war. Many went to war and some to jail and some to Canada.
Martin Luther King spoke at the right moment in the historical process of paradigm shift. He was successful, and was killed for it, as we might be, if we speak truth to an established and teetering power.
Keep saying what we do, to those who will listen, without getting into fruitless argument, is probably the best we can do with our voices.
We should be building something we think will be more crashworthy, within the context of our lives. Seeing our vision AND our efforts to prepare for it, may be convincing later, depending on how close we got.
