SO...

I am trying to figure out my relationship with this medium.  In a real sense, this blog is a vain affectation.  It makes an assumption that the public commons is a fair outlet for ideas.  I would have to agree that this is true.  But my numbers for folks coming to visit seem to show that either my ideas are stale or my presentation is lame.

Oh well.

The ideas presented here aren't particularly palatable.  When I sit down to think of them, even I am not fond of the conclusions reached.   That overpopulation seems to be at a tipping point.  That resource depletion is getting some firm traction.  That the environmental consequences of these first two points above are going to lubricate the decline we are entering.

What everyone here in Doomerland seems to agree on is the idea that badness happens.  Serious armed-survivalist preppers stock up beans and bullets and hope that they can outlast and outgun the opposition.   The vegan-prepper-survivalists are trying on the idea that being a agrarian peasant is an economic/environmental niche worth exploiting.

What seems obvious to me is that we are very close to a time of compression.  Barring some currently unforeseen and historically unique event, I don't think that the fall will be precipitous one, leading to the Mad Max scenario so adored by the survivalists.   The beans and bullets have a 99+ percent chance of going unused for their original purpose.  The vegans will discover just how hard and precarious the life of an agrarian really is.

The compressive decline ahead of us will be a long-drawn out affair.  The industrial age started around 200-odd years ago.  We have used up right around half of the fossil fuels and even more of the industrial resources.  I won't be a symmetrical bell curve with a 200-year tail, but will probably be asymmetric with a tail on the order of 80-100 years.   The exact term is a negatively-skewed distribution.

So, what I think is that we need to get a firm grasp on the idea of a decline that will take generations.  This in not sexy.  It has no heroes.  It will just take hard work and adaptability.  We will see the unrealistic goals and rewards of the current system be replaced (sometimes forcefully) with something different.  There will be errors made, and scrambling done.  Some lives will be happy, most won't.

In other words, we are going to be returning from Never-Neverland.

Tribes

It would appear that we are a state composed of tribes.  Now, in the past, tribes came from a specific forebear and maintained their identity by mythos.

There has been a move in the recent past to create tribes whose identity is wound around a set of common beliefs, whose contact is mediated through the internet and whose goals are, at best, ambiguous.  In a sense, this blog can be considered part and parcel of the doomer/prepper tribe, though I have no intention of becoming a dues paying member.

I cannot see that this will stand.  The internet is progressively becoming less free and more moderated.  Thus any tribe that chooses to set up shop in the ethereal lands of cyberspace will find its identity subsumed by the mass of tribes competing there.

The internet is ultimately a blending machine, taking the raw material of minority opinion and grinding it through a opinion machine where the new and useful are ground off to comply with the majority opinion.  It is a slow process, but it is usually sped up significantly as soon as the members of the group discover that they can make money on the deal.

No folks, you can make all the arguments you wish about the ability of the internet to create tribes, but the truth of the matter is that the tribes that you create in cyberspace are usually mutual mental masturbation societies.  Real tribes are all around you in the physical world, you just have to hold your nose, choose one, and get to work.

Confirmational Bias and Other Such Oddities

I have a tendency to read stuff that agrees with my preconceived notions.

Human nature I suppose. Being right is ever so much more pleasant than being wrong.  I am starting to question my own thoughts and the way that I see things going.  In other words, maybe things aren't going to hell.

But then, I go back and look at the presuppositions that led me to where I stand.  The green revolution and it's effects.  The rapid increase in oil production and usage.  The incredible population explosion.  Degradation of fisheries.  Pollution.

Crap

You see, the way that I see it is that we gotta go through storm times in a big way.  Things are horribly out of balance and our super-sized American dreams and expectations aren't going to make it though the fire of this particular forge.

The scariest part that I see that we will be facing is the reaction of the spoiled children that make up the population.  When the three-day supplies run out at the Piggley Wiggley and the general population is looking at a bag of rice and some questionable hamburger, are they going to recognize it as food or will they go out a "demonstrating" until they get something that is packaged properly?

I guess that what makes me akin to the other folks here in the tin foil hat fringe is that I don't see us going back.  The way of complexity is a failed path, but the way of simplicity is a much narrower one that will allow many fewer fellow travelers.
So I guess I will read those that say there are a bright future, hoping that they have somehow created a magic potion that will provide us ease and leisure once again.  But all I see out there is the same set of patent nostrums peddled by the same group of quacks that got us here.

A Cultural Schizophrenia

We are an odd country here in the US. The bulk of the leadership structure is corporate/fascistic in nature, but there is always the high wierdness of the socialist and hippie-infested education system that adds to what has to be one of the strangest political cocktails on the planet.

Our national mythology is that the Puritans came over to escape religious persecution and set up the New Zion. The truth of the matter is that they came over to have their own way and oppress the shit out of other folks.  Calvinists have never been anything but a group of creeps that way.  I would wager that as much or more of our national DNA came over as slaves, indentured servants, and transportees as ever came over for religious reasons.

The puritans set up shop running slaves.  The asiento trade was started by the Dutch (again, Calvinist pricks) and was picked up on by the English, with slave hulls running primarily out of good old puritan Boston.  This was the corporate America of early America. 

The educational establishment has all the tools to understand and teach this.  But, as most of them are pasty-faced white liberals who group hug and only look for the positive.  The other side of the coin are the right-wing imbeciles who can't imagine for a moment that our past may contain episodes where we were in the wrong and did evil.

We have buried the idea that we may be less than perfect in our past actions.  You see, then we would have to look at our current lives and realize that our wealth and their comforts are built upon the depredations of the ancestors.  Instead, we steadfastly cling to our false self image of being the highest perfection and personally blessed by the almighty as a justification for our actions.

We are now going through a spasm of payback, the same as we have gone through on a routine basis since the founding.  Everyone speaks of the injustice that the common folk blundered into via the depredations of the financial elite.  You see, this is just another delusion.  No one wishes to speak the truth about the American populace as a bunch of greedy, self-centered brats who ran up the bills.  We instead will cling to the stubborn self-deception that this was done to them by greedy bankers.  We are, after all, blessed by God!

So what we are doing now is giving things back, returning to the mean.  The nation will be poorer, but probably with a very similar happiness quotient.  It will take us a bit of humility, a dash of pain, and a bunch of hard work to rebuild, but it will be possible.  When we begin and start the growing up, we'll be just fine. 

The only thing standing in the way is the politicians telling us we don't have to grow up.  That through the Presto! of cheap accounting tricks and other peoples money, badly accounted for, we can continue our overlong puberty.

Maybe then, when we throw aside the asinine triumphalism and exceptionalism, and the politician themselves become red-faced about their lies of leisure, we can get down to the brass tacks of becoming a mature society.  Instead of the feverish adolescence we have just gone through.

Equals

At the end of the day, we have been taken in by a myth.  It is a myth of equality.

I think that it the core of our beliefs currently in the US.  It is a myth foisted on us by Democrats and Republicans alike.  But the concept of equality is a subtle thing.  It has limits and a circumscribed area where it is valid.  What has happened to it over the past couple of hundred years is that it has been pounced upon by the unsophisticated, treating the fragile little concept that started out roughly.

I would guess that when it started out, the thoughts about equality were pretty limited.  If you were able to stand up and swing with the rest of the boys, they thought of you as an equal.

No, the equality they spoke of is the chance to get into the furball and take a try at the prize.  They never, ever said that you would get an equal share of the prize, just that you would have a chance to take a whack at it.

What things have degenerated into is a game where political blocks are promised shares of the proceeds because that block has defined a set of conditions that prove they "exist".  I would not try to say that this is minority issue, as the biggest dollops of money go to pasty faced white pukes who are to big to fail.

Nope, equality has always been an illusion.  There are a lot of folks who are better than you at shit.  Get used to it. 

All real equality can offer you is a chance at the prize.

Unfortunately, that isn't offered here anymore.

The unbearable oddness of being

(Front Note: I had almost finished this article when I read this one. It is actually much better articulated than mine. Damn. Thanks Bob O’Brien for writing it so well and thanks CKMichaelson for pointing it out to me)

It is difficult sometimes to ignore the very real desire to crawl into an insulated cocoon of work/home/sleep and by doing so to ignore the world. I am living in a country where a cartel of bankers controls the government and the people who are my neighbors and friends are being relegated to the time-honored status of serfdom.

A peculiar apathy takes me sometimes. “What the hell”, I say to myself, things aren’t really so much going bad as returning to normal. But the path back to normal is going to be paved with all kinds of unsavory things. The wealth of country is going to be looted by the nobility of greed and the lives of our children will be returned to the normal impoverishment of the masses. We will be the backs that will build the new Versailles and the coins that could feed and educate our children will pay for the new Sistine chapels with a new and improved Denarii Sancti Petri.

We will argue about the oh-so-obvious pack of lies bellowed by democratic party versus the oh-so-obvious pack of lies shrieked by the republicans. It is not so much a debate as a deliberate distraction in order for the assassins to line up the crosshairs.

We will continue to knowingly elect officials with histories of screwing us over because they lard the looting with enough “jobs” for our little slice of hell. We will rant and complain, but most will in the end comply because the myth of our “American Exceptionalism” and the sacredness of our “Constitution” and our “American Way of Life” will blind us.

We are now being looted. The accumulated treasures from our rape of the financial world following the Second World War is being taken from us by the uberclass. When I started this blog, I had kinda hoped that maybe it would open some eyes. But the eyes are still firmly closed. It would even appear now that the feet are drumming on the ground, the fingers are in the ears, and a singsong “la la la” is being voiced.

Oh well, it was just money.

Time to get back to work

Just a question

So, the constitution has been around for 230+ years.  It has been the centerpiece which is garlanded with slavery, the trail of tears, a good solid crack at colonialism in the Phillipines, manifest destiny, a civil war, one good, one not so good world wars, Vietnam, the current messes in Iraq and Afghanistan, at least 6 or seven major financial crises, Guantanamo Bay, Privateers, carpetbagging, the elections of 2000 and 1876, several invasions of other countries on the sly, Dred Scott, and the Federal Reserve.

So, Why is it that something that has allowed this string of questionable events to occur and flourish is sacred?

Maybe, just maybe, we need a new starting point.

Maybe it is time for a new constitutional convention.

What is it with these guys

Now, as anyone who knows me will tell you, I am NOT a member of the Democratic Party.  I really think that the Democrats are little more than the PR department for the teachers union and the trial lawyers.   They appear to me more intent on carefully crafting a world with all the sharp corners rounded off.  They also appear to be tightly focused on making sure that we are all equally labeled and pigeonholed as victims so that they can “help” all of us.  That coupled with the empty promises of extracting us from two pointless wars leave me to think that it is all the same shit over and over again

So that being said, what the hell is the problem with the Republican Party?  They cannot seem to find anything but liars and losers to stand up and run for any office.  Can anyone think of a decent republican lately…please….anyone??  Now they are out of power they appear to have found religion in fiscal probity.  Something that they lacked seriously when they were in power.  But it appears that when they overspend in power it is for virtuous reasons, when the opposition overspends in power, it is evil.

So, since the Demos are morons and losers and the Republicans are morons and nitwits, can we please get off the “Demo’s are going to take us into hell” tirades here in tin-foil hat land.  Bullshit.  The Clinton Adminstration got us started, the Republicans under Georgie smallbrains drove us 90% of the way there, now you are going to try to blame the fall on the democrats just because they were driving when we crossed the finish line?  Give me a break.

It isn’t just the presidents, it is the legislatures at all levels who dole out money to keep us happy, and our greedy sucking at the tit that drags us down. 

I don’t know what to do, we need to somehow create a mass movement part to compete with these parties of self-absorbed thugs.  But as the the perquisites that they hand out freely to placate the masses and the corporate money and power protect the sacred “two-party” system, it seems to be an almost impossible task.  

The Peace of Westphalia is going to get reversed

The big issues that will be facing us in the future boil down pretty much to what entity will serve as the central focus of our public/political life. I think that the large nation state will not be able to hold itself together without the massive inputs of energy allowed by oil and coal.

In order to tie itself together, the large nation state needs to expend energy to tie the units together economically. The larger the state, the greater the energy usage required. The US, China, and Russia are the main examples of this level of physical size, though you probably could make an argument that Brazil, Indonesia, and Australia may be there too. And let us not forget the EU, they are effectively trying to make a patchwork giant state.

So, when the decline in availability of oil starts to gain serious traction, these states will begin to show strain. The distance from the capital will begin to matter as the state has less and less to offer the outlying districts. Large non-capital cities will begin to assert themselves and regional associations will begin to step to the fore.

I think that you will begin seeing something like the good old "Sagebrush Rebellion" but this time they will be taking steroids. Demands for return of taxes will begin and taxes at the state level will go up. The overall large-scale state will begin to deteriorate and without a large, oil-fueled military to put down the rebellion, the states will start to go their own way. So we will be looking at a repeat of Gaul and Brittannia, Dacia and Illyria.

So don't think that this will just happen here. Russia is a hodgepodge of regions with no great love of Moscow. The Uighurs, Tibetians, and the Coastal Cities aren't that fond of Beijing.

The devolution will probably end up looking like Old Europe. States that are sized appropriate to the energy and population base.

Thoughts on Easter

I believe that the West is careening its way towards two different kinds of bankruptcy. The first is fiscal bankruptcy. While most people see this as the primary problem, I see it as a minor symptom of the second bankruptcy: Spiritual Bankruptcy.

The West has created a system where the individual is the be all and end all of the world. We in America and our cousins in Europe have created a system where the government rewards any excess in the name of personal liberty. It is as if Ayn Rand's amoral universe has come into play. We have the looters true enough, but for some reason we also have the self-absorbed and egocentric villains that she tried so hard to make attractive.

The bankruptcy is the loss of the glue that holds any society together, the idea that one's actions must be part of a long line of persons. That the actions that one takes must make both one forebears and ones descendants proud. The individuals that live today is merely links in the chain of life. We take as much as we possibly can for our personal comfort, knowing that we are impoverishing the generations that will follow us.

We must begin to live in a sustainable manner. Our children and children's children will curse us if we do not.