Wednesday, December 17, 2008

New

I read quite a bit about the current state of affairs. Their are some remarkably prescient folks out there. Mike Ruppert made calls about this stuff years ago. Michael Panzer wrote a book that could easily serve as a script for the movie. Jim Kunstler and Dmitry Orlov are a joy to read. Jesse's Cafe Americain is a very thoughtful must.

But all of them seem to be using the past as a template. They seem to feel that the current state of affairs is deriviative of a past event and attempt to use the resolution of those events as the template for our way of working through this process.

But sometimes this scares me. We have a tendency to look to the past for our answers. This serves us well most of the time. We even go through the motions of pasting up overlays to reassure ourselves of the applicability of the past to the present. But I have a nasty feeling in my gut that the deal going down is different this time.

By making up our models and our chart overlays and our anecdotal comparisons, we are reassuring ourselves that we have the means and savvy to solve the problems that are coming. But this act may blind us. It may make us stop looking for the black swan.

We can plan all we want for the last war, but that has never led anywhere of value yet. The future is a fickle creature. It is what we don't expect that has the best chance of killing us.

Keep your eyes open.

Winter is coming.

2 comments:

treesong said...

Yup, once again you've expressed my gut feeling.

I think, too, that people try to reassure themselves by saying, "we've come through tough times before, we'll come out of this too." Yeah, we'll come out of whatever "this" is but, I don't think we'll come out of it "better" or that "normalacy" will be "restored." God or whomever help us all if that's the outcome!

Staying Alive said...

I think this is a new ballgame and cannot be cured by anything we know to do. People think that it can be fixed but I don't. I am going to watch it go all the way down. I will prep and I will grow garden. I will eat wild game and foraged greens. The normal guys can go piss up a downspout.

Michael