Reverse Engineer
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el gallinazo post=1072 wrote: Reverse Engineer said “The Military operates at the behest of corporations it serves”
Well, don’t stop there. And who owns and dictates to these corporations? You haven’t quite scaled the pyramid with that statement.
One could well argue that the USA had been under their heel since before the time of Smedley Butler. And there are no Butlers left – he was the last high ranking American military hero. Now we just have the fetid likes of John McCain.
Even a person with one eye (there is strangely a word for that condition in Spanish – tuerto) can see that we are witnessing the end game of turning the USA into a total 1984 martial law society. It is like a rolling wave and they no longer even attempt to cover it up. Pillsbury Doughgirl Clinton paraphrasing Caesar regarding Libya. At least Caesar could heft a Roman short sword without a subsequent trip to the chiropractor.
With this rolling wave of totalitarianism, I am beginning to wonder if the lifeboat strategies are sufficient even to help to protect awakening people. Or will they wind up like the 10 million dead Ukrainian peasants and kulaks under Stalin’s collectivization – update read “corporate farms?”
Oh, it definitely goes back a good deal further than Smedley Butler. Ever wonder where Cmdr. Matthew Perry got the money to build state of the art steam powered Gunboats to go forcibly force the Shogun out of Isolationism, while in the meantime Andrew Jackson had just killed the 2nd Bank of the FSofA. Who was financing the Big Ass Navy? Da Federal Goobermint had no IRS at the time. For that matter, who financed Washington’s Navy?
Anyhow, I dug up a Rant I wrote last year which covers the direction this whole thing is going, which I will have up on DD in just a bit. You should drop in and say Hi! at least. All Lurker Readers make a very dull board. LOL.
RE
Do I PUKE the technicolor yawn now?
Can somebody somewhere just cut to the chase here and state for the record that the Big Ass Military is run by the folks who own the companies that supply said Military?
“Legal Basis”?!?! It makes it “legal” if a bunch of Puppet Goobermints with Puppets like Obama-sama in the Driver’s Seat get together in some sort of ad-hoc committee and decide to rain Death from Above on some Random Nation which isn’t Playing Ball with them?
Blah. This requires a full scale RANT which I got no time for right now.
In short and to be very clear, there IS no “United States” anymore, if there ever really was. Its all a Puppet Show. You can go back to Smedley Butler and its the same old story. The Military operates at the behest of corporations it serves, NOT the popularly elected Goobermint of J6Ps. About the only difference I see right now is that its become so glaringly obvious and blatant, because the Scumbags at the Top are so far behind the Eight Ball now they’re no longer bothering to disguise it as a Puppet Show anymore.
This will not End Well.
Its a definite improvement. At least now you can reach the Recent Comments in 2 clicks.
Definitely are some challenges involved with integrating these formats, and overall I think this is working pretty well.
We are going to work on possibly using a Tabbed Widget or Popup windows for Blog readers to quickly scan what is going on in the Comments.
BTW Ash, I accidentally dropped the OWS article into the wrong category, it should be in the Open area, not Lifeboat. It probably should be moved. Sorry about that.
Glennda post=1057 wrote: Thanks, RE
I really appreciated that article on the Truth about OWS especially the parts about OO. So much of the MSM goes into fantasy land about the Occupy movement.
YW Glenda, but really Surly is the one to thank, he’s the OWS Editor on DD. I’m just the Board Loose Cannon 🙂 Surly is active in the Norfolk GA and keeps abreast of all OWS related developments.
I expect that May 1 is going to be very interesting. People are just getting thoughts about want different actions to do that day. Unions will do worker oriented strikes, others will Occupy the Hood etc etc. I expect there to be a very multifaceted bunch of actions, marches, statements and the police will probably be unable to comprehend a targetless or rather too many targes at once. In OO the police will cost the city huge amounts of $ and that will be blamed on the Occupiers. They can never examine themselves as to why they don’t just embarace this movement that is simiply not just fading away.
I suspect as well as Spring arrives and then Summer and the Political Conventions, OWS will resurface with more “in your face” activity. TPTB are however clearly preparing the Gestapo (read the COPS Article), so to be effective OWS is going to have to generate much bigger numbers in this next go round.
Of course, if we get in an overt Shooting War with the Iranians this will change the dynamic in many ways, so its just something you have to watch and see how it develops.
Golden Oxen post=1037 wrote: Lucca, Go pay a visit to this gentleman, and make him a deal he can’t refuse. “Yes Godfather.”
RE
Burlesque in Norfolk and the Truth about Violence at Occupy
In the scheme of things, the politics of Occupation occur on bigger stages than Norfolk, VA. Better known and noisier Occupations on Wall Street or Oakland, even Richmond, make the news and earn the headlines. Yet the fact that several groups of Occupiers maintain a presence and effect actions here in the heart of East Coast military might, and continue to bear witness to the abuses of the combination of state and economic power even here, has seemingly rattled the judgement of the stewards of that power here in southeastern Virginia.
Later she told me, “Right before it happened, I had a moment of clarity: that this was going down, and I could choose to go through with it, and if I did there could be repercussions. And I decided then to do it. And while they were arresting me, I felt pity for them.” The pretrial thoughts ofCarmen, my 20-year old daughter, the “littlest Occupier.”
Read more at
OK, I got up the Mobile Living/Nomadic article in conjunction with “OWS” day on DD. Surly got up another OWS article also.
RE
hombre post=1040 wrote: There are not really any (livable) wilderness areas left large enough to accomodate a nomadic lifestyle. Once again, population density enters the picture.
I am no Spring Chicken either. However, I am not talking about living H-G here on a neolithic level, at least not for quite a while yet. You’ll understand better what I am talking about after I get up the article later today.
For Profit? We are about the only Blog you will find that doesn’t even have Ads running or a Donate Button.
I’ll drop your post into the Hydroponics Board.
RE
alfbell post=1027 wrote: A self-sustaining community/commune with a divergent group of good like-minded people (wide ranging skill sets); on arable land (good crop fields and some solar green houses); with a good well; adobe type homes (thick clay or straw bale walls for comfort and low energy needs in Winter and Summer) with some wood stoves also; guns and ammo; and a little C-Class RV for bugout or emergencies would be a good way to go.
Here’s a concept: Buy a large tract of good land in a good location and build your adobe home. Create a bunch of sites so others can build homes there as well (could even put down concrete pads and buy repo’d mobile homes really cheap and set them up for living). Be selective and start recruiting your community by having the people you choose buy into it or rent from you. End result: a group that thrives; grows its own food, repairs it own vehicles machinery and tools, protects and defends the compound, etc.
What you describe here is something we have been discussing for quite some time on Reverse Engineering, the founding group that is responsible for the new Doomstead Diner blog/forum.
Generally speaking, putting all your eggs in one basket of a given Doomstead limits your mobility, and once you start building a whole bunch of stuff on a given plot of land you become tied to it. What happens if you say buy a nice Doomstead in Texas, but then a Border War breaks out full on with Mejico? What happens if you plop down in the mountains of Colorado but then drought or flood or Wildfires take out your Doomstead?
Cheaper raw land with no permanent structures on it distributed out in various different regions provides redundancy, as long as you have enough mobility to move from one spot to the other. The key here is learning to live on unimproved land with temporary structures in a nomadic lifestyle. Various types of good cheap shelter can be utilized from tents at the beginning to hexayurts and geodesics, along with of course the Bugout Machines for so long as you can get the gas to move them from one spot to another. Once the gas is no longer available, they stay where they lay in their Final Resting Place. Then you have secondary means of movement possible after that, Bicycles and even on Foot.
I’ll be posting up tomorrow an article I wrote a while back about living Mobile utilizing commercial Storage Units and Bugoout Machines or even just your SUV on DD.
This is great stuff GlennJeff! With your permission, I would like to get the information up in the Doomsteading area of the Doomstead Diner. You can go there directly also and add it yourself at
https://www.doomsteaddiner.org/forum/index.php?board=5.0
RE
Ross wrote: Kids just want to be kids. I know, I’m still a kid. I want a decent job, lots of free time and enough left over to go on a few vacations every year. That’s the kid in me. On the other hand, any job I could possibly find, including this one feels like an epic waste of time. 9-5 punching buttons to what end?
-Ross
To what end indeed? 30 years ago there was another young man working on Wall Street who asked himself these questions. That young man is long gone now, but he remembers the yearnings. And then when I pull up a 20 year old video of Roger Daltry, still pretty much in his prime after 30 years as a Rocker singing the anthem written by the then dead Freddie Mercury, the contradictions and futility of the dreams of youth inspired by the seemingly limitless wealth of the Age of Oil all come rushing back to me….
Read the rest at
https://www.doomsteaddiner.org/blog/2012/03/07/i-want-it-all/RE
alfbell post=1007 wrote: I think a sailboat is definitely the ultimate “bugout” vehicle. It puts you in the best fabian condition and gives you a home with the most freedom from government and authorities and the best chance of survival (and no property taxes, domicile state, or way of being located)
Its not as good as it seems Alf. There are some very critical problems with the Sail Paradigm that Dmitri does not consider. Much like the Gas Powered RV, it has only a window of Utility, its not a long term solution.
I won’t rewrite all the problems here but just sample a few. First off, Sailboats are very vulnerable to Piracy while at sea, and very vulnerable to theft while moored. For so long as the system as a whole holds up, here in the FSofA you are OK in a Marina, but when there is general lawlessness and mayhem going on any boat moored in any populated location is horrendously vulnerable.
Second, even on a decent size boat your storage space is very limited. You can store maybe a year’s worth of well packaged freeze dried stuff, but if you do you wedge out most of your living space. I do not see such a methodology as a long term solution here, its just a Bugout method.
In many respects, despite fuel unavailability likely down the line, gas powered RVs work better if again you realize that they are not long term solutions, just Bugout means.
Long term success demands a Community, the Bugout Machine is just a means to get you temporarily OUT of a really BAD situation and hopefully into a somewhat better one. In both cases, the primary advantage is in Mobility and not putting all your eggs into one “basket” of a given location which could go south on you for many reasons.
More on this in due time over on DD.
el gallinazo post=1003 wrote: As with most fiberglass boats from the early 70’s, they are overbuilt and have held up well.
I’d like to expand here on this point made by EG if you do go in the market for a Fiberglass boat (most of them). DON”T buy a new boat! First off because the prices are stupid but more importantly because Fiberglass comes in two Black/White incarnations, Good FG and Bad FG. You can’t KNOW which it is for about 10 years or so. Bad FG will delaminate, the boat will get leaks and its basically impossible to keep up with repairing it. Good FG is basically FOREVER, at least by the measure of a Human Lifespan. A Fibeglass hull that has held its integrity for 10 or more years probably is good for 50.
In the Used Market these days, you can pick up some very nice boats built in the 70s-80s for practically a SONG. Boats that sold New for $200K in 1980’s dollars can be had sometimes for under $40K, and if you shop around you find some Old Guys who took care of them so well they are better than new, and they just want to find a buyer they think will take good care of their boat. You can also find some not well maintained boats that superficially look bad, but the Hull is still first class and these you can get for $20K and under. Many also go on the Auction Block in Bankruptcies these days.
However, remember your Maintenance fees until TSHTF. Boats are a money sink extraordinaire. If you keep them in the water and don’t sail them regularly, the hull gets fouled with algae and has to be regularly scrubbed. Bigger the boat is, more it costs to yank it up out of the water and do hull maintenance. If you are actually living aboard, you can take of this problem by regularly getting in the water with snorkel and fins and scrubbing a bit in the water regularly, but if you let it go too long it has to be hauled up in dry dock. Salt accretion can also cause you issues with your electrics. All things to consider before going the Seasteading route.
RE
alfbell post=973 wrote: Reverse: Yes, a boat could be the best bugout vehicle for survival. Never really thought about that. You’ve got me thinking now. (The thing about owning a home or farm is that the gubmint knows where you are and still controls you through property taxes, and who knows what other taxes they’ll devise for homeowners.) A boat (like an RV) is a home that can move around (fabian) and doesn’t have property taxes. Also very key… no major worries about fuel if it is a sailboat.
Unfortunately, I know nothing about sailing and have no experience (I’m a land-lubber). A decent ocean going vessel could take you along the US, Canadian, Alaskan, Mexican, Central American coastlines, down to the Caribbean, etc. There would be all sorts of small ports, marinas, coves, etc. where one could locate, hide, hunker down, etc.
If I could have a large enough freezer to keep meat and also some sort of garden (hydroponic?) on board I could go for long periods without needing to come in for supplies. Guess could have solar energy too?
I’m age 60 and in good physical shape. So is the wife. If I went to the right school or teacher… how long would it take me to learn to sail in order to operate a decent size 60-70 ft schooner, or whatever the appropriate type of boat would be for this application? I know one key thing to learn is everything about weather conditions and navigation.
Dmitri Orlov, one of the most well read of early Doomers lives on a Sailboat in Boston. He has written a decent amount about his experience with “Sailsteading”. Go to Cluborlov.com and read up there to get the most positive spin on this methodology.
By NO MEANS is a 60′ boat necessary or even advisable here. Boats of this size have very big and expensive sails, and until the whole biz does go to hell in a handbasket are pretty expensive to maintain at any Marina. Bigger the Boat, bigger the monthly fees. For most purposes, boats in the 35-40″ range are quite livable. Then you have choices to make as far as monohulls and multihulls are concerned. Multihulls of the Catamaran variety are more spacious and roomy, and they are also faster and point up better into the wind than most monohull keelboats. However, unless you are a very competent Blue Water sailor, I would never take a multihull far off the coast. They can pitchpole or roll in really big seas, and they do not self right as a monohull does.
My choice is very small boat, a 28′ Ian Farier designed floding Trimaran that is trailerable. I have no marina fees. It has very little living space, its just a Bugout Machine for me that can get me from here to Tristan da Cunha, Edinburgh of the Seven Seas (generally considered the most remote Island on Earth) if need be, though that would be one mighty scary undertaking in this craft. My intention if I ever need to use it for REAL is to coastal sail it into the fjords of British Columbia. I have a water maker, solar panels and enough Preps to make it for a year on board.
Far as how long it takes to learn to Sail, not really that long. You can take week long Vacations that will teach you the rudiments of sailing a small yacht, and pick lots of places to do that still. There are Sailing schools in the Bahamas, in the Meditarranean and in the South Pacific you can go to. Will cost you some, but not nearly what a 60′ behemoth would cost.
Making big transits over Blue Water takes experience and time to gain the expertiese, but coastal sailing is not all that hard. Navigation is quite easy so long as the GPS is up and running, but when that goes off the map navigating via Sextant and Compass is quite a bit more challenging, and you gotta know your constellations, which also take time to memorize. For short coastal sailing though, Dead Reckoning keeping track of your course and over water speed works fine for the most part, and is not that hard to learn.
Dmitri is very Positive on Seasteading, but he does not cover many of the downsides that will be present in real SHTF scenarios. I try to do that with my Bugout analysis articles. Its not a perfect paradigm, but it has many good advantages to it.
If you can afford it, a good sailcraft is a good Bugout Machine. At the very least, when nobody else can leave a bad neighhborhood gone south via planes or commercial boats, you always can GTFO of Dodge, even from the Big Shities like Boston. Newfoundland is just a coastal sail away, and its not a highly populated place.
I’ll try to get more about this up on DD in the next week or so. I have a lot of material I have to mave on other topics so this will take some time.
Beguine post=976 wrote: Hmmm…. thanks, Reverse Engineer. I’m trying to imagine Mrs Pete trying to find a seat in the lounge room/lab. I wonder how many people could grow their food like that and still have a normal family life? 🙂 But all power to Mr Pete if all of that works!
I think I’ve had my penny’s worth… 🙂 thank you!
“Normal Family Life”? What is that? Sitting around the Rec Room with the Kiddoes playing the Wii? What kind of “normal family life” will you have if you can’t get enough food to eat, eh? Read that Starvation stuff Ashvin published up here. “Normal Family Life” for Ukrainians during their Famine was Eating their Kids!
MOST of the population here does not live on Doomsteads with 10 Acres of land around them, they live in McMansions plopped on 1/4 acre plots that barely have space to set up your BBQ outside.
Sure, Peter’s Hydroponics takes up his whole freaking living room, and in fact he mentioned to me he was going to convert one of the bedrooms also for grain production. Don’t know if he has done that yet. Fortunately for Peter, there is not a Mrs. Pete getting her panties in a twist because he’s turning the whole house into a hydroponics production facility. However, given the choice here between setting up a Big Screen Home theatre in your Living Room and a Hydroponics growing facility, which is the better Lifeboat, eh? You asked for Lifeboats, this is one way to do it, and in fact can be done CHEAPER than your Big Screen Home Theatre.
Hydroponics is the MOST efficient way to grow food, you keep all the nutrients none of it gets washed into the soil and wasted out. You can use all sorts of stuff to make your nutrient stew, but really just a few bags of commercial fertilizer can last you for YEARS here. Combined with using Heirloom seeds that will breed true, the system can last for a very long time indeed.
There are issues with it I know of, you can get algae growth problems in the tanks and so forth if you don’t have them well sealed against light penetration. Insect pests can cause problems also as they do for all plant growth methods.
However, what are your CHOICES here if you do not live on a doomstead with sufficient acreage for subsitence farming, eh? Goobermint Cheese is about it for most people. Not a whole lotta people are going to trip out to the commons on the Last Great Frontier and fish it up either.
Hydroponics is a very REAL Lifeboat that can be accomplished in a small space, which peter has PROVED possible IRL. if it disturbs you “normal family life”, well, that is a small price to pay IMHO for having enough food to eat, now isn’t it?
RE
The Chinese are
Of course they are addicted to debt, not just their own but everybody else’s also. They hold more worthless Toilet Paper issued by other countries than anybody else. They are SWIMMING in their own debt AND everybody else’s.
China came into the Industrialization game a Day Late and a Yuan short here. The whole apparatus built there over the last 20 years is all Debt financed. To pay off, they have to be able to export and sell their toys. They cannot do that unless they will vendor finance still MORE debt, because nobody else has money to buy their toys anymore, at least not in quantities their over capacity is capable of producing. Factories will shut down, and when they do they no longer pay on the debt taken on to build them. That debt isn’t repaid here, its just been rolled over for 20 years.
With their population overshoot and ecological issues on TOP of their unsustainable economics, the Chinese are screwed 6 ways from Sunday, the only worse off Nation on the surface of the Earth is Japan. When these two countries hit the Wall, it wil not be pretty. The Economic Meltdown will make Fuk-U-Shima look like a Sunday Picnic. Soft Crash for China is NOT gonna happen. When they go down, and go down they will, its going to be Wiley Coyote at the Bottom of the Grand Canyon.
They are still in the Levitation Period, but the drop is coming. Its not the drop that Kills you either, its the rapid deceleration when you hit the bottom.
alfbell post=966 wrote:
If it wasn’t for the peak oil scene and the cost of oil skyrocketing over the next few decades my solution would be a motor home (mobility, flexibility, follow economic and educational opportunities, escape catastrophes, follow the sun and warm weather, etc.)I call RVs and Sailboats “Bugout Machines”, and I have one of each 🙂 I write quite often about how you plan for diferent types of Bugouts using such tools depending on circumstances. I’ll probably drop one of them in as a Feature Article on the Diner in the next week or so.
Far as being intolerant of cold weather, yes lots of people are which makes it a bit easier for folks like me who cannot stand heat. Unless I am out in the Bush I don’t generally go nuts suiting up unless we get the 30 below stuff. Zero is very comfortable for me in typical winter gear if I am not outside for mre than an hour or so. Full time outdoors, you gotta Suit Up.
BTW, the Iditarod got going this Weekend. I’ll update you all periodically on the Last Great Race on Earth
Iditarod
..Neff leads a pack of top Iditarod racers out of the Alaska Range
Mike Campbell | Mar 05, 2012Amid snowfall, the top dozen mushers in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race yanked their snow hooks Monday afternoon and began a steep 40-mile descent to Rohn River.
Yukon Quest champion Hugh Neff was the first to leave Rainy Pass at 2:58 p.m. Within an hour, nine racers had given chase. They included:
• Ray Redington Jr. of Wasilla, the early race leader, who was 11 minutes back.
• Lance Mackey of Fairbanks, the four-time champion looking to tie aging Rick Swenson as the winningest Iditarod musher of all time.
• Aliy Zirkle of Two Rivers, the former Yukon Quest champion who’s behind a powerful dog team that finished seconds behind Neff at last month’s Quest.
• John Baker of Kotzebue, the defending Iditarod champion and race record holder.
• Rick Swenson of Two Rivers, the most decorated musher in Iditarod history who despite his age of 61 is hanging closer to the front that he often does.
• Jeff King of Denali Park, another four-time champion returning to the Iditarod after ending his brief retirement.
Perhaps the only surprise among the front-runners was Kelley Griffin, the 52-year-old veteran from Wasilla. Even though she’s finished three Iditarods and a number of Quests, she has never contended for victory. She was the first woman to finish the Quest and the Iditarod in the same year, a feat she accomplished in 2008. Last year, she finished fifth in the Quest and 26th in the Iditarod, both personal bests.
Both Zirkle and Mackey are driving dog teams fresh off a successful 1,000-mile run in the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race last month. Some of the dogs in Zirkle’s team were in husband Allen Moore’s team that finished second to Hugh Neff by less than a minute in that race. Mackey finished third and proclaimed himself happy with how his crew of young dogs performed.
For many contenders, the goal of the first couple of days on the trail is to stay in contention without stressing the dog team with a maddening early pace.
“A lot of people will try to race out to the front and get to the front of the pack,” young Rohn Buser, the Kuskokwim 300 champion, said on Sunday to Iditarod Insider at the race start in Willow.
“But you’ve got to be careful not to go out too fast. It’s more important to set a good pace for your team, something your team can maintain. You’ve just got to keep them relaxed and don’t blow them up on the first day so on Day 5 you don’t say, ‘Oh man, I went down the river too fast.’”
alfbell post=956 wrote: RE: yes, I agree about friends and community added to the list of stable datums. (Might I add being in a temperate climate area… thus not needing much energy for heat or A/C, and also having the benefit of a long growing season.)
Disagreed. The problem with Temperate climates is everybody wants to live there. Besides that there are food preservation issues to deal with.
You want to be in the coldest possible climate Homo Sapiens can tolerate. Basically sub Arctic conditions. Properly insulated with clothing, you don’t need Heat really down to 50 Below. Inuit have been doing this for 1000s of years. The cold climate provides you instant Food Preservation about 8 months of the year, the whole world is a Refrigerator. If you are sedentary, its also quite possible to build an Icehouse that will last all summer through to the first snowfalls.
A short growing season is compensated for by very long growing days in the Summer. Alaska farms are actually quite productive, and the peculiarities of the light distribution make it possible to grow some mammoth veggies.
Besides the veggies, there remains up here the greates fisherie still alive in the world Oceans
Finally, you just can’t beat Alaska for Population Density. At 1.24 Homo Sapiens per square mile, its one of the least populated places on the face of the Earth. Only some parts of Siberia and Antarctica and various Deserts come in lower than that.
So forget the Middle Latitudes. You just gotta learn to love the cold. BE THE COLD!
Beguine post=951 wrote: ‘Hydroponics! Check out Peter’s setup inside his house! He grows enough inside to meet about 80% of his nutriition needs. Rest comes from the local fishing’.
Thanks Reverse Engineer! I clicked on the link and stood outside patiently listening to Peter’s ‘discussion of the political aspects’ but unfortunately, I didn’t get inside his house to see his set up. Maybe one has to wait for Part 2 for that? 🙁
PS Please remember that I’ve paid my penny to get in? 🙂
You have to poke around inside the Diner. Here is a direct link for a Tour of Peter’s House 🙂
https://www.doomsteaddiner.org/forum/index.php?topic=11.0
RE
el gallinazo post=950 wrote: RE, would you consider the upcoming global economic collapse as a phase of the long term TPTSB strategy, or would you regard it as a very serious miscalculation? I really cannot figure that one out with any certainty, but not from lack of trying.
Always a source of endless speculation in the Conspiracy Theory crowd 🙂 MIne isn’t the most popular viewpoint on this question.
I believe the consequences of exponential growth have been well known by the Illuminati going well back into time, predating Malthus for sure. I also am quite sure Isaac Newton when he was Master of the Mint back in 1692 new precisely what the consequences were of the type of monetary system the BoE was engineering up. Anyhow, over the centruies here there is no doubt that the monetary system has been engineered up to keep a very small group of people in perpetual power.
The discoveries of the Enlightenment enabled the accessing of large amounts of thermodynamic energy, which thus propelled our friends the Illuminati to even higher pinnacles of power. They also however have known for a long time (going back at least to Hubbert but probably back further than that) that fossil fuel resource was limited and would eventually run out on them. So for a long time they engaged in seeking out “ultimate power” in the form of Nuclear Energy, particularly Fusion power. Billions if not Trillions have been spent over the last 40 years (that when the numers meant something before the printing spree), I was reading about coming Fusion Reactors in Popular Science when I was a boy.
Sadly here, TIMES UP, the Buzzer has gone off and Ultimate Power has not arrived here. What our Illuminati friends are doing here is rear guard action, they are trying to escape with what wealth they collected up and get out from under a collapsing Tower of Babel.
Far as a “Plan” goes, I think they think they have Plans, but for the most part I don’t think those plans will work all that long. I’ve looked at this problem up down and sideways and once the Conduits fail in earnest you get a One to the Many devolution. The center will not hold.
Anyhow, my good friend Peter who is collaborating with me on DD doesn’t agree with me on this, he is pretty sure the Illuminati have this well planned and figured all the way down the line. He makes a pretty good case for it also, and e have pursued some EXTREMELY long debates with each other on how this plays out. Eventually I’ll try to get some of those debates up on DD, they are very entertaining 🙂
In any event, I definitely would not call this one a “Phase” like the Great Depression or even the French Revolution. Those events happenned on the upswing while the Illuminati were still accumulating greater power and greater wealth. Now we are on the downslope, and its all going to come apart, quite rapidly relatively speaking. I don’t think the Illuminati can control the collapse, and I don’t think most of what is called wealth will be worth a hill of beans here pretty soon. For Rome it came apart at the seams when the monetary system collapsed. When the money doesn’t work to pay the Soldiers, you cannot Buy Loyalty anymore and the Elite are no longer Elite. That is when you will see quite a few people strung up by their Gonads with their Chestnuts Roasting over an Open Fire.
TheTrivium4TW post=940 wrote: [quote=Reverse Engineer post=927]
The Central Banking Syndicate has been around a good deal longer than Da Federal Reserve, and just getting rid of Da Fed won’t kill the Beast. The problem of course is that the Cancer has so thoroughly metasticized here its tough to kill the cancer without killing the host also.
RE, agreed – it is a system that needs to be exercised out of society. It does go beyond the Federal Reserve System, but NOTHING of substance will happen until you get rid of the *system* (not the name of the system to be replaced by the same systems under a different name). The poison that needs to be removed include:
1. Private cartel control of money and credit within a nation.
2. Money defined as debt – Debt Dollar Tyranny and, if you think about it a bit, you will conclude this system is merely a de-personalized form of debt-slavery where the slaves don’t know their masters. Think about it.
3. Endless usury and ultimate national bankruptcy.
4. 25 years of criminal bubble blowing operations that go unpunished.
5. Endless looting by the those favored in the eyes of those who control the Federal Reserve System
6. Government control via the principle that the borrower (government) is SERVANT to the lender (the private Federal Reserve Cartel).It isn’t about ending an institution, it is about ending systems and processes that are methodically and systematically destroying our nation and putting it under the heel of the criminals running the Federal Reserve System (and ultimately the BIS).
You won’t get an argument from me that Da Fed needs to be abolished, however replacement isn’t quite as straightforward as Bill Still makes it out to be. You should read my article on Central Banking and Da Fed on DD.https://www.doomsteaddiner.org/blog/2012/02/24/da-fed-central-banking-according-to-re/
RE
Beguine post=936 wrote: Come on peeps…… tell us what you are doing, interesting articles/links you have found that will be helpful for the transition – what YOU are doing!… commenting on TAE posts is fine … and informative…. but can we please DO something constructive and put forth some ideas?! Don’t feel inhibited… don’t feel you have to say something extraordinarily momentous or highly intellectual or learned! Are you building something, baking something, growing something, saving money, energy etc? Tell us!
Hydroponics! Check out Peter’s setup inside his house! He grows enough inside to meet about 80% of his nutriition needs. Rest comes from the local fishing.
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TheTrivium4TW post=925 wrote: The number 1 problem society faces is that so few people understand the how the systems that exert ultimate control over their lives actually operate. For example, almost nobody understands that our monetary system is literally weaponized by the oligarchs in order to systematically and covertly asset strip the citizens of society.
NO.
IDEA.
Saying one wants change when one doesn’t know exactly what change is foundational to making society more fair for all people is rather pointless. It seems to me our number one goal out to be to identify the #1 issue that faces society today – the Debt Dollar Tyranny Federal Reserve Crime Syndicate.
Debt money has to go – it is a fraud.
The Central Banking Syndicate has been around a good deal longer than Da Federal Reserve, and just getting rid of Da Fed won’t kill the Beast. The problem of course is that the Cancer has so thoroughly metasticized here its tough to kill the cancer without killing the host also.
chesnok post=921 wrote: [quote=Reverse Engineer post=912]We are at a crossroads now, and we either shrink ourselves back into some form of harmony with the world we live on, or we will go the way of the Dinosaur here, and take with us on the way to the Great Beyond many other species living on the planet as well, in the 6th Mass Extinction.
Or perhaps we extinct ourselves, voluntarily and with dignity.
“May we live long and die out,” says The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. http://www.vhemt.org
There’s a novel perspective I hadn’t considered before 🙂The problem I have with this is that for all the rotten no-good stuff Homo Sapiens has done here, I still think Human Beings are of value with the gift we have of Sentience. I’d rather not see ALL the people wiped off the face of the earth, but rather just shrink down to a population size that can be in balance with all the rest of them out there.
Top of the Food Chain orgnaisms don’t necessarily have to eat themselves into oblivion, Sharks don’t kill off ALL the little Fishies they eat. Predator numbers rise and fall along with the Prey in most ecosystems until they get disturbed in a critical fashion.
So, I am not in favor of auto-extinction. A mssive population reduction yes, extinction no. The main issue here is the manner in which such a Die off occurs. Ideally it would come fairly and naturally with decreasing Birth rates and increasing Death rates, spread over a century or two, but this seems unlikely. Next best thing on a Fast Crash level would be a disease Vector with high infection rates and high mortality rates, incurable by any Modern medicine. If its curable, only the Illuminati would get the Vaccine of course. The disease should strike all populations equally, through all economic classes.
In any event, the choice will be made here in the end by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Famine, Pestilence, War and Death will take down the population as they always have. In this iteration of the cycle though, it seems unlikely that Biblical Numbers of 25% will do the trick. Looks more like it will take 99.9999%.
bluebird post=914 wrote: @Reverse Engineer – If my family and friends are any indication, no one is going to voluntarily shrink any manner of their lifestyles. For them, it’s all about spending more, and buying more stuff using credit cards. Even spouse, who is 65 and sees that this economy cannot be sustained, does nothing to shrink his lifestyle. Just the opposite, he’s going to enjoy himself racing gokarts and eating fast-food. Besides, he tells me, there is nothing to worry about, we’re not going to implode during his lifetime.
Voluntary shrinkage on the part of current “Haves” in the society does seem unlikely to occur on a statistically significant basis. The number of “Haves” in the society is however shrinking rapidly here, so they automatically begin to conserve once they no longer can afford to buy gas for the SUV.
It will be interesting to see how the Pensioners and SS recipients react as their pensions and SS are cut, and their personal Portfolios dissappear into MF Global style Black Holes.
Is Hubby right that it won’t happen in his lifetime? Perhaps, but I sure wouldn’t count on it. Its sure going down mighty quick for the Greeks.
It can’t happen here though, right? Amerikan Exceptionalism. Rubbish of course. Lotta people going to get a very abrupt wake up call in the not to distant future methinks.
There is a certain amount of hubris involved when you try to compare the level of “awareness” of “primitive” people with the current version of Homo Industrialis. Just the term primitive by itself makes a comparison indicating that we know more than they did and thus are more aware of more things.
We can’t know much more about what people 30,000 years ago thought about or spoke about other than looking at a few bits of remaining artworks. We can however know quite a bit more about people who lived 5000 years ago, since their stories got passed on through oral tradition and eventually got written down. What this does tell us is that for as long as we have some record of it, people have concerned themselves with understanding their lives and developing belief structures to explain them. Are these more or less correct than our current meme of “scientific” explanation of the world through physics, chemistry and biology? From our own reference point you would say we understand the world better, but the beief structures certainly have their own complexities to them so they took a lot of thinking to create as well.
Far as what the typical lifespan was, again we make the tacit assumption that it is an “improvement” to have people living longer than they used to. However, much more important than that is the quality of life you have while you do walk the earth. Is it better to live to 90 as a slave in chains, or die at 40 a Free Man who has always lived his life in Freedom?
All the “advances” we have made, all the “improvements” we have made all carried with them Blowback. One thing we do know is that for some 60,000 years or so before the development of agriculture, the few people who walked the earth didn’t do so much damage that it imperilled their own survival. They probably were responsible for the extinction of other mega fauna, the disappearance of Mammoths on the NA continent roughly coincides with the arrival of Homo Sapiens to these shore, but overall they did not so disrupt the ecosystem that they could not continue to survive for 1000s of years after that.
Since the invention of Agriculture and then Industrialization since, we have been involved in accelerating depletion of the resources we need to live, faster than they can be replenished by natural processes. In some places by the magic of modern medicine a few people live longer now, but the planet we live on is dieing. Species extinction is proceeding along at an astonishing rate. What does this say about our “awareness”? Is it really better to sit in the rec room of your McMansion watching the flickering lights of your Plasma TV than it is to tell stories around the flickering light of a campfire? Does having high resolution pictures of the Stars taken from the Hubble Telescope tell you that much more about the Universe than you can deduce lying on your back on a moonless night watching the constellations move across the night sky?
In any event, the Hubble Telescope will come crashing down from Orbit and the Plasma TVs will flicker no more here in due time. One can only hope here that the flickering light of Human Sentience will not also be extiguished in the misguided attempts at “improving” our lives, living into decrepitude in Nursing Homes across the land. We are at a crossroads now, and we either shrink ourselves back into some form of harmony with the world we live on, or we will go the way of the Dinosaur here, and take with us on the way to the Great Beyond many other species living on the planet as well, in the 6th Mass Extinction.
Lithachne post=886 wrote:
You see, I lived in a small village in northern sub-Saharan west Africa for two years, among subsistence farmers. And they *don’t* have clean water. And they *can’t* grow enough food. And it’s *not* big US agribusiness that makes them poor. And they *want* economic opportunities beyond their moribund millet fields–they would happily work in a sweat shop for $1 a day because that would be $1 that they wouldn’t get otherwise. They want indoor plumbing, or at least a toilet. They want refrigeration, lights that don’t produce smoke. They want a floor instead of dirt, roofs made out of at least tin. Most of all, they want their kids not to die of vaccine preventable disease, or at least, they don’t want their kids to die of something as easy to cure as diarrhea. These families want their kids to be able to go to school, but they still need to be able to plant and harvest the fields. How dare you speak for them?! How dare you suggest how wonderful their lives are?!
If you admire their situation so much, any one of them would be delighted to switch places with you. I can get you some names and addresses–let’s make it happen.
Our products’ cheapness is depressing the prices these subsistence farmers can get for their crops on the international market, yet our biofuels program is driving up prices of food (complaints about which have appeared on this page). So which is it? Do we want low food costs for poor people, or do we want poor people to be able to sell the food they grow for more money?
Sachs has never lived in an African village, but at least he’s fracking been to Africa, and he’s been conducting *results-based, outcome-driven* projects that actually work to lift people out of poverty. You denigrate academics, but your essay is worse than any moldy academic treatise, because you don’t even deign to consider any data or experience, you just regurgitate and extend the unfounded opinion of someone with whom you already agree. What shall we call your type of ivory tower?Of course impoverished people “want” all the bennies that Industrialization brought to a few areas of the world! That is why farmers for years have migrated into Big Shities to earn pathetically low wages. Look at China. The Chinese are STILL trying to migrate from the Rice Paddies to factory towns in Gunazou Province, even while the factories are shutting down and the water and air are polluted beyond belief.
I don’t think Ashvin is making the case that poor folks in sub Saharan Africa have life so great. If anything, he is demonstrating how the lives of these people have been systematically destroyed by industrialization, how the economics of food production via industrial agriculture made their produce near worthless here, while all the time their populations grew beyond the point the land they live on could ever possibly support them anymore in a sustainable manner.
The thing here is, when the industrial ag model fails, and fail it will, just about all places will be in the same condition sub-Saharan Africa already is in. We are not going to be RAISING the stnadard of living of those folks, we will be LOWERING the standard we all live under now.
The process is being ringfenced, and the greatest pain is being suffered in the 3rd World economies at the moment, but that pain will be shared by many more soon enough. Greece already is on the brink of falling off the economic cliff as a society. The rest of the PIIGS will not be far behind. The Krauts can only ringfence themselves for so long as the rest of these economies topple one by one here.
Transitioning back to smaller economies that self support is not going to be an easy process, if it even can be accomplished at all. It most certainly will not be accomplished with anywhere near the 7B Homo Sapiens Sapiens currently walking the Earth. The poor folks in Sub-Saharan Africa never got the “bennies” of the Age of Oil, they only got the liabilities off-loaded onto their backs. They are the first Victims of the Overshoot, but they will not be the last.
Its Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You also.
alfbell post=885 wrote: Prediction and supposition are a waste of time. No one knows what is going to happen and when it is going to happen.
Gold, silver, digital money, new currency, cell phones and on and on and on. What a bunch of drivel.
Real wealth is water, food, shelter, clothing, tools, energy and land. That is all there is to it. This is the common denominator… the basic datum. Figure out your strategy based on this basic datum.
You forget Friends and Community in your list of Basic Datum as far as tallying up your real wealth is concerned.
I disagree however that specualting on how the collapse will play itself out on the monetary end is either “drivel” or a “waste of time”. The fact is, that for a while at least the monetary system will remain the main method people have for acquiring water, food, shelter et al. Part of Prepping Up is being aware of the possible ways the system might be manipulated or morphed here. Too many people labor under the false assumption that having a pile of Gold in the Basement Safe or a mattress stuffed full of FRNs will provide a measure of monetary security. Other people labor under the false assumption that by living on a subsistence farm (aka “doomstead”) they will be able to both produce a perpetual food supply and protect and defend it from both the State and from destitute people (aka “zombies”).
In actuality, for the most part you are going to have to find means and methods of surviving inside what looks to be evovlving as an increasingly Fascist State here on the NA continent, thus the reason I label it the “FSofA”, or Fascist States of Amerika.
Nassim post=884 wrote:
Can someone please tell me how to shade in grey quotations by others?
If you are quoting somebody from the thread itself, you just hit the “quote” button.
If you are quoting from somewhere else you are pasting in, surround the text with the words “quote” and “/quote” in square brackets. This forum accepts most BBcode so far as I have experimented with it anyhow.
On that topic, Ashvin are you running this forum on SMF software? Will it accept SMF codes natively?
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Another suggestion.
Its still a 3 Click process through screens before you can get to the Forum. You first have to click an Article, then click Read More. There is no Button on TAE Homepage to take you directly to the Index page of the Forum. That would be helpful to have.
For myself, I just made a Bookmark to go straight to the Recent Topics screen.
RE
Don’t forget yourself Ash. The Bloggers also are painting their pictures and exposing the hypocrisy of a cultural meme gone so horribly wrong now.
The battle for the hearts and minds of the Sheeple through the medium of ideas has only just begun. To date, mostly they are still inundated by the art and slogans of Madison Avenue, but that stuff is losing its meaning as more and more people fall off the economic cliff.
What will be left in the end is the world of ideas. It reamins unlikely that the quintillions of bits of information currently residing on the Google Servers will have quite the staying power of TOSA. While it is up and running though, what you write can make it out into the zeitgeist, and hopefully be retained in the collective consciousnous of those who make it through the dark days ahead.
See you on the Other Side.
Nassim post=868 wrote: Reverse Engineer,
However, as is usual with technocopic solutions, it is quite easy to waylay them. How exactly can they stop people from sabotaging local cell phone towers. I mean, if one cannot get food to eat, why should anyone else?
As soon as local towers are damaged, no one will be able to carry out any financial transaction legally. People will be forced to either barter or use gold/silver or revert to nominally worthless FRN’s
The sabotaging of Conduit infrastructure by Have Nots is already occuring in places like Egypt. That is what all those Gas Pipeline explosions are about.
If people have ZERO dollars in their Cell Phone Accounts, then they would stop carrying them around and you would not be able to track them via GPS. This sytem only works as long as you trickle out enough Dole Money for people to survive. A monthly allotment just enough for minimum food and energy requirements. As long as people get this much, they won’t en masse sabotage the Cell towers, because they remain dependent on the system for their daily bread.
Really, the fact we have 47M people currently getting a Food Allotment on their JPMC SNAP card is the reason the FSofA is not yet Egypt or Greece. If we really had 47M people unable to get the subsistence basics of life, they really would have nothing left to lose and we would see a lot more violence.
The system is overall limited in its utility, it can only persist for as long as TPTB can keep the electric grid up and running everywhere to power all the routers and keep everybody’s cell phone charged. I don;t think the system can last very long, but I also think it is something that will be attempted. As you mention, in Japan its already up and running.
The substitution of Gold or Silver really is just a Barter Economy. If its a Coin, whatever face value is stamped on it is meaningless, its only value is in whether somebody who has some food will take the gold or silver in return for that food. If that person has a large surplus of food, he might take the gold or silver for it, but really not enough people in any community have much Gold or Silver to start an economy rolling this way. What exactly would there be available for the person who collects up Gold and Silver to buy with it in this economy?
On the homepage of my Yahoo Group I kept the following quote from Revelation:
Revelation 18:11-13 And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more: 12The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thyine wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble, 13And cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men.
In a monetary collapse of this magnitude, it ALL goes worthless, even the Gold and Silver, even the Flour and Wheat, even the Souls of Men. Nothing has meaning in terms of monetary value. Its a systemic collapse of a civilization which is held together by the use of money in trade. Its happenned before, it happenned in Babylon and it happenned in Rome. Its happening again now.
el gallinazo post=862 wrote: Reverse Engineer,
Welcome to the exalted club of “conspiracy factists” here 🙂 I find your comments very valuable and thought stimulating.
Thanks EG. Actually I’m “Conspiracy Theory Lite” compared to some of my fellow Diners. We made one of our Topic areas for this area in particular 🙂 Have you stopped by the Diner yet? Brand Spanking new and pretty quiet still, but hopefully things will perk up with some good theorizing.
https://www.doomsteaddiner.org
What we might give some thought to is that if TPTSB declare a “bank holiday,” then what is all that debit card money going to debit. They would be putting all their nuts, assuming they have any, in the functioning of the electronic system. Even a minor Carrington event would take down the monetary system or a single, strategically placed nuclear explosion in the ionosphere.
No, all the information would not be lost in an EMP. Its all backed up in deep underground computers encased in a large Faraday Cage in Area 51 🙂 However, the network itself would certainly be fried along with everybody’s cell phone, so rebooting after this would take some time. Until the network was rebooted, you would probably have to go to a Bank where the manager would take your name along with others and send off a Snail Mail message via Pony Express to the regional office of Da Fed, which would have a paper file of the accounts listed in the Secure Computers in the Underground Bunker. Your local Bank affiliate would get a return Post and he would start Ledger for your account, and temporarily you would be issued Paper Notes of a limited duration to use in local commerce, until the network could be rebooted.
Also, only the Starbuck yuppies and the Amalgamated Union of Nerds with their handheld iGadgets are really ready to go cashless. The heat hasn’t been under the lobster pot long enough to get the teeming millions to go along without resistance.
Not true, the vast majority of people in the FSofA already go cashless operating this way using Plastic Debit and Credit cards. This is the same system, you just don’t have your own end terminal, the stores have them. As mentioned in the post I replied to, you often cannot even use Cash to pay some bills.
And then we should give some thought to exactly how the recall of currency will go down. While other governments have pulled this shit, they have replaced the currency with a new paper currency, and the excuse is always that their political antecedents have allowed the base unit to reach such a small value that they need a new currency that divides it by a 100 or a 1000 (or perhaps 10 to the 8th 🙂 Are enough Merikans that brain dead or would this be the kick off to an even more radicalized resistance movement? Turning in your sweat and blood paper for electrons might not go down that easily. Inquiring minds would like to know.
I lived in Brazil in the 60s, during which period the Cruzeiro was replaced by the Cruzado, then after that I think was the New Cruzeiro followed eventually by the Real. Zeros were lopped off in each iteration of this monetary farce. It of course led to a lot of political instability, but mostly the average person just lives with it, relatively powerless to do much about it. With all the Guns in the FSofA, it could be more radical here than there, but so far the imagined Revolution of Gun toting Rednecks and Tea Baggers has not yet occurred, so I’ll believe it when I see it.
BTW, bartering your JPMC acquired potatos (I prefer the Dan Quayle spelling) for vodka with your local bootlegger would be a nifty idea. Keep the wheels of industry spinning.
My Grandpa was a Bootlegger in Brooklyn during the Great Depression. He did very well 🙂 Left a lot of Booze Bucks behind. A dangerous bizness to be in back then, probably more dangerous in the Depressin to come, but still one off the most durable enterprises you can engage in to survive, as long as you can dodge the bullets.
Whether the End Game is Deflation or Hyperinflation, in the developed countries with a digital money infrastructure already in place, at some indeterminate point in the future CASH will not be acceptable payment form.
Far as TPTB go are concerned, Cash is nearly as bad as Barter, its very difficult to trace, particularly old bills that have been floating around in the system a long time. Anyone having large Stashes of Cash can be assumed by TPTB to have acquired it “illegally”. Electronic Money is much better, it can always be traced, all the Bits are Tagged and you have a complete record always of every transaction ever made with a given bit from its date of issuance onward, even if it was just to buy a stick of bubble gum.
Consider the current means of Food Distribution through the SNAP Card system. The Card is tagged with your Name, and you have to show Goobermint ID (drivers license usually) in order to use it to buy Food. You can’t hand over some Food Stamps to somebody else for say a bottle of Moonshine and then the Moonshiner could use the stamps to buy some Potatoes to make more Booze. You would have to buy the Potatoes yourself and hand the sack over to the Moonshiner to get your bottle of Vodka.
If/when we get a Full On crash, even a deflationary one, its fairly likely Da Goobermint will Decertify all FRNs, and give you a Window of time (maybe a month) to turn in all your FRNs and then be issued out Digicredits for this Cash. From then on, the only “legitimate” transactions you could ever make would be with the new DigiDollars. Probably they would be recorded in your ATT Cell Phone Account, and whenever making a transaction even with another Private Seller of something, you would have to use your Iphone to transfer the Money from your account to his, with all the Taxes automatically taken out.
You don’t really NEED the Chip Implants here, this conversion could be done virtually instantaneously now since everyone carries a cell phone. If you chose NOT to carry a Cell Phone, you simply could not buy anything, because there is no “Paper” form of currency that is accepted anymore by Da Goobermint. Its not good to pay Bills already, once TSHTF completely, its unlikely you could use it to buy anything at all.
When the monetary system crash works its way inward to collapsing the dollar, there will likely be a very limited amount of time where current FRNs will work to buy anything at all. You’ll have to use that window to convert into Hard Goods as best you can at that time, but really everyone will be doing that and shelves will empty pretty fast.
Meanwhile though, they remain the most fungible form of money available on a global level. Gold has limited utility, you cannot go to Walmart and buy out their stock of 50 lb bags of rice with an American Eagle. First you have to go to a coin dealer and get him to fork over whatever it is Gold is trading at on that day, less his vigorish, then go over to Walmart to buy the 50 lb bags of rice. In a SHTF scenario, by the time you complete the first trasaction of seling the Gold Coin and then driving over to Walmart, the shelves would already be emptied.
You have to keep your wits about you all the time here, on practically a daily basis. Really, its a possibility on any given day that the POTUS would declare a Bank Holiday, and if you don’t divest of your cash in the Bank of Sealy on that DAY before everybody else runs out trying to load up on Preps, it won’t buy jack squat, because there won’t be anything left to buy.
The fact we now have an electronic system of commerce already in place makes this economic colapse quite a bit different than the one experienced leading into the Great Depression. There was no readily available substitute for the Paper Dollars then. There is now, and one can be pretty sure TPTB will take the opportunity here to get rid of Cash completely.
Of course, the whole bizness will cause such Havoc that one cannot expect the system to hold up too long. Local communities will have to reorganize along Barter lines and produce their own local currencies to do local resource distribution, if a monetary based economy is chosen by said community. I hope we will not go down this route up here, I’d rather see us try a Potlatch economy again. Only time will tell how that works itself out.
Babble post=848 wrote:
On the other hand, without technology, trade, manufacturing most people would be starving.Incorrect. Without Technology, Trade and Manufacturing, most people on Earth would never have been born in the first place.
Society only advanced when most people no longer had to work on farms.
We advanced? I don’t see any advance in society. It’s an advance to run bigger Wars with bigger Weapons? Its an advance to turn entire countries into Polluted Sewers? Its an advance to create massive Dead Zones in the world Oceans? Its an advance to have spent fuel at Fuk-U-shima puking poison out from Nippon every day?
The only thing we are Advancing towards with this paradigm is auto-extinction.
FrankRichards post=835 wrote: RE,
It’s not that I forgot them. I was reacting to the all too standard implication that the West contributed nothing, just stole.
Physics, chemistry, engineering, vaccination and sewers. Yes, other civilizations contributed, but, hey, we have electric lights and don’t have smallpox.
Spin me how either of those is bad.
Electric Lights come at the expense of burning millions of years worth of fossil fuel energy. They burn brightly for a while, but then they burn out. They aren’t perpetual. Besides that, in order to keep your McMansion lit up, somewhere somebody is fracking some NG and shoving tasty chemicals into the water table.
Far as Smallpox is concerned, first off all disease is a form of population control, which is overall a bit more fair in its distribution than War is. Second, Smallpox and most viral diseases we suffer from come as a result of animal husbandry putting large numbers of animals in close proximity to each other and to human beings. Virial diseases mutate and spread this way through the populations of both animals and humans. Ths is why natives on the NA continent were so susceptible to these diseases, they did not practice animal husbandry in this way and so had not been exposed to these diseases previously.
So, we most likely would never had smallpox to begin with had we not stupidly domesticated animals and forced them to live in little pens and cages before slaughtering them for food. This only sent us on the road toward Overshoot and the possible extinction of our own species.
Frank, all this stuff has Blowback. The Progress Narrative isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
