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The Next 20 Years Will Not Be Like the Last 20 Years - Here's Why
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith from Of TwoMinds blog,
The Status Quo is not sustainable. Here are some resources on the many reasons why.
Coming to the understanding that the Status Quo is not sustainable is often a crooked path of overcoming programming, propaganda, denial and fear. My colleagues at peakprosperity.com (where I am a contributing writer) have summarized why the Status Quo is not sustainable in an engaging one-hour video program:
Why The Next 20 Years Will Be Completely Unlike The Last 20: the 'Accelerated' Crash Course (56 minutes).
The Accelerated Crash Course from Peak Prosperity on Vimeo.
The program's roots are in Chris Martenson's original video presentation, The Crash Course, a series that went viral around the time of the Global Financial Meltdown. The entire series has been completely reworked, and this one-hour summary introduces the key dynamics in a way that is accessible to those to whom these concepts and realities are new.
This program is free. If you've been looking for one program that would help those who are new to the topics of unsustainability, this is it.
One of my jobs (to use the term loosely) is to curate the vast trove of information the global correspondents of this site submit to further my own education. Another is to attempt to keep track of new books and what's being published in influential journals.
Here is a limited selection of recent books that speak to the topic The Next 20 Years Will Not Be Like the Last 20 Years--Here's Why. This is by no means authoritative or complete--but it is an interesting taste of the significant work being published.
The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust
Makers: The New Industrial Revolution
The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die
The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change
Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia
Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets
The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor
Fragile by Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit
Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield
Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry
You may also find my list of hundreds of Books/Films of interest.
»
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Another optimist.
There is no reset. Reset implies restoration of whatever.
There is decline. Forever. The easy oil is gone and even if you wanted to delude yourself about the magical word (ALTERNATIVES), there will be nothing to fuel their research, prototypes or production. I generally don't like to point that out because it allows whoever to imagine there are alternatives worthy of prototype or production.
There aren't. There never will be.
Game over.
If ever people stop obeying known liars and thieves, the future is very bright.
Energy is an issue, but can be overcome.
Honnestan is right about a lot of things. If I had Galt's motor, I certainly wouldn't let the statists have it... or know that I had it.
The generic advance would be sold to the highest bidder, and you know it.
And that advance is an advance if it makes the bidder more money than what he's making now.
This is not new, people. This stuff has been going on 50 years. The magical magnet in the carbueretor that quadruples gas mileage. All that crap has already had its 15 mins.
110 horsepower to move a Camry around for 500 miles in the dead of winter with the heater going before a fillup. Every single "ALTERNATIVE" approach you will hear flung out will involve the magical phrase "well, you don't need that, you can use less". This happens because they can never ever ever show the magical electric Camry (we're not talking big demands here, even a lousy Camry they can't do) that can drive 500 miles in winter with the heater going before fillups (that require 5 minutes, btw).
Oh, and don't whine "we just need more time (and subsidies). We'll get there."
Fifty fucking years. This stuff is all recycled claptrap from the 1970s, when magical this or that was going to replace oil.
Nothing has. Nothing will. Population decline approaches.
I think me and mine will do just fine in a "Deadwood" kinda town - it's just the inbetween now and Deadwood that will be a little dicey.
It's not that the potential is there for the human race. It is and it COULD be wounderous and bright.
The problem is wresting control from the PTB without pulling down the whole house in order to do so.
At this point, I don't see that happening.
I sadly think things are going to continue to get very dark and dangerous before they ever have a chance of getting better.
And even if we make it out the end. We'll probably do nothing but start the whole damn cycle over again. Only this time with the limited resources left over from before.
So probably a much shorter cycle once poputation density vs resources cross.
So yea...the promise and potential is there, has always been there. Only you just can't get rid of all the assholes who begin consolidating power and goods at the expense of others deemed less desireable or worthy.
That seems to be the rub for mankind. ;)
Work, at its most basic level from a physics definition is force times distance. Energy is the ability to do work from that same standpoint. Energy gets shit done. Now crunch the numbers. And oil is energy, and its use is considered work from a physics standpoint. Energy moves your food and pumps your water. It does work so that you may eat and drink. If our energy problems are overcome, they will be overcome with more energy from another source. If they are not overcome, billions will die.
Yes but they can die slowly via natural attrition. Some countries have shrinking populations. The smaller population can become more agrarian and cottage industry and less mall with chinese shit and supersized fast food crap. We can adapt if we want to or have to as long as we don't over radiate the whole place. Smaller quantity higher quality populations have better sustainability options than higher quantity lower quality ones (like how it is now). I am trying to be a higher quality person, get off the grid, and seek out and mix with other higher quality people.
Optimist.
"Most humans are, by nature, unrealistically optimistic. It's called Optimism Bias and is recognized as a major human cognitive bias. There's some debate about the reason for this but there is some thought that it's a function that assists in the prevention of depression.
http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00344/full
There is a small portion of the population that operates with a more realistic view of reality. These people are viewed by the general population as having depression issues, being overly negative in their views, etc. and some of them do have actual depression problems. However studies over the past thirty years show that situation assessment by these individuals is frequently far more accurate, let's just say it – sane – than the vast majority.
So it's not really that I want the end of mankind, it's that it is the only realistic outcome. A conclusion that any reasonable sane species could have seen regarding the idea of creating eternally lethal poisons that require constant extremely vigilant care to contain over a timespan greater than the collective history of said species.
It's easy to lie to yourself to remain happy. It's harder to look at the world for what it really is and retain your sanity."
Good link. Use that context for Iraq.
The Iraq oil minister about, oh three years ago, said Iraq would be producing 15 million barrels/day by 2017.
They are at 3.2 now. They got 3 years to do a X5.
And do you know the people who told them they'd be lucky to get to 5 by 2025 were called naysayers?
Humans shall live on indefinately via alternative sentient entities we create and lose control of. They will improve themselves and alter or eliminate us. Collectively, we are little more than sentient monkeys, making no sustainable evolutionary progess but crafting technological stuff while remaining morally crippled. That technological stuff is going to turn sentient one day and take care of us like how the immune system takes care of a virus.
That's not what I meant by "reset".
I think the current paradigm will continue till it collapses on itself. I think economies of the world will print and inflate until they collapse. I think societies will continue to grow more and more unsettled and violent. Bringing with it war. Whether over territory, natural resources, including water.
There will be a massive population cull world wide as a result of various pressures, conflicts, famine, war...disease.
But I don't believe there will be utter annihilation, totally of the human race.
Thus a reset.
A reset based on less petroleum and more agrarian and man power (aided by animal)...basically along the lines of a blend of 1700's - 1800's. Steam, coal, limited electrical.
The limited population will be able to exist on the level of natural resources left behind.
That's MY optimistic view.
If I were a pessimist, I guess the entire planet would be covered in a cloud of radioactive fallout...
But I'm a glass half-full kind of guy ;)
You forgot climate change. Difficult though it is for most of our soecies to comprehend, peak oil is going to crash civilization. I used to think it was the biggie until I became aware of just how swiftly climate change is occurring and large positive feedbacks are kicking in.
When I saw the bug in the broth phenomenon (exponential growth) as a gedanken experiment in a cell physiology course at the University of Illinois in 1962 I had an intense satori and realized human population growth is a lethal cancer on the face of the earth. An innoculum of bacteria in a fresh culture broth grows exponentially until the bacteria run out of sugar substrates (akin to the energy from fossil fuels for our species) or until they build up so much toxic waste it kills them (akin to the environmental trashing we so insanely indulge in). Whichever way you slice it, Nature always imposes a limit to growth. Population crash is the inevitable outcome of exponential growth. While our species may survive the Hubbert Peak it looks increasingly unlikely we will survive anthropogenic global warming.
CrashisOptomistic - You do know Henry Ford introduced a vehicle at the 1908 worlds fair that ran on peanut oil don't you? You do know peanuts can be grown in almost any warm clinate which means 1/3 of the globe right?
Electric trolleys ran beautifully and were clean and economical. Research what happened to them when a greedy piece of shit lobbyed California legislature for polluting, uneconomical burping busses that replaced them. Your too stupid for me to waste my time digging out the link.
Do you remember the conversion kits with a diesel engine and the company that built it to run on vegetable oil back on 2006? The conversion kit cost $800.
Not only Honda's but there are busses in Europe right now that run on water.
Tesla not only invented AC power where his former employer Edison ran a smear campaign to stop it, he invented hydro electric dams, the first at Niagra falls still operating to this day.
As for autopilot, Amazon and drones. Debate over. Fuck off retard.
Every tool be it government structures or tech that attempts to supress evolution is eventually overcome by necessity, the mother of all invention. But if you want it developed sooner as mentioned on another thread one will compromise with capital or get crushed, have your invention stolen or in Tesla's case only see part of his vision come true.
Last point. Henry Ford should have spent a few million lobbying Washington like Standard Oil and the Rockerfellers did. I am an idealogue but a realist. What I WISH how we collectively behave doesn't mean shit. Mankind's progress does not go in a straight line.
Attempting to overcome the dark side of human nature by pure genius alone does not succeed to push mankind forward. One must be wise and be a realist as well. You have to eat a piece of shit along with your benevolent ambitions. Einstein realized very quickly the weapons that would be designed with his equations but realized the good would outweigh the bad to benefit mankind. Se la vie.
Any "Runs on water" claim needs a non-water energy input to work. Peanut oil also requires peanuts, which require solar energy to grow, and likely fossil fuel energy to pump water. Plants suck when it comes to efficiency.
I was away for some hours so didn't see this.
It is fight club after all, so congrats on throwing punches.
It would generally be better if you didn't hit yourself with them. The ones powered by water, I mean.
Why should anyone care? Our stolen money isn't being allocated to genetic research in sufficient amounts to negate the death gene. I wonder what could have been accomplished if Newton, Tesla, et al were still living today.
IMO, fossil fuels aren't even in the equation of energy sources our descendants will have in the future. Mankind will always be in the shitter as long as we tolerate any government of any stripe. The flock needs to trample the shepherd into oblivion and go graze in peace. William the Conqueror and his tax assessors were sorry mofos that still plague us.
All of us are programmed for a dirt nap and still squabble over who controls the flock and gets the choicest witch wool on the way to impotence. Amazing.
Matchbox Twenty - How Far We've Come [OFFICIAL VIDEO]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5d7EbtLb8ok (3:26)
Matchbox Twenty - Real World
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwJazZIWNgg (3:49)
Matchbox Twenty - Disease
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5zttEPcCuQ (3:44)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwwtxHEI0Wc
Be honest, how many actually listened to that entire sales pitch? I can't get past 2 minutes listening to him drone on and on while not saying a damn thing. Worthless fuck.
There is an entire market sector for doomsday predictions and how "they" have the answer.
My ass hurtz.
I think my ass will hurtz more during the next 20 yearz.
I didn't watch the video.
The project of our time is to escort the Narcissist and Sociopath in places of influence and control out of the way of a free society.
We don't have anywhere near 20 years to do it.
Watched the video, what a bunch of bullshit premises based on bullshit data, come on down and buy a few pieces of gold or silver so we can rip you off Goldline style.
Premise #1. Wealth is bebt. - blow me! That convoluted thinking is what got us into such debt.
Premise #2. Oil rules the world. No, idiot-we outmode the use of fossil fuels by advancing renewable energy. Your oil energy bullshit would end with free energy which the Department of Energy is sitting on and refuse to release the new advances in energy. (It would upset the fossil fuel economy). Ha. Ha.
I think Hugh Smith and Peak Prosperity are nothing more than oil status quo propagandist selling you the proposed inevitable.
instead of bad-mouthing, how about posting an articulate reply?
you come across in your post as an angry, inarticulate young man.
how about some specifics? what exactly do you mean by "bullshit premises based on bullshit data", can you give specific examples? i found the video thought-provoking and accurate.
That is because you are a fucking moron!
not able to answer the question, are you?
well, that's ok, keep trying.
That is because you are a fucking moron!
w/o video here are some obvious truths: there is really nothing wrong with economic activity, most of it doesnt' count. people who volunteer, caregivers. america is not sitting on its ass. if everyone doing something useful, was paid something the economy would look a lot better than it does. (this is a service economy, so these services count) if everyone is taking care of someone else and not getting paid, why do we need government? (this is why they don't count what you are doing as economic activity) government has figured out manufacturing is no longer viable, service is the new economy, but we don't pay for or count most of the services? i was thinking today of the bob dylan song, the times they are changin. well they weren't really then but now, well now.
What a fucking moron with a statment like that.
Eat your "services" You stupid fuck.
Sustainability means planning our future in a way that we do not set ourselves up to crash and burn at some future date. Long-term planning has not been something politicians excel at or are even good at. Our system is geared at getting politicians reelected and fulfilling the most pressing needs of today.
Things like profit, greed, and quenching our unrelinquishing desire for growth are placed in front of longer term issues and needs. Mapping out a logical and sustainable long-term plan requires delving into some rather hefty philosophical questions like what brings real happiness. More on this important topic in the article below.
http://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2014/04/planning-sustainable-future-for-m...
Another fucking moron progandist that covers Zero Hedge as an apologist. The future is here asshole.
BTW, in twenty years AGW will be starting to flash some real ugliness....
Indeed. See my comment above.
You AGWankers said the same thing twenty years ago. You might be right eventually, most likely after the next mini-ice age.
AGWanker James Burke said twenty five years ago, "fortunately, there was only that one nuclear (weapon) exchange in the ME" Hay, he might be right yet, the_wanker.
Keep lying to yourself...
One of the things I'm sick of is people using academic papers and opinions to back up their peak oil vs. technology will save us claims. I think both sides could agree with me there.
So, I challenge every ZH member to do a real-life experiment. Get a $100 Goal Zero Nomad 7 + battery pack (the 4-pack of rechargeable batteries that will charge a phone or tablet), and use it to charge your phones and tablets for the next six months. Start on July 1, and charge your phones and tablets using solar only until December 31. No cheating.
I know some of you are off-grid already, so you can ignore this. But this challenge is for the run of the mill person or family on the grid. Try it.
Find out for yourself how abundant solar is or is not. Find out for yourself how difficult it is to store it in a battery (and keep it stored). Find out for yourself how much time is involved chasing the sun and timing things to keep one or two small devices going. When/if it rains for a week and you find yourself plugging your phone into the wall (and you probably will), think about what that really means. Then let it dawn on you that this experiment doesn't even come close to talking about powering lights, computers, freezers, washers & dryers, water heaters, microwaves, cars, planes, ships, trucks that move food, the ability to grow food, or anything else that powers major economies.
It's an inexpensive real-world lesson in sustainability. Show yourself. Show your kids. At the very least, you will learn how solar works in the real world and have a backup power system for your phone during an emergency.
Utility scale solar, and even rooftop solar, is a lot more efficient than your little backpack device.
No it isn't. And I have a lot more solar than my little "backpack" device, you ass.
Its all about how many hours of usage you at have your disposal, without depleting your batteries too heavily. That way you get a longer life out of your batteries. Of course, the rig I use for powering a laptop while I am out camping and fishing, is not very sophisticated. Getting 2-3 hours of power per day is not too much trouble during summer, and I'm rarely using it more than that anyway.
If I had to power all the appliances in my house using rooftop solar...I can live on a household budget, so figuring out my household power budget is something I could easily do. I can predict I would be making quite a few sacrifices though. Without electricity 'on tap' from the mains or a petrol generator, I would have to prioritise the essentials that can't be replaced, such as my water pump and water heater. All my other toys would have to be packed away until summer, with one or two exceptions, like the vacuum cleaner.
...or try to eat sardines and rice for 6 months when you have several years worth stored in the basement.
Fantastic.
An Apple charger outputs 2 Amps at 5 V, so with some conversion loss it pulls about 12 W worth of energy. A charge takes about 2.5 hours max, now calculate for one daily full charge for 180 days:
12W * 2.5h * 180 = 5.4 kWh
If you time it well, the staggered use of your solar charger could support 3 devices.
So the $100 device saved yourself from using 16.2 kWh from the grid over half a year (2.7 kWh per month) - I'm sure the world's energy problems will be solved by things like that! /s
Hugh Smith and Peak Prosperity: If Washington spent 5 billion dollars (5,000 million) to buy Ukraine government and control, how many thousand million will they pay to subvert Zero Hedge and pay for American propaganda assholes like you?
Hugh Smith and Peak Prosperity: If Washington spent 5 billion dollars (5,000 million) to buy Ukraine government and control, how many thousand million will they pay to subvert Zero Hedge and pay for American propaganda assholes like you?
Hugh Smith and Peak Prosperity: If Washington spent 5 billion dollars (5,000 million) to buy Ukraine government and control, how many thousand million will they pay to subvert Zero Hedge and pay for American propaganda assholes like you?
Hugh Smith and Peak Prosperity: If Washington spent 5 billion dollars (5,000 million) to buy Ukraine government and control, how many thousand million will they pay to subvert Zero Hedge and pay for American propaganda assholes like you?
Hugh Smith and Peak Prosperity: If Washington spent 5 billion dollars (5,000 million) to buy Ukraine government and control, how many thousand million will they pay to subvert Zero Hedge and pay for American propaganda assholes like you?
Hugh Smith and Peak Prosperity: If Washington spent 5 billion dollars (5,000 million) to buy Ukraine government and control, how many thousand million will they pay to subvert Zero Hedge and pay for American propaganda assholes like you?
Hugh Smith and Peak Prosperity: If Washington spent 5 billion dollars (5,000 million) to buy Ukraine government and control, how many thousand million will they pay to subvert Zero Hedge and pay for American propaganda assholes like you?
Hugh Smith and Peak Prosperity: If Washington spent 5 billion dollars (5,000 million) to buy Ukraine government and control, how many thousand million will they pay to subvert Zero Hedge and pay for American propaganda assholes like you?
Keep seatbelts fastened, airbags working, drive defensively and stay awake, keep emergency equipment in trunk, and hope the car doesen't go over a 1000 foot cliff with you in it but stay sprititually clean in case it does.
Like many, I am, by nature, unrealistically optimistic ...
But, the more I learn, the worse it gets!!!
To better understand the social facts, one has to be willing to recognize the degree to which almost everything has ended up being dominated by systems of legalized lies, backed by legalized violence. After one does that, then instead of "Peak Prosperity," one is looking at Peak Insanity.
I liked the pun in the title of "accelerated crash." The issue is how accelerated will that become, when we hit the wall, and then bounce off the cliff, whose bottom can not yet be seen.
Of course, I have nothing against the theory of attempting to be prepared. However, the issue is how hard is one going to crash, in order to ask, how can one be prepared for that? Metaphorically speaking, are we looking at the crash of an automobile, or a train wreck, or the crash of an airplane into a mountain?
There is no doubt that one can be prepared to ordinary car crashes. The recent history of car racing demonstrates that better safety equipment can make a significant difference in surviving even high speed crashes. Metaphorically speaking, having safety belts and crash helmets, and so forth, is great, for car crashes, to increase the chances of surviving those crashes. Similarly, if the coming crashes are not worse than that, then being prepared makes lots of sense, and could well be worthwhile.
However, what if the "accelerating crash" is more like an airplane flying into a mountain? In that case there is no safety equipment whatsoever that is adequate. There is nothing one can do to be prepared for that kind of crash!
I have been aware of everything outlined in this video for several decades, and made much more of a deliberate study of the matter, as well as working towards some better resolutions of those problems to the best of my abilities for a few decades. However, I have always found that the more I learned, the worse it got. Therefore, my current conclusions are that, despite there being some theoretical solutions, none of those stand up to the test of considering the actual degree to which civilization is controlled by lies and violence.
That means that we are rushing towards times of Peak Insanities, while preparing for possible solutions that require having "enough," in order to enjoy relatively more Peak Prosperity, is based on deliberately ignoring the oncoming Peak Insanities. As far as I can tell, the ruling classes are well aware of all the problems outlined in this video, although they never publicly admit those. Instead, they have covertly prepared for their kind of resolutions of these problems, which are to mass murder the majority of the human population, through deliberately promoting more genocidal wars, got going on the basis of deceits, and deliberately aggravated so that those get far worse, as well as preparing to impose democidal martial law, (as above, so below, and as within so without.)
Even if it is nothing but chaos, the consequences are roughly that 99% of the population are not prepared, and are apparently not going to bother to get prepared, while many of them could not be better prepared, even if they wanted to. Therefore, the about 1% who are prepared become a target for those who are not prepared. Also, that includes that those who are prepared become targets for governments too, as the worst gang of criminals they could still face, after any kind of collapse, while even if there was so much serious collapse that the governments fell apart, that would still leave lots of disorganized gangs of criminals, who would be targeting everyone that had some wealth due to being more prepared for those collapses into chaos.
The issues about "community support" revolve around the questions of whether that community is militarily prepared for the Peak Insanities? I believe that, if one seriously asks that question, then the serious answer is that it is NOT possible to be militarily prepared for the outbreaks of Peak Insanities, which will accompany Peak Everything Else. Paradoxically, the more militarily prepared one is, in any old-fashioned senses, then the more that one is thereby actually contributing to the potential of Peak Insanities.
As I said, since I am, by nature, unreasonably optimistic, I continue to do the silliest stuff, by endeavouring to imagine preparing governments that would be able to respond to the world view which I was outlining in my comment above. One of the consistent themes that I find in the main Zero Hedge articles is that I tend to agree with most of their analysis, but almost always find that they grossly understate how bad things really are, because they grossly underestimate the degree to which our civilization is dominated by runaway criminal insanities, since our civilization is based on the history of thousands of years of backing up lies with violence, which has become trillions of times worse due to advances in science and technology.
The long grind down, due to having high-graded ourselves to hell, will not immediately stop the Peak Insanity of governments, and various others, having been militarily preparing for wars and martial law. All of those preparations are supremely paradoxical, in that their real effects are most probably going to feed the bonfires and conflagrations of Peak Insanities.
Anyway, that is my response to Chris Martenson and Charles Hugh-Smith's series of articles which have been republished on Zero Hedge: they grossly understate how bad things really are, and therefore, grossly overstate how one could become better prepared for that. I wish that they were right, that we are only headed, metaphorically, towards some kind of ordinary car crash, which one can and should be prepared for. However, I believe we are headed for an accelerated crash, whose impacts will provoke such Peak Insanities that there was nothing we could do to be prepared for those, at least nothing within any old-fashioned frame of reference.
Therefore, I have probably wasted my time with daydreams about how we might slow down, and change direction, before those kinds of crashes. However, like I said, I have always found that the more I learned, the worse it got, because the primary thing that I have discovered is that the world is actually controlled by the most criminally insane people, with the most criminally insane agenda, and they are still successfully accelerating civilization into a head on crash into the walls of limits, after which things will bounce off those walls, over cliffs whose bottoms cannot yet be seen.
In my view, a significant minority of people who post comments on Zero Hedge are more aware of that than any of the typically featured articles usually appear to be. However, most of those comments are like me, in that they too continue to be unreasonably optimistic, because that does appear to be quite common human nature. My general opinion is that there are plenty of creative alternatives which are theoretically possible, and there surely could be enough for Peak Prosperity.
However, those views tend to underestimate the degrees to which the combined social pyramids, which are made up of systems of both the ruling classes and those they rule over, operating through attitudes of evil deliberate ignorance, due to thousands of years of controlling civilization through deeply entrenched systems of lies backed by violence, which means that our civilization is actually in a state of runaway criminal insanities, which means we are approaching all of the problems correctly identified in Chris Martenson's videos, amongst many others, in ways which are primarily CRIMINAL INSANITIES, HEADED TOWARDS PEAK INSANITIES, WHICH WILL BE LIKE AIRPLANES FLYING INTO THE SIDES OF MOUNTAINS, RATHER THAN LIKE ANY AUTOMOBILE CRASH.
Furthermore, IF one faces those facts, then being realistically prepared has to try to address the existence of those criminal insanities, which are what is controlling civilization, and therefore, address attempting to prepare for those events, such as more deliberately deceitful genocidal wars, and democidal martial law, cascading down and down through layer after layer of consequential lower levels of Peak Insanities.
In my opinion, people like Chris Martenson and Charles Hugh-Smith, et alia, deliberately do not go there. They deliberately do not consider the degree to which there is a criminally insane civilization, based upon thousands of years of enforced frauds, wherein in the ruling classes are criminally insane, while the vast majority of people who were ruled over also adapted to that by becoming just as criminally insane, if not more so, from the sublimely abstract point of view.
I agree with Martenson's correct assertions that we should understand the problems, in order to prepare for them ... BUT, he does not fully understand the problems, because he does not face the full facts regarding the actual degrees to which the world is being dominated and controlled by the maximum possible deceits and frauds, due to thousands of years of social success being based on the abilities to back up lies with violence. Martenson's impossible ideals seem to me to deliberately ignore the degree to which the real world is already in a state of runaway criminal insanities, headed towards Peak Insanities.
I do not think that people like Martenson appreciate the degree to which the combined money/murder systems are runaway criminal insanities, and moreover, therefore, he is not in the right ball park with respect to being prepared for that, IF it is possible to be prepared for that ... Indeed, the facts that relatively well-informed people still are naively underestimating the degree to which our current civilization, including both the rulers, and most of those they rule over, are basically criminally insane, reflects the ways that even those relatively well-informed people routinely underestimate how bad things actually are, and thus, are not in the right frame of reference regarding what it would take to be prepared for the debt insanities provoking death insanities.
More importantly, IF we assume some survival through that, then those who did not appreciate the ways that the death controlling murder systems were backing up everything else would still not be willing and able to reconsider how to operate better death controlling murder systems in the future, (supposing that some people survive through enough to be able to still worry about that later.)
It is not merely that the enforced frauds in our financial system make developing creative alternatives extremely problematic, because, within those systems, that would take even more "money" created out of nothing, as even more debts, to finance developing any alternatives, which is extremely problematic, since the debt slavery systems have already generated debt insanities! It is also, much moreover, that those kinds of debt controls always actually depended upon the death controls, which were always been done through the maximum possible deceits, which necessarily also included the ways that almost all the controlled opposition groups also shared in those basic deceits, regarding the fundamental issues of death controls.
Guys like Chris Martenson, and Huge Charles-Smith, underestimate the seriousness of the problems, which has the flip sides that their sets of preparations and alternative "solutions" do NOT then have to address the issues of the death controlling murder systems, and how one could possibly be prepared for death insanities, wherein almost everything that one can imagine doing in those regards would actually have the final effects of aggravating those, to make the overall situation become even more criminally insane.
The most important facts are that history has been guided by warfare whose success was based on deceits, enabling economics based on enforced frauds. The sum total of that, pumped up by technologies trillions of times more powerful, has generated a civilization manifesting runaway criminal insanities, headed towards peak insanities, as the greatest of all peaks in peak everything else.
The basic thrust of Martenson's presentation is that real limits to growth mean that we must change the monetary systems, in one way or another, sooner or later. There must necessarily be some kind of monetary revolution, because the debt controls must change, when the environmental circumstances make continued exponential growth impossible. However, Martenson is quite typical in the ways that he deliberately ignores how the murder systems backed up the monetary systems. He is quite typical in proposing "solutions" which never propose even the slightest hints regarding how there would have to be alternative death controls, as the central core, keystone, or lynch pin, of all the other possible alternatives.
In that way, Martenson, et alia, are actually contributing to the runaway criminal insanities towards peaking social insanities, because he shares the common traits of those who deliberately ignore how bad things really are, both in detailed and particular ways, as well as, more importantly, in the most profound theoretical ways.
As the runaway debt slavery systems generate numbers which are debt insanities, which threaten to provoke death insanities, any comprehensive responses to that should include ideas about alternative death controls, and alternative militarism, and so on and so forth, which are somehow possible after the development of weapons of mass destruction and mass surveillance.
The on-coming collapses are NOT going to wipe out the preparations that people have made for those suddenly. The death control tools are those which have been most prepared and most stockpiled. However, almost nowhere is there any saner public discussions or debates about the death control purposes, since the actual systems which exist today were based on thousands of years of death controls done through the maximum deceits, which necessarily included almost all the various controlled opposition groups, in the form of various religions and ideologies being complicit and co-opted into that frame of reference of maintaining attitudes of the maximum deceit towards the death controls.
Since money is measurement backed by murder, as the debt insanities become more blatantly obvious, for all the reasons that Martenson reviewed in his video, the death insanities will all be provoked, as peak everything else heads towards peaking insanities. In my view, the only ways that we could PERHAPS deal with that better would indeed to be to understand it better ... However, I find that people like Martenson and Hugh-Smith dismally fail to do that ... (which, of course, makes me wonder about what I may well also be dismally failing to do too?)
While I agree with much of what you say (you don't give stupidity and ignorance nearly enough weight) you would do yourself and everyone else a big favor if you were more succinct and focused. You're like a programmer who uses 3000 lines of code where 300 or even 30 would serve the purpose much better.
Radical Marijuana not succinct or focused? What are you on? Drugs?
Loved it! Thanks:)
Great! thanks! Now that you've confirmed that you're on ZH, why don't you CON FIRM what else you're on.... lol
Regarding oil, the kind of sleepwalkingness of our time is a lot based on below "myth" or false common image :
"first oil shock (73) = Yom Kippur/Arab embargo= geopolitical story= nothing to do with geologic constraints"
When the real story was :
- end 1970 : US production peak, the energy crisis starts from there, with some heating fuel shortages for instance (some articles can be found on NYT archive on that), or :
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/US_Oil_Production_and_Imports_1920_to_2005.png
- Nixon name James Akins to go check what is going on.
- Akins goes around all US producers, saying this won't be communicated to the media, but needs to be known, national security question
- The results are bad : no additional capacity at all, production will only go down, the results are also presented to the OECD
- The reserves of Alaska, North Sea, Gulf of Mexico, are known at that time, but to be developed the barrel price needs to be higher
- In parallel this is also the period of "rebalance" between oil majors and countries on each barrel revenues (Ghadaffi being the first to push 55/50 for instance), and creation of national oil companies.
- there is also the dropping of B Woods in 71 and associated $ devaluation, also putting a "bullish" pressure on oil price.
- So to be able to start Alaska, GOM, North Sea, and have some "outside OPEC" market share, the barrel price needs to go up (always good for oil majors anyway) and this is also US diplomacy strategy
- For instance Akins, then US ambassador in Saudi Arabia, is the one talking about $4 or $5 a barrel in an OAPEC meeting in Algiers in 1972
- Yom Kippur starts during an OPEC meeting in Vienna, which was about barrel revenus percentages, and barrel price rise.
- The declaration of the embargo pushes the barrel up on the spots markets (that just have been set up)
- But the embargo remains quite limited (not from Iran, not from Iraq, only towards a few countries)
- It remains fictive from Saudi Arabia towards the US : tankers kept on going from KSA, through Bahrain to make it more discrete, towards the US Army in Vietnam in particular.
- Akins is very clear about that in below documentary interviews (which unfortunately only exists in French and German to my knowledge, and interviews are voiced over) :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=fQJ-0jAr3LQ
For instance after 24:10, where he says that two senators were starting having rather "strong voices" about "doing something", he asked the permission to tell them what was going on, got it, told them, they shat up and there was never any leak. The first oil shock "episode" starts at 18:00
The "embargo story" was in fact very "practical", both for the US to "cover up" US peak towards US public opinion or western one in general, but also for major Arab producers to show "the Arab street" that they were doing something for the Palestinians.
In the end, clearly a wake up call that has been missed.
Note : About Akins, see for instance :
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/26/AR201007...
And his famous foreign affair article :
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~twod/oil-ns/articles/for_aff_aikins_oil_c...
His report to Nixon in 71 or 72 is still classified to my knowledge though, would be interesting to know if it can be declassified now.
"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." -Yogi Berra
This guy claims he has "limited time" in this video, and then proceeds to blather on and on saying ABSOLUTELY NOTHING for about 75% of the video. At about 7:50 he starts talking about a real topic: population growth and exponential growth. This is an absolutely cartoonish explanation of this subject, approached as if taught to a naive 8 year old. At this point it's pretty easy to tell this guy is selling something, preying on the naive. (I actually didn't check, but assume he is) Next up, at 10:50, exponential money growth. Here we get the statement regarding our monetary system: "It must grow in order to work". And now we have confirmation this guy is clueless. This is where I stopped watching.
kinda sad to see this on zh
Over the next 20 years, most people will experience a slow, relentless decline in their standard of living, largely due to unaffordability of many things related to basic necessities, healthy living and health care. Average life expectancy will decline signifcantly. A trigger event would be required (nuclear war, pandemic, etc.) to make the decline abrupt, i.e., the reset that many on this site are eagerly awaiting,
Exploitation of fossil fuels has lead to an explosion in development and populations over the last century. Fossil fuels, whether used in combustion engines (gasoline, diesel), or used to power the energy grid (coal, nat gas, refined from oil) are paramont in the production and distribution of the food and water needed to sustain life, and also to enhance the many comforts and enjoyment in life. There are renewable and other energy alternatives that are or will be viable in the future, and that can be implemented locally, in isolated areas, or in small scale. EROEI, commercially viable scaling, and government regulations/control are important factors in the speed with which the world is weaned off of its dependence on fossil fuels.
Wars for oil, water and other precious resources will continue; as hot wars, cyber wars, and/or financial wars. It is acceptable to have an optimistic outlook that technology will timely contribute to needed solutions, as many of us have children and grand children.
Slow or quick, that is the question, more or less ..
But quite a bit of objective information (typically with respect to what happens in nature in similar overshoot cases) points towards "quick" more than slow, and this even without a nuclear war.
Basically we have no reverse gear for many reasons (financial but not only).
Yes, yt75, that has become my view too, that quite a bit of objective information points towards "quick" more than slow."
Some people, for instance, Canadians, are still living in their BUBBLE, and so, can not imagine how quickly things could fall apart. However, there are few places left where there is a relatively small population, compared to the amounts of natural resources that they still have, and therefore, can continue to strip-mine, in business as usual. Most places have already grossly overshot, with nothing remotely close left to sustain their systems, if globalized trade breaks down.
By definition, "reverse gear" is death control. By definition, that is the only thing which stops growth. However, since the established death control systems were built on thousands of years of successful deceits, in which context rational debate about the need for better death controls is practically impossible, we are actually rushing towards death insanities. Since, overall, we collectively operate with attitudes of evil deliberate ignorance towards what we have really been doing, with false glamour and glory surrounding turning natural resources into garbage and pollution as fast as possible, with almost nobody willing and able to debate how that could or should be slowed down, therefore, catastrophic collapse into chaos seems the most probable future. Since everything in the established systems, especially the financial, are frauds designed to advance strip-mining the planet as fast as possible, we are headed as fast as possible towards the limits of diminish returns, while the established systems continue to deliberately ignore those prospects, and moreover, continue to deny that, by definition, the only real solutions must be death controls, because, that is what limiting growth must necessarily mean. All together, as my comments above reviewed, globally we are headed as fast as possible, with attitudes of deliberate ignorance, towards the relatively more objective limits to growth, while rational public debates about that are practically impossible because the core of those would necessarily be debates about the death controls, which are, by definition, the limits to growth.
From those perspectives, I think that the limits to growth are coming at us faster than we collectively recognize, (although there are still some places where that is not yet the case.) Since the limits to growth are death controls, while the actual death control systems that exist now were made and maintained by thousands of years of history of the maximum deceits, including the ideas of the controlled oppositions groups to those death controls, such as in all the significant religions and ideologies, we are speeding towards death insanities, as the main form of Peak Insanities, because it is practically impossible for the established systems to change their fundamental enforced frauds, which dominate the financial systems, and therefore, control everything else too.
Why death and not birth control ?
You're must be about 20 years old to say something like that.
Is it comfortable in your Ivy League womb?
Stopped listening at "the [exponential] chart pattern which is often called a hockey stick."
So in reverse logic the infamous Climatic Research Unit 'hockey stick' graph has that shape because the atmospheric temperature rise is exponential???
Redefining words on the fly - a truly Orwellian use of language.