John Day
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
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.Pepe Escobar works a lot for Russia Today, and also for the Asia Times. If he called imminent-collapse on the Chinese economy, he would lose a lot of access, maybe a job or two, right? He might be a criminal in China, too.
Over years, even Type-2 patients burn out the ability of the pancreas to make insulin, something we didn’t know in the past.
Control with diet and exercise early in the course of type-2 DM is ideal. Few can really do it in our world of TV, junk-food, cars and credit-cards.
sigh…Good Work, Ilargi.
I am sure your mother benefits from your presence with her.
I also assume that specific types of insulin products in specific quantities have been requested.
You do need a specific shopping list. I hope you can access low public health prices.
Maybe you need a trip to India to access the low price products to bring to Greece.
“Medical Courier” is a recognized task. I wonder what it takes to get recognized.Thanks Diogenes Shrugged,
I watched both videos.
The questions around the Maunder minimum, compared to greenhouse gasses, are questions of magnitude of offsetting effects. There is a lot of attention to solar cycles. Everybody is interested in solar cycles. NASA and the DoD sure are. I am. My HAM radio buds are. The earth has all these buffers for little ups and downs, but the buffers are dissipating. Acid rain hitting the Himalayas and taking CO2 and calcium to a sink in the Indian Ocean has a long term cooling effect on our planet, ever since India slammed into Asia. It’s been awhile. It looks like the greenhouse gas effects are much longer lived than the Maunder minimum, and climate scientists, who look at both, don’t seem to think we should expect much of a break. It would be nice, of course. We shall see. I’m doing what I can as a person. Bike commuting and growing a kitchen garden in what used to be a back yard. It’s a lot of work, and there is lots to learn. Later gardens will be bigger. This is 30 X 30 ft, the whole fenced yard. I’m realizing how small that is for production.
As to the link regarding what Hitler said about bankers and capitalists, I agree with those statements of his, to a harshly oppressed people, who were going through the wealth extraction that Greeks are experiencing today. My grandfather was a communications officer in WW-1, a radio man, and flew in the back of a Spad, in the Hat in the Ring Squadron. He attended the Sorbonne, Harvard grad school, and traved as a radio operator around the world on cargo ships. In WW-2 he was a Major in OSS Counterintelligence, the deep spook world. I grew up aware from his teaching. I have known about “international bankers” all my life. I’m 57. The relevant question about our shadowy puppet masters is: “How many of us do they figure they need, and how much stuff do they figure we will need to serve them?” The “good” news is that these elites have to negotiate and contend with each other, as well as us pawns.
There is spirit at work, as well. Let’s meditate….I have had a hypothesis germinating for awhile, based on the premise that the global power elites, like the Bush family, Rockefellers, Rothschilds, royal families, etc. are smart, not stupid, and don’t tell the truth, except in the rare case that it serves their purposes.
I think they are perfectly well informed and accepting of the realities of Peak Oil, The Limits to Growth and Global Warming. They and their trusted retainers, the Dick Cheneys, James Bakers and Joe Bidens we know so well, tell us whatever guides us in the direction they need us to go. They tell the gated community group, which serve them, what the gated community group needs to be told to keep serving. There are different messages involved, and it works rather well.
We are still on the “Business as usual” curve from the 1972 Limits to Growth projections of energy use, pollution, economy and population. This is producing, or has just produced the predicted peak in industrial output, food production and economy. We are at a rising level of human population.
What comes next in that projection is collapses in food per capita, economy and energy per capita, industrial production, and later, population.
My hypothesis is that our shadowy-puppet-masters are practicing the sequential controlled-demolition of human societies as their preferred method to deal with peak oil and global warming. They tell us whatever stupid-shit works.
Yeah, that’s why we hear nothing but stupid stuff about Greece, and the European group of economic ministers would absolutely never discuss economics with Varoufakis. It’s not their intent for Greece to recover and pay back the loans. It’s their intent for Greece to progressively collapse, further and further, as they take notes.
Iraq was blown up to save Iraqi oil from the Iraqis. That’s working. Libya was blown up to save Libyan oil from the Libyans. They’re hardly using any these days. Those countries are sitting on some of the last of the “easy oil” in the world, the stuff you just pump out for $5-7/bbl. Iran has easy oil, too. But Iran isn’t easy. Iran has an ancient and sophisticated civilization and is politically adept. Iran could still get nuked, but Iranian oil has just been put on hold for the past 5 years, which saves it for later.
Maybe there is about to be another big war, which will mess with the output of some oil producing country. I sure don’t know. Oil is otherwise about to get really cheap, which will hurt Russia, Venezuela, Brazil, the Saudis, Canada, Mexico, American fracking and North Sea powers.
Venezuela is the most vulnerable. Maybe they hate freedom and are going to attack a nuclear generator near LA this year. Maybe they are secretly allied with North Korea. Something. Whatever. Teach em a lesson!It seems that there is a lack of understanding of what you stated so clearly about the trade offs between immediate harm and permanent slavery among the commentariat, Ilargi.
It is being given the choice between prostituting your daughter or seeing your wife face death this week from a curable infection.
One reason the elites hate Varoufakis so much is (as his dad says) “he is competent”. He is competent at playing at the highest level of risk for millions of people, about which he cares, against sociopaths, who constantly seek out the weakness of what their prey cares most about. Tsipras, a seemingly regular-guy is vulnerable when playing with sociopaths, and they know it well. It’s their game against Tsipras, isn’t it?
Their game may have been disrupted enough to weaken their position a lot.
The collapse of their system is inevitable. They expect it to happen their way.
It probably won’t.Maybe Greece can sue Germany for those 279 billions in WW2 reparations, and sue Goldman Sachs for the excessive $500 million fee to hide the Greek debt for a false-pretense entry into the Euro. Schauble and Draghi could snap at each other even more, and Draghi’s role would be further exposed.
What is needed is for a “white knight” to inject some cash into Greek banks, just to keep this stringing out a bit longer. China? The Fed?Tsipras keeps showing up. Woody Allen said 90% of life is showing up.
That might be the case here.
The Troika wolves expected to have Greece all carved up and consumed well before today.
They are hungry, frustrated wolves, and they are still waiting for their dinner.
I really think that “whatever it takes” to keep stringing this process out is pretty good for revealing reality. The reality is that this expanding-debt-based financial project is coming to it’s inevitable ugly end soon.Oooh, the Greek Parliament is overwhelmingly licking the Troika boots now.
https://www.964eagle.co.uk/news/world-news/1669063/greek-parliament-backs-bailout-proposals/
This may be enough to keep the tar baby in the middle of things.@carolsiriusb
I often look at Engdahl’s work, and appreciate his good intentions, but there is usually something kind of glaring which prevents me sending it to folks.Tar Baby: Greece is Europe’s Tar Baby.
The EU finance ministers kick and punch and want to throw the tar baby in the briar patch, but they are all stuck to the tar baby.
That looks essential to the benefits in this process of the demise of the common currency.
Varoufakis sees the need for this, and has had a chance to assess all the players, including Greek players. The result of the referendum was unforeseeable. That was lighting the fire. Knowing the players, and seeing the blaze, and being unwelcome by all at that point, Varoufakis was right to take a break.
He may be the John Maynard Keynes of this historical moment, but we shall see.@Patricia,
It may be that “smashed our printing presses” is shorthand for “completely relinquished any ability to print a sovereign currency” (and smashed the dies).
The nation of Greece cannot decide to print Greek-brand Euros. I believe the ECB controls the bank of Greece and the presses.Yeah, Zero Hedge was “Cyber-Attacked”.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-08/what-first-world-cyber-war-looks-global-real-time-cyber-attack-map
WhooEEE!Hero Archetypes: Varoufakis and Tsipras.
Tyrant Archetypes: the rest.
Heroes are quick and unpredictable to tyrants, aren’t they?
🙂What happens now?
Is Sun Tzu’s Art of War, there is an injunction against interfering with your enemy, when he is defeating himself.
Russia and China should hang back a bit and let the EU/NATO do a little self-defeating again, right?
On the other hand, one of the truly great breakthroughs in the history of warfare was when generals (Darius the Persian, I think) started freeing the slaves in the cities they captured. Boy, did that help break down the walls!Golem XIV (you recall the trillion dollar platinum coin) is BACK, and has some really interesting Geopolitical-financial-war-game speculations regarding Greece, Russia, China, NATO, beginning with where the reserves of New Drachmas might have been printed (assuming they exist). It gets better, even better, much better, heh, heh, heh…
https://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2015/07/greece-china-russia/?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=greece-china-russiaTo return to an earlier part of today’s essay, it should be clear that in 2010, again in 2012, and continuing now, there has been an elite perception that Greece should be sacrificed/amputated/whatever to shield the European banks from collapse.
That must have been exquisitely clear in 2010, and has been carried forward without much internal debate.@Raleigh,
“Looking after your own money” still means holding physical gold in a “safe” place, since all that fiat is a continuously variable algorithm these days, and slips through one’s fingers. Kyle Bass is getting UT Austin to do a bit of that. A vegetable garden is a good investment of personal experience and time. Storing water, beans, rice, oil, salt, sugar and propane is a doable investment, but disheartening and limited.Stockman has a take on Greece, which seems like the underlying vision Varoufakis has. To look at all of this honestly (which can be forced) every European country needs to default on debt, as soon as the dominoes start falling.
The Euro can’t survive that, and global finance will reset.What is missed in mainstream analysis of the current debt situation is that it must collapse, and then growth will be over and we will need a new system. Varoufakis gets this, and wants to help Europe on this difficult path. He may be doing so.
Here is Ugo Bardi updating the Limits to Growth projections, which have us hitting some inflection points about now.The Limits to Growth and Greece: Systemic or Financial collapse?
Spain in Transition? looks at the power-down transition that Spain is going through, the history of the fascists killing the populists and so on. It is detailed, well organized and speaks strategically of the transition into “degrowth” and how many politicians can not bring their lips to say anything smacking of financial-regime-change.Spain in Transition?: Answers from the grassroots facing a collapsing country
Ambrose has a good take on the apparent ups and downs of the negotiating stance of Alexis Tsipras. He may be positioning Greece to be financially blameless.
I’m no expert. He is. This is an interesting angle.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11712098/Europe-has-suffered-a-reputational-catastrophe-in-Greece.html
