Reverse Engineer
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One more thing. For those of you who have not read the full version of Unforgiven on the Diner, you cannot really argue this one with me here because as presented in this compilation by Ashvin, you get a very skewed perspective on my arguments. I will just attach in this post my closing paragraphs from Unforgiven.
RE wrote: I do not see Mass Death as avoidable at this point, and I cannot accept the alternative of allowing what is going on now to end in an Extinction Level Event either. So the only real question for me here is who lives, who dies and how you cut the losses as best you can. The only people who can do that are Orkin Men. I don’t believe there will be ONE Orkin Man of vast power and control like a Mao or Uncle Joe here, I think the society is fracturing too fast for that too organize up now. Rather I think the fractured society will breed up various Orkin Men, all with varying styles and methodology, but in the end all will be responsible for the very same thing, which is MANAGING DEATH.
If YOU were charged with this unbearable responsibility, how would YOU react, what would YOU choose to do? For me, the right meme does not come off the pages of The Bible, it comes from the Pop Culture paradigm of the Old West, personified best by Clint Eastwood in so many films, from the Spaghetti Westerns to the Unforgiven. We ARE an Unforgiven bunch as Homo Sapiens, and there really are times when a Stranger needs to Ride into Town and take out the Bad Guys.
This is one of those times, for sure.
Also, Ashvin did NOT include the Videos I presented in Unforgiven to set the stage for my arguments, and they are a very important aspect of this debate. I will add just one of them here as well. For the rest, read Unforgiven in its entirety on the Diner Blog.
Imagine YOURSELF watching the shit get kicked out of little children, or murdered in cold blood. Imagine YOURSELF being beaten to a bloody pulp here. How would YOU react to that? This is happening in Greece and Syria now AS WE SPEAK. How many kids were murdered in the latest Syrian “atrocity”? Who REALLY is responsible for that? Are you going to let them GET AWAY with that kind of shit? Not if you got an ounce of COURAGE you are not. Not IMHO anyhow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYnGLcIVLNE&feature=player_embedded
Hang em High
RE
Repost from a response I made to WHD in the Diner Version of this debate:
RE wrote:
Welcome to the diner WHD. Lucky your middle name isn’t Michael. Then you would be WMD.The concept that the Inquisition is coming after every last J6P is one Ashvin likes to paint, but that is not likely to be the way this one plays out.
By the time people here get riled up enough for this kind of action, the transfer of wealth will be complete and about EVERYONE except the .01% will be living in desperate poverty. At this point you are in the position of a Christoulas in Greece, with NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE
The Inquisition also cannot and will not succeed until the Failure of the Conduits, aka the Monetary system, the Electrical and Communications and Transportation Networks and the Fracture of the Big Ass Military into many competing factions all with ever less fuel and ammo to work with.
In the main, the Inquisition results from the individual Warlords wresting control from the .01%, and so this is where it will focus. So the folks who have to be concerned about this are generally the high managerial levels of major Corporations, Hedge Fund Managers, High Level Politicians and Bureaucrats and then the levels above that as they get ferreted out, beginning with the Bilderbergers and going up from there.
It will be a VERY chaotic situation overall, “anarchy” if you will for a while. Whichever side you are on, your Loyalty has to be Unquestionable, because there will be many involved in the Quisling game, and as soon as that gets even SUSPECTED of you, you will be summarily EXECUTED. This is HOW this dynamic works, regardless of all the Christian philosophy Ashvin pumps off his keyboard on a daily basis.
Ashvin has this Vision that the Highly Principled and Moral Christians, Buddhists, Jews, Hindus and Muslims of the world are going to rise up to fight this dynamic, but he is so far wrong its not even funny. The fact is these folks will be watching their children DIE of starvation daily, they will have no opportunities for a better life and they will do what they feel they have to do to survive. They will either Line Up with the Local Warlord who will promise to get rid of their long term Oppressors, or they will join the Gestapo of the Oppressors for so long as they have working Money to pay them. Jay Gould’s 50% of the Working Class will be hired to kill the other 50%. This lasts only so long as the monetary system lasts, and perhaps not even that long.
The Inquisition results from the fact that these Warlords will be just as vicious, ruthless and cunning as the Illuminati ever were, in fact moreso because they grew up mostly on the Streets. When the Big Hardware no longer functions, the Illuminati will be EATEN ALIVE, possibly in the literal sense of that metaphor.
This dynamic likely remains a few years off here for the FSofA, possibly even decades but I doubt it. You just have to watch as one place after another cascade fails here into EXACTLY the kind of dynamic I am talking about. This is REALITY. A few more places fall into this situation, I should be able to generate a decent mathematical function to describe it also and make a better timeline prediction.
Anyhow, this is the most likely scenario I can generate up, so it’s the one I consider the wisest to prep for, in order to figure out how NOT to be caught up by one side or the other and exterminated yourself. You have to be very sensitive to the power structure as it shifts, and sense when the Herd is ready to Stampede. Because mark my words, that day is Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You.
RE
Capital Controls are all the rage now. I wrote about that one a couple of days ago on the Diner. Featured your old nemesis Inflationista Speedy Gonzalo Lira in it. 😀
RE wrote: …The problems with Simon’s advice should be obvious now. Exactly which Foreign Bank would you pick to safely deposit your money? In Europe for example, when those banks go Belly Up, the LAST Depositors who might see any of their money are the foreigners. Far as Gold goes, Simon himself mentions that one of the typical forms of Capital Controls is the confiscation of PMs, so I am not sure how having them protects you all that much once the Nation States are in such dire straights they have to try to keep anything worth anything insed their borders. Far as having a place to GO is concerned for the average Pigman, where do you PICK? Simon seems to think Cheeeelay is a great spot, where he is neighbors with Speedy Gonzalo Lira. Exactly why these guys think the Chilean Goobermint is so much more trustworthy and dependable than the FSofA one or any of the Eurotrash ones is beyond me. How many times has that Goobermint turned over in the last 40 years?…
RE
Nassim post=3654 wrote: RE,
On the one hand, you say (rightly) that the resources per unit of gold will drop.
On the other, you say (rightly) that the gold will not be available as it will be hidden (i.e supply will drop).
I think that the second argument is much stronger than the first one and so gold is going to be a good way of preserving value – Econ 101 🙂
Paradox of Thrift there Nassim. It’s occuring in Dollars as well as Gold right now. The portion of the population in surplus of the extant money starts to hoard it, and this accelerates the deflationary collapse. Why would I go out and buy a chunk of Real estate today if I figure by holding my gold, I will be able to buy twice as much a year from now, eh?
So those who have some surplus money hold onto it, and resultat from that the commerce slows to a crawl, and this results in BKs of those who depend on commerce to keep going. Overall, they generally depend on a lot of liquidity to keep this system functioning, but the Paradox of Thrift prevents that.
The end result is that by the time you pull the gold coins OUT of the Basement Safe, there is nothing left to buy with them.
Isofar as Daves argumet goes that many Asians hold personal gold, relative tot he population percentage I would dispute that one. MOST Indians and Chinese are desperately poor people who can barely buy enough food these days. Those who do have Gold Rings and Necklaces are quite likely going to be handing them over for Twinkies pretty soon. Its still not a large percentage of the population anywhere who holds PMs. More in absolute numbers in Asia perhaps, but by percentages those folks are mostly poorer than dirt.
RE
TheTrivium4TW post=3655 wrote: RE, thanks for the article – two thumbs up. Ashvin, thanks for posting it here.
If you ever dropped by the Diner Triv, you could have dined on this meal a few days earlier 😉 You probably would enjoy the Usury thread ongoing there that El G started, Ashvin Surly and I have been engaged in a DOOZY of a debate on this one.
Triv wrote:
The chumptocracy has to end.RE, if the chumptocracy doesn’t end, the “solution” will be shoved down our throats by the very people who engineered our current dilemma…
AGREED, IN SPADES
Wait for the Failure of the Conduits, then pull out the Winchesters.
RE
Nassim post=3650 wrote:
Ashvin & RE,
Why bother having energy as a form of currency, when gold is an excellent representation of energy. South Africa’s gold mines should have closed down decades ago – because of ever lower grades – if the price of energy in terms of gold had not dropped. I would much rather carry a few gold coins rather than many oil barrels around with me.
The problem Nassim is that Gold is NOT in fact a good representation of Energy, whether measured in barrels of oil or food calories.
Gold is relatively fixed in supply, and will be moreso as the energy becomes unavailable to mine it. Oil and Food on the other hand will become more scarce. So, relative to either Oil or Food, over time each Gold coin will become worth less, until it is in fact worthless. Econ 101.
Besides this is the vast Centralization problem Gold already has. It is mostly held in undergound Vaults controlled by a very few people and they are not going to chop it up into coinage to hand out to people to do commerce with. The alternative is to create Paper Notes or Digibits based on Centralized Piles of Gold, but of course you know where that one leads.
DFT wrote:
One thing to note: oil in and of itself is not useful either. In fact, its toxic by itself. Only after it is refined, and presented to a machine, and that machine is switched on, at that point it turns into a useful “energy slave.” Likewise, gold is not intrinsically useful either. It has to be presented to a society that values gold. At that moment – just like gasoline being burned in an ICE – it too turns into an energy slave, because of that willingness of that other society to accept gold in exchange for surplus. In that sense, the gold-valuing society is much like a machine fed by refined oilIt’s true that much of the current value of Oil comes from the ability to do useful work with it courtesy of the ICE, Jet Engines etc. So when the EROEI for pulling up Oil lowers to the point you can no longer run the refineries then the value of the Oil drops quite a bit, but not to Zero even unrefined. This because Bunker Fuel (basically unrefined Oil) can still be used to run steam turbines on ships and railroad locomotives, as well as being used for heating purposes.
Gold CAN drop to Zero value in a society suffering extreme scarcity of the basics of food. If you imagine the Farmer with his family and say few Feudal Serfs he recruited from the hordes of the UEY growing just enough food for all of them, if you show up at his farm Gold Coin in hand, will he trade you any of that food for the Coin? Unlikely. He has to have a decent surplus before he will make that trade.
There will of course be imbalances for quite a while here to come I suspect, with some folks (Illuminati) with plenty of Food and all the rest of J6Ps in Calorie Deficit daily, gradually wasting away and becoming more susceptible to infectious diseases until you get your Pandemic. You can’t trade your Gold to these Illuminati for their Food either. Why? Because THEY have most of the Gold ALREADY! So the only thing left here for you is to trade your Soul and Body to them as a Slave in return for “their” food, grown on “their” land. Long as you keep buying into the idea somebody can “own” the land, you have this problem.
Fact is of course, they don’t even need your Labor all that much, just a few Slaves are necessary and the rest are Useless Eaters. So 99/100 J6Ps can’t even trade their SOULS for their daily bread. As Revelation 18 said, even the SOULS OF MEN go worthless, right along with the Gold and Silver.
You can either allow this dyamic to proceed unchecked, or you fight it and knock down those who purport to “own” the Earth. You wait for the Failure of the Conduits, and then you take them out. Pull out the Winchesters.
RE
ashvin post=3640 wrote: People like me and RE want to use net energy to ultimately measure gold’s worth, but that’s something that most gold bugs, whether they support Freegold or gold-backed money, do not consider at all.
What I get from Gold Bugs is that somehow they believe that Gold holds value intrinsically without connection to available energy. This makes no sense of course, since Energy comes first for any living thing.
Anyhow you are right, net energy is the computation you have to make, and for a while with Toby on Reverse Engineering during our RBE debates I tried to concoct up a Calorie based monetary system. The Japanese actually ran one using Koku, which measured the amount of rice to feed a family for 1 year.
Gold is not valuable in itself, as Ashvin said it doesn’t exist in a Vacuum. Gold became a REPRESENTATION of wealth for many reasons, but always represented wealth in a world of relative surplus. Even if you make the assumption that Gold holds some intrinsic value, in the trade for energy it is relatively worthless. Put it this way. How many more Gold Bars do Saudi Sheiks really need in their Basement Safes? What they need these days is Food and Weapons. Lots of Weapons.
RE
jal post=3642 wrote: When history is written …
I’m sure that this will be one of the points of view that will be hotly debated.I’m trying to get the history written down now just in case there’s no paper and pens around later.
RE
pipefit post=3635 wrote: RE-Just because Ashvin’s friend FOFOA is a complete baboon doesn’t mean that gold’s supporters are wrong. If the dollar collapses in buying power, gold, oil, and everything else will go parabolic in dollar terms.
Instead of looking at the gold price in dollars, look at the price of oil, gasoline, food, or a basket of ‘stuff’ priced in gold (or silver). If you own gold or silver, you would be very happy that your metal has been increasing in buying power. But the goal here is to preserve buying power. Any increase is a gift.
Gold priced against other commodity varies according to supply, demand, market manipulation and perceived value at any given time. I already went through this Econ 101 Lesson with GO over on the Diner.
The Oil market is constrained by EROEI, which will eventually cause the production to be shut in, which will make the Oil unavailable to buy at any price, measured in Gold or anything else. Shortly after the Gas disappears from the pumps, the food will disappear from the shelves. You won’t preserve your purchasing power, because there will be nothing left to buy.
They will do a reset fairly soon.
The Clowns running this show couldn’t Reset Bowling Pins, much less this monetary system. The only thing they will do is burn down the Bowling Alley.
RE
pipefit post=3632 wrote: Actually, the Chinese are a lot smarter than you imply. They are saving in precious metals.
Don’t get me started on PMs PF! Do you really want me to paste up Revelation 18 AGAIN here? And follow that up with Ben Lichtestein calling the S&P Flash Crash? No, I’m sure you don’t. 😆
Here is what I will predict for you on the Parabolic Rise of PMs. The Day they go to the MOON in terms of their relative worth against Fiat is the Day there is nothing left to BUY with them on the shelves of Valmart and Safeway.
2 words for you to put into the Gold Bug vocabulary.
MARGIN CALLS
RE
The Chinese are of course
Your observation here Ilargi how each new entrant into the Industrial Game has “benefitted” in terms of Growth Rate by Copying what came before them is a very good one. The sad thing for the Chinese is they came in a Day Late and a Yuan Short in the great game of Industrialization. They dropped into it just when the driving force of the fossil fuels were getting more scarce and expensive. They did make up for this well of course by using Slave labor to succeed on the mercantile level.The idea however that the Chiense can ever ramp up internal consumption to maintain their growth rate is just nuts.
China’s trade surplus as a percentage of GDP is shrinking. Hence, growth will have to come from domestic demand. The government has tried all sorts of tricks to boost this, but it can’t change people’s habits overnight. The Chinese people are savers.
I don’t think the problem is that Chinese Save too Much. I think the problem is they don’t have enough MONEY to become profligate Konsumers to begin with! How can anyone who is working in a Foxconn Factory contemplating suicide on a Daily Basis making $2/hour be an I-phone Konsumer of the products they are making?
The whole MODEL is built on Selling what you make to Somebody ELSE who has more money than you do. What do you do when they run OUT of money? You VENDOR FINANCE them, in the case of the FSofA to the tune of $2T or more here.
I do realize of course that TPTB are enamored of the idea that you can lend money to YOURSELF in an endless Circle Jerk, but the idea seems to be running out of steam here now, and the Chinese got the short end of the stick on this one also. Sad to say for the Chinese, none of those Euro onds they bought will ever pay off, and their USTs are equally worthless Toilet Paper. Empty Promises of a Future that will never come.
Once the population of 1.3B Chinese grasp this, the 100K or so running the show better RUN FOR THEIR LIVES. Because inside of China, they are TOAST also.
RE
If there is one thing you could pin down that keeps the Elite in Power here, it’s the fact that everyone is scared to death of the alternative. For good reason, generally the alternative results in a lot of dieing.
So Greece, Spain, et al go into the IMF ICU as Gomers on Respirators to hang on for just one more week, one more day, one more hour to the Industrial way of life. Reversion to an Agrarian way of life without Oil can’t happen overnight, the conversion the other way took many decades, close to a Century really. The systems which were in place which made that agrarian lifestyle are mostly gone now. How many Horses do you think there are now in Greece to pull wagons and plows anyhow?
In the meantime in Greece and Spain along with everywhere else, the population EXPLODED courtesy of all the cheap food available from Industrial Ag. Now that the Oil is not so cheap anymore, the food it produces isn’t either, and if nobody will float you a Loan to buy this Food, you get to STARVE.
So this is the situation the Greeks find themselves in. Sell themselves as Slaves to the Illuminati and hopefully get enough meager rations from the IMF, ESM or STUPID Funds to stay alive a while longer, or Break FREE and take the hit of a significant portion of the population starving to death.
If you read anything of Ferfal’s Blog on the Argentinian Crisis and have seen any of the photos of encampments of the poor and disenfranchised of Argentina, you should know that all the talk of how Argentina “recovered” ecoomically and experienced “growth” after defaulting is really a crock of shit.
THIS is the future for Greece, Spain, Italy…and really everywhere else once they get CUT OFF from the lifeblood of Credit necessary to buy what remains of the Oil under the desert sands of Ghanwar.
So, everyone NOT yet off the Cliff is TERRIFIED, and rightly so. Transisitioning back off the Oil Jones is a very tough thing to do, and mostly not successful without a whole lot of dieing. About the most successful to date seem to be the Cubans, who have managed to survive Embargos and the collapse of their Patron State of the Soviet Union better than most others Cut Off from the credit markets. Still, the Cubans never industrialized that much in the first place, and they are on an Island somewhat removed from the vast geopolitical forces pushing around a land mass like Europe or MENA.
What to DO for the Greeks? What to do for ANY of us really, because this show is Coming to a Theatre Near You also in due time. it is unfortunately not a soluble problem by conventional means. Time to start thinking Outside the Box.
Patrick post=3613 wrote: The closest I come to agreement with anyone here is RevEng (and God where is El Gal when we need his humour and wisdom)? And RE I think you need to add William Catton high up on your list. His book Overshoot: the Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change is the most lucid work out there in this realm.
The carrying capacity of the planet is realistically no more than 2 billion people but we’ve degraded even that. Plus, we would most likely dip well below that in a die-off.
Let me be brutal. In the next 50 to 100 years if not sooner–here I’ll be gentle–at least 3.5 to 4 billion people are going to die and not of old age. That is if we don’t annihilate each other totally first, or suffer some other catastrophic collapse as have been mentioned above.
Yes, I should have mentioned Catton in that list also. Far as El G is concerned, he is back to writing and has published a few recently on the Diner.
The actual Carrying Capacity given some idealized solutions is open to question. If you accept some of AB’s arguments with respect to possible Energy Production and some of Peter’s with respect to Hydroponic Food production, even absent Fossil Fuel Energy the current 7B might be maintained long enough for a controlled Die Off over some time, mostly through old age attrition. Assuming of course you also could implement some Birth control at the same time, and maintain demographics well enough.
Unfortunately of course, we do agree that the likelihood of idealized solutons being implemented rapidly enough is vanishingly small at the moment, so a massive knockdown of population is the most likely scenario. It will not however be evenly distributed here, so this is where there is some possibility for the individual to enhance personal probabilities for survival.
The likelihood also is for an Undershoot to follow the Overshoot. How LOW do we GO on this one? That can only be speculated on, but of course if you take the Deer on St Matthew’s Island as a representative model, it could be nasty indeed.
I remain convinced the best alternatives are in current Low Population Zones, and the further you can reasonably get away from the center of Industrial Civilization the better off you are. With the exception of ELE type scenarios including Global Thermonuclear Warfare or Multiple Fuk-U-Shimas poisoning EVERYTHING, I think the Inuit in Nunavut and the Kalahari Bushmen and some Amazonian tribes will hardly be touched by all of this. For everybody else though, there will be some effect in your neighborhood.
Most of us, including yours truly, are not ready to go so far out as Nunavut. You can however try to make yourself ready for when Nunavut comes to you. Learn the SKILLS of Survival. Pack some of the Tools available courtesy of the Age of Oil in a Bugout Bag and keep it ready at the front door of your McMansion. When the Nazis roll their Tanks into your little town, head for the Forest, head for the Swamps, head for the Mountains. Anywhere the Tanks cannot Roll easily is a better place to be. Be prepared to SURVIVE out there for as long as it takes, and it won’t take long once it really gets rolling. Two growing seasons MAX before the big knockdown.
Good Luck with whatever you choose, wherever you go. Faith may help you to make it though the Zero Point, but Faith alone will not do it. You have to be READY for it on a practical level, and have a PLAN to SURVIVE.
See You on the Other Side.
ashvin post=3597 wrote: [quote=Reverse Engineer post=3587]
Still… it is odd to rely on Revelations 17 at all for your argument with GO about how PMs will fare in the future. If John was just making shit up about what will happen in the future, that hurts your argument. If you think it is good because it sounds like the account of money collapse in historical Babylon, then why not just use the latter as your support? We all agree (me, you, GO) that the current monetary system will eventually collapse, but it’s unlikely Biblical John would know anything about our present troubles 2000 years ago (unless he was, in fact, inspired by an all-knowing God). So why rely on the passages written by a “good science fiction writer” instead of historical accounts of Babylon? I guess just because they sound cooler!Actually, it’s Revelation 18 I used, not 17.
Why use that instead of some other historical text? First off, because I haven’t found so far another text which describes the monetary aspect of this collapse. Lots of stories about the sack of the City, the various and sundry rulers that took over and so forth, but nothing about money.
Second, this is a very concise passage overall describing many of the phenomena we see today. Kings of the Earth and Rich Merchants fornicating basically describes a weekend in the Hamptons.
The Bible is also well regarded and accepted as a Historical source. So if you do make the assumption as I do that most of the stories in there have some basis in historical fact, this particular bit of history is very relevant to us. It has a very specific reference in it to Gold & Silver, which of course is why it applies in any argument with GO.
Then of course also, as a big FAN of my writing 😉 you know how I use metaphors and go way over the top all the time, and good grief you can’t get more OTT stuff to use than comes out of the KJV Bible in Revelation. That is pretty much the best Fire & Brimstone writing ever done, and I hold it in as much esteem as I do the work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson B)
RE
snuffy post=3593 wrote: Great rant,get some decent graphics to give a visual impact,and, you have a primer for those who are bright enough to know something is wrong,but anesthetized by the propaganda….
AB’s Rant is up with Graphics as Waste Based Society III: Solutions and Alternatives on the Diner.
RE
Ashvin breaks down 3 Categories of Doomers:
Ashvin wrote:
There are generally 3 types of “Doomers”, or realistic thinkers, out there:1) Those who believe humanity is doomed to extinction or near-extinction no matter what we do at this point in time.
2) Those who believe humanity is probably doomed to extinction or near-extinction, but there is a slim chance we can avoid such a fate if the appropriate measures are taken and all the stars align in the right places.
3) Those who have FAITH that significant portions of humanity will make it through its numerous trials in the near future, difficult and painful as they may turn out to be.
Going back to debates on this topic held on TBP a little over a year ago, in my Frostbite Falls Daily Rant I broke down Doomers into 2 categories, Doom Lite and Full Doom. I later added a category of Uber Doom.
The categories break down as follows (more detail in the FFDR article)
Doom Lite– These folks see difficult days ahead, but feel we will eventually come through it with similar technology to today.Full Doom– This group sees a crash of Industrial Civilization and vast knockdown of the population of Homo Sapiens. Sub categories of people believe we can halt techno-slide to anywhere from 18th to 19th century tech, and other go all the back to Paleolithic tech.
Uber Doom– This group sees our current problems leading to an Extinction Level Event for Homo Sapiens
I’m a Full Doomer, currently leaning toward Paleolithic levels of tech in the long term for Homo Sapiens. This is based on the work of Richard Duncan, Albert Bartlett, Marvin Harris and assorted other anthropology and history out there.
Where does Faith really play into this? For me its basically an accounting here of what is likely and what is not likely to occur. You base what you do on the Most Likely possibilities, while also preparing back up plans for some of the less likely ones.
The one you cannot prepare for at all is an ELE. If Yellowstone is going to Blow, a Near Earth size asteroid is going to collide with GAIA or the pH of the Ocean is going to drop to the point the phytoplankton cannot live, we are all toast and its end of story for Human Sentience. So even though this possibility seems more likely all the time, it’s not one I concern myself with in terms of trying to prep up for it.
Doom Lite seems increasingly less likely all the time. To be able to maintain even a facsimile of what we currently have requires techno-fixes that even if possible are not being undertaken fast enough to stop population knockdown and the inevitable chaos that will result from that.
So IMHO, Full Doom is the the best theory which overall fits the facts as we see them unfolding right now. Having Faith that it will improve doesn’t strike me as a credible plan of action.
What is credible are some of the Solutions presented by people like Urban Scout Peter Bauer, and our own Peter on the Doomstead Diner. Typical Ag Based Solutions such as Farming on the Amish model to me have some credibility also, but less so than the previous mentioned ones.
Finally, the toughest thing to deal with in terms of Prep is the Political consequences in the near term here of increasing Fascism, the likelihood of War and Conscription coming down the pipe and how to negotiate that shitstorm while it is underway. Finding good solutions to that is much tougher than just the paradigms for living afterward if you survive are.
ashvin post=3580 wrote: [quote=Reverse Engineer post=3574]I This is simple, RE. You asked me what evidence I have to suggest the passage you quoted was not about the Babylonian civilizational collapse of the past, but rather about a specific future event in Jerusalem. Besides the obvious fact that it is contained in the Book of Revelations…
I think here is the source of confusion, and this is really my fault for not explaining the issue clearly enough.
Revelation is a prediction of a future event, I don’t dispute that. Whether that future event will occur in Jerusalem or the City of London or on the site of the original Babylon I don’t know.
What I do know is that any good science fiction writer who makes predictions about the future bases it on events that occurred in the past or present. So whoever it was that was writing Revelation in making his predictions about the future would likely base that on things he knew of from the past, which others of his time likely were aware of as well, as stories passed on through oral tradition. Those folks were a lot closer along the timeline to the collapse of the REAL Babylon than we are now, and stories about it likely still circulated, as currently stories still criculate about say Vlad the Impaler. For the reader of Revelation in that time, drawing the analogy of a Future event to one known of in the Past would have driven home the likelihood that similar (but worse) could occur in the future.
Hopefully this clarifies and resolves our dispute on this point.
RE
Actually, most institutions notably the Catholic Church, the Mormons, Billy Graham, Jimmy Swaggert, et al and numerous other promoters of various interpretations of Biblical MEANING are what led me to the conclusion anybody at all can pitch out their interpretation here. Exactly how LAZY I am in terms of research isn’t all that meaningful really, because I have no idea how much work anybody puts into developing their own interpretation of this stuff. Even if they DO put in a lot of work (and the Catholic Church has been working at this for CENTURIES now and Monks gave their entire LIVES to the task of buttressing their arguments), that does not mean they draw correct conclusions either.
I am sure for every argument you put up there is some Jesuit or some Seventh Day Adventist who could cite another 1000 texts to refute an argument you cut and paste from somebody else. I am supposed to spend the rest of my days walking the earth sifting through this swamp of conflicting interpretations to make my decision on WTF has it RIGHT here?
Please feel free always to knock down any argument I put up with reams of documentation from sources which meet your requirements for adequate research. I’m still looking for an argument in there which refutes the idea that the Babylonian Collapse of the Mesopotamian Era was a Monetary System Collapse. When I either find one on my own or you point me toward such an argument, I’ll read it in its entirety. What you did point me toward was just more of the same kind of bullshit I have read many times before, and I really did not need to go through all the pages to figure that one out.
RE
To return to the topic at hand, check out the latest from Ambrose:
Ambrose wrote:
Debt crisis: Germany signals shift on €2.3 trillion redemption fund for EuropeThe German government has begun opening the door to shared debts for the first time in a profound change of policy, agreeing to explore proposals for a €2.3 trillion (£1.9 trillion) stabilization fund in order to stop the eurozone’s crisis escalating out of control…
Forget that Nickel and Dime ESM with €500B in Chump Change here. Let’s talk some real money here! LOL
RE
Golden Oxen post=3562 wrote:
Doomster’s and their followers are great for telling about our problems but have little to offer in solutions.Nonsense!
You YOURSELF are a Diner, and you know for a FACT that all of us Diner Doomers work out Solutions in GREAT DETAIL all the time. You just don’t LIKE the solutions because nobody uses Gold in them. 😆
So stop spreading DISINFORMATION about Doomers. Peter Bauer, Urban Scout’s stuff is REAL SOLUTION by one Doomer. Peter’s Hydroponics are another solution by another Doomer. The Inquisition of yours truly is yet another (highly unpopular :sick: )solution. To say Doomers do not present Solutions though is a BALD FACED LIE! LIAR! I call you out for this here.
For the TRUTH about what real Doomers really think and the SOLUTIONS they discuss, visit the DOOMSTEAD DINER.
RE
ashvin post=3564 wrote:
Did you bother to read past that point at all? Chris goes on to debunk that interpretation, as well the interpretations that it refers to Rome, the Vatican, New York/London, or some type of human system. When I say “debunk”, I mean he presents a lot of solid linguistic, contextual and logical evidence for why those interpretations are flawed, and why the last city of Jerusalem is a much better fit.
I went about 10 pages deep before I puked.
Wow, so now you are saying that we cannot ever figure out the meaning of any text, because the writers are always trying to mislead us about what they mean. Is everything written down “propaganda”, or is it only the texts that you don’t like, or the ones you want to manipulate so they become convenient for your arguments, such as the Bible? We cannot know the meaning of Plato’s Republic, or of Marx’s Das Capital, or Hitler’s Mein Kampf or anything else? It doesn’t matter if it’s propaganda – we can still figure out what it means. You really came up with this craziness out of nowhere.
It’s not from Nowhere, because Nowhere is Somewhere to the person who is There already. 😛
I didn’t say “We cannot know the meaning of Plato’s Republic, or of Marx’s Das Capital, or Hitler’s Mein Kampf or anything else?”, I SAID that any reader can take away from any of those texts what from the perspective of the reader is the meaning of it.
Ashvin, I know you are familiar with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and the fact that the mere act of Observation changes the parameters. You cannot pin down both velocity and position at the same time, and you cannot pin down meaning between the text and the reader’s interpretation either.
You have a World View that one interpretation is the CORRECT interpretation, the one spun out by the “expert” academicians you respect because surprise, they buy the same bullshit you do!
OK, great, figure it out for yourself. I imagine you’ll have a very difficult time without understanding Hebrew or Greek, but, hey, it’s your time. All I know is that you have ALREADY gotten a few of the meanings wrong. Yes, contrary to your now ridonkulous argument, your off-the-cuff interpretations of texts, especially ancient ones, are not always right, and are often wrong.
Google is very helpful now doing translations. Not as good in the sack as my Illuminati Spawn girlfriend was, but not such high maintenance either.
You keep SAYING I have it wrong, but you never show why it is wrong. All you do is point me toward Experts who have a different opinion than I do. That proves nothing Ashvin, sorry.
Thousands if not millions of brilliant minds have devoted their lives over many years, sometimes out of complete selflessness, to [strike]studying[/strike]spinning and [strike]understanding[/strike]propagandizing the meanings of these things – my advice to you is to use the [strike]gift[/strike] billshit they have given you and call out the [strike]FALSE[/strike] non-brainwashed teachers of these texts.
Fixed that for you. :woohoo:
I’ll decide for myself what it means, regardless of whether some Ph.D. spent his entire life in the stacks of Low Library coming up with his theory of the Meaning of the Bible. You however are free to take out of it whatever meaning they tell you is correct.
RE
Let us review the 7-Step Program for Banksters Anonymous:
• Seize the bank
Good start, but like seizing a rotten tomato, you don’t get anything but dirty hands.• Fire management
Another Good Start, problem being that going down nearly to the level of Janitor, everybody in these organizations is corrupt. Loan Officers, Mortgage Brokers, Risk Analysts, Traders, the WORKS! Whose left to run an “honest” banking system here?• Write down the value of the bad loans to the amount they are actually worth
ZERO!• Zero out the bank’s equity (shareholders lose everything)
OK, now you have left of this Rotten Tomato a Bank with a loan book worth Zero, Equity of Zero, and nobody above the level of Janitor to staff it. You want to RECAPITALIZE this dogshit? What?!?!?• Apportion the losses to the bank’s subordinated debtholders (they lose something)
Correction. They lose EVERYTHING. The Bank is rehypothecated up the wazoo. If they are lucky, the debtholders get a penny on the dollar here.• Inject new capital in the form of senior debt and new equity
Whose New Debt are we “injecting” here? The Taxpayers? They should take on more Debt to “recapitalize” this dogshit? Who is going to buy the Equity? Wiped out Pension funds?• Refloat the bank (by selling all or part of it).
WTF is going to BUY it? Another Bank? They ALL are broke! Da Goobermint? Broke ALSO! The Ferengi? Still Light Years away with the Freighters of Gold Pressed Latinum.
Why do I think this process has about as much chance working at Rehabbing Banks as Rehabbing Lindsay Lohan?
RE
ashvin post=3544 wrote:
Chris says:”2. Some suggest it is the actual city of Babylon in Iraq. In this scenario, they say Babylon will be rebuilt in the future.”
So Chris admits there are other interpretations, and that one is that we are talking about actual Babylon. However, this is all in the predictive sense rather than what had already occurred. We know from History that Babylon was the center of commerce for the Mesopotamian empire. We also know that empire didn’t last. To me, I see an extrapolation on past events here in Revelation, but that is of course just my interpretation and Chris White probably would not agree and neither would you.
I am not talking about determining the truth of the Bible’s meaning, but the MEANING of what the Bible is saying. You are right, though, that there do exist many interpretations that are complete and utter BS – the popular Dan Brown and Zeitgest interpretations are good examples. But
these types of BS interpretations come almost exclusively from people who are not Biblical scholars, or even ancient historians.I’m not talking about Interpretation that is Bullshit Ashvin, I am talking about stuff IN the Bible that is likely complete and utter Bullshit. Like Jesus Walking on Water, Methuselah living 900 years and Moses Parting the Red Sea. Any Book which contains this level of Bullshit cannot be trusted to be 100% correct on everything.
Again, not the Truth of what it claims to be true, but the truth of what it is actually claiming – i.e. what does the Bible mean when it says this or that?
How do you know what Goebbels or Bernays really meant to do when they designed Propaganda? You can’t know the intentions behind this stuff Ashvin, and the Bible maybe claiming one thing to be true which is really false and another to be false which is actually true. What the writer MEANT to say or meant to do was simply to mislead you. You have to look at it critically and buying the whole ball of wax is a mistake, IMHO.
OF COURSE we have to rely on scholars in the field. How can you even determine the meaning of any ancient text in the first instance without relying on translators familiar with the language, unless you already know the language itself? And when you figure out what the words mean, how can you figure out what the sentences mean without considering them in a broad linguistic and historical context? This is true of Plato and Socrates just as it is of the Bible. We can all potentially become Biblical scholars, but most of us are not and do not have the time, so we rely on them and the coherence of their arguments.
In my experience walking the halls of Academia for so many years, most Scholars are Jackasses, particularly in the Social “Sciences” where every last one of them drops his or her own spin on whatever it is they are expert in. Yes, I do have to rely on the Translators or Google to translate nowadays :), so I unless a text was originally written in English I’m immediately getting some warping, but hopefully not too much just from a straight translation. Its when some Jackass starts telling me what it all MEANS that I sign off on the Appeals to Authority. I’ll figure it out for myself, thanks.
That is not a critical mind you described, it is a biased and goal-seeked mind. If you want to go around re-writing ancient religious texts in your mind to suit your already established “perception of reality”, that’s fine, but don’t expect others not to call you out for it. What you’re doing is best described as “reverse straw man” – constructing meanings for texts written by OTHER PEOPLE without any evidence and then using those meanings as support for your argument.
“Reverse Straw Man”. I like that.
IOW what you are saying here is only EXPERTS can construct meanings for texts! I’m not allowed to do that because I am not “expert” enough. In order to construct meanings that YOU accept as valid, an Expert has to have 50 citations in the Bibliography and been Peer Reviewed for accuracy by 50 other Jackass Academicians in the field. Forget it Ashvin, I don’t buy this at all. I am free to figure out the meaning of any text all by my lonesome. If I am confronted by the actual WRITER of some text who says, “No asshole, that is NOT what I meant”, then I am wrong and need to apologize for misconstruing the meaning, unless of course the writer’s prose was confusing and it’s his fault. In the case of writers long dead, they are not showing up here so everything else with respect to meaning is left to each reader to figure out.
I didn’t say you are weird or odd… I said your way of using the Bible as support for your arguments is odd. The funny thing is you would agree with me 100% if I was taking a passage from the book of a contemporary author, quoting it out of context, ascribing my own meaning to it and then using it as support for another argument. Hell, you would probably be the first person to “napalm” me for doing so… but, since it’s the Bible, and it was written sooo long ago, I guess the normal rules of critical examination don’t apply.
No Ashvin, I already said I apply all the same rules to any other text as I do the Bible. I am critical of all of them. What is congruent with what I observe in the world I use, what is not congruent I do not use. In constructing a theory, I throw out what does not work and keep only what does work. You are so slavishly devoted to one style of thinking and buy the ideas of “experts” on a regular basis I find it beyond my comprehension really. You make no sense to me, as my ideas seem Odd and Weird to you I suppose.
As Hawkeye said of the Europeans in “Last of the Mohicans”, “They are a Breed Apart, and they make no sense.”
RE
Bot Blogger post=3543 wrote: RE
I may agree with most of what you say.But in what was a small community of bloggers on TAE, and a healthy ecosystem of opinion, we now have one message delivered over and over again, by you. It’s obvious that some people are unwilling to post for fear of your wrath. You’ve made it clear it’s just sport for you. Or chess.
Excuse me? When I arrived here a few months ago, El Gallinazo was going Mano-a-Mano with Ashvin, Ben was repeatedly Napalming him, Grandpa was bemoaning the state of the board etc. Healthy ecosystem my ass.
If some folks are scared I will Napalm them, here’s a clue, I never throw the first punch. Long as you don’t go Ad Hom on me, I won’t use the Chicago Way on you.
At best, your counter-propaganda campaign promoting the spread of the bankster-mob-justice meme is a feeble personal wank. (What are you going to do? Guide and direct it from Alaska? LOL. It’s just entertainment for you. It’s simply a reward for your personal RAGE).
At worst, you are an agent provocateur looking to draw people into their own demise. (Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be. )
I am a writer on the subject of collapse. I use a lot of metaphors to illustrate what I am talking about. If you consider writing to be “wanking”, then I am a big wanker indeed.
People are waking up at the same time all over the world. Many will easily decend into rage and self loathing for having been living so close to the curtain and never looking behind. Many will find themselves taken in by hucksters offering simple relief for their blood lust. That’s history. But after the blood lust is saited then what?
After the Kitchen is Clean, you cook a new meal.
Illargi’s ongoing rage at the stupidity of our so called economic system is something that remains fresh for me because I always feel he is asking a question in the end. I feel at least he is looking for an answer. You apparently have the TRUTH. And a major source of this capital “T” truth comes from the bible in the form of GOOD and EVIL. Unconventional thinking?Seriously. Are you trying to be ironic?
Irony is another very useful tool in the writer’s bag of tricks 😉
And the Chicago way? Really? It ain’t the Chicago way. It’s the Munich way, It’s the Tel Aviv way. It’s the Santiago way. It’s the Moscow way.It’s called Shock and Awe in Washington. It’s the ‘way’ wherever military thugs and bankster gangsters set the tone. But they don’t look and speak like Sean Connery ( I suppose you’re Sean Connery in this fantasy ways-of-being-lesson you’re giving).
If you are going to pick a pop culture film icon to represent Prohibition Era Justice, Sean Connery is a good one to choose. If you are going to go to the Old West, Clint Eastwood doing Pale Rider or the Outlaw Josey Wales is good. If you are going to talk about heading for the Mountains, Robert Redford as Jeremiah Johnson is good. Pop culture is my metaphor dude.
But does collapse dictate a collapse in the complexity of the conversation itself? When the collapse isn’t going to be happening on the internet anyway! It’ll all be up at our front door. It’ll be what we’re all dealing with while trying to be useful to those we are close to. Making hard choices about how to best take care of one another. Maybe that will require some simplistic logic. I’m here on TAE for insight. I’m not saying you don’t provide that I’m grateful for your postings and your posting of Peter was particulaly intriguing. More of that and less of the morbid boosterism, or boosterized morbidity.
It’s a mixed bag. As I said to Ashvin, everyone has an axe to grind.
RE
Well, first off I am on a slow connection that is metered for bandwidth usage, so I am not going to listen/watch an Audio/Video series here. If you have a text based reference I can read that establishes why this specifically refers to Jerusalem rather than Babylon, I will be happy to read it though.
ashvin post=3540 wrote:
Obviously the Bible uses parables, metaphors, etc. in some parts, but there is NO attempt to hide those things or make them unclear as to what they are referring to. People who study the passages in historical/theological/linguistic context can develop arguments for what they mean ranging from unquestionable to very solid. Based on all of the evidence, it is very likely that the “mystery babylon” passages of Revelation constitute specific prophecy about what will happen to Jerusalem in the future.The entire Range goes from unquestionable to very solid? There is nothing that might be considered questionable in there or maybe even complete and utter BULLSHIT? :S
Beyond that, you make the case here that nobody except a Biblical Scholar is knowledgeable enough to interpret Biblical passages, so we gotta rely on them to interpret the Truth written therein. Man, if I read anything from Machiavelli to Hunter S. Thompson, from the Bhagavit Gita to Spiderman Comics and from the Bible to the the Lord of the Rings, I read it all with a critical mind, sythesize it and then take out of it what is congruent with my perception of reality as I gather it through my 5 senses. It’s NOT Differential Equations Ashvin, there are not mathematical proofs based on pure logic that work in social and historical texts.
Like I have said before, we can’t take descriptions of such specific events and pretend they are justifying all sorts of things that are not really at issue. If we accept that the passage is referring to a specific event in a specific city (see link below), then we must respect that meaning when attempting to use it as support. Here, you want to use the passage as support for your views of monetary collapse in society and how PMs will fare, but I think that’s an erroneous, and, frankly, weird thing to do.
This is your OPINION Ashvin. You don’t justify it by any other means than an Appeal to Authority argument. If you think it’s erroneous, you have to show me in more precise arguments here exactly WHY it is erroneous.
Far as it being weird, I will call you out here for pitching Napalm Lite. It’s not weird to me. It matches up quite well with what I see occurring before me on the Markets and in the Social dislocations resultant from that.
It’s like taking a description from Homer’s Odyssey and using it as support for an argument about how your journey home across the waters will end up today. But it’s even much different, because the Bible is talking about a specific event that will happen in the future, but you are applying it to whatever event you feel that it should apply to. It just seems very… ODD to me.
Weird AND Odd! How about adding in here Looney Tunes also? Look Ashvin, I never claimed to be a mainstream conventional thinker, I am WAY outside the box so of COURSE what I write seems odd and weird to you. You are a Button Down Academic with VERY conventional thought process, it suffuses all your writing. I call it as I see it. It’s not the LEAST bit “Odd” to me at all. If you just name call it as weird and odd, you prove nothing. You have to deconstruct it, and I challenge you as always to do that. I PROMISE you I will come right back atchya every time. TAKE ME ON! 😉
Academic vs Gonzo. Mano-a-Mano on the Keyboard. As Always. :woohoo:
RE
Waste Based Society III: Solutions and Alternatives, authored by Agelbert is now up on the Diner Blog.
I spruced it up with some pics and put in some paragraph breaks. AB is a Master of the Run-On Paragraph. 😆
RE
ashvin post=3534 wrote: RE,
The Revelation passages you quote are describing the destruction of the city of Jerusalem, which is often referred to as a philanderous woman named Babylon. I believe the prophecy is that she will “cheat” on God yet again, this time with the Antichrist and his kingdom – the ultimate betrayal – and will be destroyed because of it, along with all of the Earthly riches that it possesses and that the sinners crave. It will indeed be a fast demise, but it is just talking about a single city. Although, it will probably happen in the context of general mayhem across the globe.
What establishes that this is not literally the City of Babylon itself being described here, but rather a metaphorical reference to Jerusalem? I thought you said we should take the Bible as literal truth?
In any event, whether it is describing the destruction of Jerusalem, of Babylon before it or of the City of London and Wall Street and Hong Kong and Singapore at some not too distant point in the future, the description of how all merchandise is rendered worthless corresponds precisely to the kind of economic collapse of a monetary system we see in play right now. My purpose in using this passage is simply to demonstrate that the kind of economic collapse we are undergoing was not unknown even to the earliest users of Money in the Ag based societies of the Biblical Era.
The outcome of such a collapse is also well described in this passage, so why we would expect a different result here this go round is Einsteinian Insanity as its most basic level.
RE
agelbert post=3528 wrote: @Reverse Engineer,
I posted the consolidation, get a message that it has been posted here but it doesn’t appear. If you have not received it for some reason, let me know and I’ll chop it up into smaller pieces and post them in sequence if the document size is the problem.I got it AB. It will take some reformatting. Probably be up on the Diner late tonight.
RE
Bot Blogger post=3522 wrote: RE
You’re beginning to BORE.
Get some new material.
At least I have old material. What have you got BB?
Anyhow, for the NEW stuff, visit the DOOMSTEAD DINER B)
RE
Nassim post=3519 wrote: Give us a break! Now we have to read the book of revelations. I wonder how many “books” did not make it the King James edition?
I have no idea how many Articles did not make the Final cut into the King James Blog, or even into the First Edition Blog in Latin. I suspect it was many.
One can say with some assurance though that what DID make it onto the Bible Blog were the best articles the editors could find on the Monastery Web of the era.
Far as the Book/Forum of Revelation goes, while most certainly the authors there were heavily into pitching some serious Napalm, embedded in all the Hellfire and Mayhem is a whole heck of a lot of TRUTH also. I would not discount what is written in the Book of Revelation just because the authors were some serious Napalm Artists 🙂 Even *I* have difficulty writing Fire and Brimstone of that kind of magnitude. 👿
Also, play close ATTENTION to this part of the passage:
Alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in ONE HOUR is thy judgment come.
This tells me the Bible and Revelation comes down on the side of a FAST CRASH, not a LONG EMERGENCY. Not sure what real Biblical Scholars would interpret from this though. :dry: Perhaps Ashvin can fill us in on how the Bible Pros come down here on this one.
Synthesizing Biblical and Mayan predictions here, one could easily conclude that the Last Hour of Trading on the Markets on 12/21/2012 will be a doozy. LOL.
One more time, from Ben Lichtenstein in the S&P Pits. 😀
HERE THEY COME TO SELL ‘EM AGAIN!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrxlVjZJawQ&feature=player_embedded
agelbert post=3516 wrote: @Reverse Engineer,
Okay. Give me a day or so to write the thing up with a sort of pro and con format. As you may have noticed, my editing skills suffer from typos and misspellings so feel free to edit out the mistakes that I miss. My eyes are not as good as they once were.I’ll get back to you.
Sounds good AB. You can get it to me here, inside the Diner in a Post, in a PM to me on the Diner or by email. I will clean up typos best I can though I miss many on my own also. If you have pics or vids you want included, add the urls at the end of the post.
RE
pipefit post=3504 wrote:
What do we need multiple leaders for? The Euro, Yen, and Dollar will go to the same place as all other pure fiat currencies before them, the fire place. There is nothing anybody can do at this point to alter that outcome.Yup, and right along with them when they throw the Gold into the Fireplace it will all melt and go running right down the drain after the Fiat.
Right there in the Book of Revelation.
Revelation wrote:
9 And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning,10 Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.
11 And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more:
12 The 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,
13 And 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.
RE
agelbert post=3511 wrote: @Reverse Engineer,
I agree with much of Peter’s outlook.In regard to corrosion issues with sea water and maintenace of deep water (massive pressures to deal with), I only ask that you consider technology equivalence hurdles that have long since been surmounted in nuclear power plants (the ultimate in corrosion challenges including hydrogen embrittlement that is not present with sea water) and oil undersea pipelines (pump sea water to a land reservoir and start the power cables from there as a cost effective low maintenace option). And remember all we have learned through space exploration about metallurgy, high temperature insulation during re-entry and don’t forget microwave power transmission technology. We can do all this stuff. It’s really not as hard as putting a robot vehicle on Mars or building a space station in orbit.
AB, if you will consolidate and reformat what you wrote here a bit in the last few posts, I’d like to put it up on the Diner Blog as a Part III to the Waste Based Society series.
RE
ashvin post=3506 wrote:
El G left for a lot of different reasons stated in his “off the reservation” article, but none of them had to do with private emails with me. He said the straw that broke his back was a comment I made to him in the forum about the Constitution, conspiratorial meta-narratives and zero point energy technology. A bit ironic, because I think RE has the exact same views as I do about the US Constitution and ZPE tech.
With the notable exception of our difference of opinion on what constitutes appropriate Justice Ashvin, the only difference there is really between what we write is stylistic. I’m the funny one 😀
Insofar as El G goes, the main difference is that although I don’t agree with many of the things he writes, I don’t go ballistic on him for it like you do. The David Icke stuff clearly sticks in your craw even worse than my Inquisition stuff.
Everybody has an axe to grind.
RE
Karpatok post=3502 wrote: Really, I have just been recalling how it was that El Gallinazo left TAE in the first place. If I am not mistaken[and don’t hesitate to tell me I am mistaken, as I know you will surely not,] El G left in regard to an exchange of Emails with Ashvin pertaining to some conspiracy theories which Ashvin did not wish to see “set off alarms here.” In that regard has anyone reading this ever heard the expression,” I may not agree with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.” So with reference to SkipB’s remarks as well as others,I would like to redraw the map regarding Peter’s post on DD, El G’s ideas and my own lost post.
I’m not going to rehash El Gs reasons for exiting TAE, that is beating a dead horse. I also am not privy to what went on between Ashvin and El G, so I can’t speak to that directly.
However, far as BLOG Articles go, not everything anybody writes necessarily belongs up on the Blog. I mean really, I only put up maybe 1 out of 10 things *I* write on the Blog! That is my OWN stuff! That is why you have a Forum! On the forum, you can write whatever you like, much as you like, regardless of quality, editing, napalm or anything else.
If you think of it like a Newspaper, not EVERYTHING can fit on the Front Page. If you are editing a Blog, you have to make decisions about what is WORTHY Front Page material. However, if your Newspaapaer has UNLIMITED interior pages, you can include the Kitchen Sink in there, and that is why I HAVE a Kitchen Sink on the Diner! LOL. MOST of what I write is IN the Kitchen Sink, in the Frostbite Falls Daily Rant.
If you want to put up every last thing you write on a Blog, you gotta set your own up. However, even *I* am humble enough to realize not every last thing I write is all that great, so I don’t drop it all down on the Blog either.
Comment sections and Forums are different. There you can have diarreah of the keyboard to your heart’s content. I certainly do.
RE
Karpatok post=3498 wrote: In addition, unfortunately, not only are we at the mercy of a lying government apparently operating outside of the Constitution, but even websites like this one that purport to be open to free speech revert to conventional taboos and I am not referring to cursing, name calling and other rude behavior. It seems to me that nothing should be beyond discussing intellectually, but of course history proves that over and over not to be the case. Free speech dies first in the event of Fascism, especially when the fascists control the media and terrify everybody else in relation to criticism of the fascists.
The issues of Censorship and Free Speech are the whole reason the Doomstead Diner exists in the first place.
Censorship comes in many forms, some subtle others not so subtle. The most common one you find though in the Blogosphere is Group Think. In GT Censorship, any Individual with an Unpopular Idea gets shouted down by all the rest of the folks who hold the “common wisdom” to be true. The Napalm comes out and eventually the bickering results in somebody getting Banned, usually the person with the minority viewpoint.
This of course is what got yours truly Banned from so many Forums. 🙂 So off I went to Yahoo to found my own little chat group of Reverse Engineering with friends who mostly agreed with me, and even if they do not were open minded enough to listen to my rants. Why did I leave Yahoo to found the Diner? Because of Censorship again. How was I Censored in that case since I was the Group Owner? Yahoo Bots. I found I could not write certain Key Words in a post and get it to load. Peter suggested we set up the Diner, and so we did that.
So, now I am Immune on the Diner to Censorship by GT, and for the moment also free of Bot Censorship. I give the freedom to all Diners to post as they will, though I do occassionally drop in to tell them I think they are being counterproductive with excessive Napalm 😉
So far here on TAE, though I have been lambasted for some of my ideas, so far I have experienced no Censorship here. I don’t think TAE is currently a Propaganda Organ of TPTB. I do think some of the ideas expressed here are very Conventional in their Wisdom, but at least to date I have never been prevented from expressing my dissatisfaction with what somebody else writes, or had my posts edited in any way or deleted, as was the case on TBP as my participation there caused more havoc.
So KK, I think you can write as you will here right now, you just gotta be aware of how the Cookies work and save your posts before hitting the Submit Button. I can’t say your posting will be received well all the time, mine certainly isn’t, but you can still state your case as long as you are willing to take the barrage thrown at you if you are expressing ideas counter to the TAE Group Think.
RE
agelbert post=3497 wrote: @Reverse Engineer,
I appreciate your 90% approval of my thoughts. I enjoy your prolific writing and respect your views. I wish I had that kind of energy.For a non-prolific sort of writer what follows there is a mighty good Rant AB. 😉
Anyhow, you would get along well I think with Peter on the Diner who also makes the case the current population of 7B could easily be maintained, though in his case he primarily favors Hydroponics as the methodology of choice.
In theory I suspect the methods you lay out or Peter does could work. Problem of course is that it remains highly unlikely such transitions will be made fast enough to avoid a serious population crash.
Far as the Roaring 40s are concerned, I am familiar with them. I sailed in those waters in my youth, and it blows a mighty big storm there all the time. I still dispute that all that energy can be accessed in any reasonable fashion, my sense is that the maintenance issues on any turbines you placed in those waters would be horrendous. Its SALT water, extremely corrosive. Thousands of miles of high voltage cable to run, and it would have to be extremely high voltage to minimize transmission losses.
I do however agree that localized energy collection of the techy kind can be accessed. Stirling Engines, VIVACE low velocity hydro power, more and better use of Wind power etc. It’s also a canard that Wind Power can only work during high wind periods and you need Batteries to store the energy. You can store the energy mechanically in numerous ways, from pumping water up into storage tanks to compressing air to simply cranking a massive weight up with some good gearing.
So, agreed that there is much energy that can be collected and used to run a society above the Paleolithic level. Unfortunately, I do not believe we will achieve that society before this one has experienced a most serious knockdown.
RE
pipefit post=3494 wrote: It is quite apparent that we have an energy problem, particularly in the food production area. I don’t know if you are familiar with the South East Asian rice terraces, but they are an ancient agricultural system that is incredibly efficient in terms of water delivery,since the system is entirely gravity fed. The down side is that a lot of the work must be done by hand, as part of an agrarian society.
Anyway, I’m starting a project in Appalachia that uses a similar system of water delivery, although I don’t think rice would be a prominent crop. I’ll post something at the diner when I’m a little farther along with the design and construction.
I’m familiar with terracing done in the AndesMountains in Bolivia and Peru.
Very labor intensive as you mention and not amenable to mechanized farming, but overall pretty sustainable because each year new nutrients get washed down the mountain to replenish the soil.
Looking forward to reading about your project in Appalachia on the Diner. You know we have another Appalachian there now also, Mark? I didn’t even know you were a member though, since you never post up. LURKER! Accckkkk! LOL.
RE
I am on board with 90% of what you wrote there AB, and as everybody knows here by now I am all for getting rid of the scum sucking Pigmen who are running this show and turning Mother Earth into a sewer.
However, I will disagree with you on this point:
agelbert post=3491 wrote: The planet earth DOES NOT have an energy crisis. For you engineering types out there, just do the math on the energy required daily to lift trillions of tons of water vapor out of the rivers, lakes and oceans and deposit this at higher elevations in the form of rain and then try to tell me about how much it COSTS (ZERO!) and how we are running out of energy.
What the planet earth has, is a HUMAN GREED AND STUPIDITY crisis.Planet Earth doesn’t have an Energy Crisis, but the population of 7B Homo Sapiens does. This because the mass production of Industrialized Food we use to feed such a population is pretty much wholly dependent on Fossil Fuels. From pumping the water out of deep aquifers to running the tractoers and combines to fertilizing the soil to transporting the Oil-become-Food to J6P, it all depends on Oil.
Far as the massive amount of energy the Sun drops down each day to raise up water vapor from the Oceans then deposit it as Rainfall at High Elevations, the issue there is only a miniscule amount of that is collectable and even there its utility is limited by location and besides that damming up rivers produces its own forms of ecological havoc. Hydroelectric power also requires miles of cable which uses Oil Polymers as insulation and the copper wire itself is only extracted from the earth utilizing Heavy Equipment itself all dependent on Oil.
The Energy Crisis we face results mainly from Overshoot of the population. Shrink down the population enough and Mother Earth will provide plenty of energy, at least if we stop being energy Pigs anyhow.
Getting off the Oil Jones quickly, we face a very rapid population crash which about nobody wants except perhaps some Illuminati with a Century worth of Preps in a Bunker somewhere. Getting off the Oil Jones slowly, we risk continued degradation of the environment and a possible Extinction Level Event. It’s a Morton’s Fork with no good choices to make.
RE
