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On The Verge Of The Great Unraveling, Looking Back From 2050
The future remains eternally unknown and invariably holds its surprises. Fortunately however, it will prove far less unknown because among our number we happen to have one, John Feffer, with the ability to channel a geo-paleontologist who’s had some experience with the world 35 years from now and so, unlike the rest of us, can look back on our planetary fate from what turns out to be a distinctly dystopian future.
Submitted by John Feffer via TomDispatch.com,
Splinterlands, The View From 2050
Let me start with a confession. I’m old-fashioned and I have an old-fashioned profession. I’m a geo-paleontologist. That means I dig around in archives to exhume the extinct: all the empires and federations and territorial unions that have passed into history. I practically created the profession of geo-paleontology as a young scholar in 2020. (We used to joke that we were the only historians with true 2020 hindsight). Now, my profession is becoming as extinct as its subject matter.
Today, in 2050, fewer and fewer people can recall what it was like to live among those leviathans. Back in my youth, we imagined that lumbering dinosaurs like Russia and China and the European Union would endure regardless of the global convulsions taking place around them. Of course, at that time, our United States still functioned as its name suggests rather than as a motley collection of regional fragments that today fight over a shrinking resource base.
Empires, like adolescents, think they’ll live forever. In geopolitics, as in biology, expiration dates are never visible. When death comes, it’s always a shock.
Consider the clash of the titans in World War I. Four enormous empires -- the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and German -- went into that conflict imagining that victory would give them not just a new lease on life, but possibly even more territory to call their own. And all four came crashing down. The war was horrific enough, but the aftershocks just kept piling up the bodies. The flu epidemic of 1918-1919 alone -- which soldiers unwittingly transported from the trenches to their homelands -- wiped out at least 50 million people worldwide.
When dinosaurs collapse, they crush all manner of smaller creatures beneath them. No one today remembers the death throes of the last of the colonial empires in the mid-twentieth century with their staggering population transfers, fierce insurgencies, and endless proxy wars -- even if the infant states that emerged from those bloody afterbirths gained at least a measure of independence.
My own specialty as a geo-paleontologist has been the post-1989 period. The break-up of the Soviet Union heralded the last phase of decolonization. So, too, did the redrawing of boundaries that took place in parts of Asia and Africa from the 1990s into the twenty-first century, producing new states like East Timor, Eritrea, South Sudan. The break-up of the Middle East, in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the “Arab Spring,” followed a similar, if far more chaotic and bloody pattern, though religious extremism more than nationalist sentiment tore apart the multiethnic countries of the region.
Even in this inhospitable environment, the future still seemed to belong to the dinosaurs. Despite setbacks, the U.S. continued to loom over the rest of the planet as the “sole superpower,” with its military in constant intervention mode. China was on the rise. Russia seemed bent on reconstituting the old Soviet Union. The need to compete on an increasingly interconnected planet contributed to what seemed like a trend: pushing countries together to create economies of scale. The European Union (EU) deepened its integration and expanded its membership. Nations of very different backgrounds formed economic pacts like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Even countries without any shared borders contemplated such joint enterprises, like the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and, later, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (the “BRICS” nations).
As everyone now knows, however, this spirit of integration would, in the end, go down to defeat as the bloodlands of the twentieth century gave way to the splinterlands of the twenty-first. The sense of disintegration and disunity that settled over our world came at precisely the wrong moment. To combat a host of collective problems, we needed more unity, not less. As we are all learning the hard way, a planet divided against itself will not long stand.
The Wrath of Nations
Water boils most fiercely just before it disappears. And so it is, evidently, with human affairs.
Just before all hell broke lose in 1914, the world witnessed an unprecedented explosion of global trade at levels that would not be seen again until the 1980s. Just before the Nazis took over in 1932, Germans in the Weimar Republic were enjoying an extraordinary blossoming of cultural and political liberalism. Just before the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, Soviet scholars were pointing proudly to rising rates of intermarriage among the many nationalities of the federation as a sign of ever-greater social cohesion.
And in 2015, just before the great unraveling, the world still seemed to be in the grip of what was then labeled “globalization.” The volume of world trade was at an all-time high. Facebook had created a network of 1.5 billion active users. People on every continent were dancing to Drake, watching the World Cup final, and eating sushi. At the other end of the socio-economic spectrum, more people were on the move as migrants and refugees than at any time since the end of World War II.
Borders seemed to be crumbling everywhere.
Before 2015, almost everyone believed that time’s arrow pointed in the direction of greater integration. Some hoped (and others feared) that the world was converging on ever-larger conglomerations of nations. The internationalists campaigned for a United Nations that had some actual political power. The free traders imagined a frictionless global market where identical superstores would sell the same products at all their global locations. The technotopians imagined a world united by Twitter and Instagram.
In 2015, people were so busy crossing borders -- real and conceptual -- that they barely registered the backlash against globalization. Officially, more and more countries had committed themselves to diversity, multiculturalism, and the cosmopolitan ideals of liberty, solidarity, and equality. But everything began to change in 2015, a phenomenon I first chronicled in my landmark study Splinterlands (Dispatch Books, 2025). The movements that came to the fore in 2015 championed a historic turn inward: the erection of walls, the enforcement of homogeneity, and the trumpeting of exclusively national virtues.
The leaders of these movements -- Donald Trump in the United States, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Russian President Vladimir Putin, French National Front Party leader Marine Le Pen, Indian Prime Minister Nahendra Modi, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, to name just a few -- were not members of a single party. They did not consider themselves part of a single movement. Indeed, they were quite skeptical of anything that smacked of transnational cooperation. Personally, they were cosmopolitans, comfortable in a variety of cultural environments, but their politics were parochial. As a group, they heralded a change in world politics still working itself out 35 years later.
Ironically enough, at the time these figures were the ones labeled “dinosaurs” because of their focus on imaginary golden ages of the past. But when history presses the rewind button, as it has for the last 35 years, it can turn reactionaries into visionaries.
Few serious thinkers during the waning days of the Cold War imagined that, in the long run, nationalism would survive as anything more significant than flag and anthem. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm concluded in 1990, that force was almost spent, or as he put it, “no longer a major vector of historical development.” Commerce and the voracious desire for wealth were expected to rub away at national differences until all that remained would be a single global marketplace of supposedly rational actors. New technologies of travel and communication would unite strangers and dissolve the passions of particularism. The enormous bloodlettings that nations visited on one another in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would surely convince all but the lunatic that appeals to motherland and fatherland had no place in a modern society.
As it turned out, however, commerce and its relentless push for comparative advantage merely rebranded nationalism as another marketable commodity. Although travel and communication did indeed bring people together, they also increased the opportunities for misunderstanding and conflict. As a result, nationalism did not go gently into the night. Quite the opposite: it literally remapped the world we now live in.
The Fracture Lines
The fracturing of the so-called international community did not happen with one momentous crack. Rather, it proceeded much like the calving of Arctic ice masses under the pressure of global warming, leaving behind only a herd of modest ice floes. Rising geopolitical temperatures had a similar effect on the world’s map.
At first, it was difficult to understand how the war in Syria, the conflict in Ukraine, the simmering discontent in Xinjiang, the uprisings in Mali, the crisis of the Europe Union, and the upsurge in anti-immigrant sentiment in both Europe and the United States were connected. But connected they were.
The initial cracks in that now-dead global system appeared in the Middle East. As a geo-paleontologist, I must admit that I wasn’t particularly interested in those changes themselves, only in their impact on larger entities. Iraq and Syria, multiethnic countries forged in the post-colonial fires of Arab nationalism, split along ethnic and confessional lines. Under the pressure of a NATO air intervention led by the U.S., Libya similarly fell apart when its autocratic leader was killed and its arsenals were pillaged and sent to terror groups across a broad crescent of crisis. The fracturing then continued to spread -- to Yemen, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Jordan. People poured out of these disintegrating countries like creatures fleeing a forest fire.
This vast flood of refugees by land and sea proved to be the tipping point for the European Union. Having expanded dramatically in the 2000s, the 28-member association hit a wall of Euroskepticism, fiscal austerity, and xenophobia. As they reacted to the rising tide of refugees, the anti-immigrant forces managed to end the Schengen system of open borders. Next to unravel was the European currency system as the highly indebted countries on the periphery of the Eurozone reasserted their fiscal sovereignty.
The Euroskeptics took heart from these developments. In 2015, the anti-immigrant Democratic Party in Sweden leaped to the top of the opinion polls for the first time. Once the epitome of tolerance and social democracy, Sweden led the great turn in Scandinavia away from the European mainland. On the heels of local elections and those for the European Parliament, the far-right National Front of Marine Le Pen became the most popular French party and, with its newfound power, began to pry apart the informal pact with Germany that had once been the engine for European integration. Euroskeptical parties consolidated power in Poland, Portugal, Hungary, and Slovakia. Desperate to curry favor with its hardcore constituents, the British Conservative Party sponsored a referendum that guided Great Britain out of the EU. What had once been only scattered voices of dissatisfaction suddenly became a rush to the exits. The EU survived for some years more -- until the Acts of Dis-Integration of 2028 -- but only as a shell.
The unrest in the Middle East and the unraveling of the EU had a profound impact on Russia. The last of that country’s Soviet-era politicians had been attempting to reconstruct the old federation through new Eurasian arrangements. At the same time, they were trying to expand jurisdiction over Russian-speaking populations through border wars with Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova. But in their grab for more, they were left with less. Mother Russia could no longer corral its children, neither the Buryats of the trans-Baikal region nor the Sakha of Siberia, neither the inhabitants of westernmost Kaliningrad nor those of the maritime regions of Primorye in the far east. Moscow’s entrance into the Syrian conflict on the side of Damascus contributed to an upsurge in separatist sentiment in the trans-Caucasus republics of Chechnya and Dagestan. In the Second Great Perestroika of 2031, Russia divided along the lines we know so well today, separating its European and Asian halves and its industrial wastelands in the north from its creeping deserts in the south.
China found itself on a similar trajectory. A global economic slowdown frayed the unstated social contract -- incremental improvements in prosperity in exchange for political quiescence -- that the Communist Party had developed in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Beijing’s crackdown on anything that smacked of “terrorism” only pushed the Uighurs of Xinjiang into open revolt. The Tibetans, too, continued to advance their claims for greater autonomy. Inner Mongolia, with almost twice as many ethnic Mongolians as Mongolia itself, also pulled at the strings that held China together. Taiwan stopped talking about cross-Straits reunification; Hong Kong reasserted its earlier status as an entrepôt city. But these rebellions along the frontiers paled in comparison to the Middle Uprising of the 2030s. In retrospect, it was obvious that the underemployed workers and farmers in China’s heartland, who had only marginally benefited from the country’s great capitalist leap forward of the late twentieth century, would attack the political order. But who would have thought that the middle could drop so quickly out of the Middle Kingdom?
The United States, as we all know, has not fallen apart. But the American empire (which U.S. leaders took such pains to deny ever existed) has effectively collapsed. Once the U.S. government went into receivership over its mountainous debt and its infrastructure began to truly collapse, its vast overseas military footprint became unsupportable. As it withdrew, Washington deputized its allies -- Germany, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Israel -- to do the same work, but they regularly worked at cross-purposes and in any case held their own national interests above those of Washington.
Meanwhile, U.S. domestic politics remained so polarized and congealed that Congress and the executive branch could not establish a consensus on how to re-energize the economy or reconceive the “national interest.” Up went higher walls to keep out foreigners and foreign products. With the exception of military affairs and immigration control, the government dwindled to the status of caretaker. Then there was the epidemic of assault rifles, armed personal drones, and WBA (weaponized biological agents), all easily downloaded at home on 3-D printers. The state lost its traditionally inviolable monopoly on violence and our society, though many refuse to acknowledge the trend, drifted into a condition closely approximating psychosis. An increasingly embittered and armed white minority seemed determined to adopt a scorched-earth policy rather than leave anything of value to its mixed-race heirs. Today, of course, the country exists in name alone, for the only policies that matter are enacted on a regional basis.
The centrifugal forces first set in motion in 2015 tore apart the great multiethnic nations in a terrifying version of Yugoslavization that spread across the planet. Farseeing pundits had predicted a wave of separatism in the 1990s. They were wrong only in terms of pace. The fissures were slower to appear, but appear they did. In South Asia, separatist movements ate away at both India and Pakistan. In Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Myanmar fractured along ethnic lines. In Africa, the center could not hold, and things inevitably fell apart -- in the Congo, the Central African Republic, Nigeria, and Chad, among other places.
There was much talk in the early twenty-first century of failed states like Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, and Haiti. Looking back, it’s now far clearer that, in a certain sense, all states were failing. They had little chance against the governance-eroding winds of globalization from above and the ever-greater upheavals of non-state actors from below.
Perhaps under the best of environmental conditions, these forces would have pushed empires, federations, and trade pacts to the edge but no further. As it happened, however, despite conferences and manifestos and sort-of-binding agreements, the global thermometer continued to rise. The effects of climate change turned out to be the proverbial tipping point. Water shortages intensified conflict throughout China, as did food shortages in Russia. The tropics, the islands, the coastlines: all were vulnerable to the rising waters. And virtually every country entered into a pitched battle over drinking water, clean air, indispensible minerals, and arable land.
All of us have our own personal climate-change disaster stories. For instance, I lost my home in Hurricane Donald, which destroyed so much of Washington, D.C. and its suburbs in 2029. I started all over in Nebraska only to be forced to move again when the Oglala aquifer gave out in 2034, precipitating what we now call the Midwest Megadrought. And like so many others, I lost a loved one only three years ago in that terrible month of superstorms -- 7/47 -- which devastated such a large swath of the planet.
What no one anticipated was the impact climate change would have on nationalism. But how else would people divvy up increasingly precious natural resources? National sentiment proved to be the go-to principle for determining what “our” people deserved and those “others” didn’t. As a result, instead of becoming an atavistic remnant of another age, nationalism has proved to be this century’s most potent ideology. On an increasingly desperate planet, we face not the benevolence or tyranny of one world, but the multiple confusions of many worlds.
All That Was Solid
It was not only the multiethnic nation-state that proved untenable in our century. Everything seemed to be fracturing.
The middle class shattered. The promise of a stable job and income -- the iron rice bowl in the East and the ironclad pension in the West -- disappeared into a maelstrom of inequality in which the super-rich 1% effectively seceded from society while the poorest of the poor had nowhere to turn. Back in 2015, pundits loved to promote new trends like the “sharing economy” of millions of employees turned entrepreneurs or the “long tail” of a splintering consumer market. But the bottom line was grimly straightforward: the forces that could have acted to countervail the fissiparous competition of the market gradually disappeared. Gone was the guiding hand of the government. Gone were the restraining pressures of morality.
Technology certainly played a role in this transformation, first when computers and cell phones untethered individuals from fixed workplaces and then when biochips turned each individual into his or her own “work station.” The application of market principles to every facet of existence whittled away the public sphere in favor of the private one. Such dynamics at the social level also contributed to the great fracturing that took place in the international sphere.
Yes, I can anticipate your criticism. Perhaps it’s true that, in 2050, we are at a nadir of cooperation and some new form of centralization and globalization lies ahead. Clearly, the jihadis, who operate their mini-caliphates around the world, dream of uniting the faithful under a single banner. There are diplomats even today who hope to get all 300-plus members of the United Nations to agree to the sort of institutional reforms that could provide the world with some semblance of global governance. And maybe a brilliant programmer is even now creating a new “killer app” that will put every single person on the same page, literally.
As a geo-paleontologist, I am reluctant to speculate. I focus on the past, on what has actually happened. Anyone can make predictions. But none of these scenarios of future integration seems at all plausible to me. “That’s the way the cookie crumbles,” we used to say when I was a kid. And a cookie can only crumble in one direction.
Still, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out something that many have noted over the years. We have been fragmenting at precisely the time when we should be coming together, for the problems that face the planet cannot be solved by millions of individuals or masses of statelets acting alone. And yet how can we expect, with desperate millions on the move, the rise of pandemics, and the deepening of economic inequality globally, that people can unite against common existential threats? Only today can we all see clearly, as I wrote so many years ago, that the rise of the splinterlands has been humanity’s true tragedy. The inability of cultures to compromise within single states, it seems, anticipated our current moment when multiplying nation-states can’t compromise on a single planet to address our global scourges. The glue that once held us together -- namely, solidarity across religion, ethnicity, and class -- has lost its binding force.
At the beginning of the great unraveling, in 2015, I was still a young man. Like everyone else, I didn’t see this coming. We all lived in a common home, I thought. Some rooms were in terrible disrepair. Those living in the attic were often exposed to the elements. The house as a whole needed better insulation, more efficient appliances, solar panels on the roof, and we had indeed fallen behind on the mortgage payments. But like so many of my peers, I seldom doubted that we could scrape together the funds and the will to make the necessary repairs by asking the richer residents of the house to pay their fair share.
Thirty-five years and endless catastrophes later on a poorer, bleaker, less hospitable planet, it’s clear that we just weren’t paying sufficient attention. Had we been listening, we would have heard the termites. There, in the basement of our common home, they were eating the very foundations out from under us. Suddenly, before we knew quite what was happening, all that was solid had melted into air.
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Well I almost got thru the article.. do i get points for trying ?
I should have read the comments first.
I read the entire thing. What a bunch of drivel. It lost me with all the climate change and collectivist bullshit. He talks about the US splitting up into smaller countries and the EU and china splitting up as if that would be a bad thing. Would several smaller countries independent of each other have been able to unleash such havoc? No. And since several regions of this country hold such diametrically opposing viewpoints, let them split up. Since NO government probably isn't likely, the next best thing is the smallest government possible in charge of the smallest possible area. The author actually had a few things right until he had to get into the lefty global warming shit, and all the talk about how we needed to collectively come together to solve our problems, mostly liberal bullshit that only exists in the minds of progressives. That's code for using the guns of government to enforce the will of those running the show, and it NEVER ends well for the citizenry. Get 50% plus one of the group, and you are magically justified in using whatever means you deem necessary to gain compliance.
People like this fucking author are the ones leading us down the road to ruin with the massive central authority he calls for several times. Decentralization and self determination are what is needed, not moar collectivism. Tom dispatch should just stick to the anti war stuff, which is occasionally decent.
He got paid for by the word
John Feffer, the author, is a typical think-tank wonk.
He is employed by the Institute For Policy Studies (http://www.ips-dc.org/).
Amusingly, the IPS got its startup money from one James Warburg. Yup, that's right, son of Paul Warburg, banker and principal creator of the Federal Reserve.
No mention of Israel expanding its territory over areas which used to be known as Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt. That was after rebuilding Solomon's temple on Jerusalem's Temple Mount after the Al Aqsa mosque was "accidentally" destroyed when Malaysian Airlines flight 666 was hijacked by ISIS and shot down by Israeli Defense forces before it could be flown into the Knesset (lucky!).
After jumping from paragrah to paragraph, I decided to do something more constructive and watched this:
http://www.thepornster.net/video/455/skinny-blonde-euro-babe-pissed-on-a...
Geo paleontology is about what happened millions of years ago not the past two decades. For fucks sake he is an utterly clueless moron. There are some interesting points to the article, but on the whole it is utter nonsense.
In contrast to the article, the ONLY way to solve these problems is through individual action and voluntary association. We've directly experienced the end result of hundreds of years of centralization and collectivism.
Totally with you on that Carl, though "drivel" is an understatement
And he doesn't even understand why the Jew World Order is failing. It is failing because the people don't want it. We are withdrawing our consent to be governed, nay, enslaved. We will leave your agenda 21 megacities and build our own towns and villages far from your highways, bullet trains, and hordes of marauding rapeapes and dindus. And you'll be left with nothing but filthy cities full of parasite dindus and nobody to pay for them, or your lifestyle built on our backs and hard labor.
Two points. The article extrapolates the political correctness to a worldwide cultural and religious scale. If every culture and sect gets it's own "safe space", this is what the world will be like. Governments will be turned into a larger version of the University of Missouri campus.
I suggest the author write a second version of this, where the decreased solar output causes a decade of crop failures in the 2030s, and fragmented agriculture "safe spaces" don't have enough economy of scale to produce enough food. Edit: except for the Amish (who have their own technology-free safe space).
More points than.me I jumped right to the comments only to find one!
First time I ever rated an article as Poor.
That makes two (all) of us.
It was like reading a poor B-movie script that never got any funding.
Funny thing is that is exactly how I started to read it. I was actually looking forward to some creative fiction.
Alas, my spider senses tingled when he mentioned global climate warmongering bullshit and then it seems clear to me that he was pre-programming us to accept 1WorldGovernment/Religion or something like that.
This article is likely a honeypot.
It worked. Very odd. This is 1 of the few times where I avidly read the entire article. I rarely read the articles before I read the comments. This 1 was weird. There were no comments when I was done reading! Yikes!
It was a nice effort, but maybe should have been done in a few parts...I read, then skimmed...then skipped to the comments.
It's written by a guy who hasn't seen the world and who thinks hat when the US goes down hat the world will end.
It's what they tougt when the English empire went down in the beginning of the 20th century.
Another one simply took over and England recover 5 decades later and is now back the biggest financial powerhouse of the world.
People never sit back and die. They adopt and change.
People who believe the kind of crap written on top lack imagination and feel overpowered by the lack of direction and steering from the top And what he actually says is "I don't know what to do!"
I agree it is end of an era, but I don' think it extends as far into the future as he seems to. Ditto Europe. The immigration problem begins when Europe can't afford to feed everyone who isn't working. All countries have taken on more debt than they can service, those are the drivers of the next bit of history. The US military can screw things up, but it is certainly not part of any solution to anything, we are about to be left with no military and maximum number of most poed enemies.
https://thinkpatriot.wordpress.com/2015/10/27/ignoring-the-absolutely-in...
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Cute, but more utopian hype.
It won't be nearly that nice in 35 years.
Imagine the computers and the automation that will rule the land?
Where will the people be, the ones who were needed to work the jobs, now done by machines?
•?•
V-V
Always the know-it-all fag Political Science major comment from you. Did your mother fuck the mailman?
"Rather, it proceeded much like the calving of Arctic ice masses under the pressure of global warming,"
There it is again!! Global Warming BS.
Jesus,,, you can't kill this thing!
Localism: Hopefully it becomes a new trend.
The reason that we will "devolve" to a splintered group of smaller, more culturally cohesive groups is that is the survival paradigm for human society. Any long lasting society has members that resemble each other in their choices of proper values. Trying to force widely divergent cultures to peacefully mingle won't work. The US worked only so long as it was a "melting pot" where newcomers wanted and were expected to adopt the prevailing social norms.
The article seems pretty light on the US role as financializer in chief and economic bully.
I think it will. And I think globalism will be the cause.
We are seeing it now, in the rise of nationalist parties in Europe, and the popularity of Trump here.
A also believe that the reversal will be extreme, and we will see things headed for near-fascism before it balances out.
I appreciate the effort.
In truth...This shit is pretty fucking difficult to explain.
-:)
Mushrooms? It was a nice story.
:-)
"The sense of disintegration and disunity that settled over our world came at precisely the wrong moment."
The worl is diverse, trying to put it together in a uniform format is madness... It simply will not work. Despite the "dreamy" artcle this is one of the project that are implemented... no nations, no banners, one power. Which is really madness.
Ever sat in the upper deck of an 747-200?
Spatial reality
Captain's log, 11/10/2050: Finally got to the comments section... 35 years later. Fortunately the article was not very accurate.
Well that was an interesting thought experiment. The author did well to encompass the stronger, yet mostly unrecongized pressures that are bubbling beneath the facade of modern society. But it is hard to imagine a future where the stabilizing hand of time and humankind's ingenuity has failed to make an impact.
From what I can see, we have everything we need to establish a more resilient and prosperous existence. The only unknown as far as I'm concerned is whether or not the insatiable needs of the elite will be smothered out before they distort the functions of society any farther.
May the international language of free markets and people be spoken by all.
I think the evidences for "climate change" we are seeing are the beginning of the birth pangs of Matthew 24 and Mark 13. The Creator is telling us to "Wake up! Time is growing short." Indulge me for a brief moment - temporarily set aside your objections and just think about this:
Note the significance of 7 in multiple instances in the Bible. Then consider a week has 7 days. Every other astronomical measurement of time (a day, a month, a year) has an orbital or rotational origin. For example, one day equals the amount of time for the earth to rotate once on its axis. But there's no basis other than the Bible for a week being 7 days.
Now expand the 7 days in a week to the biblical history of the world. In Genesis, we read that God created everything in 6 days and rested on the 7th day. In Revelation, we read of a 1,000 year reign of God on this physical earth. In 2 Peter 3:8, we read "But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day." Could this be a clue as to when to expect "The End"? Do we only get 7,000 years on this planet?
We are currently in Hebrew Year 5776. That is, the belief the world was created 5776 years ago. It is possible, although not expressly stated in the Bible, that the time allotted for creation will correspond to the first 6 days (6 X 1,000 = 6,000). If so, we have approximately 215 years until the millennial kingdom (1,000 year reign) is established. And 7 years before the millennial kingdom is the start of the Tribulation (i.e., the 70 sevens of the Book of Daniel). So we have about 208 years before the confirmation of the Anti-Christ and the start of the countdown towards Apocalypse.
Is this crazy talk? Of course. But I find it interesting to consider nonetheless. I know all the ZHers moan and complain that everyone predicts an event will happen, but nobody says WHEN. Well, you heard it here first so that when it comes true be sure to give proper credit. In the meantime, keep stackin (Matthew 6:19-20)
We have a three headed Semitic snake in the room.
Jason. Jason? Where is that old man when you need him? Somebody break it's back before it poisons the mind of some innocent child.
Are you talking about weather?
Tomorrow will be partly cloudy with a chance of rain unless it snows or hails or something else.
I take it this fictitious future propaganda is a new angle at promoting the same line of multicultural collectivist nonsense that's regularly posted to ZH. It's like the same bullshit only covered in a layer of horseshit.
Oh no, white people with guns! Oh no, global warming! Oh no, people want to control borders! If only Hillary would have been elected way back in 2016 we would have been saved!
Some of you guys are heartless when it comes to taking cheap shots at the authors. You remind me of the Ancient Mariner shooting the Albatross.
After all it isn't every day you get a round trip through time with Leviathan. Did you even notice the paradoxes? What else did you miss?
Future - http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-10/verge-great-unraveling-looking-...
Present - http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-09/end-feds-self-deluding-feedback...
Past - http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-08-11/chart-day-rise-regulatory-levia...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIxRTcFaxTg#t=46m46s
By 2050 we will have gone through a major world wide economic collapse, WWIII will be over with no winers global, peace will follow, one world socialist government will emerge, borders will be open, and there will be one world currency.. Sorry but that's just what I see coming.
Unregulated greed basically murdered capitalism. As a result everyone lost faith in capitalism and turned to socialism.
Considering that there is an entire cottage industry built up warning of 'global financial collapse' it will be pretty hard to sound intelligent and still claim you did not see it coming....unless math 'just ain't your thing'.
Most of us will be saying, 'you just could not understand how it lasted another day and yet it limped on for years'.
Neat story but....
It's tough to make predictions, especially about the futureyogi
2030
I'm sitting in 4th grade class, after summer recess, walking home down Forest Ridge Drive.
Let's discuss how Howard Hughs destroyed TWA. Lets discuss Carl Icahn.
I come to Zero Hedge to learn.
We often hear:
How many fiat currencies stand the test of time?
But not:
How many civilisations stand the test of time?
The answer is the same for both - none.
Fuck you. The scorched earth policy of the globalists mutha fucka.
Chi ps.
The solution is so simple, take the power away from them. Stop making payments to them, stop paying them to enslave us. As of January 1st, stop making mortgage payments, stop making vehicle payments and stop making credit card payments. Pull your money out of direct withdrawn accounts. If they don't take notice the first month, do it for another month. Pay your local bills, groceries, hardware etc. but cut the banks out. The problem is trying to organize enough people that would be willing to do it. Share the idea on social media, if you know someone who is a public figure, talk to them about it. #NewYearsRevolution
The good news is, we win.
The bad news is, loved ones are lost.
"The disorders following the military takeover in 861, and the loss of the empire, had played havoc with the economy. At such a moment, it might have been expected that everyone would redouble their efforts to save the country from bankruptcy, but nothing of the kind occurred. Instead, at this moment of declining trade and financial stringency, the people of Baghdad introduced a five-day week."
THE FATE OF EMPIRES
http://www.rexresearch.com/glubb/glubb-empire.pdf
Entirely predictable:
1920s/2000s - high inequality, high banker pay, low regulation, low taxes for the wealthy, robber barons (CEOs), reckless bankers, globalisation phase
1929/2008 - Wall Street crash
1930s/2010s - Global recession, currency wars, rising nationalism and extremism
The myopic "seer" doesn't even know what happened in the past so why waste time reading his ravings about the future
"Consider the clash of the titans in World War I. Four enormous empires -- the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and German -- went into that conflict imagining that victory would give them not just a new lease on life, but possibly even more territory to call their own."
The Anglozionazi Empire has been airbrushed out despite the fact that it is still THE cause of most of the injustice and slaughter ongoing on this planet.
Onward to the past where the future was aborted by Winston Smith.
Good point. The author must come from non-anglo schools. The mainland Europeans have always discounted the role of the Anglo-Zionist empire in the world wars. Despite the fact that we benefitted most from those wars.
Kind of like how people like to say Russia, and not the USA "won" WW2. Russia was devastated in ww2 and lost 30% of its population, from which it has NEVER recovered. If that is "winning" then I'm glad we "lost.". WW2 was a great adventure for most Americans and we emerged richer and more powerful than ever.
I though this was going well until he mentioned climate change....
Any Geoscientist who belives in Manmade climate change is mentally retarded
Good stuff up until the climate change propaganda.
The brightest light in this vision of the future is that if white people start looking out for themselves rather than producing a massive abundance for the Jews to pilfer and redistribute to blacks we will zee them starve to death by the hundreds of millions. Blacks are house pets for whites all over the world. Stop feeding them and they cannot take care of themselves and die.
Where's the "great African famine of 2032" when 800,000,000 blacks starve to death because white people stopped feeding them?
The sad dream of a American lost in the bitterness of his own decadence.
The reality of Pax Americana's dissolution is not the reality of History's resolution.
Just as an example from History : Things looked very different when the Byzantines were discussing how many angels could sit on the head of a pin; precisely when the Ottomans attacked their impregnable city's walls and then incredibly for those within it was "game over".
The West survived that cataclysmic defeat of clash of civilization. In fact it galvanized the West to send its adventurers around the globe.
1492 iconized that new turning point and the new horizon totally revitalized the West in its rise to world hegemon.
So History is never written in advance. And Humanity can always reinvent the future if there is a WILL. And will comes from Hardship and tipping times that chime the bells of new paradigms.
We are in an age of paradigm change and as of today we can see that the new paradigm has three major axes in order to change the current dystopian momentum :
1° The MIIC cabal is no more a cost effective way of world governance. In fact it destroys civilization. We will move to more collaborative commons once the Pax Americana model is rejected. And the world realizes that moving back to Armageddon on the basis of "our way of life is non negotiable" is a pipedream.
2° The future lies in efficient use of renewable energy which is unlimited and has a marginal cost which in near zero once the initial investment has been made and which is not PLANET DESTRUCTIVE as the current trend of fossil/nuclear use have proven. Also the current fossil and nuclear energy threads have, due to continual and verfiable depletion of cheap RM reserves, a very steep rising marginal cost of future Incremental production.
So all future use of energy to maintain human survival and growth has to move to renewables; to a platform of low marginal cost unlimited energy; whose storage and fluxing to levels of grid density and cost efficiency is the challenge of the next Thirty years over which this paradigm shift will occur. Moore's law will apply here to renewables as it did to semiconducters.
3° The future industrial platforms will move to decentralized and Internet of object type configurations, AWAY from vertically integrated power constructs of our corporate culture world of today. This means we have to have open source knowledge/information platforms and a move to sharing of asset investments instead of outright ownership (Uber/Bnb etc.).
This is a huge cultural move in society which is based on a free neutral and accessible world Internet and knowledge platforms that are open sourced. Human creativity does not lie in ownership but in continual improvement to infrastructure and productive investments, in terms of quality of output and its cost.
It means world governments have to collaborate instead of being at loggerheads.
We have to have commonality in the collaborative platforms of tomorrow.
To obtain this, Man's Ethical framework has to move from individual greed fueled to collectively shared type cultural changes which will be imposed by the force of Circumstances. Monetary platforms will also move to relate to this new reality. They wll not stay centralized, controlled by vertically networked monopolies.
Its the 'Saint Andreas' faults of current society which OBLIGE Humanity to move in his long meandering march to this new paradigm. We learn from the challenges of the past.
I am a believer that dark clouds have silver linings and we should never lose faith in our ability to resist to the pathological trends in society which go against the GRAIN of HISTORY.
"2° The future lies in efficient use of renewable energy which is unlimited and has a marginal cost which in near zero"
Doh!
You can have all the ruinables you like. You still need the nuclear/fossils for when then the wind don't blow, the sun has set and the tide is turning (or you are not on the coast). Leaving nuclear and fossils on tickover is the same as having them at full tilt, all a matter of eficiencies.
Well either you are blind or you can't reason.
It says : Paradigm change of 30 years... you may think that in that period we won't be able to make renewables grid compatible via mega storage (different forms are already being studied... notably hydraulic storage etc.) and grid compatible in flux.
I believe we will have the technology to do that and thus be free of intermittent renewable power loss. With a productive cumulative efficiency overall of 21% over the Year for wind (relative to nameplate power capacity) and 14% on similar yardstick for solar, there is enough place on the earth to feed 24/24 and 365/365 all of humanity's current needs.
Power could also be transported via intercontinental grid hook ups using DC current which reduces power losses over long distances.
"Man's Ethical framework has to move from individual greed fueled to collectively shared type cultural changes"
Communism with cute new terminology. Reminds me of Hillary's "People have to change their beliefs." line. How will this "move" occur? Why, via totalitarianism and brainwashing of course, under the guise of "raising people's consciousness".
"GRAIN of HISTORY"
Repackaging of Leftist imaginary fait accompli "Right side of History" meme.
Post-scarcity is now part of Leftist mythology that discounts the reality of human nature and individuals' unlimited desires.
Well, I enjoyed it. Very creative writing. Except the bit about white people doing the scorched earth thingy. We create civilization that everyone votes with their feet is the tops.
When we retreat, our civilization collapses. Surprise, surprise. Unknot your brow. It is not hard to understand.
The simple fact is we are more vulnerable than any other empire in the history of man. We are all grid dependent. The grid from its infancy to its full growth is just a hundred years old. Nothing like it ever existed in the past. The grid is complex and ridged and susceptible to economic and social shocks.
Here in central Florida we had an opportunity to experience grid collapse for an extended period of time when three hurricanes took down portions of the system in 04. Food and fuel distribution briefly came to a halt. What kept everything together were the visible efforts of line crews from all over the nation working continuously to bring the system back on line.
When the grid goes down not to come back in any meaningful way, we will become a much younger population in very short order.
Bollix!
Squid
2 things I guarantee in the future. All fiat currency fails, and all governments will become corrupt and fail.
You can look back on this 900 years from now, and it will still hold true. Earth is perpetual in this manner.
Humans have always been tribal. We all grew up learning the characteristics of our tribes from our parents that overrode the media blitz to be multi-cultural. In each one of us, though hidden in many, is who we really are as peoples of the world.
In the not to distant future when all world fiat currencies fail from QEn, when governments implode from corruption and chants of war echo in all quarters we will again find our tribes. Those not in our tribes are the enemy and fighting will ensue. Only if a calm clear single voice emerges in each nation to remind us each of our heritage will we bind again into unions of government that can function.
What this short story misses entirely is the predicate to these titanic events: Fiat Currency systems cause societal collapse and create mass death with the purpose of stealing from the little guy until he is ruined and, then, profiting from the little guy's death - you know ... the 99%(+). This is because Fiat Currency systems are based upon the lie that the product of one's labor is SAFE within their financial system: it isn't. And, to compound this lie, Corporate Democracies pass laws that, while sounding good, are actually tools of enslavement to capitalize on the ignorance of the masses: 'Black Lives Matter', 'The Great Society', 'Trickle Down Economics', etc.
It's all about Enslavement as a matter of public policy and the sociopathic 'tools' who enforce it.
Do away with Fiat Currencies - and imprison psychopathic slave masters and their slobbering sycophantic media class (the popular kids in class) - and you will have gone a long way to repatriating freedom to the better part of all mankind.
Oh, and, for the incurable psychopaths and sociopaths - perhaps we should employ their own tools of human experimentation - and at least profit from their deaths - maybe even sending them on one way trips to Mars or Uranus - just to document how human-like physiologies deal with radiation, exposure and isolation. We might even consider sending them food - but, seeing how they operate today, I suspect they'd prefer eating each other.
I should point out that when this pocket-philosopher begins to regurgitate Al Gore propaganda ... well, I think he's been drinking that grape Kool-Aid. Someone should tell him ... Cyanide ain't good for kids!
How many leftist assumptions can be crammed into a single piece of pseudo fiction?
Title this 'A Liberal's Nightmare' but don't pretend it could really happen.
Some of us know (with the same certainty) that gold will rise as the new, much improved, reserve and will act as the anchor for a new era of international commerce. The problems of prior gold standards were thought through and fixed in the form of the Euro. It only needs for the dollar to fold and it can rise, not as the new reserve but as a currency built to be a simple medium of exchange with no claim as a store of value. It will eliminate the fight for 'currency king of the hill' status and make the concept of national currency irrelevant. The US might not even go through the motions of creating the new dollar, the Euro could suffice as a world currency. Even today it functions as the currency of a couple of dozen nations....whats a few dozen more?
With money itself finally figured out and a system in which the simple savers of the world are able to save without losing value every 7 years, producers will produce without fear of losing all yet again to the hungry collective. A new burst of international trade will start, led by the holders of the new capital par most excellent. Billionaires will hold a bit of gold instead of trying to fit all that wealth into a Modigliani or Picasso....Balloon Dog Orange.
The future is starting now.
As soon as this recent dip of deflation destroys the entire empire of the dollar we can begin.
Hows that for an improved view of the coming apocalypse?